REFLECTIONS ON RELIGION AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERAL POLITICS Presented at Fordham University Center on Religion and Culture November 11, 2004 Mark A. Sargent* To make sense of today’s topic, we need to be clear about what we mean by “religion” and “liberal.” If we define “religion” as conservative evangelicism or Catholicism, and “liberal” as the left wing of the Democratic party, it’s pretty clear that the two don’t have a future together, and the only question is what the Democratic Party can do about it, if anything, if it wants to win presidential elections. That’s an interesting and important question, but I will leave it to someone more knowledgeable about politics than I to answer. I’d like to suggest, instead, that the meanings of “religion” and “liberal” are more complicated than that, particularly in their relationship to each other, and I’d like to spend a little time parsing them out. Out history has several important instances of religious voices providing critical moral and political support for positions or causes usually defined as “liberal”: --The anti-slavery movement (rooted in evangelical Christianity); The civil rights movement (the Letter from Birmingham Jail is a profoundly religious document rooted in the Gospel); The labor movement (this extends from Rerum Novarum to the labor priests and beyond; picture Karl Malden being lifted out of the hold of the ship in On the Waterfront where he delivered his homily on the crucifixion of the longshoreman Kayo Dugan); The anti-war movement (remember William Sloan Coffin and the Berrigans); The anti-poverty movement (Catholic Social teaching was an inspiration to Michael Harrington and many more).
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In all these instances, a conception of human dignity grounded in the sacred converged with, or at
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Dean and Professor of Law, Villanova University School of Law.
least paralleled the evolving secular liberal tradition of human dignity. I think it has to be acknowledged, however, that the world view of the liberal tradition, ranging from the 19th century emphasis on economic liberty to modern rights-based lifestyle liberalism, has usually defined itself against the religious worldview: -Epistemologically, liberalism expresses a principled skepticism about, or even hostility to the truth claims at the heart of any religion, being more than slightly queasy about such unreasonable and potentially threatening claims; Morally, liberalism embodies, or at least tends toward and tolerates a substantial degree of moral relativism, thereby conflicting with religious traditions confident in their ability to define the good; Anthropologically, liberalism is built around a highly individualistic, rightscentered conception of the autonomous human person that is in tension with the religious vision of the human person as created, as a creature of God, whose freedom exists to serve God; Liberalism understands human sexuality primarily within the framework of autonomy and rights, in contrast to the religious worldview for which the matter is complicated by the need to reconcile the claims of flesh and spirit, the ethics of non-exploitation and non-instrumentalization of other persons, and the possibilities of sin and transgression; In its Rawlsian strain, liberalism would exclude faith-based discourse from the public square, because religious reasons cannot be public reasons.
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It is no wonder that for much of its history liberalism has defined religion (and in particular Catholicism) as its antithesis and enemy. So it’s also no wonder that religion has often defined itself against liberalism — see, for example not just Veritatis splendor, but the Francoist tract which answered the question “what is liberalism?” with “liberalismo es pecado” — “liberalism is sin.” What is more surprising is that through much of American history liberalism and religion have not functioned as antitheses, but have converged, at least in their goals and political actions.
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I gave you a few examples a moment ago, and I would certainly echo the point E.J. Dionne made in his introductory comments – that at times genuine political change in the United States has depended on the moral force of religious belief, Those moments of convergence, however, have often depended on the simultaneous and impermanent confluence of other social and political factors. Take, for example, the Catholic/liberal convergence of the ’30s, ’40s and into the ’50s. The Democrats could count on sizeable majorities of white, ethnic, working class Catholic voters because the economic and social policies of the New Deal and its progeny were consistent with their class interest, with their self-identification with the poor (despite their social and economic ambitions), their pro-labor orientation, and the communitarian, somewhat anti-capitalist tradition of Catholic social thought. John Courtney Murray and Monsignor John Ryan – the Right Reverend New Dealer – were the intellectual leaders of this convergence, which in some senses culminated in the election of John Kennedy, who many Catholics voted for not simply because he was Catholic, but also because he was “liberal.” It is that moment of convergence that Democrats look back upon nostalgically and wistfully when they think about the Catholic vote. But, of course, that moment is really gone, for one reason that has little to do with religion and another that has everything to do with it. The first reason was the Republican Party’s enormous success in forging an iron link between race and taxes - - i.e., paying high taxes came to mean spending money on undeserving and threatening black people - - that began with Nixon and culminated in the reigns of Ronald Reagan and George Bush I, and tore white ethnics, now largely middle class or at least lowermiddle class, away from the Democratic Party and its tax-and-spend, race-coddling liberals.
