4. Secularism, Democracy, Freedom, and Power
Secularism, Democracy, Freedom, and Power
The attempt to refine what we mean by “culture” and how to think about postmodernism sets the stage for this chapter. The empirical realities of the larger culture are enormously diverse. Inevitably, the kinds of pressures they generate push Christians, and everybody else, in many different directions. In the Western world, these various directions are frequently responses to four huge cultural forces: the seduction of secularization, the mystique of democracy, the worship of freedom, and the lust for power. These are not the only important cultural forces, whether in the West or elsewhere; I am not even insisting that these are the most important ones. But their power to shape cultures in many parts of the world, not least in the West, provides an opportunity to compare the shaping of culture by such forces as these with the shaping of culture effected by allegiance to the Bible and its story line, culminating in Jesus Christ and his gospel.
The Lure of Secularization
Part of the challenge is definition. On the lips of many, not all of them secularists, “secular” is a word with positive overtones. It calls to mind Jesus’ insistence that Caesar, as well as God, is to be given his due. It forces us to recall the theory of Gelasius: there are two swords of legitimate power. Even “secularization,” which customarily refers to the process, sometimes has a positive ring. One remembers Peter Berger’s description of the de-divinization of nature,1 which left in place God’s order over nature, with enough space to live without fear of the demonic and to begin genuinely scientific exploration. But “secularism” is usually understood to be the social reality that fosters nonreligious or even anti-religious consciousness.
In more popular parlance, however, all three words — “secular,” “secularization,” and “secularism” — have to do with the squeezing of the religious to the periphery of life. More precisely, secularization is the process that progressively removes religion from the public arena and reduces it to the private realm; secularism is the stance that endorses and promotes such a process.2 Religion may be ever so important to the individual, and few secular persons will object. But if religion makes any claims regarding policy in the public arena, it is viewed as a threat, and intolerant as well.
In reality, the social pressures of secularization are far more unrelenting than this simple distinction between private religion and public religion suggests. To preserve Christian faith even in one’s private life is viewed by many as a mark of weakness. If “God” has any place at all, it is not outside human consciousness. Religion in general and Christianity in particular may have some instrumental value, but not much; religion may have some mythological value as that which represents the best and noblest in the human spirit, but to reify the myth is to depreciate humanism.3 Nowhere is this pressure more powerful than in our universities.4 Christian faith must not only be private in the sense that it is not permitted to have a voice in direction, priorities, literary theory, science, or anything else, but it must also be so private that it becomes invisible: Christians become nervous about talking of their faith and thus become unpracticed in witness.
Where secularism becomes as vehement as that, it is, de facto, a “religion”: it strongly advocates its own view of the ultimate good, it articulates its own belief system, it establishes its own code of ethics. For instance, the Anti-Defamation League, a strong voice for secularism — David Klinghoffer amusingly comments that the group “is Jewish only in the sense that bagels are Jewish”5 — provides a recommended reading list for school children that ostensibly fosters “anti-bias education” but inevitably advances secular teaching on, say, homosexuality: for example, Gloria Goes to Gay Pride, according to the group’s website, is summarized this way: “A young girl participates in the Gay Pride Day parade.”
Apart from the obvious attractions of secularism’s appeal, there are more seductive subtleties that need to be challenged. I mention three.
(1) A considerable literature argues — or, worse, presupposes — that the processes of secularization, as understood here, are historically inevitable. Secularization thus becomes tied, in popular outlook, to the effluent from the Enlightenment, to material prosperity, and above all to the idea of progress. Today there is a small but growing and important riposte that questions these connections.6
(2) More subtle yet is the pressure to drift toward what Avery Cardinal Dulles calls “the Deist minimum.”7 Deism — whether in the form espoused by Thomas Jefferson, which judged Christianity, as he (mis)understood it, to be the highest form of religion, or in the French form espoused by Thomas Paine, following the encyclopédistes, who were profoundly opposed to Christianity — has produced, in the West, “a favorable climate in which the various forms of biblical religion could and did thrive.”8 The heritage of this Deism left various forms of civil religion that believed in one God, in God-sanctioned moral law, in some loose form of providence, and in some kind of rewards and punishments after death (with much greater emphasis on the rewards than on the punishments!).
Unfortunately, however, naive Christians often think that these signs of residual civil religion and the Deism on which they are based constitute solid evidence of Christian commitments. Conversely, they see the erosion of civil religion, and the Deism on which it is based, as an erosion of genuinely Christian commitments. Neither assessment is realistic. Worse yet, some Christians, more knowledgeable but not necessarily wiser, are tempted to speak to public issues solely in the categories of Deism, hoping thus to gain wider exposure and establish a broader consensus. At a certain level of public policy, they may on occasion be right. But arguing for morality from the assumption of Deism is a far cry from upholding Christianity. Deism has no power to check the advances of secularization, for it is religion without either robust intellectual defense or genuine power. Deism is not a halfway house between secularism and Christianity; it is in fact a form of secularism.
At the popular level, this instinctive lust to accommodate contemporary cultural predilections produces the self-help bromides of a Joel Osteen, which are easily detached from Scripture for the very good reason that they are not, despite superficial appearances, grounded in Scripture.9 Equally, it produces various strands of “liberal” Christianity that take their cues from contemporary cultural agendas much more readily than from the Bible. Most of these latter strands are in serious decline: “To the degree that this form of Christianity has assimilated itself to the dominant ethos, reasons for anyone joining it are harder to come by.”10
(3) As Western culture becomes more polarized, the barriers to meaningful interaction between, on the one hand, Christians who are trying to be faithful to the Bible, and, on the other, people who are committed to one form or another of secularism, become more acute. At one level, of course, this is scarcely a new problem, even if the nature of the polarity varies over time. It can be argued, for instance, that what the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume so strenuously set himself against was not historic confessional Christianity but a form of christianized British natural theology.11 Yet most observers hold that in recent decades the polarization of positions has become both more extreme and considerably more hardened. But I shall return to this observation in the next section.
