CHAPTER SEVEN

The Death of God

These developments—the growing assertiveness of civil society groups, the rising prominence of sectarian rivalry, the maturation of the court’s rights revolution, and the growing impulse toward inclusion and toward liberalism—were a beginning, not an end. Part of the dilemma was the political philosophy expressed by the Supreme Court. Prior to midcentury many people had operated with the vague sense, as the Harvard political scientist V. O. Key put it in 1942, “that the government is identical with the mass of the population and that by some mysterious process the ‘will of the people’ is translated into governmental decision and thereby people ‘rule themselves.’ ”¹

In fact, as the conflict at midcentury showed, society was composed of groups. Politics consisted primarily of group conflict. Policy emerged from disagreement, bargaining, and consensus among groups who, individually, could muster only a plurality within American society. But when several groups worked together, they were able to achieve a stable governing alliance in American life. This is known as the pluralist conception of politics.²

The court on some level recognized the political reality and saw itself as part of a pluralistic social and political process. When groups engaged in litigation, they were using suits, the court said in 1963, as “a form of political expression.” “Groups which find themselves unable to achieve their objectives through the ballot frequently turn to the courts,” it continued. “Under the conditions of modern government, litigation may well be the sole practicable avenue open to a minority to petition for redress of grievances.” As a result, the court became a principal place for minorities, religious or otherwise, to be recognized in American public life.³

But the dilemma of pluralism was about to be faced by more than just the court, in part because the political developments of the sixties forced a confrontation with the scale and scope of American multiplicity that had hitherto been unimaginable. It turned out that midcentury conceptions of diversity were too narrow, which accounted for the justices’ continued surprise as groups appeared before them with a bewildering number of affirmations. The narrow conception of diversity that animated pluralist politics left many people on the margins of American life, struggling to find ways into the public debate.

Those other groups soon began to muscle their way more fully into public political consciousness to decenter white Christian conceptions of the United States. The process had already begun in 1955 with the start of the civil rights movement, though initially the movement posed no real challenge to the public role of American Christianity. Movement leaders were mainly ministers who spoke the language of theology and who called on the American public to embrace black rights as a matter of Christian religious interest. For white Christian groups, who viewed themselves as guardians of American public culture, the religious language of the early civil rights movement was merely an invitation to extend their custodianship to the acquisition of black rights. It advanced pluralist politics while keeping Christian religious prerogatives in place.⁴

By 1960, though, the cultural and social dynamics that structured the era would take a turn. David Hollinger has spoken of two long-term processes that came to a head during the 1960s. The first, which he calls “cognitive demystification,” dated to the nineteenth century and was the original impetus for Protestant liberalizers to update their faith. It involved the critical assessment of religious truth in light of modern biological, geological, sociological, biblical, and political understandings. By the sixties a growing commitment to cognitive demystification led a variety of religious people, especially Protestants, to engage in self-interrogation about their religious beliefs, their social role, and the American political system.

The second process, which Hollinger calls “demographic diversification,” proved to be even more convulsive. The growing diversity within American life and the resulting encounter with difference tended to call into question whether the practices and norms of a group were universalizable across an entire society or societies. This dynamic, which also dated back to the nineteenth century, was sparked by the massive migration of various ethnic and religious groups into the United States and the centrifugal force of the American religious scene that always threatened to pull apart the religious center. By the 1960s demographic diversification took on a new and more pronounced form, one that would challenge white Christians.⁵

As usual, many religious leaders were unprepared for what was about to happen. The problem was a set of mental limits that white Christians adopted when thinking about other people. The way leaders tended to talk about religious diversification always presumed that religion-in-general furnished a stable basis for society in spite of religious variance. The white Christian confrontation with otherness was, as a consequence, often somewhat superficial because beneath the experience of difference was the presumption of a sameness rooted in ecumenical faith. If only the underlying sameness-within-difference could be uncovered, then the essentially religious foundations of society could be maintained.

But the experience of the sixties shattered that presumption. It began in 1960 with the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and a more confrontational approach to protests. As black student groups began to drive the civil rights movement, and as white, disproportionately Jewish students followed their lead into activism, their critique of American society broadened and deepened. Soon the civil rights movement branched out into groups that were often led primarily or even exclusively by young people and that adopted either an overt hostility to religious faith or a belief in the irrelevance of religion to their causes.

