In a recent article in the Nation ("Freedom from Religion," February 19), Ellen Willis, director of the cultural journalism program at NYU, makes a candid, straightforward, and wrong-headed argument about church and state, religion and culture. Her immediate complaint is Bush II’s establishment of a White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and the bipartisan political support it has received. More appalling, in her view, is the burgeoning emergence (or reemergence) of religion in public life, which gives a basis of support to these faith-based initiatives. She insists not only that the wall separating church and state be impenetrable, but that religion be kept out of the public square, because "a genuinely democratic society requires a secular ethos."

It does not take much to elicit from me-and possibly many other Catholics and Christians-some sympathy for her plea for "freedom from religion" in opposing government funding for faith-based initiatives. Many will recognize in the Bush initiatives a potential danger to the public weal (is this yet another Republican effort to shrink government?), as well as a danger to religious institutions themselves. Her broader argument, however-religion out of public life-deserves critical scrutiny.

Begin with Willis’s version of recent history. In the sixties, she argues, secularists and believers worked together for civil rights, against the war in Vietnam, and against poverty and social inequality. Their cooperation, she believes, was based on a shared understanding of the common good, rather than, as now, on efforts of religious liberals and leftists "to promote the power of religion itself or [take] issue with the secular left on specifically religious grounds."

This is a plausible interpretation, but Willis underestimates the degree to which religious teachings and sentiments fueled those protest movements and provided both the troops and the mandate for social change. (How else do we understand the centrality of Martin Luther King and the black churches to the civil rights movement?) Then, she mistakes the depth and duration of cooperation: there being little initial disagreement between secularists and religious on goals-ending segregation, ending the war, and ending poverty-neither group had to examine the other’s underlying assumptions very closely. That, of course, did not last beyond the violence of 1968. Yet Willis looks back on the sixties as a golden age of good behavior by the churches; both religious and secular groups lived under the regime of a shared separationist understanding of the First Amendment.

She does acknowledge, but underplays, the gap that emerged in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. (As I was reading her lament, I recalled a similar one in the seventies by peace activist Daniel Berrigan, S.J., regretting attacks from friends on the secular left because he and other Catholics opposed abortion.) Willis also skips over the secular and leftist politics that led Catholic ethnics and working-class voters to take their distance from liberalism and the Democratic Party in 1972. In fact, religious people, with or without allies, went right on acting by their own lights in the public square. (Who led the opposition to Ronald Reagan’s wars in Central America?) Their lights were not always those of the secular left.

For Willis the real troubles began with the religious right’s efforts to breach the wall of separation and its insistence that religious interests be heard in civic life. Today, she finds that her liberal and leftist allies have adapted an argument (first advanced on behalf of multiculturalists and sexual liberationists like herself) that in a democracy real tolerance and equality require that a place be made for every view. She cites the campaign speeches of Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and the writings of E.J. Dionne and Garry Wills as examples of liberals who are "supporting efforts to dilute the separation of church and state and increasing the power and influence of religion in American life." (Full disclosure: she also has reference to my work and that of Peter Steinfels.) These eminences can speak for themselves, but it strikes me that Willis mistakes the reach and the power of religion in American society. More surprising, she misconstrues the First Amendment.

First, religion is neither burgeoning nor reemerging; in some places it’s diminishing. Churches, faith, religion (she uses the terms interchangeably) have been there all the time, doing what they usually do: worshiping, meditating, educating, healing, doing good works, encouraging social justice, and sometimes being out and out nutty. At times, these activities coincide with the projects of the secular left, or right, and coalitions form. The emergence or dissolution of such coalitions does not rest on attitudes toward the First Amendment, but usually on agreement/disagreement over moral principles or accord/discord on political goals and strategies.

Second, Willis overrates the cohesion and consistency, and thus the power, of religious groups. Her assumptions about religion/faith/churches, in fact, are the mirror image of the religious right’s views of the secular left-powerful conspiracies that are winning in a life-and-death struggle for domination of U.S. society. Seriously practicing Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists know that the juggernaut of religion is a fantasy created by secularists. Conversely, secularists, like Willis, feel vulnerable precisely because they know secularism is no juggernaut either. Curiously enough for a lefty, Willis never looks at the real juggernaut, the economic forces that are shaping-often with an invisible hand-the culture and politics against which liberals, secularists, and religious often struggle in vain. Where is Karl Marx when we really need him?

Third, and here I think we arrive at the neuralgic issue: Willis sees programs of sexual liberation-abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage, nonmarital sex and childbearing-as the fundamental disagreement between secularists and religious. These are the issues that bring religion forcefully into the public square as cultural and political critic. And with the culture’s gradual obliteration of the divide between public and private, these are precisely the issues that Willis wants removed from the purview of religious tutelage.

She writes: "One need not trivialize the fears of religious parents [about these issues] to recognize that this is at bottom a complaint against democracy itself." Is that so? Is this a quarrel about democracy or about the definition of democracy, about whose ideas count and whose don’t? Which ideas are allowed voice in the public square and which are forbidden? "Religious" ideas about divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage, and single parenthood are forbidden speech because they are religious, while "secular" ideas about them are permitted speech. Secular ideas enjoy their First Amendment rights, the freedom of speech and conscience, while religious ideas are barred because of the nonestablishment clause. Heads I win, tails you lose.

An astute religious advocate may decide to shape his or her objections to abortion, teenage pregnancy, same-sex marriage, etc., in philosophical, sociological, or political rather than scriptural or doctrinal language. But are they obliged to do so? As long as religious advocates are willing to take the flak, why should they be ruled out of public debate? Neither can they expect, as Willis insists, privileged treatment. On the other hand, if religious advocates can convince others that divorce is not good for children or that teenage motherhood is bad for mothers and children, so much the better for the whole society, secularists included.

Willis sums up: "If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist." Her essay, however, suggests quite the opposite. For Willis, there is one absolute for democracy: religion cannot be part of the public conversation. Now, that is antidemocratic.