Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal – April 10, 2011

Not too long ago I heard someone say that the greatest problem
facing the country is the intrusion of religion into politics. He was
quoting Jimmy Carter, who is generally wrong about both those things,
and I thought it was pretty far off the mark to say that this is our greatest problem. He did have a point,
but his point was most accurate in a sense other than he intended it.

I took the complaint as being aimed at the religious right, and
conservatives in general, and it has some merit in that context.
There are those evangelical Christians who speak of the United States
as the New Israel, a nation whose foundation was directed by God and
whose wealth and power are attributable to God’s continuing
favor, which will be (is being) withdrawn as we descend further into
squalor. As to the first assertion of God’s purported action, you don’t
have to know very much history to see that it doesn’t stand up
to a close inspection. As to the second, it is an easily observable
truth of nature that a people who cultivate beliefs and behavior
hostile to liberty and prosperity are not likely to remain free and
prosperous. It is not necessary for God to trouble himself with
casting down the mighty from their thrones if the mighty would rather
be in Las Vegas anyway.

At the fringes of evangelicalism there are indeed those who would,
if they could, institute an Islamic-style theocracy. And there are
a few Catholic traditionalists who seem to be similarly minded. But in
general this charge against politically conservative Christians is
greatly exaggerated, and a somewhat insincere tactic for declaring
their political activism illegitimate only because it is unwelcome, when it would be (and has
been) applauded in the service of liberal views.

But religion has a major role on the left as well, though a more
obscure one. I don’t mean that relatively small number of
people who describe themselves as the religious left, Christians and
believing Jews who hold liberal political views. I mean those of no
particular religion, but whose political views have the weight of
religion in their lives. If the religious right can be justly charged
with combining religion and politics (not that they can or should be
completely separated), the left is full of people for whom politics
has become religion.

I first became aware that something like this was going on many
years ago. A co-worker was discussing a new employee, saying that he
wasn’t sure whether he liked him or not: “His politics
are ok, but…” I remember
this because it was so astonishing to me. Never
in my life would I have put someone’s politics at the forefront
of my view of him at first or brief acquaintance (unless the
acquaintance had begun with him haranguing me), and it certainly wouldn’t have been the grounds on which I liked or disliked him. Since then I’ve recognized that the attitude is not uncommon in some circles. But I was nevertheless similarly astonished a few years ago by a story in the local paper about a bookstore (somewhere in Mississippi, perhaps
Oxford), which apparently is something of a literary and politically
liberal institution, known as an oasis of enlightenment in the
ever-dark South. One of the owners, by way of explaining her ability
to be happy in such a place, mentioned that she lived “on a
street where everybody is a Democrat.” Once again I was unable
to imagine myself thinking that way. Until I read that piece, I
had never even wondered about the political views of my neighbors.
Chances are that the majority of them are Republicans, because I live
in an area which is predominantly Republican. But I didn’t know
or care.

And then I tried to formulate
that sentence in terms that would matter to me: “A street where
everybody is a reasonably faithful Catholic.” Yes, that’s
something I would care about, although I would have cared a lot more
when we had young children. (Of course I have to qualify “Catholic,”
because we all know many Catholics-in-name-only whose beliefs and
behavior are no different from the secular norm.) What one wants in
one’s community, aside from basic decent behavior, is agreement
on the most fundamental principles. For me, that agreement is reached
in the Catholic faith; for the bookstore owner, in the Democratic
party. I don’t want to wrangle over whether it is proper or
useful to refer to one’s unassailable axiomatic principles as
constituting, in effect, one’s religion, whether or not the
principles are specifically religious. But it is surely fair to say
that being a Democrat occupied the same place in the bookstore
owner’s consciousness as being a Catholic does in mine

It’s not surprising that it
should be difficult to maintain a friendship across such a
divide. These are important matters, on which disagreement is likely to produce hostility, especially if both people have strong convictions which they are not shy in expressing.

You can see this in that Salon piece on which I commented a few
days ago. The liberal who is shocked and disturbed by her friendship
with a Republican speaks of her friend as one would expect her to speak of a
citizen from a country with which her own had been at war. And that
of course is where Jimmy Carter does have a point, and where the
Salon liberal is not totally mistaken. I am certainly not the only
one to see in our present divisions, in the thing we call the culture
war, the psychological material of an actual war. Calls for civility
are not sufficient to defuse the situation, because the political
differences do often—not always, but often—originate in a
deep disagreement about fundamental principles.

What are the disputed principles? Well, like all serious religious
disagreements, this one is fundamentally about the meaning of human
life. The March/April issue of Touchstone
contains an article about utilitarianism from which I took this
excellent summary:

The impulse to utilitarianism derives its force from the
assumption that our lives lack any purpose but the purpose we give
them. This depressing thesis, combined with the optimistic belief
that human beings can work together to create a better (read: more
pleasant) world, amounts to the principle of utility.

(from “The Utilitarian Prince:
Tolstoy’s Stepan Oblonsky & the Pleasure Principle That Doesn’t Work”
by Daniel Propson)

Speaking very, very broadly, and with due allowance for
secularists on the right and religious people on the left, the
conflict is between the belief described in the preceding paragraph
and the belief that life has an intrinsic and transcendent meaning.
When a Christian opposes certain features of the “better world”
as advanced by liberalism, he is not just wrong, but an infidel, a
wilful enemy of the truth. And his error is not merely abstract: his
belief that comfort and pleasure in this world must often be limited
and sometimes sacrificed for the sake of what is eternally good,
true, and beautiful makes him also an enemy of society, as the
utilitarian sees it.

The better world of the utilitarian is most often a socialist one,
more or less—if you could capture all the yearning sighs
provoked by John Lennon’s atheist manifesto, “Imagine,”
you could probably use them to produce a few kilowatt-hours of
electricity from a windmill. But right-wing utilitarians who look to
capitalism rather than socialism to bring us the better world are no
less enemies of the transcendent; their disagreement with the left is
about means, not ends.