The stated theme of this issue of TNR is "Where Religion Fits in American Politics." The answer, one gathers, is that it doesn't. In the first article, David Frum explains why the religious right doesn't matter politically. In the second, John B. Judis warns that it matters a lot, apparently being the greatest danger since Hitler, maybe even since Joe McCarthy. Then historian Sean Wilentz reviews a book that gives a favorable account of American religion's role in social change (Cosmos Crumbling by Robert H. Abzug) and he cautions us that there is also an ugly face of religion in public life. The last is fair enough; the first two are fair not at all.
John B. Judis has in recent years become one of the left's favorite chroniclers of the right. He made his chief mark with a biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., which assures us that Mr. Buckley has grown over the years and it is alright to like him so long as you don't agree with him. In the present exercise ("Crosses to Bear"), Judis goes looking for crazy things that religious rightists have been known to say, and, goodness knows, he's in a target-rich environment. He informs us, inter alia, that "if the movement has a theoretician, it is Texas fundamentalist David Barton, author of The Myth of Separation." Barton is not without significant influence in sectors of what is vaguely called the religious right, but there are writers much more widely read and cited. Barton serves Judis' purposes, however, since he offers an implausibly simple version of a "Christian America," complete with graphs purporting to demonstrate that our national decline commenced with the "rejection of divine law" in the school prayer decisions of the early 1960s.
Actually, The Myth of Separation is scholarship of a high order compared with some of the books Judis might have mentioned to illustrate his point. The point, or so it seems, is that people of the religious right are not so very bright and are therefore the fit objects of the sniggering superiority of their social and political betters. Or, as one Washington Post reporter put it a while back, they are "poor, uneducated, and easily led." (To its credit, the Post has since run several extensive analysis of the religious right that, while not sympathetic, are respectful and frequently insightful.) For Judis, however, sniggering is only permitted between the raising of alarums that these Christian rubes are the latest manifestation of the ever- present fascist threat. He doesn't put it quite that way, but only the obtuse will miss the point.
Like Professor Higgins in another context, Mr. Judis wonders, "Why can't they be like us?" He graciously allows that Christians can be constructively engaged in politics. There was Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance. Stifling the suspicion that Mr. Judis has not really read Moral Man and Immoral Society, which he invokes, and noting that our respect for Niebuhr is second to few, one must point out that he is quite wrong in suggesting that Niebuhr, unlike religious conservatives today, did not make rather direct connections between Christian faith and specific public policies. Niebuhr was, for instance, a founder and the moral captain of Americans for Democratic Action, an organization that did not stop at the brink of partisanship. And his writings in the late lamented Christianity and Crisis, which he also founded, offered very specific counsel on the political controversies of the day. Including, incidentally, his counsel that the school prayer decisions were a dangerous step toward the secularizing of American public life.
In short, Niebuhr was a good liberal; a very intelligent liberal with a profound sense of human limits, historical irony, and Divine judgment, but a good liberal for all that. It was easier to be that kind of liberal before liberalism was transmogrified into what Lionel Trilling termed "the adversary culture," an elite culture at war with the beliefs and behavior, especially the religious beliefs and behavior, of the American people. Mr. Judis deplores the fact that Pat Robertson and his friends do not speak in the refined tones of Niebuhr from what were then the respectable academic bastions of Morningside Heights. And it is true, the notes of nuance, ambiguity, irony, ambivalence, uncertainty, and tentativeness are not much struck at rallies of the Christian Coalition.
Under the auspices of the religious right, Judis mourns, religion "becomes infected with the darker egoism of group and nation; it no longer softens and counters our ungenerous impulses but clothes them in holy righteousness." Leaving aside whether there is some other kind of righteousness, I expect Niebuhr today would advise Mr. Judis to spare a generous impulse or two for millions of Americans who, knowing full well that they too are sinners, are justly fed up with being treated with contempt by political elites and have decided they aren't going to take it any more. Like Peter Finch in Network, they are "mad as hell" and, as Mr. Judis unsurprisingly succeeds in demonstrating, they sometimes sound like it. But enough of Judis' "Crosses to Bear." In trying to understand the remarkable and often confusing insurgency of the religion factor in contemporary politics, his article does not get us much beyond the bumper stickers.
When it comes to counting votes and otherwise measuring real power, Frum contends in this article, the social conservatives don't amount to much. He invites us to infer that, on the issues, he is generally sympathetic to the social conservatives, but his job is just to give the facts, unpleasant though they may be. "Christian conservatives often react with hostility to bad news, even when they hear it from their friends. Good populists, they confuse the observation that they are losing with the opinion that they ought to lose. And they usually reply to bad news by citing polling data that indicate substantial public support for their positions."
What is wrong with that, according to Frum, is that Christian conservatives assume that this is a democracy in which, through their representative institutions, the people deliberate and decide the questions of great public moment. That is not the way it works in the real world. Frum writes, "American politics is a far more elitist business than most of us are comfortable admitting." It is not entirely clear just how uncomfortable David Frum is with the circumstance in which real power is wielded by "bureaucracies, legislatures, and courts," with public opinion mattering on occasion. He compares public opinion to the atomic bomb in international relations-"useful when it comes time for the ultimate showdown but not terribly relevant to ordinary decision-making."
