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rimisHillsdale College Hillsdale, Michigan 49242 Vol . 11, No .
7
July, 198 2VMORAL LEADERSHIP INPOST-SECULAR AMERICABy Richard
John Neuhaus
Richard John Neuhaus was born in Canada andeducated in Ontario,
Nebraska, and Texas. He holdsdegrees from Concordia Theological
Seminary ,Washington University, and Wayne State University
.Ordained in 1960, he was from 1961 to 1977 headpastor of the
Church of St . John the Evangelist, a low -income, mainly black and
Hispanic parish in the Wil-liamsburg section of Brooklyn. He now
pursues his sev-eral ministries as "Pastor on Assignment " for the
EastCoast Synod of the Association of Evangelical Luthera
nChurches, as editor of Forum Letter, a monthly com-mentary on
religion and culture, and as a Senior Fel-low of the Council on
Religion and Internationa lAffairs .
This presentation was part of a seminar entitled"The Bible and
the Republic in a Secular Age," hel din the Center for Constructive
Alternatives at HillsdaleCollege March 7-11, 1982 . Other speakers
in additionto Pastor Neuhaus included Carl F . H . Henry,
RabbiJakob Petuchowski, Ralph David Abernathy, Malach iMartin,
William Ralston, Russell Kirk, Cal Thomas ofthe Moral Majority, and
futurist Barbara MarxHubbard .
When we set out to talk about moral and religiou sleadership in
post-secular America, we are facing cer-tain perennial questions,
questions that are not going t ogo away until, if the Christian
gospel turns out to b eright, the Kingdom of God comes .
Jesus talked about rendering to Caesar what i sCaesar's, and to
God what is God's . Paul talks i nRomans 13 about the powers that
be, and more nega-tively in other places about the principalities
and pow-ers that stand against the rulership of God . Likewisewith
Augustine, Innocent III and all of the contro-versies between the
Popes and Emperors during th eHoly Roman Empire, Thomas Aquinas,
Luther ,Calvin's grandly flawed experiment in Geneva—all the
way up to today's debate about Roe vs . Wade and abor-tion,
about prayer in public schools, about tax exemp-tion and what is
meant by religion for purposes of theIRS .
It was thought until very recently, by the cultura lleadership
of the Western world, that these issues ha dbeen resolved in some
way—basically by excluding re-ligion or religiously-based morality
from the publi carena, where the serious business of society was
take ncare of. The idea of the separation of church and state
,which most of us have taken in with our mother's milk ,has by
remarkable convolutions of logic and law cometo mean in the minds
of many people the separation o freligiously-based values from
public policy . But theperiod is now past when it was assumed that
theseissues could be resolved simply by removing one sideof the
debate from the public square . We are entering anew period in
which we are asked to read the signs of
im .pri .mis (im-pry-mis) adv . In the first place . Middl
eEnglish, from Latin in primis, among the first (things) . . .
.
Imprimis is the journal of Hillsdale's two outreachprograms
seeking to foster clear thinking on th eproblems of our time: the
Center for Constructiv eAlternatives in Michigan, and the Shavano
Institute fo rNational Leadership in Colorado. A subscription is
fre eon request.
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the times in a different way, recognizing that in somevery
profound sense we are entering a post-secula rworld .
This has all kinds of ramifications . It will affect notonly
American life, but also—if America is, as som epeople allege, the
advance society of world history, i fwhat is happening in the
United States today is what i slikely to be happening elsewhere
tomorrow—then th epost-secular character of American society tells
u ssomething about the likely prospects of world-historica lchange
.
Thus we find ourselves back in what is for mos tintellectuals
today an unfamiliar cluster of questions ,but one which within the
broader range of ou rcountry's history has been most characteristic
ofAmerican thought : namely, the role of America in th eworld, the
idea that in some sense America represent ssomething new, both
promising and ominous, about th efuture of humankind . That
certainly was the basic be-lief of the constitutional founders and,
even more im-portant, of the religious and spiritual and poeti
cvisionaries at the beginning of the American experi-ment .
This attitude toward America as being experimental ,as being
provocative, as being a test of human possibil-ity, has almost
totally been lost . It has been driven ou tof public discourse in
recent American history, so tha tnow it almost sounds quaint, like
a nostalgic throwbac kto a time long ago, back to a period of
innocenc ebefore Vietnam and the Second World War andAuschwitz . It
seems difficult now to envision a worldin which the American
proposition would once agai nbe something of promise in a
world-historical context ;yet I think that that is the kind of
world which we ma ynow be entering . A time is coming in which we
wil lhave to make some decisions, not simply at a prag-matic or
economic level, but much more solemn an ddaring decisions about
what we think history is about .
