The team wouldn\u2019t have to be only<\/em> Baptists, I guess, since atheists, Jews, other religious minorities, John Courtenay Murray\u2019s estate, and the expert jesters of the Satanic Temple would all have a stake in participating. Among others. But it\u2019d be good to have a rotating squad of us to respond to this perennially frustrating business.<\/p>\n Team members, I imagine, would occasionally receive a text: \u201cSomebody\u2019s arguing that the First Amendment stifles religion. You\u2019re up.\u201d Or \u201cSome poor soul seems to think the two clauses of the First Amendment are \u2018in tension.\u2019 Your turn.\u201d Or \u201cHey, looks like yet another person has forgotten that the opposite of secular is sectarian. Wanna handle this one?\u201d<\/p>\n If the team was big enough, each of us would only need to respond two or three times a week.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s one part of the post linked above that would prompt that team to respond:<\/p>\n In liberal democracy, so long as you don\u2019t harm your neighbor, you are free to believe anything you want and pursue happiness as you think best. In America the most visible example of this is the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: \u201cCongress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.\u201d<\/p>\n In light of this posture, political theologians on the religious right have made strong and cogent arguments that liberal democracy has pernicious and corrosive effects upon religious belief. To be sure, freedom of religion is lauded, but faith is hard to grow in the soil of liberalism. For my part, the most thoughtful critiques making this point take a cue from Alasdair MacIntyre and his book After Virtue.<\/em> Specifically, the pursuit of flourishing for a nation, and among those within a nation, demands a teleological vision of the good. What determines a good human life? What makes for a good business? What is our vision of the common good? We need to ask and answer teleological questions about a host of pressing social issues. For example, are marriages good? Are families good? If so, should the state protect, promote and support these goods over against alternative lifeways?<\/p>\n Liberalism can\u2019t answer any of these questions. The state is neutral toward questions of \u201cthe good,\u201d leaving that up to its citizens to work out for themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ugh. Look, if you want \u201ca teleological vision of the good\u201d you shouldn\u2019t be trying to order that from the catalog of the GPO in Pueblo, Colorado.<\/p>\n Yes, it\u2019s true that in a liberal democracy, the state refrains from supplying you with \u201ca teleological vision of the good.\u201d That\u2019s not something to complain<\/em> about.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat determines a good human life?\u201d is a good question and a vitally important question. You don\u2019t want<\/em> your government supplying the answer to that question. Because any government providing an answer to that question will end up imposing<\/em> an answer to that question.<\/p>\n Even on the very slim chance the government somehow initially got the answer mostly \u201cright,\u201d the establishment of that \u201cright\u201d answer would change it, alter it, and deform it. This bastardized, twisted version of that \u201cright\u201d answer would become the official answer, and any other answer \u2014 including the \u201cright\u201d one in its untwisted form \u2014 would be precluded.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat determines a good human life?\u201d is very much not a question you want the state to take an official, established, and mandatory position on.<\/p>\n In a liberal democracy, the state does not supply you with the answer to that question \u2014 which is to say the state refrains from imposing an answer to that question. This is one of the Good Things about liberal democracy.<\/p>\n But neither does that liberal democratic state prevent you from seeking and finding your own answer to that question. Nor does it interfere with you embracing, living, promoting, or sharing that answer. You are free to pursue that answer in your own life and you are free to persuade your fellow citizens of the truth, beauty, or goodness of that answer.<\/p>\n You\u2019re even free to learn from them and from whatever reasons they may have for not finding your<\/em> particular answer compelling, persuasive, or attractive. You are thus free to work with them to help one another refine and improve your various answers.<\/p>\n This allows for the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that you and your fellow citizens can, together, come up with a \u201cvision of the good\u201d that is much better than anything imagined by either Aristotle or his revivalists and cover bands. Better as in better for everybody<\/em> \u2014 as in more true, more beautiful, more good. It might, for example, be a vision of the good that isn\u2019t horrifically bad for women, slaves, and barbarians, and thus would allow for much more of that \u201chuman flourishing\u201d we all claim to be seeking.<\/p>\n None of that is likely, or even possible, if we instead rely on some top-down establishment of the official, approved, and favored vision of the good.