David Frum's somewhat sniffy dismissiveness with respect to public opinion is, of course, in what some consider the grand and others consider the perversely antidemocratic tradition of Walter Lippmann. In any event, the atom bomb metaphor is less than apt, since one supposes that ordinary decision-making in international affairs is very much influenced by who has atomic bombs. But Mr. Frum's point is that, no matter how much popular support they have, the positions of the religious right are not going anywhere because its leaders are no match for the political elites that run the country. He writes, "More important than the ability to pack a nomination meeting in Amarillo, Texas, is the ability to sway the media, to attract support in the academic world, to lobby congressional staffers, to write a solid legal brief."
Frum adds for good measure: "The Christian right has not done much better wielding power indirectly. Has there been a network news report sympathetic to its point of view? What large corporation worries about its image in the evangelical community? How many senators and governors regard the religious right as anything more than a nuisance to be managed?" If one agrees with Frum's answers to these questions, one might agree also with his judgment that "by the end of the '94 electoral cycle we're going to cease to read so much about the Christian right: those who compose it will have returned, if unhappily, to their old position as auxiliaries of the Republic Party and secular conservatism."
How do I disagree with David Frum? Let me count the ways, or at least a few of them. First, Frum misleadingly forces a sharp tension, even antithesis, between economic and social conservatives. In fact, and with few exceptions, social conservatives are also economic conservatives- suspicious of Big Government, favoring lower taxes and less government regulation, and supportive of the market economy. Apart from the increasingly isolated radical libertarians, economic conservatives are more sympathetic than liberals of any stripe to the issues of the social conservatives. Conservatives hold in common the conviction that ordinary people know best how to run their lives; within some broadly agreed limits of law and decency, government should get out of the way and let people get on with it. There is a tension, to be sure, on the question of abortion. But the studies suggest that conservatives of all stripes are more in favor of the legal protection of the unborn than are liberals of all stripes, and that Americans as a whole are for much more protection than is permitted under the abortion regime of Roe v. Wade and its judicial offspring.
The National Education Association and other government employee unions, along with feminist and homosexual rights organizations, constitute an exceedingly powerful, frequently controlling, auxiliary in the Democratic Party. That reality does not usually occasion excited media attention; it is considered the normal state of affairs among Democrats. Of course, one reason it does not occasion excited media attention is that the media powers-that-be tend to approve of feminism, gay advocacy, state monopoly of funding for education, and expanded government employment. In other words, those who belong to what might with as much justice be called the "secular left" as Christian conservatives are called the "religious right" are quite happy to be auxiliaries of one of the major parties. They do not think they have failed, nor should they. In time, the media may come to recognize as normal the influence of religious conservatives in the Republican Party, even though they do not approve of it. Then, as Mr. Frum says, we will "cease to read so much about the Christian right." Good.
As to whether big league politicians view the religious right as no more than "a nuisance to be managed," there are nuisances and then there are nuisances. When elections typically turn on two or three percentage points, coalitions commanding the allegiance of millions of voters nationally and large minorities at the state and local levels will indeed have to be "managed" (read appeased, neutralized, won over) by politicians who wish to gain or keep office. If Mr. Frum is telling us that the religious right by itself does not and will not determine the outcome of most elections, that is not very interesting. The same can be said of any other identifiable sector of the electorate.
Major politicians know that some questions must be "managed" with exceeding care. Most Republican leaders know, for instance, that it would be political suicide for the party to alienate the pro-life electorate (which, of course, is by no means coterminous with those voters who identify with the "religious right"). It could nonetheless do that, of course, in which case hypothetical scenarios about third and fourth parties (perhaps including Ross Perot Redux) become considerably less hypothetical, with electoral consequences beyond anyone's powers of prediction.
Frum is right about the importance of writing "a solid legal brief." It appears to have escaped his notice that today there are a number of increasingly high-powered legal defense organizations litigating religious freedom and other items on the conservative agenda, whereas ten years ago there were none. I once asked the late Leo Pfeffer, the American Jewish Congress' great champion of extreme separationism, why he thought he had won so many cases before the Supreme Court. He smiled and responded, "Because there was nobody on the other side." That wasn't quite true then, but it is certainly not true now, and it will be even less true in the years ahead.
It may be a very long time before the religious right is able to command lawyer-power comparable to that of the ACLU or Planned Parenthood, and it may never happen. But with remarkable alacrity, religious conservatives are learning to wage the war of legal briefs. One views that with some ambivalence, since, by joining in making the courts the locus of contention, conservatives may inadvertently reinforce the liberal pattern of moving the country ever farther away from democratic self-governance to government by the judiciary. It is worrying that few in the religious right seem to be worrying about that. And those who do worry about it invoke the maxim about fighting fire with fire, which is not easy to answer.
