Public Square
Items on religion in public life and social discourse
Does Democracy Need Religion?
Mon 13 Mar 2006 by Joseph Loconte
Current suspicions about religion are unrealistic—and unreasonable
Senior Fellow Joseph Loconte discusses the recent outcry against religion from European and American opinion shapers and reminds us of some founding American principles that should not be lost—and lessons from history that should not be forgotten.
Eco on Secular Credulity
Mon 05 Dec 2005 by Peter Edman
Novelist and agnostic Umberto Eco has a lovely essay in the London Telegraph a couple weeks ago. In “God isn’t big enough for some people,” he highlights Chesterton’s observation on belief.
It’s worth the time to read through.
Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.
They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms—yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious—to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest. . . .
We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
Eco concludes with a comment that the Christian faith is an absurdity (albeit a logical and coherent one). And this is an essentially true statement. It just happens to be a true absurdity.
Loconte on Pacifism
Tue 08 Nov 2005 by Peter Edman
Senior Fellow Joseph Loconte had an article in the Friday November 4 edition of the Wall Street Journal that is worth noting.
In ”Peace Now: Christian pacifists ignore the true ambitions of terrorists,” Loconte, ever the equal opportunity critic, addresses the theological and practical problems attending a certain current variant of Christian pacifism, which calls for peace at all costs. Unfortunately, its unconsidered costs include truth—and logic. In addition to being essentially futile, this position is fundamentally disrespectful to the enemy as well, suggesting that terrorists and others really don’t know what they want and would quiet down if we were nicer to them:
Any religious critique of terrorism that fails to acknowledge these ambitions is deeply impoverished. It produces a political theology that helps to rationalize terrorist rage. It refuses to distinguish between the acts of murderers and the use of government force to stop them. . . .
Christians have never viewed peace as the highest good. There are other goods: protecting human dignity and restraining evil, for example. A just peace can be the final result of these pursuits, God willing. But if peace is made the supreme goal, if it consumes all other virtues, it becomes an idol--and a snare to the statesman as well as the saint.
People interested in the topic will probably find much worth pondering in Loconte’s recent book, The End of Illusions.
Loconte on Robertson and Katrina
Tue 27 Sep 2005 by Peter Edman
I was away when this came out, so just posting now.
Moderator Joseph Loconte has an op-ed (September 16, 2005) on the Tribune News Service (link here at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) discussing “Christianity’s Religion Problem.” He’s justifiably harsh on Pat Robertson, who has been serially irresponsible and demonstrably uncharitable if not unorthodox in his public views for decades. Loconte’s criticism is among the strongest I’ve seen, though I’ve not been following this debate as closely as I should. I hope he’ll get a wide hearing.
Religious leaders rightly worry about airing their dirty laundry. But Robertson has made himself a public figure—and a massive public relations problem for the church. Until more evangelicals make a visible break with him, they’ll be vulnerable to the crass caricatures that dominate media coverage of conservative religion in America.
In an intensely partisan era, with so much at stake politically, it’s tempting to simply ignore the failings of one’s allies in the culture wars. Yet without integrity, cultural influence is impossible. As the apostle Peter once warned, not so delicately, judgment begins with the family of God.
It certainly would do Mercy Ships and other positive CBN ministries good to be dissociated with their founder. Board members, please take note. The means we choose define the way we reach our ends. They shape our ends. They matter as much as any ideal future.
The Bible and Its Influence—A New Public School Text
Tue 27 Sep 2005 by Peter Edman
The Bible Literacy Project, led by TF alumnus Chuck Stetson, has released its student textbook, The Bible and Its Influence.
A teacher edition will follow. The project continues in the tradition of the Williamsburg Charter and its contributors include Charles Haynes and others familiar to us at the Trinity Forum. As someone who worked with Os Guinness on an older project, Living With Our Deepest Differences, now out of print but with similar ambitions, I’m very pleased to see something of this caliber out there.
This curriculum differs from earlier attempts in that it recognizes not just the literary and cultural influence of the Bible, but its importance as a religious text as well, and it does so while respecting but not endorsing various faith traditions and denominations. I hope it will be more influential than the Wall Street Journal is fearing. (Knight Ridder article)
The Future of Tradition
Fri 22 Jul 2005 by Peter Edman
The Wall Street Journal has published a long but extremely thoughtful essay on “The Future of Tradition” by novelist and essayist Lee Harris (22 July 2005).
