Jeff Sharlett says Steve Waldman has succumbed to “the solace of centrism” in his new book on the faith of the founding fathers.
Meanwhile, Founding Faith–a new book by Steven Waldman, a former religion reporter–is the sort of carefully crafted crowd pleaser that trades Williams’s liberty of conscience for the solace of centrism. “The Founding Faith,” Waldman writes, “was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty–a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.” Here we see the implications of the fine line Nussbaum draws between “freedom” and “equality.” The former, on its own, can collapse into the sort of bland theism announced by an original catchphrase of Beliefnet, an online religion portal created by Waldman in 1999 and recently sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp: “Everyone believes in something.” In political terms, such a sentiment results in the banal cold war faith of President Eisenhower, who dispensed with the Constitution’s Establishment Clause with the curt declaration that “our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith–and I don’t care what it is.”
The Nation has his review.