In tones almost gleeful, Frum observes that the religious right has lost on obscenity. After enormous fuss about government funding of crucifixes immersed in urine and similar instances of artistic creativity, says Frum, "All the NEA artists blackballed by the Bush administration have jumped back on the public payroll. If the Christian right couldn't win that one, it can't win anything." The claim does not bear examination. That an administration elected with 43 percent of the vote is spending a few million dollars on the more bizarre antics of adolescent artists (some of them quite elderly) hardly indicates the triumph of the hard- core adversary culture. No more than Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders' celebration of the joys of gay sex indicates the triumph of the homosexual movement. The Clinton Administration has done many things egregiously offensive to the religious right and, it seems likely, to the majority of Americans. Frum is right in observing that those who opposed Clinton were defeated by his election. But each new offense committed by the Administration should not be counted as an additional defeat. They might more accurately be described as actions by which a severely crippled Administration is crippling itself yet further.
Included on Frum's list is the putative fact that "the gay rights cause is carrying the day." Possibly so, but if it does so it will be by judicial imposition and not by popular consent or legislative action. With respect to homosexuality, as with so much else, Americans are a very tolerant people, but where the question is legal recognition of homosexuals as a victim class entitled to affirmative redress, quota preferences, etc., the line has been drawn wherever the public has had a chance to express itself. Moreover, there is slight evidence that the gay rights cause, as defined by its advocates, is carrying the day when it comes to societal acceptance of homogenital sex as morally neutral behavior. Ask almost any parent. Ask the officers of the Presbyterian Church (USA) or the ELCA Lutherans.
The pro-choice leadership knows that any movement toward a democratic "accommodation" can only be in the pro-life direction. One expects that Mr. Frum knows that, too.
He correctly notes the analogy with the struggle over slavery, but I believe he draws the wrong lessons from it. He suggests that the violence employed by a few frustrated opponents of abortion indicates that they know their cause is lost. There are striking similarities between our circumstance and the 1850s, when the slavery abolitionists were confronted by the Dred Scott regime which was supported by both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. Today's abortion abolitionists may, as Frum says, "sense they are losing" in what he calls the "elitist business" of American politics, but those elites have to know that they have lost with the American people.
Only two institutional centers of leadership stood against the 1973 "settlement" endorsed by the entire American establishment-the Catholic Church and, later but very effectively, the captains of evangelical Protestantism. Today those two centers of leadership are more united and determined than ever on abortion. All the research demonstrates that the pro-life side can only gain and the pro-choice side can only lose by the public becoming better informed about existing abortion law and practice. This question simply will not go away. As the courts continue to stifle the politics of democratic action, we continue to head toward a constitutional crisis every bit as ominous as the conflict over slavery. "Abortion retains its status as a constitutionally guaranteed right," says Frum with great assurance. The same could be said of slaveholding in 1857.
Fundamental realignments-political, cultural, religious-are nothing new in American history (see Lyman Kellstadt et al., "It's the Culture, Stupid: 1992 and Our Political Future," FT, April 1994). An important aspect of the present realignment is provocatively analyzed in Christopher Lasch's posthumous book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, just published by Norton. At least since the 1960s (although Lasch thinks the beginning can be traced back to the 1920s), America's elites have taken a decided turn away from the very idea of democratic governance. The notion has gained ascendancy, says Lasch, that ordinary people are not competent to govern themselves; government is the business of experts who have escaped the prejudices- most especially the religious prejudices-of the majority of Americans. Among such elites, "democracy" means chiefly upward mobility, the opportunity to liberate oneself from the common folk and join the superior company of those who are in charge of things.
Lasch's analysis is disturbing and persuasive, but one must go a step further. The unhappy circumstance he describes is reinforced by the fact that dominantly liberal and secular elites are no longer capable of providing, or are not willing to provide, a philosophical rationale for democratic governance. The "revolt of the elites" is not simply the result of ambition or snobbishness or disillusionment with the experience of democratic politics. As a generality, our societal leadership despairs of making the case for the truths that historically undergirded democratic governance. The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, Tocqueville, Lincoln-all are still ordinarily honored as adornments of the American experience. But their words are not engaged for what they are-practical, moral, and philosophical arguments for this constitutional experiment in self-government.
To be sure, there are those who address these questions. But, however brilliant, the political philosophy of people such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin produces little more than conceptual contrivances that make for interesting conversation among a few academics who are interested in that kind of thing. There is today no project comparable to John Dewey's valiant but flawed efforts to make a moral and philosophical, even religious, case for democracy. And what is left of Dewey's legacy is claimed by Richard Rorty and other "liberal ironists" whose contempt for the American people-particularly for their moral and religious sensibilities-could not be made more crassly clear.
Frum says that the religious conservatives are "good populists," and there is a lot to that. Joined to it must be the capacity to make effective arguments for popular government. The development of that capacity among politically conservative Christian and Jewish thinkers has not been conspicuously successful to date. With few exceptions, there has been little advance on the arguments set out by the likes of John Courtney Murray and Reinhold Niebuhr a half century ago. In addition, there is a not unimportant sector of the religious right today that believes that the whole idea of democracy is misbegotten, that America must be reconstituted on the basis of "Bible Law." Nonetheless, it may be that Dewey's hope for a "common faith" that can sustain and invigorate democracy has at last appeared. It turns out to be the Judeo- Christian construction of reality, or what most people identify as the biblical tradition. Unlike Dewey's proposed new religion, and unlike the academic artifacts of people such as Dworkin and Rawls, this tradition has a remarkably strong popular base, which is a great advantage when the question at hand is government by the people. More than nine out of ten Americans profess allegiance to the moral tradition called Judeo- Christian, or at least more allegiance than they profess to any other way of trying to make moral sense of the world.
