I’m reminded by this post from prolific Orthodox blogger Daniel Larison that there are those who not only don’t regard the First Things crowd as theocrats, but who actually regard them as fatally compromised and sold out to secular Enlightenment liberalism. In addition to traditionalists like Mr. Larison there are folks like Stanley Hauerwas who resent what they characterize as the liberal-democratic “policing” of distinctive Christian language and practice which they contend is the result of the paradigm pushed by people like Richard John Neuhaus.

That paradigm, as I understand it, is an attempt to “revitalize” the ideas of a liberal political order by basing them on a vision of human nature that is both more secure and truer than the various utilitarian and rights-based approaches inherited from secular liberal theorists. The latter secular liberalism, lacking a distinctive vision of human good and flourishing and based on individual autonomy, has resulted in what Neuhaus and others consider to be an ultra-individualistic and ultimately nihilistic political stance that permits things like abortion-on-demand, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia.

As Neuhaus says:

In the 1960s I was very much a man of the left. Not the left of countercultural drug-tripping and generalized hedonism, but the left exemplified by, for instance, the civil rights movement under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the latter half of the 1960s this began to change with the advent of the debate over what was then called “liberalized” abortion law. By 1967 I was writing about the “two liberalisms”—one, like that earlier civil rights movement, inclusive of the vulnerable and driven by a transcendent order of justice, the other exclusive and recognizing no law higher than individual willfulness. My argument was that, by embracing the cause of abortion, liberals were abandoning the first liberalism that has sustained all that is hopeful in the American experiment.

That is my argument still today. It is, I believe, crucially important that that argument prevail in the years ahead. There is no going back to reconstitute the American order on a foundation other than the liberal tradition. A great chasm has opened between the liberal tradition and what today is called liberalism. That is why some of us are called conservatives. Conservatism that is authentically and constructively American conservatism is conservatism in the cause of reappropriating and revitalizing the liberal tradition.

Some traditionalists and (for lack of a better word) communitarians may agree that America was founded as a liberal order, and that many contemporary “conservatives” are actually a species of liberal. But what they won’t agree to is that this is a good thing or something that Christians should reconcile themselves to. Hauerwas would say that Christians’ primary political commitments should be found in the church – the community constituted by distinctive political practices. And he would add that when Christians seek a “seat at the table” or a “place in the public square” they almost inevitably end up compromising their message and re-interpreting or translating it to make is understandable to a secular order, effectively neutering it in the process.

For my money, I don’t find either Neuhaus’ Thomistic liberalism or Hauerwas’ ecclessiocentric communitarianism fully persuasive (though I think there’s value in both). In my view, the transcendent order of justice Neuhaus appeals to is perceived only incompletely and “through a glass darkly” by any of us in this fallen world, and to attempt to make that perception the basis of a polity is to invite tyranny and coercion. It doesn’t take seriously enough the fact that people can hold, and be justified in holding, quite divergent views about the existence, nature, and character of the transcendent order. This kind of “epistemic humility” ought to make us wary of basing too much in the way of political coercion on our perceptions of it.

Interestingly, I think Hauerwas and some other aligned movements (e.g. Radical Orthodoxy) may make a similar mistake. They claim a high degree of certitude for Christian conviction and action, though they base Christian practice primarily in the church. But by so sharply emphasizing Christian distinctiveness and its irreconcilability with any “secular” (or non-Christian?) outlook, they don’t seem to take seriously the potential for common ground with those who don’t share one’s own convictions as well as for encounters with those others to challenge and even change one’s convictions.

Following Christopher Insole, I think a broadly liberal political outlook is the natural complement to the kind of epistemic humility I’ve been describing. Since none of us can claim to discern the contours of the transcendent with perfect clarity, we need to be humble about subjecting others to our certainties. This results, in Insole’s words, in a “politics […] ordered towards peaceful co-existence (the absence of conflict), and the preservation of the liberties of the individual within a pluralistic and tolerant framework, rather than by a search for truth (religious or otherwise), perfection and unity.”