Religion-free Zone

The following reflection came as a result of a question my wife asked me the other day about the Democrats’ debate over the words ‘God-given.’. I had taken a few moments to email her my response, but since then I have been thinking more and more about what’s at stake in this debate. My thoughts are a bit tangled and dense and partial, but it seems worthwhile to toss in my 2 cents as it becomes increasingly important to shed more light than heat in these pre-election days.

DNC and Secularism

The vigorous debate during the Democratic National Convention over whether or not to remove ‘God’ from its platform is related to the Party’s more general adoption of a certain conception of what role religion should/should not play in a secular State. Their position, regardless of one’s  judgment on it’s viability, is an attempt to intelligently respond to an unavoidable and irreducibly complex question: How does a religiously diverse/pluralistic democracy negotiate difference while preserving unity?

In short, the logic of the liberal democratic view contends that religious pluralism requires that faith-based reasoning (i.e. arguments drawn from the sacred texts/worldview of a religious tradition) be considered a non-public form of reason, i.e. a form of reasoning that cannot serve as the basis for the laws that govern public life.  In this view, faith-based arguments are disqualified from possessing any publicly binding force by the very fact that they arise from a distinctive theological tradition within in a pluralistic society; which would allow the part to determine the whole.

This premise, carried to its logical conclusion, leads to a progressive excision within the socio-political order of all obvious (or latent) forms of ‘religious reasoning.’  What replaces such religious reasoning?  A secular form of reason (here ‘secular’ is defined as the world understood as devoid of any transcendent or theological meaning) that construct theories of justice, of human flourishing, etc. based on a ‘reasonable consensus;’ theories that are then invested by their purveyors with the binding force of ‘public reason,’ that nebulous consensus arrived at by secularized, reasonable people.

It is this last claim that really becomes for secularists the sticky wicket, as it begs the million dollar question (as Alasdair McIntyre phrased it), ‘Whose justice, Which rationality?’  How does one argue for the truth of one’s claims, and how does the newly conceived justice/rationality get to ‘win’ a dominant position?

Naked Zone

This version of the secular State attempts to solve the challenges found in a religiously pluralistic democracy by ‘cleansing the temple’ of public life from all vestiges of religious reasoning and rhetoric, putting in religion’s place an alternative ideology that, it is argued, is capable of bearing a sufficient ‘neutrality’ to allow for peaceful coexistence.  Such secularists argue that their approach is capable of justly negotiating the seemingly irreconcilable differences among religious traditions by leaving, as the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus called it, a Naked Public Square where all are welcome without distinction or judgment.  In the religion-free zone, religious people can be themselves in the privacy of their own heart.

In its ‘softer’ forms, this alternative ideology promotes a public tolerance of religious traditions’ non-public beliefs and practices, while in its ‘harder’ forms (as in France) it aggressively sidelines, and seeks to digest, religious traditions as a way to reduce/eliminate the necessary, messy tensions that flow from cohabitating in a religiously pluralistic society.

Imposing Faith?

In either version of this secularism, the social-psychological effects tend toward the radical privitization of religion, i.e. it cultivates a mindset among religious practitioners that views religiously-based language and worldviews as strictly personal (defined here as private), and pressures anyone who attempts to share their faith to see such an act as ‘imposing’ the private on the public. Evangelization becomes proselytizing.  Moral arguments become mere private opinions. In some ways, this effect is far more important to the progressive elimination of religion from public life than is the high profile political-legal fight to elminate religion from public life.

Cultural shifts precede political-legal revolutions.

It’s About Morality

In particular, it is the ethical dimension of religious traditions that comes to the fore — e.g. abortion, marriage, sexuality — and serves as the prime target of secular reasoning’s critique of non-public religious worldviews.  As so much of the history of the grounding and force of the arguments for the inalienable dignity of unborn human life, or of the definition of marriage as heterosexual, indissoluble and monogamous, appeals to some conception of a God who created humanity with a wise and provident design, anyone who wishes to deconstruct these ethical arguments must contend with their theological rationale.  And though the Catholic tradition would assert that these arguments could be persuasively made apart from theology (i.e. natural law theories), the fact is few people make such fine distinctions and it is usually quite easy to make the Slam Dunk, guilt-by-association argument (i.e. anti-abortionists are religious fanatics trying to impose their parochial fundamentalisms on our diverse society) and simply bring a speedy end to the hegemony of Christian morality in America.

So, we return to the DNC vote — to remove, or at least domesticate, God is the necessary next step in the progressive elimination of religion’s non-public role from public life. In its place is the ideological complex that is seeking to deify free-floating (i.e. detached from any conception of objective, self-evident, binding truth) human choice as the source and summit of law and culture, though the definition(s) of what is choice-worthy rests on the portion of the population that has the power to impose  arguments of justice/rationality on the rest of us.

{This somehow reminds me of a funny comment an elder priest once made to me — ‘A Catholic parent recently pleaded with me to speak to her back-from-college son about his new-found atheism, and my first question to him was, “What’s the name of the girl you’re sleeping with?” ‘In my experience,’ he said, ‘rejection of “organized” religion, or the idea of God, is often arrived at through the back door of a morally dissonant life — my lifestyle is presently incompatible with my faith, so I can either repent of my sin, or rework/reject the faith.’}

Further Reading

Though I will not propose the Catholic alternative to this vision, I will propose to those really interested in delving deeper: buy Cardinal George’s The Difference God Makes.  In it he argues for a unique, ‘simply Catholic’ alternative that still preserves what is good in the secularist experiment.  It’s excellent.

John Allen, whom I find to be a purveyor of intelligent analysis in the Church, also has some intriguing things to say on this.

Also excellent, but working from a very different angle, is David Hart’s Atheist Delusions, where he argues that the highest ethical ideals of the anti-religion secularists are actually disingenuously masked versions of a distinctively Christian worldview.  All the benefits of Christianity without Christ. He also makes these same arguments in a highly entertaining radio debate with an atheist-secularist.

I will end my analysis with a quote from the CDF in Rome that weighs in on this debate with some keen insights:

In democratic societies, all proposals are freely discussed and examined. Those who, on the basis of respect for individual conscience, would view the moral duty of Christians to act according to their conscience as something that disqualifies them from political life, denying the legitimacy of their political involvement following from their convictions about the common good, would be guilty of a form of intolerant secularism. Such a position would seek to deny not only any engagement of Christianity in public or political life, but even the possibility of natural ethics itself. Were this the case, the road would be open to moral anarchy, which would be anything but legitimate pluralism. The oppression of the weak by the strong would be the obvious consequence. The marginalization of Christianity, moreover, would not bode well for the future of society or for consensus among peoples; indeed, it would threaten the very spiritual and cultural foundations of civilization.

My Bride

To bring this story full circle, I was able to bring to my wife this final product of my musings. She is my editor, and a brilliant one at that who puts right all my misplaced modifiers. But, as I am certain you can imagine if you have heroically endured this tangle of ideas to the end, my tome brought about an effect in her consonant with my other identity: Inventor of the mind-numbing NealQuil®.

If you have insomnia, let me know – I will write you my thoughts on it, and cure it.

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