Jonathan Derbyshire sets us a challenge. Liberals, he says should “revisit some fundamental questions concerning the place of religious commitment in modern democracies.”
So, here’s my tuppenceworth. There is a limited but important place in politics for Christian religious commitment. This place exists not because such commitment is right or rational, but precisely because it is irrational.
Let me start by rebutting two accusations made against Christianity. The first is that it is illiberal and reactionary.
Of course, much of it is. But so is much of the secular world; I’ll bet the people who kicked David Morley to death weren’t regular church-goers. Reactionary bigotry is a problem whether it is secular or religious.
It’s wholly wrong to identify Christianity with illiberal or reactionary politics. Progressive policies – the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement and the creation of the Labour party to name but three - have been supported and opposed by Christians and non-Christians.
This casual history shows that there’s nothing distinctive about the content of Christian morality. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in his A Short History of Ethics that: “Religious conceptions of morality are intelligible only insofar as they complement or otherwise elaborate upon existing secular conceptions.”
This means we can argue against the religious right in terms of conventional morality. Eugene Volokh is right when he says:
Some particular legal proposals may well be wrong…But if that's so, then these proposals would then be equally wrong whether they're suggested by religious people for religious reasons, or by secular people for secular reasons. And conversely, if particular legal proposals are morally and pragmatically right, then religious people are just as entitled as secular people to advocate them. So people should certainly criticize the proposals of the Religious Right (or Religious Left or Secular Right or Secular Left) that they think are wrong on the merits. But they would be wrong to conclude that the proposals are illegitimate simply on the grounds that the proposals rest on religious dogma. Religious people are no less and no more entitled than secular people to enact laws based on their belief systems.
I’ll agree that Mark Schmitt has asked a good question. But it’s one of sociological, not ethical, importance.
The second misplaced objection to the role of Christianity in politics is that made by Peter Singer in The President of Good and Evil. Political arguments that start from a religious basis, he says, are socially divisive.
The virtue of democratic politics, he says, is that it provides “a public conversation about issues of common concern.” In this conversation:
We should offer reasons that can appeal to all, not only to other members of our own community of belief. Otherwise there can be no public conversation that embraces the entire society; we are implicitly dividing societies into separate communities.
The mistake here is that this charge is not one to which Christianity is uniquely vulnerable. It applies to almost all old-style political discourse today, because most of this is aimed only at “other members of our own community of belief.” The Groan comment pages, speeches by Blair and Brown and publications from the Institute of Economic Affairs (to pick just three) all seem aimed at persuading only like-minded people. Politics has descended into tribalism, with utterances intended not to persuade, but to unite one’s own faction.
There’s a reason for this. Most people have lost confidence (I nearly said faith) in the power of moral argument to persuade people. As MacIntyre said in After Virtue, the dominant attitude towards morality today is emotivism – the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.”
Even Tony Blair subscribes to this view. In May 2001 he told the Sedgefield Labour Party that: “In the 1980s, I stopped thinking about politics on the basis of what I had read or learnt, and started to think on the basis of what I felt.”
Herein, I think, lies the place for religious commitment. A preference or feeling that comes from God (or what you think to be God) is more strongly held than one you think to be just a preference. And strong feelings are necessary to motivate us to fight for our beliefs.
President Bush believes that liberty is “the plan of Heaven for Humanity” (quoted by Singer). This gives him a reason to fight for freedom. We atheists, by contrast, are stuck with Rawlsian-style rationalist justifications. This might make us more able to persuade people to be liberals if they are willing to be so persuaded. But this is not what we need now. What we need in the fight against genuinely dangerous religious bigots – the murderers of Theo van Gogh and Margaret Hassan - are not neat academic arguments, but fire in our bellies. Christianity gives us this, rationalism doesn’t.
This, I think, explains Christopher Hitchens’ lament:
Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left…If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time…George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled…Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL.
What I’m saying here is that rationality is not always a good thing. Sometimes, we need some irrationality to give us the (over-)confidence to act, to fight. Back in 1980, Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross wrote in Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment that:
We probably would have few novelists, actors or scientists if all potential aspirants to those careers took action based on a normatively justifiable probability of success. We might also have few new products, new medical procedures, new political movements or new scientific theories.
This is why I say that Christian religious commitment, irrational as it is, has a limited but important place in politics. Important, because there are times when we need to fight. Limited, because there are also times when we need to think.
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