Tyranny Over Religion
The ongoing flap—hardly a debate—over the Ground Zero Mosque has elicited the response (as predictable as it is erroneous) that to deny a building permit to Muslims would a) violate the First Amendment and b) abridge the freedom of religion that belongs to every human being by virtue of natural law, divine will, or whatever justification you wish to invent. The inevitable reductio ad absurdum of this argument was reached in Oklahoma, where a group of Satanists is going to stage a blasphemy in the main hall of the Oklahoma City Civic Center. They cannot be denied a permit because that would infringe their religious freedom.
Whenever one of these controversies erupts, there are only two sides in the public form. the Hard Left—whether Marxists, Libertarians, or Multi-Culturalists—take their stand on freedom of religion, while the Soft Left (otherwise known as Conservatives) say that while there is a freedom of religion, it does not quite extend to Satanists or Muslims wanting to build a mosque at Ground Zero, though a mosque anywhere else is just fine and dandy.
Let me put my cards on the table. The First Amendment does not impose a universal right to religious freedom within the United States but only forbids the Congress (and by implication the President and the Courts if they pretend to be legislators) to interfere in the exercise of religion or set up a national church. We have a national church--that goes without saying--in the education establishment, but that is another question.
Any conservative, that is any soft-leftist, who knows anything about the Constitution will agree with this first point, though they may be under the delusion that the 14th Amendment has something to say about religion, but where they are sure to be enraged is with my second point, which is this: There is not only no natural or rational or god-given right to religious freedom, but, what is more, the whole idea is entirely bogus. Freedom of religion is nothing other than a weapon, forged by the Enlightenment Left, in their unremitting campaign to extirpate Christianity.
What, some blockheaded Norwegian is sure to exclaim, are you arguing for theocracy? Of course not. There is an infinite set of possibilities spanning the gap between complete freedom of religion and theocracy. The Romans had a state religion but permitted most unofficial or alien cults but with many exceptions or restrictions. The cult of Dionysus was proscribed because it encouraged licentiousness and the Senate, on a famous occasion, condemned violators of the ban to death, though it instructed their families to carry out the sentence. Druidism was forbidden, not only because the Druids practiced human sacrifice but probably also because the priests were the intellectual and political leaders of Celtic resistance. Judaism was licit, and because of their rules on sabbath observance Jews were not forced to serve in the army. Christianity was outlawed for several reasons: The founder of the religion had been put to death as a traitor or leader of a rebellion, and his followers were accused by their Jewish neighbors of a variety of crimes--sex orgies and human sacrifice. Some alien cults that many Romans found distasteful were permitted but restricted. No Roman could become a priest of Cyble/Magna Mater, because priests had to be mutilated, and their public activities were restricted to a certain time of the year. Augustus ruled that Egyptian cult could not be celebrated in Rome itself, and there were periodic deportations of soothsayers and philosophers.
But no major commonwealth has probably ever been so tolerant of religious diversity. The polytheistic Romans believed you could not have too many gods, potentially, on your side, and Tiberius is said even to have proposed the inclusion of Christ in the Roman pantheon. (Obviously non-Christian scholars do not believe this, but it is perfectly possible. Tiberius would have liked that bit about "my kingdom is not of this world" and welcomed a sect of Judaism, as he would have regarded it, that was not likely to start another rebellion.) But their generous toleration had limits, and cults that threatened security or offended against Roman taste or morals were either restricted or banned outright.
A man would be very foolish who thought that Christians, once given the right to practice their religion openly, would be eager to tolerate rival religions. Unlike Roman pagans, Christians believed they had a monopoly on truth and despised all other religions as the worship of demons. They were, however, wise enough to grab much of the best that paganism had to offer: Roman marriage customs and festivals and the Greek philosophical tradition. The result was that Christianity escaped its narrowly parochial Jewish origins--and the mean-spirited law that condemned parts of the creation as unclean. Ordinary Christians were able to savor the festival joys--suitably christened-- that pagan religions offered, and theologians availed themselves of the wisdom of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus.
Between Constantine and Theodosius the Church grew and prospered--except for the fortunately brief reign of Julian--and the somewhat bigoted Theodosius outlawed other religions, though it would take some time for intellectuals to give up their philosophies and ordinary people to renounce all their old ways.
Enough history. Religious freedom is a gift of a society or commonwealth, not a natural right. This is partly because religion is not faith--what one believes or feels--but an organized public action. Thus the public or republic has the right and duty to protect itself from alien or malignant cults. In a diverse Christian society, naturally, the various churches have had to learn to tolerate each other, though in practice toleration is generally a sign of indifference. Church becomes that thing you do or don't do on one day a week. It is like the beautiful jewel you take out of the box every once in a while to admire and feel good about yourself for owning. But religion is more like a wedding ring, a visible symbol of an enduring commitment.
The painful truth is that serious Catholics and serious Calvinists cannot live together without sacrificing a good deal of their religion. Christians can only co-exist with Jews on a basis of toleration, that is, the Christian majority agrees to put up with an alien religion so long as the adherents behave themselves. But Satanists? Muslims? The idea of Christians according religious freedom to Muslims who define themselves in part by their hatred of Christianity and who have oppressed Christians whenever they have had the power to do so, is preposterous. It is worse than preposterous, because the point of the exercise is not to liberate Muslims but to enslave Christians.
I could say much more, and I shall in my November essay in Chronicles. In the meantime, I am happy to develop the argument in response to queries and constructive criticism.
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Dr. Fleming, you asked for principled demurrals from your position, and I attempt to offer them, by embracing your system, not by rejecting it.
You rightfully allow that we cannot stop the theological clock at Augustine or Aquinas; this is good, as it would not allow for the Reformation.
But we must examine the Reformation itself: past Luther and Calvin themselves, their successors starting with Melanchthon and Beza, and continuing on, do return to natural law scholasticism and to a "liberalization" of political theology leading to the concepts of "natural rights." So when you draw a boundary around "traditions of any mainstream Christian traditions," any boundary is an arbitrary one, chronologically speaking.
But leaving the rights question aside, we are not obliged to abandon our God-given reason in developing a political theology, and the simple facts on the ground are that the Reformation spawned so many sects that if we are to burn heretics, we shall surely run out of wood.
Now one might argue that Locke is "outside the Christian tradition" [I disagree], but his argument for tolerance is a mix of theology and common sense.
a) No government can get you into heaven
b) The political cure for heterodoxy/heresy is worse than the disease
...as illustrated by Europe's bloody wars and civil wars over doctrine. If we may draw a parallel from the practical wisdom of Aquinas, eradicating prostitution would do more damage than good.
Now who is a "serious Calvinist?" In the Founding era, none was more serious than Samuel Adams, who wrote in 1772:
"In regard to religion, mutual toleration in the different professions thereof is what all good and candid minds in all ages have ever practised, and, both by precept and example, inculcated on mankind. And it is now generally agreed among Christians that this spirit of toleration, in the fullest extent consistent with the being of civil society, is the chief characteristical mark of the Church. Insomuch that Mr. Locke has asserted and proved, beyond the possibility of contradiction on any solid ground, that such toleration ought to be extended to all whose doctrines are not subversive of society."