At this point we must reflect briefly on the culture of those who thoughtfully espouse secularism and the culture of those who thoughtfully espouse biblically informed Christianity. At the risk of repetition, I must again underscore the fact that these two groups may embrace many shared cultural values. Even within the orbit of things discussed here, both groups may warmly espouse a shared commitment to some form or other of the separation of church and state — even though the reasons each group advances for supporting the separation of church and state may be quite different. To secularists, God, if he exists, is not the sort of personal being whose mandates extend beyond personal religious experience and perhaps general moral tenets; to Christians, their own Master has taught them that some sort of distinction between Christ and Caesar must be maintained, with each receiving his due. I shall return to this subject in the next chapter. But after all such caveats have been entered, the way one views the world is quite different in the two groups: in short, their worldviews are different, and so the cultures they espouse and reflect are decidedly different.12 To the one, the processes of secularization spell liberation from (false views of) God and the maturation of what it means to be human; to the other, the very basis of what it means to be human is established by God himself, and all attempts to liberate oneself from God are nothing more than further instances of idolatry. To the one, ethics is finally grounded in the will of legislatures, or in international law, or in contemporary political agendas that promise liberation of various kinds; to the other, ethics must finally be grounded in God’s gracious revelation, or it proves not only unstable but massively destructive.13
Christians whose worldview — whose way of looking at the world14 — is decisively shaped by the Bible’s story line cannot forget that we human beings have been made in the image of God; that our first obligation is to recognize our creatureliness, and thus our joyful obligation to our Creator; that sin is nothing other than de-godding God; that our dignity as God’s image bearers is horribly marred by our rebellion; that the entire race, and all of human history, is rushing toward final accountability before this God who is no less our Judge than our Maker; that there is a new heaven and a new earth to gain and a hell to fear; that our sole hope of reconciliation with this God is by the means he himself has provided in his Son; that the people of God are made up of human beings from every language and tribe and nation, and, empowered by God’s Spirit, are growing in personal and corporate obedience and love, rejoicing to come under the reign of God in anticipation of the consummation of that reign. Meanwhile, we are enjoined to do good to all, especially — but certainly not exclusively! — those of the household of faith. In other words, Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality.15 However complicated the issues may be, however disputed the way ahead may be, this vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns. Christians informed by the sweep of the Bible’s story line will not be intimidated, for instance, by academic sneering. As Paul in Athens was distressed by the idolatry he witnessed in that highly sophisticated and learned city (Acts 17:16), so Christians today will learn to ask the question, “What does Jesus Christ think of the university?”16 Not to ask the question is already to sell the pass. Conflict between two cultures, both of which are making sweeping but mutually conflicting claims, is inevitable.
In much common usage, “authenticity” refers to something narrowly personal. It means something like “being sincere.” An “authentic” person is someone who is not a hypocrite. But how is authenticity to be measured, unless there is a standard by which to assess the integrity or the hypocrisy? “Authentic Christians” are not those who are merely very sincere and who call themselves Christians. If “authenticity” is to retain any utility in this discussion, the “authentic Christian” is the one who is most shaped in thought, word, and deed by Christianity’s foundational documents, by Christianity’s Lord, by Christianity’s creeds.17 That is one of the reasons why reading and rereading the Bible, and knowing and reciting the creeds, are part and parcel of what gives us the categories and labels by which we think. Of course, it is possible to enjoy a merely professional knowledge of such sources. Authentic Christianity demands more: a love for the God who has thereby disclosed himself, a response to him in obedience and faith. But it is futile to speak of loving and trusting and obeying this God if his words do not delight us and terrify us and instruct us and shape us. When they do, our worldview is progressively transformed, and the culture of which we are a part, and which we pass on to others, cannot help but diverge from the culture of those who embrace the processes of secularization. In such instances, Christ and culture are heading in different directions.
The Mystique of Democracy
Most people in the West would say, unhesitatingly, that democracy is a good thing. Certainly in America, the notion that democracy ushers in peace and is therefore the right of all human beings has influenced government foreign policy for almost a century — since Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Undeniably, the establishment of democracy has brought about magnificent transformations. Out of the rubble of World War II, out of the failed totalitarian régimes of the Land of the Rising Sun and the Thousand Year Reich, emerged two strong democracies. Democracy kept on rolling through Western Europe: Italy, Greece, Spain. It proved a remarkable triumph in South Korea. It was one of the grand ideas that contributed to the overthrow of the Soviet empire, most of whose former satellites are moving, at various rates, toward less totalitarian and more democratic ideals. Part of the impetus behind the current military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq is the hope that well-established democracies in those countries will not only overcome their respective internal divisions but also become attractive magnets throughout the Middle East, drawing other Muslim countries toward the benefits of democratic government, free markets, relative freedoms, and fewer outbursts of fanatical aggression. No one brought up under a democratic form of government can remain ignorant of its many inconsistencies, of course — its fumblings, inefficiencies, and corruptions; none can be unaware of how thin may be the line between democracy and demagoguery. Even so, one has to be extraordinarily ignorant of history not to sympathize with the oft-repeated assessment of Winston Churchill: democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other kinds.
Before we reflect on the ways in which democracy helps to establish a culture that is rather adjacent to, and sometimes in conflict with, the demands of Christ, it is worth remembering that democracy is a complex phenomenon. The complexity extends from form to underlying ideology to degree of maturity. The relatively direct but certainly restrictive democracy of ancient Athens is rather different from the complex levels of voting in the United States, where even the president is voted in through the mediating institution of the electoral college. Different countries call up competing mythologies. The United Kingdom harks back to 1215 and the Magna Carta and proudly remembers that Westminster is the “mother of all parliaments” — though its history since the thirteenth century has included various civil wars, one regicide, the institution and abolition of slavery, and the rise and fall of the British Empire. The French dwell fondly on the Revolution of 1789, the overthrow of clericalism, and the elevation of liberté, égalité, fraternité — but of course the French Revolution led directly to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and to the Napoleonic Wars, while the exigencies of history have, since 1789, driven France through two empires, two monarchies, two dictatorships, and, the last time I counted, five republics. America is justly proud of its Constitution and attendant Bill of Rights, of a form of government with well-defined divisions of power, but this form of democracy did not prevent the Civil War (proportionately the bloodiest war, by far, in its history), its long struggles over slavery and racism, miscellaneous assassinations and attempted assassinations of its presidents, and of course the usual assortment of injustices, inequities, instances of manipulative populism, and embarrassing mistakes in foreign policy.
