It is often the assumption of those of various perspectives that no one is doing anything to help the poor, as though there is some large vacuum of assistance for the poor that must be filled. However, that is simply not the case. Oftentimes the church creates a plurality of programs that all attempt to handle a single problem, but no one is working to partner with one another, creating redundancy.

This post is not that long because this idea is simple not that complicated. We as the church need to take a little time to figure out who is doing what before jumping in blindly with both feet. Perhaps some one already has a program or someone already has an effort that is reaping some success.

Several years ago I met with someone from Lutheran Social Services about caring for the elderly. I asked if such care was needed in our area of Wisconsin and the answer surprised me. The woman told me that the last thing that was needed was more people providing programs. There were already enough programs to go around and another program would simply dilute the already limited resources and elderly senior citizens even more. She advised that if a church really wanted to care for the elderly, they should partner with an existing organization.

The same is true of the poor. As we look around and find a need, we also need to see if someone is already working on that need. The last thing we need is redundancy. There is simply too much work to be done to duplicate efforts in such a small area. Instead, as the church personalizes its response to the needs of the individuals, it also needs to partner with those who are already working, those who may understand the problems and solutions better, and those may already have that personalized connection.

“Hang” on to your seats, Hang Togetherites. We’re going to experience a Great Conjunction this week, as I’m about to propose a unified field theorem that ties together the three lines of discussion that are emerging on HT:

1) Religion and the social order. We have been asking to what extent the idea that every human person has intrinsic dignity is dependent on religion, rather than on the more universal bases of reason and experience. As a larger share of the population goes in for a highly individualizing and subjective Romanticism, Karen is challenging us to think about the role of religious institutions in shaping society.

2) The church and the poor. We have agreed that the church can’t wait for the welfare state to get out of the way; it must follow the lead of our Mormon friends and create a superior system of poverty alleviation that runs parallel to the welfare state. In a series of posts, Kyle has been giving us a front line pastor’s perspective on what that means.

3) Political theory. In another series of posts, Dan has been laying out his perspective on the most basic ideas underlying the liberal-democratic order, such as free enterprise and rights.

Ready to have your minds blown? Here we go.

As I have already commented over on Karen’s post, the rise of Romantic individualism has led to a decline in understanding of the social nature of religion among those who are not Romantic individualists. Rousseau understood very well that the chief danger to his project was not the abstract idea of “Christianity,” which could be refashioned through a judicious reinterpretation of its meaning, but the institution of the church. “The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” is really aimed not at displacing “Christianity” but at displacing the church. It attacks Christian doctrine, and in that sense it does attack Christianity, but the goal is to change the meaning of “Christianity” to something else rather than to overthrow it and set up “natural religion” in its place. What Rousseau does very much want to overthrow is the church. Hence in the Social Contract a politically controlled “civil religion” replaces the independent church.

The long-delayed spoils of his victory are today’s “nones.” They are not really in rebellion against Christianity; they don’t know enough about it to be in rebellion against it. They mostly believe in God and have what we would recognize as spiritual lives – not Christian ones, but not militantly anti-Christian ones, either.

What they are in rebellion against is institutions. I think numerous people have made this point, but I will quote the ever-valuable Ross Douthat:

The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general. [ea]

See Charles Murray’s last book for more on this.

Here comes the unified field theorem that will bring about the Great Conjunction. I see two challenges arising from the disconnection of the nones from institutions. The first connects to Kyle’s discussion of the church needing a new approach to poverty; the second connects to Dan’s discussion of the political ideas necessary to liberal democracy.

The immediate challenge is to the religious freedom of we who practice a social religion. The nones fail to understand that other people’s religions – ours, for instance – presuppose institutional embodiment. Our religion cannot be what it is if it is only a matter of personal belief. So the nones disallow the claims of our institutions to be what they are, not out of hostility but out of an inability to grasp that something important is at stake in those claims. They have no frame of reference even to understand the nature of our claim, much less to make that claim plausible.

In the lawsuits over Obamacare, the administration has asserted the theory that a profit-making business or a hospital or a school cannot be said to exist primiarly for a religious purpose or mission. If the courts endorse this claim, Christianity has been made illegal. Christianity cannot be what it is if the total primacy of God’s claim on our lives and the mission he has given us in the world is not permitted to achieve institutional expression in all areas of life, rather than simply in churches narrowly defined. This is not to say that all Christians must attend distinctively Christian schools or work in distinctively Christian businesses; far from it. However, if the formation of such institutions is illegal, Christianity is illegal.

Who has a solution to such a dire predicament? Kyle Ferguson, of course!

