[Futurework] yin and yang of the religious mind

[Karen Watters Cole]

From the Atlantic Monthly March 2003:  Read this as follow up to all those postings we’ve shared about the influence of religion on contemporary geopolitics and the sociology that it represents.    Note that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are mentioned by name more than once and that the author refers to foreign policy not domestic.   – KWC   Ideas Kicking the Secularist Habit A six-step program by David Brooks Like a lot of people these days, I'm a recovering secularist. Until September 11 I accepted the notion that as the world becomes richer and better educated, it becomes less religious. Extrapolating from a tiny and unrepresentative sample of humanity (in Western Europe and parts of North America), this theory holds that as history moves forward, science displaces dogma and reason replaces unthinking obedience. A region that has not yet had a reformation and an enlightenment, such as the Arab world, sooner or later will. It's now clear that the secularization theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom. Islam is surging. Orthodox Judaism is growing among young people, and Israel has gotten more religious as it has become more affluent. The growth of Christianity surpasses that of all other faiths. In 1942 this magazine published an essay called "Will the Christian Church Survive?" Sixty years later there are two billion Christians in the world; by 2050, according to some estimates, there will be three billion. As Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, has observed, perhaps the most successful social movement of our age is Pentecostalism (see "The Next Christianity," October Atlantic). Having gotten its start in Los Angeles about a century ago, it now embraces 400 million people—a number that, according to Jenkins, could reach a billion or more by the half-century mark. Moreover, it is the denominations that refuse to adapt to secularism that are growing the fastest, while those that try to be "modern" and "relevant" are withering. Ecstatic forms of Christianity and "anti-modern" Islam are thriving. The Christian population in Africa, which was about 10 million in 1900 and is currently about 360 million, is expected to grow to 633 million by 2025, with conservative, evangelical, and syncretistic groups dominating. In Africa churches are becoming more influential than many nations, with both good and bad effects. Secularism is not the future; it is yesterday's incorrect vision of the future. This realization sends us recovering secularists to the bookstore or the library in a desperate attempt to figure out what is going on in the world. I suspect I am not the only one who since September 11 has found himself reading a paperback edition of the Koran that was bought a few years ago in a fit of high-mindedness but was never actually opened. I'm probably not the only one boning up on the teachings of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, Sayyid Qutb, and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.   http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/03/brooks.htm   Then, consider this from the Spring 2002 Wilson Quarterly, John Rawls and the Liberal Faith by Peter Berkowitz:  “Over the centuries, however, the liberal tradition has also drawn strength from religion. Locke viewed the law of reason—a moral law that he regarded as universal and objective—as an _expression_ of God’s eternal order. He also argued that religion, no less than reason, taught toleration. In the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that liberal democracy in America depended on the vitality of the people’s religious faith. Hegel sought to show that the liberal state is Christianity in secular and political form. Today, even as the United States wages a worldwide war against religiously inspired terrorism, religion remains a powerful force within America itself. Yet at the heart of the liberal idea a question remains: Is it reasonable for a liberal to be religious? Can it be reasonable to claim to put freedom first while also binding oneself to a system of theological notions about where we come from, what we are, and how we ought to live? Such doubts have a distinguished pedigree in the liberal tradition, and they have impelled many contemporary liberals to regard religion with intense suspicion, if not outright hostility. In the old quarrel between liberalism and religion, John Rawls, the preeminent academic moral philosopher of the last 50 years, has often seemed to encourage the view that while liberals must tolerate religious faith, it would be unreasonable for them to profess it. But with the publication at the end of his career of his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000), Rawls’s most searching examination of liberalism’s foundations, he provides reasons to believe that far from being the antithesis of freedom, religious faith of a certain sort may be the basis of our respect for freedom, the very thing that renders our respect rational.   … In an instructive phrase in the Lectures, Rawls says that Kant’s moral philosophy aspires to the ideal of an "aristocracy of all." This calls to mind John Stuart Mill’s vision of a society of sovereign individuals, as well as the Protestant notion of a "priesthood of all believers." All three notions are variations on a venerable modern theme: the harmonization of a substantial human equality with a sweeping individual freedom. It is not hard to understand the aspiration to an aristocracy of all. But can a person’s human desire for distinction be satisfied in a society in which everybody is recognized as an aristocrat, sovereign, or priest? What are the practical effects on our hearts and minds of the conviction that each person is supreme? And what are the implications for moral psychology, or how the moral life is actually lived, of a form of moral reasoning that authorizes all individuals to conceive of themselves as laying down universal laws? These are some of the intriguing questions—seldom raised by his colleagues and students—that Rawls’s probing classroom lectures ought to provoke among those who wish to assess the reasonableness of Rawlsian liberalism. In the universities, at a time when most philosophy professors were engaged in dry-as-dust conceptual analysis, John Rawls gave new life to a certain progressive interpretation of classical liberalism. His philosophical labors, which were devoted to clarifying the structure of liberal thought, brought to light, in some cases unwittingly, stresses and strains, fissures and flaws, and ironic twists and turns in the liberal spirit. Nowhere was this more true than in relation to liberalism’s foundations. Rawls’s thinking culminated with a series of books in which he defended the idea of a "political conception of justice." This was supposed to be a free-standing liberalism, a liberalism resting solely on Americans’ shared intuitions about freedom and equality. From these shared intuitions, Rawls tried to derive fair terms of social cooperation, the constitutional ground rules under which it would be reasonable for free and equal citizens to choose to live. But is the intuition that we are free and equal a freestanding truth of reason? Or is it a belief that is also nurtured by religious faith? While many of Rawls’s followers regard it as bad manners (at best) to raise such a question, we now know, thanks to his recently published lectures, that Rawls himself raised the question and saw something serious at stake in how it was answered. In trying to come to grips with the foundations of liberalism, Rawls offers conflicting ideas. On the one hand, he holds that the founding moral intuitions are self-evident. On the other, he holds that they rest on faith. Yet if good arguments can be made on behalf of both propositions, then by definition the moral intuitions cannot be self-evident. What is evident is the doubt about how precisely to understand liberalism’s moral foundations. So at minimum it is reasonable to pursue the fecund thought that Rawls’s freestanding liberalism actually stands on an act of faith. Perhaps Rawls’s conflicting accounts can be reconciled, as in the Declaration of Independence, through the idea that a certain faith impels us to hold as self-evident the truth that all people are by nature free and equal. No one is saying that liberalism requires you to be religious or that religious people are more amply endowed with the liberal spirit. But for those who care about understanding liberalism, a more precise knowledge of its foundations should be welcome. And as a practical matter, for those who care about freedom and equality, knowledge of the foundations of the truths we have long held to be self-evident can contribute to our ability to cultivate the conditions under which we can keep our grip on them firm.”    (WQ requires a subscription. Contact me if you want this in full Word doc – the FW filter declined to fwd it.  Also, if you want the shorter Brooks piece in Word doc.)