Religion’s Fading Role Leaves Many Adrift : Morality: Increased separation of church and state has silenced the ‘voice of conscience’ for many. But some groups vow to continue battle against the nation’s social ills.

Prayer in school, creches in front of government buildings and invocations at public ceremonies are out. A television network promotes its most popular show with a scene mocking a family saying grace: “Dear God, we pay for all this stuff ourselves so thanks for nothing” is Bart Simpson’s punch line.

Today, government funds are used to support an art exhibition that includes a crucifix soaked in a jar of urine, and United Way funding is temporarily withdrawn from a Boy Scout chapter after objections to the scouts’ oath to do their duty “to God and my country.”

A generation of revolutionary change in the role of religion in public life has left many Americans reeling, and the nation struggling to find a common ethical ground to solve divisive moral issues such as abortion, drugs, homelessness, poverty and the possibility of war.

“For all kinds of good reasons, we have systematically excluded the church from our public life. Now we discover that the voice of conscience which we always depended on--the church--is not present in the public debate,” said Lisa Newton, a philosopher at Fairfield University who wrote the study guide for the Public Broadcasting Service’s 10-part series on ethics in America.

“So the question that confronts us now is, given the constraints of the separation of church and state, how do we re-empower the churches?”

Only 39% of the respondents to an Associated Press poll conducted in November by ICR Survey Research Group said they believed religion is increasing its influence in American life. In a 1985 Gallup Poll, 49% said religion was increasing in influence. And in 1957, a Gallup Poll indicated that more than two-thirds thought religion was gaining power.

In 1986, after 12 years standing alone as the nation’s most trusted institution, religion was replaced by the military as the institution in which Americans have the most confidence, according to another Gallup Poll.

But contrary to some expectations, religious groups are not going quietly into a secular age.

“Born-again” Christian evangelicals who burst onto the American political scene in the mid-1970s have shown no sign of withdrawing. And groups such as Catholics, Jews, black churches and now Muslims, alarmed by a rising tide of indifference to social ills from racism to drug abuse, have entered into public policy debates in dramatic fashion.

“As I travel around the country, I find a lot of very reasonable, rational people who feel under siege,” said Gary Bauer, a former domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan who now is director of the Family Research Council, perhaps the most powerful evangelical lobbying group in the nation.

“Their perception is that they’re living in a hostile country, that everything they believe in is under persistent attack.”

When the Pilgrims founded this country, they could not have foreseen a culture that celebrates a crucifix-adorned woman named Madonna who capitalizes on religious imagery with songs such as the none-too-subtle “Like a Virgin” and the title of her latest anthology, “The Immaculate Collection.”

The purpose they declared in 1620 in the Mayflower Compact: “For the glories of God, and advancement of the Christian faith.”

The public manifestations of religion at the core of American life stayed with society from the American Revolution, when all but one of the 13 states had a tax to support the preaching of the Gospel, to the 1950s, when national values that mainline Protestantism supplied were reinforced by billboards along the nation’s highways encouraging Americans to go to church.

“That was kind of a final burst of a dream of the Protestant America where the churches continued to enjoy a great deal of influence and authority,” said Dean Thomas Ogletree of Yale Divinity School.

While the percentage of Catholics in America has jumped 40% since 1947, the percentage of Protestants has declined 23%.

Within Protestantism, churches such as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assemblies of God grew rapidly, while the denominations that used to hold cultural sway, such as the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, declined dramatically.

Some sociologists expect Islam to surpass Judaism as the nation’s largest minority religion by the end of the century, behind Christianity.

Judicial rulings keep pushing the walls separating religion and public life further apart, and an increasingly secular education system is shutting out any reference to religion, said A. James Reichley, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “Religion in American Public Life.”

At the same time, Reichley said, society is getting more of its direction from other institutions, such as television.

“The actual influence of the churches and religion in shaping a public ethic is continuing to decline,” he said.

William McKinney, dean of Hartford Seminary and co-author of “American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future,” uses baseball imagery to trace the changes.

The early Protestant groups built the stadium and supplied the teams, he said. In the federal period in the late 18th Century, they were forced to admit other teams. By the 1920s, other teams had their own stadiums, but mainline Protestant churches still supplied the umpires.

“What’s happened in the last 30 years is the umpires are gone and nobody knows what the rules are,” McKinney said.

Many religious leaders praise the new religious pluralism in a nation that has a history of religious bigotry--represented by the period in the early 19th Century when the Nativist Movement fueled the burning of Catholic churches and convents, and the virulent anti-Semitism in the latter part of the century in reaction to the rise in Jewish immigration.

“The difference (today) is that the various religious traditions get expressed, and no one group has the power or will have the power to force its view on others,” McKinney said.

Religious groups working in coalitions have enjoyed some political successes. Catholics and evangelicals have helped sustain the abortion issue, and mainline Protestant and Catholic groups receive credit for focusing attention on human rights abuses and helping keep the nation out of direct military involvement in El Salvador and Nicaragua during the Reagan years.

But some religious observers say the struggle of competing secular and religious voices has left society with no common language to mediate moral conflicts.

Concern for the common good is giving way to “just pure selfishness,” with an accompanying rise in ethnic and racial tensions, including anti-Semitism, Reichley said.

What some now fear is that if religion is reduced to the periphery of American society, ethical debates will be reduced to a Darwininan struggle of special interest groups, where power, not morality, rules.

“Political scientists don’t want to talk about the Good Society,” but instead confine their discussion to analyses of voter preferences, Ogletree said.