Adams, per Locke, is referring to Papists here in that last part; still he touches on the greatest strength of your overall argument, that a society cannot cohere without some common ethos.
However, if the "serious Calvinist" and the "serious Catholic" cannot live together in America, then where can they live separately? Certainly not Amsterdam. Nowhere else I can think of either. Geneva is out, and Vatican City has little room for a billion Catholics.
When you write
In general, one can see that in the Christian world pluralism has led typically to a decline in faith overall.
This may be accurate, but the fault is that of the churches, not the state. To advocate pluralism as a [necessary] practical matter is not the same as admitting one's religion is not true [or The Truth]. This is the dilemma you limn here, but a resolvable one, I think. Whatever was a greater nominal observance of religion in some better days---America's churches were far more full---I question that the quotient of genuine faith was any higher.
As Mr. Locke eloquently argued, with a theological wisdom fit for an Augustine or Aquinas,
What if he neglect the care of his health or of his estate, which things are nearlier related to the government of the magistrate than the other [religion]?...No man can be forced to be rich or healthful whether he will or no. Nay, God Himself will not save men against their wills.”
The American Founders wisely separated soteriology [concern for the next world] from political theology [the concerns of this one]. The political concern is to keep the doors of your church open, against Leviathan's continuing attempts to close them.
#45: Dr. Fleming, thanks for the clarification. Your original comment about the English novel in #8 was never murky, but 45 has illuminated your point even further. If anything, the point about the recent history of the novel as a microcosm of the general decline in Christian values in the west is shockingly clear and telling. Even though the state of the Anglo novel today was not your main point, it nevertheless grabbed my attention. Indeed, when I first read your list of great novelists, then noticed the dearth of Protestants in the 20th-century section, I was provoked into trying to come up with a counterexample. I share your admiration of Greene and Percy and the others, and I would have thought coming up with an equivalent group of Calvinists would have been simple. But you seem to be onto something. It so happened that I came across Dr. Wilson's old reviews of Garrett's novels later that day, and I couldn't help wondering whether he was not a lone Protestant voice. I must say that I had never heard of Garrett, though Dr. Wilson's hilarious and fascinating reviews of Garrett's books have made it obvious that I will need to get them soon. Particularly arresting was this quotation in Wilson's review of Garrett's "Poison Pen":
"Manners represent a formal obligation to one's neighbor (who is always Everyman) and the ritual recognition of the love of God and for the presence of the Holy Ghost in all of one's fellow creatures. Therefore an act of bad manners may well be, to the Southerner, an act of violence. A violation of the code of manners may well be taken as at least meaning the same thing as a fist in the face or a blade between the ribs."
1) I don't know if I've ever come across a more thrilling exegesis of Christ's formulation of the second part of the greatest commandment.
2) However, this proves nothing as to Garrett's state of faith, let alone a particular church affiliation.
He must have been a fascinating, and obviously a delightful, man to have known. Incidentally, I believe that Garrett's statement embodies perfectly the sentiment, rehearsed constantly and truly in the present discussion of the NYC mosque, that there are perfectly well known limits to what kinds of behavior shall be tolerable in a civilized (read Christian) society. Islam is generally out of order in a Christian society; and the effort to plant a mosque near the WTC site is probably far more truly interpreted as an act of atrociously bad manners than as one of dhimmitude.
Muslim terrorists destroyed the WTC in the worst terrorist attack in history. Two wars followed, and all muslims, radical and expansionist or not, know that America is losing those wars. In light of all that, those who plan to build that mosque at that spot had to have known how it would look to most Americans, and how they would react. Therefore this mosque is intended to have a psychological impact. They intend for it to be a thinly veiled sign of their victory. They are rubbing our faces in it. They are using 'our' liberal pseudo-philosophy against us to do it.
Stupid, self-destructive ideologues who care more for their selfish beliefs than for their own people and descendants are helping them do it out of a false and baseless sense of 'principle'. Their own descendants, should they have any, will curse their names and spit on their graves for what they did to them.
This is not about rights or manners or the constitution or insane court rulings, it is about survival in a dangerous world, which necessitates keeping undesirables and dangerous elements out. Arguments against this truth based on 'rights' and 'tolerance' put ideology above the good and safety of the people and of cilivisation, and therefore are delusional and evil.
I don't see what is so complicated about all this. Christianity is The Truth. If a religious or ideological group wants to cripple or destroy The Truth then Christians have a duty to supress that group. Of course Christians believe in free will, so that a person cannot be forced to believe in The Truth and the state should not try to make them believe. However, if a pagan is out to destroy The Truth he can be fully suppressed, and if he is ambivalent it is probably prudent to curtail his civil rights somewhat (i.e. he can't run for office) to ensure the society and culture remain amenable to Christianity. There is no "right" formula. Charlemagne was intolerant, El Cid was somewhat tolerant, John Paul was very tolerant. Each served Christ as best they could given the circumstances of their times.
A couple of simplistic observations about this debate.
There seems to be another idea at work that I don't believe has been mentioned directly. And that is, those who are in favor of this mosque (specifically and generally) may have some loose notion of what Islam is (it's bad, and mostly sandy) and think, let them come anyway for we will transform them into something better -- like New York Times' subscribers. Who could survive long term exposure to American culture anyway? Could Christianity even survive here much longer in a public, vital sense?
Another is that so many others of the pro-mosque set seem to have little or no knowledge of Islamic history and still defend "religious freedom" vehemently. These types seem to have no religion of their own to defend, either, and instead, like NS, dance around behind a thin, beaded curtain of laws, or worse, legal process. Or worse still, the shifting scooches of majorities.
There is little to the real part of this debate beyond Dr. Fleming's question. I may have it wrong, but it revealed to me a great simplicity. Even a legalist would admit that the intention of our laws was to ensure a sense of "rights" that come from our Creator, not from the laws themselves or the crown. How then could we share those rights and the protection of the law with those who cannot acknowledge this Creator? Beyond that, tolerance is what it is, but from this basis alone can it be judged.
Yes, where does this mysterious freedom of religion come from?
I do await Dr. Fleming's considered and substantive response to my rebuttal[s] above [#42 & 50], but in the meantime, it's not as if his larger argument is not without great weight.
Mr. McCabe writes;
Even a legalist would admit that the intention of our laws was to ensure a sense of “rights” that come from our Creator, not from the laws themselves or the crown. How then could we share those rights and the protection of the law with those who cannot acknowledge this Creator?
Mr. McCabe, at this point, I believe Dr. Fleming is arguing against the very existence of such "rights," if I follow his argument correctly. His is a very deep and essential argument. Before we even get to the Bill of Rights, we must question "the right to have rights."
