A Thinking Reed

The politics of religious language

Written by

Lee M.

in

Eric links to this interesting article by two theologians in the International Herald Tribune which argues that, rhetoric notwithstanding, the (in their view, unrelievedly bad) policies of Bush and Blair are motivated by secular ideology, not Christianity. Far be it from me, as anyone who reads this blog knows, to defend the recent foreign policy moves of the Bush administration, but there are a couple of points where I want to disagree with what these gents are saying.

First, we get the now-hackneyed identification of the “fall” of the church with the ascendancy of Constantine. I realize this is a brief article, but can we get past this simplistic dichotomy of pre-Constantinian church=good/post-Constantinian church=bad? In addition to being historically dubious, it seems to me that this stance risks a seriously truncated doctrine of providence. This is sort of the highbrow version of the fundamentalist view that the church lapsed into apostasy sometime shortly after Paul’s letters were written, only to re-emerge sometime during the 16th century.

Secondly, there is the blaming of the ills of nationalism, war, racism, etc. on the ever-present bogey of “liberalism.” Are we to understand that these things don’t exist in non-liberal societies? Again we get the Christianity=good/liberalism=bad dichotomy with little or no recognition that classical political liberalism has its roots in Christianity, not only in early modern thinkers like Locke, but going back at least to the later Scholastics like Francisco Suarez and Protestant thinkers like Hugo Grotius with their concept of natural rights, international law, just war, etc.

That said, the piece makes some good points about how politicians hijack lofty religious rhetoric for less than noble purposes. Definitely worth a read.

Comments

8 responses to “The politics of religious language”

  1. Eric Lee

    Per your second point, I really think you doth protest too much. It’s not all based on causality like you consistently argue. These guys wouldn’t say that these things don’t appear in non-liberal societies. In fact, they don’t. You persisitently come up with this argument, but it has no basis, and I feel it misses the point.

    Masonry also has some beginnings with people who claimed to be Christian, or at least many who call themselves Christian are Masons, but that doesn’t mean that Masonry is Christian. Empires have had leaders who are Christian, but that doesn’t mean that the empires have ever been Christian. Socialism has had many proponents who were Christian, but that doesn’t make socialism by itself, Christian. Nor does it follow that just because liberalism had its start with some who were and some who were not Christian, does it then get baptized in any way as ‘Christian.’

    The dichotomy of Christianity=good and liberalism=bad is one that you’re imposing upon these guys more than they are even saying, which is always frustrating. If these guys (say, Blond) is at all Augustinian like many of these RO guys try to be, there is no such thing as these black and white dichotomies that you try to project on them. Instead, since sin is seen as a lack, then liberalism, while of course constantly critiqued and rightly shown having a pagan philosophy, doesn’t mean it is pure nothingness, but just that the violence that it perpetuates does not participate in God.

    Because causality isn’t the problem, I don’t see why you persist in making it one? Not once have I ever seen these guys argue that these ills are unique to liberalism, so I don’t know why you’re saying that they are saying this. But, because Liberalism seems to happily engage in these ills (it is happy to ‘tolerate’ them, at least) at the moment and its undergirding philosophies are fertile soil for them, I see no reason that they shouldn’t continue their critiques.

    Peace,

    Eric

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  2. Lee

    But if liberalism doesn’t cause the problems, then why invoke it at all? What explanatory work is it doing? Why say things like “Thus does liberalism make fundamentalists out of us all”?

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  3. Lee

    In fairness to Blond and Pabst, their essay can be read to be criticizing a perversion of liberalism rather than liberalism per se as in this passage:

    “Contemporary liberalism has championed the secularization of both religion and politics. In the name of tolerance and pluralism, secular liberals relegated religion to the private sphere. By denying religion any public import, this hitherto shared realm became drained of any objective moral beliefs. Society was atomized and culture surrendered to relativism.

    “Paradoxically, by privatizing religion, secular settlements produced religious fundamentalism. Confined to the personal sphere, religion is deprived of civic engagement that would mitigate fanaticism and foster moderation, and faith answers to no authority other than subjective inner conscience.

    “Indeed, this is why Blair thinks the invasion of Iraq is consonant with his Christian beliefs: On television he explained, “The only way you can take a decision like that is to do the right thing according to your conscience.” The trouble is that once liberalism has surrendered any belief in objective truths, all personal subjective beliefs become true. Once all things are equally valid, the only way to attain supremacy is through war and power. Thus does liberalism make fundamentalists out of us all.”

    But I would deny that these consequences are a necessary outworking of the liberal project.

    Also, I’d argue that Christianity is much more organically connected with liberalism than, say, Masonry!

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  4. Lee

    Also (forgive the triple-post!), as to whether the issue is posed in stark black-and-white terms, Milbank has written:

    “The ‘modernity’ of liberalism has only[!] delivered mass poverty, inequality, erosion of freely associating bodies beneath the level of the State and ecological dereliction of the earth – and now, without the compensating threat of communism, it has abolished the rights and dignity of the worker, ensured that women are workplace as well as domestic and erotic slaves, and finally started to remove the ancient rights of the individual which long precede the creed of liberalism itself (such as habeas corpus in Anglo-Saxon law) and are grounded in the dignity of the person rather than the ‘self-ownership’ of autonomous liberal man (sic).”

    Hardly a nuanced account! Though, these guys may well disagree with Milbank about any number of things for all I know – there’s no reason to suppose a kind of monolithic view on these matters.