Nonetheless, Frum's elites are indeed formidable. Christopher Lasch leaves one with the doleful intimation that the revolt may be permanent, that the jig may be up with an experiment that is no longer attractive or convincing to those who have the responsibility to care for it. There is another possible future, however. The cultural reconfiguration that is made politically visible, in part, by the religious right could produce an explosion of argument about the idea and practice of democracy. That much of the argument will be marked by religious conviction will make it difficult for secularized elites for whom upward mobility has meant liberation from religion, or at least liberation from having to deal with religion in public. They will publish articles on the theme of "Where Religion Fits in American Politics," and will ponder most gravely whether, or on what terms, these passionate social conservatives should be admitted to the circle of The People Who Run Things. If our reading of this historical moment has any merit, observers ten or twenty years from now will be puzzled, and perhaps amused, that these editors and writers seemed to think that they were still in charge of admissions.
The proponents of the myth of the "population bomb" are determined, as
is evident in the reflections of liberal columnist Nicholas von Hoffman.
He writes, "So it won't be long before the Coast Guard will be machine-
gunning people trying to float in here on rafts, whether or not the new
arrivals are desirable (and however one defines that word). There simply
are too many people in the world. If they're all allowed into Jonathan
Edwards' shining city on a hill, the place will turn into Slumtown,
U.S.A., the new Bangladesh. Even at present rates, the American
population will grow to a sickening 383 million within the lifetimes of
today's high school students." We should have learned by now, says von
Hoffman. "For 150 years, men like Robert Malthus and Charles Darwin have
been writing that we hairless apes would f___ ourselves into extinction.
Unhappily, other voices, men such as Karl Marx and an endless succession
of Popes, have written otherwise, to the great confusion of the gullible
and unthinking." (One word edited.)
He writes that "only a few optimists are left who believe the human
population will level off of its own accord." "Hitler, Stalin, and Mao,
murdering day and night for half a century, didn't make a dent. All the
wars of this bloody age haven't stemmed the procreational tide. AIDS
offers no hope. Even the much discussed spread of homosexuality, while
perhaps an encouraging development, has yet to put a discernible crimp
in the birth rates." The Pope, "who ought to know better," says the rich
nations can help the poor to share in the benefits of productivity.
That, says von Hoffman, is unrealistic. "Anyway, Mr. Pope, get real-
politically it ain't gonna happen." People worry about coercive
measures, but freedom "may be a luxury that only low birth-rate
societies can enjoy." In the face of the population crisis, von Hoffman
proposes the creation of "Bobbitt Squads to ferret out and fix human
males with a rooster complex who can't get it through their heads that
insemination is a criminal, antisocial act."
The U.S. should cut off food and medicine to societies that lag in
population control. Von Hoffman admits that "we'll need a strong stomach
to turn a blind eye to the means used to bring birth and death
statistics into balance," but he reminds us that "this fight is for the
survival of our species." Of course strong-stomached folk like Nicholas
von Hoffman are hysterical and ill-informed, but they are not without
very considerable influence. And, as aforesaid, despite the changes
brought about in the original U.S.-backed proposals for Cairo, the big
funding is still scheduled to go to the proponents of turning a blind
eye to both the plight and the potential of the world's poor.
Bernstein on what happens next: "On the one side, the forces of the New
Consciousness are on the rise, and, as George Orwell once pointed out,
to be on the rise is an end in itself. 'The object of power is power,'
he said in 1984. 'One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to safeguard
the dictatorship.' Certainly, this is true of the dictatorship of
virtue. It is propelled by so many forces. There is post-1960s
disillusionment; there are rising expectations; there is a general
inclination in liberal-democratic societies to find fault in the large
historical forces, rather than in individual acts of irresponsibility.
There is the normal human propensity toward a foolish zealousness. There
is the yearning for community that the sociologists are always telling
us about. You read the journals with their boilerplate about 'genuinely
oppositional education,' and you sense that much of what is politically
correct stems from a desire to win the admiration of the rest of the New
Consciousness cohort, to belong to the club. And there is also the
American infatuation with the new. Susan Haack, a professor of
philosophy at the University of Miami, explained to me the power that
novelty has in academic life. 'If somebody submits an idea saying that
she, or he, is going to do research that radically changes how we look
at our world, how before everything was masculine and white and
bourgeois, then that generates excitement. If somebody, more reasonably,
comes along and says "I'd like to look into this, and I think that in
doing so I might make a modest change in our vision of things," that
generates less excitement. The first is far more likely to win a
research grant than the second.'
"Above all, perhaps, the New Consciousness senses that it is gaining
power, and that alone is reason for its existence in the first place.