The new movements had a similar origin. Often the awakening to activism first involved a personal awakening, a kind of self-discovery on the part of people whose sense of themselves fell outside the normalizing categories regnant within American culture. The terminus of that self-awakening was what would soon be called identity politics, a pejorative term in some circles today but a revelation back then. As the intellectual historian Andrew Hartman has said, to people coming of age in the 1960s “identity was something to be stressed; it was something to grow into or become. Only by becoming black, or Chicano, or a liberated woman, or an out-of-the-closet homosexual—and only by showing solidarity with those similarly identified—could one hope to overcome the psychological barriers to liberation imposed by discriminatory cultural norms.”⁶

The discovery of identity outside mainstream categories led to a doubling down on that sense of self as the basis for protest. Activists soon launched a wide-ranging assault on American political culture that promoted women’s rights, campus free speech, Black Power, Latino worker protections, Chicano liberation, native American autonomy, antiwar dissent, and gay rights. Protest was often exponentially radical, as the goal or goals became ever more transformative. The centrifugal thrust of sixties politics became dizzying in scope, intensity, and omnidirectional dissent. Wave after wave of increasingly angry remonstrations became the norm in the United States.⁷

The immediate effect of the identity-based movements was to force the American public to confront the actual scope of diversity in the United States and the ways in which such diversity had been suppressed or ignored in the past. Affiliation with the subgroup and differentiation from the wider society pushed the logic of pluralist politics to its obvious conclusions. Identity politics was, in that sense, an extension of pluralist politics that simply sought to produce an awakening in the American public consciousness about the true scope of American multiplicity. As Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton put it in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), “Group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralistic society.”⁸

Sixties activism would eventually change the American secular order. It led nearly every religious group to confront the astonishing diversity of the human family that could be found in American life. And it profoundly destabilized Christian leaders, who regarded themselves as guardians of the nation. Custodianship became more difficult to sustain given the press of diverse claimants in the 1960s and the rejection of white Christian privilege articulated by many activists.

No religious group experienced the change more suddenly, or more surprisingly, than the Roman Catholic Church. The hierarchy had long depicted the church as a fortress that stood firm amidst the chaotic maelstrom of the modern world. The church remained faithful to its values, anchored to the rock of doctrine, and committed to its catholic and apostolic tradition. The self-conception of the hierarchy as promoters and articulators of an unchanging Truth had suggested to some critics an indifference to the contemporary world, an increasing detachment with which church leaders surveyed global affairs. To the prelates, though, their steadiness of leadership was a necessary component of the church’s office as the explicator of an unchangeable God.⁹

Yet in spite of their public face of imperturbability, the currents of modern life were buffeting church leaders. It had been a vexing several decades for the hierarchy. By midcentury Catholic prelates looked around and began to observe the limited appeal of the church’s formulations to many within Western societies. Those countries were growing more open to non-Western religious traditions or were turning away from religious traditions entirely. The erosive social dynamics, some within the leadership began to acknowledge, threatened the stability of the church unless it shored up its intellectual foundation.

Their discomfort came to a head in 1958, when Pius XII died. Although conservatives had remained in firm control of the hierarchy, the Catholic cardinals found themselves unexpectedly at odds. They were divided on a variety of issues and uncertain about the best way forward. Their division made it difficult to appoint a successor to Pius. After eleven ballots they finally settled on Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, a sweet old man. He was seventy-eight years old and was expected to be a short-lived caretaker pope until the cardinals could work out their divisions. But to everyone’s surprise Pope John XXIII, as Roncalli called himself, immediately announced his intention to open a Second Vatican Council. His goal, he said, was to bring “the modern world into contact with the vivifying and perennial energies of the gospel.”¹⁰

The opposite would more likely be the outcome, but in the early months of preparation no one could be quite sure what would happen. When the Vatican called for proposals on topics that the council might address, American bishops promptly sent their ideas. Two-thirds of the responses dealt entirely with internal church matters. Many said nothing about the social, economic, and political challenges facing the church. And although some did propose that they take up questions of church and state or of religious freedom, many bishops went to the council entirely unprepared for what was to take place.¹¹

John Courtney Murray, though, was hopeful. His status had been ambiguous in the years since his silencing. Just before Pius XII died, it seemed as though the Holy Office, the seat of conservatism in the Catholic church, had won explicit papal rejection of Murray’s views. Murray’s attempts to clarify the matter were shot down. But the condemnation stalled. Pius’s sudden death, John’s enthronement, and the call for a Vatican council offered new possibilities.¹²

Murray soon found vindication. When Pope John opened the council in 1962 he noted the many challenges the church faced. Their gathering offered the opportunity to address the challenges and to update Catholic tenets for the contemporary moment. To be sure, John went out of his way to defend the unchangeableness of doctrine. But, he said, “the whole world expects a step forward.” The council offered an opportunity in which traditional beliefs “[could] be studied and expounded through the methods of research and through the literary forms of modern thought.” The Truth would remain the same, John said. But the manner in which truths were expressed could vary.¹³