Politics, I would argue, is always a function ofculture, and at
the heart of culture is religion . Ourculture consists of those
symbols, those ideas, thosestories which inform the way we try to
shape our live stogether . It is those values we hold up, those
some -times intuitive, sometimes articulate notions of what i
shonorable and what is base . It is our notions of excel-lence .
And at the heart of all such cultural assump-tions, are ultimately
beliefs about what is true .Whether we call them religious or not,
whether the yhave a denominational brand name pegged to them ,they
are religious in character—in that they engage ou rintuitions about
the absolute, about that which trans-cends all possible discussions
of simple utility o rpragmatism . When we ask what it is that
really thi sworld of ours is all about, and whether indeed there
isfinally any kind of meaning, we are dealing withreligion .
Today, the role of religion in public has change dvery
dramatically, because of the recent outburst o fwhat is called the
religious New Right, the MoralMajority, Christian action groups of
all sorts . And inmany people's minds—especially people who hav
ebeen brought up to believe that the separation of churc hand state
means the separation of public business fro mreligiously-based
values—this movement is viewed a sa kind of invasion of the
barbarians, of the people wh owere once presumably locked into
their cages way backin the 1920s during the famous "Monkey Trial,"
wit hH. L. Mencken's acid caricaturing of these funda-mentalist
Neanderthals .
So now the question many people in "respectable "circles are
asking is, how do we get these animals backin their cages, these
people who are disrupting the wayin which we have decided to
conduct our business i npublic? Well, my premise is that they are
not animals ,they are citizens of this Republic ; and for those of
u swho are Christians, they are recognized as sisters andbrothers
in Christ . They are new and vital participant sin the always
raucous process of democratic govern-ment . In fact, it may even be
that Jerry Falwell and th eMoral Majority have kicked a sort of
tripwire—ratherclumsily, perhaps inadvertently, sometimes
perhapseven with an element of malice—a tripwire alerting u sto a
much more massive change. That massive chang eis, if I may put this
rather ambitious proposition to you ,the collapse of the 200-year
hegemony of the secula rEnlightenment .
The Naked Public Squar eThe cultural and, therefore, political
elites of our
society have for the last 200 years assumed that th edogmas of a
secular Enlightenment ought to prevail a sthe formative influence
in how we shape our publicdiscourse . Those dogmas were distinctly
hostile toparticularist religious belief . It was assumed,
comingout of the more militant secularism of the lateeighteenth
century in France, that enlightenmen t(which is to say, education)
is incompatible with relig-ious belief, and hence that as people
become moreenlightened they will become less religious .
Religionwill wither away, or will at least be confined to th
eprivate sphere of life . This is the basic model whic hnot only
militant secularists, but also a good manyreligionists, have bought
into . Our century is plaguedby this notion that somehow what one
does religiousl yis a private negotiation between oneself and God
,hermetically sealed off from public discourse abou tquestions of
right and wrong in the agora, in the publi csquare .
Thus we have ended up, as a consequence of th esecular
Enlightenment, with the idea of the nake dpublic square—that is,
the public space, in terms of th egovernmental process,
legislative, executive, judicial ,but also in terms of a mere
physical and psychologica l
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space that we call public—the idea that all of this spac eought
to be sterilized of any specific religious influ-ence . At one
relatively trivial level, but nonetheles simportant if one thinks
about it, the issue of the nake dpublic square arises every year
around Christmas time .As sure as the date itself, there are
lawsuits wit hgroups like ACLU and Americans United for Separa-tion
of Church and State joining in to make sure tha tthat Christmas
tree isn't put in the town square, or tha tChristmas carols are not
sung in the public school . Thi sis merely symbolic of a much more
profound assump-tion : that somehow it is possible to take care of
all th epublic business without any reference to the
relig-iously-based values of the American people .
Now the idea of hermetically sealing religion of ffrom the
political process is not without its understand -able historical
roots . Coming out of the seventeenth -century wars of religion, in
which the post-Refor-mation conflicts between various religious
partisangroups almost destroyed the civil fabric of Europe, it i
sunderstandable that it was assumed that religion inpublic is, by
definition, divisive and destructive an dthat it therefore must be
kept out of the public squar eor we will end up in perpetual civil
war . Yet it is ob-vious today that the notion of a secularized,
religiousl ysterilized public space is no longer believable .
