Modern Age - Winter 2016 - 93
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN THE DOCK
1950s, Marsden maintains, were to scientific reason and individual
autonomy and the quest for individual self-fulfillment. In a sense
there was nothing new about this-these were the reigning ideals of the American enlightenment. The problem was the understanding of each of these ideals. To begin with, it was no longer
apparent if these two commitments were compatible. Was there
room for human freedom in the universe revealed by modern
science? In an intellectual universe dominated by positivist epistemology, moreover, how could science vindicate the defining
commitments of a free society or secure the moral and political
consensus on which such a society depended for its stability or
coherence?
Furthermore, whereas traditional American understandings of
autonomy and self-fulfillment had taken for granted the existence
of a body of "self-evident 'goods'" (43) specifying the contents of
"human flourishing" (42) that could and should guide the choices
of individuals, the idea of such goods was becoming increasingly
problematic. Absent such goods, autonomy tended to acquire a
new and more radical meaning, namely, the idea that individuals should "become a law unto" themselves (132), that individuals
had the right to make of themselves and of the world whatever
they choose.
Taken together, these developments acted both to erode
the shared moral capital on which the unity of American society depended and on which we had historically traded, and to
weaken "the subcultural communities" in which this capital had
been "cultivated" (132). By the late 1960s this shared moral capital
and the consensus it made possible had collapsed, leaving in its
wake the America we see today-a society characterized by a corrosive individualism, fragmented into "numerous competing and
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2016
Contents
Modern Age - Winter 2016 - Cover1
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