Murray immediately saw that John had endorsed his formulation. As he later said, “The council moved the church squarely into the world of history.” That sounded simple, but it was far-reaching. It involved a series of interlocking propositions affecting the nature and understanding of truth. One must acknowledge, Murray said, that truth was part of history, that it had to be apprehended by an individual human person, and that it finally had to be experienced or lived by real people in the modern world. Bringing the church into the realm of history meant confronting the inherent subjectivity and the historical mutability of truth. That, in turn, undermined certainty, questioned authority, and required a reworking of the entire edifice of Catholic doctrine. Murray’s thinking was deeply radical.¹⁴

The council went a long way toward working out that radicalism. By the time the council closed in 1965 the bishops had approved sixteen total documents that reformed nearly every aspect of church life. It especially changed how the church related to the world and to everyday affairs. The bishops allowed for greater participation of the laity during Mass and permitted the Mass to be conducted in the vernacular languages or languages other than Latin. It brought the Mass within the ordinary experience of the people.¹⁵

The council also drafted a statement on the relationship of the church to non-Christian religions. Rather than emphasizing the exclusive truth of Catholic beliefs, the bishops now spoke of “what human beings have in common.” All people shared a religious sense and all religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, even folk traditions—contained aspects of truth. Speaking to the monotheistic religions, the council looked “with esteem” on Muslims and absolved Jews from guilt for Jesus’s death. The statement eased the ability of Catholics to interact with non-Christians.¹⁶

Murray drafted the most far-reaching change of the council. After being shut out of the first session—disinvited, Murray complained, by some of his Vatican enemies—he received an invitation to the second one. Rather than stepping lightly, he drafted a statement on religious freedom. Because it altered the political theory of the church, it immediately became a point of conflict.¹⁷

The source of controversy, as Murray saw it, was not the notion of religious freedom per se or, rather, not just the notion of religious freedom. The deeper problem was the pattern of thought that was required to support religious freedom in the first place. The church had essentially stopped thinking about the subject with the encyclicals of Leo XIII. For hardliners within the church, Leo had articulated a long-standing Catholic position that was further systematized by subsequent canonists. It held forth the Catholic confessional state as a transhistorical and unquestionable ideal.¹⁸

But Murray pointed out that an alternative ideal of religious freedom had been growing among the political democracies of the West as they confronted the level of religious dissimilarity that existed within their societies. To hold to the classical position of the church entailed a hostility toward modern constitutional law and a posture of nearly constant reaction toward its rulings. If one thought instead that doctrine could change and that that growth could occur not primarily through the church but through natural revelation that was available in the world, then there was no real reason to believe that doctrinal development ceased with Leo XIII. This was in keeping with what Murray called a proper historical consciousness.¹⁹

In the statement on religious freedom itself, Murray sought to further his point by making a distinction between the ecclesiastical and the political orders. Politically, Murray wrote, all people ought to seek the truth, but they can fulfill their duty to seek that truth only when protected from civil coercion. He acknowledged the plural nature of modern societies and the diversity of opinions within contemporary democracies. Given the markedly perspectival ways that people responded to truth, modern democracies seemed to require political freedom as individual people worked out their own beliefs. But the church had not historically recognized political freedom; in fact, it had rejected it. Yet it had now come to see that political freedom, in Murray’s words, “[left] untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”²⁰

The point was simple but profound. Political rights and religious duties were not identical. Accepting the distinction between the political and the religious allowed the church to acknowledge religious freedom in a political sense, Murray pointed out, while continuing to affirm the exclusive truth of the Catholic position in a religious sense. It also allowed the council to affirm contemporary religious freedom without explicitly disavowing any of the positions of the past. Those prior notions were true, Murray wrote, but limited to the ecclesiastical realm in a specific historical moment. The modern embrace of religious freedom was a fuller truth that allowed the church to speak to contemporary constitutional development.

