Mirror of Justice

Dr. Moore's Erasmus Lecture is now available, in print, at First Things.   I recommend it very highly.   It was delivered before the presidential election but is no less timely or important for that.  Here's just a taste:

A religious conservatism that sees politics as important but not ultimate is necessary even for our public policy goals. Take the issue of religious liberty. Some, in secular circles, assume that an emphasis on religious liberty is a merely defensive move. Many on the religious right think the same. One pastor told me that he’s all for religious liberty, but wishes that we could do something “more proactive” rather than “merely defensive.” Religious liberty is not a reactive, defensive move. Religious liberty reflects a positive vision of the limitations of the state and the dominant culture, one that frees religious communities to carry on their work. To think otherwise suggests a vision of power and influence in which statecraft is more important than church-craft. Statecraft is important, but good cultures and good laws, important as they are, merely put more resilient shackles on the Gerasene demoniac. The depravity of humanity can be mitigated by law, but humanity can only be renewed and transformed by something transcendent. It’s not just our religion that teaches that; our politics teaches that also, if in fact we are in any meaningful way “conservative.”

Religious liberty is a means to an end, and the end is not political. The Gospel frees consciences that cannot be coerced. The end we rightly seek is a society in which religious communities are free to serve and to persuade. If we are to be honest, the threat to this freedom comes as much from the collapse of cohesive church communities, especially in what once was the Bible Belt, as from Washington, D.C. When faith is not shaped by community, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks points out, religion becomes politicized and politics become religionized. The collapse of well-defined, disciplined congregations in the South has been politically disastrous, and not merely theologically disastrous. Consider the way Latter-day Saints have approached the moral questions raised by the 2016 election in contrast to Evangelicals, even when the voting patterns were not substantially different. The difference between the two rests, I believe, in the contrast between intentional, cohesive, conscience-shaping communities of identity and social solidarity, not only in Utah but in the Mormon minority communities around the country, and Evangelical communities that are too often influenced by raging pundits, talk radio, and TV shout-shows—and these voices sometimes drown out the pastor’s. A Christianity without visible churches is backward-looking and seething with rage. Christianity loses its Gospel-centered character, Marilynne Robinson tells us, indeed any religion loses its distinctive identity, “when its self-proclaimed supporters outnumber and outshout its actual adherents.”