That might seem like nonsense in this modern age, but as Dr. Fleming writes [quite accurately]:
"[T]he fact [is] that rights theories come in and out of fashion. We don’t find them in Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, though we do find them in Renaissance Jesuits arguing for papal supremacy. They were in fashion in the 18th century, but Hume and Bentham subjected them to devastating attacks."
Thomas Fleming is an estimable scholar, and a busy man. It is unfair, unjust, and disrespectful for us to read him uncarefully---or not atall---before firing off any replies.
I happen to agree with your sentiments here, Mr. McCabe, but Dr. Fleming isn't quite talking about what the Founders called "self-evident," except to say that nothing is self-evident. Which is true, let's face it. If the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence were so self-evident, mankind, or failing that, Christianity---would have discovered them well before 1776 CE, AD, In the Year of Our Lord.
If I've misstated your position, Dr. Fleming, pls let me know, privately or publicly. I appreciate your engagement with your critics here in your comments section, and I am no "Norwegian Shooter" or other pseudonym or mindless grenade-tosser. You can look me up. I have read many of your other writings, and am not shooting from the hip here.
I have great difficulties with your position here as I understand it, but have given you all benefit of the doubt and a sympathetic reading as a philosopher/theologian and not a mere politician or pundit. Absent further reply, clarification and discussion in this forum, I must express my reservations about your current essay in other fora. I prefer other means and avenues. I greatly respect your body of work.
Respectfully,
TVD
Good article Tom. I'm a Perennialist/Traditionalist so I don't reject other major religious traditions but I cannot understand how a society or culture could have many faiths of any size without being torn apart. If culture and society are encompassing and have a major formative role in the individual's life then how can there be major competing religions or mythologies to animate these cultures and societies without them splintering?
I don't wish to weary the participants by repeating what I have argued in books, articles, and on this website (re abortion, fetus liberation, etc.) on the myth of human rights. I shall then just list a few main points. First, beware of Mr. Jefferson's declaration, drawn from writers like Selden and Locke--neither of them great shakes as political philosophers--that the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit are self-evident. The only justification for calling some principle self-evident is that it is believed to be revealed truth or it has been handed down from time immemorial. Since neither Scripture nor Tradition speak the language of rights, it cannot be revealed truth, and since it is not the language of Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, or the Reformers, it can hardly be tradition. In fact, we know where the theory comes from: the atheistic materialist Epicurus put forth a myth of human origins and social contract whose reasoning, picked up again during the Renaissance for opportunistic reasons--defense of the papacy and later part of the Whig myth--and used ever since as a rhetorical brickbat, whenever anyone wants to undermine the social order. Leave such language to "Dr" King and his admirers, e.g,. Glen Beck.
Here is the basic question. Suppose we are commanded to do or not to do something to someone or something else. Does that someone or something then have a right either to be done to or not done to? Does a deer out of season have a right not to be shot? Does a beggar have a right to our money? Confusion developed because of careless translations of, for example, the Latin word ius, which means a law or principle of right. It is thus ius, for a mother to bear and take care of her child, but does the child have a right, that is a claim, on the mother? Decidedly not. Thomas uses this very example to show that ius cannot mean claim, because to a normal Christian man it was clear that dependents do not have claims on the people on whom they depend. A mother is commanded by nature and by what Jefferson quaintly called "Nature's God" to bear and take care of her child. In killing or exposing it, she commits a grave evil. If, by contrast, we said there was a universal right to life, then any one of us might be required to liberate the fetus and, if we are a young woman, to insert it into the womb and give birth to it. But this is not what our Faith teaches us, quite the contrary. Our obligations are first to the people to whom we are connected by nature. Of course, we are forbidden to do evil to strangers, but we are not told to run around the world looking for bodies to save.
Now, it has been argued and I respect those who have made the argument, that we can convert the Christian language of duty into the liberal language of rights without running serious risks. I took up this question in the Morality of Everyday Life. However, in borrowing the language of the enemy, we are then forced to fight on his ground. By enemy I do not mean simply leftists but The Enemy. Dr. Johnson, the greatest Christian moralist in the English language, in referring to the arguments and strategies of the Whigs who used rights language to advance the cause of liberty and equality, observed correctly: The first Whig was the Devil. Christians should return to their own language, their own argumentation, and quit letting their enemies and The Enemy define the terms.
PS Locke is very bad business, and despite the efforts of conservative intellectuals, some of them my friends, to paint him as basically Christian, it is a futile exercise. He was first of all a propagandist rather than a philosopher, and his tabula rasa psychology combined with his state of nature mythology provides sufficient basis for any revolution, whether against kings or aristocrats or against Christianity. No, one does not have to be a Filmerite or a monarchist, but Christian moral theology cannot be framed in terms of Lockean rights. For Locke, men lived in a fairly happy state of nature until they realized the inconveniences and came to terms with each other in a social contract that is dependent upon the rulers' good behavior as determined by the subjects. For Christians, God made man in his image, perfect from the beginning, and it was his original sin that caused his expulsion from Eden, not any contract drawn up between Adam and Eve.
To JGC, I would say you have misunderstood the priorities of the Left. They embrace Islam out of a hatred not of all religion but of Christianity itself. Naturally they would be quite miserable in an Islamic regime, but they do not imagine that could happen. The Left's objective has been clear since Montaigne's Essay on the Cannibals and since Voltaire began signing his letters, Ecrasez le consubstantiel, that is, wipe out the consubstantial one (the Christ who is both God and man).
Mr. Wessexman,
Thank you for your contribution and honesty. I would only add that no man can understand the Western world without understanding Christ and the Church. Nor could anyone understand India or China without reference to Hinduism and Buddhism,.. or Iraq without Islam. It cannot be repeated often enough that the biggest obstacle to understanding another religious tradition is the failure to understand ones own. For most normal people it takes a lifetime, the field of comparative religion as we know it, is mostly shallow nonsense.
To TVD @56, thank you for your gentle warning. I can only assure you that I do not read Dr. Fleming in haste, since I am a painfully slow reader in the first place and his writing is denser than most, even some mathematics. This led me to put rights in quotes, because I am well aware of the arguments over the use of this word and what it has come to mean.
However, I did fall into the predicament described by TJF in 58's third paragraph. It is truly a dangerous and maybe futile game. But it is difficult to understand something in one language, perhaps a Christian language, and not strive to bring it out a little for public discourse. If we can only argue with Christians, then it will be difficult to slow the tide, and in fact, why argue at all then?
Where such creative appropriation works, it is worth a try, but in invoking the language of rights Christian writers have gravely impaired their ability to defend their traditions in a debate with the left. How many cynical leftist Catholic bishops have used this language to defend the welfare state or attack capital punishment? I think it is probably a mistake to worry too much about "what people say" particularly leftist people, when we should be really concerned with speaking the truth in the language of truth.