Indeed, to come close to power takes a good deal of the risk out of an
enterprise that presents itself as inherently risky. The fact is that
assaulting the establishment, declaiming against the racism and sexism
of society, reiterating the approved phrases about oppression and
exclusion, promising to uncover previously neglected worlds, these
require not a jot of courage these days. These are the sanctioned
activities of the counterestablishment, the gestures and idioms that
gain approval and lead to good opportunities, to jobs, to prizes, to
book contracts, to prominence in American life. It takes no bravery to
be a multiculturalist. There is no risk in smashing the icons. There are
millions of dollars in foundation grants available for people who claim
they are doing so.
"Indeed, courage is now required to transgress the dictatorship of
virtue. That is perhaps the greatest of the multicultural-politically
correct victories. The upholders of the dictatorship of virtue have put
the other side on the defensive."
But, ultimately, Bernstein believes that the other side, his side, the
liberal side, will prevail. The immoderation of the Robespierres and the
certainty that their panaceas will not solve but will only exacerbate
the problems they address so wrongheadedly will finally do them in. "The
pendulum will swing eventually in the other direction." But not before
the mandarins of the New Consciousness do a great deal more damage. True
liberals today, he says, need to take their cue from the likes of Irving
Howe, Sidney Hook, and George Orwell, who dared to do battle against an
earlier totalitarianism.
"It is not that we face a danger equivalent to theirs. We can be
thankful that we do not. And yet the stakes are high enough, involving
as they do our ability to tell the truth, to believe that there is a
truth to be told, to provide the means to get ahead to those who most
need it, and to encourage people to have self-esteem, not via ethnic
boosterism, but by taking responsibility for their own lives. The time
has come for liberals to recapture the high ground from the demagogues
of diversity, to declare their diversity fake, fraudulent,
superstitious, cranky, sanctimonious, monotonous. It is time to reaffirm
the greatest engine of genuine diversity that the world has ever known,
which is the liberal-democratic society sustained by a set of concepts
now dismissed as the narratives of the people in charge."
Dictatorship of Virtue is, as the reader may have gathered by
now, a book with an attitude. It is also intelligent, informative, and,
despite all, a great encouragement. Not the least of its merits is its
sympathetic telling of the story of citizens all over the country who
have stood up to the tyranny of PC and have prevailed. If enough people
read and act upon Richard Bernstein's argument, who knows what might
happen? Retiring the neoconservative number, we might resume the liberal
jersey for the innings ahead. But that is getting way, way ahead of the
game.
A particular mortification was the complete fizzle of John Boswell's
long-awaited book on the putative history of Christian blessing of
homosexual marriage, a fizzle for which some associated with this
journal are pleased to accept a large measure of blame. Outside the
subcultural press, the book has, to the best of our knowledge, received
not one favorable notice, and most have been devastatingly dismissive of
Boswell's erudition in the service of ideology. Even in the more liberal
churches, efforts to obtain endorsement of homogenital behavior seem to
be blocked for the foreseeable future. Only on the campuses is the
semblance of the continuing revolution sustained.
The movement's frustration is evident also in the increasingly
incoherent lines of argument being advanced by various organizations.
For instance, a recent study conducted by researchers at the Harvard
School of Public Health has been hailed as a great breakthrough by the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The study suggests that almost one-
fifth of Americans have been attracted to someone of the same sex at
some time since age fifteen. The Task Force declares that "these figures
are significantly higher than last year's study by researchers at the
Battelle Human Affairs Research Center that reported only 2 percent of
men surveyed had ever engaged in same-sex sexual behavior, and one
percent identified themselves as exclusively gay."
Perhaps so and perhaps not. Tom W. Smith, a statistician at the
University of Chicago, says of the Harvard study, "They basically asked
whether you were ever attracted to a member of the same sex at any time
since you were age 15-which can mean one very fleeting, very trivial
sensation or feeling which may have never been acted upon and may never
have been felt again in the next 30 or 40 years of your life." David
Wypij, who helped direct the study in question, says, "Our perspective
is that sexual orientation isn't just a yes-no, heterosexual-homosexual
question. I think in most individuals there is some sort of range. You
may be more heterosexual, you may be more homosexual."
The Harvard study-conducted in cooperation with the Center for Health
Policy Studies in Washington and published in Archives of Sexual
Behavior-tends to confirm what most people intuitively think to be
the case. A substantial number of people (many more males than females)
have at some time felt a sexual attraction to someone of the same sex. A
small minority, perhaps 2 percent, have at some time given in to that
impulse, while perhaps as many as one percent give in regularly,
claiming that it is the only form of sexual expression they desire or of
which they are capable. It is hard to know why gay and lesbian advocates
champion these findings. The research, which highlights the often
confused fluidity of sexual desire and action, undercuts claims of
genetic or other fixed determinants of homosexual behavior. Of critical
importance on the legal front, it undercuts the claim that the
homogenitally active are a "class" in a way comparable to the legal
definition of class defined by reference to race or gender.
The reality would seem to be that some are tempted to a certain
behavior, most resist the temptation, a few succumb to it, and a very
few surrender themselves to it in a manner so complete as to constitute
their "identity," their most basic sense of who they are. It is well to
remember that all of us live under the judgment and under the mercy of
God, and that homosexuality is by no means the most damning of the
disorders to which sinful human beings are prone. But such sympathetic
understanding is not what gay advocates were hoping for and expecting
from what they declared to be the Revolution of 1993. The sense of
disappointment has to be severe. A year later, it would seem that both
popular and scholarly opinion about homosexuality is more settled, and
settled along traditional lines, than it has been for some time. Of
course that will not prevent judges and university administrators, who
are admirably situated to ignore both scholarly evidence and democratic
opinion, to ally themselves with determined activists in continuing to
press the revolution that wasn't.
