Is Cultural Compromise Dead? What happens when secularism metastasizes into dogma

James Kalb asks whether the cultural compromise that involved everyone agreeing to the proposition that our deepest differences do not matter in the conduct of culture is now dead, and whether it was ever a good idea for the Catholic Church to buy into it.

It brings up an interesting question: Is the United States really united anymore by anything other than constitutional formalities? Is compromise between religions or between religion and secularism even possible? These are questions that will be controversial among the religious followers of people like the late Richard John Neuhaus, founder of First Things magazine, who were such ardent signatories to the compromise.

As Kalb explains it:

Christian societies, Muslim societies, and secularist societies are all different from each other. One excludes another, so we can’t favor them equally. It seems then that we must choose one over the others, or else live with a compromise that is likely to prove awkward and shifting—a situation, of course, that is often very difficult to improve upon. That view of the matter makes people today uncomfortable. 

They would like to agree with the political philosopher John Rawls, who wanted basic questions put aside in public life as divisive, and claimed that could be done in a principled way to the satisfaction of all reasonable citizens whatever their outlook. Rawls devoted a great deal of effort to working out those views, and they have become extremely influential.

We have all been operating in this country under this implicit agreement since at least the end of World War II (and in some more implicit form even before that). Catholics (and Christians in general, although Kalb himself does not universalize his thesis in this way) have proved themselves model citizens by holding up their end of the bargain. But it has come at a cost:

The apparent hope behind such tendencies was that lessened emphasis on transcendent absolutes would make the Faith more accessible to modern man, and enable the Church to cooperate in the construction of a peaceful and tolerant world in which Catholics could maintain personal and religious integrity as citizens of a free and open society. They would serve God by serving man, acting as a leaven and transforming hearts and minds.  

The hope hasn’t panned out, and the transformation has gone the other way. Integration of Catholics into a society that rejects the Faith ever more comprehensively has mostly led them to redefine Catholic belief as strictly private opinion or an idiosyncratic restatement of existing social aspirations. For conservatives, Faith often merged with faith in America. For liberals, who have had more intellectual and organizational influence, Love became mostly equivalent to social welfare as understood by their secular colleagues, and the Divine Other tended to give way to the human other, so that outreach and inclusiveness came to substitute for the mystical union.

But whether Catholics can stay within the compromise may be a moot question due to the metastasizing of secularism into a doctrinaire and punitive ideology. In other words, it isn't really the religious signatories to this compromise who are bringing it down. It is dogmatic secularists who have basically declared war on all meaningful religious expression: You can follow your religious inclinations all you like, as long as it doesn't have any tangible consequences.

Groups like the ACLU and the Democratic Party are all fundamentalists when it comes to the First Amendment—except that troublesome part about freedom of religious expression, which we not only don't interpret literally like the part about free speech, but which think really must go.

Secular liberals have issued an Edict of Milan turned upside-down; they have flushed the Flushing Remonstrance.

Catholics may or may not have been wise in signing the cultural treaty: I suspect Kalb is right in thinking they should not have. But it doesn't matter: Secularists have already violated their end of the bargain and declared war.

Anthony Esolen on the Intolerance of the New Secular Theocracy

Anthony Esolen, in Crisis Magazine, on the New Intolerance:

The “faith” of no faith moved Stalin to murder his millions in the Ukraine, and Mao to murder his tens of millions throughout the vast rural territories of China.  Secularism is a bloody business, because, without God, man is affixed to the terrible adverb “only,” and there is very little you cannot do to someone who is “only” a counter in an economic tally, or a pawn in a vast historical battlefield, or an organic machine consuming food and water, or whatever.

Read more here.

Kalb Speaks: The inhumanity of secularism

James Kalb, the intellectually intrepid author of The Tyranny of Liberalism writes in the Catholic World Report on the wages of technology and technocratic thinking and what they hath wrought:

Everybody who matters is a secularist today, and the situation has far-reaching implications. One is that educated and well-placed people now believe that the institutions on which social order is based should be technically expert, economically rational, morally nonjudgmental, and universal in their reach. So the world should be ordered comprehensively by global markets and expert regulatory bureaucracies, together with subsidiary institutions such as universities, think tanks, media organizations, and various NGOs that serve or try to influence government and business. That, it is thought, is the uniquely rational way of organizing society, and whatever threatens it, or attempts to limit it or introduce other authorities, is irrational, disruptive, and a threat to humanity.

... Anything else would violate the vision of the secular development of the human world into an ordered and beneficent cosmos. That, it is thought, would be the triumph of chaos, irrationality, and violence. The problem is that the society aimed at has no room for man as he is. It treats him as fundamentally a careerist and consumer, with no natural particularities, and no higher aspiration or destiny than the perfection of the system that enables him and his fellows to get what they want. Any qualities that go beyond that are disruptive, and must be eradicated or neutralized by confining them to a purely private sphere where they won’t influence anything. 

For that reason it has no place for the attachments that have always formed human life and to which we have always given our deepest loyalties: family, religion, specific community, particular people and culture, ultimate truth.

Read the rest here.