|
Does “religion talk” unnecessarily drive away non-religious traditionalists?
Hannon writes :
Of the varied ways you have allowed me to expand and extend my thinking, one important area is the relationship between religion and politics. As a deist I can agree or at least sympathize with your frequently expressed ideas in this area, especially the recent post from a reader in Germany. What concerns me, though, is that just as our nation is founded on a classical liberal, republican philosophy, derived from rational and reasonable thought, so too should the tenets of any modern conservative development be largely free of any direct entanglement with Christianity per se.
At the same time I can agree that Judeo-Christian belief serves as the underpinning of our experiment in moral terms. This should never be denied. Yet does it not alienate many Americans to be forced to consider that there is some abiding link between these realms, who might otherwise agree by its righteous principles alone with traditional conservatism? I am not attracted, or unattracted, by this link but many must see it as a superfluous conflation of two complementary ongoing Western developments.
LA replies:
You write: “Yet does it not alienate many Americans to be forced to consider that there is some abiding link between these realms, who might otherwise agree by its righteous principles alone with traditional conservatism?”
That’s a tough question. I’m always trying to be what I see as in the middle on this issue. But what I see as the middle may seem too Christian to you. Perhaps the best answer is to consult the authority of the people in our tradition whom you would most respect: Deists among the Founders. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Washington and Jefferson were deists. Would they have said, with you, that Christianity should be left out of discussions about the nature of our society? No! Would they have said, with you, that “our nation is founded on a classical liberal, republican philosophy, derived [solely] from rational and reasonable thought?” No! Even though Jefferson himself believed that morality and religion could be reduced to purely rational affirmations, he didn’t seek to impose that notion on the society or insist that only the language of pure reason should be used in discussing good and bad and the meaning of life and the sources of government. He recognized and accepted the Christian nature of America. Though he was not a Christian himself, he nevertheless deferred to the Christianity of his society. And I think that is a key point for us to remember today and perhaps an answer to your question.
Furthermore, your statement, that “our nation is founded on a classical liberal, republican philosophy, derived from rational and reasonable thought,” is simply not true. Look up Ellis Sandoz’s huge volume of religious sermons during the Founding period in which REASON and REVELATION, Locke and the Bible, were used together. This was the common language of the Founding period. It is simply untrue—spectacularly untrue—that the Founding was based on pure Enlightenment. Yes, Locke and other Enlightenment writers were central to Founding generation’s thought, but the Founding generation were not Lockeans. They were integrating Lockean thought into a distinct American tradition which included American experiences with self government as well as profound elements of medieval thought and of Protestant thought and practice.
Furthermore, we cannot simply follow the Founders in this, for experience has shown that they erred on the secular side. Central to American traditionalism is the understanding that the Founding documents were too abstract, making the universal, procedural, and liberal aspects of the Founding explicit, while leaving the cultural, religious, and moral aspects of the actual American society implicit; the latter were discussed generally, but not placed in the documents, and so were not given the authority that the former were given. This in turn led to America progressively elevating the explicit liberal principles of the Founding and increasingly ignoring the actual qualities of the society needed to sustain such principles. And so America has kept moving to the left, abandoning the Founding, abandoning its own identity and particularity. Therefore we cannot simply go back to the Founding. The Founding is truly great. But the Founding was flawed. And therefore a part of the traditionalist endeavor is to revisit the Founding and inject into it the particularist elements it lacked. An example of this is my recent proposed constitutional amendment banning the practice of Islam in America. Another is my article on a traditionalist approach to the Federal Marriage Amendment. What these two articles are saying is that America is not just constituted of procedural political principles; it is constituted of culturally specific things, e.g., it is not an Islamic society, and it is a society based on marriage, meaning the union of one man and one woman. In the past, it was not necessary to formalize these understandings because they were taken for granted by everyone. But now that these things are threatened, they need to be formally asserted and protected in our Constitution.
I have not addressed all the points you have raised, but that’s enough for now.