Not only in the area of religion and politics, but in s omany
other areas, the hegemony of the secular En-lightenment no longer
seems very plausible . In our lawschools today, for example, there
is a refreshingupsurge in ethical questions—not simply in terms
ofhow you stay out of trouble with the law, but in a mor eprofound
sense of what are the issues of right an dwrong which make law
legitimate and illegitimate ;what finally are the values that give
force to law ,beyond simply the mechanistic notion of precedent
orthe relativistic notion of that which serves the severalinterests
in conflict .
The collapse of the secular hegemony is equally evi-dent in the
sciences . Especially in physics, but also inbiology and a whole
host of fields, people are realizin gthat science is not the
solving of problems so much a sit is an encounter with mysteries
which are to b erevered. We are hearing that somehow there is an
abso-lute mystery at the center of it all, which when
seriousscientists talk about it sounds more and more lik etheology
.
In a whole host of endeavors, then, the cutting edg eis moving
toward an understanding of a religiou scharacter in the nature of
the reality of which we arepart . Certainly this is true in the
realm of public polic yand in the political process . We need, in
the phrase o fsociologist Peter Berger, an understanding that we
live"under a sacred canopy." At one time secularis mitself, with
all of its very noble and frequently compel -ling visions of human
progress, provided a sort o fsacred canopy for many of the
intellectual and cultural
leaders of the Western world . Today it doesn't, as werealize
that we can only become more mature person snot by outgrowing
mystery but by entering ever deepe rinto the mystery .
Fifteen years ago, sociologists of religion and ofculture would
almost all assert that as society becamemore modern, it would
inevitably become more secu-lar. Today many of those same
sociologists, scholarslike Peter Berger, Clifford Gertz, Daniel
Bell and othe rneo-conservatives, have done a 180-degree turn and
ar esuggesting that as we move further into modernity therole of
religion will become not less but moreimportant . As we move deeper
into what Max Webe rcalled "the iron cage" of a specialized and
rationalize dsociety, the irrepressible question about the meaning
o fit all, the religious question, will come increasingly tothe
fore .
There are other reasons as well why the new asser-tiveness of
religion in public portends a different kin dof future for American
politics and social change . Onemajor reason is, quite simply, that
the United States i sa democracy, which means that if governance is
no talways of, by, and for the people, it is at least not i
ncontempt toward the people . And the fact is that inAmerican life,
the overwhelming majority of thepeople understand their values to
be inseparably con-nected with their religious belief . Observers
from othe rsocieties have often seen it more clearly than hav
eAmerican social critics, but the sociological evidence i sthere
even if one has very little power of perception :for better or for
worse, Americans are incorrigibl yreligious. You can list for
yourself all the ways i nwhich our understandings of what is right
and wrong ,of good and bad, of that which gives reason for hope
,are tied to particularist religious beliefs—primarily, o fcourse,
Christianity and Judaism .
This is why it is not possible for public policy to g oon acting
indifferently toward the religiously-base dvalues of the people in
whose name the democracy pre-sumably has moral legitimacy . Take
for example themost heated issue in American life today, one tha
tunavoidably joins religiously-based values and publi cpolicy: the
issue of abortion . In the Roe vs . Wade deci-sion of 1973, Justice
Blackmun, writing for the major-ity, acknowledged correctly the
solemnity and the cent-rality of the issue joined : who belongs to
the humancommunity for which we accept common responsibil-ity? Or
in Biblical language, who is my neighbor?
The reason why Roe vs . Wade has been repudiate dby the American
people, and why it will eventually b eturned around, is that for
the first time in Americanjurisprudence, it was explicitly stated
that it is possibleto address these issues of ultimate importance
withoutany reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition that ha
salways been the primary source of public values inAmerica. The
strength of the religious New Right ,which I find a very troubling
phenomenon in many
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ways, is positive to the extent it has alerted us that th
edirection pointed by Roe vs . Wade is no longer possi-ble, not
unless we as a society are willing to enterdeeper and deeper into
what sociological jargon calls alegitimation crisis—a situation in
which governance i sdivorced from morality, in which law is
asserted as la wsimply because it is the law .
Toward a Theonomous SocietyThe great task of our time, then, is
to develop a new
kind of public ethic that is able to engage the ultimat
equestions, that is able to be responsive in a democrati cway to
the juices of belief among the poeple . The onlyalternative is a
legitimation crisis in which, in HannahArendt's phrase, we no
longer have governance tha trepresents authority, but governance
that represent sonly power and that can only be continued by the us
eof increasing doses of coercion . That is where we areheaded
unless we can begin to talk again about ultimatevalues in public
.