Regarding the Romans and religious freedom I'm reminded of a passage from Otto Kiefer's Sexual Life in Ancient Rome:
As for the whole constitutional question; the failure of the old constitution was both foreseen (De Maistre) and analyzed (Schmitt) to near exhaustion.
Schmitt wrote: "What matters for the reality of legal life is who decides." In other words: Auctoritas non veritas facit legem.
De Maistre, who referred to Protestants as "the Moslems of Europe," was more succinct."All that is written," he said "is nothing."
The old "constertution" is culpable in that it was based on flawed political ideas (Protestant Bibliolatry is the primary cause the written word, in constitutions or the old press, is/was given so much importance and influence) and an infirm grasp of what constitutes (real) political power. Therefore it should not be appealed to in an attempt to clean up the mess that it itself is largely responsible for. I believe Lysander Spooner made a similar argument. So did Sam Francis.
So now we're stuck with Norwegian Shooter.
Finally, religious toleration and pluralism, especially in America, are the result of Western Christendom's fracturing beginning in the sixteenth century. Today there are some 26,000 Christian ecclesiastical outfits. These divisions were and are bound inevitably to weaken whatever commonality Christianos profess to hold. Christian fissures in turn provided breaches that have been exploited expertly by a variety of it's enemies. These fissures are the ultimate source of the problem.
As Plato wrote in The Laws, "All change in the state comes about from a division among it's rulers." Or as Aquinas put it,"Corruptio optimi pessimo."
Physicians, heal thyselves!
* The Bacchanalian conspiracy, I think.
I haven't read Kiefer but the quotation strikes me as entirely wrong, particularly as a comment on the outlawing of the Bacchanalian rites. As I noted above, these rites posed a threat not to Roman order but to their sense of decency. The punishment was left to the families, which is not the sign of an all-powerful state but of an oligarchic commonwealth resting on the power of kinship. Schmitt, for a change, was right.
Dr. Fleming, you you say a few words regarding Caesaropapism? Particularly as it concerns the Orthodox?
* can you
Dr. Fleming, there's a lot of statements that I have been used to dismiss as right-wing hyperbole, and out of charity, I normally assume the hyperbole is deliberate and just as jest, BUT -
What you just said about the Left's embrace of Islam is not at all hyperbole, even though I would have had such a reaction to such statements even last week. But that was until I had just read something on RevLeft.Com (I check there to see what the Indian Maoist insurrection is planning next).
http://www.revleft.com/vb/religion-most-appealing-t103184/index2.html
On a topic on what religion Communists found most compatible to their own views (although they are all hardcore atheists), there was not a single one who said Christianity. I was shocked that 40% of them said Islam, and there are dedicated Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, and Black Panthers on that site who had decided to see the Kuran out of curiosity and liked it. Many did say so in half-jest, because they are obviously not like Muslims at all, but there was the notion of sympathy. In most anti-religion discussions of theirs, it's Christianity which is targetted.
It's one of those moments, when a man sees something unbelievable, but when he repeats it exactly as he sees it to others like us, we don't believe it. I suppose there could be many instances of the Right telling the rest of us today solemnly, "We told you so."
As an aside, as for Locke, Locke was a mediocre thinker. You can hear the exact same thing from many contemporary liberals, and I am one of them. Here's the problem for us - Locke's ideas were not one bit new, and where it was new, it was wrong. I found out from their pieces that the likes of Gordon, Rothbard, and Raico had not become liberals out of Lockean inspiration, but much older French, Spanish, Dutch, and German thinkers from decades (and centuries) before Locke. It's the same with Adam Smith, who was preceded by Bernard Mandeville. That's the problem - that everybody else can represent liberals as descendants of mediocrities like Adam Smith, John Locke, and John Stuart Mills. It's what the Germans used to call Das Adam Smith Problem. Some Central Europeans had evidence that he was an outright plagiarist who betrayed colleagues.
That's probably why the "Devil was the first Whig" - English classical liberals were probably not the most honest group out there, especially since English classical liberals were often government officials and elite intelligentsia themselves. In the view of many of us here still bitter in India, the English had the habit of falling for whatever new age ideology that became fashionable in their day, as an excuse for their decadent indulgences (Fabian Socialism, for example). Nobody denies British achievements, but a point of English arrogance is not giving credit where credit is due, especially to European foreigners. As it is, with their hijacked liberal movement, the older strain of liberal thought was marginalized, but remained a part of a broader spectrum of beliefs, that itself continued to evolve beyond the narrow confines of the Smith-Locke-Mills mainstream.
(And that's just talking about the social sciences. There are entire schools of thought in mathematics, nutrition, biology, and physics that have evolved in complete isolation in France, Germany,.etc and going much beyond Anglo-American progress, without much notice from the rest of the world. That's what our family has found out from friends back in France, made when we used to live there.)
I don't think the Orthodox are fond of that term. It certainly is an inaccurate and misleading way to characterize a very complex and ever-evolving relationship between church and empire. Strong emperors did exercise a good deal of authority--probably too much--over the Byzantine hierarchy, but the Church was not supine, and usually won in the end, suppressing monophytism and monotheletism, triumphing over iconoclasm, and fighting tooth and claw against reunion. The papacy was probably more often in a stronger position, but the western emperors won quite a few battles, as did the Normans.
Many classical liberals dislike Mandeville because he sounds to completely cynical. I very much enjoy and value Mandeville's clarity and in practical terms I agree with him that private acquisitiveness must be tolerated--though I would say up to a point. Locke's platitudes and shoddy metaphysics, on the other hand, have always inspired me with loathing. Like Montaigne, he is a sly underminer rather than an honest rebel, and his treatments of marriage or religion are reassuringly bland on the surface while in reality denying reality to the institutions. Perhaps someday we should have a book discussion on the Fable of the Bees.
I've always thought of Lockeans as sort of like the Soviets that would invent things that had already been invented in capitalist countries decades before. I used to have a higher opinion of Locke but not so of Mills amd Smith, but I think Mr Sanjay is right, its a case of Locke reading others work and then repackaging them as his own, but in a mediocre fashion.
By the way, Sempronius, I agree with you on constitutional interpretation.
Interpretation of a writing without human bias is impossible.
If it were written, "Congress shall make no rule of law abriding freedom of speech or press", it still wouldn't stop people using this statement to condemn police for removing a man wearing an offensive T-shirt...even though a T-shirt is not speech, and the police is not Congress.
But lo, hundreds of case laws would still be available to somehow justify otherwise.
Mr Sanjay, I think the rub has more to do with when acts became confused with speech. Is wearing an offensive T-shirt, burning a flag or making pornography an act or speech? For much of our history, it has been considered the former.
Mr. Robert M. Peters,
Thank you for introducing us to Brother Mose, and for passing on his fascinating explication of the context behind the Jews' rejection of Christ and the Incarnation. It does make perfect sense (now that I've read Br. Mose) in human terms that, having been drawn into and dragged down with idol worship, they would then be vulnerable to going too far in the other extreme, feeling compelled to avoid anything as tangible and accessible as a living human being. I suppose it must not have helped Jews to believe in Jesus that, at about this time, (please correct my chronology if necessary) the Romans were elevating their emperors to deities, thus vulgarizing and making even more suspicious others' claims of divinity.