In Italy, even more than here, it is difficult to make any theological
or philosophical assertion without having people read into it all kinds
of political designs. About the complexities of the maddeningly confused
politics of Italy, I repeatedly had to insist upon my innocence born of
ignorance. Michael Novak joined us for the book promotion part of the
visit, Mondadori having brought out his The Catholic Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism at the same time. Italians take great delight
in conspiracy theories, and there was much speculation in the press
about this "American intellectual invasion." The far left perceived the
tentacles of American capitalism reaching out to bring Italy under the
U.S. imperium, while the far right viewed us as doubtful Catholics
insinuating the insidious doctrines of secular liberalism. For the most
part, however, the arguments we made were respectfully, and sometimes
enthusiastically, received.
It was repeatedly remarked that this was something quite new, since in
Italy it had almost always been assumed that Catholic social teaching is
pitted against liberal democracy. Italy did not have a Father John
Courtney Murray, the Jesuit thinker who worked through the connections
between Catholicism and the free society in this country, a thinker
whose legacy some of us are eager to foster. The possibilities of
Catholic teaching in support of the free and virtuous society were
strikingly evident in the seminar at the Vatican which included Rocco
Buttiglione, a philosopher who has been a student and collaborator of
the Pope's for many years and who is now trying to rethink and
reconstitute the Christian Democratic tradition in Italian politics.
Participating as well was Carlo Scognamiglia, the speaker of the Senate,
and for some reason this piqued most particular interest in the press
and among political observers in Rome. As aforesaid, I know next to
nothing about Italian politics. We were simply setting forth some
general arguments, but it was rather fun to see the sundry political and
ideological uses to which they were put.
The most important purpose of the visit was to touch base with various
officials in the Vatican on matters ecumenical, ecclesiastical, and
theological. In extended conversations with such as Cardinal Ratzinger
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Cardinal Cassidy
who heads the council on Christian unity, intense and supportive
interest was expressed in, among other things, our various initiatives
to bring together Catholics and evangelical Protestants. This is clearly
a question of great importance to the Holy See as it looks forward to
the reconfiguration of the Christian reality in the Third Millennium.
There was also extended and wide-ranging conversation with the Holy
Father.
While such meetings are by no means secret, what is said in such
meetings is privileged. However, I can say that, apart from a very
painful hip that makes it exceedingly difficult for him to walk, the
Pope seemed to be in fine, even robust, health. The visit was precisely
at the time when the international press was filled with chatter about
his impending demise and the usual idle speculation about who might
succeed him. The Holy Father was vigorous, candid, expansive, humorous,
self-deprecating, and clearly in command of the many subjects he
addressed. He powerfully evinces the sense of heightened expectation
that attends being radically open to the direction of God. Catholics
believe that he is Peter among us, and in his presence it seems quite
self-evidently so. In any event, there is every reason to believe and
hope that this Pope will lead the Church into the Third Millennium.
Herewith a few impressions that may be of interest. They are but my
impressions, for whatever they're worth. One has the very distinct sense
that Rome believes it is on the verge of reestablishing communion with
the Orthodox churches of the East-Russian, Greek, Ukrainian, and other.
That communion between East and West was broken in 1054, and it may be
that, as the Second Millennium was the millennium of Christian division,
so the Third Millennium will be the millennium of Christian unity.
On the Western front, there have been disappointing setbacks in some
ecumenical relations, especially with the Anglicans, but there can be no
question about the long-term resolve of Rome's ecumenical commitment. As
mentioned above, there is great interest in developing relations with
evangelical Protestants here and around the world, joined to a sober
recognition that the time for serious consideration of ecclesial unity
with evangelicals is very far in the future, if indeed it ever arrives.
But if one asks what is the top priority for this pontificate in the
years ahead, the answer, I believe, is Christian unity. It is rumored
that there will shortly be a major document, perhaps an encyclical, on
Christian unity, possibly before the much awaited encyclical on respect
for human life. The most dramatic evidence of heightened ecumenical
expectations, however, is what appears to be the approaching restoration
of communion with the East. The historic stumbling block for the Eastern
churches has been the question of papal jurisdiction, and it now seems
that Rome has determined that unity is more important than jurisdiction.
One may date the first chapter of this pontificate from 1978 to 1989,
the latter year marking the collapse of communism. In that period the
Pope was perceived as facing East and was tolerated, even cherished, by
the Western powers as an ally in the struggle against Marxist
totalitarianism. Now he is seen to be facing toward the West, and his
moral and spiritual challenge might not be so welcome. In this
connection, one must count the Vatican's role at the United Nations
Cairo conference on population and development to be a great success. Of
course this reading directly contradicts the story peddled by most of
the American and international press, in which the Vatican was featured
as little more than an obstructionist nuisance. In fact, the Clinton
Administration was foiled in its intention to use the conference to
establish abortion on demand as an international right-and, denials to
the contrary, that was among the stated purposes of the Administration.