<\/p>\n If I seem a bit impatient in my response here it\u2019s because I\u2019ve been responding to this same anti-Baptist shtick about this alleged liberal democratic threat to real, true Christianity since the early \u201990s.<\/p>\n Back in those days, people still remembered Yakov Smirnoff. The Cold War comic\u2019s signature bit was helpful for illustrating some of the ought-to-be-obvious problems of these critiques of liberal democracy. This still works: When you encounter some ponderous essay about the inherent \u201cconflict\u201d or \u201ctension\u201d between religion and liberal democracy, just start reading it out loud in the voice of Yakov Smirnoff. \u201cIn liberal democracy you choose religion. In Soviet Russia, religion chooses you!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe state is neutral toward questions of \u2018the good,'\u201d the post says, as if that were a bad<\/em> thing. What\u2019s bad about it? Well, this neutrality \u201c[leaves] that up to its citizens to work out for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Yep. We\u2019re being left to govern ourselves<\/em>. When in the course, we hold these truths, of, by, for, etc. That\u2019s a feature, not a bug.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a fundamental laziness to this critique of liberal democracy \u2014 not lazy thinking but actual<\/em> laziness. Reading this in Yakov voice helps to highlight this as well. \u201cIn America, citizens have to govern selves. In Soviet Russia, government does it for you!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n The free exercise of religion is, like all exercise, hard work. But, also like all exercise, no one else can do it for you.<\/p>\n That highlights one of my favorite things about the whole Aquinastotelian school of \u201cvirtue ethics.\u201d It\u2019s all about practice, practice, practice.<\/em> That \u201cteleological vision of the good\u201d? That\u2019s supposed to come from working at it like Tony Gwynn in the batting cage, keeping at it until your callouses bleed. So it\u2019s more than a little strange to realize that the lingering legacy of MacIntyre\u2019s attempt to revive virtue ethics is the complaint that self-government requires us to do such work ourselves.<\/p>\n As I mentioned above, back in the \u201990s, critiquing liberal democracy by clout-skimming MacIntyre and Hauerwas was even trendier than flannel and goatees. But we\u2019d all also just witnessed the democratic revolutions of 1989 and the ripple effects that followed in the former Soviet Union and South Africa. So those critiques of liberal democracy were usually offered in the spirit of that old line from Churchill: \u201cThe worst form of government, except for all other forms that have been tried.\u201d<\/p>\n The current trend of rehashing all those critiques isn\u2019t as constrained by the memory of that revolutionary time. Richard Beck\u2019s post seems more like his attempt to summarize those critiques than his full endorsement of them, but many of the critics he\u2019s summarizing do not share Churchill\u2019s preference for liberal democracy over \u201call other forms.\u201d Today, these rehashed recitals of those Grunge-era critiques are coming from Orbanists and \u201cCatholic integralists\u201d and Bartonites and dominionists and other authoritarians who explicitly seek the end of liberal democracy.<\/p>\n The language of Beck\u2019s summary helps illustrate what it is these folks are hoping for:<\/p>\n What determines a good human life? \u2026 What is our vision of the common good? \u2026 Are marriages good? Are families good? \u2026<\/p>\n Liberalism can\u2019t answer any of these questions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Liberalism can\u2019t \u2014 but authoritarianism can!<\/em> It can answer all<\/em> of those questions so you won\u2019t have to! It can answer all of those questions so you won\u2019t be allowed<\/em> to.<\/p>\n And so can Orbanism, and Trumpism, and Catholic integralism, and every other form of fascism.<\/p>\n Liberalism can\u2019t tell you what determines a good human life, but the king or dictator or strongman can<\/em> tell you that. And they will, as hard as they can.<\/p>\n The strongman will assign you a vision of the common good and tell you what kind of marriage and family are best for you, and thus what kind of marriage and family you will be permitted to have and required to have.<\/p>\n The strongman will not abandon you and leave you all alone with the job of governing yourselves. He causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive his teleological vision of the good. This calls for wisdom.<\/p>\n Or, put another way: Imagine a teleological vision of the good stomping on a human face. Forever.<\/p>\n Or, to be more explicitly Baptist about it, borrow the voice of a better comedian than Yakov:<\/p>\n To be fair, many of those pushing this Neo-Mahathirite MacIntyre-Hauerwas two-step are not calling for the end of liberal democracy and the establishment of some explicitly authoritarian religious autocracy. Most of them aren\u2019t Adrian Vermeule<\/a>. But their complaint with secular government is \u2014 wittingly or un- \u2014 a call for sectarian<\/em> government, which is a terrible idea with a monstrously high body count.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2024\/02\/PuebloPO.jpg\")
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