It was also good to be reminded of a Christian's obligation to be humble in "honor of the work which God wrought through the Israelites", especially in these days when, what with the modern Israelis seeming to run our government, and with the damage the bankers and market manipulators are doing to the prospects of the American worker, I have found myself, I hope not sinfully, looking upon the old Jew-hatred of our benighted ancestors a little less sure of their moral inferiority.
Tjf, we posted our September 5 comments at the same time, so I've just now seen yours: "Is religious liberty a right and if it is, where does it come from ?" (btw, this is your first non-rhetorical question in the entire debate. I've asked dozens of you without a single response)
Religious liberty is a right. It comes from the sum total of all American jurisprudence on the issue: the Constitution, including all Amendments; laws, from federal, state, and local governments; and judicial interpretation of these two sources, through the appropriate court system. That is, it is granted by mere mortals. Furthermore, the edge between "this action is allowed while this action is not allowed" does change over time. However, describing it as "changing fashions and personal whims" is entirely unfair. Have you ever read a Supreme Court decision? I linked to hundreds of them on religious liberty. Please find me an opinion that shows how "changing fashions and personal whims" have decided the case.
So, now your turn, is religious liberty a right and if it is, where does it come from? One cannot in good faith say God because any particular god you are referring to has much too narrow a group of adherents. Besides, we shall end up saying that it is the interpretation of ancient questionable texts that will decide the matter.
Unless his answers rise to a higher level, this will be NS's last appearance, hardly a hurrah. Since states, after the adoption of the Constitution and bill of rights, continued to maintain religious establishments and religious tests for holding office, there was no absolute right under the Constitution until some time in the 20th century. Any other "rights" issue would yield the same results. Is Plessy still the law of the land? Judges now believe differently from what they did 50 years, much less 200 years ago, and we are then at their mercy to decide. What a taste for turgid prose and bad logic you must have to read the wit and wisdom of federal judges. Perhaps this poisonous stuff is habit-forming, like junk food. Since I have already shown that there can be no universal religious basis for freedom of religion, your last paragraph merely illustrates the mind-numbing effects of reading opinions.
If law is nothing more than the current consensus opinion of federal judges, then we are at their mercy. If this makes leftists happy, that is not my concern, but why should they argue with people they disagree with? Why not just sue them in federal court and let the judges decide? When the Muslims take over this country, these judges or their successors will be singing a different tune, something like the Four Seasons' classic, "Shar-i-a, Sharia baby, gonna cut with a knife."
Dr. Fleming, today's "scholarly" Locke is perhaps the true one, that his iffy metaphysics and theory of "rights" are modern and unChristian. However, I believe it's an error to read Locke-as-Locke instead of how the Founders understood him, which was in the natural law tradition of Aquinas and the "judicious" Anglican Rev. Richard Hooker.
As James Wilson, signer of both the Declaration and Constitution and later a Supreme Court justice wrote:
"I am equally far from believing that Mr. Locke was a friend to infidelity. But yet it is unquestionable, that the writings of Mr. Locke have facilitated the progress, and have given strength to the effects of scepticism.
The high reputation, which he deservedly acquired for his enlightened attachment to the mild and tolerating doctrines of christianity, secured to him the esteem and confidence of those, who were its friends. The same high and deserved reputation inspired others of very different views and characters, with a design to avail themselves of its splendour, and, by that means, to diffuse a fascinating kind of lustre over their own tenets of a dark and sable hue. The consequence has been, that the writings of Mr. Locke, one of the most able, most sincere, and most amiable assertors of christianity and true philosophy, have been perverted to purposes, which he would have deprecated and prevented, had he discovered or foreseen them."
Neither is it accurate, I believe, especially in light of the work of Brian Tierney on medieval canon law, to dismiss "rights" as unChristian and not part of a developing Christian natural law political theology.
________
To Mr. McCabe, we are in agreement. I have so far had better luck with arguing the natural law foundations of "rights" as we know them today than with Christian fideists who reject natural law.
And as we see, fideism is a conversation-ender with anyone who does not share one's own faith.
To Wessexman, I also agree, and in this area, Dr. Fleming has a sustainable point, that one cannot expect a society to cohere without a common worldview, or in the case of those who do not share it [non-Christian religions, nonbelievers], a willingness to go with the flow and not disrupt it.
What troubles me about Dr. Fleming's thrust is that a certain Christian fideist worldview can be as equally disruptive to the Founding principles as non-Christian or modernist views. Calvinists and Catholics must live together in peace, and with the rest, too. Even if Jesus "brought a sword," it's insane if not unBiblical to believe that God put us on earth to be at each other's throats.
The political theology of the Founding is first and foremost that God and His Providence are a reality, not a theory, not a matter to be cordoned off in the "private sphere."
It is the defining of God as reality [and not just mere religion] that is the true current crisis.
My only concern is to find the truth, advocate it, and live by it. While an older generation was alive, e.g. Andrew Lytle, Russell Kirk, Mel Bradford, I had a pious wish not to disillusion them about the state into which our republic had fallen our about the Enlightenment fantasies that underly the Declaration. For rhetorical purposes, I did not wish to quarrel with the Kendall interpretation of the founding--though in fact there never was a founding. In writing about religion and religious liberty, a Christian must write as a Christian. In general, however, when I write about politics it is from a perspective somewhere between Aristotle and Machiavelli. I see no reason in following James Wilson more than I would follow my own reasoning and have in fact studied these questions at deeper level than he ever did, and if I will not follow the judicious and hardminded Wilson, I can hardly be expected to defer to Mr. Tierney. Saying that he has proved something is, to put it politely, an overstatement, if the passages of his book that I have looked it have given me an accurate impression.
About three-fourths of this discussion is well worth one's while, though Norwegian Shooter quite fails to understand the discussion of rights vis-a-vis the right.
One minor point of information: my old acquaintance Garrison Keillor is not, to my knowledge, Norwegian. He's Scots and English, the apostate scion of a family of Plymouth Brethren. I still find him funny, though I could do without the scatological and crass sexual jokes in his writing.
Alas, I suppose I should say, I remain three-quarters Swedish.
I should add, if there were a founding fueled by abstractions-as there was not except in the minds of a few people like Paine--then I am against it. The rhetoric of those days picked up weapons from Locke and the others as so many weapons to use to justify their rebellion. To insist very strongly on those very dubious arguments puts our own revolution on par with that of the French. It was those pernicious principles, however, that would soon encourage northern states to liberalize their divorce laws and set in motion the events that culminated in the destruction of the republic. If there was a founding theology, it was somewhere between the Freemason Libertine friend of Voltaire--Franklin-and the even more subversive "ideas" of the atheist Paine. In a better age, it was better to pay lipservice to these superstitions, but those days are long past. I am happy to live in peace with my Calvinist friends who will send me to Hell for refusing to go along with their revolutionary and heretical principles, but I know full well if such people ever gained power, I would be on the list for being burned.
