Virtuous liberty — ordered liberty — is the only kind of liberty for which the American republic was designed. And it cannot be sustained without religious belief. Unlike in France, this was the settled conviction of the founding generation. More than that, it was a doctrine considered axiomatic for political and civic life. “Every just principle that is to be found in the writings of Voltaire,” concluded Benjamin Rush, “is borrowed from the Bible.” Nevertheless, many ignore our debt to biblical religion. The result is liberty without wisdom, the path of folly and madness. Many Americans, indeed, are discarding the duties and the blessings of revealed religion for the empty promises of a counterfeit and degraded freedom.
…What path will we take? Perhaps the welfare of the City of Man really does depend, after all, on our belief in the City of God. Perhaps no political society can survive for long when it excludes those spiritual truths that alone can judge, inspire, and transform our earthly politics. Maybe, more than anything, we need a recovery of faith in what C. S. Lewis called the “far-off country,” a renewed quest for the virtues and ideals of that bright Kingdom that lies beyond the Sea. “Because we love something else more than this world,” Lewis wrote, “we love even this world better than those who know no other.”
And yet, and yet. The fact remains that increasing numbers of people simply don’t believe in the literal truth of Christianity. Their pursuit of truth has led them to the conclusion that the Christian story is not true, however useful it may be. What is to be done about that? Countless essays like this one never attempt an answer. They simply reassert that it sure would be good if they did believe. Can people be compelled to believe for the greater good? Is it good enough to make an outward show of faking piety? I dare say that I’m indistinguishable in my behavior from my Christian friends and neighbors, so what does that signify? That unbelief is not quite the slippery slope to the French Revolution as those like Loconte would have us believe? Or that social norms aren’t nearly as dependent on intellectual axioms as intellectuals would have us believe? Perhaps traditional behaviors endure long after the rationales have become outdated and forgotten. Perhaps there is some middle ground between devout Christianity and bloodthirsty paganism. Perhaps many of us are simply getting on with it, making sense of things as best we can, like people have always done and always will do.
January 29, 2020 @ 6:25 pm
My wife and I talk about this sometimes. There are people (e.g. Theodore Dalrymple) who we feel “ought” to be Christians, based on their opinions and values. That’s pretty flimsy, admittedly. It’s a big leap from “X honors the Catholic tradition as a necessary foundation of Western culture” to “X should therefore believe in Christianity.” What irks is when X treats religion as valuable and necessary for society on the whole but as something which is, of course, impossible for an intelligent person such as himself. That said, there are probably as many avenues to faith as there are objections to it. But in the end I can only agree that no one should call himself a Christian who doesn’t believe Christianity is true.
January 29, 2020 @ 7:13 pm
Yeah, I’ve heard them called “faitheists” — they have faith in faith. “Religion is necessary…for other people.” I read a book called Blasphemy by David Levy many years ago, a history of the topic, and I was struck by how often judges, prosecutors and other authorities justified their clampdowns and censorship by a similar rationale. “Okay, fine, we learned men can discuss this topic calmly and rationally, but the masses…We have to keep up appearances for society’s sake; we can’t be seen tolerating unbelief, or anarchy will follow.” I just feel like I’ve seen a hundred versions of this essay, and they all studiously avoid grappling with the reality that many people have jettisoned faith not because it was impeding their boundless desire for hedonistic excess, but because they simply don’t believe it’s true. That genie’s not going back in the bottle. How can we work with what we have to preserve the best aspects of religious belief without wasting time and energy on nostalgia for a consensus that may never have really existed anyway? I’m still waiting to see some social theorist tackle that question.
January 29, 2020 @ 9:23 pm
“That genie’s not going back in the bottle.” Indeed. Though sometimes I do secretly pine for the good old days of the middle ages when the Church and society were coterminous, with no question about it.
January 30, 2020 @ 8:55 am
I think that’s a pretty universal yearning in general, if not in the particulars. I’ve felt stirred by it myself in various ways. But as the Blasphemy book, or Alec Ryrie’s recent book Unbelievers have illustrated, I’ve come to doubt that there ever was a golden age of social harmony. I think that, as we’ve discovered to our horror these days, the average joe has always had a jumble of ideas in his head, from the merely heterodox to the stark raving mad, and social and technological developments have simply lifted the lid on what was always simmering. Previously, the average joes just didn’t have an outlet to express themselves. In many ways, I think that our own time is primarily defined by a crisis of authority, whether religious, political, or cultural. (One of the Arts & Letters Daily links today was about the collapse of traditional book reviewing due to competition from Amazon reviewers, Goodreads, book bloggers, and other amateur outlets.) Who are the recognized scribes who get to define the contours of an era anymore? We’ll probably be working that out for decades, if not centuries.
February 1, 2020 @ 12:34 pm
It is such a relief to see these opinions (yours, I mean) so articulately expressed – the relief coming from the fact that I apparently pretty much share your views. I also appreciate your mentioning the book BLASPHEMY, which I had not known about – although a book probably in a similar vein, DOUBT: A HISTORY by Jennifer Michael Hecht, was certainly useful in consolidating/focusing my own long-standing constellation of feelings/hunches about the theorcratic manifestations of Authority.
February 1, 2020 @ 2:28 pm
Hi, Cal, thanks for commenting. Yes, I read Hecht’s book a long time ago. I’ve always enjoyed her writing. (She had a poetry blog going for a while, but she didn’t update it frequently.)
If you haven’t read it, Alec Ryrie’s recent book Unbelievers is also interesting in that he attempted to focus on religious doubt as expressed by ordinary people throughout the centuries, as opposed to intellectuals and philosophers. Of course, ordinary people didn’t leave as much textual evidence for historians to discover, which makes it complicated to guess how much they truly believed, and how much they merely acquiesced to their social superiors. Personally, I don’t think human nature has changed much if at all over the centuries, so I have no trouble believing that there was plenty of independent or heterodox thought that was simply never preserved in the textual fossil record.
February 4, 2020 @ 6:18 pm
Glad to learn you knew of Hecht’s book. (The one she wrote called HAPPINESS I was less enthralled by; I didn’t know she also wrote poetry.) Thank you, too, for the additional citation. I will add UNBELIEVERS to The Ever-Swelling List of to-be-tracked-down-and-investigated titles.
February 4, 2020 @ 7:55 pm
Interestingly, I see that Hecht recently updated the blog I mentioned after a four-year hiatus. Sounds like she’s working on a new book too.