    Reply
  5. Eric Lee

    Er, I didn’t say that liberalism doesn’t cause problems, but that causality itself isn’t the problem. My point is that it’s not a pure causality–it can’t be reduced to causality–, but that yes, that being said, liberalism then does cause things to happen, or at least fosters an environment where dualities persist. When life gets broken up in these parts, instead of a wholistic approach, then problems occur — hence what the article is reacting to.

    One of the points of the article is that liberalism fosters a deep rift between faith and reason. So, to answer your question (Why say things like “Thus does liberalism make fundamentalists out of us all”?), the article answers that directly:

    “Paradoxically, by privatizing religion, secular settlements produced religious fundamentalism. Confined to the personal sphere, religion is deprived of civic engagement that would mitigate fanaticism and foster moderation, and faith answers to no authority other than subjective inner conscience.” (Paradoxical because secularism/Liberalism claimed it could be the moderator of the so-called ‘wars of religion’ and stuff.)

    My point is that these guys aren’t saying quite what you’re putting into their mouths. In response to critiques of Liberalism, we can always say that “so and so does it too!”, but at the end of the day, that isn’t really addressing the critiques (nor is it accurately reflecting their original arguments). If it wasn’t Liberalism, then it would be something else causing these divides between faith and reason. Communism does that too, to an exterminationalist extreme — but that doesn’t mean that we can’t then look at how Liberalism causes problems.

    During the comment preview addendum: Ah, just saw your comments. Well, the thing is about Milbank’s quotation: the ‘modernity’ of Liberalism has delivered those ills. It’s not like it can be argued that it has not by pointing elsewhere and that somehow gets Liberalism off the hook! Also, if you notice, he’s talking about the ‘modernity‘ of liberalism, which can only be made sense if you keep reading in his essay.

    To quote from the same essay from which you quoted (found here for anybody following along), Milbank goes on to refute some of your own points, because he is speaking about liberalism in a rather nuanced way:

    What must rather challenge liberalism is a truer ‘liberality’ in the literal sense of a creed of generosity which would suppose, indeed, that societies are more fundamentally bound together by mutual generosity than by contract…………..this being a thesis anciently investigated by Seneca in his De Beneficiis and in modernity again reinstated by Marcel Mauss.

    This is not, of course, to deny that merely ‘liberal’ measures of contract are not ceaselessly necessary to safeguard against the worst tyrannies, nor that we do not often have to resort to them in lieu of more substantive linkages. For these reasons I am not seeking to push a liberal approach altogether off the political agenda. Instead, the argument is that contract can never be the thing that fundamentally brings people together in the first place, nor can it represent the highest ideal of a true distributative justice. So before contract, since it is more socially real, lies the gift, and ahead of contract, since it is more socially ideal, lies once again, the gift.

    Actually, your reading of him is less nuanced than he actually is! 🙂 He is specifically referring to the ‘modernity’ of liberalism which puts the ‘contract’ before the gift.

    It is interesting to play this conversation out to see what our assumptions are about say, Milbank. It’s fun.

    Peace,

    Eric

    Reply
  6. Lee

    But how is Milbank not simply retracting what he just said? How can he say that liberalism has “only delivered mass poverty, inequality. etc.” (all emininently contestable claims, incidentally) and then go on to say that “‘liberal’ measures of contract are […] ceaselessly necessary to safeguard against the worst tyrannies”? It seems like liberalism has delivered something good after all – namely safeguards against tyranny. No small accomplishment, that. In any event, I think Milbank is strawmanning liberalism, or at least he’s ignoring liberal thinkers (Tocqueville, Smith, and Burke among others) that recognize social obligations prior to contractual agreements.

    My beef witht the causal argument is this – it’s not very persuasive to identify liberalism as the cause for particular social ills if those ills aren’t unique to liberal societies. Why not suppose that there’s some other explanation shared by liberal and non-liberal societies? Indeed, I think one could make the case that religious fundamentalism flourishes in its most virulent forms in the least liberal societies (e.g. Saudi Arabia). It seems to me that liberal societies have a much better track record overall on fostering religion’s civic engagement.

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  7. Joshie

    If I may be allowed to jump in, there seems to be some conflation, on Eric and Milbank’s part, of “modernity” and “liberalism”. Saudi Arabia is a modern society, but not a liberal one. Nationalism is a modern phenomenon but the nationalism in Eastern Europe in the late 19th centrury, or Zionism for that matter, did not crop up in “liberal” societies, they developed in the Ottoman (you knew I had to bring them up), Austrian and Russian empires, the bastions of 19th c conservatism. “Liberal” Britain and France were pretty much immune to this. Hence the pan-slavic movement and the fight for Greek indepence but the lack of a pan-Celtic movement or a war for the liberation of Provance.

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  8. Lee

    Right, good points – nationalism and liberalism have frequently been at odds. Though there is, in the U.S. at any rate, a strain of what Christopher Insole calls “crusading liberalism” – the idea that liberal ideals and institutions can be spread by force of arms. It seems that at least some people in the Bush administration (the “neocons”) hold this view. Though I’d argue that rank-and-file war supporters are more likely to be motivated by old-fashioned nationalism (or whatever you want to call the American equivalent, since there isn’t really an American “nation”).

    Where I disagree with Milbank, et al., (I think!) is that I tend to see liberalism as, other things being equal, a good thing, and I think many of the bad things that are attributed to it are either not the results of liberalism or are the results of some distorted form of liberalism.

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