As for natural law, this is a subject that few natural-law professors understand at all, since their minds have been corrrupted by Locke and Hegel, who are entirely at odds with the understanding of Aristotle, the Stoics, and Cicero.
Finally, I knew I could count on my Swede friend Ray to bring a light heart to the conversation. I am getting ready to leave for Charleston and cannot devote more time. If Mr. Van Dyke will read my books, then I will be happy to answer questions, but I am too busy on the next one to spend a great deal of time repeating what I have said in the past. By the way, the proper way to study the American Revolutions is through the eyes of ME Bradford and thus to concentrate on each state. Rereading George Rogers fine little book on Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, I relearned much that I had once knew or thought I knew about the mindset of South Carolinians. While many fell in with the Yankee rhetoric of the time, Henry Laurens was too shrewd and conservative, and by the early 19th century, Charles Pinckney was breaking with his cousins over their federalism and unionism. Clyde Wilson could speak to this point far better than I, but the rights of man play a much smaller role than the interests of planters and merchants. The best thing about what is left of conservative Republicans today is their narrow focus on profits and self-interest. It is precisely when they start talking loftily about freedom and democracy, that they become, like Palin and Beck, entirely repulsive.
Thank you for your time, Dr. Fleming. I believe I've engaged your concepts on their own terms to show that I understand them. I've read a number of your monographs.
I do not know if one can accept your history without accepting your theology, and vice-versa. With that limitation, it's hard to tell where you have standing, as an American or as a Christian theologian. Either way, I don't see how the logical conclusion of your thesis can avoid tyranny.
Our mutual friend Aquinas does not approve of tyranny.
Have a nice journey and I look forward to our next exchange.
On the way out the door, I have to say you cannot have understood much about what I have written if you think it can be twisted to a defense of tyranny. I am neither a theologian nor an historian, but a philologist, and my view of American history, far from being inspired by my religion actually cuts against me. I do not see that it would have been wrong for a Protestant state to discriminate against Catholics. Where there are large minorities, such discrimination is imprudent and may even be unfair, but I do not see why it would have been wrong to keep Catholics out of a Calvinist state. It is a very bad idea, I would submit, to engage in generalizations about the mythical American founding without a state by state study of real people, what they said and did. Otherwise we are back to political mythology, which is fine so long as the mythology is upholding a decent regime. In the case of the USofA, the reigning mythology taught in schools is upholding a very bad system. The "founders" you invoke were by and large not trinitarian Christians, and it is hard to see why one would elevate the likes of Franklin and Paine or even Adams and Jefferson to the the level of Christian heroes.
Mr. Van Dyke, have you read Annabel Brett's Liberty, Right, and Nature? (A limited preview is available at Google Books.) iirc, she does respond to Tierney's placement of the source of rights within the Franciscan tradition. In my all-too-shallow inquiry into actual medieval canon and civil law, I have only seen rights defined by law, and not the other way around. (That is to say, rights are posterior to law and not prior to it.)
Indeed Robert most "scholars" of comparative religion are modernists, if not agnostics or worse, whose main interest seems to be historicism. I've heard criticisms by "scholars" of comparative religion which seem to suggest bias in genuine scholars because they accept some idea of transcendent truth or divinity! You really have to go to figures on the margins of "mainstream" academia to find decent scholars of comparative religion like Frithjof Schuon, Henry Corbin, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Rama Coomaraswamy(and his father of course.).
'As for the whole constitutional question; the failure of the old constitution was both foreseen (De Maistre) and analyzed (Schmitt) to near exhaustion.'
Sempronius, I'm not very familiar with the work either of Maistre or of Schmitt. Where do they write about this?
Mr Sanjay @ 67:
Your next to last paragraph is the most insightful criticism of the Victorian Brits I seen in a long time.
Furthermore, you wrote:
'(And that’s just talking about the social sciences. There are entire schools of thought in mathematics, nutrition, biology, and physics that have evolved in complete isolation in France, Germany,.etc and going much beyond Anglo-American progress, without much notice from the rest of the world.)'
I can resist. What are these schools of thought?
Mr. Chan, my counterargument to Dr. Fleming's thesis isn't based on Brian Tierney's work, except to illustrate that "rights" didn't drop in from Mars one day in the 1600s with the Enlightenment. It was well underway inside Christian political theology. Neither the historian nor the philologist is qualified to decide what thought is "Christian" and what is not.
Thank you for the recommendation of Annabel Brett's work. I will follow up.
And with all do respect to Dr. Fleming, I'm quite familiar with his arguments. I may be wrong in my demurrals, but it's not for lack of understanding him.
Allen, a man called Benoit Mandelbrot in France created an entire branch of mathematics called Fractal Geometry, which has progressed as its own school in France. Virtually unknown outside it, until a Lebanese American man wrote a bestselling book about it. Also, have you ever wondered why French people are not fat, while so many Brits and North Americans are? A school of lipid research came up in France, by Claude Bernard, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and Jean-François Dancel, who gained brief fame in the 1860s when they helped a short, two-hundred pound Englishman lose eighty-five pounds in two years, the results of which were widely publicized back then. They based their work on a German chemist Justus von Leibig.
Fascinating, isn't it, like a whole world out there that we don't know about? That's part of the reason why I come to Chronicles - knowing that some multi-lingual and pro-European people write articles here, I thought this would be one of those places to see ideas outside orthodoxy.
Mr. Wilson @84
I can't tarry so I will try to provide a more extensive list tonight. But you may wish to begin with De Maistre's Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and Study on Sovereignty. Also, there are Schmitt's Concept of the Political Political Romanticism and Political Theology.
These works don't deal directly with the US constitution, but with the wider mentality/deology from which it emerged.
Mr. Van Dyke has not succeeded in scoring a single point but he has managed to derail the discussion, whose very object he has apparently misconceived. My purpose, as should have been plain, was not to advocate any particular policy toward any particular religion but to show that there is no absolute right to religious liberty, either in nature or in Christianity. The historical examples of ancient Athens and Rome, Medieval Christendom, and even the early American republic should be enough to make this point, and when the mainstream of philosophy that Christianity absorbed says nothing about rights, that should clinch it, but instead of responding to these arguments with evidence or reason, he keeps on repeating what he believes. In a case like this, I don't much care what I believe and if proved wrong, I am happy to switch sides. Imagine with what enthusiasm I read a stranger's apodictic declarations.
I must be brief before closing this part of the discussion, but let me just say that Mr. VD is wrong on virtually every point, beginning at the most trivial level, with his statement that he understands my work. While there are limits to the authority of the first-person perspective, a writer's word ought to be given some credence, and in going over his responses it is clear he has no idea of what I have been saying here or elsewhere.
