Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Gerson on "culture wars," pluralism, and religious freedom
I think this piece, by Michael Gerson, is excellent. A bit:
In a free society, which should have priority: pluralism or the advance of liberal values?
The advocates of pluralism believe that a political community should consist of many communities pursuing different ways of life. Some will be consistent with liberal, democratic conceptions of equality and choice. Others will be exclusive and traditional — defined by sectarian beliefs and hierarchal authority. They may oppose contraception or forbid women from serving in some leadership positions. A pluralist view of freedom requires tolerance for some ways of life that other citizens find oppressive or unreasonable. . . .
I tried to make some similar points in this Public Discourse piece, "Confusion About Discrimination."
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/06/gerson-on-culture-wars-pluralism-and-religious-freedom.html
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While several points in general are excellent, the right wing's impoverished language on that which constitutes "community." Once the list is enunciated by a conservative, all that seems to come up to demonstrate such things are families and religious groups. Is family community? Or are they elements of a community? (I maintain it is the latter.) A religious entity can be a "community" such as a "parish community" but such terminology is hard for conservatives to come back to after overt rejection of the concept of "worship community" starting over a decade ago, thought to be a gooey concept for progressive Catholics.
Conservative Catholic thought needs to focus on developing a concept of the local community, that which involves their neighbors and their schools. The religious conservative concept of family has been usurped by libertarians to become a Ayn-Randian "selfish unit" about which the community injects support, into a kind of bottomless well of need. The family in this context lacks connections outside of itself and lacks contributions to larger institutions. When these external communal institutions, in , make external demands on families in a community, current conservative formulations label these demands reflexively as oppressive and "destructive of the family unit." Families are part of communities. The Christian family's duty is to the community, and this concept is poorly addressed in conservative discussions.
The community's demands on the individual and the family as enunciated so infrequently and poorly by conservative Catholics in routine Catholic thought seem highly influenced by libertarian values.
If conservative Catholics continue their plan to force the liberal "others" out of the Church, conservatives will be held responsible to develop and learn those parts of their religion the progressives know and do better. Currently, on matters of community responsibility, the left does the philosophical (and real-world) heavy lifting for conservatives. Drive out the liberals and the conservatives will be left trying to develop those areas of religious life and philosophy they neglected over the years.
A lively, deep, philosophy of community is one such area. A community is more than a series of "Don't Tread on Me" fences defining boundaries. As far as theories about a community's limits on demands on the person and the family-the Catholic conservative has plenty of well-funded intellectuals and think tanks for this. What lacks is the attention to developing the role of the individual's family's responsibility to the community.