When the council approved the statement, at the end of the final session in 1965, observers were amazed. It was the only conciliar document addressed to the entire world and could rightly be seen as a concession to the pluralistic realities of modern political democracy. Joseph Fletcher, a Protestant ethicist, confessed his astonishment that Catholic liberals had managed to drag their church’s ethics into the twentieth century. Paul Blanshard, a fierce anti-Catholic journalist, wrote in the Nation that after Vatican II Catholicism could “no longer be described as a monolithic glacier of reactionary thought.” To the man and woman on the street all of this came as a shock. It showed that, contrary to everything that had been taught, the Church Immutable could change.²¹

But even as Catholicism renewed itself, its reformist energies were far outstripped by what was happening within Protestant circles. Protestant leaders responded to the tumult of the 1960s with a level of self-interrogation that is, even now, remarkable in its extensiveness. Their interrogation worked along the two tracks that Hollinger has identified: demystifying the tenets of Protestant belief and confronting the dizzying diversity that emerged through sixties politics.

Among liberal Protestants there had long been a desire to rework the categories of theology in light of modern, scientific knowledge. By the 1960s the desire was intensifying. In 1961 Gabriel Vahanian, a Princeton-educated theologian teaching at Syracuse University, published The Death of God. Borrowing from the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Vahanian dismissed the picture of God that emerged from the Bible. “The essentially mythological world-view of Christianity,” he wrote, “has been succeeded by a thoroughgoing scientific view of reality, in terms of which either God is no longer necessary, or he is neither necessary nor unnecessary: he is irrelevant—he is dead.”²²

Vahanian’s work began a movement toward what its proponents called a secular theology within Protestantism. Two years later, as the Supreme Court was striking down Bible reading in schools, Paul Van Buren of the University of Texas followed Vahanian with his book The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. Like Vahanian, Van Buren rejected traditional Christian doctrines and urged religious leaders to strip Christianity of supernatural elements in order to become believable again.²³

In 1965, as the court was declaring a right of privacy, Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School added to the literature with The Secular City. En route to urging a radical ethical commitment upon the church, Cox dismissed many traditional religious subjects. Doctrinal issues, cultic worship, pietistic devotion, the stuff of historical Christian life, these were all distractions from the wider work of, as Cox put it, “liberating the captives.” The book was wildly successful, selling over a million copies.²⁴

Others wrote in quieter, more personal ways. Thomas J. J. Altizer of Emory University spoke frankly of the corrosive power of modern scientific knowledge and the effect that that knowledge had on church life. “Lament as we may its vanished glory,” he wrote in 1965, “the whole established order of Christendom is eroding about us. As its foundations disappear into the dark ocean of the past, we can experience only the receding ripples of its dying waves. Theology has met this challenge by a heroic if futile attempt to establish an island of faith, an impregnable fortress fully shielded from the dangers outside it, but a fortress containing a lighthouse that would direct a saving beacon to the surrounding darkness.” Unfortunately, he wrote, the waters had now swallowed both the land and the fortress on the island of faith, leaving a lonely lighthouse that plunged directly into the water. “Having vanished from our historical present,” Altizer continued, “its beacon has become a mirror reflecting the vacuity of a faith that would claim to stand upon thin air.”²⁵

The sense of loss among these writers was palpable. William Hamilton, a theologian at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, spoke frankly of his own creeping experience of bereavement. He first lost the language of theology, then any feeling of transcendence, both of which finally terminated in his lack of God. But the bereavement, Hamilton said, was paired with a sense of liberation from now-obsolete creeds.²⁶

The movement was not without tension. Cox complained of the imprecise language that others used. What exactly caused the absence? he asked. “Is it the loss of the experience of God, the loss of the existence of God in Christianity, or the lack of adequate language to express God today?” Others questioned Cox about his desire to jettison God-talk while doubling down on Christian ethics.²⁷

The New York Times, trying to figure out what united all the efforts, decided that they shared two basic stances. First, according to the Times, death-of-God theologians acknowledged the unreality of God. Second, they affirmed the mundane world as the source of spiritual and ethical inquiry. Both claims fed into the same ethical impulse common to liberal Protestantism. But the formulations dispensed with any pretense that they still believed the old truths, even if they could not quite abandon Christianity itself. The resulting theological mode could at times seem self-stultifying. Daniel Day Williams, a process theologian at the University of Chicago and a death-of-God critic, put a fine point on the tension when he said that death-of-God theology could be reduced to a relatively simple position. “There is no God,” he said, in the voice of death-of-God theologians, “and Jesus is his only begotten son.”²⁸

The uproar remained fairly localized, in spite of press coverage, until Easter 1966. That year Time magazine decided to highlight, in its words, “the visibly growing concern among theologians about God and the secularized world of the mid-1960s.” It had already run several articles about the theologians, but unlike past efforts it decided to address the issue in a cover story. After a back-and-forth the editors realized that no cover image could convey the message. After all, part of the radical theologians’ position was that God defied adequate representation because in the lives of modern people he had ceased to exist. So Time, in a first, dispensed with a cover image. Using red lettering on a black background, the editors asked simply, “Is God Dead?”²⁹

The decision caused a sensation. Unlike the cover, the actual article discussed the religious confusion and cacophony of the 1960s. But readers took their cues from the question posed on the front of the magazine. The letters to the editor continued for weeks.