One of the strengths of Ketcham’s recent book18 is its careful delineation of the quite different roots of democracy in, say, North America, Europe, and Asia. For instance, the Confucian ideological contributions to many Asian forms of democracy have steered democracy toward hierarchical and communal ideals rather removed from most Western forms of democracy. One might also ponder how democracies evolve. The changes may be so slow that it is not impertinent to ask the question, “When did the United Kingdom become a democracy?” — and recognize that no simple answer will prove convincing. Or consider how strongly most of the framers of the U.S. Constitution saw democracy not so much as a form of government in which wisdom is found in majority opinion, but as a form of government in which accountability to the people is established, with mechanisms for turfing out the “rulers” every few years before their individual power, not to say the power of government itself, becomes both unresponsive and corrupt.19 By contrast, today’s politicians of all stripes are inclined to appeal to “the wisdom of the American [substitute “French,” “British,” “Canadian,” etc.] people.”
More challenging yet are the “democracies” that preserve almost none of the freedoms and values that most in the West traditionally associate with “democracy.” Many a ruler in sub-Saharan black Africa has been elected with reasonable fairness, and begins with the genuine support of the majority of the people, only to turn into a tyrant who is ousted only by a coup. The democratically elected governments recently put into place in Iraq and Afghanistan are still very fragile (especially the former), and neither is anywhere near as supportive of “freedom of religion” as are the democracies of the West — but in all fairness, “freedom of religion” does not look like quite the same issue when 99 percent of the people of Afghanistan are Muslim. The reasons voters put in some government or other are so complex that what is mandated by the vote is not always easy to discern. Many have argued, for instance, and with some justification, that the recent Palestinian vote (2006) that put Hamas into power sprang less from a majority resolution of the Palestinian people to wipe out Israel than from being fed up with the obscene corruption of Arafat and his cronies — a more sensational version of the vote in Québec that brought the Parti Québecois into power, not because there was a clear majority commitment to secede from the rest of Canada (as the subsequent referendum demonstrated), but because a majority of voters was fed up with the squabbling, parochialism, and corruption of the more traditional parties. In a word, democracy is messy.
Many serious commentators have noted that to have a reasonably stable democracy in the Western sense, various conditions must prevail. At the very least, there must be an independent judiciary, a free press, some system of equality before the law (usually with an enshrined constitution and a disciplined police force), structures to ensure that the military is under civilian control, and a system of changing who is in charge without bloodshed (usually a stable two-party or multi-party system). One can add other desiderata, such as a reasonable level of education in the populace, but the idea is pretty clear: what most Westerners mean by “democracy” might well be labeled “liberal democracy,” over against the “illiberal democracies” that have sprung up in many parts of the world. The latter expression, “illiberal democracies,” is Zakaria’s, whose penetrating book argues that superficial democratic forms of government, without real measures of assured liberty already in place, readily give rise to totalitarianism — demonstrated in the rise of fascism in the twentieth cen-tury.20 In other words, a democratic vote or two doesn’t establish very much. Ideally, it will be the first step toward something more substantial,21 but an illiberal democracy may pass a vote, even a reasonably clean vote, merely to justify a tyrant, a butcher, or an ideologue (religious or otherwise). There is no evidence of which I am aware that the recent vote in Iran was substantially corrupt, but the new president, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, belongs to that remarkable subset of human beings who deny that the Holocaust took place. He still vows to wipe Israel off the map. As he tightens the imposition of Muslim shariʾa at home, Christians in that country are feeling the pressure from fresh rounds of violent persecution. It appears, then, that in Iran, Christ and culture are bound to clash, in substantial measure, for years to come. Yet this government was democratically elected. Obviously, then, thoughtful Christians cannot happily espouse every appeal to democracy.
But let us restrict ourselves now to Western democracies, democracies that have enjoyed a sustained history of the freedoms we largely take for granted. From the Western perspective, the only democracy worthy of the name is surrounded by assorted liberties and safeguards; it is what Zakaria calls a liberal democracy. What about such democracy? How will Christians think of it?
Some years ago, I talked with a pastor in Slovakia. He said that when the Berlin wall came down, almost immediately new freedoms were introduced into his country. A mere three weeks later, for the very first time in his life he had seen pornography sold on the streets of Bratislava. That is not a development Christians will applaud — but neither is a complete subjugation of the press by the government. In short, freedom brings with it many good things, but precisely because we human beings are capable of corrupting any system whatsoever, inevitably it has the potential for bringing with it many evil things, too. Experts tell us that the income from the sale of porn in North America now outstrips income from the sale of alcohol, illegal drugs, and cigarettes combined.
The issue is much more complicated than what is suggested by the story related by the Slovak pastor. Majority rule means there is also a minority. There is no particular reason to think that the majority will always, or even often, sympathize with Christian ideals. With the rapid self-distancing of most Western countries from their Judeo-Christian heritage, the polarities between the views of the democratic majority and the view of the Christian minority — and similarly, of course, from other minorities — loom larger. In theory, democracy tries to protect the rights of minorities; in reality, that is a very tricky thing. Sometimes legislators and judges have been so concerned to protect the minority that the views of the majority are ignored.22 But where the views of the minority are shaped by religious commitments, especially Christian commitments, there the Jeffersonian “wall of separation between church and state” has for some time demanded the privatization of religion — which brings us back to the challenge of secularization, described in the first section of this chapter. If Christians weigh in on, say, abortion, homosexuality, or stem cell research, they are inevitably charged with smuggling Christianity into the public arena, where it does not belong. If they weigh in, as Christians, on, say, the homeless, the poor, public welfare, and consumerism, then they are widely (if sometimes condescendingly) thought to have prophetic voices.
