The Christian mullah problem 

The Christian mullah problem

My question: Does Christianity have a tendency to produce mullahs--religious leaders who wish to use political authority to enforce conformity and purity? Are Christians, because of their beliefs, likely to support such an approach?

In recent months there has been a tendency to draw a sharp contrast between Christianity and Islam. Christianity, we are told, is compatible with freedom, capitalism, the liberation of women, and all the good things the U.S. is fighting for; Islam may not be.

I know very little about Islam, and I'm not an expert in Christian theology either, but the questions raised here have interested me for a long time.

I should say at the outset that I don't think Jerry Falwell or Franklin Graham (Billy's son) have ambitions to be ayatollahs. When Bart Giamatti spoke at Yale in 1981 and warned about the threat to free speech and free thought posed by the Moral Majority, he must have been dreaming. There may not have been a single fundamentalist Christian anywhere on that campus. On the other hand, there were groups who wanted to prevent certain books from being sold and taught--feminists, cultural relativists, etc.

(I found the Giamatti quote at http://www.bfi.org/grunch_of-giants4.htm/ In fairness, there is also a quote by Giamatti on the web warning about various groups threatening freedom of speech--on the left as well as the right.)

I very much enjoy reading Richard Neuhaus in his journal First Things. In my experience his commentary "The Public Square" is usually the best thing in every issue. The name refers to his book (which I haven't read), called The Naked Public Square. Like Walter Berns and other scholars, Neuhaus argues that the U.S. Supreme Court has gone too far in interpreting the First Amendment's injunction against "establishing" a religion. The Court in the 60's and 70's did not simply to wish to prevent a particular sect, or even a particular religion such as Christianity, from being established; they wished to remove religiosity as such from the public domain; hence "the naked public square."

Neuhaus encourages public religiosity, and serious discussion of religious and theological questions. He was an outspoken pro-lifer even as a Lutheran, and is perhaps even more so as a Catholic convert. He is confident that "religion" in the U.S., if any appeal is made to the majority, will mean Christianity. He is confident that a truly significant proportion of Americans are believing Christians, as well as believers in liberal democracy. It is important to him to argue that there is no necessary tension or opposition between the different strands of true belief in the decent, church-going American middle class.

In November 1997 Neuhaus wrote on "pluralism" as follows:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9711/public.html/
(Sorry I'm still not linking properly. I need to learn how to link from a few plain-language words.)
"It is not accurate to say that Christianity has made its peace with pluralism and democracy, as though they were forced upon it and only grudgingly accepted. Nor is it accurate to say that pluralism and democracy are achievements of Christianity alone. But without Christianity they would not have been. The Church acknowledges these children as her own, even if some of the midwives involved in the delivery were less than friendly to the Church. Today, declares John Paul II in the encyclical Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer), 'The Church imposes nothing. She only proposes.' She would not impose if she could, and that precisely for the sake of the mission of the Redeemer. Democratic theory and practice is not of first concern for the Church. Priority is and must always be given the mission of Christ. Among the things learned from the Church's experience of religious monism is that it compromised and obscured the lordship of Christ by confusing his rule with ecclesiastical power in the temporal realm."

Neuhaus suggests there is no necessary tension between Christianity and democratic pluralism--indeed it is Christianity that has allowed pluralism to flourish. He seems to admit that some great defenders of pluralism were not Christian. But if those thinkers believed the success of pluralism required the decline of Christianity, they were mistaken.

Neuhaus took up a similar argument in December 2000. In this case he enters a debate with a former teacher of mine, Clifford Orwin:

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0012/public.html/

Orwin had written in the National Post as follows: "What remains of religion in mainstream North America is one thing only: a diffuse moralism accompanies by a vague conviction that religion supports morality....Americans may go to church more often than other modern peoples, but what they learn in church is this gospel of universal toleration. All good people go to heaven."

Neuhaus replies in part:
"The never-ending task for Christians is to make clear that their respect for others is not despite but because of their Christian faith. The alternative to tolerance premised upon indifference to truth is a lively pluralism premised upon the conviction that the truth both requires and makes possible our mutually respectful engagement of the differences that make the deepest difference. It is probable that only a minority of Christians understand and embrace that alternative, but then it has probably always been the case that most Christians are, at least most of the time, not terribly serious or reflective about what they say they believe as Christians.

