Making Myself Clear

Lukas Halim at the YFP blog thought my column on policiticized Christianity "was terrible." I think he misunderstood it profoundly. I'll taking his criticisms in stages.

He [I] claims that the United States was founded as a "liberal, secular democracy." Wishful thinking.

If I had meant to suggest that the United States was founded in accord with the doctrines of 20th century FDR/LBJ style liberalism, then I would indeed be way off the mark. But every time I used a variation of the term "liberal" in that column, I was referring to the classical liberalism of the 17th and 18th centuries, an approximate composite of Locke's (and Montesquieu's) politics, Smith's and Ricardo's economics, and Hume's meta-empiricism. It's simply undeniable that this was the spirit underlying the United States' founding documents---and the US is unique among nation-states in that it was created and perdures via a literal social contract. As a political entity, the US was created explicitly and intentionally as a secular state.

Have there been anti-secular cultural strata present within the boundaries of the political superstructure since the nation's founding? Of course. But they had and have nothing to do with with the nation's de lege formation. The founders' support of federalism and indirect representation was a reflection of the need to create escape valves by which antithetical elements of the country's culture could find expression without doing harm to edifice of the governing political compact.

Moving along.

Mr. Koffler quotes the president of Bob Jones University, as though he represented the views of the Religious Right. I may as well quote Rage Against the Machine and attribute their words to Mr. Koffler.

I did indeed quote the president of BJU, because I thought his assertion about Bush's re-election being a "reprieve from the agenda of paganism" was a rather succinct and even eloquent specimen of the religious right's post-election triumphalism. If Mr. Halim thinks that Mr. Jones' comments were out of accord with the general mood and the public pronouncements of the religious right's leaders, then a bit of determined googling will prove him wrong. Is Bob Jones III a frringe figure? Lest we forget, President Bush made it an explicit point to visit the BJU campus on his way to shoring up the evangelical vote, and he has to this day never grown the balls to condemn Jones' hideous anti-black and anti-Catholic bigotry.

While I could have chosen many, many, many more fundamentalist leaders to quote, the YDN has fairly tight space restrictions, so I cited only Charles Colson and James Dobson in the passage in question. If Lukas wishes to suggest that Colson is somehow unrepresentative of the religious right, then he will have to square that contention with Colson's semi-official role as a liason between the Bush-Cheney campaign and the religious right. Colson in his younger, less devout years, moreover, was a big cheese in the Nixon dirty tricks operation, and was in fact the man who created John O'Neill as a political advocate (O'Neill being of course the Professor Moriarty to John Kerry's Holmes).

As for James Dobson, this one simply speaks for itself. There is no more influential elected or unelected religious conservative figure in the entire country. Even Tom DeLay daren't cross Dobson. If you want to know what social policy initiatives the Republican party will be backing tomorrow, look at Focus on the Family's press releases today. The fact that an unelected radio-evangelist should play a decisive role in determining United States Senate committee chairmanships---and that so many senators' and congressmen's knees should buckle in fear of his wrath---is an unrationalizable step towards theocracy. In writing my column, I thought only to give a rough outline of Dobson's power, which just about exceeds that of any Constitutional officer save maybe the president, the speaker of the house, and the justices of the Supreme Court. Had I decided to quote one of the awful things Dobson has said, it would have been his response to George Stephanopoulos's question about how he can justify calling Senator Leahy an "anti-Christian bigot." Dobson said, (slight, non-substantive paraphrase), "Well, he disagrees with my views." Talk about immunity to self-criticism. Q.E.Fucking.D.

Apropos of which, here's Lukas's next criticism:

This paragraph is choice:

How, exactly, is one supposed to argue with those who think their political positions bear the mark of divine ordination, and for whom, consequently, things like self-criticism, rational persuasion, or the need to ground one's beliefs in observed evidence, are the vain tools of the Devil and of liberals that can only lead people to waywardness and heterodoxy?

Self-criticism is a vain tool of the devil? Ever heard of an "examination of conscience"? Some nonbelievers, such as Nietszche, would say that believers are neurotically self-critical, but according to Mr. Koffler they're not self-critical at all.