They often consisted of strongly worded statements offering the usual Christian apologetics, on the one hand, or atheistic triumphalism, on the other. Time also received a large number of appreciative responses from Protestant ministers of many persuasions.³⁰

The controversy spilled beyond the pages of Time, in ways that stunned the theologians. Hamilton later complained, “The reaction overwhelmed the original event.” It became a “pseudo-event . . . in which angry men were fighting non-existent enemies, and people were reacting to things never spoken.” He received a variety of letters from readers. They ranged from the taunting (“I heard that you have lost a dear friend”), to the nasty (“You dirty commie atheist homosexual bastard”), to the Christian nationalist (“You are a communist working in the international conspiracy against Jesus Christ and Christians”).³¹

He soon started receiving death threats. Friends began to distance themselves. Gene E. Bartlett, the president of Colgate Rochester, said in response to Hamilton’s provocations, “We do not accept his views. We debate them and affirm the opposite.” Bartlett took Hamilton’s basic course in theology away from him, and, within a year of the Time article, Hamilton left Colgate Rochester to teach religion at New College in Florida.³²

The reaction raised an obvious question: Why all the fuss?

Looked at in one way, the death-of-God debate was not all that novel. It simply repackaged older theological developments. But the newness of the controversy was not the issue, at least not the main issue. All of the theologians tended to speak of their project in the same way. They began by questioning their personal beliefs and conceptions of God. Then they moved to the impossibility of finding an adequate image or metaphor for God in modern, technological society. And, finally, they crept up on the real issue, which was the social significance or insignificance of the Christian religion in contemporary American life. Their declaration that God was not just meaningless but unnecessary seemed to reinforce the broader secularizing thrust of American political culture in a way that many people found either liberating or unacceptable.³³

In that way the death-of-God theologians popularized and mainstreamed ideas that had long circulated in intellectual circles. Paul L. Holmer, a professor of theology at Yale, complained that “the neo-Protestant intelligentsia” was simply promoting the “theme of the avant-garde,” that is, echoing the radically anti-Christian thinkers who believed that the theological thought of the church was an anachronism. To those who saw Protestant Christianity as already standing on an insecure social foundation, the death-of-God theologians were committing a strategic error.³⁴

But while Holmer and others were complaining about vanguardist themes among Protestant writers, other Protestants began to confront the fact that their custodial posture toward American culture was no longer tenable. This was the more profound discovery, the encounter with difference that sixties politics provoked. The dawning realization of diversity and the corresponding loss of custodial confidence did not happen overnight. As late as 1964 the National Council of Churches was urging Christians not to withdraw their explicitly religious voice from public affairs because doing so would “create a vacuum” that would “be filled by secular religions or by secularistic philosophy.”³⁵

The council’s statement would prove to be one of the last public expressions of guardianship from mainline Protestants. Many within the liberal Protestant community simply dropped the posture as not just unviable but positively nefarious. John C. Bennett, the president of Union Theological Seminary, spoke for many when he said that “the ecumenical Christian community” needed to actively reject the idea of Christian America. The declaration that the United States had a Christian foundation was simply not ecumenical enough. It confused the religious community with the nation as a whole. It was latently sectarian. Sixties politics had revealed American society as too diverse to be subject to Christian leadership. Only by dropping the pretensions of a Christian America, Bennett asserted, would liberal Christians be able to collaborate with others in a secular regime for the betterment of American life.³⁶

The liberal Protestant position was helped along by a creeping demographic weakness. By the 1960s many politically active young adults started to conclude that the churches were unnecessary in the political and ethical work they wished to pursue. Other young adults, though they tended to be much fewer in number, decided that liberal churches no longer stood for historical Christianity and migrated into conservative denominations. Soon the big Protestant denominations that had long dominated American life went into demographic free fall, the result of the low ecumenical birthrate and the loss of their children to other organizations or, more often, to no religious affiliation at all.³⁷