"There is nothing wrong with the claim that 'all good people go to heaven,' if we understand that the good is inseparable from the true. The tolerance that, implicitly or explicitly, denies the reality of truth recruits religion to the service of the American Way of Life, which then becomes, not to put too fine a point on it, an idol. The circumstance and the temptations described by Prof. Orwin have been with us since the beginning of the American experiment, and in fact go back much earlier. The adherents of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus have always been tempted to settle for His being tolerated as one of the gods of the tribe or nation. But He remains a jealous God because truth is jealous. Truth refuses to split the difference with falsehood.

"Tolerance, rightly understood, is obedience to St. Paul's injunction to 'speak the truth in love,' which, in turn, is premised upon love for the truth. In this light, the 'gospel of universal toleration' is not to be despised. Most Christians are not theologians, which is just as well, nor given to making fine distinctions, which is perhaps unfortunate but inevitable. When they tell pollsters that religious differences make no difference in their respect for others, many, if not most, Christians probably believe that that is what is required by the commandment to love one's neighbors. What social scientists register as religious indifference may in fact be, to cite Paul again, 'faith active in love.' It may be. Who knows? God knows. And one day He will let us know."

Neuhaus rejects the suggestion that there is a choice to be made between "dogmatic thugs" and "relativistic wimps," with the former believing that "vibrant religion" requires "the readiness to declare that those who do not share one's understanding of the truth will go to hell." True faith and true tolerance go together, but there are constant temptations both to give up and tolerate falsehood, on the one hand, and to crack down on disagreement on the other. Some of the famous persecutions of heretics and infidels, we might say, show the power of one temptation; some examples of American easy-goingness show the power of the other.

My question is: how powerful is that temptation to crack down? Or: does Christianity as a whole make something like a crack down by mullahs likely? The U.S. has achieved some kind of combination of Christianity and tolerance. Does it primarily show that Christianity supports and encourages true tolerance, or that liberal tolerance, beginning from non-Christian if not anti-Christian sources, has tamed Christianity?

The Roman Catholic Church kept Dante's work Monarchy on the Index of condemned works until sometime in the 19th century. In this work, the poet whose Inferno is considered a classic statement of Catholic theology, insists that the Pope should be subordinate to the secular political authority. There is at least a substantial hint that the basis for legitimate authority is the consent of the governed. It was only with the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's that the Catholic Church formally accepted liberal democracy.

How close is pre-liberal Christianity, or Christianity that can consistently oppose liberal materialism, to rule by the mullahs? Anne Roche Muggeridge, in her book The Gates of Hell, said: "A conservative Catholic feels more sympathy with the world view of ardent Moslem leader Colonel Quaddifi than with that of Marxist-oriented theologian Gregory Baum" (p. 23). I'm pretty sure she says something similar in her more recent book, The Desolate City, but I have been unable to find it.

Meanwhile, where did liberal democracy, and its practice of toleration and pluralism, actually come from? Two major sources are Hobbes and Locke--and they are surely among those Neuhaus hints were not Christians in any recognizable sense. (Although of course today many people say it is possible to call oneself a Christian ane believe almost anything).

Hobbes has been accused of making an "absolutist" argument for government. He says that once we give up our right to attack others to the sovereign, or government, in order to leave the state of nature, we have no right to return to a state of war by attacking the government because of its actions or views. If the government confiscates your property, Hobbes says, that is indeed an "inconvenience," but you should be glad your life is not threatened. Government might impose or establish one sect or religion (such things have been known to happen); Hobbes makes a complicated argument that almost all doctrine is a matter of indifference in any case. Although he was mainly interested in 17-century England, it seems he would want people to accept Islam if that were necessary to keep the peace.

What later liberals tend to miss is that Hobbes establishes liberalism. He says government only has one purpose--to protect the lives and security of the governmed. And there is one one legitimate basis for government--the consent of the governed. Hobbes insists that almost any government is better than none, but he is also forced to admit that no one can force you to risk your life, or to accept an attack on your life by the government without running away.

