When Liberals Write About Religion

EVER SINCE the Enlightenment liberals have liked to talk about religion as something they are separate from. Liberals are the voice of reason, freed from the superstitions of conservatives, reactionaries, and other simple people.

So when liberal religion writer Alan Wolfe writes in The Atlantic about “the coming religious peace,” he doesn’t mention the great secular religions. No, what he’s talking about is the coming peace between Islam and Christianity and their reconciliation into the modern secular world of reason and tolerance. What a good thing, to end this pernicious religious war.

Still, many people, he writes, are expecting an upsurge in religious violence.

A common worry is that intense competition for souls could produce another era in which religious conflict leads to religious war—only this time with nuclear weapons. If we are really in for anything like the kind of zeal that accompanied earlier periods of religious expansion, we might as well say goodbye to the Enlightenment and its principles of tolerance.

But don’t worry. Over most of the world, religious belief is declining.

[M]any areas of the world are experiencing a decline in religious belief and practice. Second, where religions are flourishing, they are also generally evolving—very often in ways that allow them to fit more easily into secular societies, and that weaken them as politically disruptive forces.

You can see what is going on here in the mind of Alan Wolfe. Religion and faith are things that other people do, and the Platonic Guardians like himself, looking at the world from a higher place—presumably up at the entrance to the Cave, far above the lesser mortals still chained and looking at shadows on the wall—can look forward to the day when the shadow-watchers will have seen the light.

But the great fact of the world since the Enlightenment has been the growth and militant expansion of secular religions like nationalism, socialism, fascism, and the “politics of meaning.” And that’s leaving out other enthusiasms like anarchism, New Age spirituality, and general left-wing terrorism like the Weathermen and the Baader-Meinhof gang.

We conservatives see an inevitable clash, at some point, between the moderate, religious forces of democratic capitalism, and the secular religions which in general are arrayed against the gentle world of trust and reciprocity of the global commonwealth. They want to terminate the differentiation of society into separate political, economic, and moral/cultural sectors. They want to collapse these sectors into a nostalgic compact society secular politics and secular religion.

As a secularist, Alan Wolfe cannot see the persecutions carried out by the militant secularists: the endless secular propaganda on the media and in the schools, and the speech code enforcers, human rights commissions, and informal tribunals that daily show ordinary religious people the instruments of torture.

Yet that is where the flashpoint will occur. Between the militant secular believers and the moderate religious believers. But people like Alan Wolfe define the world to exclude such a possibility.

And in my view the clash will come over the question of human life. Secularist ethics is profoundly self-centered and directed towards amorphous questions like a free-floating compassion, obesity (!) and saving the planet with government programs. Religious ethics is centered around the need for people to purge themselves of selfishness and rage, to practice the difficult process of forgiveness and compassion towards those nearest and dearest and between generations within a family.

The question is how much inconvenience people are willing to tolerate with respect to inconvenient life. That would be inconvenient unborn life and inconvenient older life.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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