These challenges caused other groups associated with Protestantism to transform. Protestants and Other Americans United (POAU) began to fall into a crisis of self-awareness. At its height in 1964 the organization had two hundred thousand members, fifty full-time staff in ten cities, and hundreds of part-time and volunteer workers. But while the National Council of Churches was still urging Protestants into the public arena, the POAU began to shed its Protestant identity and its self-congratulation. As Franklin H. Littell, a professor of church history at Chicago Theological Seminary, told Newsweek, “It is one of the myths of Protestantism that we had religious liberty in the past and that this was a Protestant contribution.” In fact, the religious liberty was somewhat limited, and Protestants, as a result of their position in public life, often set the limits that were experienced by others. Once POAU had internalized the historical reality, the organization dropped the explicit Protestant reference from its name and became instead Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. The shift—from Protestant to American—demonstrated the wider Protestant embrace of diversity that emerged in the era.³⁸

Yet the biggest challenge of sixties politics had not quite fully presented itself. It was one thing to accept pluralized democratic practice, to grant that many groups existed in society that had political rights. But it was harder to acknowledge that once these groups came fully into the American political process the consensual moral norms which had long been taken for granted could no longer be upheld. The revelation of plural moral worlds required a much fuller embrace of difference and a much more consequential rejection of Christianity’s protective role over American culture.

The challenge soon became apparent, as sixties politics merged with the counterculture and affirmed that personal authenticity often terminated in sexual and social liberation. The slogan often heard at New Left rallies, “It is forbidden to forbid,” expressed the antinomian impulse. As the New Leftist Theodore Roszak said in 1968, “The counterculture is the embryonic cultural base of New Left politics, the effort to discover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihood, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities on the far side of power politics, the bourgeois home, and the Protestant work ethic.”³⁹

Once the counterculture became more prominent, its cultural displacement of latently Christian norms became more powerful. All that had formerly been agreed upon seemed to be up for reconsideration. In place of established mores or values many people within American culture were forced to consider that the normative embrace of heterogeneity, which they had willingly undertaken, required a corresponding cultural, ethical, and even intellectual relativism. Politically speaking, such relativism tended to terminate in secular liberalism, which privatized religious beliefs about proper behavior and accepted that individuals could determine their own standards. This is what John Courtney Murray described, skeptically, as “the secularistic tradition of the autonomous man.”⁴⁰

The directionality of countercultural politics toward relativism was especially clear in the aftermath of the Griswold decision, which declared a right to privacy. One of the central preoccupations of religious groups up to that point had been how to promote a public morality. That was why so many liberal Protestants had spoken of the importance of religion as the basis of society. It offered a collective moral compass that pointed people in the direction they should go. But Griswold made social and moral regulation much harder. The political philosophy that the court affirmed was essentially what Betty Friedan had offered in her 1963 classic The Feminine Mystique, when she declared that “[women] must live their own lives again according to a self-chosen purpose.” Individual people—individual women—were free to choose their own directions rather than having society lay out the path for them.⁴¹

The emphasis on personal autonomy and freedom from societal, cultural, and religious constraint confounded religious leaders who still saw a place for public morals in American life. Catholic leaders were especially perturbed. It turned out that even though liberals had won a battle within the hierarchy during Vatican II, many conservatives had not yet conceded the war. They continued to affirm that God established morality, that the church sought the protection of moral norms, and that even those who rejected the church’s authority were still subject to what Catholics considered natural law.

The idea of natural law was vital to conservative Catholic thinkers who sought to preserve the place of religious norms in public culture. The concept presumed a morality that was publicly available rather than privately determined, that was objective rather than subjective, and that was, because it came from the natural revelation of the world, available to everyone, not just Catholics. But, in practice, natural law comported entirely with Catholic doctrine.

Catholic natural law became especially critical after Griswold, as the feminist movement began to push for greater sexual autonomy for women. Technological developments in birth control, especially the development of the birth control pill, raised the specter of a sexual ethics that profoundly upset conservative Catholic leaders. Sexual liberation and medically controlled birth ran up against a cluster of Catholic beliefs that had a long history in clerical pronouncements and were tightly interwoven. This cluster entailed several notions: first, that a natural law existed; second, that contraception violated natural law; third, that God determined the purpose of sex, which was procreation; fourth, that God determined the limits and meaning of life; fifth, that if a person suffered through disease or deformity or for any other reason during the course of life, that suffering must have meaning because God allowed a person to come into being, allowed the suffering to continue, and sustained his or her life in the midst of suffering for however long God chose. The comprehensiveness of Catholic doctrine committed the church to a variety of positions that were all well known: birth control was bad; doctors and patients should err on the side of the preservation of life; medical technologies that allowed choice were evil, in that they fostered the autonomous illusions of modern secularism.⁴²

