Mirror of Justice

Over at the New Republic, which is hosting an online debate about religion, democracy, liberalism, and the "Theocons," Ross Douthat's reply to Damon Linker's reponse is up.  Douthat writes:

I agree that modern liberalism is founded on (among other compromises) religious believers giving up their right to impose their faith on others "in exchange for the freedom to worship God however they wish, without state interference," as you put it. I just think you take an extremely pinched and ahistorical view of what this bargain should mean in practice.

The Constitution of the United States has very little to say about religion. This omission offers an implicit rebuke to those Americans who would like to have the government endorse their personal beliefs about the nature of the Almighty, and rightly so--but it offers a rebuke, as well, to secularists like yourself who are eager to tell their fellow citizens which of their personal beliefs ought to be relevant to their political activity. You can inform me as many times as you like that, in order to participate in liberal society, I must pretend that my views about God--and, by extension, about public morality, a just society, and so forth--are as irrelevant to politics as my views about Shakespeare. But your saying it doesn't make it so (or even possible), and I think you'll have an awfully hard time pointing to any passage in the Constitution that buttresses your case. Yes, Congress may make no law establishing a religion, but, unless you take the most maximalist interpretation of what the word "establish" is supposed to mean, the establishment clause tells us next to nothing about whether and how religious convictions can inform public policy on (to list just a few of the issues in our history where religious faith has had a profound impact, for better or worse or both) war and peace, slavery and integration, poverty and the social safety net, the environmental movement and the temperance crusade, abortion and marriage law, et cetera. . . .

Now, of course, there are limits to what kinds of legislation American majorities can pass, because the Constitution--and specifically the Bill of Rights--sets limits on how far a majority can go in imposing its convictions (whether religious, civic-republican, or something else entirely) on a minority. . . .  But these limits exist to protect the individual from the tyranny of any majority, whether religiously inspired or not. . . .  The Constitution discriminates against government actions--banning guns, searching homes without a warrant, restricting the freedom of worship. It doesn't discriminate against government motives.

Yet that's precisely what you seem to think the "liberal bargain" is intended to do--to discriminate against religious motivations in politics in a way that it doesn't discriminate against, say, the motivations of a secular social engineer seeking an earthly utopia. Sure, you do offer a way out for religious believers who want to put their faith-based ideas into action: As long as they're willing to make nonreligious arguments for their ideas, you generously allow, they're welcome in the public square. . . .

But the fact remains that the advocates of racial equality didn't defend their ideals in secular-civic terms--or at least not nearly as often as they defended them in terms of the Christian morality that most of their fellow American shared. . . .

The same principle holds true if we move from specific political issues to the broader question of public philosophy. This is what you see as the crucial danger of the "theocon" project--that it doesn't just offer a laundry list of causes, but actively proposes a larger political philosophy for America, one grounded in the Catholic-Christian tradition. Again, while I understand that you disagree with and dislike Neuhaus's public philosophy, I'm baffled by the suggestion that religiously-grounded political worldviews are required by the liberal bargain to cede the field to their secular competitors. . . .

I know I'm harping on history a bit here, but I really thought that The Theocons's greatest weakness was its refusal to grapple with the complexities of the American past in any detail--as if Neuhaus and his compatriots had emerged from nowhere, rolling the apple of religious discord into a secular Olympus. If you had simply made the argument--which you did make, and make again in your response to my first post--that Neuhaus's Catholicism is ill-suited to serve as our national public philosophy, because not enough people are likely to accept it, then you might have persuaded me. . . .

But you couldn't just say that the "theocons" are out of step with America and leave it at that, because your alarmist thesis required you to have it both ways: Thus "theoconservatism" is somehow both wildly unpopular and primed to regulate every aspect of our daily life--out of touch with the public and somehow capable of keeping secular America "under siege." And, worse, you don't want to just argue with your political opponents; you want to remove them from public life entirely by accusing them of violating the bargain that supposedly holds our country together.

If you're the arbiter of what the liberal bargain means, then I want no part of it. The American experiment has succeeded for so long precisely because it doesn't force its citizens channel their "theological passions and certainties ... out of public life and into the private sphere." It forces them to play by a certain set of political rules, yes, which prevent those passions and certainties from creating a religious tyranny. But it doesn't make the mistake of telling people that their deepest beliefs should be irrelevant to how they vote, or what causes they support. The kind of secularism that you're promoting--and that Neuhaus and the rest of the "theocons" were originally reacting against--is an attempt to change those rules and impose greater restrictions on religious Americans than have heretofore existed. This isn't just blinkered, unfair, and contrary to the actual American tradition of how religion and politics interact; it's also dangerous to liberalism, because it vindicates those people--Christians and secularists alike--who have always said that faith and liberalism aren't compatible and that everyone need to choose between Christ and the republic, between God and Caesar. And, if you force Americans to make that choice, I'm not sure you'll be happy with the results.