Amidst all the comment surrounding the death of Father Neuhaus, Damon Linker, responding to Ross Douthat, raises the most important politico-theological question of the moment, one that will last far longer than the more obvious immediate questions about whether Neuhaus went way too far in the direction of arguing that a serious Christian is morally obligated to support the GOP (he certainly did), and whether he sometimes indulged in Manichean readings of complex and ambiguous cultural and political phenomena (he did). The question is this: what is the true nature of the relationship between liberalism and Christianity?
Neuhaus regularly argued that Christianity was the ultimate underwriter of a stable, enduring liberal order, because Christian anthropology and its account of secular and sacred realms sustains the virtues, assumptions and practices associated with liberal society, above all the dignity of the individual person and an equal right to life and liberty for all human beings. He was sensitive to the “death of man” he saw emerging beneath the emphasis on a late modern bio-political freedom of choice and desire and with it a purely contractual, utilitarian morality corrosive of pre-liberal institutions (like the family and the right to life from beginning to end)– institutions that liberalism had always assumed so instinctively that it felt no need to defend them.
Linker believes that there isn’t any necessary relationship at all between Christianity and liberalism– indeed that as a “religion” Christianity, like other religions, has to be quite vigilantly set apart from politics for liberalism to function. I assume that Linker would be prepared to concede that there is a historical relationship between Christianity and liberalism, but that even this historical relationship would, in his view, give ample testimony to the need for religions, including Christianity, to be kept at a safe distance from our common, public life. He may well go farther, and argue that to some extent, religion should not be comprehensively entwined with the moral and cultural sensibilities of liberal citizens (or at least their governing elites), lest volatile and potentially violent religious passions disrupt the practical, sober deal-making and ultimately irenic this-worldliness of liberal politics.
Linker and Neuhaus address themselves to two very different questions, yet come up with the same answer. Neuhaus wanted to ask: what deep implicit assumptions has liberalism historically made about human beings that are not themselves drawn from liberalism? Where did these deep assumptions come from, and are they necessary for the health and flourishing of liberal politics? Linker asks: what are (and have been) the deepest and most persistent threats to the ongoing functioning of developed liberal institutions and their pragmatic orientation, at least at their point of origin? They answers move in the same direction: toward religion, specifically Christianity.
And up to a point, they are both right. Not only are they both (partially) right, but it has been the unique genius of America’s formal and informal Constitution that both truths have been honored and recognized. American society was long imbued with a less than comprehensive but still broadly and deeply religious sensibility, as Tocqueville and countless others have observed. Yet for that very reason, the state could function without religious factionalism and passions manifesting themselves in ongoing and ever-deepening political divisions, as they did with generally awful consequences in modern France, Belgium, Spain and Germany, for example. As American society (at times “from below,” at times through the action of secular-identified “elites”) has become less and less imbued with religious ideas and sensibilities, the wonderful, blessed ambiguity about the relationship between Christianity and liberal order in America has started to require “clarity.” Neuhaus and Linker have both made contributions to this clarification, a tendency that I firmly believe to be dangerous, since this very process of clarification undermines both the healthy, practical secularity of American politics and the permeable but pervasively Christian atmosphere of American society, which indeed does underwrite several assumptions that permit the flourishing of liberal order.
Charles Péguy famously wrote that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” In contemporary America we are watching this apothegm at once confirmed and turned upside down. Our Christian mysteries have become increasingly, foolishly, trivially and tragically politicized in everything from campaign bumper stickers to apologias for an aggressive foreign policy. Yet at the same moment, our regnant, resolutely anti-mystical political philosophy (based on consent, contract, enlightened self-interest, and the resistance to comprehensive accounts of the good life) has achieved the status of a kind of mysticism, one that holds sway over large swaths of American society, and that eagerly labels its critics intolerant and reactionary in its pursuit of ever-greater “choice” in an ineffably individual quest to define the “sweet mystery of life” for themselves alone. History often rewards a highly-developed sense of irony, but this moment in America is one of the more exquisite (and excruciating) historical ironies I can call to mind.
Yet in immediate terms, how can America best preserve the gifts of an ambiguity that is vanishing before our eyes? More on that anon.