While there is much important work to be done on this issue, the most immediate need is for Christians to start demonstrating the unique value of Christian institutions. Kyle is exploring one of the ways we can do that. Christian nonprofit minitries and (just as important) Christians in for-profit business can beat the welfare state at its own game. The ministries can provide the poor something no non-Christians are currently providing them: personal development to help them become good workers; and Christian businesspeople can provide another thing no one else is currently providing: job-creating businesses that are ready and willing to go into depressed areas and employ the poor, providing them the dignity of work and self-support.

But it won’t be just poverty. What can Christian institutions do to provide unique contributions to the flourishing of our non-Christian neighbors and society at large in arts and entertainment? In business? In neighborhoods? Even in politics?

That, however, is only the short-term need. The long-term need is not to rescue the church from the threat of persecution, but to rescue liberal democracy from the threat of moral fragmentation.

Religions and quasi-religions (let’s not reopen the debate over what counts as a religion) can’t be sustained without institutional embodiment. This is just a basic feature of human behavior. We need to have institutions that teach us, structure our behavior and hold us accountable. And since liberal democracy depends on a virtuous citizenry, in the long run it depends on religious and quasi-religious institutions.

Romantic individualism has a contradiction at its core: it is not as individualistic as it thinks it is. It has always sought, and achieved, institutional embodiment – all while denying to itself that it seeks this. The two chief places it has been embodied are in the state – hence the need for a state-controlled “civil religion” in the Social Contract – and in educational institutions. The near-total triumph of Romantic individualism in these two sectors has coincided with a continual contraction of actual liberty for the individual, as both these types of institutions have become more rigid in imposing Romantic individualism as orthodoxy.

Rousseau foresaw all this and laid it out plain and simple in the Social Contract – those who do not voluntarily find their freedom in submission to the general will must be “forced to be free.” Those words are widely misunderstood and abused – Rousseau was no totalitarian – but the indifference to the individuality of the individual was very real and deliberately chosen.

Who has a solution to such a dire predicament? Dan Kelly, of course!

What will be needed in the long run is a restoration of the idea – which predominated at the American founding – that participation in and voluntary financial support for religious institutions is a necessary virtue of good citizenship. We can’t impose this by law consistent with religious freedom; but in the long run we also can’t sustain religious freedom unless society once again sets the expectation that all good and decent citizens will be part of religious institutions. This principle must be incorporated into the premises of liberal democracy at the same level as free enterprise, rights, etc. Get to work on that, Dan.

A parting question for Karen: can we extend this principle to include quasi-religious institutions? Would that be sufficient for liberal democracy, or does it have to be “religion proper”?

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Pardon my slight change of the subject of religion to a practical outworking of religion. In two previous posts I began addressing the question of an appropriate response of Christians to the poor, as the political solution has either been to give the poor a handout or expect them to pull themselves out of poverty. Christians need to pray (because prayer leads to caring and recognizes only God changes hearts) for the poor, and need to be present in the community they wish to change. Third, and the focus of this post, is to personalize.

When I was in college, one of my professors, Jana Sundene, used to say “People, not programs.” She was referring to ministry work in churches, but the same applies to working with the poor. The government deals with programs. Are programs bad? Certainly not, but the government, in case no one has noticed, is huge. I’m not making a value judgment on size, simply stating a reality. This means that the huge government is attempting to help individuals that to the government are simply names and numbers. There is no personalization, nor should there be. Government, by nature, needs to be largely objective, otherwise corruption and manipulation come into play. Government, by and large, cannot and probably should not (I let Greg discuss the ‘should’) be making judgment calls as to who deserves assistance and who does not. For one thing, the government is to large to make micro judgment decisions. For another, how would the government determine who is  “deserving” assistance? Again, this is simply reality.

But, Christians are  individuals who live day to day in the micro rather than the macro. I do not live in California and have no contact with poor Californians. I do, however, have contact on a micro scale with poor Wisconsinites and soon, Virginians. My small church community is also in a community and can make personal, subjective decisions based on scripture (ala, if you don’t work, you don’t eat, etc.) about who ‘deserves’ assistance and who is just lazy. The micro nature of individuals and individual faith communities allows for personalization of the decision, making it most beneficial to those who have needs.

But this micro nature of individuals and churches also recognizes that the people being helped are persons. They are not treated as names and numbers but as human beings who have value and have needs. Not only can the actual assistance of these individuals be personalized, those helping can communicate that the recipient is a person who has been created by God with true, intrinsic value.