I am not referring to the kind of formulas which th ereligious
New Right often seems to suggest, where yo ugo straight from a
Bible passage to the enactment of apiece of legislation . That
would imply going back to apre-Enlightenment situation or even to a
pre-Refor-mation situation, back to some kind of unified
Chris-tendom, which is just not possible today . This task
ofconstructing a new public ethic, informed by the livin gbeliefs
of the American people, will have to be a post-Enlightenment
adventure . It will be a quite new chap-ter, an experience that
will have internalized all of th eEnlightenment's great
contributions with regard to crit-ical reason, all of its criticism
of authoritarianism invarious forms, so as to suggest a new way of
recogniz-ing what is authoritative .
It will mean that we have moved, in Paul Tillich' sphrase, from
the heteronomous society that existedprior to the modern age—a
society in which one isruled by others in an authoritarian way, you
do whatyou are supposed to do because I say so or the Bibl esays so
or the Church says so or the King say sso—through an autonomous
society—the great notio nof the secular Enlightenment, of every
individual bein ghis or her own Pope, own Bible, own King, the kind
o fsociety which has brought us to our present impass eculturally
and politically and morally—to achieve, atlast, a theonomous
society, a society that recognizestranscendent values by which it
is held accountable .
As late as 1954 the phrase "under God" was putinto the Pledge of
Allegiance : "one nation underGod." Some people find that phrase
distressing ,because they think it suggests that America is someho
wimmune from the sins and the ambiguities, the com-promises and the
crimes of other nations . Well, i fthat's what Americans mean when
they say "unde rGod," then it's indeed unfortunate that the phrase
i sthere . But I would urge you to consider that it is a great
thing that it is there if we understand "under God" t omean
under judgment . To be under God in this sense i sto acknowledge
that there is an absolute to which w eare historically held
accountable . Moral leadership i nAmerica, from the Mayflower
Compact way back i nthe beginning of the seventeenth century right
down t oDr. King's August 28, 1963, "I Have A Dream"speech at the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington, ha salways conveyed that sense of
historical destiny . It i sthat sense of historical destiny, of
calling, of vocation ,of accountability, of purpose, of intent, of
testing, ofexperiment, which I think is required if we are
toreconstruct a public ethic .
Historically in the United States it was the Puritantradition
that gave most vigorous expression to tha tsense of destiny . If
you look at American religiontoday, there are a number of churches
that are the heirsof the Puritan tradition, the churches that
ordinarily ar ecalled mainline Protestantism . The United
MethodistChurch, the United Presbyterian Church, the
ProtestantEpiscopal Church in America, the United Church o
fChrist—these are the churches that accepted, up unti lthe middle
of this century, the culture-forming tas kwhich Puritanism saw as
its vocation for America . Buttoday the Protestant mainline has, I
believe, largel yabdicated its culture-forming task, thereby
raising theissue of which new religiously-based communities o
fmoral leadership will provide the kind of moral visionthat is
required for the reconstruction of a public ethic .
There are many other candidates; the brand-nameProtestant
churches in America are not in fact, numeri-cally speaking, the
mainline at all . The largest singleChristian community in the
United States, of course, i sRoman Catholic, of whom there are
roughly 50million; they are not part of the so-called mainline
.Another 20 million Americans claim they are Lutheran ,and the
majority of these are in no way part of th emainline either . There
are approximately 30 million ,some would say as many as 50 million,
under the broa dbanner of Evangelicalism and they are not mainline
.And obviously the Jews and the Eastern Orthodox arenot mainline
Protestant . The so-called mainline major-ity is, in fact, the
minority .
Is America a Force for Good?Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian social
theorist at the
beginning of this century, had a little theory which h ecalled
the circulation of elites . He said that in anysociety you have a
certain number of functions thatneed to be taken care of: military,
economic, cultural ,religious, artistic, and so forth . Each of
these func-tions, Pareto said, gathers around itself an
elite—people who by an old-boy network, by family connec-tion, from
one generation to another, lead the defini-tion of the task
relative to that function . But eventu-ally, he says, an elite will
weary of its function, or los eits confidence, or lose touch, so
that it drops away an d
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a new elite then circulates to that function and begin sto take
over .
