Why We Can Get Along

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Why We Can Get Along

By: Richard John Neuhaus

"The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from the field, to extirpate it, root and branch." That is bracing stuff.

Professor Fish makes a very important argument about, inter alia, religion, reason, liberalism, and tolerance. I will not offer a point by point response to his article, but will develop along rather different lines some of the questions that he so provocatively raises. (Quotes that are not attributed are from Professor Fish's essay.)

The usual secularist telling of the story of modern freedom is that liberal democracy, with its devotion to civility and tolerance, is most importantly an achievement secured in opposition to the truth claims of religion. There is, let it be admitted, some historical justification for that way of telling the story. For the liberal project to advance, truth-claiming religion must retreat or be vanquished. Many Christians agree with that way of telling the story. They suspect, although they may not say so, that their faith is incompatible with a liberal regime. They put up with tolerance, they tolerate tolerance, but they have an uneasy conscience about it. If they had the courage of their convictions, they tell themselves, they would be aggressively intolerant of those who do not accept the truth that they know to be true. Perhaps they even experience a pleasurable frisson at the thought of forcefully overturning liberalism's table rather than politely taking a seat.

There is no doubt that the dominant rules of liberal discourse, especially in sectors of the academy, militate against any claims to truth, and not only religious truth. But the hostility to truth that is identified as religious is especially sharp. Many and seductive are the ways in which the ostensible acceptance of religion at liberalism's table can mean, in fact, the gelding of religion. If the opponents of religion cannot exclude it completely, they are practiced in the arts of coopting and neutralizing it. This they feel they have to do because authentic religion is threatening. It raises, for instance, the question of faith, and most liberal secularists are in deep denial about their articles of faith and acts of faith. Religious truth also proposes a comprehensive meaning system that offends and threatens those who insist that no one reading of reality should, as they say, be privileged.

The offense and threat of religion goes deep. It forces, for instance, the fundamental decision as to whether we are "self-made" or "created," and the logic of that decision, one way or the other, has consequences that are not under our control. Not just what currently passes for liberalism but the liberal regime itself must, as its critics say, vanquish, exclude, or coopt the challenge of principled antiliberalism. The interesting question is whether religion necessarily poses such a challenge to the liberal regime. According to one reading of John Stuart Mill and the liberal tradition, religion is incompatible with liberalism because it requires obedience to authority, and obedience to authority is incompatible with the open-endedly critical mindset required by the liberal view of freedom. An alternative claim that needs to be considered is that obedience to authority can be not the surrender of freedom but the exercise of freedom in response to truth. It may be that that truth, in turn, does not end the civil conversation but sustains it through history until, as Christianity holds, the fullness of truth is undeniably obvious to all.

For the entire article see: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9602/articles/neuhaus.html

-- Bill Nelson (bnelson45@hotmail.com), October 03, 2003

Answers

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-- Bumper (bump@bump.com), January 15, 2004.

Without going more deeply into the article (which I will later because I simply love "First Things"), it seems that Neuhaus is beginning with the assumption that liberalism is simply permissiveness and denial of such a thing as absolute Truth. While I think it is good to address a tradition on its own terms, I would add that the liberal tradition has its own authority, its own laws, and its own structures. Never succeeding in actually destroying the concept of Truth, liberalism merely stands truth on its head. It merely affirms opposite 'truths' to religious Truth.

The peculiar freedom of religion is that, in being actually true rather than simply an unsuccessful attempt to destroy truth, it accords one the freedom to pass through the artifical structures of liberalism at his leisure--much like the Glorified Risen Body of Christ was not bound by such petty obstacles as stones or walls. Liberalism's double "failure" is that it has neither actually escaped Truth nor is it even wholly untrue. Thus the religious person, insofar as he has tapped into the Divine reality, is free within the world, "living in his own country as though he were only passing through."

-- Skoo (anonymous@God.bless), January 15, 2004.


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