There is an array of issues here that must be probed a little more deeply. The nature of freedom has been inserted into the argument, and I shall briefly reflect on that subject in the next section. The relation between church and state is clearly a broader issue than the appeal to democracy itself, and I must return to the larger issue in the next chapter, for Christians have given quite disparate accounts of what “the” Christian view of the state should be. For now it is enough to underline the fact that even these preliminary reflections demonstrate that Christians cannot possibly view democracy as “the cure” for the world’s ills. For many pragmatic and moral reasons, we may concur that, granted attendant structures and liberties, it is the form of government least unaccountable to the people and least likely to brutalize its citizens without some eventual accounting. It is a form of government most likely to foster personal freedoms, including, usually, freedoms for Christians to practice and propagate their faith. But it has also proved proficient at throwing off a sense of obligation to God the Creator, let alone the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is another way of saying that it is proficient at fostering idolatry. Its freedoms, so many of which are enormously praiseworthy for political, religious, personal, and artistic reasons, include the freedom to be hedonists, to pursue a life revolving around entertainment, to become inured against responsible family life, communal interaction, and self-denying service in the endless worship of massive egos, passing fads, and this-worldly glitter. Laying up treasures in heaven does not seem to be on the radar screen of many Christians. Christians with a firm grasp of the Bible’s story line from creation to consummation, even while they offer thanks for the freedoms that democracy provides, will not overlook the fact that democracy, rule by the people, what we might call the kingdominion of the people, cannot compete for righteousness with the kingdominion of God. History coughs up many examples where democracy cannot be counted on to do the right thing: one need go no further than Weimar Germany. Taking into account what the Bible says about the moral accountability of people and nations alike, we may sometimes wonder how long it will be before God calls to account some of the major democracies of the West, as he has done by war and plague in the past, as he has done with respect to every civilization in the past. For this remains God’s world, a world in which righteousness exalts a nation, while sin condemns any people (Proverbs 14:34). Even while Christians are being tugged, by Scripture itself, to being good citizens, not least within a democracy, their ultimate citizenship, and thus their ultimate loyalty, lies elsewhere (Hebrews 13:14). Tensions between Christ and culture are unavoidable because tensions between democracy and religion are unavoidable.23
The Worship of Freedom
By now readers of this chapter will have detected that the four sections that make it up are not independent but intertwined. We have already seen how the lure of secularization is inescapably tied to the mystique of (especially Western) democracy. Democracy is also irrefragably tied to notions of freedom. Yet freedom is far more than a political category. One may be “free” from the constraints of the state, but one may also be “free” from traditions, free from God, free from morality, free from inhibitions, free from oppressive parents, free from wise parents, free from assignments of various kinds, free from sin, and much more. Americans like to think of themselves as inhabiting “the land of the free,” and thus are inclined to assign freedom or liberty to the very highest rank among the virtues. “Live free or die,” one state slogan puts it. It is hard to imagine any state with the slogan, “Be holy or die” — so once again, without for a moment disavowing the many ways in which Christians want to embrace freedom, it is easy to uncover ways in which the worship of freedom may actually displace the worship of God. Christ and culture may at some points share common perspectives, but it is not hard to see how they are likely to clash.
We must probe a little more deeply into the nature of freedom from state coercion. In America, while the right bemoans the power of the left in some sectors — in particular, the media, the courts, and the universities — the left bewails the power of the right in the executive and legislative branches of government during much of the last twenty-five years. Some of the most fascinating purple prose was written after the 2004 elections. “[W]hat troubled me yesterday,” Tom Friedman wrote in The New York Times, “was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don’t just favor different policies than I do — they favor a whole different kind of America. . . . Mr. Bush’s base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president.”24 Garry Wills made a more desperate connection:
The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. . . . [W]e now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies. Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein’s Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.25
In a similar vein, Robert Kuttner said that the Democrats “neither warned the mainstream voters of the danger of a theocratic president whose base rejects modernity nor articulated a compelling moral language of their own.”26 And Maureen Dowd, never to be outdone, wrote, “W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq — drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or ‘values voters,’ as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. . . . Only Dick Cheney can make ‘to serve and to guard’ sound like ‘to rape and to pillage.’”27
What is remarkable about these opinions is not only the extraordinarily intemperate language but also the drumming insistence that Bush and those who vote for him are taking away democracy and returning to theocracy. In a very shrewd essay, Ramesh Ponnuru, who quotes some of these same sources (and others), imagines, for the sake of argument, that the social conservatives have their way: what would America look like?28 He suggests that “the wish-list of Christian-conservative organizations involved in politics” would prohibit abortion, and perhaps also the research that destroys human embryos. They would restrict pornography and try to ensure that the government not recognize homosexual relationships as marriages. Probably they would try to get more prayer in the schools and less evolution. They would replace sex education with abstinence education. They would insist that the tax laws promote marital stability. Most of them think that “religious groups should be able to participate in federal programs without compromising their beliefs.” The very conservative among them might try to ban sodomy and contraception and a few other things that almost everyone recognizes as unattainable. After going through this list, Ponnuru comments:
It is not my purpose here to argue that this agenda, or even the relatively restrained version of it, is one we should wish to see enacted (or even allowed by the Supreme Court). My point, rather, is to note that introducing nearly every one of these policies — and all of the most conservative ones — would merely turn the clock back to the late 1950s. That may be a very bad idea, but the America of the 1950s was not a theocracy.29
In other words, when voters choose something other than what these liberal writers want, these writers cannot conceive of it as the outworking of democracy; rather, they see it as the sacrifice of democracy. This judgment is grounded in the assumption that theological considerations cannot be admitted into the reasonings of any voters: in other words, religion is private, the values of secularism are unquestioned, and those who challenge this stance are not democrats at all. Worse, in the mind of leaders of the left, what is being destroyed is their freedoms, and thus their vision of America.
This stance is not universal on the left, of course, but it is surprisingly common. Consider Amy Gutmann’s recent book.30 At first, Gutmann appears to understand the problem: she criticizes liberals for demanding too much freedom and for allowing too little for those who disagree with them. Under the banner of equal freedom for all ways of life in a democracy, she says, liberals typically end up wanting to curtail the freedom of those whose vision of the good demands more structure. The liberal-egalitarian ethos ends up wanting nothing to prosper but the liberal-egalitarian ethos — so inevitably when it seeks to shut down options that seem to be “narrower,” it appears to others as nothing more than a mean-spirited agenda-driven mess of contradictions. To her credit, Gutmann recognizes the problem. She wants a form of liberalism, she says, in which liberals do not defend mere atomistic individualism but understand full well that individuals usually flourish in the context of private associations, “identity groups” (hence the title of her book), including churches. Moreover, liberals should not merely put up with these identity groups in some concessive fashion: they must heartily endorse freedom of association. So far so good.
But Gutmann treats all associations — churches, drama groups, NAACP, even groups identified by such words as “geek, jock, bimbo, and hottie,” as nothing more than the result of individual choices. These identity groups are fluid and changing, little more than the contexts of individual freedom of choice. Thus the primacy of individual freedom of choice is front-loaded into the discussion. Gutmann says virtually nothing about obligations and responsibilities — whether to family, country, church, or God — obligations and responsibilities that may well exist whether we have chosen them or not. For our purposes, the responsibilities and obligations of Christians are finally mandated by God himself, even as the joys and privileges of Christians are grounded in God himself. But none of this is taken into account by Gutmann. Because in her view “free people” join and leave many different associations and thus have multiple and changing identities, group identity must not be allowed to stifle individual freedom of choice: that is, the individual can mix and match identities as he or she desires, and governments must protect such freedom. If gays insist on their right to membership in the Boy Scouts, or feminists insist that they have equal rights of participation in the leadership of Orthodox Jewish life, then government has both the right and the obligation to force these groups to comply. If many members of these groups feel that their rights and freedoms are thereby being trampled into the mud of the liberal-egalitarian vision, that’s their problem: their views cannot be allowed to supersede “democratic justice” and “civic equality.”
