There are two interwoven concepts to be explored here: First is the meaning of public, and the second is the meaning of public speech, which is more than just speech that happens in public. The meanings of these social facts will be rooted in the work of Dewey (1927/1988) for a theory of the public and Tom Green (1994) for a theory of public speech. These are by no means the only people who have theorized either of these concepts, but they are robustly democratic conceptions, and I have chosen to use them because they create a productive frame for considering the problem of religion in the public life of a polity.
Dewey is a familiar enough figure in educational thought that I will not spend too much space in developing his idea. Rather, I will indicate the salient points he makes about the meaning and nature of a public. In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey (1927/1954/1988) confronts the fact that the modern age has done much to destroy community, a key and defining feature of which had been the interpersonal nature of relationships. His concept of democracy is rooted in communities—face-to-face associations. However, we cannot even conceive of governing a nation as a community unless citizens have strong roots in what Putnam (2000) refers to as mediating institutions. In short, one must belong to real, face-to-face communities, which then overlap, before one can conceive of a national community[1].
Dewey’s ideal of democracy is rooted in this sense of community. It is the experience of knowing others and their needs in context and complexity that allows us to care about others’ welfare as fully as our own. As Dewey (1976/1980[2]) puts the claim in School and Society, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys democracy” (p. 5). There is certainly some hyperbole here: If we did not prefer our own children to the children of others we would be some entirely different species than we are, and not necessarily better for it. But the rhetorical point is a powerful one: While I may decently prefer my own children over others, I may not create social structures that work against the well-being of those others. And Dewey is not just speaking of education and children; his broader point is that, in a democratic polity, there must be concern for the well-being of others. This, Dewey tells us, is the essence of democracy, not “… universal suffrage, frequent elections, majority rule, congressional and cabinet government.,” which are merely “devices” (p. 145).
Key, then, is the claim that democratic society must function as a community; at a national level it must be constituted as a Great Community.[3] What matters is the working of this public: when a public exists, we are aware of the fact, because we are aware of our membership in it. Further, the existence of community is the existence of democracy and vice versa: “… democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion” (Dewey, 1927/1954/1988, p. 184).
This brings us to Green’s (1994) work on the nature and importance of public speech. Speech that calls a public into being and does its work, is, as Dewey puts it, “… a subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication” (Dewey, 1927, 1954/1988, p. 184). Like Dewey, Green is concerned with the loss of something in public life—perhaps the loss of public life itself:
…[W]e now have practically a whole generation of students who in their entire lives have no major public leader speak to the nation powerfully about our ties to one another, much less with conviction about what gratitude we owe our predecessors and what we owe our children. (p. 369)
And this was in 1994. Our current situation is largely the result of toxic speech that permeates and poisons the spaces that a public might inhabit, and is consciously used to undermine the notion of a public. Consider the importance of Ronald Reagan’s division of the American public in the eighties: He convinced a potential public that we are each on our own, and that there is no such thing as a public or common good. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” (Reagan, October, 1980) was his question, not, “Are we better off?” There was, for Reagan, no such thing as we. Similarly significant was his inaugural statement that “Government is not the answer to our problems. Government is the problem,” (January, 1980) denies the possibility of democratic life as anything more than competition, since it denies that we can use government as a means to institutionalize solutions to common problems.
Like Dewey, Green is concerned about how we might address this lack. As Dewey considered the question of what a public looks and acts like, Green dealt with the question of how a public comes to be, and his insight is that “…the public is created by public speech” (p. 364). This seems simple, but it is not. How does public speech do its work, he asks? For Green, the beginning of understanding is to ask: What makes public speech public?
Green’s central insight in this regard is that public speech does not become public merely by being spoken in the proximity of others. Under those circumstances it is possible that the speech will be public speech, but so too it might be mere noise, background, or static. Unless it is heard in a certain way, it is not public speech: “… public speech occurs when what is said in one person’s speech is heard by others as candidates for their own speech” (p. 375, emphasis in original). This is what Green calls the Auditory Principle, and it is key not only to Green’s construction of public speech, but Dewey’s notion of a public itself. I must be able to imagine myself in the place of the speaker, thus making the other, less other.
The importance of this Auditory Principle is this: If Green is correct, then our mutual full membership in the democratic polity is not only dependent on our choice to participate, but further hinges on whether my speech is recognized by others as “candidates for their own speech.” Beyond the effort, care, and vigor with which I claim my share of the public space, I am only in a public with those who are willing to listen to me, and that is a decision over which I can have very little effect. If X is not educated so as to hear the speech of Y (and vice-versa), then X denies Y membership in the public to which X belongs. This aspect of learning, of education for listening, is one of the reasons the democratic pedagogy of the sort described in Vivian Paley’s You Can’t Say, You Can’t Play (1992) is so critical in the formation of democratic citizens. We have the power to effectively bar others from public membership—from citizenship, in any robust sense. We also have the moral responsibility not to do so.
It is important to note here that inclusion and recognition, what Kunzman (2006) calls “mutual respect” (first cited, p. 41), in no way implies consent or agreement, or even lack of blame. We can consider the claims on us that other people place, and then reject them. The Auditory Principle is not an obligation to agree, but to use my imagination to hear another’s speech as possibly my own. I might then reject that position. If I reject it prior to such consideration, I am rejecting the idea of a public, and thereby contributing to its unmaking.
Publics are fragile, when they exist at all. They are an example of what Durkheim (1982, p. 1) referred to as a “public fact” something with no real ontological status, but no less real for that. A social fact, such as the existence of a public, exists when and if its members think (or, as Green would say, when we speak and listen) it into existence. If we act as though there is no public—in Dewey’s terms, if I do not attend to the well-being of others in addition to my own; and in Green’s terms, if I do not listen to another as though it was at least possible for me to share that person’s point of view—then, in fact. there is no public, and, they would argue, no democratic life is possible. On the other hand, our actions in this regard can bring a true democratic society into being, if we choose to so act.