On abortion and other questions, the Vatican employed persuasive
argument and astute parliamentary strategy to effect striking changes in
the original American-sponsored designs for the conference. For the
present, one simply notes that Cairo supports the heightened
expectations for the Vatican's singular role as a catalyst for moral
deliberation in the international arena. Also important in this
connection is the forging of new working relationships with a number of
Muslim centers of influence. This also touches on changing religious
configurations for the next century, changes in which the remarkable
developments in relation to Judaism, the community of our "elder
brothers," are critically important.
In the post-1989 second chapter of this pontificate, some journalists
and other observers have recklessly speculated that there is a pulling
back from Centesimus Annus and its strong endorsement of the
free economy in a free and virtuous society. According to these
speculations, Rome is so appalled by the decadence that has accompanied
freedom in the former Communist states that it is casting longing eyes
back to the good old days of socialism. In discussions with persons at
various levels of authority, such speculation meets with amused
incredulity. Centesimus Annus highlights the complex
relationship between the cultural, the political, and the economic, and
recognizes that no earthly social order will ever get the connections
exactly right; always and everywhere, short of the Kingdom Come, there
will be very real problems. But there is no doubt whatever that this
pontificate vigorously champions the teaching of Centesimus
Annus and is strongly appreciative of bishops, theologians, and
others who have accurately communicated that teaching.
In sum, on this visit to Rome I was struck by a sense of heightened
expectations. Nothing enthusiastic, mind you, but a quiet confidence
that, in the mysterious purposes of God, great and good things are
afoot. It has to do with the fast approaching Third Millennium, no
doubt. It may also have to do with catching a second breath after the
momentous events that closed the first chapter of this pontificate in
1989. And it has to do with the perception that, while dissent and
confusion still abound in many quarters, the momentum has shifted toward
the authentic teaching of the Church's faith. In this regard, the
remarkable response to the new Catechism of the Catholic
Church, not least in the U.S., has been a tonic. These and other
factors figure into, but do not explain, the remarkable spirit of
hopefulness. The explanation, at least some of us are convinced, would
require an extended reflection on the curious ways of the Holy Spirit.
Confession time. I read one of the O. J. Simpson stories, by Anne
Applebaum in the London Spectator-because Ms. Applebaum is fun to read,
and because it is an O. J. Simpson story about the O. J. Simpson
stories, so I thought maybe I could catch up on what I had not missed by
so cavalierly flipping through the paper. Ms. Applebaum is of the view
that in today's America a murder is never just a murder, at least when a
celebrity is involved; it is an excuse for national self-examination.
And what remarkable self-examinations there have been. Through the prism
of O. J.'s crime (alleged), it seems we are finding out all kinds of
things about race, class, celebritydom, sports, sexual dysfunction, and
failing marriages. Maybe there's even a religion angle, although it did
not show up on Ms. Applebaum's screen.
She does note the Harvard psychiatrist in the Washington Post
who says, "It certainly seems to me that in dealing with O. J. Simpson
the media has been portraying him as a wife-abuser and a violent person,
and negatively digging up his past." Ms. Applebaum thinks it difficult
to be positive about a past that indicates the man is a wife-abuser and
violent person. Also in the Post, a black businessman expressed
concern that "this is yet another opportunity to bring an African
American down hard," while a political activist declares that "anybody
who commits a crime like this is someone who obviously is a victim." It
follows, sort of.
Some years ago the writer Joan Didion noticed the strain of self-
centeredness that runs through the American media culture. "Where are we
heading?" she was asked on a book tour. "'Where are we heading?' they
asked in all the television and radio studios. . . . Quite often they
wondered not just where we were heading but where we were heading 'as
Americans' or 'as concerned Americans' or 'as American women' or, on one
occasion, 'as the American guy and the American woman.' I never did
learn the answer." What does the O. J. Simpson case tell us about
ourselves? What should we learn about who we are and
what we have done?
Anne Applebaum finds it hard to take. "In America, the use of terms
borrowed from psychoanalysis is so widespread-popularized by countless
self-help books and talk-show hosts with therapy training-that it no
longer seems odd that the whole society should be held accountable for a
single crime. America's aggression may well have needed to work itself
out; America's forgotten childhood traumas may need to be unearthed; an
incident in America's life ought to be examined, in order to understand
America's deeper problem. This, is after all, a country whose political
commentators sometimes refer to Yugoslavia as a 'dysfunctional country,'
as if it were a family, and a country whose President uses his emotions
to justify policy decisions ('I feel good about the bombing,' was one
memorable Clinton remark). . . . It is therefore hardly surprising that
a celebrity murder is also received by the American public as an
occasion for national soul-searching and an investigation of racism-the
great national personality disorder-rather than as a time to evaluate
the facts, decide whether the celebrity in question is guilty or not,
and perhaps also decide to discuss racism later on, in a more
appropriate context. . . . After all, if O. J. did do it, that would not
be unexpected: men kill their wives every day, it is the commonest sort
of crime. If he did not do it, his plight is hardly different from that
of thousands of other people, black and white, also falsely accused of a
crime. Perhaps there is nothing to make sense of, nothing deeper to
understand, no racial overtones, no implications for society at large.