It is deeply troubling to discover that Gutmann does not even see the problem. If the Boy Scouts are allowed to exclude gays, she says, then they themselves must not be allowed to meet on any public property, as such permission would signal government support for the inferiority of gays. Gutmann never considers that by excluding the Boy Scouts from meeting on public property, the government is signaling the inferiority of the Boy Scouts, for no other reason than that they disagree with the liberal-egalitarian assumptions on this subject. Gutmann goes so far as to say that religious groups should not be treated with special consideration, but she does not tease out what this means. Might it mean, for instance, that Catholics must progressively be pressured by the government toward the ordination of women? of homosexuals? What is that saying about freedom? about religious freedom? Gutmann simply does not see that while she is trying to define all of democracy, she herself belongs to an identity group, a rather narrow-minded tribe more eager to impose their ideological views on everyone else than are most of the members of other identity groups she is still committed to marginalizing.31
The point of these observations is neither to demonize the left nor to imagine that only those on the left are trying to promote their position within Western democracies. Quite the opposite: every position on every spectrum tries to promote its viewpoint and elect its representatives, save for those who prefer to remain aloof from the system out of either lethargy (e.g., everyone who does not bother to vote) or an ideology of separateness (e.g., the Amish). Obviously there are voices on the right who try to convince the electorate that they constitute “the moral majority” (that terminology is American, of course, but the idea is certainly not uniquely American). Thus every position that is angling for a greater say in the democratic mix is in some sense trying to “impose” its will on others, in the sense that it is trying to build a majority voice, a consensus. But at the moment, the voices that not only push their own position (which is certainly a democratic thing to do) but also insist that their opponents are neither truly democratic nor truly supportive of freedom are almost all on the left.32
Even if we get by these initial debates over the nature of freedom in a democracy, several other areas demand a few comments:
(1) Because assumptions about the existence of “natural law” or “nature’s God” were much stronger in America at the time of the founding of the nation than they are now,33 what was meant by “rights” was also rather different from the contemporary conception. “Rights” were bestowed by “nature” or by God; government was therefore morally obligated to defend these rights by not intruding upon them. Freedom was thus tied to God-given (or nature-given) freedoms that must not be breached by government. By contrast, very often today “rights” have to do with entitlements, which are “granted” by government — and, inevitably, must be paid for by ever bigger government, which makes “positive” law out of the democratic will, without reference to some higher law, natural law, or God’s law. Notions of “freedom” have undergone a huge shift.
(2) The problem of the tension between majority rule and the obligation to preserve the freedoms of the minority are easily exemplified in an issue like pornography. Suppose the majority say that pornography is bad and ban it: at what point does this jeopardize the freedom of those who think pornography is harmless and perhaps that the ban even threatens the freedom of the press? Suppose, instead, the majority say that pornography is harmless and protect it: at what point does this jeopardize the freedom of people who are convinced that it is demeaning to women and dangerous to children? Or again: an individual here and there who abuses narcotics and doses himself up with hallucinogenic drugs is scarcely a threat to public order and the common good; but when such practices become an epidemic, the common good is threatened in many ways, and the state has an interest in intervening, even though individual liberties are thereby being curtailed. Usually legislatures and judiciaries try to adjudicate such differences in perspective by trying to determine what is in the public interest, or by trying to be sensitive to what a mythical “average community” judges to be obscene, or the like. But such devices merely expose the chasms that divide contemporary opinion,34 some of which are generated by debates over the preceding point — that is, whether there is such a thing as transcendent morality.
Or consider the outpourings of wrath in the worldwide Muslim community over offensive cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in the Danish press. Christians, of course, have put up with that sort of thing for centuries. Countercultural “exhibits” like Piss Christ and the Dung Madonna may arouse protests, letters to the editor, and attempts at legislation but no massed marches resulting in the deaths of scores of people in country after country. Decent people, of course, try not to give unnecessary offense to others, whether to Christians or to Muslims or to any other group. Nevertheless, it is possible to sympathize with Muslim protests only on the assumption that Islam is true and the freedoms inherent in democracy are wicked. After all, where people are free to disagree, to disagree strongly, some forms of satire are bound to erupt. Must they all be suppressed by force? That means that it is always the party in power that cannot be satirized — an extraordinarily dangerous proposition. One begins to understand why Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim is not permitted wide circulation in Muslim countries, but The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is readily available. Respect for Islam does not convert into respect for Judaism or Christianity. By contrast, in a democracy one may protest if government funds are used to desecrate certain religions, but one does not issue a fatwa against someone who draws an offensive cartoon. Moreover, the worldwide protest in Islam occurred many months after the publication of the cartoons, and only after many of the protestors had an ample supply of Danish flags to burn in all the protests: after all, how many Danish flags would have been available for burning in Palestine or Karachi or Cairo unless there had been considerable planning?
One understands when the government decides to intervene in the interest of public safety, as when American Nazis threatened to march through the largely Jewish town of Skokie three decades ago. But by and large, religious people, not least Christians, know that they do not have to listen to or read the propaganda of those who despise them and are happy to celebrate and honor the freedom that allows them to worship in peace, knowing full well that if they crush those who disagree with them today, the crushing may be in the opposite direction tomorrow. There is something to be said for seeing freedom as a political expression of the dignity of human beings made in the image of God, even if that freedom is sadly abused. Equally, there is a great deal to be said for the view that a liberal democracy allows for, and even encourages, what Carter calls “the dissent of the gov-erned,”35 without that dissent turning to bloodshed. Yet while Christians, knowing that this is a fallen and broken world, not only concede such freedom but applaud it, they also know that in the consummation of the kingdom there will be no dissent of the governed: we will have minds and hearts perfectly attuned to the will and pleasure of our Maker and Redeemer. Our ultimate hope, therefore, can never rest in the freedoms that democracy seeks to institutionalize. Such freedoms are at best stopgap measures to mitigate evil in a rebellious world. As such, they deserve the support and nurture of Christians and non-Christians alike. But that is a far cry from giving them the sort of ultimacy often assigned them.
