This posting is the second part of a discussion that began with an earlier posting and is related to two previous postings about liberal fundamentalism and the American Founding.
Richard John Neuhaus wrote a book entitled The Naked Public Square: Religion & Democracy in America. First published in 1984, it addressed societal trends and the philosophical issues underlying the religion/democracy debate in America. Here are some excerpts where he describes the problem:
Politics and religion are different enterprises…But they are constantly coupling and getting quite mixed up with one another. There is nothing new about this. What is relatively new is the naked public square. The naked public square is the result of political doctrine and practice that would exclude religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business…
When religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square, it does not mean that the public square is in fact naked…
The truly naked public square is at best a transitional phenomenon. It is a vacuum begging to be filled. When the democratically affirmed institutions that generate and transmit values are excluded, the vacuum will be filled by the agent left in control of the public square, the state. In this manner, a perverse notion of the disestablishment of religion leads to the establishment of the state as church…
Our problems, then, stem in large part from the philosophical and legal effort to isolate and exclude the religious dimension of culture…only the state can…”lay claim to compulsive authority.”…of all the institutions in societies, only religion can invoke against the state a transcendent authority and have its invocation seconded by “the people” to whom a democratic state is presumably accountable. For the state to be secured from such challenge, religion must be redefined as a private, emphatically not public, phenomenon. In addition, because truly value-less existence is impossible for persons or societies, the state must displace religion as the generator and bearer of values…
[T]he notion of the secular state can become the prelude to totalitarianism. That is, once religion is reduced to nothing more than privatized conscience, the public square has only two actors in it – the state and the individual. Religion as a mediating structure…is no longer available as a countervailing force to the ambitions of the state…
If law and polity are divorced from moral judgment…all things are permitted and…all things will be done…When in our public life no legal prohibition can be articulated with the force of transcendent authority, then there are no rules rooted in ultimacies that can protect the poor, the powerless and the marginal…
Politics is an inescapably moral enterprise. Those who participate in it are…moral actors. The word “moral” here…means only that the questions engaged [in politics] are questions that have to do with what is right or wrong, good or evil. Whatever moral dignity politics may possess depends upon its being a process of contention and compromise among moral actors, not simply a process of accomodation among individuals in pursuit of their interests. The conflict in American public life today, then, is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of moralities in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate…
The founding fathers of the American experiment declared certain truths to be self-evident and moved on from that premise. It is a measure of our decline into what may be the new dark ages that today we are compelled to produce evidence for the self-evident.
It is sobering to consider how rapid the decline in America has been, happening during our lifetime. For example, contrast today’s status quo with this 1952 opinion by William O. Douglas who, as a not particularly religious man, wrote the following in a U.S. Supreme Court case entitled Zorach v. Clauson:
We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. We make room for a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group and lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma. When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows in the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accomodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.
Finally, here are some additional thoughts from Neuhaus where he offers some guidance on how to understand and fix the problem:
One enters the public square, then, not as an anonymous citizen but as a person shaped by “other sources” that are neither defined by nor subservient to the public square. The public square is not a secular and morally sterilized space but a space for conversation, contention, and compromise among moral actors…compromise is an exercise of moral responsibility by persons who accept responsibility for sustaining the exercise that is called democracy…
One enters the democratic arena, then, as a moral actor. This must be insisted upon against those who view compromise as the antithesis of moral behavior. It must also be insisted upon against those who claim that moral judgment must be set aside before entering the public square…In this [latter] view, the assertion that a moral claim is an intrusion…an “imposition” upon a presumably value-free process. Morally serious people, however, cannot divide themselves so neatly…We do not have here an instance of moral judgment versus value-free secular reason. We have rather an instance of moralities in conflict. The notion of moralities in conflict is utterly essential to remedying the problems posed by the naked public square. Those who want to bring religiously based value to bear in public discourse have an obligation to “translate” those values into terms that are as accessible as possible to those who do not share the same religious grounding. They also have the obligation, however, to expose the myth of value-neutrality…
Neuhaus is now a Roman Catholic priest, a man known for publicly stating his deeply held religious beliefs. Yet, it is instructive to note how, through the use of reason that reaches out to all Americans, he carefully describes the issues we face here. In that way, he is being true to the principles of our Founding.
Americans who believe in liberty and self-government need to take responsibility for changing the course of our country’s debate on this important issue. We need to approach this issue with greater clarity.
