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and scope of its binding address. Over the past century, religious authori–
ty has not only been relegated to smaller and smaller areas of human
experience, but even there its power to compel has been tamed and domes–
ticated. There are, of course, a few important exceptions-religious
orthodoxy has, in some cases, continued to be linked to violent protest
against abortion, homosexuality, avant garde art and the like just as it con–
tinues to be linked to more mainstream (yet still quite conservative)
poli tical activism. But considering the larger ins ti tutional presence of reli–
gion fin de siecle it is increasingly the exception to the rule.
In exploring the changing constitution of religious authority I have
focused upon the case of American Evangelicalism. Given all of its natur–
al resistance to the modernizing and liberalizing tendencies in the culture
one can make a prediction. If these dynamics are at play here, then they
must be at work in other faiths as well. Indeed, the tendencies of frag–
mentation and subjectivization as well as its consequences are in evidence
especially in those religious tradi tions that have Ieft orthodoxy far
behind-from liberal Protestantism and Reform Judaism to secular com–
munitarianism. In different ways than in Evangelicalism, the evidence
points to the same in other orthodoxies too. All belief systems have
reworked their form of address (albeit, in different ways) from the tran–
scendent to the subjective. All are experiencing the pressures of
fragmentation.
It is banal simply to conclude that public culture is irretrievably secu–
lar. With the privatization, fragmentation, and subjectivization of religious
particularism, we are seeing the emergence of a functional nihilism in pub–
lic culture. How so?
Historically, it is clear that religion has long provided the foundation
of various societal orders. Its authority has animated commitment,
demanded moral discipline, and offered transcendent legitimation. This is
true of the "religion" of the classical world as well in which Nature and
its Laws functioned in the same way. The transformation of the religious
authority in the ways described has enormous consequences for the larger
social order. Not least, there can be no religious faith that can be publicly
acceptable any more. Even if there were such a fai th, as, say, in civil reli–
giosity, it is neither stable nor coherent. Where symbols of transcendence
are invoked in public, they have no compelling substantive content.
Likewise, appeals to traditional values are made without any binding par–
ticularity. In brief, we end up with the separation of religion from the
moral order in public life. Here too the moral ideals invoked are shorn of
the offensive particularities of specific creeds.
All of this, of course, was anticipated by Nietzsche a century ago.
Nietzsche recognized that the Victorian moralists-like "that flathead
Mill" and "that moralist female" George Eliot-who sought to secularize
