Disclaimer: I recognize that it is easier to be a cynic than to argue – well – that there is cause for hope. I’ve perhaps too taken the former path in posts while Greg has bravely forged (oh dear) “forward” with “hope” for renewed moral consensus in America. (Greg, I promise those words were coincidental.) So I must apologize for yet again playing the moral consensus Scrooge.

After rereading Greg’s response to my post on whether religion has any “added value” (which Dan wisely revised to “added value that can be shared”), I’m beginning to think that we might be responding to questions that are significantly, though subtly, different. That difference has to do with the distinction between Greg and me on what the term “religion” denotes. I’m getting ahead of myself, because I’ve assumed without verification that Greg does indeed mean to use the minimalist definition of ‘religion’ as a combination of reason and experience, while acknowledging that to many people, it is much more than that (though even for them, it is at least that). But for argument’s sake, let’s assume that either he (or someone else) does want to use that idea of religion.

My own position is that religion is necessarily more than that, and while it would take a book to lay out a good workable definition, suffice it to say that 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. This needs explanation, refinement, defense, etc. But the definition of religion isn’t the point here, so I’ll risk sloppiness so as to raise the question I’d actually like to ask, which is, in brief, “Do we need religious renewal in order to have renewed moral consensus?”

When Greg is talking about the religious “nones” (i.e., those who respond “none” in surveys about their religious affiliation), he is talking about people who may have what I would term “ideological” commitments and what he would call “religious” commitments in the forms of Romanticism, Marxism, perhaps Utilitarianism, etc. He asks whether “we should think of the nones as potential recruits to religious movements”, with the implicit hope that with some religion, the ‘nones’ might become those we ally ourselves with on issues of public morality rather than those whose positions we must oppose.

Why this is different from what I thought we were talking about, then, is because I rarely think of religious (as I understand it) conversion as a prerequisite for renewed moral consensus in America. I tend to think like Hadley Arkes (no surprise there, I know) in the article Greg cited; i.e., I think that we can appeal to a standard of justice knowable by natural reason without explicit (note bene! explicit!) appeal to religion or religious doctrine. So that’s my hopeful side – we can still reason with each other in the public square once that public square has lost religion. (But only to a degree, and here we need to talk about the effects of the obliteration of religion on one’s ability to reason.)

A whole slew of qualifications have to follow. One, I don’t think that one’s ability and willingness to accept such standards of justice are the most important; the salvation of souls matters infinitely more, and that certainly can’t be done by natural reason alone. Two, it would be way better, certainly for souls and almost certainly for moral consensus, if we did actually experience a religious (ok, I’m partisan, Christian) renewal in this country, which is what I take Greg to be hinting at in his comment on the religious nones becoming part of broader religious movements (please correct me if I’m wrong, Greg!). And three, none of what I’ve said or am going to say should be taken as reason to spend any less efforts on evangelizing, and that for the aforementioned reason – no matter how low public morality gets in this country, souls matter more.

But here I put my Scrooge hat back on, because it seems to me that the ‘religious’ people who are, in my terms, only ideological, are not so easily swayed. And that is because, as Greg certainly holds by his including Marxism and Romanticism in the category of “religion,” they also hold beliefs deeply. Yes, if, as Greg suggests, they convert to Christianity, we’ll have more grounds for moral consensus. But at the moment, they are religious nones who have instead ideologies. And that, it seems, puts us back into our own camps, that is, IF we are to rely on the “shared added value” of religion as our grounds of moral consensus. It would be nice – really, really, really nice – if we could in fact rely on that shared added value of religion on which to base a moral consensus, but right now, I’m inclined to think that we need instead to sharpen our “reason and experience” articulation skills, to pry open the door to moral reasoning in the public square.

Romanticism, Enlightenment, Theism

Now that we’ve got that trivial electoral stuff out of the way, we can circle back to what matters. I was challenged by Karen’s and Dan’s responses to my post on the question of how we know human beings have an intrinsic dignity.