In this article, originally published in Policy Review, Harris discusses how tradition has been defended and attacked by the Enlightenment and its elites and suggests some different ways of talking about tradition that are well worth pondering—particularly for those of us in Western societies who are having difficulty maintaining our population and tradition—Italians and other Europeans, pay attention! Actually, everybody should probably pay attention to this one. The second parts of the essay are much more concrete, so skim the first section if you must, but do not miss the later discussion. Moral abstraction, he says, is not enough. Good historical context for the culture wars. Interesting discussion of the unintended consequences of Maimonides trying to defend Jewish dietary laws as if they were a health code. Fascinating discussion of language and the repsponsibilities of the elites. Read toward the end for some unexpected personal revelations by the author. Take that, Andrew Sullivan.
Basically, take the time to read this.
. . . in the view outlined here, a tradition is viable if it effectively keeps future generations from backsliding to a lower ethical or civilizational state. The track record of a tradition is irrelevant here; it may have been supremely useful in the past, but if its continuing embodiment in the rising generation begins to lower the society’s civilizational standards, the tradition must be discarded and replaced, and it makes no difference how many evolutionary challenges it may have successfully overcome in the past.
Congratulations, CT!
Fri 01 Jul 2005 by Peter Edman
Christianity Today, one of the more important evangelical Christian magazines, has an editorial out on the public portrayal of evangelicals in the U.S. media.
”We’re Prime Time, Baby!” (July 2005) notes that evangelicals are being treated with more even-handedness by the news side of the media (not the opinion side, to be sure), and suggests some responses in light of that, including this one:
Second, as noted, we really can’t play the persecution card anymore. As “players,” we will be criticized sharply still, but that’s just part of life in America.
This is extremely encouraging to hear. Publicly claiming to be a persecuted minority may have been a good fund-raising strategy, but it has never been legitimate. It’s well past time for evangelicals to leave it behind.
Loconte on the Religious Left
Thu 30 Jun 2005 by Peter Edman
Moderator Joe Loconte has an article in the Wall Street Journal for 1 July 2005 on the latest resurgence of politically liberal Christians.
In ”From Gospel to Government,” Loconte discusses the current “Christian Alliance for Progress” and gives some context from recent history.
It proffers an agenda “founded firmly on the teachings of the Gospel.” Some students of the Gospel may be surprised at how neatly such an agenda fits the Democratic Party platform . . .
They can at least be comforted that they are not alone—the sermon from Tom Wright I linked to earlier included comments that in the UK, the people pushing for religion in public life are more on the left.
Loconte helps me articulate something I’ve been struggling with for a few weeks now:
N. T. Wright on Tolerance and the People of Faith
Thu 30 Jun 2005 by Peter Edman
Bishop N. T. Wright’s sermon at the end of the Anglican Consultative Council meeting deserves a wider hearing than just Anglicans.
Wright, an eminent New Testament historian and Bishop of Durham who has moderated Trinity Forum sessions in Europe, spoke on 28 June 2005. Particularly if you haven’t been aware of his thinking before, take the time to read this through very carefully.
“Shipwreck and Kingdom: Acts and the Anglican Communion” (one source text is here) includes an ironic discussion of the politics of left and right, but is particularly thought-provoking on the concept of “tolerance” and the truth-claims that underlie the Christian faith—and all other faiths, for that matter. Faith is not a matter of personal opinion, and those who say otherwise have their own not-so-hidden agendas.
But when you are in Caesar’s world, where truth comes out of the barrel of a gun, or in his day the sheath of a sword, tolerance can simply be a fancy name for cowardice. The claim that ‘Jesus is Lord’ was never, in the first century, what we would call a religious claim pure and simple. There was no such thing as religion pure and simple. It was a claim about an ultimate reality which included politics, culture, commerce, family life and everything else you could think of. . . .
And if you stop saying ‘Jesus is Lord’ out of deference to the private opinions of your friends and neighbours, Caesar smiles his grim smile and extends his empire by one more street. After all, the great eighteenth-century virtue of tolerance was developed not least by those who were keen on extending their geographical or industrial empires, and who didn’t want God breathing down their necks to stop them. Keep religion in the private sphere and we’ll run the public square. And to that idea Luke says a clear No; and so must we.
More on tolerance and its implications:
Vox Populi, Vox Stupidity?
Fri 17 Jun 2005 by Peter Edman
Spiked Magazine features an article by University of Kent sociologist Frank Furedi on populism and elites in light of recent events in the U.S. and EU.
A well written and historically aware article covering the bases from the EU constitutional referendum to the 2004 U.S. elections (and some Australian commentary) and the parallel response of many elites.
Fascinating and more than a bit scary in light of the insights raised by the Foucault/Ayatollah essay and my recent reading in Postman’s Technopoly. Technopoly as fundamentalist secularism? Political and even NGO elites openly desire a move from democracy to technocracy, or rule by bureaucracy. It is a quintessentially illiberal notion.