Second, he is entirely wrong to dismiss history and philology as sources of understanding. What are we supposed to do, take his assertions on faith? Non-philologists rarely know how to read and understand difficult texts in a foreign language. A clergyman with two or three years of seminary Greek under his belt only knows enough to make him dangerous to himself and to anyone foolish enough to listen to his discussions of the New Testament. I have been studying Greek for nearly 50 years now and Latin for more than 50 I am from satisfied with the state of my understanding. When amateurs undertake broad intellectual histories, they rely on translations, commentaries, and intellectual historians, whose word they must accept. In the case of natural rights, this is very tricky business indeed, since the words translated as rights from Greek and Latin are rather different from what we are used to dealing with in English. Aristotle's natural right, for example, is sometimes better translated as natural justice, but dike is a richer word than iustititia. It is the natural order of things. For example, a poet can say that it is justice for a man and woman to have sexual relations if they live together. But it is also true that a merely abstract analysis, even one informed by philology, of Aristotle's ethical and political works is insufficient, since it is very important to know what sort of societies Aristotle was familiar with, how they were structured and how they worked. Only some of this can be teased out of the text: much must be gained by studying literary and historical texts, and what is true of Aristotle is true of Cicero, St. Thomas, and Althusius.
Now let us take up his error about what is and is not consistent with Christianity. First off, a man may be a good Christian but be mistaken about physics. He may also be a good Christian but hold views incompatible with the best Christian tradition, for example, he may be loose in his views of divorce and remarriage. Heresy enters the picture when a Christian begins to believe and preach opinions that are not merely contradicted by Scripture and Tradition but which go against the very heart and soul of Christ's teachings, for example, the classical liberal who says we have no individual or collective obligations to practice charity.
Now, a Christian may hold false views that are taught by his society without incurring much blame. Thus, I do not engage in windy denunciations of American Christians who put more stock in the Declaration of Independence than the ethical and political teachings of the ancient Church, but it is entirely false and foolish to argue that because it might be possible that some eccentrics picked up the false theory of rights from one or another source, that this constitutes and sound evidence for the compatibility of rights doctrines with Christianity. If Mr VD is a Jesuit and wants to cite Suarez and Molina, then let us have that discussion, but it is, I fear, an historical discussion that must be had and not an abstract one.
Who are the great apostles of Natural Rights? Grotius, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Gandhi, MLK. Which of these is a sound orthodox Christian? The best case can be made for Grotius but if you read carefully what he says about marriage, you will not see evidence of a Christian moral formation, quite the opposite.
The best arguments that have been made for saving the Declaration and the tradition of natural rights has been made by conservatives who tried to save the tradition by pointing out conservative elements. As I said earlier, I respect Kendall and his disciples and friends, but their exercise in mythologizing has no relevance for this postchristian postrepublican postconstitution postamerica in which we find ourselves. I have just wasted 30 good minutes of valuable time, and I do not intend to waste any more. If more of these irrelevant assertions are posted, I shall instruct the webmaster to take them down, ban the poster, and close this discussion.
Mr. Wessexman @#83
Yes, I can see that you have looked into these matters and "are not far from the Kingdom".... I was fortunate to have had a teacher who knew these things and their relationship with the very culture in which they are taught and practiced. The california gurus, the grapefruit crowd and kids eating peyote nuts in New Mexico in order to "find themselves" are usually either frauds, dillusional or mentally disturbed. If more Christians would go back and read the early Fathers, Cassian, The Rule of St. Benendict, John of the Cross, St. Theresa of Avilla, The Devout Life by St Francis De Sales, The Little Flower or the Immitation, they would find that these writers all say the same thing; and would perhaps even discover the roots of their own spiritual inheritance and traditions instead of wandering around the world trying to understand one that will always remain foreign and difficult for the Western imagination. But since we have relegated Faith from a kind of knowledge to mere sentiment, I doubt there are very many willing souls left with the fortitude to make the difficult passage. I hope you find the narrow way.
Can the Muslims be much worse than the gang of Atheists, abortion lovers, homosexuals, Zionists, Masons, and other crooks and degenerates who presently govern us? This has been a very good discussion.
Believing Muslims can be better in many respects than postchristians but they are less likely to murder you. There are some people trying to be decent in NYC and besides even a community of creeps should be permitted some say over what they will tolerate. But thanks for the observation.
T.F.: "I don’t think Luther had this in mind, but the effect of the Protestant revolution has been indifference."
Luther certainly did not seek to bring about indifference, but Dr. Fleming is correct that the effect of his actions was to open the door for men to move away from the Roman Catholic Church and move to churches of their own creation. It seems to me that Luther's actions sought a RESTORATION, not a Reformation. Luther sought to RESTORE the Church to its Biblical roots--before it was corrupted irreversibly by the men who led it. What happened later, and became what we now call the Reformation, was that men took advantage of the open door, picked and chose Catholic tenets they wanted, "adjusted" others, created still more, and made their own churches. Of course this would lead ultimately to the indifference of the 21st Century. Luther loved not just the Triune God, he also loved the Bible and the Church. The Church was built on the foundation of the Bible and, for more than a thousand years, it had been the sole font of Truth for Christians. The Church had tumbled off of its foundation in some ways, and Luther wanted to force the Catholic Church back onto its Bible-based foundation. The sad fact is that his fight to restore the Church led to its splintering into hundreds of Protestant sects.
Federalist 45 "The Church had tumbled off of its foundation in some ways, and Luther wanted to force the Catholic Church back onto its Bible-based foundation."
Yes, your post is mostly true in my opinion but Henry VIII and Calvin's big and difficult book also stoked the fire of rebellion and greed. Luther's objections were in house and would have resulted in nothing much but another gradual reform as the Church has had to do from the very beginning --since Peter promised he would never deny Our Lord before hearing the cock crow several times before dawn. Or Paul corecting him about circumcision. It is the human part of the spiritual life to fall and rise, fall and rise until one eventually begins to understand from where goodness and truth really come. It is the same today for the old Church -- she is full of heresy, immorality, modernists, neo-modernists, schismatics and all the rest. There always exists more sinners than saints in the Church in every age.(this seems to infuriate men such as the poor miserable Mr. Hitchens)It did not infuriate Dante who simply noticed all the trimmers outside the vestibule of hell and continued his life's journey through heaven and hell.
This idea that all the good guys are on one side and the bad guys all on the other has never really interested me. But I will say that the poetry, the solemnity, the music, the ancient rites of mercy, The Holy Mass, baptism, The Mother of God,respect for the dead, philosophy etc. come from within the tradition and not from without. This is a minor point to those familiar with the thing itself, but a major point for those who are not. I hope to see my old Luthern friend, Aaron Wolf, sooner rather than later so we can discuss more important things such as whether it was the Catholics or Protestants who conserved the best recipes for beer and spirits or whether Clyde Wilson has a point when he answers,"neither one. It was the Southerner who produced the finest whiskey known to man." This type of learning is based upon friendship and is also an attribute to God. Once it is discovered, as decribed by Plato and Scorates, evidently one can never exhaust the human thirst for it, until near the very end when everything is seen as vanity compared to the vision that awaits them.