- end of initial entry -
Ben W. writes:
In the “Does “religion talk” unnecessarily drive away non-religious traditionalists?” discussion, Hannon writes, “Our nation is founded on a classical liberal, republican philosophy, derived from rational and reasonable thought.”
I would ask Hannon how he defines “rational and reasonable thought.” Other societies have also been derived from “rational and reasonable thought”—e.g. the Soviet Union from “rationally” derived documents such as the Marx/Engels “Communist Manifesto” or Nazi Germany from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” It appears to me that “reason” is operating as an undefined terms in Hannon’s presuppositions. [LA comments: Doesn’t Hannon make it clear he’s talking about classical liberalism?]
The Declaration of Independence uses terms such as “Nature’s God” which may be solely deistic. However the phrase “they are endowed by their Creator” points to a god acting in creating and defining man. This same document ends by affirming, “the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.” The Encyclopedia Britannica defines “providence” as “the quality in divinity on which mankind bases the belief in a benevolent intervention in human affairs and the affairs of the world.” This is a vision of an active, intervening god as a guarantor of the founders’ efforts at nation building. So God is viewed as creator, endower and securer of man’s rights. He is not simply a bystander in the affairs of men.
Ben W. continues:
Hannon states that our nation was founded through “reasonable thought” and “does it not alienate many Americans to be forced to consider that there is some abiding link between these realms” (ie. reason and Christianity).
This is a cute twist of logic. Hannon has not defined what the elements of “reasonable thought” are yet he has already concluded that “reasonable thought” and Christianity are two distinct and separate realms. So while he does not stipulate what components constitute “reasonable thought”, he assumes from the get-go that Christianity is not one of these.
This type of “logical trick” has been done countless times—excluding Christianity from rationality a priori without actually enumerating what are the components of reason.
Ben continues:
One last note on Hannon’s divorce of reason and Christianity with respect to the birth of our nation. Why did the framers of the Declaration of Independence count on God for the rightness of their intentions? “We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions…”
If reason is self-sufficient, why did our founding fathers appeal for the correctness of their motives to God? They must have found “reason” insufficient for final accountability!
LA replies:
In reply to Ben’s last point, it could be said (though I am not saying this) that the Founders were appealing to the deist God who is knowable through reason. Remember, the defining belief of deism is not that God created the world and then left it alone; it is that God is knowable through reason sans revelation. So perhaps Hannon is saying he could go along with that deistic God, but not the “Full Monty” Christian God.
Terry M. writes:
This is an interesting article. The question asked in the entry title is intriguing, but it seems to me to lend itself to a very straightforward answer. If “otherwise traditionalist” conservatives are “alienated” by “religion talk” (talk incidentally that our founders seem to have had little hesitancy engaging, as you point out), then it would seem that the qualifier “otherwise” attached to this brand of “traditionalists” would call into question their very traditionalism. I don’t know how “traditionalist” it can be said to be for one calling himself by the title to allow his alienation from traditionalism on the basis of “religion talk.” But it sure sounds like a “fair weather” kind of traditionalism to me.
I’m not implying that Hannon is a “fair weather” traditionalist, but his concern for alienating that faction reminds me of the ‘04 Republican National Convention where such speakers as Giuliani and Schwarzenegger climbed on stage (to the delight of the audience in attendance) and basically argued for the Republican Party to be an all-inclusive party (cheers and applause!).
N. writes:
A few points to add:
John Locke himself studded his famous “Two Treatises on Government” with what many modern secularists would decry as “religion talk”—the word “God” appears over and over in both volumes. In a very interesting discussion of when to use lethal force, for example, he points out that the life God gives to a man is not to be taken by anyone without God’s approval. That is, a highwayman who demands “Your money or your life,” even if all that is stake monetarily is two pennies, has declared war upon society and may be—indeed, should be—resisted with all force required to make him cease and desist. It is both the right and duty of every person to resist such evil, precisely because life itself is a gift from God, not the “property” of any one person.
