4. Madison’s protection of individual rights as well as rights of minorities was unmatched among the Founders, as he repeatedly brought up the subject of needing to prevent the majority from trampling the rights of others, and this suggested a federal legislature composed of representatives of all states, manifesting different interests, and in reasoning together even interests that transcended peculiar state interests. See, for example, The Papers of James Madison, editor in chief, Robert Rutland (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1977), Vol. 10, pp. 25; 32–34;138–139; 205–219; 266–267; 269; 415; 478–479.
5. This assertion was made by Justices Scalia and Kennedy in the oral argument before the Supreme Court of Thomas Van Orden v. Rick Perry, No. 03-1500 on pp. 16–17, 23–26. J. Scalia emphasized that the “God” referred to by the Ten Commands, was a “unitary” god, the true God, to whom “we pray” in distinction to other religions in which people pray to gods (plural) (p. 8, and others).
6. Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse (New York: Harper Collins, 2019). Religious communities today, as compared with the years immediately following World War II certainly reveal less social cohesiveness within the religious communities. Much of that had to do with the ending of a major war in which U.S. citizens were thankful for the result, and were more religious than typical. However, the United States’ tradition of “revivals” was successful in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and to some degree in the twentieth) because they broke with established religious institutions and their theology, and because, especially in rural areas, the “converts” found a group to which they could belong and be important. Finally, the erosion of the traditional metaphysics by science has made much of the appeal of a religious communion less, especially if institutions or clergy have disqualifying interests.
7. This willingness to trust in the different others, to realize the necessity of compromise with those with whom we differ is illustrated graphically in Brands’ recent study of the “second generation of American giants.” See H. W. Brands, Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, The Second Generation of American Giants (New York: Doubleday, 2018). The “second generation” experienced a few decades in which “compromise” with those who differed was not only tolerated but admired, yet by 1850, divisiveness eclipsed this and the Civil War became inevitable.
8. Martin E. Marty, When Faiths Collide (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
9. E. J. Dionne’s diagnosis of the divisiveness we see in the U.S. culture “war” seems to be growing even since he wrote. See Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).
10. One can think of many examples, for example, the Jonestown mass suicide, or of the “teleological suspension of the ethical” in Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling,” produced by one’s encounter with the Absolute. A pastor’s recent (2018) sentence of fifteen years in prison in South Korea for sexual assault was a situation in which many of the congregation of 130,000 followers of the Manmin Central Church were so psychologically manipulated by the pastor’s profession of being the agent of God, thus infallible and absolute, that despite his propagation of chastity to the group, he had been able to violate them for years.
11. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), p. 20.
12. The recent spate of books on “God,” tracing the evolution of the idea of “God,” make errors if they speak always of “God” in the singular, since most cultures have never limited beliefs in supranatural powers or beings to a single one, and the movement we see in human thought is not something that has simply gone “full circle” as Reza Aslan proposes, from a pantheism, to polytheism, and various forms of theism, only to return to pantheism again. It seems rather to move from a polytheism or crude animism to forms of theism, and finally to atheism. See Reza Azlan, God: A Human History (New York: Random House, 2017). Preceding this were books such as Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006); Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2009).
13. Susan Jacoby’s marvelous The Age of American Unreason of 2008 is now in its revised, second edition, The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies (New York: Vintage Books, 2018), a “must read.”
14. Jacques Barzun defines “decadence” as a “falling off.”
It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.
Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), p. xvi.
15. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Essays 1972–1980) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. chapter 1 on the contingency of language.
16. Dorothee Soelle, Choosing Life, tr. Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981) and Political Theology: A Conversation with Rudolf Bultmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974). The former is directed more against consumerism and cynicism while the latter book is a “conversation” with Rudolf Bultmann, critiquing the excessive individualism of his theology.
17. Dawkins, The God Delusion. The “proofs” for the existence of God which he spends considerable time refuting, were actually refuted by Kant, but perhaps the latter’s method was admittedly too obtuse. His better book that religious people should read is The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2009).
18. Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
19. Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004).
20. As the Dalai Lama observed, then it becomes the unending question of “which religion.” It was this, among other reasons, that he articulated a nonreligious ethic even though he is certainly religious. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium, p. 26.
21. John C. Bennett, The Radical Imperative: From Theology to Social Ethics (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975).
22. If one looks at the rather unequal variety of “vices” Paul includes in his letters’ “vice lists,” one hears him say that, such people will never experience the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9) or that they “deserve to die” (Rom. 1:18-32), it is rather hard to take him seriously. That a “gossip’s” fate with God is the same as a murder’s? That envy is as immoral as theft or adultery?
23. See Masao Abe, “Buddhism,” in Our Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 119; Abe, “Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata,” in The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, ed. John Cobb and Christopher Ives (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1994), esp. 5–25.
24. One cannot help but think of Psalm 50 in which the writer seems more like a “reform” prophet than a priest as he belittles the people for their lack of morality while they are diligent in their “sacrifices” to God. So he has God saying, “I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds. . . . If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?” A little sarcastic humor?
25. I was educated as a theologian/philosopher of religion, and recall how in the late 1960s there were so many books being written about what a “theologian” could or should do—such as Fritz Buri’s little book on “speaking about God