Their pro-life doctrines placed the hierarchy in opposition to many revolutionary components of movement politics, but the American Catholic leadership became especially hardened after contraception activists turned to the issue of abortion. As women’s groups associated with second-wave feminism began to lobby for a loosening of abortion laws, Catholic clerics turned frantic. The apparent success of feminists made the American Catholic leadership, conservative though it had been to that point, consider the unthinkable step of making alliances with non-Catholics. After several legislatures took up bills on the issue, Cardinal Cushing of Boston called “all persons of goodwill to unite in opposition” to the revision of antiabortion statutes. “I have viewed with ever-increasing alarm the efforts currently being made in parts of the country either to repeal or to render ineffective . . . the laws condemning the crime of abortion,” he said.⁴³

Cardinal Cushing was not alone. Nearly the entire hierarchy rejected the legalization of abortion as a violation of public morality that had profound significance. A human embryo was human, they believed, and so it was a nascent person in the eyes of God. To kill that person was murder. The social acceptance of the practice undermined support for the sanctity of human life. To hold firm on abortion, in the hierarchy’s view, was to hold firm to the notion that our lives are bound by objective moral standards and that something existed above either the individual or the state. By contrast, to embrace or to allow abortion would be to declare, as the Jesuit Robert I. Gannon said, “God is dead and our right to life comes from the state.” If that happened, said the hierarchy, systematic extermination would soon follow.⁴⁴

But the tumult of the 1960s made the hierarchy’s position harder to defend because other religious leaders simply rejected it, thereby undermining the notion that their views were an expression of natural law. In New York, Rabbi William F. Rosenblum dismissed abortion opponents as “medieval-minded.” Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told a congressional hearing that the Catholic hierarchy was making an issue out of nothing. “We are discussing the legalization of the removal of a fetus, a nonperson, an undeveloped organism,” he said.⁴⁵

Protestants tended to agree with the rabbis, at least in part. They were more likely than Jewish leaders to express moral qualms about abortion. But in keeping with the trend in Protestantism toward self-interrogation and a reluctance to exercise cultural authority, many simply expressed their uneasiness while simultaneously affirming that abortion should be legal. Nearly all of the Protestant denominations accepted that it was an issue of private morality that ought to be kept out of civil law. To think otherwise would make it allowable, as Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York put it, “for one group to impose its vision of morality on an entire society.”⁴⁶

Catholics even had a difficult time forming a united front among themselves. A few Catholic thinkers began to question the official position on contraception, drawing on the statement of religious freedom from Vatican II. The most prominent dissenter was Robert F. Drinan, a Jesuit priest and U.S. representative from Massachusetts. Drinan concluded that the bishops were not thinking about the issue from the proper social and political standpoint. They needed to be strategic, he suggested. If a person were against abortion, the goal ought to be to reduce it as much as possible within a society. But it was unreasonable to expect that it would be curtailed entirely, and it was especially irrational to expect that the passage of a law would eliminate the practice. Abortion, like gambling, adultery, or prostitution, was necessarily surreptitious, having to do with private moral behavior and a woman’s body that was not easily controlled through the force of law. The question was how to mitigate fetal death. When put in those terms, it was not at all clear that prohibiting the procedure would curtail it in any way or that outlawing the procedure would be the best way to limit it. Drinan speculated that legalizing abortion might result in the greatest decline. Legalization would, at the very least, give some sense of how widespread abortion was by bringing it above ground, so that the causes could be both understood and addressed. Abortions might thereby be minimized over time.⁴⁷

Others echoed Drinan, using the pronouncements from Vatican II to advance a distinction between moral law and civil law. In June 1965, after the court handed down the Griswold decision, Commonweal declared that the ruling was long overdue and speculated that it had been put off by the determined activities of the Catholic leadership. The prelates, in Commonweal’s view, sought wrongly to embed their moral ideas within the coercive apparatus of the state. Likewise, William F. Buckley Jr., a Catholic conservative, wrote in National Review that the hierarchy’s obstruction on the contraception issue failed to follow its own conciliar ideas. “Surely the principal meaning of the religious liberty pronouncements of Vatican II is that other men must be left free to practice the dictates of their own conscience,” he wrote.⁴⁸

These statements emanating from lay voices showed that the radicalism of Vatican II had permeated deep into Catholic life in ways that the prelates had not anticipated. The council’s accommodation with modern democracy seemed to allow people in pluralistic societies leeway to choose their own course, to have the benefit of a private morality, which included the right of private immorality. Some post–Vatican II writers thought that the function of civil law was not to proscribe everything that was immoral, in contrast to the assumption of the hierarchy. Secular law sought to create the rules by which individuals could take the responsibility of moral choice upon themselves.