Modern secularists recoil from such talk, in my experience, because they wish to be atomized individuals, rather than members of a community. I have encountered this time and again, despite some blather of “communitarianism” that shows up in some quarters, and have become convinced it is embedded deeply into some subcultures of the modern, Western world. At the root is a rather childish self-centeredness that all too often manifests as hyper-extended adolescence. There are “baby boomers” 60 years of age who still think, and talk, and act, like teenagers in their insistence on their atomized individualism and anger at any “religion talk.” Such people wish to take Locke’s liberalism, but not his “God talk,” unhappily for them the two concepts are deeply intertwined.
Second, the Founders no doubt regarded the social and cultural artifacts of their time as perfectly natural, normal and therefore of no significance. That is, they expected the culture to continue forward no matter what form of government they adopted, and so there was not any need to spell such things out explicitly. It would, for them, have been like spelling out “There will be air to breath, and water in the sea,” I suspect. [LA comments: I agree. But now the air is toxic, the seas are vanishing, and that is why we need to revisit the Founding and make explicit the fundamentals that the Founders reasonably felt were simply understood.]
Finally, it is worth bearing in mind in all discussions of government that there is no perfect form of government that can be created by flawed humans: all are doomed to have errors and problems in them. The best we can hope for are systems of government with sufficient dispersion of powers, and means of self-critique, that the inevitable errors can be corrected to some extent. However, all the governmental structures one can think of will be of no use if the people using them are of bad character. (See “Clinton, Bill” and “Nixon, Richard” for just a couple of examples.) Character matters, and what people do when they think no one is watching, and they can “get away with” anything, is very important.
Thanks for bringing up an important topic in a different way.
James W. writes:
The Founders would not be found saying their documents and understandings were not flawed, but they might not be flawed in the way you have them here—the relationship of secular enlightenment and religious principle favoring secular enlightenment.
One of the great issues of contention between Federalist and Anti-Federalist in the ratification debate was indeed the remarkable lack of religious distinction in the Constitution. As Jefferson later said, a man’s religion should be read in his life and not his words. The founders correctly saw the connection of religion and government as fatal to religion, with government following the desent [?] due to lack of religious principle. Europe would prove them out.
Madison put it this way—We have staked the future of American civilization not on the power of government—far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to sustain ourselves to the Ten Commandments of God.
In other words, free, self-sufficient, and virtuous men would form voluntary associations of ever evolved strength, where those in lands where power flowed from the top would be ever diminished.
Alan Roebuck writes:
The question, it seems to me is: how do we religious traditionalist conservatives appeal to prospective allies who are agnostic or atheistic?
This is a question of tactics, not strategy: we understand that in a properly ordered America, Christianity would be acknowledged as the paramount worldview, so the question before us is how to appeal to non-Biblical people without compromising on a non-negotiable issue.
First, it seems to me, is the fact that a person who is hostile to the Biblical worldview is simply not a traditionalist conservative, regardless of how he may identify himself. Such people may be our allies on certain individual issues, but they are ultimately not our allies.
Also, we should emphasize that under a properly-ordered America, nobody would be forced to be a Christian, or to pretend that he was. A traditionalist America would slightly restrict the freedom of non-Christians, but not in any way that a true traditionalist conservative would find onerous. For example, homosexuals would still be permitted to engage in their sexual activities, as long as they were discreet about it. What would not be permitted would be ostentatiously flaunting one’s homosexuality, or demanding that the public order officially certify homosexuality as being equivalent to heterosexuality.
Furthermore, we should appeal to these non-Biblical traditionalists seriously to consider becoming more consistent in their thinking. We should say to them: “You have enough courage, wisdom and integrity to reject the thinking of the dominant liberal establishment; why not become fully consistent? Liberalism is based on a small number of premises, from which a multitude of specific liberal conclusions are derived. If you reject the conclusions, why not also reject the premises? And premise number one of liberalism is that the God of the Bible does not exist. Why not join us in affirming His existence?”
