Conscience and Its Reviewers: A Response to Kevin Doyle - by Robert P. George

 In TPD

Kevin Doyle, a Catholic lawyer and death penalty opponent, has published a review in America magazine of my new book Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism. I’m grateful for the kind things Mr. Doyle said about me and my work. Still, there is an error at the heart of the review, and it goes to a central matter: the meaning of conscience. So I want to address that error. Before that, I’ll comment on some less significant shortcomings of Doyle’s review.

The Death Penalty

First, Doyle says that “the death penalty wins mention in [George’s] case against Mario Cuomo but draws no condemnation.” Let me say plainly what I have said before: I believe that all direct killing of human beings—that is, deliberately bringing about death, whether one’s own or another’s, as the precise object of one’s act—is morally wrong. So I am opposed to the death penalty.

I did not address the substantive moral issue of capital punishment in this book because support for the death penalty scarcely qualifies as a dogma of liberal secularism. Most liberal secularists oppose the death penalty. I think they are right about that, albeit right for the wrong reason. The subject came up in my chapter on Mario Cuomo and other politicians who claim to be “personally opposed” to abortion yet “pro-choice,” because Cuomo had advanced an absurd argument trying to square his opposition to the death penalty with his support for the legalized and taxpayer financed killing of unborn babies. Here’s what I wrote:

Cuomo claims that when he speaks of the death penalty, he never suggests that he considers it a “moral issue.” Then, in the very same paragraph, he condemns the death penalty in the most explicitly, indeed flamboyantly, moralistic terms: “I am against the death penalty because I think it is bad and unfair. It is debasing. It is degenerate. It kills innocent people.” He does not pause to consider that these are precisely the claims pro-life people make against the policy of legal abortion and its public funding—a policy that Cuomo defends. . .

Subsidiarity and Solidarity

Second, Doyle says that in my analysis “subsidiarity eclipses the counterbalancing imperative of solidarity.” This claim rests on the mistake—a common one, to be sure—of supposing that subsidiarity and solidarity “counterbalance” each other. To suppose so is to misunderstand the principle of subsidiarity (which, among other things, restrains government action in some areas and authorizes or even requires it in others) as well as its relationship to solidarity.

Subsidiarity and solidarity are distinct principles, and respect for both is required as a matter of justice. But they do not pull in opposite directions. They do not need to be “balanced.” Nor, strictly speaking, can their normative demands be in conflict. They do not require tradeoffs. Both are to be applied and respected fully—all of the time. To suppose otherwise is to start heading down the wrong path from one’s first step.

Health Care

Third, Doyle says that, for me, “health care as a human right becomes merely something of which it is ‘certainly not unreasonable to speak.’” Doyle’s “merely” is extremely misleading, as the context of the quoted line from my book makes clear:

Human rights exist (or obtain) if principles of practical reason direct us to act or abstain from acting in certain ways out of respect for the well-being and the dignity of persons whose legitimate interests may be affected by what we do. I certainly believe that there are such principles. They cannot be overridden by considerations of utility. At a very general level, they direct us, in Immanuel Kant’s phrase, to treat human beings always as ends and never as means only. When we begin to specify this general norm, we identify important negative duties, such as the duty to refrain from enslaving people. Although we need not put the matter in terms of “rights,” it is perfectly reasonable, and I believe helpful, to speak of a right against being enslaved, and to speak of slavery as a violation of human rights. It is a right that we have not by virtue of being members of a certain race, sex, class, or ethnic group but simply by virtue of our humanity. In that sense, it is a human right. But there are, in addition to negative duties and their corresponding rights, certain positive duties. And these, too, can be articulated and discussed in the language of rights, though here we must be clear about by whom and how a given right is to be honored.

Sometimes it is said, for example, that education or health care is a human right. It is certainly not unreasonable to speak this way; but much more needs to be said if it is to be a meaningful statement. Who is supposed to provide education or health care to whom? Why should those persons or institutions be the providers? What place should the provision of education or health care occupy on the list of social and political priorities? Is it better for education and health care to be provided by governments under socialized systems or by private providers in markets? These questions go beyond the application of moral principles. They require prudential judgment in light of the contingent circumstances people face in a given society at a given point in time. Often, there is not a single, uniquely correct answer. The answer to each question can lead to further questions. The problems can be extremely complex, far more complex than the issue of slavery, where once a right has been identified, its universality and the basic terms of its application are fairly clear. Everybody has a moral right not to be enslaved, and everybody an obligation as a matter of strict justice to refrain from enslaving others; governments have a moral obligation to respect and protect that right and, correspondingly, to enforce the obligation.

The context reveals that Doyle’s characterization of my view, served by his use of the term “merely,” completely fails to do it justice to my point—an analytical point about a key difference between claims of negative and positive rights. It is a point that Doyle ignores. I doubt that he or anyone else would contest my claim that for assertions of positive rights to be meaningful, the types of questions I mentioned must be addressed.

Marriage

Fourth, Doyle’s treatment of my arguments about what marriage is—and isn’t—is odd. He doesn’t offer any criticism of my arguments or even address them in any substantive respect. Instead, he dismisses them—and dismisses them in a curious way, especially (as we shall see) for someone who dedicates himself to fighting against the death penalty.

Doyle allows that I’ve put the advocates of redefining marriage to include same-sex partners in a tough spot by challenging them to, among other things, identify a basis of principle consistent with their rejection of the conjugal conception of marriage for understanding marriage as inherently involving two persons, as opposed to three or more in polyamorous sexual partnerships. And he notes that those advocates have “side-stepped” the problem “until now.” But he doesn’t suggest how they might actually respond to my challenge. Nor does he offer any criticism of my philosophical defense of the conjugal conception of marriage or my criticism of the revisionist alternative conception of marriage as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership.

Instead, he says this:

For many Americans, George’s marital metaphysic will stand up poorly next to the reality—just down the block or a few family relations away—of a committed gay couple with children. So take or leave George’s argument that a same-sex marriage cannot be a genuine marriage.

