Day: August 29, 2025

Congress is down, but how close is it to being out? What is the ultimate source of its vitality, and how might it return to that wellspring in our deeply cynical political moment?

The three excellent responses to my initial essay, “Choosing Congressional Irrelevance,” helpfully probe these questions and bring to light some useful disagreements. Yuval Levin, Joseph Postell, Shep Melnick, and I look at Congress from different enough angles that we each perceive different possibilities for further marginalization or, perhaps, revival. In this response to their perspectives, I start by probing what I take to be the fundamental question: what animates Congress? I then consider just how gloomy we ought to be about Congress’s prospects and briefly take up a few solutions.

Do We Believe in Representation?

As is so frustratingly often the case, Yuval Levin lays out many of my central ideas with greater clarity and force than I mustered. Although Congress is our lawmaking body, Levin insists we remember that “Congress’s most fundamental purpose is not to advance major legislation.” Rather, “It is to facilitate bargaining across factional and party lines.” To the extent we think of Congress as a tool for efficient action, we will naturally come to think that “members are the problem and leaders are the solution.” If we want a congressional renaissance, we will need members to take their own role in producing a legitimate political order more seriously.

Postell takes nearly the opposite tack. He says that giving members more opportunities for influence is likely to be a recipe for institutional stagnation. In his reading of the historical record, “decentralized structures and procedures such as open amendment processes, leadership shorn of committee assignment and agenda control powers, and powerful committees, have tended to fragment Congress and render its collective action more difficult.” Were we to move away from the centralized, omnibus-heavy procedures behind most of the contemporary Congress’s enactments, our legislature would quickly find itself even more stymied by internal dissent and even more irrelevant than it is today.

Postell is surely correct to say that, at present, congressional policymaking depends on this path—but, with Levin, I take very different lessons from the historical record. Members have sought efficiency, but their energies have dissipated. As Levin puts it, the ironic result of prioritizing programmatic, ideological coordination has been to devalue their own representative function.

What does that mean, exactly?

What makes representation potent is the sense that there is something real in each congressional district that needs to be made present in national deliberations. This is something different than the political beliefs held by the majority of a district’s voters. I’m happy to go with Postell in identifying the relevant distinction as being between (national partisan) ideology and (locally rooted) interest. I share Edmund Burke’s belief in the solidity of interests, separate from opinion, as a sturdy basis for politics. We want to grapple with realities, not fantasies, even when they are somewhat grubby. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington was, for decades, known as the Senator from Boeing. This was meant as an insult, but it seems healthy for a corporation at the heart of America’s military-industrial complex, which employed many tens of thousands of Washingtonians, to have had its say. (Jackson, in turn, forcefully brought the public’s concerns into the corporation.)

Narrow-minded “parochialism” is generally contrasted with high-minded universalism, but I hold with Willmoore Kendall in believing that the two values need to be in constant conversation with each other, and that Congress is the appropriate venue for the rooted interests to contend with each other and temper the grand schemes that often emanate from the White House.

For that vision to make sense, we must believe in the connection between the organic community and its representative, who has a distinctive way of knowing about his or her community and its needs. There are three components of that: 1) believing that the organic community itself is real and distinctive; 2) believing that the elected representative has a special relationship to it; and 3) believing that, in carrying out the activity of representation, the representative will hold faith with the community, rather than betraying its interests. If all those hold, then, as Levin says, Congress takes on the emergent “capacity [of facilitating] broadly acceptable negotiated legislative bargains,” which is of immense value to our constitutional republic. (This is what I argued makes Congress “indispensable.”)

Each of these three necessary beliefs is strained today. Our belief in the integrity of geographic communities has waned as people forge more of their connections in life through the Internet, and more people work for firms far away from their homes. We are justifiably more skeptical of the idea that our representatives orient themselves toward their districts, given how much more nationalized our politics has become. If the “D” or “R” appearing next to a candidate’s name vastly outweighs everything else about them, how special of a relationship can that person really have with the district? And, finally, as Melnick points out, we live in a time when we are generally dubious of fidelity in all forms. This certainly holds regarding the public’s views of their legislators. Recent research indicates that Fenno’s paradox, in which citizens hold their own member of Congress in high esteem even as they mistrust the institution, has lost steam in recent years. Many voters clearly feel that their members of Congress care little about them, rather than their place in the news cycle. With representativeness itself under strain, Congress’s institutional self-confidence sags.

Melnick calls our attention to an even deeper concern: Counterintuitively, the juggernaut of democracy itself may be working against representation in a development that spans centuries rather than decades. Citing Tocqueville’s apprehensions of the individualistic, leveling tendencies of the democratic spirit, he notes that the purest little-d democrats may be naturally “allergic to forms and formalities. They want their favorite policies, and they want them now.” Citizens who think in these terms are likely to be skeptical of the complicated give-and-take of congressional bargaining and attracted to the presidency’s promises of instant gratification, even if they are dimly aware that the president is offering sugar highs rather than real sustenance. I, too, worry that the democratic logic triumphant in our time promotes distrust of intermediaries of all kinds. Why should representatives have any greater voice than you or I? This impulse flares up constantly in the public’s relationship with Congress.

How Bleak Is It, Really?

Then again, that point surely rang true at much earlier points in our nation’s history, and Congress has time and again shown its resiliency. We have to be careful of taking any sort of historical logic to its endpoint, or presuming we live there.

Attending to our own specific moment, we should consider: Is anything so bad about Congress in the present moment? Postell reminds us of the ongoing importance of “Secret” (“low-salience” Congress, which can achieve a good deal with little fanfare. And he (with me) notes that members of Congress did play a large role in shaping the reconciliation law that is the centerpiece of Trump’s busy 2025. He also asks whether overall productivity might be holding up just fine, notwithstanding consistently negative media coverage of Congress. Maybe legislators have changed how they work, without losing influence.

I hope these suggestions (which, to be clear, Postell offers as helpful provocations) turn out to be right, and that Congress is poised to unleash a gusher of productive legislation. But I doubt it. I tried to make clear in my original piece that Congress still does a great deal, and that it would be a mistake to simply write it off. But my sense is that the institution is genuinely on a downward trajectory. Based on previous research, I can say with some confidence that the 118th Congress (2023–24) was historically unproductive. It is too early to judge the 119th, but I’m willing to bet on low output (coupled with continued historically high reliance on omnibuses). We have lost a great deal, without reaching a nadir. We can lose much more.

Supposing that is correct, how difficult would it be to turn things around? In a different vein of his response, Postell brings out an inevitability argument: “Reducing partisan loyalty and incentivizing cross-cutting policies may simply be out of touch with the mood of the people, and perhaps no amount of institutional reform within Congress can change that.” Our Congress is what it is because we are what we are, and no amount of reformist messing around can change that. Melnick also strikes a pessimistic note, saying Americans’ dislike of open conflict will make it difficult for Congress to ever regain people’s trust.

I (try to) maintain more hope for Congress because I feel that the American people really are more complex (and interesting) than our current Manichaean style of politics, which repulses enough people to make burnout and reinvention a live possibility. Especially because of the rise of artificial intelligence, we are heading into a time of massive social upheaval, and we need a functioning politics to help us find our collective way through. Trust generated by shared experience of place may be harder to come by, but it is still a real force, which makes geography-rooted representative government the best solution. That’s especially clear given how obvious it’s become that the public fora of social media can never function as an acceptable “universal town square.” The deficiencies of mass plebiscitary democracy, unmediated (or poorly mediated) by a powerful representative legislature, are clearer every day.

How to Make It Better

Of course, articulating the good that a more self-assured Congress could bring is no recipe for actually delivering one. So let me conclude with a brief run-through of some of the suggestions laid out by my interlocutors. Postell recommends:

• Expanding the House such that, instead of representing some 750,000 constituents, each member would represent only 250,000, thereby strengthening the connection between citizens and their representatives. The principle is good, but I worry that a House of 1,300 members would be too large to support any genuine deliberation. Madison warned in Federalist #55 that an assembly’s number must be low enough “to avoid the confusion and intemperance of a multitude.” That concern makes me more receptive to the recommendation to expand to 585 members made by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences report on the subject, which Yuval Levin coauthored.
• Cancelling direct congressional primaries. Yes, but how could this possibly gain political momentum? Likewise with the cause of devolving policymaking powers back to state and local governments.
• Reforming campaign finance so that a district’s constituents are privileged. I’ve been persuaded by Michael Malbin’s work on this subject, though devising a workable scheme that doesn’t run afoul of the First Amendment is difficult.
• Limiting the presidential veto and reviving the legislative veto. I’m sold on both, but trying to practice constitutional politics outside of our current partisan divide seems very difficult, and so all Article V amendments seem like longshots. We should build bipartisan support for constitutionally valid mechanisms that approximate the legislative veto.

Rather than seek a reformist groundswell, my inclination (shared by Levin) is to urge members of Congress to reorient their chambers toward committee work, especially in the House. That this sounds dull as bricks to outsiders is an advantage; it is a program that can be pursued underneath the din of national politics. Members who care about policy and plan to spend years in Congress need to see how institutional reconfiguration can serve their own ambitions. Hard work needs to be rewarded with agenda control. Back benchers have nothing to lose but their leashes.

What is the United States’ greatest achievement? Winning World War II? Landing a man on the moon? Hollywood’s global reach? For Dartmouth College historian and Episcopal priest Randall Balmer, all these accomplishments pale in comparison to a less celebrated but more enduring breakthrough: the separation of church and state. Few ideas, he argues, have done more to preserve both religious vitality and civic peace. In America’s Best Idea, Balmer offers a spirited defense of this foundational principle, contending that the First Amendment’s twin guarantees—no establishment of religion and free exercise thereof—have made the United States a uniquely fertile ground for religious pluralism and, in turn, a more virtuous and democratic citizenry. 

He is alarmed, however, by what he views as a growing desire in some quarters to return to an older model in which church and state walked much closer together. His book is at once a historical account of how this achievement was won and a warning (at times a touch hyperbolic) about the threats now arrayed against it.

For Balmer, this arrangement is not only good for the country, but good for the faith itself. It protects religion from state corruption and safeguards government from sectarian dominance. From Roger Williams’s exile in Rhode Island to William Penn’s “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania, Balmer traces how a long line of dissenters, reformers, and visionaries helped craft a constitutional order rooted in freedom of conscience rather than religious coercion.

And in our own unsettled moment, when some Americans fear the rise of Christian nationalism, others lament Christianity’s retreat from the public square, and religious liberty lawsuits surround everything from Ten Commandments displays to Satanic Temple nativity scenes, Balmer contends that the American model remains both radical and essential. In a nation where Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, and secular candidates now routinely seek office, and where the religiously unaffiliated continue to grow as a cultural force, his argument feels all the more urgent. 

A mixture of history, polemic, and pastoral plea, America’s Best Idea is Balmer’s attempt to remind Americans why the First Amendment was worth creating and why it is still worth defending. His sense of urgency stems from what he sees as a growing and deeply troubling threat: the rise of Christian nationalism. For Balmer, recent efforts to conflate Christian identity with American citizenship (whether through Ten Commandments mandates in schools, public funding for religious education, or political campaigns wrapped in religious rhetoric) represent a betrayal of the founders’ vision and a danger to both church and republic. But given the flood of recent books attacking Christian nationalism, Balmer’s critique adds little that hasn’t already been said. His concerns and arguments closely mirror those found in works like Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers and Andrew Seidel’s The Founding Myth, both of which portray Christian nationalism as little more than a cynical power grab built on a willfully distorted reading of America’s founding. Like them, Balmer treats Christian nationalism as a manifestly bad-faith movement—historically dubious, theologically misguided, and politically corrosive. But while those critiques may carry some merit, Balmer’s tone often lacks nuance. He shows little interest in understanding the appeal or growth of Christian nationalism and is often more interested in denunciation than diagnosis.

Nevertheless, what distinguishes America’s Best Idea from many other recent critiques of Christian nationalism is that Balmer is not merely issuing cultural warnings—he is casting a historically grounded, theologically informed vision for the American experiment in religious liberty. As both a historian and an Episcopal priest, Balmer defends the separation of church and state not as a secularist imposition, but as a theological and civic gift that has allowed religion in America not only to survive, but to flourish. He situates the First Amendment as a radical break from the European model of established churches, tracing its lineage to figures like Roger Williams and the Baptists, whose commitment to religious voluntarism was rooted in the gospel’s refusal to coerce. Balmer sees this system not as a safeguard against religion, but as a safeguard for religion, protecting it from factional capture and state corruption. 

His account celebrates this pluralistic religious economy as central to both the vibrancy of American faith and the health of its democracy. 

Along the way, Balmer reminds readers that evangelicals were once at the forefront of social reform movements, from abolition to temperance to women’s education. In that spirit, he calls today’s believers to recover that legacy of public witness, not by grasping for political power, but by preaching from the margins. Rather than lamenting the decline of cultural privilege, America’s Best Idea urges both religious and secular Americans to preserve the delicate architecture of the First Amendment, a system that, in Balmer’s view, has conserved both faith and freedom better than any official religion ever could.

By the end of America’s Best Idea, readers will likely come away with a renewed appreciation for the remarkable achievements of the First Amendment. Balmer’s historical sweep makes clear just how dangerous (and often deadly) state-established religion has been. Beginning with the sectarian conflicts that plagued Europe for centuries, Balmer shows that religious establishment has more often led to coercion and violence than to piety or peace. Against this grim backdrop, the American model of religious disestablishment appears not just prudent but inspired. Balmer underscores that it is precisely under this framework of constitutional neutrality that once outlawed or marginalized faiths have flourished. Baptists were once jailed in Virginia, Mormons driven west by mob violence, Catholics viewed with suspicion, and Jews barred from elite institutions. But all of these, along with newer movements like Pentecostalism, Islam, and Hinduism, have found space to grow, organize, and even shape public life in America. While the experience of religious liberty in the United States has certainly not been a straight line, when set against the alternatives found in both past and present, Balmer’s case for the First Amendment’s enduring genius is inspiring. 

While one can appreciate Balmer’s passion for the First Amendment, aspects of his framing are historically problematic. He rightly celebrates early champions of religious liberty such as Roger Williams and William Penn, yet he often portrays the American experiment in religious freedom as if it arose chiefly in opposition to traditional Christianity, rather than emerging from within it. The very Baptists he praises (figures like Isaac Backus and John Leland) were not theological progressives or pure Lockean liberals; their arguments for liberty of conscience were rooted explicitly in biblical exegesis and evangelical convictions. Furthermore, Balmer’s repeated appeals to a “wall of separation” between church and state rely on a modern and legally contested interpretation of the First Amendment. One shaped more by mid-twentieth-century jurisprudence than by the text, context, or original intent of the founding generation. Jefferson’s metaphor, which was lifted not from a legal text or constitutional debate, but from a private letter to a Baptist association, has come to bear far more constitutional weight than the framers ever intended or could have imagined. 

In emphasizing rigid separation, Balmer overlooks the fact that early American states routinely supported religion without establishing it, tied public morality to religious belief, and defended the right of religious citizens to contribute meaningfully to public life. Massachusetts, for instance, maintained religious tests for public office well into the 1830s. Connecticut’s 1818 constitution explicitly affirmed “the duty of all men to worship the Supreme Being,” and several states, including Maryland and North Carolina, required public officials to profess belief in God or in divine judgment. Far from being anomalies, such measures reflected a broad consensus that religion, particularly Christianity, was essential to civic virtue and republican self-government, even if no single denomination should be elevated above others. Much of what Balmer presents as a timeless constitutional principle is, in fact, a projection of modern jurisprudence and liberal Protestant values onto a founding generation that held a far more complex and variegated view of church and state. 

