Allen Zeesman responds to David Wolpe on religion and liberal democracy

To the Editor:

David Wolpe is surely right that the decline of religion is not merely a change in private belief. Liberal democracy depends on qualities—humility, gratitude, obligation, restraint, service, and concern for people beyond the self—that freedom itself cannot generate. Freedom creates the space in which we choose; it does not teach us what is worthy of choosing.

Wolpe’s distinction between spirituality and religion is especially important. Spirituality can remain a feeling. Religion disciplines feeling through practice, community, ritual, sacrifice, and obligation. It asks us not merely to admire virtue but to perform it.

But this raises a further question. Religion forms people, yet it does not always form them for freedom. Religious traditions have cultivated humility and service, but they have also justified coercion, hierarchy, exclusion, and political supremacy. The public need is therefore not simply for “more religion,” but for forms of religious life capable of producing morally serious people who also accept equal citizenship, freedom of conscience, and constitutional limits on what any community may impose upon others.

Religious institutions must also confront why so many people ceased to trust them. Any religious humbling of America must include a humbling of religion itself: acknowledgment of hypocrisy, abuse, political capture, and failures of moral authority.

Wolpe has nevertheless identified the indispensable problem. A free society cannot survive on freedom alone. It requires institutions that teach citizens that not everything permitted is admirable, that life is received rather than wholly self-created, and that liberty carries obligations to others and to the world we inherit.

The challenge now is to recover moral formation without recovering religious domination.