I happened to notice this 2012 post from Greg, while clicking around the back end of the site. With slight adjustments for windage, I think we’re heading the same direction, here:
In the lawsuits over Obamacare, the administration has asserted the theory that a profit-making business or a hospital or a school cannot be said to exist primiarly for a religious purpose or mission. If the courts endorse this claim, Christianity has been made illegal. Christianity cannot be what it is if the total primacy of God’s claim on our lives and the mission he has given us in the world is not permitted to achieve institutional expression in all areas of life, rather than simply in churches narrowly defined. This is not to say that all Christians must attend distinctively Christian schools or work in distinctively Christian businesses; far from it. However, if the formation of such institutions is illegal, Christianity is illegal.
(source: Religious Institutions and Modern Society | Hang Together)
And I’ll cheerfully sign on to this critique:
Romantic individualism has a contradiction at its core: it is not as individualistic as it thinks it is. It has always sought, and achieved, institutional embodiment – all while denying to itself that it seeks this. The two chief places it has been embodied are in the state – hence the need for a state-controlled “civil religion” in the Social Contract – and in educational institutions. The near-total triumph of Romantic individualism in these two sectors has coincided with a continual contraction of actual liberty for the individual, as both these types of institutions have become more rigid in imposing Romantic individualism as orthodoxy.
Rousseau foresaw all this and laid it out plain and simple in the Social Contract – those who do not voluntarily find their freedom in submission to the general will must be “forced to be free.” Those words are widely misunderstood and abused – Rousseau was no totalitarian – but the indifference to the individuality of the individual was very real and deliberately chosen.
(source: Religious Institutions and Modern Society | Hang Together)
I’m a tiny bit less sanguine about the potential for modern liberal democracy to survive its contradictions, but I whole-heartedly agree that if there is any hope for it, it depends on our recovering or inventing cultural institutions that offer a convincing alternative to “Romantic individualism.”
And in any case, first and foremost, if there is any hope for any of us, the Church must be the Church.
For clarity, note that it was “Romantic individualism” rather than “modern liberal democracy” whose “contradictions” I was discussing. I am concerned that your comment (“I’m a tiny bit less sanguine…”) collapses the distinction between them.
We can understand “modern liberal democracy” either philosophically, as a complex collection of normative claims, or sociologically, as a set of real-world institutions (formal and informal). Philosophically there are many different theories of modern liberal democracy, some of which are rife with contradictions and some of which are not. Sociologically, modern liberal democracy is certainly filled with internal contradictions, but so is every political order when it is considered sociologically.
Sociologically, I understand modern liberal democracy – particularly its American incarnation – as a reasonable working compromise between Christianity and Romantic individualism. A compromise necessarily involves internal contradictions, but is not therefore necessarily bad. If I thought something better than a reasonable working compromise between Christianity and Romantic individualism were possible without reigniting the wars of religion, I would work for that. As it happens, I think a reasonable working compromise between Christianity and Romantic individualism is the best we are likely to be able to do within our ethical constraints. What concerns me is the absence of Christian structures of legitimacy for accepting such a compromise. The universe is all one big super-slippery slope, with God at the top and Satan at the bottom and nothing in between. All that is not spotlessly Christian is demonic. That’s where we get wars of religion from.
For scholarly discussion of these issues see The Avengers.
Thanks. I think I grasp the elements of your sketch. In my mind, the “contradictions” that “modern liberal democracy” has to survive are at least the contradictions between a Romantic individualist and a Christian view of humanity in society that you’re sketching.
It doesn’t help that most American Christianity has itself been deeply affected by Romantic individualism (I’m thinking *especially* of low-church evangelicalism, but *no less* of classical-liberal mainline denominationalism, and *yes let’s don’t forget* the effects of modernism on Catholics), and that most Romantic individualism has long since lost touch with its original impulses (leaving us with a large percentage of the population which believes that “freedom” and “privacy” consists of having every portion of one’s life minutely managed by despotic experts *except* those most intrinsically social elements, sex and child-bearing, which must be kept so free from any interpersonal constraint that increasingly even that requires constant, direct government intervention–thou shalt sex ed, thou shalt contraception, thou shalt continuous adjudicable consent, etc).
So in my mind neither “Christianity” as a bloc nor “Romantic individualism” as a bloc are possessed of any authority to reach a compromise in American politics. Nor is either vision of humanity (particularly at their most identity-politics prone edges) currently in touch with history enough to realize that “tenuous consensus to let mutually exclusive varieties flourish” is a defensive gesture; instead, they have all been taught that America is exceptional in all the wrong ways and for a great variety of wrong reasons.
