Last week, in a course I am co-teaching on Religious Pluralism and Civic Life, we discussed a fascinating story from The Jerusalem Talmud (completed before 400 CE), with help from my Tufts colleague Yonatan Brafman:

§ Rav Yehuda [Judah bar Ezekiel, 220–299 CE] says that Rav [Abba Arikha 175–247 CE] says: When Moses ascended on High [to Mount Sinai], he found the Holy One, Blessed be He, sitting and tying crowns on the letters of the Torah [kether or decorative tags added to specific Hebrew letters]. Moses said before God: Master of the Universe, who is preventing You from giving the Torah without these additions? God said to him: There is a man who is destined to be born after several generations, and Akiva ben Yosef [50-135 CE] is his name; he is destined to derive from each and every thorn of these crowns mounds upon mounds of halakhot [laws and ordinances]. It is for his sake that the crowns must be added to the letters of the Torah.

Moses said before God: Master of the Universe, show him to me. God said to him: Return behind you. Moses went and sat at the end of the eighth row in Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and did not understand what they were saying. Moses’ strength waned, as he thought his Torah knowledge was deficient. When Rabbi Akiva arrived at the discussion of one matter, his students said to him: My teacher, from where do you derive this? Rabbi Akiva said to them: It is a halakha transmitted to Moses from Sinai. When Moses heard this, his mind was put at ease, as this too was part of the Torah that he was to receive.

Moses returned and came before the Holy One, Blessed be He, and said before Him: Master of the Universe, You have a man as great as this and yet You still choose to give the Torah through me. Why? God said to him: Be silent; this intention arose before Me. Moses said before God: Master of the Universe, You have shown me Rabbi Akiva’s Torah, now show me his reward. God said to him: Return to where you were. Moses went back and saw that they were weighing Rabbi Akiva’s flesh in a butcher shop [bemakkulin], as Rabbi Akiva was tortured to death by the Romans [for teaching the Torah]. Moses said before Him: Master of the Universe, this is Torah and this is its reward? God said to him: Be silent; this intention arose before Me.

Menachot 29b, in The William Davidson digital edition of the Koren Noé Talmud, with commentary by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, via Sefaria.org.

When Moses magically enters Akiva’s classroom (maybe 1500 years in the future), he chooses to sit in the back row, like an apprehensive freshman, and then feels his confidence slip even further when he realizes that he cannot follow the sophisticated conversation. This is a metaphor for intellectual progress and growing expertise.

But then, when Akiva’s authority is challenged, the rabbi credits everything he knows to Moses (or to the commandments that Moses that had received on Sinai), which is a metaphor for original revelation. Akiva is saying that everything was already known at the beginning of the tradition.

At the moment that Moses experiences his vision of Akiva’s classroom, he has not yet received the Torah and does not know its content. He is consoled by the thought that the text that he will receive will “contain” Akiva’s interpretations of it.

The frame text (“Rav Yehuda says that Rav says …”) alerts us to the chain of pronouncements and commentary that is central to Judaism–and to many, if not all, intellectual and spiritual traditions. Ideas come from sources. Interpreters analyze and interpret these ideas, building larger bodies of thought that derive authority from their origins even when they no longer express the founders’ intentions.

One could say the same of US constitutional law. In that tradition, too, it is common to think that the founders would be bewildered by contemporary legal arguments, or that everything we argue today is somehow contained in the founding documents–or both. We might imagine:

The ghost of James Madison went and sat at the back of Larry Tribe’s Harvard con-law lecture class and didn’t understand what anyone was talking about. He ducked low in his seat in case Tribe decided to cold-call him. Madison was relieved when Tribe suddenly mentioned him as the “Father of the Constitution.”

To doubt that there is–or ought to be–any link between the founding and the present is to dispute the value of the whole framework.

At some point, it’s natural to ask why such an edifice exists, as Moses does when he asks about the “reward” of Torah. According to tradition, Akiva was tortured to death for refusing to stop teaching scripture, which dramatizes this question. The answer is: “Be silent; this intention arose before Me.” In other words: “Don’t ask.” Even the divine voice is passive, as if the “intention” arose of its own volition.

At the base of the structure is obligation, not choice–or so this Talmudic story suggests. Is that always the case?

See also: scholasticism in global context; the relevance of American civil religion to K-12 education; is everyone religious?;  a Hegelian meditation

On one hand, I am concerned about the phenomenon of white Christian nationalism in the United States. In some churches and religious networks, some people believe that the nation ought to be fundamentally white and Christian and that Christianity somehow undergirds this idea. White Christian nationalism competes with more emancipatory and inclusive theological views, but it’s influential.

On the other hand, I am still drawn to the old, Tocquevillian argument that participating in the governance of an organization that contains any diversity can teach skills and values of deliberation, tolerance, and inclusion. And churches can be such organizations.

Therefore, I am worried about people who identify as white and Christian without actually participating in maintaining communities or wrestling with the complexities required by self-government. At the same time, I am cautiously optimistic that asking people to take responsibility for real religious communities will strengthen democracy, because members can learn how to hold a group together, manage disagreements, select good leaders, interact with outsiders, and hold each other accountable.

Thus I would hypothesize that:

• H1 Identifying as a white Christian will be associated with racial anxiety and intolerance, because white Christian dominance is threatened today by growing racial diversity and greater equality. But …
• H2 Participating in groups that offer an element of self-governance will promote democratic values and therefore should correlate negatively with racial anxiety. (Especially if the group is diverse).