This simply will not do. My actual arguments either are successful or they are not. Doyle vaguely suggests that they are not, but he does so without taking a clear position, much less defending it. That this is unsatisfactory in a review would be clear enough to Doyle if we switched the topic from marriage to the death penalty. Doyle has devoted his career to making arguments—serious and well-informed arguments—against capital punishment. But whatever their ultimate merit, it would simply not do for a critic to say something like this:

For many Americans, Doyle’s metaphysic of the inalienable dignity of the life even of a wanton murderer will stand up poorly next to the reality—for some right in the neighborhood, and sometimes even in the family—of young men who have been gunned down in the streets and girls who have been brutally raped and then killed by their assailants. Most Americans fully accept the death penalty for such crimes, and there are countless family members for whom the execution of the perpetrator is essential to emotional well-being and a sense of justice and closure. So take or leave Doyle’s argument that the death penalty is morally wrong.

Conscience and Its Protections

Fifth, let’s turn to that big error I mentioned at the beginning. Doyle claims that while I “plead powerfully for the claims of conscience” of those with whose judgments in conscience I agree, I am “non-committal” or “send signals in different directions” when it comes to consciences that I believe are formed incorrectly. But that is the reverse of the truth—manifestly so. In fact, I do not think I could possibly have made clearer my view of the importance of respecting and protecting the rights of conscience even of those with whose judgments of duty I disagree.

Let’s take an example. I am, to say the least, not especially sympathetic to atheism. Still, here is what I say about the conscience rights of atheists in Conscience and Its Enemies:

Respect for the good of religion requires that civil authority respect (and, in appropriate ways, even nurture) conditions or circumstances in which people can engage in the sincere religious quest and live lives of authenticity reflecting their best judgments as to the truth of spiritual matters. To compel an atheist to perform acts that are premised on theistic beliefs that he cannot, in good conscience, share, is to deny him the fundamental bit of the good of religion that is his, namely, living with honesty and integrity in line with his best judgments about ultimate reality. Coercing him to perform religious acts does him no good, since faith really must be free, and dishonors his dignity as a free and rational person. The violation of liberty is worse than futile.

I make clear here and elsewhere that I utterly reject the “error has no rights” view in the name of which radical traditionalist (“rad trad”) Catholics reject the robust conception of religious freedom set forth by the fathers of the Second Vatican Council in the great declaration Dignitatis Humanae. In fact, I make my view on this point so clear in so many places, that I was initially puzzled at how Doyle could suppose that I was “non-committal” on the rights of people with erroneously formed consciences.

Reading on, though, the basis of Doyle’s error came into focus for me. He must have missed, or in any event he clearly missed the point of, Chapter Ten, entitled “Two Concepts of Liberty . . . and Conscience.” Evidently failing to notice my distinction—drawn from Newman—between the traditional conception of conscience as a “stern monitor” imposing duties we must fulfill whether they are in line with our preferences and desires or not, and the modern autonomy-based liberal idea of conscience as “self-will” grounding a right to do as one pleases, whatever one pleases, so long as there is no direct or palpable harm to others, Doyle supposes that I should be on the side of the liberals concerning the legal regulation of allegedly self-regarding immoralities.

In that chapter—which contrasts the conceptions of liberty and conscience held by John Stuart Mill with those held by John Henry Newman—I go to great lengths to explain the competing views and say why I think it is a mistake to conceive conscience as licensing conduct rather than imposing obligations:

Conscience, as Newman understood it, is the very opposite of “autonomy” in the modern liberal sense. It is not a writer of permission slips. It is not in the business of licensing us to do as we please or conferring on us (in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court) “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Rather, conscience is one’s last best judgment specifying the bearing of moral principles one grasps, yet in no way makes up for oneself, on concrete proposals for action. Conscience identifies one’s duties under the moral law. It speaks of what one must do and what one must not do. Understood in this way, conscience is indeed what Newman said it is: a stern monitor.

Contrast this understanding of conscience with what Newman condemns as its counterfeit. Conscience as “self-will” is a matter of feeling or emotion, not reason. It is concerned not so much with the identification of what one has a duty to do or not do, one’s feelings and desires to the contrary notwithstanding, but rather with sorting out one’s feelings. Conscience as self-will identifies permissions, not obligations. It licenses behavior by establishing that one doesn’t feel bad about doing it—or at least one doesn’t feel so bad about doing it that one prefers the alternative of not doing it.

I’m with Newman. His key distinction is between conscience, authentically understood, and self-will—conscience as the permissions department. His core insight is that conscience has rights because it has duties. The right to follow one’s conscience, and the obligation to respect conscience—especially in matters of faith, where the right of conscience takes the form of religious liberty of individuals and communities of faith—obtain not because people as autonomous agents should be able to do as they please; they obtain, and are stringent and sometimes overriding, because people have duties and the obligation to fulfill them. The duty to follow conscience is a duty to do things or refrain from doing things not because one wants to follow one’s duty but even if one strongly does not want to follow it. The right of conscience is a right to do what one judges oneself to be under an obligation to do, whether one welcomes the obligation or must overcome strong aversion in order to fulfill it. If there is a form of words that sums up the antithesis of Newman’s view of conscience as a stern monitor, it is the imbecilic slogan that will forever stand as a verbal monument to the so-called me generation: “If it feels good, do it.”

Now, Doyle has every right to disagree with me about the superiority of Newman’s conception of conscience as duty-imposing to what, following Newman, I argue is its counterfeit: “conscience” as “self-will,” licensing the subject to do as he or she pleases. But he should be clear that what I oppose is conscience-as-license—and not respect for the good-faith conclusions about duty of people whose moral or theological judgments and beliefs I reject.

Doyle seems to have missed the critical distinction between these two conceptions of conscience altogether. But it is a distinction that is at the heart of Conscience and Its Enemies. Had he noticed it, he would not have supposed I was “non-committal” on the need to respect the consciences of those with whom I disagree. He would have seen that I am committed to an understanding of conscience, and the rights of conscience, that is very different from the one he himself, I gather, holds.