The Anglo-American consensus was unusual, and prevailed almost nowhere else. I’m not convinced that it is possible to build consensus for a compromise except among those who are exhausted from the battle. The best way I know to try is to find creative alternatives to confrontation, ways to disentangle conflicting views of humanity–personally, I think that means building strong local ties–extended families embedded in neighborhoods profoundly shaped by respect for religion, trade skills, cultivation of real property, and humane education–that can disengage (even radically) from higher-level power schemes.
Honestly, though, I think that the Anglo-American compromise tradition reached high tide philosophically at Locke, theoretically at our Constitution, and historically at Reconstruction, and has been ebbing since. It is not clear to me what can be done within this system that does not exacerbate its decline; I am Burkean and Hayekian on the point of existing institutions, a great fan of Chesterton’s Fence.
What I advocate is as-possible disengagement from dysfunctional institutions in favor of deeper institutions with more divine promise, combined with steadfast witness against the refusal of those dysfunctional institutions to let us go. I am happy for some to advocate within our system for “religious liberty,” happy for laws to be lax where no means exists to justly unite moral authority with power, but absolutely unwilling to permit myself or anyone else to be legally obliged to pretend that perverse fictions are actual bonds–that killing a baby is anything but what it is.
I am convinced, however, that Christians do have an intrinsic rationale for preferring a charitable Toleration that is almost as strong as the Christian opposition to pluralism de jure must also be. And that we can and should begin by living in continuity with the whole history of the faith, from Adam and Abraham and Moses and Jesus to the present day, in a manner no less personal than public, in every department of life, whether we have the support of others or their violent opposition. Only after we have committed ourselves to that course will martyrdom, or triumph, or some conscionable modus vivendi present itself as a true path.
And I do think it should be possible to articulate, in light of the epoch now arriving, what an arrangement of powers would serve us better than the late form of “modern liberal democracy” will look like. Locke will help, and Aquinas, and also I think we’ll need to go back and work some of the kinks out of the evolution of modern conceptions of “property” and “natural rights” (especially when we get to questions of how “human rights” and “civil rights” and “fundamental human rights” are related). It will take some time, but I’ll keep working on it.
In the meantime, I don’t want the lights to go out on my freedom to practice my faith publicly, so will continue to promote commitment among the faithful and confusion to the secularizing powers.
1) I must object to the statement that the influence of RI (for short) is more visible in evangelicalism than the mainline. I would accept the statement that there is a great deal of influence visible in both.
2) But influence goes both ways! American RI is far more humane and just than European RI, and that is entire due to the influence Christianity has had on it due to the working compromise.
3) I do not think RI has moved much at all from its “original impulses.” The slate of preferences you describe is not a late development in RI; it is actually a fair summary of Rousseau!
4) I think this may be the deepest difference between us: I do not think we should speak in terms of who has “authority” to build moral consensus. That is a deeply aristocratic way of thinking about politics. All human beings have authority to participate in the building of moral consensus by virtue of the fact that they are human.
5) You say that you don’t want the lights to go out on your freedom to practice your faith publicly, so you will continue to fight for Christianity and against secularists. But I suspect the main danger to our freedom to practice our faith publicly comes precisely from this culture-war mentality in which Christians always approach their neighbors solely in a mode of hostility, thus legitimizing and reinforcing ther hostility to us. Our only hope is to defuse the culture war, and that will only happen if Christians approach their neighbors (they will not go first, we have to) and say, “we don’t want to be locked in this struggle with you. We can share this country.”
1) Fair–I think the connection is more obvious in the history of low-church evangelicalism, but more philosophically deep in the liberal mainline. Traditional religion, and confessionally and liturgically enriched religion, in both Catholic and Reformed communions, have had some measure of restraining power.
2) In the sense that adherence to *any* truth tends to bring us into contact with *more* truth, yes. And yet, institutionalizing any error tends to strengthen moral hazards, and one doesn’t have to be the more dour sort of Augustinian to see that such institutions will have built-in expiration dates. So the challenge remains to find a modus vivendi that does not require us to defend any actually false principles.
Oh, and for (4), in this case I only need the rhetorical sense of “authority”–institutional ethos, some way to know that one is reaching an agreement with an “honest broker.” Something other than trying to make a peace deal with Mahmoud Abbas, for example.