To the extent that we know it through “religion,” that might imply that the very foundations of liberal democracy include a force that creates cultural division. We will be constantly fighting over the meaning of human dignity and (consequently) how we honor it in practice, because we will know it differently. I surveyed two web articles seeking a common ground for knowledge of human dignity, one from Hadley Arkes seeking it in reason and one from Peter Berger seeking it in experience.

We must find at least some common ground (we need not find common ground on absolutely everything) and reason and experience seem like the things we share in common. But neither can work if set up on its own. Arkes’ abstract Kantianism and Berger’s appeal to “primal experience” are both implausible to me. The formation of an idea (even an incohate idea that involves no generalization to abstract principle) is a process that involves the interplay of reason and experience. The Kantian philosopher becomes a Kantian philosopher through life experience – thoughtful and reflective experience, to be sure, but the thinking and reflecting are themselves experiences. The pretense of his Kantianism, that he is thinking in categories that transcend experience, is self-deceptive. Meanwhile, it is true that Huck Finn (Berger’s example) has never been exposed to abolitionist propaganda or any other formal system of thought that explicitly taught him to see Jim’s human dignity. But Huck has been exposed to thought – the book is explict that a highly distorted but still recognizeable form of Christianity was an important factor in his world – that presumably prepared him to interpret his experiences in a certain way. More importantly, the act of interpreting his experiences is itself rational thought. Huck forms the thought that if he goes to hell for the sin of freeing Jim, going to hell is the right thing to do. That is not sound theology, but it is clearly theology.

So does “the interplay of reason and experience” get us what we want? I suspect not, because that just takes us back to religion. There are many people for whom religion is much more than just the sum of their reasoning and experience on moral and spiritual things. But there are many for whom it is not. “Religion” to them simply is their reasoning about and experience of transcendence. And even for those whose religion is much more than this, it is still not less than this. Their reasoning and expierence of transcendence are, for them, religious. So if we say we know human dignity through a combination of reason and experience, we are really saying we know it through religion.

Karen’s and Dan’s responses both raise the question, to me at least, of exactly what is “religion.” Karen is treating it narrowly, in terms of the highly developed world religions. But much real religion does not conform to those patterns. This is true not only among those who do not identify with a religion (the “nones”) but even among large numbers of those who do. How many American “Christians” are really practicing a folk religion that has not much to do with classical and historic Christianity beyond its outward forms? Meanwhile, Dan seems to me to reduce religion merely to the will of the believer to believe. That is one classic definition of “faith” (at least the sense of an individual’s “faith”) but not of religion. Religion is also sociological; it is embodied in texts, in mores and laws, in institutions and ways of life.

We may get closer to the problem if we start to classify the religion of the “nones.” I would argue that the overwhelming majority of Americans who are not Christians are Romantic individualists (capital R) and that Romantic individualism is a religion. It’s not an organized or highly developed religion; it’s more of a folk religion, although one with an intellectual history more distinguished than most folk religions.

If we think in those terms, would it make sense to say that half of Americans know human dignity through Christianity while the other half know it through the folk religion of Romantic individualism? If so, what would that imply for our ability to identify common ground in the ways we know that humans have dignity? What role would reason and experience play in the answer?

This summer I published an extended argument that The Avengers is about the culture war. Steve Rogers is the cultural product of historic Christianity; his behavior can be explained in terms of it, and it is even alluded to briefly in the movie. Tony Stark is the cultural product of Romantic individualism. (Bruce Banner represents the Enlightenment.) The great question of the movie is whether Steve Rogers and Tony Stark can pull together:

The conflict between Rogers and Stark, which manifests itself as a conflict over justice, is at bottom a religious conflict. Justice and religion flow in and out of one another in perplexing ways. People of different religions can reach moral agreement – if it weren’t so, we’d all have torn each other to pieces long ago. Yet even when our senses of justice align, the religious difference never quite goes away, never quite stops threatening to break out into a war…

