1/15/01 9:00 a.m.
Religious Pluralism For Liberals, 101
Against religious bigotry.

By Michael Novak, fellow, American Enterprise Institute
& NRO contributing editor

n their rancor toward the admirable John Ashcroft, soon to be the flinty-eyed, square-jawed attorney general from the Western Plains, the extremists of the Left are day by day adding fine detail to their own self-portrait.

They say, for instance, that they don't see how he can enforce laws that he personally opposes or even thinks immoral. The reason they think this is they couldn't do it. Extremists of the Left feel obliged to write their own morality into law. They often feel obliged to disobey (or void) laws out of tune with their own morality.

Liberal extremists don't seem to know that conservatives, drawing on a long tradition of their own, have a very different theory of law and morality. John Ashcroft told the Economics Club of Detroit in 1998, "It would be against my religion to impose my religion on others." That's an old tradition in the dissident Christian churches opposed to state-established religion. If liberals knew religious history, they would know that.

Even John Locke, drawing on these traditions (cautiously, for fear of his head) pointed out in his Letter on Toleration that to respect the liberty of the consciences of others is the true teaching of Jesus Christ, and that tolerance is another name for Christian charity. This same point is picked up in the last provision of the Virginia Declaration of Religious Rights.

Liberal extremists don't seem to remember that the primary energy behind the First Amendment came from the Baptists and other dissident churches of Virginia, Jerry Falwell's ancestors, who suffered grievous punishments — public whippings, jail, heavy fines — for the "crime" of preaching without a licence from the state. They held the state had no power to licence preachers of the gospel, only the gospel did. When James Madison was opposed to writing amendments into the new Constitution, the Baptists of Orange County reminded him vigorously that they had elected him to office, and they wanted religious liberty put down in writing. "No establishment — free exercise" turned out to be the perfect formula in their eyes.

Baptists and other evangelical Christians need no lectures from secular liberals about the meaning of the First Amendment. In 1791, it was their idea. John Ashcroft is a true son of that tradition of liberty.

Another thing extremists of the left don't understand. They think that the "mainstream" of America passes through big cities, university towns, and Indian reservations — that is to say, the few hundred counties in the U.S. that the Democratic party's candidate won in 2000, those little isles of blue on that vast sea of red representing the 2,494 counties won by the Republican candidate. Most extremist liberals don't seem to know anybody who voted Republican. That's how insular, isolated, and out of the mainstream they are.

Third, most extremist liberals don't seem to have the foggiest understanding of religion, let alone the variety of Christian traditions. They demand a religious test for public office, and the test they propose is simple: No one in public office is allowed to take religion seriously, or to apply it to reality, or to allow it to shape their views. The upshot of this test is that all officers of the government of the United States ought to be effective or practical atheists.

John Ashcroft in particular must never, ever, be guided by his faith in public. Extremist liberals seem to have a special hostility to evangelical Christians, such as John Ashcroft. They do not propose similar assaults on any other religious group. They give every outward indication of indulging in religious bigotry. This demand may be a fruit of their own ignorance about religion, an ignorance they allow themselves in religion as nowhere else. Even the redoubtable New York Times tolerates egregious errors in this domain, as when it has (more than once) referred to "the St. James version" of the Bible.

The religious bigotry among the extremist liberals assaulting John Ashcroft is now visible to all, their lack of respect for his faith tradition, their desire to shackle the conscience of John Ashcroft as they would not tolerate the shackling of their own.

In the hope that it may be useful to liberals, then, allow me then to propose four brief lessons from Religious Pluralism For Liberals, 101:

1. Evangelical Christians have shed much blood, born many stripes upon the back, endured many weeks in jail, in the struggle against the state establishment of any religion; and they find the establishment of any version of the Christian religion particularly odious, because the state inevitably corrupts the church.

2. Evangelical Christians hold that God speaks directly to the soul of each individual and, therefore, the arena of individual conscience is inviolable by any human agency, and the individual act of conscience is inalienable by any other individual; and these beliefs are enshrined both in the Virginia Declaration of Religious Rights and in the famous Remonstrance of James Madison, and protected in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as insisted upon by evangelical Christians in Madison's congressional district in the first place.

3. Evangelical Christians hold that all authority is from God, not from the state, and that therefore there is a realm of inalienable rights that the state may not violate, and that is the root of the motto Benjamin Franklin once proposed for the Great Seal of the United States: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." The same idea was incorporated in a slogan hurled against King George III during the Revolutionary War era, "We have no king but Jesus," meaning that the source of rights runs deeper than the King's writ.

It is this slogan that John Ashcroft used in his famous remarks at Bob Jones University in 1999. These remarks put down a marker for the university to live up to — a call to respect basic rights in the lives of all connected with the university and in the university itself; a call to live up to the full potential of the university, not yet met.

4. Evangelical Christians hold both to a basic realism about the persistence of sin, weakness, and conflict in human life, and to an obligation to strive to do better, to be more perfect, to move forward into the full potential that God intended for human beings, as is sketched in the image of the "shining city on the hill." From this source more than any other comes the constant striving in America for improvement and progress, and the profound sense that we are not yet where we ought to be. John Ashcroft's religious tradition deserves great respect from those of us in America who spring from other traditions, not least because it has helped to form the rest of us as Americans.

John Ashcroft, the man, also deserves respect. He is a great witness to the best that America produces in the realm of conscience, respect for law, dedicated public service, and human decency (as exemplified to an extraordinary degree in his recent campaign). Ironically, he is a superb witness to many virtues that liberals insist upon for others, and hope to exemplify themselves: respect for the conscience of others, a fierce commitment to religious liberty, and enforcement of the law as written.