Churches are manifestations of Christian identity and places where some people receive racialized messages, but they are also groups that can offer various degrees of diversity and self-governance. Therefore:

• H3 Among whites, church membership (a proxy for Christian identity) will be associated with racial anxiety and intolerance. However,
• H4 Controlling for religious identity as well as race, church participation will be associated with higher tolerance. (This hypothesis is similar to the findings of Ekins 2018.)

Nationally representative survey data collected by Data for Progress from August 4-30, 2022 offer a chance to test these hypotheses. The sample is 1,899 likely voters (who differ from non-voters in the US resident population). The survey asks several questions about religious belief, identity, attendance, and participation.

The survey also asks several attitudinal questions about diversity. I chose: “It would bother me if, one day, white people were an ethnic minority in the United States.” I will label disagreement with that prompt “inclusiveness,” for the sake of using one word.*

Two limitations of the survey: It doesn’t ask about the diversity of respondents’ religious congregations or which religion people belong to. However, 94% of white Americans who identify as religious are Christian (2% are Jewish), so a relatively modest error results from assuming that white religious respondents are Christian and their congregations are churches.

I have run Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions to predict inclusiveness based on various other questions in the survey and to test the four hypotheses stated above.

H1 is correct: The importance of religion to a person is negatively correlated with their inclusiveness (when controlling for demographics). Being white, over 45, and not being college educated are also negatively associated with inclusiveness in this model.

Another way to look at the same pattern is to restrict the sample to whites (most of whom are either Christian or non-religious) and omit race from the regression. For whites, being religious, over 45, and not college educated are negatively associated with inclusiveness.

H2 is not correct: Contrary to what de Tocqueville or Dewey might predict, a person’s total number of active group memberships is negatively associated with inclusiveness. The more groups you actively participate in, the less likely you are to accept whites becoming a minority. This relationship is statistically significant but small. When looking only at whites, the relationship is no longer significant, but it isn’t positive, as I would have hoped.

Different group memberships evidently have different relationships with racial anxiety. The bivariate correlation between religious-congregation membership and inclusiveness is -.058** (Pearson), but no other forms of membership are correlated to a significant extent with this outcome. In a regression with group memberships as the only independent variables (i.e., without demographics), religious groups and sports are negatively correlated with inclusiveness; art groups are positively related.

H3 is correct: Being a member of a religious congregation is associated with less inclusiveness (controlling for demographics).

H4 is correct: Religious participation helps.

In a model that includes prayer, attendance, religiosity, congregational membership, and religious participation, membership has a significant positive correlation with inclusiveness, whereas religiosity is a negative correlate. When looking at whites only, congregational membership is a positive; religiosity and attendance are negative.

The previous sentence is my takeaway. For white Christians, being actively involved in a church builds the values that we need for a pluralistic democracy. At the same time, simply identifying as Christian and hearing Christian messages is associated with intolerant values. We need the first effect to outweigh the second one, and that is a struggle in an era when most associations (including churches) have weakened while mass and social media have expanded.

*Data for Progress actually ran a survey experiment and asked some people whether they would be bothered and others whether they would not be bothered. This difference in question-wording yielded somewhat different results. I combined the two items into one measure.

See also: churchgoing and Trump; the relevance of American civil religion to K-12 education; the Dutch secret; the prospects for an evangelical turn against Trump.

The American Political Science Association’s annual meeting will be in Los Angeles from August 31-Sept 3, 2023. The overall conference theme is “Rights and Responsibilities in an Age of Mis- and Disinformation.” (But most papers do not address the annual theme.)

The Civic Studies Related Group invites proposals for panels, round tables, and individual papers that make a significant contribution to the civic studies field; articulate a civic studies perspective on some important issue; or contribute to theoretical, empirical, or practical debates in civic studies. We especially encourage proposals that emphasize actual or potential civic responses to current social and political crises, their origins, and possible consequences.

Recent civic studies sessions have included a panel on how COVID-19 affected civil society and an authors’ roundtable on the books Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy by Robert C. Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett.

Civic studies is a field defined by diversity yet connected by participants’ commitments to promoting interdisciplinary research, theory, and practice in support of civic renewal: the strengthening of civic (i.e., citizen-powered and citizen-empowering) politics, initiatives, institutions, and culture. Its concern is not with citizenship understood as legal membership in a particular polity, but with guiding civic ideals and a practical ethos embraced by individuals loyal to, empowered by, and invested in the communities they form and re-form together. Its goal is to promote these ideals through improved institutional designs, enhanced public deliberation, new and improved forms of public work among citizens, or clearer and more imaginative political theory.

The civic studies framework adopted in 2007 cites two ideals for the emerging discipline: “public spiritedness” (or “commitment to the public good”) and “the idea of the citizen as a creative agent.” Civic studies is an intellectual community that takes these two ideals seriously. Although new, it draws from several important strands of ongoing research and theory, including the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and the Bloomington School, of Juergen Habermas and critical social theory, Brent Flyvbjerg and social science as phronesis, and more diffuse traditions such as philosophical pragmatism, Gandhian nonviolence, the African American Freedom Struggle. It supports work on deliberative democracy, on public work, on civic engagement and community organizing, among others.

To propose a session, click here. You do not have to be a political scientist, but you would have to attend APSA 2023 in person. APSA members can also join the Civic Studies group (free) at this link.