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The second reason, however, has everything to do with religion or, more precisely religion and sex. While the political battles over contraception, in which the Catholic Church engaged vigorously, suggested that a potential fissure between liberals and Catholics was growing, the differences between liberals and Catholics about sex were not very threatening to their New Deal convergence. After the ’60s and Roe v. Wade, however, the differences over human sexuality, whether it was abortion, homosexual rights or the pervasive growth of sexual imagery and attitudes in the media, contributed to a culture war that lingers today, drove a wedge between the Democratic Party and the institutional Catholic Church, many Catholics and certainly most evangelicals. The religious voice in politics thus came to be dominated by conservative religious voices, who coopted the language of faith, values and life, and made it appear that there were no other religious voices in politics. The Republican Party seized upon and exploited this development, increasingly presenting itself as the only possible home for religious people, and the Democrats played into their hands, at least in presidential politics, by adopting an extreme position on abortion at least as non-negotiable as the strongest Catholic position against abortion. The same pattern is more or less being followed with respect to same-sex marriage, with the unexpected result that even the Democrat’s previously impregnable position in the black churches is being eroded. So what hope is there for religion in liberal politics? Here is where we need to begin thinking about what we mean by “religion,” or at least the religious perspective. A couple of years ago I attended the annual luncheon of the St. Thomas More Society of Philadelphia, a wonderful group of Catholic lawyers on whose board I serve. The speaker was a
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well-known conservative Catholic public intellectual, who argued, in essence, that the only possible political home for the faithful Catholic was the Republican Party, largely because the Democrats had categorically excluded pro-life voices. Amid the general assent, a brave priest who spends a lot of time working with the many immigrants and farmworkers in the Philadelphia Archdiocese, raised his hand and asked whether the Republican Party’s positions on poverty, war and peace and capital punishment also reflected a commitment to life. The speaker sort of sneered, and said that “I don’t really buy this Seamless Garment of Life thing. It allows so-called Catholics like Ted Kennedy to say that because he’s batting .700 on everything else, he gets a pass on abortion.” On the way home I thought of the retort I should have made, “What makes you think that you get a pass on everything else because you are batting .200 on abortion?,” but that has to remain in the category of things I wish I said (I guess I’m saying it now!). The argument among Catholics over the moral equivalency of abortion and other areas of Catholic concern in the consistent ethic of life is of course a wedge issue among Catholics, and one that had a real impact on the Catholic vote in the last election, but I don’t want to try to resolve it now (as if I could)! The relevant point here is that there is a cleavage among Catholics between those for whom issues such as abortion (and increasingly same-sex marriage and embryonic stem cell research) are absolutely central and non-negotiable, and those for whom the Catholic positions on social justice issues are equally important. This split between the “culture of death” and the Seamless Garment crowds (to use Cardinal Bernardin’s famous, evocative image) has created two dilemmas, which are actually two sides of the same coin. The first dilemma is what I call the tragedy of the pro-life liberal. My liberal and progressive friends are as astonished when I describe myself as a “pro-life liberal” as they would
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be if I claimed that I could breathe under water or that I rooted for both the Red Sox and the Yankees. But that indicates the problem – there is no political home for such a rara avis. The second dilemma is that of the Democratic Party, which is losing those people who wanted to vote for John Kerry, but had extraordinary difficulty doing so, despite their belief that President Bush’s record on so many areas of Catholic concern was reprehensible. A while ago on the blog I share with a group of other Catholic law professors, Mirror of Justice, we conducted a thought experiment on the platform of an imaginary third party – the Seamless Garment Party – in which the central organizing principle was the consistent ethic of life. This party would provide an ideological framework for expressing a wide range of Catholic (and more broadly Christian) convictions about social justice, energizing the waning force of American liberalism’s commitment to the preferential option for the poor, and linking these concerns to a far more nuanced dialogue than is currently possible within the Democratic Party about abortion, sexuality and sexual ethics, and experimentation with human life. This would extend the conversation on the left beyond the rhetoric of rights and the uncritical idolatry of scientific progress to a more serious appreciation of human dignity. Our experiment goes on. Membership cards for the SGP will be available at the door!
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