Religion -- Context And Crisis From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space, William T. Cavanaugh: Cavanaugh alerts the reader immediately, based on Martin Marty's book (Politics, Religion, and the Common Good) that there are conflicts in this world when it comes to religious beliefs and political values. And the thrust of Cavanaugh's scholarly article is that there needs to be a balance between social unity and the American Constitutional rights that allow groups to identify with their faith through pluralism.

In Cavanaugh's referencing of Marty (299), violence was visited upon Jehovah's Witnesses (JW) in the 1940s, in part because the JW dogma did not allow children to salute the American Flag. But Marty fails to stand up against the "zealous nationalism" that fuels the distrust, loathing and even violence against the JW faith. Marty asserts that religion " ... can cause all kinds of trouble in the public arena" (Cavanaugh 2006).

This provides an opening for Cavanaugh, who clearly believes that religion does not and should not be a movement that conforms to political agendas, and the theme of the first portion of Cavanaugh's chapter is that there are two distinct public spaces (or cities) within a nation like the United States: there is unity ("which is essential") and pluralism. Of course the Constitution guarantees the right of religious freedom, which means that religious pluralism is a legal part of the civil society, even when right wing nationalistic bombast tries to assert that blind patriotism supersedes faith-based pluralism.

But unity, if it means that everyone has to fit into the national political goals -- that is, everyone should get...

According to Cavanaugh, the First Amendment's reference to freedom of religion creates " ... a religiously neutral civil sphere which imposes only a limited unity on the plurality, to maintain peace among the many" (303).
An important point in this piece is Cavanaugh's reference to John Courtney Murray's take on religion and the state (which Cavanaugh finds occasional fault with). Murray asserts that the state is not in place just to assure "the common good," but rather, the state is the agency that "maintains the public order" which in turn allows the common good -- including, one presumes, the many faiths that bring joy and peace to the citizens -- to "flourish" (Cavanaugh 2006).

When it comes to the issue of pluralism in society vis-a-vis religion, a recent case in point in America was the visit of Pope Francis. The head of the Roman Catholic Church of course had a message for his followers and he celebrated mass on several occasions. But the overriding message from Pope Francis was "the common good," which anyone paying attention could see was Francis' dip into the pluralistic waters of global theology. All humans have the right to dignity, whether Jewish, atheist, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhism, the Pope emphasized in numerous venues, including to a joint session of the U.S. Congress.

Francis clearly made an impact on American society through his Environmental Encyclical, in which he urged the world's leaders and the U.S. government to accept that the planet is warming and that cutting back on the national carbon footprint…