But the abortion issue ultimately showed the limits of Catholic religious freedom. In 1968 Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, a reaffirmation of the Catholic prohibition against “artificial” birth control. The encyclical tended to tighten Catholic debate and only increased the divide between the Catholic leadership and the laity. A Newsweek poll in 1971 showed that 58 percent of American Catholics believed that a person could ignore the church position on contraception and remain in good standing.⁴⁹

All of this conflict occurred within a wider context of institutional religious decline. By the early seventies millions were rejecting traditional, organized religion, and they were not just liberal Protestants. Church attendance and financial contributions to religious institutions declined across the board. Opinion polls showed that what were once considered orthodox beliefs—the affirmation of God, personal salvation, heaven and hell—all showed large drops. That left the Catholic hierarchy struggling to sustain its position not just with its members but among the wider public.⁵⁰

Inevitably, it also shaped the response of the court. After the Griswold decision, activists sought to bring cases on appeal that would overturn the nation’s abortion laws. It took a few years but finally, in 1971, a case made it to the Supreme Court: Roe v. Wade. The justices predictably groped for a response, as they did with many of the issues that dealt with the public role of religion and morality. During conference the majority seemed inclined to strike down the Texas abortion law but without any clearly agreed-upon reasoning. The case had to be reargued the next year. During conference after the second hearing the justices were again bewildered. The issue of abortion raised tricky constitutional, moral, and religious considerations.⁵¹

Eventually they found their bearings. The resulting opinion, in a 7–2 majority written by Harry Blackmun, struck down many abortion laws in the United States. His reasoning was genuinely historical. Blackmun noted that in the late eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth state laws tended not to prohibit abortions conducted before the first felt movements of the fetus, its quickening. Those laws tightened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with, though he did not say so, Catholic emigration to the United States. But because the laws were of relatively recent origin, Blackmun reasoned, antiabortion statutes could not be justified by deep constitutional precedent.

Having dispensed with the historical issues, Blackmun shifted to the moral ones. Religious and moral authorities tended to disagree about abortion, he pointed out. Their divergence manifested itself in the political arena, where some voices urged prohibition and others legalization. But a woman’s right to privacy, which the court had declared in the Griswold decision, meant that the state had no business making a moral decision for her about whether or not to abort a fetus. The right to privacy carved out a space for individuals to make moral choices within a wider context of societal and religious disagreement.

Blackmun did acknowledge that the state had an interest in protecting human life. The right to privacy, like other rights, was not absolute. Once the fetus became viable outside the womb, which Blackmun located in the third trimester of pregnancy, the state could regulate or even proscribe abortion because that fetus could be considered more fully a person in his or her own right. Before then, women could make the choice for themselves.⁵²

The remarkable thing about the opinion was its detachment. Even though he was treading through a hotly contested moral issue, Blackmun used a consistent vocabulary of personal choice, individual medical consultation, professional judgment, and the right to make a difficult decision within a private mental and moral space.

Shortly after the ruling the legal scholar Laurence H. Tribe unpacked the court’s strategy in the Harvard Law Review. The court faced problems in deciding the case, Tribe pointed out. The foundational problem lay in defining the characteristics of a human being. Doing so necessarily involved religion and therefore questions about abortion involved the court in a religious form of reasoning. The legislation itself was shaped within the context of religious controversy. For the court to weigh into the debate was inherently to take part in a religious dispute, just as the laws themselves were an outgrowth of a religious disagreement. The court could not make substantive determinations on the issues without violating the Constitution. So it focused on, in Tribe’s words, “who should make judgments of that sort.” It had to determine who possessed decision-making authority within a wider context of public religious controversy but avoid entering the disagreement. The Catholic leadership had declared that the state, responding to religious leaders, ought to make the decision. But the court decided that the moral authority to choose lay with the woman in consultation with her doctor.⁵³

In that way the court followed the logic of its own jurisprudence, tortured though it sometimes was, toward its endpoint of religious and moral privatization. The court acknowledged the pluralization of ethical norms that occurred in the 1960s. It recognized the impossibility of adjudicating those norms without becoming a party to a religious dispute. It conceived of the individual woman as a point of pure moral self-determination and left the choice to her. At the same time, the court announced an abandonment of the role of the state in defining and defending an official morality. The abandonment entailed a repudiation of the social significance of religion in determining moral norms at the hands of the state. Religion could no longer fulfill that role given the diversity of moral and religious opinion in the United States and the resulting religious conflict that the court had observed over the past thirty years.

With Roe, in other words, American secularism reached its apotheosis.