HERE COMES MR. JESUS (via Matt Murphy):

Heaven Can Wait (Susan Jacoby, Spring 2006, Dissent)

In his call for left-wing moral revivalism as a counterweight to the ascendancy of the religious right in American politics (“A Difficult Marriage: American Protestants and American Politics,” Winter 2006), Michael Kazin cites the historian D.G. Hart’s argument that religion is “inherently useful in solving social problems because it yields moral guidelines that inevitably generate both a concern for justice and the welfare of all people.”

Inherently? Inevitably? Does the quote refer to an American religion that fought slavery over the opposition of many orthodox churches or to a religion that upheld slavery in the South and profiteering from slavery in the North? Are we talking about a minority faith that insisted women should have an equal voice in the house of God and man or a majority of clerics who denounced feminists, well into the twentieth century, as unnatural female infidels? Are Hart and Kazin referring to a religion that makes room for secular knowledge or a religion that refuses to listen to anything science has to say about the origins of life?

There is no such thing as generic religion or, for that matter, generic evangelical Protestantism, and most ecclesiastical leaders, whether evangelical or not, are interested in the welfare of all only insofar as welfare is defined in accordance with their particular faith. That is the fatal flaw in all proposals, whether from the left or the right, for a stronger religious voice in the public square. No one would deny that some religious spokesmen are capable of framing moral issues in transcendent fashion; the civil rights leadership provided by black churches is the prime twentieth-century example.

Ms Jacoby accidentally cedes the argument, for morality has to be transcendental. All else is opinion.

MORE:
The Phone Book Test: Robert P. George explains how a simple experiment reveals the great divide in our culture. (Interview by Andy Crouch | posted 07/05/2006, Christianity Today)

Before we can talk about becoming a counterculture, we have to understand the culture. What's your reading of our culture right now?

I've argued in my book The Clash of Orthodoxies that the contemporary moment is marked by profound cultural division. We have a clash of two worldviews. On the one side are those who maintain traditional Judeo-Christian principles, such as the principle of the sanctity of human life, the principle that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, the principle that sex is integral to marriage but that sex ought not to be engaged in outside of marriage, and so forth.

On the other side of the cultural divide are people who have abandoned those principles in favor of some alternative ideology. Often it celebrates personal autonomy and freedom from traditional moral constraints, mixed with certain utilitarian elements. Sometimes it manifests itself in radical forms of feminism or quasi-pantheistic forms of environmentalism.

This division runs between elite and popular opinion. If I may borrow a concept from William F. Buckley Jr., consider what the results would be if we were to ask 800 members of the Princeton faculty about their views on abortion or homosexuality or other issues of that sort, and then make the same inquiry of the first 800 people in the Trenton, New Jersey, phone book.

Interestingly, the Princeton faculty and people of Trenton are probably going to vote largely alike—for Democratic candidates—albeit for different reasons. But when it comes to morally charged political issues, you're going to get answers from the 800 people consulted in the Trenton phone book that would be similar to those answers that would be given by 800 people from north-central West Virginia (where I grew up) or from Kansas or New Mexico. Their answers would be very different from those that would be given by the Princeton faculty or the editorial boards of The New York Times or The Washington Post. That's what I call a clash of orthodoxies. [....]

Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, even has a name for people who share the secularist orthodoxy. He calls them, and he includes himself in this, the Brights. And the implication of that is the others are the Dumbs or the Stupids.

The Dims.

That's a better word, the Dims.

Is it one orthodoxy versus another? Or is it a Judeo-Christian tradition versus a variety of orthodoxies?

Just as within the larger community of people who hold Judeo-Christian values and beliefs there are people who emphasize different things, there is a variety on the secular liberal side. There are people who emphasize different issues—some who emphasize environmentalism or animal rights, some who press for what they insist on calling "abortion rights," and some who push for the redefinition of marriage to include persons of the same sex or even "marriages" of three or more people.

But there's a family of views. They hang together on the basis of certain assumptions about human meaning, dignity, and destiny. In one perspective, the dignity of the human being depends on the human being's autonomy being strictly respected when it comes to issues that they regard as being of an intimate and personal nature. So, we are told, not only must we accept homosexual conduct and polyamorous relations, we must honor them and even accord them the status of marriage where that is desired, and so forth. Abortion has to be permitted, and not only permitted but paid for with public money, and there must be no stigma attached to it.

So, as I say, it's a family of views, but the rejection of Judeo-Christian principles is central to everything on the secular Left that marks it as distinctive.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 17, 2006 12:12 PM