Laicity, Christianity, the West: an Historical Profile - Archbishop Giampaolo Crepaldi

In Catholic Culture

The paradox of the West

The relationship of the Christian faith with the West, but more specifically the Catholic faith, is essential in nature. By that I do not intend to argue that there is a sort of identity between the West and Christianity, or that Christianity is a category of the western mentality, or that Christianity can be such only within the West in a geographical, historical or cultural sense. Such a banal pretence could be all too easily rebutted in an equally banal way by remarking that Christianity saw the light of day in the eastern Mediterranean and has spread throughout the world. In other words, the ‘western’ relationship was not a contingency in the history of Christianity. Emerging in the relationship with the West have been characteristics Christianity cannot separate itself from without ceasing to exist, but from which it has historically taken its distance precisely in the West. Thus issuing forth is the problematic and paradoxical character of the West. On one hand, Christianity’s encounter with the West was “providential”[1], helped mould and shape western civilization, and in certain periods of history – especially in the XII and XIII centuries – projected a Christian civilization[2] with particularly creative expressions. On the other hand, however, developing in the West has been a process of secularisation that progressively tends to exhaust Christianity in its ability to ‘produce’ civilization. Developing for the first time only in the western world has been “a culture that constitutes the absolutely most radical contradiction not only of Christianity, but of the religious and moral traditions of society” [3]. Hence the profound ambiguity of the category of “west” as regards Christianity itself. The “resilience” and the resistance” of Christianity are faced with a decisive ‘test bench’ in the West.

Catholic dogma and the West

Often given is a rather reductive interpretation of Catholicism’s impact on western civilization in the sense of being looked upon as influence and nothing more. That is tantamount to saying that Catholicism influenced western civilization with its works charity, art, literature, religion driven social networks, the coronation of kings and the like. All this is true, but Catholicism’s profound relationship with the west concerns dogmas and is the expression of the historicity of dogmas. This expression – historicity of dogmas – does not mean dogmas evolve historically in a manner parallel with self-awareness believers have of them. This would be the modernist vision of the issue. What the expression actually means is that a dogma has an historical and real content, and may not be relegated to the realm of myth. Dogmas nourish the Church and the Church is the Body of Christ in history, a Body remaining for eternity[4]. Between dogma and Body there is an indivisible unity, such that a dogma is present not only in a believer’s conscience, but by its very nature becomes history, and therefore civilization. This is the realism of the Catholic faith.

The Church has moulded western Christian civilization with its dogmas defined in its dogmatic Councils. Nowadays there is a widespread underrating of doctrine in the life of the Church and an emphasis on pastoral praxis, which runs the risk of thrusting this important aspect into the background. I’d like to offer two examples in this regard. The first of them has to do with Gnosis. The condemnation of Arianism and the definition of the human and divine nature of Jesus contradicted Gnosis, which was an expression of Hellenic rationalism. This entailed a lengthy process, which involved both Councils and the work of the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church. This ‘match’ has yet to be won since alongside the Gnosis of the early centuries of Christianity there is an “eternal Gnosis”, but the battle of Christian dogma against Gnosis preserved human civilization from the catastrophes of Catharism, the simultaneous refusal and exaltation of matter, the destruction of matrimony and the family, and the refusal of political authority. It produced fruits of civilization in the form of the just consideration of evil and suffering, and defended against nihilism. The defence of the Old Testament against the Gnostic onslaught made it possible to preserve the positive vision of creation and the historical social dimension of the Christian faith. The baptism of children, prayers for the dead, priestly celibacy and the worship of images: what benefits brought by these elements to western civilization, and all of them would have been lost forever by a possible prevalence of Gnosis. What damage would have been caused by pauperism, pacifism, Gnostic-type radical purism if they had been able to spread without restraint! When commenting on the battle of Muret on 13 September 1213, when Simone de Montfort, after having attended Mass celebrated by St. Dominic, led 1,000 men in a rout of the Aragonese army supporting the Albigensians with 40,000 men, Jean Guitton said: “Muret is one of those decisive battles where the destiny of a civilization was decided. Strangely enough, most historians overlook this fact”[5].

The second example concerns Pious IX and the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Jesus. The definition of this dogma issued forth from a theological reading of the events of the liberal revolution. According to Pious IX all the contemporary errors stemmed from the negation of original sin, and hence the irreconcilability between God and sin. The aim of life had to be the progress of man and the world; modern man had to become autonomous and self-sufficient, liberating himself from the tutelage of the Church; religion was only useful for purposes of civil progress and had to be subordinate to it. Once original sin was denied, however, there was no place for Christ, the Church and for grace.

In the face of such a vision of things Pious IX wanted to reiterate the irreconcilability between God and the sin of the world, as well as the fact that the ultimate aim of the world and history is not the celebration of human progress, but the glory of God. And he did this by proclaiming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, “glorious victor over heresies”.

The violent events Pious IX had to witness were part of a plan to emancipate the natural order from the supernatural order. He was of the opinion that it was not possible to come to terms with this plan, that it could not be “Catholicised”. Hence the genesis of the Encyclical Letter Quanta cura and the Sillabo, which are not to be separated from the profound theological significance of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, but, together with Vatican Council I, seen as Pious IX’s response to modern sin. Not by chance was 8 December an important date for all of them: the proclamation of the dogma on that date in 1854, the Quanta cura and the Sillabo in 1864, and the opening of Vatican Council I in 1869[6].

The construction of western civilization took place with dogmas. Dogma was the principle wellspring for countering the apostasy of the West from Christianity. And this because that apostasy had also become dogmatic.

The secularisation of the West

I intentionally took an example from the early centuries of Christianity and a second one from modernity. Between them there is the construction of a Christian civilization and then a progressive parting from it through ever more accentuated secularisation. Nonetheless, since many are those who attribute this secularisation to Christianity itself, things become a bit complicated. But let’s take it by steps.

Perhaps less than well known may be the fact that the most enthusiastic exaltation of the importance of the Catholic Church for western civilization is contained in the work, which, more so than any other, theorized a rigorous and complete secularisation of that selfsame civilization, I am referring to Auguste Comte’s The Course in Positive Philosophy. Karl Löwith, in his rightly famous book “Meaning in History. The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, cites Comte’s laudatory words regarding Catholicism[7] and argues that Comte held the Catholic system in high esteem especially as regards the separation of spiritual power from temporal power. That’s what we could call laicity. Regarding Protestantism, on the other hand, Comte thought it had favoured “the emancipation of temporal power and the subordination of spiritual power to national interests”[8]. Catholicism had founded an order, while Protestantism “had laid the foundations for the modern philosophical revolution, proclaiming the right of each individual to free enquiry in all fields”[9]. Comte was of the opinion that “the degeneration of the European system has but one cause, that being the political degradation of spiritual power”, and Karl Löwith comments: “If we think each immature spirit was left to its own decisions in the most important matters, there is reason for being surprised that morality did not decline completely”[10]. Back during his times it had yet to decline completely.