There is one draw back of this personalization. It’s difficult. The government can mail out checks and remain emotionally uninvolved. In order for personalization to take place, every Christian must get involved with the poor in their area, being a praying presence. But this also means that it might get messy. These are real people with real problems. They are not just lists of names and the amount of check they receive. Personalization means taking time, learning a person’s story, and doing what is best for that person. It means experiencing the joy of having it ‘work’ and suffering the emotion of disappointment when helping out the less fortunate blows up in our face. Yet, none of this changes the fact that Jesus (who also had it blow up in his face, although that was the plan!) has called personal Christians to be personally involved rather than letting an impersonal government depersonalize the poor.

It’s been a week with very little time to sit down so until now I hadn’t yet responded to Greg’s very persuasive post concerning the religiosity of the religious nones. He writes:

“If our goal is to figure out how moral consensus could be rebuilt among people of diverse religious belief and practice in our society, it seems to me we would be well advised to adopt a definition of “religion” that tracks with what our society would treat as a religion. The practical problem before us is that the nones are treated as having a right to live as nones – to live in accordance with what Karen calls their “ideology.” And I do not see how we can maintain religious freedom without granting that right. So isn’t their ideology a religion at least for our practical purposes, even if it might not be one for other purposes?”

Two things here. First of all, as I mentioned in the post Greg is responding to, the question of what is or is not religion is, I think, probably not the most important. Greg would like to include what I would term “ideology” as religion, and I’m quite happy to go along with what he suggests – to treat ideology as a religion for some purposes, even if it might not be for other purposes. Again, I don’t claim any sort of access to the Form of Religion (and I don’t think anyone is trying to claim such knowledge, if it exists), and in any case I think none of us wants to get caught up on semantics, which I’m in danger of leading us straight into.

Second, as concerns Greg’s question of whether the religious nones should be treated as having a right to live as nones: Absolutely yes. Religious freedom must grant the right to those who practice was I was calling ideology to live according to whatever religion or non-religion one believes (within limits that, as far as I’m concerned, the Supreme Court has so far been quite good at identifying, though in upcoming years that could change). I would simply call that “secularism” or “atheism” or “agnosticism,” but here, too, I think the semantics are probably not the central issue.

But where the semantic distinction does matter, I think, becomes clearer when we examine our understanding of religious liberty. It has historically comprehended both “libertas personae” and “libertas ecclesiae”, or the freedom of both the individual and the freedom of the church. The distinction has been lost in our very individual-belief-oriented religious culture, but as religion is increasingly being called into question, I think we are starting to see that religion has perhaps always been more than a matter of just what one person believes; he or she is always standing on the shoulders of giants who have, very often, worked as members of a body (ecclesia). With or without formal members of the clergy, churches and other religious institutions have established some sorts of structures and corporate identities that bear on but are not synonymous with the religious identities of their members. And I think it is important that we grant religious institutions the freedom – the libertas ecclesiae – to continue to do so. (Thankfully, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld this right in last year’s Hosanna Tabor case.)

Granting libertas ecclesiae to religious institutions does not in any way lessen the libertas personae of those whose religion or ideology is less formal. In other words, on the individual level, both a Mormon and the Savoyard Vicar are equally religious in the sense that they both are protected by the right to religious freedom qua individuals. But corporately, they are quite different. Mormonism has a unifying structure in its church – which is not to say that all Mormons agree on what it both does say and should say, but rather that that is a matter internal to the Mormon church as  a matter of libertas ecclesiae. (This is why I included “unifying figure” in my very rough operative definition of “religion”: there is something, not necessarily a god but something sharing in divine characteristics, which an institution most certainly can be thought to do, that unifies its members more tangibly than shared sentiment.)

This, incidentally, is something that has at times gotten lost in the furor over the HHS contraception mandate. The mandate to provide contraceptives and abortion services is so offensive to us not only because it would require individual employers to act against their individual consciences – which is bad enough – but also because it requires members of a religious body, or ecclesia, that officially forbids the use of contraception – minimally, the Catholic Church – to choose the state over the church.

I’m not sure that Romanticism merits the same type of corporate protections as do the Mormon or Catholic churches. But maybe it does, so I’ll stop here and hope Greg will bite!

Karen is, as always, pushing me to ask the right questions. Here I’m going to take up her challenge on the question of what religion is. Soon (but not too soon, alas) I’ll circle back and take up her question of whether a religious revival would be a necessary precondition of rebuilding moral consensus.

She thinks Romanticism is not a religion: “I take religion to mean not only reason and reasoning about experience, which to me seems like ideology, but also some sort of worship of a unified figure that adherents recognizes as somehow divine.”

It seems to me by this definition only the Abrahamic faiths unambiguously qualify as religions. It is unclear to me whether Hinduism passes this test, particularly as regards “unifying figure.” And if the status of Hinduism is in doubt, all the more doubtful would be the other, less developed forms of – I almost wrote “of polytheistic religion,” but then, by this definition polytheism is not necessarily a religion. And Buddhism in its more serious forms clearly does not qualify.