(3) Many observers have rightly concluded that unless a democratic state is made up of citizens who are largely in agreement over what is “the good,” that state will tend to fly apart, forcing the government itself to become more and more powerful and intrusive in order to hold things together. In the words of David Hart,
[T]he gradual erosion — throughout the history of modernity — of any concept of society as a moral and spiritual association governed by useful ethical prejudices, immemorial reverences, and subsidiary structures of authority (church, community, family) has led inevitably to a constant expansion of the power of the state. . . . We call upon the state to shield us from vice or to set our vices free, because we do not have a culture devoted to the good, or dedicated to virtue, or capable of creating a civil society that is hospitable to any freedom more substantial than that of subjective will. This is simply what it is to be modern.36
The irony, then, is that as citizens espouse increasingly diverse visions of what it means to be free, governments (including the courts) step in to resolve the divergences and end up making people less free.
(4) The optimism expressed by some thinkers regarding the attractiveness of freedom from coercive control (as we in the West view coercive control) strikes some of us as naively optimistic. The recent book by Michael Novak, for instance, thinks that the “clash of civilizations” is far from inevitable, because the universal desire for freedom will damp down the most controlling forms of government and religion.37 Novak is not expecting the Muslim world to become secularized (he does not think that the future lies with the successors to Ataturk); rather, he hopes — indeed, expects — forms of Islam to arise that will accommodate the modern world, including democracy and market economy, in much the same way that Catholicism made similar adjustments. Well, maybe, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The book has the feel of utopianism: give them time, and they’ll all be nice democrats like us, even if they get there by a different route. It is always possible that serious clashes will be averted for a time: one certainly hopes so. But both Scripture and history testify that power blocs of various kinds keep forming, for sin will out: there will be wars and rumors of wars, even if the end is still to come (Matthew 24:6).
By now it should be clear why democracy, as valuable a form of government as it can be, must never be confused with the Christian vision of the good, and why a democratic culture cannot be aligned isomorphically with a Christian culture. Christians will cheer on democracy, believing that, by and large, it benefits the greatest number of people, provides mechanisms for limiting human power (and for ensuring that power can change hands without bloodshed), and usually provides more freedoms than other forms of government. These freedoms inevitably allow many things to foster (I almost wrote “fester”) that Christians will dislike, but the same freedoms protect freedom of worship, freedom to bear witness, freedom to change one’s faith without government reprisals, and much more. Nevertheless, all notions of freedom invoke, implicitly or explicitly, subsidiary notions of freedom from and freedom to or for.38
The democratic tradition in the West has fostered a great deal of freedom from Scripture, God, tradition, and assorted moral constraints; it encourages freedom toward doing your own thing, hedonism, self-centeredness, and consumerism. By contrast, the Bible encourages freedom from self-centeredness, idolatry, greed, and all sin and freedom toward living our lives as those who bear God’s image and who have been transformed by his grace, such that our greatest joy becomes doing his will. Even if that direction (“freedom toward”) will not be perfected until the new heaven and the new earth, already the Christian is beginning to glimpse the glory of the words, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. . . . So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:34-36). The grand paradox inherent in such commitments falls right out of the Bible’s story line: that means our greatest freedom is to become slaves to Christ.39 “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation.”40 That produces a culture that may overlap with one or more of the notions of freedom in the cultures of our age, but it is certainly different from all of them and will in substantial measure be incoherent or even repulsive to most of them. David Hart is right: very often decisions handed down by the Supreme Court “should serve to remind us that between the biblical and the liberal democratic traditions there must always be some element of tension. What either understands as freedom the other must view as a form of bondage.”41
The Lust for Power
In the three previous sections, we have noted ways in which the topics of those sections — secularization, democracy, and freedom, respectively — cannot properly be labeled either “good” or “evil.” They can be either, depending on the context of their operation; indeed, because of multiple contexts, they are regularly both.
So also for power.42 Despite the opinion of some deconstructionists and other sentimentalists, the exercise of power is not always a bad thing. Within the family, a complete want of discipline, an utter power vacuum, regularly results in disoriented and anarchic children. When violence erupts in the streets, when a bank is being robbed, when drug-fuelled gangs go wild, when a young woman is being raped, most of us are pretty glad if the police show up in strength and exercise a little power. Even at the international level, some evils have to be opposed by force. Doubtless war should never be more than the last resort (though it often is), but not many of us would argue that it was morally wrong to stop Hitler or to put an end to the genocide perpetrated by Serbia. Indeed, when the conditions of “just war” are actually met, all but pacifists will be driven to the conclusion that it is a moral failure not to go to war, since it betrays lack of love for neighbor, an unwillingness to sacrifice for the sake of others. Journalists who love to criticize those who are “in power” are of course exercising their own form of power as they do so. Much as we sometimes dislike the way the power of the media is dispensed, most of us who have lived the better part of our lives in countries with a free press would hate to see that freedom taken away, for the reduction of the power of the fourth estate sooner or later results in unchecked power in the state itself.
Yet every form of power can be abused. Where a family dynamic is nothing more than the expression of raw power and various reactions to it, the potential damage is incalculable. The police whose task is to serve and protect can become corrupt and exercise their power for personal gain, or simply because the exercise of power becomes intoxicating behavior. Even “just wars” invariably include incidents or patterns, let alone individual decisions, that are morally inexcusable, generated by too much power and too little conscience. As necessary as the media are to preserve a relatively free society, the lust for power — spelled out in money, influence, exposure, high-profile jobs — is so intense that it frequently blinds those who hold these jobs as to the nature of their calling and thus to the importance of truth and integrity.
Of course, both good and bad motives may also characterize those who exercise power in the name of Christ. The lust to be “first,” to be Number One, did not die out with Diotrephes (3 John 9). Having rejected the authority of the pope, many a Protestant pastor exercises papal-like authority in his much smaller fiefdom. One is not long in the ministry before one observes some curates, assistant ministers — whatever a particular denomination labels them — subtly trying to undermine their seniors, wickedly trying to assume power, covering the operation with a gauze of pious verbiage and a veneer of humility. Yet it is no answer to imagine that ministers of the gospel should have no authority, no power, at all: one need only read the Pastorals to be reminded of the authority of the Word itself, the authority of moral suasion, the power inherent in good example, to say nothing of the power of the Spirit at work through the gospel and through believers. Moreover, not every minister of the gospel is hungry for power in some improper sense. The example of Christ is a constant constraint on those with sensitive consciences: the Master was the perfect suffering Servant, but he was also the one who cleared the temple precincts by overturning the tables of the money changers and driving out their animals with a whip. As Richard John Neuhaus never tires of telling us, one does not have to choose between being a thug or a wimp. However falteringly, we try to learn when it is right to suffer abuse and love those who persecute us, very much like the Master himself, and when it is right to clear the temple, very much like the Master himself. Thus the very nature of the gospel message, centered as it is in the obscenity of the cross, has a curtailing effect on the lust for power, as long as the gospel itself is prized above all things.