The work by Karl Löwith I have cited here explains in a convincing manner how the modernist philosophy of history from Voltaire all the way to Nietzsche consists in a progressive secularisation of Catholic dogmas. A turning point of great interest in this secularisation process is to be found in Comte. In Catholic dogma he saw the condition for the existence of the social order according to a principle of distinction between temporal and spiritual power based on the political role of spiritual power. Nonetheless, he also saw that this equilibrium was by then in disarray because in the wake of the “Protestant revolutions”, the spiritual realm had abdicated its duties over the temporal order, and the latter had emancipated itself from the spiritual realm. At one and the same time, therefore, in Comte we have utmost praise for the historical structure of Catholicism and its most radical negation through the proposal of a equally absolute but radically lay position: the positive spirit. According to Henri de Lubac, Comte’s positivism is the most radical among the forms of contemporary atheistic humanism insofar as it projects a life without God, with no more regrets or illusions, and precisely for this reason has the same motivating force of a religion able to construct an order. An order without God. In de Lubac’s mind this project was and remains doomed to failure.[11] This, however, is not the point of interest for us at the moment. What interests us here is its “dogmatic” character, dogmatic in the sense of being radically and absolutely anti-Catholic. Then again, if the construction of the West had been due to Catholic dogmas, and if the ‘dismantling’ had taken place through the secularisation of Catholic dogmas as so will demonstrated by Karl Löwith, the decisive turning point had to take place when secularisation also assumed the character of dogmatic absoluteness. This transpired with Comte, and we can therefore say positivism is the dogma of modernity. 

Regarding the presumed irreversibility of secularisation

I’d like to return to Karl Löwith’s comment about the modern autonomy of the temporal sphere from the spiritual one cited above: “If we think each immature spirit was left to its own decisions in the most important matters, there is reason for being surprised that morality did not decline completely”. Coming to the surface here is a decisive point in the issue at hand: does the emancipation of the temporal from the spiritual, the replacement of Christian salvation with progress and religion with science produce true autonomy capable of self-conservation at its own level, or does it produce “decadence”? Löwith seems to align with the latter position, and in the commentary under consideration considers it miraculous that it proved possible to maintain an albeit weak form of morality after this detachment.

Laicity understood as the mutual distinction of the temporal sphere and the spiritual sphere is an historical contribution of Christianity. Said distinction, however, did not mean the separation and absolute autonomy of the temporal sphere from the spiritual sphere, but took place within Christian civilization, against a religious horizon. The Christian sovereign acted autonomously, deploying political prudence, which means exercising liberty within a system of truths whose ultimate guarantor was the Church, which in Catholic dogmas conserved and protected the patrimony of natural law as well.

As Karl Löwith remarks, however, beginning with modernity is an ever more demanding secularisation that renders the temporal sphere “capax sui”, autonomous in an absolute sense, sufficient unto itself, and able to endow itself with sense. Initially this ‘sense’ was borrowed from Christian dogmas through a secularised interpretation of them, but then claimed more and more as proper to secularisation itself, and this seems to have occurred especially with Comte and positivism.

Published in 1968 was the book “On the Theology of the World” written by Johann Baprist Metz, a German theologian and disciple of Karl Rahner. Prior to this he had written “Christian Anthropocentricity” in which he had argued that secularisation had been caused by Christianity and was hence a Christian fact to be accepted and lived as a fruit of Christianity, not to be fought against as contrary to Christian faith. In this manner the process of secularisation was interpreted as irreversible. In this later book Metz sustained that in the wake of secularisation the world had by now become completely worldly: “This the world where God is not encountered” [12]. In is opinion, “for a long time – almost up to the beginning of the last Council – the Church had followed this process only with resentment, considered it almost exclusively as a downfall and a false emancipation, and only quite slowly built up the courage to let the world become ‘worldly’ in this sense, and hence consider this process not just a fact contrary to the historical intentions of Christianity, but rather a fact determined also by the most profound historical impulses of this Christianity and its message” [13].

In my opinion it is not correct to retain that positivist secularisation stems from Christianity itself, nor can we accept the view that it is the destiny of history. The irreversibility of secularisation is a positivist dogma issuing forth from an ideological reading of history, the Comtean reading of the law of the three stages, whereby humanity would have evolved from the religious stage to the metaphysical stage to the positive stage in an irreversible manner.

What are the ultimate reasons why positivist secularisation cannot be seen as a consequence of Christianity, or considered irreversible?

The first reason is that positivism cannot help but project itself as a new religion. We saw this above: secularisation becomes such when it does not limit itself to being the immanent reformulation of Catholic dogmas, detaches itself completely from Christian tradition, and proposes itself as an absolute principle. For as long as Hegel, Marx, Pr0udhon, and Voltaire, Condorcet, and Turgot before them had limited themselves to replicating Christianity by proposing an immanent and secularised version of it, the phases of secularisation could not lay a claim to true self-autonomy or embody secularisation in the true sense. The process remained linked to Christianity and continued to be reversible. What other way to sever this umbilical cord with Christianity than to propose secularisation as an absolute principle? Hence its religious character; religious no longer in the sense of still being in debt to the ‘old’ religion, but religious in the sense of religiously expressing an absolute anti-religiosity.

This secularisation is not the fruit of Christianity.

The eclipse of nature and human nature in particular

As already remarked above, the second reason has to do with the possibility for the temporal level emancipated from the spiritual level to maintain itself without succumbing to self-degeneration.

Having acquired the feature of religious absoluteness, as we have just seen, secularisation is destined to be opposed to the concept of nature, as well as the concept of human nature. This is because otherwise maintained would be a moral order that would constantly and implicitly demand completion of some sort of religious form. If nature remains, so does natural law, that being the order of nature that expresses a moral norm. In its turn, the norm contained in natural law would keep ever open the issue of its absolute and transcendent foundation, because in itself the moral order needs an absolute foundation. Proposed anew, therefore, would be the ‘old’ religion. For as long as Hugo Grotius denies the transcendent foundation of natural law, but maintains natural law, there is no irreversibility: the need for a transcendent foundation can be argued and recovered. But if nature is denied, as does positivism, this becomes definitively impossible and we have irreversibility.

