Spirited Debate

About This Series

SPIRITED DEBATE

A Penn School of Arts & Sciences (SAS) Initiative

Pernicious Polarization

In January 2022, a Carnegie Endowment report warned about the rise of “pernicious” forms of political polarization in America:

The rise of an “us versus them” mindset…in American sociopolitical life is evident in everything from the rise of highly partisan media to the decline in Americans’ willingness to marry someone from the opposing political party…Many other democracies around the world have grappled or are grappling with the difficulties posed by the onset of pernicious polarization…defined…as the division of society into mutually distrustful political camps in which political identity becomes a social identity.1

Over the last three years, many other studies have painted much the same bleak civic picture. For instance, in August 2022, a PNAS study supported by multiple foundations and institutes, and co-authored by ten leading lights in political science, sociology, and other academic disciplines, summarized the evidence as follows:

Animosity toward political opponents, rising for decades, is now so widespread that it affects ostensibly nonpolitical aspects of life. Partisan animosity shortens family conversations on holidays, undermines romantic connections across party lines, causes workplace discrimination, exacerbates intergroup conflicts, and complicates coordinated responses to societal crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.2

Civic Tonic/Civic Toxin

Over the last decade, the Penn Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS), a 25-year-old program of Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences (SAS), has convened Common Ground for Common Good, known as “C2G2”—a diverse and diversely accomplished group of scholars, present and former government officials, religious leaders, journalists, and other leaders, some traditional religious believers, others dedicated non-believers, and most somewhere in between—to debate church-state policies, landmark court decisions, and the role of religion, variously defined and measured, in mitigating polarization or manufacturing it.

C2G2 has modeled how to disagree deeply regarding religion without being disagreeable or disrespectful. To an individual, its members recognize that in America and all around the globe, religion has been, and continues to be, a powerful and persistent force for civic good—and a powerful and persistent force for civic ill; a pro-social tonic—and an anti-social toxin; a bridge-building source of social capital that fosters civic pluralism—and a bridge-burning source of bonding social capital that foments civic strife.

As sharply as C2G2’s members have disagreed with each other on both classic and contemporary issues concerning “religion in the public square,” they have been as one in recognizing that particular religions in certain periods and places have been irresistible forces for selfless service, diversity, and democracy—and the very same religions in other periods and places have been immovable objects favoring self-dealing, discrimination, and autocracy.

In 2000, What’s God Got to Do with the American Experiment?, a Brookings Institution volume co-edited by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne and Penn scholar, Professor John J. DiIulio, Jr., drew upon a diverse group of leading thinkers to explore multiple and competing views regarding religion’s role in “creating and nurturing” the American nation.3 At that same time, Penn scholar, Professor Ram A. Cnaan, began and led a series of studies documenting how America’s churches, synagogues, mosques, and other religious organizations supplied enormous amounts of social services to their communities and functioned as major civic seedbeds of volunteering and philanthropy that bridged income, class, racial, ethnic, and religious differences.4

Likewise, shortly after serving as founding director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (reconstituted in 2009 as the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships), DiIulio joined with Harvard University’s Professor Robert D. Putnam and others in reporting that religious institutions “build and sustain more social capital—and social capital of more varied forms—than any other type of institution in America,” and estimated that “nearly half of America’s stock of social capital is religious or religiously affiliated, whether measured by association memberships, philanthropy, or volunteering.”5

By comparison to today, however, those were much simpler times. Over the last quartercentury, politically salient differences deepened both among “church-going” citizens and between them and the much-expanded ranks of religiously unaffiliated citizens and secular citizens. Today, about 36 percent of Americans are “nones” (religiously unaffiliated), and roughly two-thirds of the nones, or 28 percent of all Americans, were “secularists.”6 Few Americans are either anti-religious secularists or anti-secular sectarians, and most Americans (including “nones”) favor government partnerships with faith-based programs and believe that religion in general has predominantly pro-civic consequences.

Still, divides over religion have become so “deep and durable” as to constitute a dangerous “new fault line in American politics.”7 Generally speaking, do different “faith factors” (individual religious beliefs, institutional attachments, programmatic affiliations, and interfaith networks) remain robust as prophylactics against civic ills ranging from poverty to polarization, and, variously defined and measured? More generally, is “religion” a net positive or a net negative in civic terms?

There are multiple and competing perspectives on this question and related questions that should be freely voiced, honestly vetted, and intelligently and respectfully debated, not least of all by scholars and students at our greatest universities.

Living the Hard Promise via Spirited Debate

On November 23, 2023, SAS Faculty Dean Steven J. Fluharty announced the SAS “Living the Hard Promise” initiative:

At any great university, including Penn, we recognize that there is a delicate balance between supporting open expression, dissent, and protest and upholding communal values of civility and mutual respect. If we are to reach across cultural and campus divides, a willingness to work collectively is more important than ever. It’s essential for us to bravely engage with ideas and commit to discussing them respectfully and authentically. That is why the (SAS) is launching a dialogue series, “Living the Hard Promise,” to create spaces in which the Penn community can begin working through the tremendous challenges of the moment.

In furtherance of this initiative, PRRUCS has launched a Spirited Debate project that has four interlocking components: four annual undergraduate Spirited Debate seminars; two annual Spirited Debate author meets critics panels (one each semester); one annual Spirited Debate one-day symposium; and a series of ten topically organized collections of occasional papers.

Spirited Debate occasional papers collections trace developments pertaining to religion in the public square and/or represent opposing viewpoints on particular topics regarding religion, polarization, and public and international affairs.

PRRUCS posts the occasional papers on its website and publishes a limited number of print editions. Some of the papers are also published in full or abridged form by one or more major media or digital outlets. The four of ten planned collections are listed below, with the first essays linked to their titles.

Collection 1
White Evangelical Christians and Politics

Collection 2
American Jewish Identity and Israel

Collection 3
An Insider’s History of Federal Faith-Based Initiatives

Collection 4
Reflections on Religion and Public Life in America

Collection 5
Catholicism, Liberalism, and the Future of Democracy

 

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1 Jennifer McCoy and Benjamin Press, What Happens When Democracies Become Perniciously Polarized? (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 18, 2022), p. 1.

2 Jan G. Voelkel et al., Mega-study Identifying Successful Interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes (Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, August 2022), p. 4.

3 E.J. Dionne and John J. DiIulio, Jr., What’s God Got to do with the American Experiment? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), p. 1.

4 For a sample, see Ram A. Cnaan et al., The Newer Deal: Social Work and Religion in Partnership (Columbia University Press, 1999); Ram A. Cnaan et al., The Invisible Caring Hand: American Congregations and the Provision of Welfare (New York University Press, 2003); and Ram A. Cnaan, The Other Philadelphia Story: How Local Congregations Support Quality of Life in Urban America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

5 Robert D. Putnam et al., Better Together: Report of the Saguaro Seminar (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2001), p. 5; also see John J. DiIulio, Jr., Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America’s Faith- Based Future (University of California Press, 2007), and Robert D. Putnam and David Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Shuster, 2010).

6 David E. Campbell et al. Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020); also see John J. DiIulio, Jr., “From Nuns to Nones,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall Edition, 2021, pp. 88-90.

7 Ibid.

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