Locke was able to build on Hobbes's foundation. If government violates the security of too many people, making many people think their lives might later be in jeapordy, then it is the government that has re-belled, or returned to war, not the so-called rebels. Hobbes argued that we should be sufficiently indifferent to different religious creeds that we can take almost anything a government dishes out in terms of doctrine; Locke expects believers to want to keep a recognizable creed, so he argues for toleration of different creeds. My main point is: logically, indifference comes before toleration, and that gets back to Orwin vs. Neuhaus.

I e-mailed Colby Cosh on this last November, and I will cut and paste some of what I said then. I think the combination of Christianity and liberalism works only when there is a fundamental indifference to the truth of revelation. This seems strange with the great example of the U.S. before us, but Americans are always talking about choosing for themselves the specific church that is right for them. There is a never-ending proliferation of sects--not because people are going to make war to spread the truth, but because they want to pick and choose until they get what they want. This is somehow the opposite of saying: we will follow a specific revelation humbly and to the best of our abilities. Tocqueville says many wonderful and subtle things on this subject, but I believe one thought is: Americans want to do well in this life, so they don't see why they shouldn't do well in the next life as well.

In short, to the extent people are genuine Christians, they probably tend to support mullahs; if there is little or no sign of such support, that is probably because Christianity has been transformed by liberalism. Liberal democrats want peace rather than war, and Christianity often presents itself as the religion of peace. But what is the goal that comes closest to uniting all Americans, whether believers or not? Material progress. What is the daily activity that defines this unity? Not prayer, not really acts of love, but commerce.

I e-mailed another former teacher of mine--William Mathie--on these questions back in '99. Mathie converted to Catholicism about 20 years ago. Somewhat rudely, I asked if the Church was still or always attracted to the Ayatollah or Inquisitor role. (Thinking partly of the "Grand Inquisitor" in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov). One thing he said in his reply is that this role was rejected by Aquinas (citing Summa Th. 91.4) if not Augustine. It seems funny to say the Catholic Church gave up using the state to persecute heretics about 1100 AD. Does this mean that in all the religious wars of early modernity, Rome was more sinned against than sinning? Even if this is true, it suggests that the problem was not clearly resolved until about a thousand years after the death of Christ. Islam may not be all that far behind.

Mathie also cited recent encyclicals by Pope John Paul II. in Anno centissimo, the Pope seemed to endorse liberal democracy or the view that consent is the necessary and sufficient basis of government (Mathie's paraphrase); in the later Evangilium vitae, however, he expressed second thoughts. The later view, in Mathie's words: "government ought to be seen as in the hands of the Lord's annointed, or as a scourge for fallen and sinful man, not so that it can reach and impose upon men's souls but so that it can limit the human propensity to do wickedness through the collective power of society."

This is an incredibly long post, but I am almost done. Mathie's language, paraphrasing the Pope, sounds like Augustine as elaborated by Ernest Fortin. The Christian should see politics as a way to mitigate evils, not a path to paradise on earth, or even as a way to do the work of the Church in spreading the truth. Augustine was concerned to show that Christians could be good citizens in an utterly un-Christian political order; their faith calls on them to perform many duties, including lowly daily and human ones, at a high level, so they should do what the government or political community asks (as long as it is not an outright sin)in addition to, not as a substitute for, their strictly Christian duties.

Fortin says in a 1971 article that Augustine did not perfectly resolve the issue of the Christian and the political order.
http://www.library.villanova.edu/sermons/fortin.htm/

He comments that in terms of various kinds of natural law, later thinkers (above all, I would guess, Aquinas) are more clear than Augustine but also more rigid; they may not provide a better solution, for example, to the problem of war, and the attempt to define a just war (pp. 29-30). In another Fortin article, which unfortunately is not on the web and I don't own (his article on Augustine in the Strauss-Cropsey reader), Fortin says that when Augustine as Bishop used governmental support to suppress the heretics called Donatists, he did so reluctantly, and he came to regret it; nevertheless, there is a certain logic to a Christian leader doing so.