Naïve, therefore, is the perplexed astonishment voiced by Karl Löwith. It is not possible for the natural level to endure on its own once detached from the supernatural level. The stark version of positivism projects itself as a “new beginning”, absolute and religiously anti-religious. In order to do this it cannot help but deny nature and natural law. Their decomposition and their abandonment may well be progressive in time, but the principle of this process is stipulated in its absoluteness from the very outset. What we witness nowadays is a rampant and alarming negation of nature and natural law. Without the support of the Christian religion the natural dimension of procreation, matrimony and the family is not able to hold its ground. The so-called “gender ideology”[14] is the most recent outpost of this negation of nature and human identity.

West means Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. Benedict XVI repeated his in his famous speech to the Bundestag in Berlin[15]. However, when Christianity encountered Greek thought and Roman civilization, in addition, quite naturally, to the Jewish religion, it discovered in them both openness to transcendence and consideration of the force of natural law. It found a pre-Christian but human world. Today, however, it is faced with a post-human and hence radically post-Christian world.

The religious proposal of laicity

I have depicted an historical profile more in terms of the history of ideas than the history of facts, and this itinerary has shown that laicity is a Christian concept. This concept implies the separation of the political sphere from the ecclesial one, temporal power from spiritual power. It does not, however, call for the separation of politics from ethics, because the political sovereign, who is distinct from he who exercises spiritual authority, acts according to rational prudence and not in an arbitrary manner, since “there are limits to what the State may command, also when it is a matter of what belongs to Caesar” [16]. Neither in terms of personal will or discretion, nor in terms of a “will expressed by the majority”: as far as this point is concerned democracy has not contributed – in theory – to any radical change of perspective. Insofar as inseparable from ethics, to which it is directly bound, politics is also inseparable from religion as such and from the Catholic religion in particular. In fact, the ethical level is ultimately unable to serve as its own foundation by remaining at the simply natural level: “If we do not first understand our relationship with God we’ll never be able to keep these ambits in correct order” [17].

In modernity, however, another concept of laicity saw the light of day. Initially this was divined as the secularisation of Christian dogmas, but then became radically detached from Christianity and from any order, erecting itself as a new absolute and religious principle. This happened with positivism understood as a perennial category. In this manner the political level became completely autonomous from the religious level, but it also became incompatible with Christianity by assuming a religious form in itself. This is how relativism became a dictatorship.

In the face of such a scenario, rather naïve is the attempt on the part of Christianity to “laicise itself”, abandoning the cloak of dogmas and doctrine in order to dialogue with the lay world. If there were anything akin to a non absolute lay level open to human nature and religion, dialogue on laicity involving believers would prove possible. Unfortunately, this is not the main trend, and the reason is quite simple and grave at one and the same time: in order to be ‘lay’ in the sense we have just seen, laicity needs the Christian religion. Therefore, a laicity that has projected itself with positivism as an absolute and religious principle cannot be ‘lay’. This is the paradox of the west: the farther away people go from Christianity in order to be ‘lay’, all the less are they so.

Following this paradox is yet another one. If Christians wish to contribute to positive laicity they must propose the religious dimension of their faith in its completeness, without any forms of horizontal reductionism. Here as well is the reason so tragically simple: in a religiously post-human world it is necessary to begin from the proposal of Christ and then, within the religious vision, recover the human dimension and hence the ‘lay’ dimension. This is where the Social Doctrine of the Church encounters “new evangelisation”.

Endnotes

[1] This expression is used often by Joseph Ratzinger lo indicate the encounter of the Christian faith with Greek philosophy, and we can also use it in the broader sense of encounter with the West. Cf for example: J. Ratzinger, Fede Verità Tolleranza. Il cristianesimo e le religioni del mondo, Cantagalli, Siena 2003, p. 98.

[2] Fundamental references are the works of Christopher Dawson: La formazione della civiltà occidentale, D’Ettoris editori, Crotone 2011; Id., La divisione della Cristianità occidentale, D’Ettoris editori, Crotone 2009.

[3] J. Ratzinger, L’Europa di Benedetto nella crisi delle culture, Cantagalli, Siena 2005, p. 37.

[4] J. Ratzinger,Fede Verità Tolleranza. Il cristianesimo e le religioni del mondo cit., p. 74.

[5] J. Guitton, Il Cristo dilacerato. Crisi e concili nella storia, Cantagalli, Siena 2002, p. 166.

[6] Cf R. de Mattei, Pio IX e la rivoluzione italiana, Cantagalli, Siena 2012.

[7] K. Löwith, Significato e fine della storia. I presupposti teologici della filosofia della storia, Il Saggiatore, Milano 2010, pp. 98-104 (prima edizione 1977).

[8] Ibid, p. 100.

[9] Ibid, p. 101.

[10] Ibid, p. 103.

[11] De Lubac H., Il dramma dell’umanesimo ateo, Morcelliana, Brescia 1988.

[12] J. B. Metz, Sulla teologia del mondo, Queriniana, Brescia 1969, p. 144.

[13] Ibid, pg. 141.

[14] Osservatorio Internazionale Cardinale Van Thuân sulla Dottrina sociale della Chiesa, Fourth Report on the Social Doctrine of the Church in the World (edited by G. Crepaldi and S. Fontana), Cantagalli, Siena 2012.

[15] Benedetto XVI, Seech at the Reichstag in Berlin, 22 September 2011.

[16] J. V. Schall,Filosofia politica della Chiesa cattolica, Cantagalli, Siena 2011, p. 123.

[17] Ibid, pg. 122.

© International Observatory Cardinal Van Thuân for the Social Doctrine of the Church

When the State Replaces God - An interview with Benjamin Wiker, the author of Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion

In CWR 

Benjamin Wiker is a senior fellow at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, a contributor to Catholic World Report, and the author of several books, including the recently published Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion (Regnery, 2013). He spoke with CWR about his book. 

CWR: Isn’t the title of your book hyperbolic and simply meant to stir up interest? Can it really be argued that anyone, at least in the United States, really worships the state? Whatever do you mean by that?  