As we prepare for another new year, it is a worthy endeavor to contemplate how each of us can make our own individual contribution in 2005 to helping the land we love.
This Christmas holiday season has reignited the public debate about the proper roles for church and state.
Why are so many Americans upset about what is going on? Consider the following:
Christmas has been sanitized in schools and public squares, in malls and parades…
“Those who think that the censoring of Christmas is a blue-state phenomenon need to consider what happened today in the Wichita [Kansas] Eagle,” said William Donahue of the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
The Kansas newspaper ran a correction, he said, for mistakenly referring to a “Christmas Tree” rather than a “Community Tree” at the Wichita Winterfest celebration.
“It’s time practicing Christians demanded to know from these speech-code fascists precisely who it is they think they are protecting [by] dropping the dreaded ‘C-word’,” Mr. Donahue said yesterday…
“People are tired of efforts to sanitize religious expression. This policy against even instrumental Christmas music in schools violates common sense and is neither necessary nor constitutional,” Mr. Scott [of the Alliance Defense Fund] added…
Denver, for example, refused to allow a Christian church float in the city’s holiday parade, because “direct religious themes” were not allowed. Homosexual American Indians, Chinese lion dancers and German folk dancers, however, were welcome…
School districts in Florida and New Jersey have banned Christmas carols altogether, and an “all-inclusive” holiday song program at a Chicago-area elementary school included Jewish and Jamaican songs, but no Christmas carols.
Meanwhile, a Kirkland, Wash., high-school principal nixed a production of “A Christmas Carol” because of Tiny Tim’s prayer, “God bless us everyone,” while neighboring libraries banned Christmas trees…
“Our Founding Fathers didn’t intend to take religion out of the state. They took state out of religion,” [said] Jim Finnegan.
We have seen similar issues arise in Cranston.
Unfortunately, however, the problem is much deeper and not limited to the Christmas season. As an article entitled “Declaration of Independence Banned” noted:
In the city of Cupertino, California, a fifth grade public school teacher at Stevens Creek School, Stephen Williams, has been prohibited by the principal from distributing the Declaration of Independence among other documents from the American Founding. Why? Because they mention God.
Things have truly gotten out of hand when American children are forbidden from reading our own Declaration of Independence. And, it shows how far certain people will go to enforce the new religion of secular intolerance. (See the Liberal Fundamentalism, Revisited posting for additional perspective on this intolerance.)
The same author continued:
Carried to its logical conclusion, the position staked out by modern courts would prevent not only any mention of God in the classroom, but would render teaching the natural rights principles of constitutional government unconstitutional…
…there is a concerted effort to drive God out of our schools and out of our public square…to remove constitutional limitations on government power, and, at the same time, replace moral, free, self-sufficient citizens with needy, subservient citizens dependent on government. Removing God from the American mind advances both goals.
Understanding that sound government and a free, moral society rest upon a belief in the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” California passed a law in 1997 requiring public schools to teach the Declaration of Independence and other documents from the Founding period…
As my friend, John Eastman, said in the same article:
“Unfortunately, our courts have abandoned the original meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, and what we are witnessing today is the logical consequence of a half-century of misguided jurisprudence.”
This view of the world has serious implications for the American principle of self-government. Here are some further thoughts from an article entitled “Belief in God Underlies Self Government”:
America’s founders devised the world’s most excellent constitution, but they never imagined that their handiwork would survive without the proper understanding of its foundations and purposes.
The ultimate cause of our political order, and the reason for its existence, is set forth with surpassing eloquence in the Declaration’s Preamble:“We hold these truths to be self evident-that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
This is the most revolutionary political doctrine in the history of the world…
But the radical nature of the Declaration consists not only in its revolutionary character but in its reliance on the authority of a divine Creator. The Declaration teaches that the authority of the people is prior to government, but that the rights of the people are the gift of God. Neither man nor government is the author of liberty. That honor belongs only to God…
It is true that America’s founders were scrupulously neutral between the numerous religious sects that existed in their time. But it is not true that they were hostile to the God worshipped by all of them…
What is especially sinister about the relentless campaign to remove all public references to God is that it calls the nation’s foundations needlessly into question. If there is no God, then there is no human freedom and there is no government by consent of the governed…
Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia,“[C]an the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?”
I will post shortly some excerpts from a powerful book which directly tackles this important issue of religion and democracy in America.