Today in the United States the religiously-basedmoral leadership
of the country is witnessing a ver yvigorous contest in the
circulation of elites . Themoment obviously calls for a new
community of lead-ership, a community that can give
religiously-base dmoral definition to the American experiment and
thu slay the groundwork for the reconstruction of a publi cethic.
To a lot of people it is very frightening to hearsomeone talk this
way . They say, you're talking abou tChristian America, aren't you?
Yes—yes, I am . Theextraordinary thing is that today it is though
tun-American to talk about Christian America .
Up until 1931 the U .S. Supreme Court itself coul dsay, without
any fear of contradiction, that of coursethis is a Christian
society, and it could tick off thepoints of reference which make
that characterizatio nmeaningful . But it is all different now .
Really the ideathat the belief systems of a people, especially in
ademocracy, ought not to inform and shape the way inwhich we
construct our life together is a very novelidea indeed—and, I
think, a very bankrupt one . We arenot talking about imposing a
belief system, but rathe rabout resisting the imposition of alien
belief systemsthat impose themselves under the guise of being value
-neutral and value-free, when in fact they are laden wit hall kinds
of values which are alien to the beliefs, thedreams, the
convictions of the American people .
Throughout American history, certainly as recentl yas the late
nineteenth century and the early part of thi scentury, the great
religious leaders of the Social Gospe lmovement, like Washington
Gladden, Rauschenbush ,and the rest, had no doubt but what their
goal was t oAmericanize Christianity and to Christianize America
.They had no doubt about this being an experiment no tonly in
politics and in economics, but also in culture—the carrying forth
of a heritage which was the merge rof Greek classicism and
Judeo-Christian faith . Whereastoday, mainline Protestant religion
has largely suc-cumbed to the illusions of the secular society . It
is nolonger thought to be possible nor even desirable toexert a
distinctively Christian influence within thepublic square . Thus in
the World Council of Churches ,for example, a slogan that has
dominated for the last 1 5years has been, "The world sets the
agenda for th eChurch ." You look around to see what, by
seculardefinition, is happening in the world and then assumethat it
is the business of the church to advance that, t oget on that
bandwagon .
able public subject, but without any believable connec-tion to
the distinctive truth-claims of the Christianfaith . It is a vast
disillusionment with the Americanexperiment that has led to this
loss of nerve, this abjec taccommodationism, this retreat from
being distinctive-ly Christian, even distinctively religious, in
public .
I have taken a little survey, unscientific but nonethe-less I
think reliable . I have asked people in the worl dof 475 Riverside
Drive, the National Council o fChurches and so forth, that if you
put a certain proposi-tion to the middle- and upper-level
leadership ofmainline Protestantism in America, what would thei
rresponse be? The proposition is this : That on balanc eand
considering the alternatives, American power is aforce for good in
the world . On balance and consider-ing the alternatives, American
power is a force fo rgood in the world . A rather carefully nuanced
proposi-tion, I would say . The response I have found has
beenalmost unanimous, that if one put that question to th emiddle-
and upper-level leadership of mainline Pro-testantism in America
today, probably less than 15% ,at the most 20%, would say yes, that
is true . Probably50% or more would flatly say no, that the
contrary i strue . And the rest would so equivocate in their
answerthat in effect they too would be saying no .
To Dream Anew
Now what does this tell us? It doesn't tell us thatthey are
necessarily wrong ; I think they're wrong and Isuspect most of you
think they're wrong, for I believ ethat America is, on balance and
considering the al-ternatives, a force for good in the world . But
it doe stell us that whether they're right or wrong, they clearl
yare not in a position any more to provide cultural defi-nition for
the American experiment . Dr. Martin Luthe rKing, with whom I
worked for several years back i nthe '60s as a liaison between his
SCLC and variou sparts of the anti-war movement, was fond of sayin
gthat whom you would change, you must first love . In asense it's
very simple ; any good parent or teacher orpastor knows that .
People are not going to take thei rsense of direction from their
declared enemies . It is no tat all obvious that the National
Council of Churche sloves America . Indeed, it is rather manifest
that thei rposture is basically one of hostility, a posture tha
tclearly excludes them as a candidate for providin gcultural
leadership .
There are other groups in America who obviousl yare prepared to
do it . For one, the whole religious Ne wRight. I do not think that
they are going to win inPareto's game . I hope that they are not,
or that if theforces they represent do come to dominate the publi
cdiscussion of religiously-based values, certain of
theircharacteristics will have moderated by that time .