Wiker: Well, it’s certainly meant to stir up interest! Do people in the US, especially from the Left, physically get down and bow before, say, the steps of the Supreme Court? No! But do they treat the state as a kind of substitute for God? Yes, very much so. Is there precedent in the history of liberalism for an actual worshipping of the state? Again, yes. 

We first have to stand back and look at our current situation within a larger historical framework. Over the last two hundred years, self-consciously secular states have, quite literally, transferred worship from God to humanity itself, or more precisely, to the greatest concentration of human power, the state. 

The French Revolution’s Religion of Reason was actually a worship of man himself, and the secular revolutionary state made up its own religion, so that the revolution itself and the revolutionary state became the object of actual religious devotion. 

This same kind of movement—rejecting Christianity, only to idolize the secular state—occurred with various other political movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries: nationalism, communism, Fascism, and Nazism are the most obvious examples. For good reason, scholars have called these “political religions.” 

Socialism was one more political religion, which quite literally understood itself as transferring the worship from God to humanity itself, or more exactly, to the socialist state that promised to give citizens in this life what Christianity had promised only in the next—a this-worldly utopia. Socialism was, therefore, essentially religious in its original conception, and it became the historical foundation of liberal progressivism in the United States. 

So, yes, we are talking about actual worship of the state! But we can also see, even aside from this historical background, that the liberal state has taken upon itself the role of God, even while it busily evicts Christianity from the public square.

Let me offer one important example, President Obama’s HHS mandate, compelling all institutions, including Catholic institutions, to pay for contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization. That’s the liberal state saying, “Thou shalt participate in the liberal sexual revolution.” That’s the state defining good and evil. 

The same thing is occurring with the Left’s use of the courts to impose the acceptance of gay marriage, or the state, with abortion and euthanasia, taking upon itself the authority to define what marriage is, what life is, and when death should be dealt.
CWR: There are, as you note, many types of “liberalism.” What form of liberalism is your book about? And why do you write that “we cannot even understand liberalism until we understand some important things about Christianity”? What things?

 

Wiker: I begin with the most obvious and familiar form of liberalism, with liberalism as it is understood on the popular level. What are the typical liberal views? Liberals tend to be atheistic, agnostic, or at best affirmative of a “progressive” form of Christianity with little or no doctrine and a liberal view of morality. Liberals support abortion, the gay agenda, the sexual revolution, multiculturalism, a kind of moral relativism, euthanasia. And finally, liberals tend to support big government. 

That’s the popular conception of liberalism, and it’s a reasonable place to begin to understand it more deeply. While relying on this, I take the reader more deeply into the historical origins of liberalism, going all the way back to Machiavelli in the early 1500s. Here, with Machiavelli, we can most clearly see what liberalism, in its origin and essence, really was and is. It begins with a kind of double movement, a self-conscious rejection of Christianity by Machiavelli, and an affirmation of our bodily existence in this world as our highest good. 

Thus, liberalism, at its heart, is secular, defined by the rejection of Christianity and its simultaneous affirmation of the world. In this, it represents a kind of return to paganism. That’s why, historically, the advance of secular liberalism has meant both de-Christianization, and a return to a pagan worldview. 

CWR: What sort of “cosmological support,” to quote from the book, does “liberalism demand”? 

 

Wiker: When we understand liberalism as a self-conscious affirmation of life in this world as the only defining good for human beings, we have the key to understanding what kind of cosmos liberalism needed to support it—and that is a materialist view of the cosmos. 

It’s no accident at all that with the rise of liberal secularism we also have the rise of the materialist worldview. What’s the best way to rid the world of Christianity? Simply make a world into which Christianity won’t fit: a world made entirely of matter, a world without souls, spirits, or God. 

That’s why secular liberals always push, as part of their agenda, an entirely materialist worldview. It’s a view of reality that disallows the central truths of Christianity any foothold. If human beings are just elaborate chemical creatures, with no soul, and there’s no God, then all Christian doctrines are entirely without any foundation. 

This worldview also supports—really, defines—every aspect of the liberal view of morality. If we are only bodies, then good and evil must be defined entirely by body, that is to say, entirely by physical pleasure and pain. And so, anything that anyone finds physically pleasurable, must be, for that person, good. Good and evil are entirely relative, entirely defined by our private, individual physical desires. Of course, in a materialist world, God, who is pure spirit, cannot exist, so we are left free to make up our own morality. 

CWR: How did the early Christians go about dealing with what you call “the degraded pagan state”? Didn’t the Church simply become degraded and corrupted as well after Constantine legalized Christianity in the fourth century?

 

Wiker: Why is this question important? We realize why when we learn that the pagan Romans heartily affirmed contraception, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, easy divorce, easy sex, pornography, pedophilia homosexuality, and yes, even homosexual marriage! In other words, the first Christians were born into a pagan state, a pagan culture, that looks suspiciously like ours! Or to put it the other way around, secular liberalism has brought us right back to paganism, and contemporary Christians should have an unpleasant feeling of déjÀ vu. 

But that realization also brings with it an important lesson. The first Christians didn’t crawl into the catacombs in order to avoid the degraded pagan culture; instead they marched forth and evangelized it. That’s how the pagan Roman Empire, and hence the West, became Christianized. 

And that includes the evangelization of pagan Roman emperors, the first one to convert being Constantine. Jesus said to convert everyone, even the people at the top! 

While many, looking back, have viewed the conversion of Constantine as a kind of “fall” from pure Christianity, the Christians of the time didn’t think so. Just before this conversion, Christians were being burned alive, flayed, torn apart by animals, beheaded, beaten, jailed, and so on—by the pagan state. They rejoiced at the news that, quite suddenly, the pagan Emperor had converted, and rightly saw it as a fulfillment of Christ’s power of transforming everything. Constantine’s conversion was seen as a great act of Divine Providence. 

I suspect those who, looking back, yearn for the good old days of Christianity before Constantine where Christians were being massacred in the cruelest possible ways, have a merely romantic idea of what it might mean to be hunted down by the state. They should ask Christians who have lived under communism how romantic it is! 

Did the conversion of Constantine cause problems? Yes, but not nearly as many as is often reported. What Christians did learn was that the emperor could not be the head of the church—even with the best of intentions, his political aims will, sooner or later, corrupt the church. So, the Church did self-consciously create distance between itself and the state. Instead of being absorbed by the state—as pagan religion was, and to a great extent, as the Church in the East was—the Church in the West asserted that there must be a true distinction between church and state; that they must each act under their own governance, and for their own respective aims. In short, it was the Church that invented the distinction between Church and state.
CWR: In what ways did the Church invent and develop the distinction between Church and state? And if that is so, why do so many Christians seem to dislike or even attack the “separation of Church and State”? 