Consigned to the “irreligious” bin as well would be all those great deist, pantheist and generally unclassifiable thinkers who believed in the divine and organized their whole thought around it, yet did not “worship” it in any sense we would recognize. It is not clear how we could reinterpret the whole 18th century project of “natural religion” to fit this scheme – was it an ideology that falsely believed it was a religion? Nor could we make sense of the many people who have taken with utmost seriousness Socrates’ claim to be on a divine mission, and who have in general made a religion of philosophy. Here is Book III, Chapter 4 of Augustine’s Confessions:

Among such as these, in that unstable period of my life, I studied the books of eloquence, for it was in eloquence that I was eager to be eminent, though from a reprehensible and vainglorious motive, and a delight in human vanity. In the ordinary course of study I came upon a certain book of Cicero’s, whose language almost all admire, though not his heart. This particular book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy and was called Hortensius.Now it was this book which quite definitely changed my whole attitude and turned my prayers toward thee, O Lord, and gave me new hope and new desires. Suddenly every vain hope became worthless to me, and with an incredible warmth of heart I yearned for an immortality of wisdom and began now to arise that I might return to thee. It was not to sharpen my tongue further that I made use of that book. I was now nineteen; my father had been dead two years and my mother was providing the money for my study of rhetoric. What won me in it [i.e., the Hortensius] was not its style but its substance.

How ardent was I then, my God, how ardent to fly from earthly things to thee! Nor did I know how thou wast even then dealing with me. For with thee is wisdom. In Greek the love of wisdom is called “philosophy,” and it was with this love that that book inflamed me. There are some who seduce through philosophy, under a great, alluring, and honorable name, using it to color and adorn their own errors. And almost all who did this, in Cicero’s own time and earlier, are censored and pointed out in his book. In it there is also manifest that most salutary admonition of thy Spirit, spoken by thy good and pious servant: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ: for in him all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily.” [Col. 2:8, 9] Since at that time, as thou knowest, O Light of my heart, the words of the apostle were unknown to me, I was delighted with Cicero’s exhortation, at least enough so that I was stimulated by it, and enkindled and inflamed to love, to seek, to obtain, to hold, and to embrace, not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, wherever it might be. Only this checked my ardor: that the name of Christ was not in it. For this name, by thy mercy, O Lord, this name of my Saviour thy Son, my tender heart had piously drunk in, deeply treasured even with my mother’s milk. And whatsoever was lacking that name, no matter how erudite, polished, and truthful, did not quite take complete hold of me.

Augustine’s response to the philosophy of Cicero is a religious experience. Admittedly he makes a connection to Christianity, but I don’t think that blunts the point. Having been trained to view Christ as the great authority of wisdom, he is not satisfied with Cicero but goes in search of wisdom from Christ. But he is not worshipping Christ, he is “worshipping” (if that’s the word) wisdom itself. This is exactly why his next stop after Cicero was to reject the Bible and fall in with the Manicheans. They were wisdom-worshippers but claimed to be offering the wisdom Christ taught.

With all this as background, I place before you the “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” the section of Rousseau’s Emile dealing with religion. This section was so central to the development of the Romantic movement that it was widely published and read as a stand-alone book. I believe, though I’m open to correction, that many more people read the “Profession” than read the Emile entire.

Romanticism was always a religious movement. It did not worship a divine being but it made claims about what is divine and how we know the divine, and inspired people to reorganize their lives around those claims.

The heart of Romanticism is precisely the claim that our own reason and experience put us immediately in touch with the divine, and nothing else does. For them, reason and experience are the divine.

C.S. Lewis used to quote someone who said that Romanticism is “spilled religion.” The “cup” from which it has been “spilled” is the formal elements of religion – especially the sociological ones (ritual and institutions). But spilled milk is still milk.

Speaking of sociology, here is another reason to broaden the category of religion. We come to this discussion not as detached and disinterested speculators, like Socrates and his disciples. We are socially engaged; we are interested parties who come to this question with a practical problem we are trying to solve. That has implications for how we define our terms.

If our goal is to figure out how moral consensus could be rebuilt among people of diverse religious belief and practice in our society, it seems to me we would be well advised to adopt a definition of “religion” that tracks with what our society would treat as a religion. The practical problem before us is that the nones are treated as having a right to live as nones – to live in accordance with what Karen calls their “ideology.” And I do not see how we can maintain religious freedom without granting that right. So isn’t their ideology a religion at least for our practical purposes, even if it might not be one for other purposes?