[Open full post]For a classic example of why the Democrats have a hard time gaining foreign policy respectability, see this Matt Ygelsias post over at Tapped (via Jonah Goldberg at NRO).
Yglesias’ post is an example of the classic Jimmy Carter-style thinking that has crippled Democratic foreign policy, attacking the United States for pursuing its own interests, while simultaneously saying there is no real threat from our enemies aggressively pursuing interests contrary to ours.
I do not disagree with the idea that more information about the state’s legislators would benefit the democratic process, but I am not convinced that biographical data or past voting records are the most important pieces of information that a state-level blog can compile.
My biggest complaint about local legacy media legislative reporting is that it is hard to get a sense of what issues are to be voted on much more than a week before the vote happens (with a few high-profile exceptions, like separation of powers or the casino issue). Part of the problem is that lots of important action can happen in committee and that legislative rules are extremely dictatorial. House/Senate leadership and committee leadership have tremendous power to decide which bills live and which bills die using scheduling powers and the like. My sense is that state government fails to be properly representative, not because all of the legislators conspire together, but because legislative rules make it possible for a few members to manipulate the system, and the rest just go-along to get-along.
Thus, I think the best use of blogosphere electrons with respect to the legislative process would be applying the “collective brain of the Rhode Island blogosphere” to tracking [maybe even writing?] legislation, and keeping progressive changes from disappearing into the Hobbesian world of legislative combat.
Here’s an interesting find from URI economics professor Leonard Lardaro:
As our unemployment rate fell from 5.8 percent to 4.5 percent, resident employment, the number of Rhode Islanders who were working, rose by only 423! The decline in our labor force, 7,146, was almost identical to the drop in the number of unemployed, 7,569, which is consistent with the discouraged worker effect.
It would make for an interesting study to examine increases and decreases in welfare caseloads and emigration during the same period. I’ve never quite understood how people can just stop looking for work. (That lack of comprehension, just so you know, has both practical and moral components.) People have to survive. Are the “discouraged workers” attempting to get by on a single income, if married? Are they going on welfare? Are they moving out of state? (Are they even fully autonomous adults?)
Looking at some additional information that Professor Lardaro provides for his “Current Conditions Index” on his Web site, new claims for unemployment insurance are up, while new housing permits are even more dramatically down. That’s on a month-to-month basis, so it doesn’t accurately capture longer term trends. Still, I’m close enough to the financial brink to know the temptations of abandoning ship and heading where work is more plentiful and housing cheaper. And I’m sure that many Rhode Islanders have taken that course; I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the case most frequently (and most distressingly) among the young and ambitious.
Another chart on Lardaro’s site shows that increases in local government employment dramatically outpace those in the private sector. In Rhode Island — a state that saw a mere 2.4% growth in population from 2000 to 2003 (PDF) — fewer people are paying for more public employees and improving benefits for them. Discouraging, indeed!
Circumstances must improve, one way or another. The question for such families as mine is whether we can afford to hang on until they do.
A caller to Rick Adams’s show (listen here) just suggested to Don that Anchor Rising publish background information — voting records, fund contributors, family employment, union sympathy, and so on — for each of Rhode Island’s legislators. That’s a fantastic idea, and we should certainly give some thought to ways in which to get it done.
The problem is that aggregating such information can be time consuming. Perhaps when things get rolling, we can make it a periodic feature — either addressing particular legislators or particular aspects of background with each iteration.
In the course of yet another article about bias in our univerisities, William Pilger (a pseudonym), a conservative tenured professor in a southern university, managed to both display the value of a humanities education and the reluctance (and reason) that students show for engaging in any type of classroom discussion that may touch on current events. After having taught Virgil’s Aenid during the course of a semester, Pilger had finally arrived at culminating point and posed the question
Did Virgil give us a world that is fundamentally just or unjust, fundamentally good or evil?
Getting the typical who-cares-the-guy-died-2,000-years- ago look, I said: “You think this doesn’t matter? This is, after all, what the humanities are about. We’re reading profound thoughts by a profound poet, and they help instruct us how best to live as humans in a human world. Being a human and thinking humanly and living in a world of contingencies is complex. And Virgil can help us think about what’s going on now. Take Iraq, for example. How might we use Virgil’s view of the world to comment on what’s happening in Iraq? Who’s Aeneas in Iraq? Is there a Juno? A Turnus? Where’s piety? Who’s in the right?”
