Douthat on Dogma

Ross Douthat asserts that liberals tend to be peacetime utilitarians (e.g., stem cell research) and conservatives tend to be wartime utilitarians (e.g., torture), then makes an interesting observation as to why we seem doomed to utilitarianism:

This reality, I think, offers the umpteenth example of why the Victorian project (which persists to this day) of doing away with Christian dogma but trying to keep Christian morality intact is doomed to failure. Not because Christian morality can’t be approached rationally by nonbelievers of good will, but because without the lived experience of a religious tradition it will never be anything more than an abstraction, an arid intellectualism, something that gets followed when following it is easy to follow and abandoned as soon as the going gets tough.

Rob