Taking on Faith
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the resurgence of “faith-based progressives.” Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter have both taken visible roles in reminding Democrats how to talk to religious voters. Moderate churches are fighting back against fundamentalists with messages of tolerance. Opposition to the war is increasingly being framed in explicitly-Christian moral terms. Even some fundamentalists themselves are finding justification for liberal environmental positions in Scripture.
I suppose this is better than the alternative. Apparently huge numbers of Americans require the language of religion to access their basic moral sense. Maybe it takes the authority of Jesus and nothing else to convince some people of the immorality of an unprovoked war against a basically defenseless opponent, based on deliberate lies and resulting in unthinkable misery and chaos. Maybe the common sense of environmental conservation only resonates when wrapped in the 4000-year-old dictates of the Book of Leviticus.
Forgive me if I can’t share the enthusiasm of fellow progressives on this development. For me, the prospect of a faith-based liberalism to combat faith-based conservatism is a rotten bargain. It’s a step backward toward the Middle Ages and a repudiation of several hundred years of civilization in the service of political expediency.
Look around the world: the Middle East, India, Northern Ireland, the Sudan, Israel, Russia – is there anywhere that more religion in politics makes the situation better? When people feel they are doing the will of God, there isn’t much room for compromise and accommodation, even when their positions are compatible with humanist liberal ideals. Democracy requires theological humility on the part of all participants: recognition that human politics is a give-and-take between legitimate interests and provisional truths on both sides, not a clash of absolutes.
All over the world, but most pointedly in Iraq, the West is getting an object lesson in the failure of representative government if the citizenry sees government as the proper forum for the adjudication of sectarian disputes. That’s a fancy way of saying that when fanatics vote, you get an elected dictatorship and a civil war. Some see this as an argument against democracy. I see it as an argument for secularism in politics.
History shows us that civilization (that is, peace, learning and material progress) advances when populations put aside the certainties of religious faith and begin to grapple in earnest with the gritty complexities of the real world. They suspend the kind of uncompromising “chosen-versus-heathen” judgments demanded by sectarian religion in favor of ecumenical tolerance and the radical idea that good ideas about the world might possibly come from people who see things differently than oneself. Eventually, societies reach a convergence between their material and moral interests. It turns out that what’s morally and ethically capital-R Right is also what works best in the long-term interests of peace and prosperity (this is what unites free market libertarians and socialists under the rubric of “material determinists,” in opposition to theocrats). Individuals arrive at their personal understanding of truth through whatever method appeals to them (organized religion, spirituality, existentialism, etc.), but the society as a whole governs itself according to instrumental principles that don’t allow any religious or moral precepts a greater claim to authority.
The neutrality of the state toward religion is a strength, not a weakness. The certainties of religious belief can blind believers to truths that may exist outside their own traditions, whereas a secular state can consider all valid possibilities purely on the basis of how useful they are to achieving material goals. History has shown that secular states are much better at solving problems, making social and scientific progress, generating wealth and advancing the products of their culture – even if they lack the certitude and fanaticism of sectarian societies.
The problem is, secularism is a hard road. Especially when individuals in the society cling to personal religious beliefs, it is difficult to propose that certain things may be true for oneself but not necessarily true as an organizing principle of government. To live in such a society means constantly facing unsettling or morally-complicated situations without the comfort of knowing that respectable public opinion unanimously favors one set of judgments and one course of action. Life can become a puzzle. People can be overwhelmed with choices. They may fear that abandoning belief means embracing chaos.
For this reason, the temptations of fundamentalism become stronger with the advance of modernity. Religion offers a way to simplify moral complexity; ancient wisdom and priestly authority are shortcuts for people exhausted by the responsibilities of freedom or left cold by materialism. And that’s fine for individuals and self-selected communities. Unfortunately, religious claims to absolute truth can never stop there. Absolute means absolute, which means compelling belief (or at least obedience) from non-believers, which means the end of secular pluralism.
When religion seeks to order all of society rather than just individual lives, the only effective response is for secularism itself to become more militant. This is paradoxical because of the central role of tolerance in secular ideology. But tolerance does not need to require a suicidal lack of judgment.
Liberals fought hard against religious absolutism to establish secular humanism, civil society and pluralist democracy. They acknowledged the benefits of religious beliefs, but never its authority. They never conceded the point that religious belief is necessary to be a moral person or to run a moral government. They did not recognize the concept of “heresy” as a crime requiring a civil punishment, and did not exempt religious speech from the same kind of critical scrutiny as any other political speech when it tried to assert its positions on social or political issues.
Most in the West agree that we are currently in conflict with militant fanatics of a faith that has little recent tradition of tolerance and pluralism, and whose beliefs stand in irreconcilable conflict with the most basic precepts of liberal humanism. Yet today, some progressives see the need to equivocate on core principles. Perhaps this comes from the well-engrained habits of open-mindedness and accommodation, perhaps from less-admirable opportunism or cowardice in the face of militant absolutism. Maybe the argument of private faith/public secularism is too subtle for progressives to make in this debased era – although our Founding Fathers were able to express it in 16 magnificent words of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting the Establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof.”)
Whatever the perceived necessities of the situation, liberals are doing themselves no favors playing footsy with theology, even the relatively benign “progressive” theologies now in play. The proponents of faith-based policy already have one party devoted to their cause. Is it too much to ask that the opposition stand squarely for the primacy of reason?
11:51:47 AM 
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