Here’s why this is the movie for our time: the history of modernity is the history of great religions – Christianity, Islam, Marxism, Fascism, Romantic individualism, etc. – struggling for control of the great engines of power unleashed by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. America was the product of a great alliance between two of these religions, Christianity and Romantic individualism, against the others. It was not merely a temporary pact to share power but a real forging of deep alliances, resting on a robust sense of shared morality between the two. In spite of the differences, there really are deep undercurrents of similarity. Christianity really does celebrate the preciousness and dignity of the individual; we call it the imago Dei, the image of God in every human being. Romantic individualism really does seek to encompass both moral seriousness and an authentic sense of spiritual renewal (to see justice and mercy meet and kiss, as the psalm puts it). Yet in our time the alliance is strained. The differences between religions must always run just a little bit deeper than the similarities; otherwise they wouldn’t be different religions, they’d be different branches of the same religion. And now those differences are rising back up to the surface. The conditions that forged the original alliance have passed. Can it be reforged?

An existential threat submerges the differences and renews the alliance for a while. In the movie, it was an alien invasion. In our time, it has been 9/11. That doesn’t last, however. In the end of the movie, the heroes disperse to go their separate ways.

The closing note of the movie is Nick Fury expressing certainty that if an existential threat ever arises again, the heroes will reunite. Why does he think so? “Because we’ll need them to.” That is the optimistic scenario. I believe (for theological reasons) that there are rational grounds that logically justify a limited amount of optimism about how things go in the world. I am optimistic about renewing the old alliance that defines America. Yet there are limits, and in our time we are testing them.

So let me use that image to put a sharp point on this question. Do Steve Rogers and Tony Stark have enough common ground in reason and experience – or in any other way – to keep the team together?

Washington Post county-by-county election results

Well, one longtime question in the field of political science appears settled. Do campaigns make a difference, or do voters vote pretty much the way they would even if there were no campaigns? As Matt Ladner puts it: “The Obama campaign worked their math problem with masterful precision…The narrow national popular vote majority plus the lopsided electoral college result is a testament to the effectiveness of the Obama campaign.”

Worthwhile reflections from Michael Barone and Arthur Brooks on the election. Barone (written on election day before the results were known):

Bill Bishop highlighted the political consequences of this in his 2008 book “The Big Sort.” He noted that in 1976, only 27 percent of voters lived in counties carried by one presidential candidate by 20 percent or more. In 2004, nearly twice as many, 48 percent, lived in these landslide counties. That percentage may be even higher this year…

Americans have faced this before. This has been a culturally diverse land from its Colonial beginnings. The mid-20th-century cultural cohesiveness was the exception, not the rule.

We used to get along by leaving each other alone. The Founders established a limited government, neutral on religion, allowing states, localities and voluntary associations to do much of society’s work. Even that didn’t always work: We had a Civil War.

An enlarged federal government didn’t divide mid-20th-century Americans, except on civil rights issues. Otherwise there was general agreement about the values government should foster.

Now the Two Americas disagree, sharply. Government decisions enthuse one and enrage the other. The election may be over, but the Two Americas are still not on speaking terms.

Brooks:

With the Legislature divided on party lines and a president holding only a tenuous mandate, we have a recipe for gridlock…

Gridlock today is especially corrosive because of the enormity of the challenges we face—and the urgency of solving our problems…

Getting beyond gridlock, though, will require compromise. To some, this may sound like surrender. It need not be. For instance, pro-growth comprehensive tax reform that is revenue neutral (or even revenue reducing) can help grow the economy while decreasing the Byzantine complexity of America’s tax code. It may mean giving up some of the welfare transfers that the left loves and the deductions that the right loves; but each side will have to give up some sacred cows. It need not mean increasing tax rates of giving the government beast more sustenance.