Ben W. writes:
You wrote:
“In reply to Ben’s last point, it could be said (though I am not saying this) that the Founders were appealing to the deist God who is knowable through reason. Remember, the defining belief of deism is not that God created the world and then left it alone; it is that God is knowable through reason sans revelation. So perhaps Hannon is saying he could go along with that deistic God, but not the “Full Monty” Christian God.”
I don’t know deism well enough but would deism characterize God as a judge of human motives such that people have to account their actions before him? The Declaration in that paragraph is appealing to a judge—one that is supreme—thus declaring final accountability to rest with him. Perhaps deists do believe in such a judge and such judgment.
LA replies:
I’m not clear on that myself at the moment. See my discussion about whether G. Washington was a deist or a Christian (I say that he verges on being a Christian, though not for the reasons that Michael and Jana Novak give for calling him a Christian), then tell me if that resolves the question.
Hannon writes:
I will defer to you and the other writers here as to the particulars of the Founding and admit readily that my reading on the subject has been very light to date. Nonetheless I retain a very keen interest in the character of our nation and all its implications.
Although my message was brief and exploratory and thus open to different interpretations, I do not believe I suggested that “discussions about the nature of our society” should leave out Christianity. To the contrary, I concur with Jefferson’s sentiments where he “deferred to the Christianity of his society.” But the central dilemma for conservatives, in my opinion, remains the separation of church and state as far as the nature of society and of government. I am not one of those who is obsessed with this founding innovation. But can we agree that religion pertains essentially to the realm of society, and rationality and reason, with their more flexible properties, pertain especially to government and that neither should be exclusive of the other in absolute terms?
You wrote: “Central to American traditionalism is the understanding that the Founding documents were too abstract, making the universal, procedural, and liberal aspects of the Founding explicit, while leaving the cultural, religious, and moral aspects of the actual American society implicit; the latter were discussed generally, but not placed in the documents, and so were not given the authority that the former were given.” I guess I have not yet encountered that lesson on traditionalism on VFR, but it seems the Founders had it right. Again, the separation that seems so deeply to bother some is fundamental to our so far successful system, even if it is not (and it should not be) seen in absolute terms.
For me you hit a critical point with your comment about ” … ignoring the actual qualities of the society needed to sustain such [Founding] principles.” This is exactly so, and is one of the reasons your proposals re Islam and marriage make sense. But must we continually shore up our laws, including the Constitution itself, in order to make up for a society that only supports a now degraded moral imperative and sense of character?
Ben W. asks for a definition of “rational and reasonable thought” and to avoid a subjective or useless answer I can only say that this statement was meant to distinguish such a concept from ideas that are clearly based on non-abstract Biblical teachings. To suggest that Marxism or Nazism are “rationally” derived is perhaps tenable but please note that I used “reasonable” in tandem which neither of these is. Ben makes a very good point that I had overlooked about the Declaration of Independence and also about the founding fathers’ appeal to God for final accountability. Arguments about “which God” aside, I agree with these statements.
I am unclear as to how Ben W. can take my cleaving of Christianity from “reasonable thought” and imply that this means that Christian thought is not perforce reasonable. That is not what I said or meant to imply.
Thanks to James W. for the quote from Jefferson: “a man’s religion should be read in his life and not his words.”
Terry M. writes:
Regarding what some of your other commenters have said concerning the connection between reason and Christianity, Noah Webster certainly understood this connection, and described it as a connection between reason and revelation, and he certainly considered Christianity to be revelation from God. Says he:
“As men are furnished with powers of reason, it is obviously the design of the Creator that reason should be employed as their guide in every stage of life. But reason, without cultivation, without experience and without the aids of revelation, is a miserable guide; it often errs from ignorance, and more often from the impulse of passion…”
The implications of these statements are obvious.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 14, 2007 01:36 AM | Send
|