There is simply no way to talk about justice, or ordering the polis, without some reference to morality and metaphysics.
There is simply no way to talk about justice, or ordering the polis, without some reference to morality and metaphysics.
M ichael Strain writes an elegant plea in Project Syndicate for Christians to stand against bigots like Nick Fuentes, who called for a “Catholic Taliban” to put people in their place. As an additional duty, Strain asks his readers to oppose with him post-liberals and “soft theocrats” who, while not so crude or bigoted as Fuentes, commit a sin in kind by imposing their values rather than merely proposing them.
Now, while I think it is inflammatory to lump post-liberals such as Patrick Deneen with bigots like Nick Fuentes, who would obviously despise him, I understand Strain is trying to address what he sees as a common intellectual error that they share and to vindicate a broadly small-l liberal approach to politics. He cites Vatican II’s document on religious liberty, which states that “no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.” He limns it with the teaching of John Paul II, saying that the human being’s search for truth must be authentic and requires “immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom.” Strain cites God’s unwillingness to coerce virtue from individuals in Scripture. While Strain professes some sympathy for cultural concerns, he still insists that imposing our views is a matter of “soft theocracy.”
At the same time, he says that “Christians should make clear that religious liberty can be fully protected without the government being radically neutral in matters of morality.” This is an important acknowledgement. Because, of course, how can we pursue justice without some reference to morality itself? And where does our morality come from?
My sincere question is: So what is the part that isn’t neutral, and why isn’t it “soft theocracy”? What are the “due limits” on not forcing people? Because that is exactly what is always under dispute in liberalism.
Recently Christians, along with other people of good will, have passed laws that forbid doctors from giving puberty blockers to minors or performing so-called gender confirmation surgeries on them. In a very real way, we are restricting the liberty of people who do not share our beliefs on this. They perceive it as softly theocratic, as they do any restriction on abortion. So did many slavers feel they were being subjected to the religious enthusiasms of abolitionist Evangelicals.
Even the freedom of religion itself is bounded in America. We do not legally recognize polygamy, and occasionally we legally persecute it, though both traditional and modern native religions have preached it. We impose on this practice for many reasons, likely residual religious conviction that is so deep and old it hardly registers as such. But we also do so because sociological evidence shows us that polygamous societies produce clannish and even tribal forms of social life that are incompatible with the political commitments of a modern democratic republic. We impose.
I don’t call myself a post-liberal. I’m not sure what the term means, exactly. Viktor Orbán gave a famous speech praising illiberal democracy. But his Hungary still operates by anyone’s definition of a liberal regime. Everyone has individual political rights; they participate in a mass representative democracy with constitutional limits on government power, along with a market economy. What Orbán seemed to be rejecting in his famous 2014 speech was “liberal democracy” if it is defined to have a specific teleology, one that adopts secularism and mass immigration and dissolves national culture and familial bonds as sites of bigotry and oppression. In this he seemed to be identifying what the Polish intellectual Ryszard Legutko termed the “demon in democracy” — the latent but increasingly vocalized idea that liberal democracy has the same historical horizon as communism, birthing a new man liberated from religious, national, or familial obligation, and thereby free of the attendant prejudices entailed.
The fact is there is no stable definition of the “religious fundamentalism” that Strain objects to, nor a stable definition of the religiously informed but non-imposing liberal political action he endorses. In the 19th century, abolitionism was fundamentalism, while abhorring abortion and believing in two and only two human sexes was just common sense and natural reason. Today, believing abortion is morally wrong and recognizing only two human sexes is religious fundamentalism. It’s easy to imagine a world in the future where self-reproach in the church confessional will fall under expanding definitions of “criminal reparative therapy.” Reparative therapy is banned, but its definition could easily be expanded to include, say, confessing sinful sexual inclinations and seeking advice for overcoming them from your confessor. The question then is whether you’re willing to be perceived as fundamentalist enough to assert your right to abominate yourself, thereby contradicting someone else’s preferred metaphysics.
There is simply no way to talk about justice, or ordering the polis, without some reference to morality and metaphysics. There is no way to do justice than to restrain those who criminally transgress the law, which is often related to the moral law.
Perhaps the only way to save liberalism is to stop thinking of it as an abstract political doctrine and more like a learned political-sociological set of habits — habits that, in the face of original sin, abjure perfectionism and teach forbearance to preserve as many present goods as Providence allows.