Religious Social Movements in the Public Sphere 329
importance. As a result, they will often declare victory on the basis of little evidence,
before more sober postelectoral analysis can be done.
Finally, the separation of the public and private spheres has become deeply en-
trenched in our society. True, many activists with religiously based messages decry
that separation and see an irretrievably close relationship between public and private
as necessary for a moral society. But, even among evangelical Protestants, that view is
not the only perspective available. Evangelicalism has grown in the past two decades,
and as it has grown it also has diversified. Many devout Christians are less interested
in organizing to change government than in simply keeping governmentoutof their
lives – in the great American tradition of suspicion of institutions. If they are active at
all it is a “defensive” activism that is not easily translated into more ambitious agendas.
In the final analysis, those who put their religious beliefs at the very center of their
lives often have reservations about “fellowshipping” with those who do not share their
beliefs, whatever their political similarities. To the extent that this reticence coexists
with the development of activist religious SMOs, it is yet another sign of the discon-
nection between the institutions and practices of our political system on one side and
the private lives and cultures in which ordinary Americans actually live.
RELIGIOUS SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
In Jose Casanova’s (1994) analysis of the “deprivatization” of religion in the contem-
porary world, he notes that for religion to have an effective public presence it must
accept the basic institutional terms of modernity. One of these terms is an institutional
differentiation between religion and government. Even in those places where religion
dominates the state, such as postrevolutionary Iran, there are concessions made all the
time to the practical demands that operating a modern nation-state demands. While no
significant religious group in the United States has serious expectations of dominating
and controlling the state, the same observation holds about participation in legitimate
politics. The price of getting on to the playing field of American politics is a willingness
to play by the dominant – and admittedly secular – rules. Religion matters in American
politics, but as my discussion of civil religion demonstrated, American public religion is
expected to be conciliatory, often generalized and abstract, fundamentally universal (if
not always completely inclusive), and at least formally tolerant of pluralism (Williams
1999). Granted, many Americans do not see expressions of Christianity as “sectarian,”
and to that extent our civil religion is basically Protestant and majoritarian. But many
of the same people who are completely comfortable with a Christmas nativity scene on
the city hall lawn, or with presidential candidates who claim to be “born again” Chris-
tians, still feel it is a basic violation to claim publicly that other religions are false or
shouldn’t be granted full rights of free exercise. Perhaps those implications just seem a
little impolite (a different take on the idea of a “civil” religion) but that uneasiness with
sectarian triumphalism is a cultural obstacle for any religiously based social movement
that proclaims its faith foundations too vociferously.
While this tension between the sectarian and public religious expression may be
thought of as an external dynamic for movements (that is, between a movement and
its environment), there is a parallel tension within any religiously based movement.
When a social movement is basically a moral crusade, the passion and dedication that it
produces among adherents is a great advantage. But how does one “ratchet down” such