I had finally pushed the right button to get a reaction, but not the right button to encourage discussion. The students objected en masse to the political nature of the question. So I gave a cursory sketch of two opposite ways one might relate the Aeneid to Iraq, and moved on.
After class, I asked one of the students for his read on what had happened. How could the response be so heated but the question left unengaged? He replied: “You know how it is. Students don’t want to disagree with their professors. Most of the students around here are pretty conservative, but they get the strong sense that their professors are liberal. And on issues like these, they’re afraid to disagree.” They had made assumptions about how I would think and were reluctant to contradict me.
Notice how the students objected to the posing of the question, not it’s content? They felt threatened by any contemporary topical discussion because experience had informed them that their grades could have been at stake. Rather than voice well-reasoned dissent with their instructor on the topic, and risk a poor grade, they chose silence. Not exactly an atmosphere in which open dialogue and intellectual diversity is flourishing, is it?
[Open full post]Consider these quotes about the recently concluded election:
“Election results reflect a decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry…Ignorance and blood lust have a long tradition…especially in red states…They know no boundaries or rules. [Bush and Cheney] are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant.” Jane Smiley
“I am saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country – the heartland.” Article
“Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity?” Garry Wills
“…used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad…” Thomas Friedman
“W’s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We’re entering another dark ages…a scary, paranoid, regressive reality.” Maureen Dowd
These are just some examples of the heated and frequently over-the-top rhetoric by the left.
That ugliness and resulting polarization led me to dig out one of the most powerful editorials I have read in my adult life – and it speaks directly to the so-called Red versus Blue state phenomenon. Here are some excerpts:
We have been following the extensive theological commentary in the press on the subject of politics and religion in the current presidential campaign. It might not otherwise have occurred to us that so many editorialists and columnists harbored so many deep, pent-up opinions on religious worship, voluntary school prayer or Christian fundamentalism.
What we have been looking for but have so far missed in this great awakening of religious writing is a short sermon on the subject of liberal fundamentalism…we would like to offer a few thoughts on what has been far and away the most messianic religion in America the past two decades – liberal politics.
American liberalism has traditionally derived much of its energy from a volatile mixture of emotion and moral superiority. The liberal belief that one’s policies would on balance accomplish something indisputably good generally made opposing arguments about shortcomings, costs or unintended consequences unpersuasive…
In retrospect, it’s clear that the moral clarity of the early civil-rights movement was a political epiphany for many white liberals…many active liberals carried along their newly found moral certitude and quasi-religious fervor into nearly every major public policy issue that has come along in the past 15 years. The result has been liberal fundamentalism.
…Not surprisingly, this evangelical liberalism produced a response. Conservative groups – both secular and religious – were created, and they quite obviously made the political success of their adversaries more difficult. Liberals don’t like that. So now, suddenly, we find all these politicians and columnists who are afraid someone might want to impose a particular point of view on them…
If some liberals are now afraid that certain Christian fundamentalists will reintroduce new forms of intolerance and excessive religious zeal into American political life, perhaps we should concede the possibility that they know what they’re talking about. But they might also meditate on the current election and why there has been an apparent rightward shift in political sentiment in the U.S. It could be that a great many voters have taken a good look at the fundamentalists on the religious right and the fundamentalists on the political left and made up their minds about which poses the greater threat to their own private and public values.
Interesting perspective, isn’t it? Doesn’t it strike you as if the editorial was written on November 3, 2004, the day after the election? But, no, it wasn’t written last month or even this year. Rather, the Wall Street Journal published that editorial entitled “Liberal Fundamentalism” on September 13, 1984.
Unfortunately, liberal fundamentalism continues to actively strip naked the traditional public square and replace it with a secular absolutism. Another editorial discussed recent actions against the Boy Scouts and Catholic Charities by noting:
What’s going on here is an effort by liberal activists and their judiciary enablers to turn one set of personal mores into a public orthodoxy from which there can be no dissent, even if that means trampling the First Amendment. Any voluntary association that doesn’t comply – the same little platoons once considered the bedrock of American freedom – will be driven from the public square. Meet the new face of intolerance.
This ideological intolerance is not the historical face of America. It does not reflect the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And it is not the practices of most Americans today, including many principled liberals and conservatives.