Even here, we are still picking at the edges of things. The lust for power is so subtle and absorbing that it is inadequate to say nothing more than “Sometimes power is good, sometimes it is bad” — as true as that may be. The fact that every exercise of power has at the very least the potential to corrupt demonstrates how deeply flawed we human beings are. The lust for power very often reflects our desire to control others. Even when we think this is for their good — and sometimes it is, though not nearly as often as we’d like to think — this desire to control people is very difficult to distinguish from lack of love of neighbor; it is almost impossible to disentangle from our desire to play God, which is a breach of the first commandment.
Here, too, of course, the attractiveness of power is linked in subtle ways to the other siren voices described in this chapter: freedom, democracy, and secularism. (1) The more power we exercise over others, and the less power others have over us, the more we judge ourselves to be “free.” In this light, even rampant consumerism can be seen as a subset of the lust for power: the shiny toys make us as good as, or, preferably, better than, our neighbors; the more we possess, the “freer” we are to order our lives as we will and to handle the vicissitudes that come our way with independence and aplomb: better medical care, another holiday abroad, vast sums spent on psychotherapy. If consumerism doesn’t trip us up, its opposite might. For oddly, even that seductive form of superiority that apes humility, such that we find ourselves boasting of our self-denial and asceticism, easily succumbs to the same lust for power. All it needs to do is pander to our desire to lord it over others, even in our own minds. (2) We have already seen that the practice of democracy is very much bound up with balancing the powers of different branches of government and of extra-governmental institutions, including the media. Christopher Lasch was not wrong when he insisted that, in contemporary America, democracy is linked in the popular mind with a sense of hope that is itself grounded in notions of progress, individualism, secularism, and wealth43 — all of them linked with power. (3) Insofar as secularism deludes us into thinking that God is dead or, equally damning, snookers us into thinking that God exists to bless our personally designed and self-defined mode of spirituality, while remaining accommodatingly irrelevant to how we live, it enhances our sense of personal power.
None of this exonerates religionists from similar pursuits of power. Under the guise of submission to God, we may simply be invoking the word “God” to enhance our authority and bolster our opinions. Lust for power is not restricted to those who make no profession of religion. Even the desire to be “useful” or to “extend the kingdom” may in part (so treacherous are our motives) be a mask for an unquenched hunger for power. Moreover, I have briefly described manifestations of power in the context of the West, especially in America, but it would be an easy exercise to describe manifestations of power under very different cultures and regimes, from China to Liechtenstein, from Saudi Arabia to India.
But Christians who are committed to thinking through the doctrinal and ethical implications of “the whole counsel of God” necessarily face some curbs on this universal lust for power. The doctrine of God reminds us that we are not ultimate: God is. The doctrine of creation tells us we are not our own: we are responsible to the One who made us. Any “power” we exercise is derived, and we will be held accountable for what we do with it. The doctrine of sin will challenge us not to indulge in the creative stances that endlessly excuse our idolatry. The entire plotline of the Bible tells us, again and again, “Be reconciled to God.” The death of Christ removes the huge load of guilt we otherwise bear, while his resurrection enables us to anticipate the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness — even while his example calls us to renounce self-promotion, for we are called to suffer with him and only then to reign with him.
***
These biblical realities make for a worldview that is sharply distinguishable from the worldviews around us, even where there are overlapping values. We cannot embrace unrestrained secularism; democracy is not God; freedom can be another word for rebellion; the lust for power, as universal as it is, must be viewed with more than a little suspicion. This means that Christian communities honestly seeking to live under the Word of God will inevitably generate cultures that, to say the least, will in some sense counter or confront the values of the dominant culture. But to say the least is not enough. Christians thus shaped by Scripture envision a church that not only counters alternative cultures but also seeks sacrificially to serve the good of others — the city, the nation, common humanity, not least the poor. Salt does not confront; it enhances. Believers must be the best possible citizens (cf. Jeremiah 29:7; cf. also 1 Peter 1:1; James 1:1), and that means that Christians, who are taking their cue (and thus their worldview) from outside the dominant culture, not only shape and form a Christian culture recognizably different from that in which it is embedded but also become deeply committed to enhancing the whole.
Yet there are pitfalls everywhere, and in the remaining two chapters I want to outline two of them, not so much to adopt a contrarian stance as to foster expectations that are themselves shaped by Scripture.
1. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969). (The British title is The Social Reality of Religion.)
2. That is the usage, for instance, in the important book edited by Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
3. That, essentially, is the view of David Boulton, The Trouble with God: Building the Republic of Heaven (New Alresford: John Hunt Publishing, 2002).
4. See especially George M. Marsden and B. J. Longfield, eds., The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
5. “Speaking Out: That Other Church,” Christianity Today 49/1 (January 2005): 62.
6. See the survey by Richard John Neuhaus, “Secularization Doesn’t Just Happen,” First Things 151 (March 2005): 58-61. In particular, see Christian Smith, The Secular Revolution; and Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991).
7. “The Deist Minimum,” First Things 149 (January 2005): 25-30.
8. Dulles, “The Deist Minimum,” 29.
9. Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: Seven Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (New York: Warner Faith, 2004). His seven steps to “living at your full potential” are: (1) enlarge your vision; (2) develop a healthy self-image; (3) discover the power of your thoughts and words; (4) let go of the past; (5) find strength through adversity; (6) live to give; (7) choose to be happy.
10. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 64.
11. That is the perceptive suggestion of Kirsten Birkett, “A Treatise of Hume’s Nature,” Case 7 (2005): 7-12.
12. See Pope Benedict XVI, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006). (The European title is The Europe of Benedict: In the Crisis of Cultures.)
13. One contemplates with horror the dimensions of evil reflected in the tragic reality that, during the twentieth century, about 170 million human beings were murdered by their own governments, quite apart from the losses in wars. See the website “Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power, Democide, and War,” at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html (last accessed 18 February 2006).