For the rest, I see two things, here:
(first)
I think the Anglo-American consensus tended to hold because it arrived early and organically at a mixed-government consensus (in both feudal and constitutional-monarcy / constitutional-republic phases) and accepted constantly contested power structures as a norm. The challenge for this consensus is that it is a negative principle of government, and thus depends on powerful non-regime institutions to provide the positive principles of civil society. That means that the regime will be, not as good as its *structure*, but as good as those institutions. This gives multiple failure points that we must be vigilant against, if we aim to make the True, Good, and Beautiful flourish in a just society of free people: the regime “buying out” or “nationalizing” or “socializing” or “redefining” the non-regime institutions of civil society; the systematic corruption of those institutions by perverse policy and philosophy; the insulation of the regime from reform. Since at least the Progressive Era, and arguably since early in Reconstruction, but definitely since the New Left’s “long march” coalesced in the federal buyouts of education finance, healthcare, our institutions have been failing at all these points–popular ignorance and cupidity being exacerbated by the well-coordinated efforts of radicals. As of the Obama Administration’s blatant and repeated efforts to neutralize (pour encourager les autres) even limited and insignificant resistance to its mandates, a neo-Bismarckian Kulturkampf is underway.
I never went in for “Christian America” (trying to sort through that was how I found Locke in my teens), and I think “Reconstructionism” and the “Moral Majority” and “Christian Coalition” approaches were folly that did more harm than good. What sympathy I had with them largely went by the wayside in the middle 1990s, and I tried hard to be a consistent civil libertarian for years. But that does not mean that I do not think the Church, precisely *as* Church, should not speak with authority about what are non-negotiable ways of living for Christians. I think she should do so more consistently than she has for many years, more faithfully, and with more will to impose practical consequences on those who pretend to the name of Christ, and to cooperate practically with those who live as Christians.
In other words, the Church must be that cultural institution, apart from the regime, not owing its existence to the regime, which can make it necessary for the regime to either tolerate the faithful, embrace the True and Good and Beautiful as they embody it in the world, or make martyrs of them.
And I think every husband and wife, by marrying, have accepted the obligation to make a family which does the same. The nature of the Church and the nature of the family, as consequential public realities, are not subject and may not be subjected to the regime’s negotiations, or its powers, or its laws. They can only make martyrs of us, or tolerate us, or embrace us, while we remain faithful.
This is not the same thing as saying that whatever gets votes for laws to force people to pretend to morality is good.
(second)
My sense is that you have committed yourself to “rage against the dying of the light,” Greg, and I commend you for it. You seem to be holding the candle for a dying, perhaps a long-dead, consensus. I would like to be proven wrong, and in my happiest moments I can convince myself that there are reasons to believe that a consensus in favor of letting folks move around until they find a place where they can arrive at a modus vivendi with their neighbors is still the American way. But the world of IRS, HHS, DoE, DHS, BATF, FNMA, FEC, Greg? It’s not that world. It’s Bismarck’s fantasy, and Washington’s nightmare.
(source: 76. Maud Muller. John Greenleaf Whittier. Yale Book of American Verse)
The candle I’m holding is not for an old, dead consensus but for the new one that needs to be created, and which it must be possible to create if human beings (even the pagan ones) are made in God’s image. I rage not against the dying of the light but against those who would rather curse the darkness than light a (new) candle.
I should note that “aristocratic” does not strike me as having any stronger negative charge than “democratic.” I am indifferent to the choice between feudal and republican forms of government–one should use whichever of these mixed modes dependent on pre-existing non-regime institutions best protects the commons–but neither “democratic” ideology nor any of various narrow interpretations of “aristocracy” [i.e., hereditary sycophants of an autocratic sovereign, oligarchs–or for that matter apparatchiks, nomenklatura, plutocrats, meritocrats, technocrats] strikes me as likely to produce justice in society, rather than to institutionalize various injustices.
The secret to my professed love of feudalism is precisely in this: I regard “feudalism” proper, like “republicanism” proper, as a practical political ideal rarely successfully implemented. A proper feudal system, like a proper republican system, is simply one that recognizes and institutionalizes real bonds of various kinds, and tends to resist their reduction under one kind with material force. In our society, I think some feudal virtue may well be a tonic for a co-opted language of republican virtue, though I do get happy when I hear people speaking staunchly about real republican virtues (like rule of law, right of exit, deference of the regime to pre-existing institutions, Burkean conservation of custom, and so on).
As I suspected, this is the deepest difference between us.
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