This is one of the best posts I have seen on this site and I have seen a good many excellent ones. Dr. Fleming, you have not only hit the nail on the head, you smacked him square between the eyes.
If more of these irrelevant assertions are posted, I shall instruct the webmaster to take them down, ban the poster, and close this discussion.
Message received, Dr. Fleming. But I'm not arguing from the facile positions you assign to me, nor enlist support from humbugs like Jefferson.
I trust that in referring to me as "Mr. VD," no puerile insult was intended, but it makes for a puzzling oversight coming from a philologist.
Thank you for your time. My objections will have to stand without further eloquence.
Of course there is no absolute right to freedom of religion, or any other thing in this world. Man makes promise to man, in order to enlist his service in political enterprise. When remembered at all, the promise is generally not sustained for long.
I believe Norwegian Shooter correct when he links religious liberty in this country to federal court decisions. How else to define liberty in a state defined by rules backed by force, but as a conditional freedom granted to man by man? However, man and his opinions are fickle, and what rulers giveth they taketh away without reflection or regret.
Still, political institutions must be legitimate in order to survive. Herein lies a question. Do the rulings of the courts have value above the value of paper and ink? Is the concept of using federal courts to make and interpret the rules that we must live by an idea that still has life left, or is it fully depreciated?
If instead one wished to make a clean break from precedent and make a fresh start, does one need to start from scratch? I think probably not. Shouldn't there be fundamental characteristics, tried and tested, that should be incorporated into a working set of rules on religious practice?
Indeed Robert. I'm an Anglican myself but a pretty traditional one and I've learned much from Catholic spirituality both pre-reformation and after, as I have from Orthodoxy Christianity and certain branches of traditional Protestantism. If you want to read a 20th century Christian mystic of great faith and spiritual depth may I recommend the largely unrecognised Anglican laywoman Lilian Staveley. She wrote in anonymity, perhaps like the greatest mystic should, but her work is truly moving.
When it comes to Luther and the reformation I think the blame is on both sides. The church had become somewhat corrupt and needed to change. If it had accepted some of the general ideas of reform of some of the earlier reform movements, particularly the Lollards, then the reformation may not have happened and what's more the church may have been able to assimilate the renaissance without it becoming the corrosive, anti-contemplative force it did, as Byzantium had long been able to hold its own humanism. Being an Anglican, and though being a very traditional one and respecting much of Roman Catholicism, I cannot help but think that its more rigid hierarchy and certain of its practices were unnecessary, like celibate priests unnecessarily repeating the restrictions of the monks, and thinking that if the Christian West had been a little bit more like the Christian East then again we would have been spared the ravages of the reformation. It is Orthodox Christianity which of the main divisions of Christianity is probably the more historically and traditionally pure and indeed balanced with Protestantism and Roman Catholicism tending to varying degrees to move in one way or another beyond a strict balance and sometimes beyond a reasonable balance.
Thomas Fleming I believe you mentioned you were going to work on a more exhaustive treatment of the idea of religion and culture or something similar?
May I humbly recommend utilising ideas in the writings of Robert Nisbet and Richard Weaver; two writers you are probably very familiar with. These two writers both seem to me to have important insights into building a case against multiculturalism/a multifaith society and against secularism.
Robert Nisbet reminds us that the individuals self(at this mundane level.) is significantly formed by his interactions with everyday social associations and society and culture at large. He reminds us that each social association is made up of various roles, functions, ideas, authorities, statues and so on and that the individual interacts with these in many ways, often beyond his full rational understanding, and they help to orient him and indeed partly give meaning, values(both rationally and unconsciously.) and personality to him. These social associations, and the factors just mentioned that make them up, themselves or rather individuals that make them up interact with the other social associations in a society to form a balance and unity both functionally and ideationally.
Now bearing that in mind if we utilise Richard Weaver's insights into culture, that is aims at cohesion, that it is based around a unifying, values giving image or mythology, then a powerful argument against a multicultural/multifaith society beings to take shape.
This is because this culture and its mythology must, according to Nisbet and Weaver, interact with the various social associations, and the factors listed that make them up, in a myriad of ways, many beyond the full rational understanding of the individuals they influence. This is because the culture and mythology by creating a value-giving image around which social associations and society measures itself will orientate these factors, like ideas and authorities, within the social associations towards the standards of this values-belief system.
Now the fact that these mythologies must themselves be complex enough to play these myriad roles and interactions and the fact that these interactions are often far beyond what is rationally constructed or fully understandable implies that there cannot be multiculturalism or "multifaith-ism" in a healthy society. This is because it is not simply, in this view, the rational precept that we should not steal for instance that helps to instill this virtue in a society(though we shouldn't downplay the importance of such precepts.) but the way this figures in the mythology of the society and how this mythology interacts with the factors that makes up society in order to reinforce this morality, both rationally and unconsciously.
Now Islam, though it may share many of the basic moral precepts of Christianity, obviously has a very different mythology and tradition and hence these values will have distinct interactions with social associations and the factors that make them up compared with Christianity.
This means that in a multicultural state there would be a tear in the society and culture, because though the two(or more.) faiths may share many similar morals, the mythologies with which they transmit these are very different and will replicate, confuse and frustrate in many instances.
It is rather like trying to build a model train set according to two very similar plans, however one suggests using a OO guage and one an N guage(yes I had to look these up being no expert on models trains, unfortunately!) and one suggests using a DC power system and the AC power system(yes its probably a poor analogy but it is the best I could think of quickly.).
Or another example would be to use Lord of the Rings and Narnia. Both have similar values and beliefs they are trying to instill but if the lesson to be taught by one set of imagery and rashly and unthinkingly merged with the other then the lessons become harder for all to make out.
And as Nisbet and particularly Weaver reminds us culture, society and social associations, being the products of human nature are like it aiming at unity and cohesion.
This argument also implies a lack of merit in secularism. This is because secularism by its very nature posits an artificial, rationalistic, ideological and narrow values and belief system to be the image or mythology providing centre for a culture and society. It seems very unlikely that such an image could be broad, organic or deep enough to fully interact with and orient the myriad factors that make up social associations in a good enough way to keep society, and many individuals, healthy and strong.
Now this is but an embryo conception with many kinks in it but I do think it has merit in improving the Traditionalist or Conservative enunciation of our views on culture, society and religion.
@ 84 Mr. Wilson,
Also see De Maistre's Study on sovereignty and scattered remarks in Considerations on France. For Schmitt see Roman Catholicism and Political Form Constitutional Theory The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy and The Constitutional Theory of Federation.
I think Spooner summed things up pretty nicely: