In a world desperate to stick simple labels on everyone, Yale law professor and writer Stephen Carter presents a challenge. He’s an outspoken Christian, an aberration in an Ivy League faculty. He’s a serious academic—to research one book, Carter read 50 years of transcripts recording federal judicial confirmation hearings—but his latest work was a blockbuster debut novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, whose reputed $4 million author advance caused a huge stir last summer. He’s a rationalist who says he makes decisions based on rigorous scholarly review of an issue but is equally vocal about working to hear and respond to God’s call in his life.
Carter is also known as a social critic who has written controversial books on affirmative action, the place of religion in U.S. law and politics, and the importance of restoring integrity and civility in American life. But he defies being neatly pigeonholed into conservative or liberal political camps, insisting he is not a partisan and cannot get excited about who wins elections. “I do not much like lockstep conformity,” he says, “and I have known too many people who have sacrificed what they believe to be true for the sake of belonging.”
The subject of truth comes up again and again during a January interview with Carter, ’76. He says one scholar belittled his “search for truth” as a 12-year-old’s idea of intellectual endeavor. Carter wasn’t fazed: “I think that’s fair, and I like that,” he smiles, refusing to identify his detractor. (“Naming names gives me no pleasure.”)
Carter’s early intellectual endeavors led him to physics. At high school in Ithaca, N.Y., where his father taught law at Cornell University, that’s what smart kids aspired to study, he remembers. But physics at Stanford wore him out. “The people were smarter than I was, and smarter than I was in that field. I lacked the intellectual gift and drive for that,” he says. So he switched to history, also dabbling in philosophy, medieval studies and computer science.
Mostly, though, he poured his time and energy into the Stanford Daily, as a columnist and eventually managing editor. He admits he was “not the student I should have been,” graduating with just enough units. Still, the Daily was a useful forum for his early attempts to shape public opinion. In one column Carter criticized left-wing white students for piggybacking on the political efforts of minority students. Already he was attacking sacred cows.
In 1976, Carter enrolled at Yale Law School. He says he wasn’t consciously following his father’s footsteps (or his grandmother’s), but concedes family history might have played a part. “People had told me from the time I was very small that I should be a lawyer—I think because I loved to talk and loved, in particular, to argue.”
He met his wife, Enola Aird, at law school, and after clerking for a federal judge and for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Carter returned there to teach. These days, he spends much of his time in his office, surrounded by stacks of papers and books, reading, writing and preparing for his contracts lecture course or a seminar on law and religion. Recent research interests include the separation of powers in the federal government and the way sports fans’ behavior changes in a stadium crowd.
Carter’s experience applying to law school became fodder for his first book, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (Basic Books, 1991). It begins: “I got into law school because I am black.” The book doesn’t simply defend or attack affirmative action. Instead, Carter asserts that the practice provides the most help for affluent and middle-class minority students and allows society to ignore the neediest. He argues that affirmative action should be cut back to do what it was originally intended to do—provide opportunities for those who wouldn’t get them otherwise.
Readers expecting to find a black conservative, like Shelby Steele, expounding an argument more typically made by whites, will be surprised. As the New York Times review put it: “Anyone who thereby presumes that Mr. Carter is some sort of neoconservative advocate or apologist will quickly be brought up short ... whether by his strongly stated argument that the death penalty is administered in a racially discriminatory manner or by his comment that ‘the Republican Party is now ... a natural and evidently comfortable home for white racism in the United States.’ ”
Like so much else about Carter, the way his religious faith developed wasn’t predictable. In the 1960s, his family moved to Ithaca from Washington, D.C., but opted to leave him behind so he could finish junior high school. He boarded with a Jewish family and saw for the first time what life was like in a household where faith played an important role, watching as they sang blessings and lit candles on the Sabbath. “I saw people who lived in the world, but weren’t worldly,” he recalls. “They tried to live their religious convictions.” Until then, Carter’s main exposure to religion was as an acolyte at the Episcopal church he attended with his family’s next-door neighbors.
In the mid-1980s, when their first child was born, Carter and Aird began to seek out a more deliberate religious life. They spent more than a decade in one of the nation’s few predominantly black Episcopal parishes, but later moved to an interdenominational church in Middletown, Conn., some 40 minutes from their home near New Haven. Carter describes the family’s decision to change churches as a “painful” one that he hopes in time to be able to write about.
“I don’t think people should go to church to be comfortable,” he says. “We both had a sense that we were being led somewhere else. We had a sense that that was not where God was calling us to be.”
Carter’s faith informs virtually every aspect of his life. He and Aird and their two children, ages 17 and 15, wake up for Bible study at 6:30 in the morning several times a week and pray together regularly. He also spends time analyzing scripture, writing notes in his diary and chatting regularly with a theologian friend. Recently, Carter says, he’s focused on Romans, chapter 11, a text about the salvation of Israel hotly debated by theologians. He says he has been sharply criticized for arguing in one of his books that the Christian call to evangelize does not require attempts to convert Jews. “I respect the views of the critics,” he says, “but I still think that I am correct.”
In studying the practices of the first- and second-century Church, Carter hopes to learn about the beliefs of Christians living close to Christ’s lifetime. “I do not say that those early beliefs and practices should be all there is to Christianity, but certainly understanding the history can help clarify the present,” he says.
Carter is also a keen student of religious freedom in colonial America, and his best-known nonfiction book—The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (Basic Books, 1993)—explores the place of religion in contemporary U.S. society. His main point: in much of our culture, religious belief gets treated like a hobby and people are encouraged to keep that hobby to themselves. “For Americans to take their religions seriously, to treat them as ordained rather than chosen, is to risk assignment to the lunatic fringe,” he writes. He advocates respect and relatively wide legal latitude for the practices of people of faith, from mainstream Christians to Native Americans using peyote.
Even some who disagree with Carter’s take on law and religion, such as George Washington University law professor Ira Lupu, acknowledge his contribution to the field. “Stephen Carter, in that book, provoked a very serious conversation about how society had became secular and had biases against those who practice religion,” Lupu says. “It got the conversation away from a small group of legal professors to a larger group of people.” Harvard professor Martha Minow, an old friend of Carter’s from their days at Yale and as clerks at the Supreme Court, credits him with changing the field. “He was one of first to challenge a settled orthodoxy, that faithfulness was not something to be brought into academic discussions,” she says.
During the 1990s, Carter wrote five more books on legal, civic and religious topics, but he was haunted by an imaginary character—a conservative, ambitious black judge—who had come to mind pretty much full-blown 20 years ago when he was clerking in Washington, D.C. His agent knew about the idea, and Carter had given her about 15 draft pages. In December 2000, she encouraged him to finish the novel. He wrote nearly nonstop for two months.
When his agent sent The Emperor of Ocean Park to publishers in early 2001, editors practically tripped over each other to get the rights. The response was “humbling,” recalls Carter. “If someone just ran off a few hundred copies, I would have been thrilled,” he says, adding that he had dreamed of being a published novelist since childhood. “I would have paid someone to publish it.”
The complex, 600-plus-page thriller revolves around the family of Judge Oliver Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination ended in scandal. Readers follow his son Talcott from his faculty post at an elite law school in the Northeast to his childhood vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard and back to Washington, D.C., as he searches for the truth about his father in the wake of the patriarch’s death. (The idea of the judge being nominated and then failing to win appointment to the Supreme Court came long before the controversies over Clarence Thomas or Robert Bork, Carter says. He points out that, historically, one in four nominees to the federal bench are rejected or withdraw.) Carter is at work on a second novel, which he says features some of the characters from Emperor.
As in many novels, there are obvious surface similarities between protagonist and author—both are upper-middle-class black law professors with ties to Washington and Martha’s Vineyard. Talcott occasionally uses phrases you can practically hear coming out in Carter’s perfect enunciation. An example: “In those days, it was not yet our national sport to ravage the reputations of the great.”
What’s more unusual is that the author’s nonfiction books make personal arguments while remaining serious, scholarly works (The Culture of Disbelief includes nearly 40 pages of footnotes). One of Carter’s most compelling characteristics is his willingness to let you in—just a bit—to his personal life in a way most academics don’t. He writes about how he and his wife and children pray before trips, meals and sleep, and how he remembers wondering how Jewish children felt when the Christian majority prayed aloud back in his public elementary school. (Carter argues in The Culture of Disbelief that the Supreme Court is correct to forbid organized prayer in public schools. But he says that other rulings go too far, citing the school district that in 1990 forbade a teacher from keeping a personal Bible where students could see it.) Looking inside Carter’s world, you sense that he, unlike many intellectuals, actually lives the life he advocates.
For example, he’s an ardent sports fan, who made one of his few post-Emperor splurges buying Washington Redskins season tickets. (For the record, he wrote a Stanford Daily column three decades ago opposing bringing back the Indian as Stanford’s mascot, and he’d like to see the Redskins change their name, too.) But Carter makes it clear that he and his wife haven’t simply pocketed his hefty advance. “We are a Christian family, and we believe very strongly that from those to whom much is given, much is expected. Giving freely of what we have is a duty,” he says. Carter will not disclose his beneficiaries, because, he says, “I do not give in order to achieve recognition.”
Those who know him well say Carter stands out for devotion to his family. He makes a point of regularly attending his children’s school events and often speaks with pride about his wife’s accomplishments (she’s director of The Motherhood Project, based in New York, which seeks to put family issues on the national agenda). Minow says that even in law school, Carter talked about family as the center of his future, and that he has made decisions—about where to live and how to organize his days—on that basis. “When we were in law school, that’s not something most men talked about,” she says.
Carter can sound goody-two-shoes, but he readily admits to shortcomings. “I am a sinner,” he says. “I have a lot of faults.” One bad habit: spending too much time on the computer, mostly writing or playing chess. His workaholic tendencies contributed to a health crisis two years back. Now 50 pounds lighter, Carter takes long walks, skips the cheese on his grinder and picks at a salad without dressing.
The controversial issues he writes about, and his willingness to share what’s behind some of his ideas, have made Carter a public figure. He lives with the realization that many people who think they know who he is and what he stands for haven’t read even one of his books start to finish. “People know about them, and they think they know what they say,” Carter says. He brushes off the personal consequences of that problem—the fact that people often misrepresent his complex arguments—but frets about the implications for society. “We are more interested in personalities than in problems,” he says. “We care more about what people think than the argument behind it.”
As if to prove his point, Carter won’t be pinned down on certain topics, such as abortion. He says simply that he is “an optimist about life’s possibilities.” But he will describe how his take on an issue has changed over time. For example, he opposed school vouchers in the 1980s, accepting the “liberal consensus.” But, as he studied law and religion more and more and paid tuition for his own children to attend religious schools, he began to feel comfortable with the thinking that not only are vouchers not forbidden by the Constitution, they might also be a good thing.
Carter’s obsession with argument over position makes it hard for him to understand why people can’t disagree civilly, why we seem to hate those who see the same set of facts differently. On this point, law professor Lupu can vouch that Carter manages to practice what he preaches. He remembers a lecture series in memory of Justice William Brennan, where Carter presented a paper and Lupu was invited to comment. Lupu disagreed vehemently with Carter’s assertion that Brennan philosophically supported government giving religion special respect and some degree of autonomy from state regulation. When Lupu rose to speak, he argued that while Brennan did hold some accommodationist views, he also took positions that camp would oppose. He called Carter’s paper “just about exactly half true” and proceeded to pick his arguments apart.
At dinner after the lecture, Lupu and Carter ended up sitting side by side. “There wasn’t a drop of resentment or irritation,” Lupu remembers. “I called [Carter] down in front of his father, Mary Brennan, some people whose opinions he surely respected, but I had taken him seriously as a scholar and engaged him at that level. We had a wonderful, pleasant conversation throughout dinner. I still remember it and really respect that.”
That sort of civility and respect makes Carter something of an anomaly in government circles, where he has ventured when politicians sought him out for an opinion or to sit on an advisory board—as the last three administrations have done. Last fall, with little explanation, Carter resigned from the President’s Council on Bioethics after just nine months. He plans to steer clear of political work in the future.
“I don’t think I am suited for public life,” Carter says. “If I have an idea, or something I want to argue over, I write about it, usually at length, because serious arguments are complex. But public arguments are not permitted to be complex. Applause lines are preferred, and I have none and want none.”
For Carter, it all comes down to the search for truth. “For me, that was one of the original attractions of academic life ... to be free to follow the truth wherever it leads, without regard to ideology,” he says. “I write and I teach. That exhausts my talents.”