Balmer’s narrative tends to flatten this complexity into a simplistic binary, either establishment or total separation, when the historical record reveals a spectrum of arrangements across the states, many of which retained close church-state ties well after 1791. By reading back a post-Jeffersonian, mid-twentieth-century model of “separation” as the founders’ original intent, Balmer risks turning a rich and pluralistic founding landscape into a legal abstraction better suited to modern polemic than historical accuracy.

Then there are the words of warning against Christian nationalism. Like many books in this genre, America’s Best Idea offers warnings that feel hyperbolic and out of proportion to the actual threat. Balmer largely overlooks Christian nationalism’s limited real-world influence, its lack of theological or organizational coherence, and its marginal growth beyond chronically online circles. As Mark David Hall and Miles Smith IV have persuasively argued, the notion that the United States is on the brink of becoming a theocratic nation-state owes more to Twitter threads and fringe podcasts than to any measurable political reality. In fact, and somewhat ironically given Balmer’s earlier work on the rise of the Religious Right, the more significant transformation in recent years has been the emergence of a non-religious right. In contrast to Christian nationalism, this is a tangible and measurable shift: according to the Public Religion Research Institute, the share of religiously unaffiliated Republicans has tripled, from about 4 percent in 2006 to roughly 12 percent in 2022, and Gallup reports that nearly one-quarter of nonreligious Americans now lean Republican. Ironically, this growing secular bloc on the right (which is probably far more aligned with Balmer’s pluralist ideals) gets far less attention than the overhyped specter of Christian nationalism, despite representing a deeper and more lasting shift in American life.

Which brings me to a perplexing tension in Balmer’s account. He lauds evangelical involvement in nineteenth-century reform movements (particularly abolition, temperance, and women’s education) as exemplars of Christian public witness. These efforts, in his view, demonstrated faith speaking truth to power and working for the common good. Balmer also praises historical figures like William Jennings Bryan for his economic populism and Martin Luther King Jr. for his prophetic civil rights leadership, holding up such examples of progressive, justice-oriented engagement as faithful expressions of Christianity in the public square. More broadly, he voices admiration for faith-based activism that advances values like social justice, equality, and inclusion.

Conversely, Balmer is consistently critical of recent evangelical political engagement, especially when it aligns with the Republican Party or centers on issues such as abortion, gay rights, or religious symbolism in public life. He often portrays such activism not as prophetic witness but as a bid to reclaim lost cultural privilege or enforce sectarian morality through legislation. One is left to wonder why Christian moral witness is celebrated in one era but viewed as suspect in another. Of course, Balmer is entitled to his political and theological commitments, but the criteria by which he distinguishes faithful from inappropriate activism often seem ad hoc and selectively applied. The result is a framework in which Christian political engagement is endorsed when it advances progressive goals but dismissed when it reflects more traditional convictions.

In short, Balmer seems comfortable rendering unto Caesar when Caesar shares his views, yet eager to proclaim “Jesus is Lord” when Caesar does not.

Despite its limitations, America’s Best Idea stands as a compelling progressive tribute to the Madisonian tradition and its vision of religious liberty. Balmer’s greatest strength lies in his passionate and historically informed defense of the First Amendment as a civic and theological breakthrough, one that has allowed an astonishing diversity of religious communities not merely to survive, but to flourish. In an era when “religious pluralism” can often sound like a platitude, Balmer roots the phrase in real historical struggle, making clear just how hard-won (and how uniquely American) this achievement truly is. His narrative reminds readers that the separation of church and state was not designed to diminish faith, but to preserve its integrity and safeguard public life from religious domination. While reasonable people may disagree over how this principle has been interpreted or applied over time, Balmer makes a compelling case that our church-state separation truly is one of America’s best ideas.