14. I will not here again take up the challenge of those who deny there is such a thing as a “worldview.” By worldview I mean, as I explained in chapter 3, a reasonably comprehensive interpretation of reality (whether thought through or not) that affects all we do. Everyone has one.
15. That is the central thesis of Nancy R. Pearcey and Phillip E. Johnson, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004).
16. That is precisely the point made by Charles Malik, A Christian Critique of the University (Waterloo, ON: North Waterloo Academic Press, 1987), 24-25. The same point is picked up by Duane Litfin, Conceiving the Christian College (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 79. According to Litfin, Malik “does not presume the validity of the secular [emphasis mine] academic world and then ask what that world thinks of Jesus Christ; he starts with the most profound truth the race has known, the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and then asks in its light what we are to make of the university.” Indeed, it has long been noted that the idea of a university, as opposed to a multiversity, presupposes a unity of truth best safeguarded in the glad confession that all truth is God’s truth: cf. D. A. Carson, “Can There Be a Christian University?” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 1/3 (1998): 20-38, and the literature cited there.
17. This is one of the valid emphases of Radical Orthodoxy — though admittedly its adherents tend to lay rather more stress on the ancient creeds than on the Scriptures themselves. But the commitment of the project to reconstruct the way we talk about reality is highly salutary. For a competent introduction to the movement and its chief proponents, see James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker; Bletchley: Paternoster, 2004).
18. Ralph Ketcham, The Idea of Democracy in the Modern Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
19. Nowhere is this clearer than in The Federalist Papers, of course. But it is also well worth perusing the collection edited by Bernard Bailyn, The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification, 2 vols. (New York: The Library of America, 1993), which includes not only much of the work of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton but also that of many others, including their opponents.
20. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2004).
21. That is, of course, the assumption in a book with the moral clarity of Natan Sharansky, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
22. See, for instance, Richard John Neuhaus, “The Tyranny of the Minority,” First Things 154 (June/July 2005): 63-64.
23. See the many thoughtful essays in the Spring 2004 anniversary issue of Public Interest.
24. “Two Nations Under God,” The New York Times, 4 November 2004, Editorials/Op-Ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/opinion/04friedman.html?ei=5090&en=141d38656c8&oref=slogin.
25. “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out,” The New York Times, 4 November 2004: http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views04/1104-25.htm.
26. “An Uncertain Trumpet,” The American Prospect (Online Edition), 12 December 2004: http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=8870.
27. “The Red Zone,” The New York Times, 4 November 2004, Section A, p. 25.
28. “Secularism and Its Discontents,” National Review 56/24 (27 December 2004): 32-35; much of the summary in the following lines is from p. 33.
29. Ponnuru, “Secularism and Its Discontents,” 33. Similarly, one recalls the address of John F. Kennedy to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on 12 September 1960: see Ithiel deSolaPool, Candidates, Issues, and Strategies: A Computer Simulation of the 1960 and 1964 Presidential Elections, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: MIT, 1965), esp. 107-10. I am grateful to Michael Thate for this latter reference.
30. Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
31. Although I have used Gutmann as my foil in this discussion, her approach is far from unique. See, for instance, Alan Race and Ingrid Shafer, eds., Religions in Dialogue: From Theocracy to Democracy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), which brings together spokespersons from the three major monotheistic religions to push the thesis implicit in the title. But why are these worthy spokespersons all more deeply committed to the same view of democracy than they are to their ostensible religions? Note that I specified “the same view of democracy”: my point is that there are other ways of conceiving of democracy than that of Gutmann, which in fact in the name of freedom is merely trying to impose on “democracy” a certain tribal perspective.
32. This is not the same thing as saying that all the voices from the left adopt that stance: see, for instance, the more careful work of Jeff Spinner-Halev, Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Life (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), whose aim is “to defend the choice that people make to live an illiberal life” and to consider how such cultural and religious groups may protect their “identities” within the context of a liberal democracy (pp. 5–6). Nevertheless, sometimes one wonders, in cynical mood, if some of the intemperance of the press, in particular, is grounded in rising frustration that they are being listened to less and less. Between 1900 and 2000, daily newspaper readership in the United States fell from 52.6 percent of the adult population to 37.5 percent. For those in the 18-34 age bracket, the figure was down to 19 percent. Add to this the not-so-subtle shift from attempts at even-handed reporting to the kind of “investigative journalism” that always assumes that those in power are corrupt, and one begins to understand the dynamics. Ordinary readers are constantly being told that all those whom we elect to office are thieves and thugs, morons and megalomaniacs. Certainly some of them are. Nevertheless, when the aim of the press is not so much to report the news as evenhandedly as possible but to uncover the evil that really must be there in elected officials, the virtue of balancing powers begins to slide over into the vice of suspicion, divisiveness, one-upmanship, and self-righteous triumphalism.
33. See Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2006); David L. Holmes, The Faith of the Founding Fathers (Oxford: Oxford University, 2006).
34. This is also why some opinions can swing back and forth. Gambling in America was astonishingly prevalent in the last third of the nineteenth century, but it was progressively banned on moral grounds over the following decades as the social damage, cost to government, and transparent corruption all became more and more obvious. For the last two or three decades, the drift has been in the opposite direction, under the twin banners of freedom to choose one’s pleasures and the hope for windfall taxes to boost government incomes — without, of course, weighing what such action will cost the government down the road as it seeks to address problems of addiction, lost jobs, corruption, broken homes, and the like. Where is the freedom?
35. Stephen L. Carter, The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, repr. 1999).
36. David B. Hart, “The New Pornography Culture,” The New Atlantis 6 (Summer 2004): http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/6/hart.htm.
37. The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
38. This is one of the major planks of the book by Richard Bauckham, God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002).
39. See especially Murray J. Harris, Slave of Christ: A New Testament Metaphor for Total Devotion to Christ, New Studies in Biblical Theology 8 (Leicester: Apollos, 1999).
40. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 215.
41. Hart, “The New Pornography Culture.”
42. In this section I use “power” very loosely to include the exercise of authority in its various forms, including personal physical force, legal coercion, moral suasion, demagoguery, and force of arms.
43. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1996). Lasch himself wants hope to be linked with memory (personal and corporate), virtue, humility, limits, and the spiritual discipline of religion. Lasch argues that when hope is uncoupled from its proper theological context, it is simultaneously uncoupled from humility and from any understanding of limits. Democracy, he argues, must be based on a conception of human equality that is itself grounded in a shared sense of human frailty. See the penetrating discussion of Patrick J. Deneen, Democratic Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).