But still the question remains: Where will we go from here as a country? No one should doubt that this is a battle for the future of our country and it requires active engagement by all of us. History from recent decades shows that the apostles of liberal fundamentalism are unrelenting in their self-righteousness and intolerance of any opposing world view. We are fighting what Thomas Sowell has labeled the “vision of the [self-] anointed.”
As we do battle with this determined foe, I would offer you three quotes for reflection and encouragement.
The first quote reminds us of the natural law principles articulated by our Founders and why that leads to a crucial belief in limited government:
…natural law jurisprudence represents the greatest threat to the liberal desire to replace limited, constitutional government with a regulatory-welfare state of unlimited powers.
…the principle that our rights come not from government but from a “Creator” and “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” as our Declaration of Independence says, and that the purpose and power of government should therefore be limited to protecting our natural, God-given rights.
The left understands that if it is to succeed, these principles of constitutional government must be jettisoned, or at least redefined…the founders’ natural-law defense of constitutional government is fatal to liberalism’s goal…
…Woodrow Wilson, for example, insisted that unlike the physical universe, the political universe contains no immutable principles or laws. ‘Government…is a living thing…’
From a liberal view, liberty cannot be a natural right, protected by a government of limited powers, because there are no natural rights…Instead, ‘the state…is the creator of liberty.’
…The liberal critique of the Constitution has been repeated so long and with such intensity that it has become orthodoxy in our law schools, courtrooms and legislative halls…
The size, scope and purposes of our government are no longer anchored in and limited by our Constitution…The American people need to be reminded of the source of their rights and persuaded that limited government is good; that the principles of the Constitution – which are the natural-law principles of the Declaration of Independence – are timeless, not time-bound; that without those principles, the noble ends set forth in the Constitution’s preamble can never be achieved.
The second quote comes from Thomas Jefferson, as mentioned in Chapter 6 of Richard John Neuhaus’ book, The Naked Public Square:
…Jefferson, however, had no illusions that democracy had resolved the religious question by establishing “the separation of church and state.” Consider, for example, his well-known reflection on the immorality of slavery:
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?…
In short, Jefferson understood that that no constitution or written law is strong enough to defend rights under attack. Their “only firm basis” is in their being perceived as transcendent gift.
The final quote comes from George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address as his Presidency was ending. It speaks to the importance of religion and morality:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness – these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them…Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
The very nature of public debate on a controversial issue in a democracy is “messy” and that messiness makes the debate appear inefficient or even ineffective. But that is because it takes time to build a consensus among citizens across our great country. For the survival of our country, we must find that consensus over time by helping people rediscover the importance of limited government and how both morality and religion are crucial building blocks.
I believe we will achieve such an outcome by appealing to Americans across the political spectrum who hold a deep-seated belief in the right of individual Americans to live a life of principled freedom among their family, friends, church and community – without interference from fundamentalists of any persuasion.
While leading the way to the Christmas tree that my family had tagged a month before, I was amused by the searching look from the young man with the saw when he alluded to some volunteer work that he’d recently done with Rock the Vote and I said nothing. The other day, a solicitor for a charity called and, in attempting to find a way around my “just can’t this year,” started making jokes about how President Bush will be inaugurated but wasn’t “reelected.”
Spending time with a new acquaintance, today, I smiled inwardly at our Dance of the Issues, whereby two people gradually unveil their views on particular topics — the more closely bounded, the better — in lieu of the kind of shorthand that suffices when one is confident of holding the majority opinion. Go to church? Yes. Michael Moore? Fool. Iraq? Media bias. Second Amendment? “Bear” means “carry.”
These various anecdotes bring to mind a recent Ben Stein piece:
The man at the Christmas tree tent in Malibu kept winking at me and nodding when no one else was looking. I smiled and kept looking at the trees. (In Malibu, we Jews have Christmas trees.) Finally, he motioned to me to come over to is table. He cupped his hand over his mouth and took my hand. “We won,” he said. “We won.” …
This is the way it is here. We meet in smoky places. We give the high sign, we nod knowingly. We are like members of the Maquis in Occupied France. Or early Christians emerging from the catacombs in Caligula’s Rome. We are the GOP in Hollywood, and on the West Side of L.A. The culture here is so dominantly left-wing, PC, vegan, hate-America that many of us feel we have to behave as if we were underground.
My experiences here in Rhode Island aren’t to the level of Stein’s, but then again, I’m not a public figure.
(Via Blog from the Core)