Where Lukas got the impression that I was referring either to all religious believers or to all Christians is beyond my ability to guess, but it certainly wasn't from the column. Cf. this graf:

It's worth noting that the pan-theocratic ecumenicism Slater (and Lieberman) defend is exactly the wrong way to understand the Republicans' equation of moral values with religious faith. Their religious base will not be satisfied by the genuine profession of any faith at all; one must pay homage to the True Faith. The imperatives to legislate homosexuality out of civic life, to confer citizenship on amalgamated cells in petri dishes, to micromanage the permissible content on radio and television, to assert the validity of "creation science" in public schools, to regulate against premarital sex and also to deny contraception to those who engage in it, etc., are not the values of the benign, undifferentiated faith that every national office-seeker must affirm regardless of his or her politics. They are the specific tenets of an ultra-politicized fundamentalist Christianity, whose adherents are certain that their social agenda is God's plan for the United States, and that recent Republican victories are evidence of His will in action.

In other words, I am referring to a very specific, very loud, and very influential constituency within the Republican coalition. Despite some of its (and Bush's) outreach to conservative Catholics, it is a movement that, like Bush, is overwhelmingly Protestant and born-again. Dobson's readers are not versed in the classics of medieval scholasticism and yes, would be vaguely suspicious of both philosophical introspection and of people who use the term. I could argue at length about why I think that people who sign oaths of loyalty to a politician or recite pledges of allegiance to him are not capable of genuine self-criticism, but I'll let that stand on its own intuitive weight for now. As for the rejection of reasoned inquiry in preference of modal, material, and religious faith, all that needs to be said has been said by William Saletan in his fantastic "Truth Standard" column:

Bush was refusing to measure his claims and decisions against the truth. Or so I argued.

I don't have to argue the point anymore, because last night, Bush confirmed it. Here's what he said at a rally in Oregon, according to a White House transcript:

Once again, last night, with a straight face, the senator said—well, shall we say, refined his answer on his proposed global test. That's the test he would administer before defending America. After trying to say it really wasn't a test at all, last night he once again defended his approach, saying, I think it makes sense. (Laughter.) The senator now says we'd have to pass some international truth standard. The truth is we should never turn America's national security decisions over to international bodies or leaders of other countries. (Applause.)

You heard that right. The president explicitly refuses "to pass some international truth standard." Because evidence is the fundamental test applied in France as well as in the United States, Bush thinks he shouldn't have to back up his claims or decisions with evidence. ...[snip]...

This is the second time Kerry has defined the test. Each time, he has made clear that it's a test of evidence, not opinion, and that Americans, "your own countrypeople," are the first people to whom the evidence must be shown.

When Bush replied last night that he refuses to pass this "truth standard," there's really no other way to interpret his position. He's saying that he doesn't have to show you any evidence, because evidence is the sort of thing a Frenchman would ask for.

As Glenn Reynolds would say, read the whole thing. Then there's Lukas's final criticism:

And how about the claim that rational persuasion is the vain tool of the Devil? I think this accusation might be true of Karl Barth and Kierkegard, since both deprecate reason in preference to a leap of faith. But is it true of St. Thomas, or contemporary Christian conservatives, like those at First Things and National Review?

Let me state, for the record, that while I adore Kierkegaard as both as a stylist and as the most insightful psychologist who ever lived, I would not rely on him to provide a political prescription. I'm also quite positive that the movement I'm describing is not engaged in the reading and discussion of Kierkegaard, Barth, or Aquinas. I'll confess to not being well-read about First Things myself, and as for National Review, I have to say that despite the occasional insightful piece (usually by Rick Brookhiser), there is no publication that has done more to perfect the genre of pseudo-self-introspection [okay, maybe the Nation--ed.]. Some time ago I realized that if I read another NR article in which religion went around masquerading as scientific expertise (c.f. 99% of NR's and NRO's thought re: stem cell research), I would wretch.

Lukas puts me in a difficult position with Aquinas, because although I do regard him as a genuine philosopher and critic, which sets him quite apart from James Dobson and the contemporary American evangelical right in general, I also happen to think that he is responsible---through the correct interpretation of his views---for more material and psychic suffering than any other philosopher who has ever lived. I'm getting into an area tangential to Lukas's comments, so I'll restrict myself to saying that the Thomistic/Aristotelian framework of moral teleology is fond of talking about "rationality," and dresses itself comfortably in the language of reasoned inquiry, but is far more inimical to rationality (note the use/mention distinction) than anything in Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. They at least grasp the concept of epistemic rationality, and of modal diversity, which allows them to avoid completely unwarranted attributions of normativity to non-normative features of the world.