But compromise on core principles is never acceptable. Ultimately, no compromise is worth making if it undermines free enterprise, allows the continued and unchecked expansion of the state, or furthers the notion that Washington can or should pick economic winners and losers. In other words, we can build on truths shared between parties and ideologies on policy issues. But we cannot have compromise between the majority who support American free enterprise and the minority who wish to see it fail.

Finding common ground on policy while standing firm on principle is the grand political tradition of our republic. Our founders, who were greatly divided on the important policy questions of their day from tariffs to federalism, did not waver in their commitment to limited government and individual liberty. The moral covenant between government and the people established by the Declaration of Independence and reflected in the immortal phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was not up for negotiation.

As the dust settles after a clear win by President Obama last night, I’ve found the rhetoric interesting. On the one side I hear tried and true right-leaning republicans ask “Does this mean the majority of our country feels entitled to handouts?” On the other side, I hear more moderate conservatives state “Maybe our strategy of ‘work hard and you’ll pull yourself up financially’ doesn’t work with the masses. I find both interesting because these are both questions we have discussed here on this blog in the past few weeks.

On the one hand, “No” the majority of our country does not feel entitled to handouts. However, they have rejected the far right perspective of “You can do it yourself without any help from government!” Moderates have finally realized this fact, a fact which I stated less than a week ago. There are only a small percentage of people in this country who are self-starting entrepreneur types. People need some help. Maybe now politicians will wake up and realize standing on the sidelines shouting to the poor to pull themselves up by the bootstraps doesn’t really help anyone.

If it alliterates it must be true, right? As we talk about organizing compassion for the poor, as we begin to pray that God would cause us to have compassion on the less fortunate, we are faced with the continued question of how we are to care for those who live elsewhere than we do. I care for my neighbor, but what do I do when my neighbor is not poor and the poor are not my neighbor? Simple, move!

It’s right there in Matthew 28:19…Go! In fact, in Greek, not only is the “Go!” a command, it’s also done simultaneous with making disciples–“As you go…” Of course, American Christianity has chosen “come and be discipled” over “go and make disciples,” but that is an issue for another post. But the same root cause underlies both–we are content to wait for the opportunity to disciple or to help the poor to move in next door. And by next door, I mean right next door! The idea of going fifteen miles to get into an area where the poor are is simply too much effort for most people.

In order to really help the poor, we have to be present in their lives and present in their communities. In some cases, this means moving back into those communities that have become devoid of caring people through urban flight. One of the problems with forced compassion or redistributed entitlement of wealth is that in many cases as the poor become unpoor, they too flee to the suburbs, leaving more poor behind them without a caring presence. If we truly cared, we would put our money where our mouth is and move into the communities that need help, being part of the solution. Throwing money into these areas from out in the suburbs simply won’t help. These people need compassion, not a handout.

But presence doesn’t simply mean moving, although that is a great option. Perhaps it means choosing to shop at stores in that area, building relationships with clerks. It may mean getting out of my car when I buy gas so I can talk to the clerk inside rather than just swiping my card at the machine. I may eat at restaurants in those areas, participate in programs in those areas, and simply be a presence.

Sound difficult, sound impossible? I grew up in Green Bay Wisconsin, where one of the deacons at my church had a heart for mercy ministry. This manifested itself in such a way that if anyone needed help moving, whether from the church or not, this deacon would get a truck and organize a team. So here they were at a random house in a poorer neighborhood of Green Bay, helping someone move who had simply called in for help. A passerby saw what was going on and approached the deacon and said “Hey, are you the church guys who help people move?” No advertisement, no uniforms, no signage, but people knew. How? Presence. They were known in the community, their compassion was known in the community because they were present. And…they all lived in the ‘suburbs’ but they were still present in the community.

Dan is right…it starts with prayer, but prayer must lead to action, neighboring not just with those who become neighbors, but becoming neighbors with those we want to help by being present.