That kind of loss of nerve is at the heart of the col -lapse of
the influence of mainline Protestantism . Theseare the churches
that are in the doldrums, the churche sthat are not growing, the
churches that are in institu -tional trouble, out of touch with
their own constit- There are other contenders, the Roman Catholi
cuencies, running all kinds of "church and society" Church perhaps
first of all . Certainly in many ways thi sprograms, issuing
pronouncements on every conceiv- ought to be the Catholic moment in
America, th e
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moment in which Catholics with their rich intellectua
ltradition, with a heritage of conceptualization about th
erelationship between the city of man and the city o fGod, are in a
position finally to play a culture-formingrole that in the past,
because of anti-Catholicism on th epart of Protestants and because
of their own immigrant -based insecurities, they have not been able
to play . I donot know whether indeed the Catholic Church will ris
eto that challenge . It seems to me that the leadershipsectors
within the Roman Catholic Church are toda yAmericanizing themselves
in a pattern that is in man yways imitative of the mainline
Protestantism that i salready struck out . But theoretically, it
could be th eCatholic moment, for Catholics up to now have been a
tbat, so to speak, in shaping American culture .
Lutherans have not been at bat . Their experienceagain is very
similar to the Catholic immigrant experi-ence, but without the
conceptual riches and without th etheological equipment, quite
frankly, for dealing withthe issues posed by a democratic society .
On anotherfront, I would say that the great issues posed
byCalvinism, by John Calvin's grandly flawed experi-ment in Geneva,
also hold a great deal of promise i nthe so-called evangelical
churches . I am very impressedthat today, if one moves around the
United States ask-ing where are the people and where are the
communi-ties that are really posing first-principle questionsabout
the meaning of modern society, the relationshipof God and the
Republic, the nature of social legitima-tion in the modern world, a
surprising number o fpeople who are probing these issues with
intelligence
and imagination call themselves Calvinists .The Jewish community
in America also plays a vita l
role in the possible reconstruction of a public ethic . Ithink
it was generally agreed in the leadership circle sof American
Jewry, somewhere back in the 1930s, thatthe more secular the
society, the safer it would be fo rJews and other minorities .
Today within the Jewishcommunity, led by organs such as The Public
Interes tand Commentary, by figures such as Daniel Bell an dIrving
Kristol, that basic decision is being re-thought .The question is
being raised whether the naked publi csquare isn't a very dangerous
place after all . For whenthe public square is really naked, when
there are n otranscendent sanctions of either a positive or a
negativ enature, then what finally are your protections agains
tevil, including the evil of anti-Semitism ?
This discussion of moral leadership has ranged farafield, all of
it in search of rediscovering what Joh nCourtney Murray, a great
Roman Catholic theologianand political philosopher, called the
American pro-position—the audacity, the freshness, the almost
unbe-lievable chutzpah, that is the United States of America
.Revivifying what is unique about this kind of polity ,this kind of
democratic aspiration, revitalizing it an ddreaming it anew, it
seems to me is the great an dinvigorating challenge of our
generation and of th egenerations to come. For I do believe that it
is not wit hembarrassment, but with a profound sense of
account-ability to the transcendent judgment of God, that w ecan
say it remains true today that this America, this pro-position,
this experiment, is the last best hope of earth .
Harrington
Hillsdale's `Counterpoint' TV Series Starts August 4Debate -
Documentary Show to Run on WTBS Cabl e
Free-market economist Walter Williams wil ldebate socialist
author Michael Harrington on thequestion of economic opportunity in
America ,Wednesday evening, August 4, 1982, at 9 :05 pmEDT over
WTBS cable television nationwide .George Roche, President of
Hillsdale College ,will moderate the debate .
The program, entitled "Counterpoint," is thefirst in a regular
series produced by Hillsdale' snew outreach division, the Shavano
Institute forNational Leadership . During the hour, Williamsand
Harrington will each present a short docu-mentary film specially
produced to argue his sideof the issue; then they will face off in
a livedebate before Turner Broadcasting's potentia laudience of
over 18 million homes coast to coast .It's an evening Imprimis
readers won't want tomiss .
Williams
The opinions expressed in Imprimis may be, but are not
necessarily, the views of the Center for Constructive Alternatives,
the Shavano Insti-tute, or Hillsdale College . Copyright © 1982 by
Hillsdale College . Permission to reprint in whole or in part is
hereby granted, provided custom-ary credit is given . ISSN
0277-8432 . Editor, John K . Andrews, Jr ., Assistant, Patricia A .
DuBois .
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