Kujenga Amani facilitates the exchange of ideas about diverse aspects of peacebuilding in Africa. David Walker. There are no comments yet No comments. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Avatars by Sterling Adventures. He should want what Milton wants, a unified conception of life in which the pressure of first principles is felt and responded to twenty-four hours a day. We cannot have religious freedom without it. What is not allowed religion under the private public distinction is the freedom to win , the freedom not to be separate from the state, but to inform and shape its every action.
That idea never even occurs to McConnell because it is so antiliberal and in the end a liberal is what he is. Taken to its conclusions this argument is devastating for the liberal project. For it is only if rationality and faith can be separated that one can establish a public sphere in which issues of civic concern can be discussed by persons who have left their religious convictions at home or checked them at the door.
Suddenly rationality and faith and, along with them, fact and value can be separated, and with separation returns the liberal public sphere and the possibility of assessing agendas without inquiring into the worldviews from which they emerge.
A pro-life advocate sees abortion as a sin against a God who infuses life at the moment of conception; a pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs.
No conversation between them can ever get started because each of them starts from a different place and they could never agree as to what they were conversing about. A pro-lifer starts from a belief in the direct agency of a personal God and this belief, this religious conviction, is not incidental to his position; it is his position, and determines its features in all their detail.
One understands why Carter wants to separate the message from its source: He is bothered by the fact that liberals tend to dismiss certain views just because they are motivated by religious conviction. Accommodation is a much better strategy than outright condemnation, for it keeps the enemy in sight while depriving it of the exclusionary edge that makes it truly dangerous; and best of all, one who accommodates can perform this literally disarming act while proclaiming the most high-sounding pieties.
The answer has many components, including the Jeffersonian project of softening sectarian aggressiveness and establishing a general religion of peace, reason, and morality, the identification of common sense philosophy with Christian morality within the assumption that each supported the other, the rise of the cult of the expert whose skills and authority were independent of his character or religious faith, and the substitution for the imperative of adhering to an already-revealed truth the imperative of continuing to search for a truth whose full emergence is located in an ever-receding future.
This last was particularly important because if truth was by definition larger and more inclusive than our present horizons declared it to be, obedience to traditional norms and values was no longer a virtue, but a fault, and a moral fault at that. On the contrary, it should train men for those occupations in which self-government, independence, and originating power are preeminently needed. Of course, this process by which an ethic of free inquiry supplants and liberalizes an older ethic of obedience to settled truth was not without opposition, and Marsden duly records the voices that were raised in protest.
Moses and Paul or according to Buckle and Draper. In tones recently echoed by conservative polemicists, the editors of Cosmopolitan magazine complained in that. This then is the story Marsden tells, and he tells it with a dispassionate equanimity that sits oddly with the strong point of view he announces in his introduction.
If such a base-level stage of perception does in fact exist, it can be identified as the common ground in relation to which uncommon— that is, not universally shared—convictions like, for example, Christ is risen can be marginalized and privatized. By claiming to have set aside his strongly held values in deference to the virtue of fairness—a virtue only if you are committed to the priority of procedure over substance—Marsden agrees to play by the rules of the very ideology of which his book is in large part a critique.
He is still playing by those rules in a concluding postscript in which, he tells us, his own interest, hitherto not strongly in play, will be elaborated. It would have joined the universe of liberal discourse but at the price of not being taken seriously. That is what Marsden should want: not the inclusion of religious discourse in a debate no one is allowed to win, but the triumph of religious discourse and the silencing of its atheistic opponents.
Marsden wants to argue against that marginalization, but his suggestion for removing it is in fact a way of reinforcing it. One could hardly imagine a better formula for subordinating the religious impulse to the demands of civil and secular order.
Presumably it will not be religion that specifies what the rules of evidence and argument to be honored are; and it surely will not be religion that stigmatizes as dogma any assertion that does not conform to the requirements of those rules. Dogma, of course, is a word that once had a positive meaning: it meant the unqualified assertion of a priori truths and was indistinguishable from a truly strong religiosity.
Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed?
We manage to debate normative matters anyway — but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to. Well, one way is to invoke secular concepts like freedom and equality — concepts sufficiently general to escape the taint of partisan or religious affiliation — and claim that your argument follows from them.
But, Smith points out following Peter Westen and others , freedom and equality — and we might add justice, fairness and impartiality — are empty abstractions. That content, however, will always come from the suspect realm of contested substantive values. Is fairness to be extended to everyone or only to those with certain credentials of citizenship, education, longevity, etc. Is it equality of opportunity or equality of results the distinction on which affirmative action debates turn?
Only when these matters have been settled can the abstractions do any work, and the abstractions, in and of themselves, cannot settle them. Indeed, concepts like fairness and equality are normatively useless, except as rhetorical ornaments, until they are filled in by some partisan or ideological or theological perspective, precisely the perspectives secular reason has forsworn. E-mail This Print Share. February 23rd, am One would think you were presenting a case for presuppositionalism a la Cornelius Van Til.
Splendidly done. Recommend Recommended by 6 Readers Jeff Colorado February 23rd, am Sounds like Steven Smith needs to get out a little more often First of all, where does Mr. I think Mr. Some were valid once, but no longer are, and some were never valid in the first place. The laws against eating pork made sense thousands of years ago in the desert where food spoiled quickly, but today with modern refrigeration it no longer makes sense. The only way to know that it no longer makes sense is via secular reason.
These come simply from a misapplication of empiricism and secular reason. Again, though, their religious reasons, however wrong they were, were based on empiricism, flawed as it was. And once you do that then you have to acknowledge that they are not fundamentally different from secular reasons, they are just typically based on human guesses about how the world works instead of scientific verification of how the world works.
The only problem is that its also very easy to impart all kinds of biases onto this third party as well, and when we do that the end result is often justification for many of the worst kinds of human behavior. Recommend Recommended by Readers EKB Mexico February 23rd, am A problem with your essay is that you have divided the world into secular and religious more or less. For me the difference between secular and spiritual is that some people have no sense that there is something beyond them, and some people do have such a sense.
But all systems, religious and secular, are efforts to organize our societies and give them meaning. No one wants to live an existence that seems without meaning. We are such limited creatures, our abilities to perceive, so limited by our human nature, that it is hubris to think that any of us has truly more knowledge by virtue of faith than other people, especially a specific faith. For whatever reason, we humans of whatever stripe do better organized. Societies have generally perverted whatever system they have started out with.
It seems the greedy and those lusting for power and for empire and those who are self-righteous come to dominate. Instead of arguing the virtues of religious approaches vs. Perhaps a potlatch system? Recommend Recommended by 57 Readers But hardly anyone who identifies as a secularist will concede all values to religionists. Unfortunately, the article offers no reason to believe that the secularist is mistaken in his belief that he can engage in values-talk without, by that very fact, engaging in religion-talk.
Pragmatic reasoning is social. 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. Comments are visible to subscribers only. Log in or subscribe to join the conversation. Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a donation.
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