In the 1971 address, the Donatist controversy comes up very briefly (p. 26): Christian love "encompasses one's enemies as well as one's friends and fellow citizens...the toleration of...evils...is as much a betrayal of love as is the self-righteous and fanatical desire to extirpate forcefully all evil from among men. Its total dimension is summed up in Augustine's well-known dictum, 'Love and do what you will....' Interestingly enough, the maxim appears to have been invoked for the first time in the course of the Donatist controversy as a means of justifying reprisals against heretics."

In other words, granted that self-righteous persecution in an attempt to save and purify souls is an evil; letting sinfully sleeping dogs lie is as great an evil, and a Christian must do something about it. Here we go again.

Colby Cosh drew a contrast between Christianity and Islam. I'll attempt a paraphrase: Christianity has a long tradition of accepting different points of view, reasoned argument, even (with Augustine, Aquinas and other) some kind of marriage with Greek philosophy. Christians are taught that the truth shall set them free, so they don't necessarily accept that there is a real tension or opposition between faith and reason. Scripture is a document to be interpreted and worked on, rather than a weapon as the Koran seems to be for Muslims.

I would agree that during the Salman Rushdie episode, and more recent ones, there has been a striking contrast. Rushdie was supposed to be killed for blasphemy; blasphemy in books is old hat for Christians. Of course there are protests at the depictions of Christ in movies, but debates about whether Biblical miracles actually happened go back for centuries. The relationship between faith and Greek philosophy is especially interesting. The great Islamic empire produced and in a way protected some great philosophic scholars, who knew the Greeks well. It has often been said it was the Muslims who kept the Greek books in existence until "the West" was able to appreciate them. But as I understand it, philosophic writers in the Muslim world were always forced to conceal their meanings--Leo Strauss uses them as the ultimate example of great and profound writing that was carried out under persecution. Only in the West has there been something close to open avowals that there is a true Revelation from God, and at the same time, open and radical questioning of any such claims. To paraphrase Strauss again; it is at least a major part of the definition of "the West" that it keeps alive, incorporates, and keeps in tension, apparently contradictory views of the whole of life: Bible vs. philosophic skepticism; ancients vs. moderns; liberal individualism vs. various universal and secular faiths, etc.

We can all be grateful to Christians for contributing to this rich debate. We can also be glad that mainstream Christianity has turned into something compatible with liberal democracy. It still seems, however, that Christianity like Islam once had at its core an evangelical zeal to spread a simple teaching, and to encourage people to "live by the rules." Sophisticated talk about reason didn't necessarily help with this mission, and it may indeed have obstructed it. Lawful, constitutional government, including liberal democracy with its open avowal of toleration and pluralism, may also have been an obstacle to be cleared away by holy men and women. Perhaps Islam simply needs more time to become more Western and modern.

Update July 18: Fortin in Strauss and Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy, 3rd ed. U. of Chicago Press, 1987; pp. 197-98. As Bishop of Hippo, Augustine had to deal with a group of sectarians or heretics called the Donatists. Drastic measures became necessary because the Donatists were growing in strength and resolve, and were resorting to methods including terrorism that threatened the entire civil order.

Augustine decided to "sanction the use of force," and "turn the matter over to the local civil authorities." He tried to impose restrictions on the severity with which people were treated, especially if they showed that they were open to persuasion.

"Unfortunately, his action established a precedent whose consequences far exceeded anything that he himself appears to have foreseen. What was, for him, a mere concession to necessity or at most an emergency measure designed to cope with a specific situation was later invoked as a general principle to justify the church's reprisals against heretics and apostates. If such is the case, Augustine may be partly to blame for the religious persecution of the Middle Ages, which came to be looked upon as a prime example of the inhumanity fostered by the undue exaltation of moral standards and became the object of one of the principal criticisms levelled at the church throughout the modern period."

Obviously this also has some relevance to "McCarthyism," which has been disinterred by Ann Coulter more than once. Trying to find the truth about people's hearts and minds, and punish bad thoughts or disloyalty, can start a kind of police action that is hard to stop.

Update August 30:

See an excellent article by
James Q. Wilson (link from Instapundit). Wilson stresses the role of historical accident in the development of "tolerance" in Western countries; the religious factions grew so numerous, and the fighting so bitter, that some kind of truce had to be arranged in order for any stability or trade to be possible. Similarly Turkey became the most Westernized of Islamic states largely because of one person: Ataturk.

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