Faith in Politics, by A. James Reichley

The founding fathers were right, says A. James Reichley; "republican government depends for its health on values that over the not-so-long run must come from religion." The founders were right because democracy needs "a value system that legitimizes both individual rights and social authority and establishes a balance between the two." Only religion of the type that Reichley calls "transcendent idealism" can provide such a system. But is it only the values which religion supplies, or also the religion supplying them that is essential to republican government? And is Reichley really talking about anything more than the values of an American civil religion when he discusses faith and politics?

Reichley's judgments come at the conclusion of his book, which builds on and significantly revises his 1985 Religion in American Public Life (also published by Brookings) and his 2001 The Values Connection (Rowman & Littlefield), in which he explains in detail the seven major value systems summarized at the beginning of Faith in Politics. Reichley was for years a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington's oldest and leading think tank. One of only a few Washington students of politics who is learned in American religions, philosophy and political thought, Reichley is now a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of Georgetown University.

Faith in Politics is really two books that are insufficiently integrated. The first summarizes his "theoretic structure of seven value systems." There are four major religious value systems, according to Reichley: monism, absolutism, ecstasism and transcendent idealism. The three major secular value systems are egoism, collectivism and civil humanism. Reichley constructs these categories as universal types and is interested primarily in how each relates to politics and government.