 

Wiker: Let’s quickly view the words of the late-fifth century pope Gelasius: 

For Christ, mindful of human frailty, regulated with an excellent disposition what pertained to the salvation of his people. Thus he distinguished between the offices of both powers according to their own proper activities and separate dignities, wanting his people to be saved by healthful humility and not carried away again by human pride, so that Christian emperors would need priests for attaining eternal life and priests would avail themselves of imperial regulations in the conduct of temporal affairs. In this fashion spiritual activity would be set apart from worldly encroachments and the “soldier of God” (2 Timothy 2:4) would not be involved in secular affairs, while on the other hand he who was involved in secular affairs would not seem to presided over divine matters. Thus the humility of each order would be preserved, neither being exalted by the subservience of the other, and each profession would be especially fitted for its appropriate functions. 

Note the main reason to keep the Church and state separate: to avoid pride and corruption. The political ruler must always remember that he needs the priest, he needs the Church, for the sake of his ultimate salvation. He’s not a God on earth. He’s not above God’s law and the need for God’s grace. On the other hand, the leaders of the Church must not usurp the place of political rulers or they will become worldly, and hence corrupt the church. 

So each has its appropriate function and domain: the Church, caring for the good of the soul in regard to the next life, and the state caring for those things largely pertaining to caring for bodily things and administering justice in this world. 

But note: the Church invented the distinction between the Church and the state. It was not understood as a separation defined by antagonism, as if it were the state against the Church. The kind of antagonism where we have a secular state trying to erase any and all influence of the Church—that’s the invention of modern secular liberalism. Unfortunately, we’ve lost the original meaning of the distinction between Church and state, and that is due to the rise of modern liberalism. Christians need to understand where the distinction really came from, and what it originally meant, as well as why and how it was corrupted by secular liberalism—and of course, I spend quite a lot of time on that in Worshipping the State.

 

CWR: Why was Machiavelli so important in the development of our modern understanding of “state”? And what were some of the key consequences of that development?

 

Wiker: It was, in fact, Machiavelli who invented the modern secular state, the state defined by its essential rejection of Christianity, and its embrace of an entirely this-worldly, materialistic view of politics. Our contemporary notion of “erecting a wall of separation between the church and state,” of the state as an active, secularizing institution bent on removing Christianity from the public square, is indebted to Machiavelli. 

The obvious consequence of accepting Machiavelli’s view is that the Church is driven into extinction or, somewhat more generously, impotence and irrelevance. Secularization means de-Christianization, and that’s what Christians are experiencing today. 

CWR: You argue that Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) was crucial as both the “father of modern liberal democracy” and “the father of modern Scripture scholarship”? How can that can be so when there hasn’t been a movie made about his life? 

 

More seriously, how did Spinoza's pantheistic views affect the Western understanding of the state? And what did Spinoza think of Christianity in general and the Catholic Church specifically?  

Wiker: I think there should be a movie, because the intrigue in regard to the strategy of secularists like Spinoza in ridding the world of orthodox Christianity is every bit as interesting, even more so, than the ever-lamentable novel The Da Vinci Code, which painted orthodox Christianity as itself a kind of conspiracy! 

Spinoza was a key radical Enlightenment thinker, certainly one of the most influential. As with all the other secular thinkers of the Enlightenment, Spinoza thought Christianity was a great big historical mistake, and Catholicism was the worst form of it. He therefore sought for a way, or ways, to undermine it. He was a brilliant strategist.

For example, rather than attack the Bible directly, he undermined it by introducing an approach to the study of Scripture that results in turning the Bible into a morality tale for the masses. To take a related example, rather than attack Christian doctrine directly, he argued that all that mattered, to be Christian, was that you loved your neighbor—all the other beliefs, all the other dogmas and doctrines were merely window-dressing. What he meant by loving your neighbor was tolerating whatever beliefs your neighbor had as long as he was generally law-abiding, because religious beliefs were entirely subjective. That view helped to define modern liberal democracy, where everyone’s beliefs about God are equally viable and equally true because they are equally without foundation. 

But Spinoza did have a kind of philosophic religion. He was a pantheist, famously declaring that God is nature and nature is God. The result, once the belief caught hold with the Romantics, was that nature was worshipped as divine. But since we are part of nature, then we are divine as well. And since the state is something that we divine human beings make, then the state must be divine! So, Spinoza’s pantheism contributed directly to the efforts of those who, in the 19th and 20th centuries, considered the state itself to be a god worthy of our highest worship. 

CWR: What is relationship between liberalism (as you've described above) and democracy? What are some of the essential factors that must be considered in assessing that relationship?  

Wiker: This is a tricky question, one that must be handled delicately because of the reigning confusions, both about democracy and about liberalism. To be all too quick about it, secular liberalism was historically defined by its essential antagonism to Christianity. It wanted to remove Christianity from culture, root and branch. It met the Christian understanding that there is real truth, with a new form of intellectual and moral relativism—the intellectual and moral relativism which so dominates our academic and intellectual circles today was devised by these first secular thinkers like Machiavelli, and we may add, Thomas Hobbes.

What does that have to do with liberal democracy? Liberalism so dislikes the Christian claim to have the truth, that it embraces the notion that there is no truth, and that anybody’s view is as good as anyone else’s. It undermines Christianity by undermining any claim to the truth. 

That relativism undergirds the liberal view of democracy, where no one’s view is any better or worse than anyone else’s, so everyone’s view must count equally. Since there is no truth, the goal of liberal democracy becomes affirming everyone’s right to do and say whatever he or she pleases. 

That is liberal democracy. Suffice it to say that democracy could be built on other foundations, such as the notion that all are created in the image of God, that we all are sinners, that we are all loved by God, that we are all in need of moral regeneration, and that we all have moral obligations to fulfill in society. 

CWR: What are the “two faces of liberalism”? What face are we staring at today, in 2013, in the United States? What are some of the unique features of secularism in the US?  