Perhaps the outcome of this trial will not affect 'where we are going,
as Americans.' But if that were the case, then there will be nothing to
talk about in America this autumn."
Well. It certainly makes those of us who have not been paying attention
feel better. ("I feel good about ignoring it.") Although Ms. Applebaum
is no comfort to those commentators, including, we have no doubt, quite
a few preachers, who seized upon the O. J. affair to exercise their
expertise in the deeper meanings department. We had trouble enough
during those turbulent days pondering the Yankees. What does it say
about us as Americans when the baseball owners and players of all the
other teams close down the game rather than allow the Yankees to win the
World Series?
Turning a Blind Eye
The United Nations conference in Cairo on population and development was
a very big setback for the Clinton Administration and a very
considerable success for the Vatican, which demonstrated its singular
capacity to evoke a measure of moral reflection in the international
arena. A forthcoming issue will carry a detailed and very lively report
on what happened in and around the Cairo meeting. One possible irony is
that U.S. feminists who established the theme of "empowerment of women"
may have removed from center stage the Paul Ehrlichs, Garrett Hardins,
and groups advocating a hard-nosed coercive approach to controlling
population. While the feminists may have effected a "paradigm shift" in
the rhetoric, however, it is likely that the massive funding that Cairo
called for will still go to the coercive controllers.
Rediscovering Liberalism
Richard Bernstein is a true liberal, which is to say he is a principled
opponent of the illiberalism that today passes for liberalism in the
worlds of journalism, entertainment, philanthropy, and education, both
higher and lower. Which is to say that Richard Bernstein is a
neoconservative. Remarkably enough, he has managed to survive as
national cultural writer at the New York Times. He has now
written a book that we recommend very highly, Dictatorship of
Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future
(Knopf, 367 pp., $25). It is a marvelously literate and detailed guide
to the culture wars being waged on numerous fronts. He dissects the
rewriting of history, indeed the turning of history into fiction, in
order to bolster ethnic and racial self-esteem, and the ways in which
"diversity," under the auspices of the moralistically superior champions
of the New Consciousness, has been turned into the systematic censorship
and exclusion of any truth that offends political correctitude.
Dictatorship of Virtue is a polemic, but it is much more than a
polemic. It is an intellectually keen analysis of the dynamics of
institutions and their vulnerability to ideologies that are advanced in
the name of enlightenment and progress. It is also a bracing call to
arms against the threat of what Robespierre called the "emanation of
virtue."
The Revolution that Wasn't
1993 was the year of gay and lesbian advocacy. There was President
Clinton's promotion of homosexuals in the military, the great gay march
on Washington, cover stories in almost every national publication,
network programs galore, and a number of books aimed at "mainlining" the
gay subculture. All the stops were pulled and gay advocacy reached a
crescendo made noisier by the conservative discovery of homosexuality as
an issue ripe for political exploitation. 1994 has been something of a
disappointment for the partisans of the gay cause. Not, of course, that
they do not continue to work hard through the courts and educational
establishments to advance their views and secure goals such as legal
victim status and same-sex marriage. But there is no evidence of a
groundswell of change in popular attitudes or political support.
A Sense of Heightened Expectation
A most instructive visit to Rome (in the company of George Weigel, no
stranger to our readers) at the end of September perhaps warrants a
word. One purpose of the trip was to promote the Italian editions of
Weigel's The Final Revolution and my Doing Well and Doing Good,
both of which have just been brought out by Mondadori, Italy's largest
publishing house. That involved many press conferences, and seminars in
Naples and Milan, as well as Rome. The focus, of course, was on Catholic
social teaching, with which Italian journalists and intellectuals are
much more familiar than their American counterparts. On the other hand,
it is by no means evident that they have seriously engaged the arguments
advanced by this pontificate, especially in the encyclicals
Centesimus Annus and Veritatis Splendor.
Deeper Meanings, Sort Of
Where were you when you heard that JFK was killed? It's likely half our
readers weren't born yet. But there are these events, usually tragic,
that are supposed to congeal the sense of national community by
indelibly imprinting a moment on the collective mind. Like that long
chase of O. J. Simpson in his Ford Bronco. Where were you? It seems that
all but a dozen of us were transfixed in front of the television. It
seems that way, but one may be permitted to doubt it. Admittedly, this
writer is hopelessly out of it, but I not only did not see the chase, I
haven't watched one program or had one conversation with anyone about
the Simpson affair. Yes, one hears passing remarks about the nation
being obsessed with the matter, and you can't help but note the many
stories about it in the paper as you flip through what certainly does
not require your attention. Actually, I think we are being put on. I am
sure there are many, many more than a dozen of us who have remained
quite impervious to the clamor, aside from opining, if anyone asks (no
one has), that of course someone might get away with murder if he can
pay five or ten million for his defense, and there is nothing very new
about that.
Salvation to all that will is nigh,
That All, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must
beare,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo, faithful Virgin, yields himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though he there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet he will
wear
Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force
may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created, thou
Wast in his mind, who is thy Son, and
Brother,
Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'd; yea thou
are now
Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother,
Thou hast light in dark; and shutst in little
room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.