Recently, Stephen Colbert, well-known host of “The Late Show,” received a call from his network’s lawyers informing him that he could not have James Talarico on his show. Talarico is a former middle school teacher with a degree in theology who is running for the US Senate in Texas. The decision was justified on the basis of TV regulatory guidelines dating back to 1934. The intervention was unusual, and, reading the tea leaves, it seems Talarico is seen as a threat within the Trump administration because his Christian-humanist message resonates across party lines. The interview was, however, made available on YouTube, where such regulations are not in effect, and reached 8 million viewers in one week.1 One of Talarico’s core messages is that Christian nationalism is a danger to spirituality and the church. Talarico credits his grandfather with teaching him that a Christianity that gets comfortable with political power loses its prophetic voice. He goes on to say that it is bad for any spiritual organization to associate itself with a political party.
This idea was articulated long ago by Thomas Jefferson: religious life has the best chance of being guided by wisdom and virtue if it is removed from the fields of political power, public revenue, and politics. Wilhelm von Humboldt argued for a similar separation in his book The Limits of State Action. However, he focused not on religion but on a separation between school and state. As it turns out, although Humboldt’s idea never took root in Germany, it exercised a decisive influence in the USA. Choosing against a national university and college system was based on a conviction that the spirit “bloweth where it listeth” and that the state was too crude an instrument to respond to such subtlety (subtlety on which the most prized dimensions of human experience depend).
Attending the recent conference at Harvard, I was reminded of this unique history and the still palpable sense of an autonomous right to follow one’s hunch—and the feeling that all authority in cultural and spiritual matters should arise from free and voluntary recognition of individuals in civil society, outside the “limits of state action”.
Image Matthias Rang from the Goetheanum and participant Branko Furst in conversation between sessions in James Room East, Harvard Divinity School. Photo: Garret Harkawik
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