Wiker: This is a rather complex point, but to boil it down, there are two main streams in the historical development of liberalism, what we might call conservative or classical liberalism, and radical liberalism. Both share in the fundamental liberal aim to entirely secularize (i.e., de-Christianize) the state. 

The father of classical or conservative liberalism is John Locke, a very ambiguous figure, to say the least. Locke’s aim was to secularize the state, make it entirely defined by this worldly bodily welfare. In his words, the sole aim of government is the protection of property—not the encouragement of virtue, not the care of the souls of the citizens, not a preparation for the next life, but merely to see to it that its citizens could make money, and those who made it could keep it. Locke wanted to liberate the state from the Christian concern for the fate of the soul in the next world; or to be more blunt, he wanted to liberate the citizens from the Christian worry about the sin of avarice, so that they can pursue this-worldly economic gain with a clear conscience. 

Yet, Locke believed that religion was necessary as a kind of moral prop for this essentially economic endeavor—religion is necessary to control the unpropertied masses!—so he didn’t want Christianity thrown out. He just wanted it transformed into a moral helpmate for the secular, economically-defined state. That makes him “conservative” in his liberalism. 

The other face of liberalism is radical. It wants the message of liberation from the Christianity preached to everyone. Here, the father is Rousseau, and then, after him, Marx. Here we find the seeds of full-bore anti-Christian secular liberalism that we are familiar with today. 

Radical liberalism arose as a reaction to conservative or classical liberalism. The radicals argued that religion was merely a prop protecting the propertied classes in society, the so-called capitalists (which, of course, was true, given Locke’s assumptions). So, out with religion! Let the property of the few be distributed to the many, and let us have a secular state governed by everyone and serving everyone with every this-worldly good. 

That’s where socialism, communism, and the modern welfare state come from. Or, to bring it down to our contemporary political level, Republicans tend to be classical liberals supporting a government that protects economic interests, and Democrats tend to be radical liberals touting a government that dispenses economic benefits to everyone.

Unfortunately, in the contemporary US, Christians are made to believe that the entire choice they have is between two kinds of liberals, rather than digging more deeply into history, and into the Church’s own teaching, for a more profound understanding of politics that transcends our current situation.
CWR: Your final chapter is titled “Disestablishing Secular Liberalism.” What must be done? What is, realistically, the alternative to secular, democratic state?

 

Wiker: I offer several strategies for disestablishing secular liberalism as our defining cultural worldview, as the religion adopted and pushed by the secular state. 

First, we need to understand that secular liberalism isn’t a neutral view—the view that you get when you subtract all the various religious views from the public square. Rather, liberalism is a very particular worldview, with its own assumptions about the universe, about human nature, good and evil, what should be done by the state, and so on. Indeed, liberalism qualifies as a religion: it is as extensive in its claims as any religion, and it historically was understood, in its various forms, as a religion meant to displace Christianity. 

So, if liberalism is a religion, then it should be, according to our First Amendment, disestablished as the official government-sponsored worldview. That doesn’t mean liberalism is outlawed. It must simply step down from its privileged position, and take its place among the other religions in the public square, so that it can make its case by argument rather than imposing itself through state power. 

Second, we need to become educated about what really happened historically, both in regard to the history of Christianity and the history of modern secular liberalism. Ignorance of what actually happened historically is a great obstacle to re-evangelizing our de-Christianized culture. 

We need to understand that it was the Church that invented the distinction between the church and the state, and we need to be very clear about what the difference is between what the Church intended and what liberalism now puts forth as the separation of church and state. 

We need to understand that it was Christianity that invented the university. Why? Consider what effect it might have to teach, in our universities today, that the university wouldn’t exist if Christianity hadn’t invented it. The next obvious question is, or should be: What is it about Christianity, about its doctrines, about the structure of the Church, that brought about the invention of the university within Christendom and nowhere else? To understand why there is a university at all, we must carefully and sympathetically study the history of the Church. That, one hopes, would lead to a kind of openness in the universities to Christianity, rather than what we generally find today—complete animosity. 

There are other examples in Worshipping the State of teaching “what really happened” that would go a long way in undermining the smug hold on culture enjoyed by secular liberals. Liberals make the case for secularization by presenting Christianity, historically, as the cause of all kinds of evil. We need to counteract that. We need to study what actually happened in the Crusades, rather than the various myths that support the liberal view of Christianity’s “dark” history. Study the history of science, and discover that modern science was born in the Middle Ages, in the Church, and that the first scientists were monks, priests, and bishops. Study the actual history of warfare, and discover that, contrary to popular liberal opinion, the Church isn’t the cause of the greatest and bloodiest wars, and that the number slaughtered in the name of secularism dwarfs the numbers killed in the name of faith. 

But above all, we can’t just look to the past. We must attend to the future. The Church must evangelize the culture, just as it did the declining pagan culture of the Roman Empire—and this is not a mere analogy, since secular liberalism has created a culture that differs very little from that of ancient pagan Rome. 

What is the alternative to a secular, democratic state? Well, to be a bit startling, one alternative is occurring in Europe. The secular liberal democracies of Europe are imploding. The sexual revolution has reduced them to a birthrate far below replacement, and family life has been all but destroyed. The population vacuum is being filled by Muslim immigration and a birthrate far above replacement.  The imminent alternative to a secular, democratic state in Europe is a Muslim state, where a determined minority fast becoming a majority uses democracy to transform the state from a secular, democratic state into a theocracy governed by sharia law. 

Let’s look at another alternative, an understanding of politics built upon the natural law. The natural law is not explicitly Christian, that is, it is not based upon Christian revelation, but is rooted in the nature of human beings as such, and hence available to everyone. 

This would be democratic, in the sense that all human beings are equally human, and must therefore be treated as having equal moral worth. But it wouldn’t be based upon a false equality of relativism where all opinions are equal—i.e., the liberal notion that there is no truth, and so anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s. Needful to say, the liberal notion that there is no truth undermines itself! Why should we hold to liberal views if no view is any better or worse? 

Nor would it be based upon the liberal notion that human beings are merely soulless chemical aggregates who have nothing more to hope for in life than physical pleasure, but rather, upon the full reality of the human good as defined by our being a unity of soul and body. 

This is only a sketch, and it would take an entire book to fill in the details—a task which I might very soon take up as a sequel to Worshipping the State.