The Fundamentals and The Gingrich Picture Clarifies
There is a distinct difference between a religious test and the necessity for religion in society. Religion, in a reasonably generic sense lies at the bottom of freedom and conservatism. We find that fundamental case made in a couple of places yesterday. The London Telegraph reviews a new book “God is Back:”
The authors do not intend to reflect their own (conflicting) religious opinions. As they say themselves, their message is “a profoundly liberal one.” They seek to show that religion is compatible with a free society. They argue that the more technology, democracy, choice and freedom a society has, the more religion will be strengthened. Religion is most active in men’s hearts, they believe, when it competes for them.
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There is a sense in which religious people feel cheated by the liberal state. They feel that it talks big about freedom and then imposes doctrines of its own. Liberals find this almost impossible to understand, but it is one of the great sources of resentment in the world.
And yet it is also clear to most serious believers that religious fanaticism and violence are very revolting things. So we need a religious – as opposed to socio-political – case for why, however strongly we believe something to be necessary to salvation, we should not clothe it with earthly power. For Christians, the answer would seem to lie in the example of the founder of the religion. Jesus explicitly forswore the offers of worldly kingship which were almost literally laid before him. If that was his view, surely his followers should beware of the same temptation?
For Muslims, the case is rather different. Mohammed was a preacher first, but eventually a political leader and a general who ordered the slaughter of his enemies. I am sure it is not impossible to develop a form of Islam which does not equate conquest with the will of God, but, as Micklethwait and Wooldridge accurately chronicle, it is proving troublesome.
Religious ideas (freedom, the dignity of the individual…) lie at the very heart of the American experiment. Dan Gilgoff shows a video of Newt Gingrich making that point extremely well at a Republican dinner Sunday night. The video is very worth the watch ad I think it clarifies what Newt is up to. He sounds, once again, like an ideological leader, not a political one. He is not running for office. We have discussed here numerous times that the religiously motivated movement in the Republican base is on the brink. They overplayed their hand in the last cycle, tore the party apart, and where we are today is obvious.
Much has been written about who will emerge as the new leader of the religious voice in the party. We have long contended here that pastors and other people of a primarily religious calling blow this effort. But Newt might just be the perfect person. As politically shrewd as they come, with a story of deep personal religious experience, Gingrich is uniquely positioned and overwhelmingly qualified, to speak for the religious concerns of the many and varied Christian expressions in the nation. That, I think, is Newt’s game. He knows we have to have a religious voice in the nation. He knows that Republicans are the traditional holders of that voice. He knows Republicans are dead in the water without it and that it is going to take smart, political leadership to recapture it.
The real question is, will the Huckster and his ilk listen?
There is much at stake. Instapundit links to the Corner who links to Politico to point out that Obama cites Jesus more tham George W. Bush. Read all the analysis through that chain and then compare the policies of the Obama administration to the values that Gingrich espouses in the speech. You will soon see illustrated another contention of this blog – that religion, captured by politics, will be harmed far more than politics. Obama and the left seek not just public policy but to change our very understanding of the fundamental values our religion teaches us. If I lose a political freedom, the American system of governance will allows me to fight to get it back. But if the values of the nation, and the fundamental religious understandings that underlie them, change as Obama clearly seeks to accomplish, then the fight is lost before it begins.
To close, let me link to this somewhat silly, yet highly controversial example.
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coltakashi on 10 Jun 2009 at 10:17 am #
The way I read Newt’s remarks is that he is simply calling for a revival of the “civil religion” that Lincoln invoked in both his references to the Declaration of Independence, including in his Gettysburg Address, and in his Second Inaugural, which asks the question of whether the terrible suffering of the Civil War was not a judgment by God on America for tolerating the evils of slavery that denied the premise of the Declaration, that God creates all men free and equal.
While that civil religion evokes old documents and old men, it confronts the modern challenge of the Nanny State, which is founded on the premise that the government is smarter and fairer in its judgments than we the people, as individuals or collectively, could ever be. The judgments of the Nanny State are based on its own judgment about the average benefit to the masses, which ultimately is really about the benefit to the Nanny, which always places its own welfare–its continuation, its sustenance, its power–above the welfare of any individual. The Nanny State inevitably leads to the Brezhnev Doctrine, that the need to preserve the power of the State, so it can benefit future generations of the proletariat, has priority over the express wishes of any present people to govern themselves (which is how he justified sending tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968).
Thus, that civil religion is not an exaltation of any particular creed or group of denominations, but an invocation of the common belief in a Creator who made mankind–and redeems mankind–because He loves us, a Sovereign who places his earthly sovereigntly in the hands of all of us, not in the hands of any king, president or Congress. Belief in our own individual religions benefits the civil religion because it affirms the sovereignty of God above governments, and thus of the people above the government. When people lose a belief in God, they lose the traditional justification for telling the State that it is not God. That is the danger that motivates atheists to attack monuments of the Ten Commandments, because they are unequivocal in declaring the supremacy of God over all competitors–including the State. It is the age-old conflict that motivated Pilate to sentence Jesus to death, because living belief in a living God overrides loyalty to a self-proclaimed god like Caesar.
coltakashi on 10 Jun 2009 at 10:36 am #
P.S. A few years ago, Will Smith starred in a movie titled “I, Robot”. While based on the many stories and novels of DR. Isaac Asimov, it was an original work whose theme was precisely the danger to human freedom of an all-powerful regime that desires to keep us all “safe from harm.”
Asiimov had, in his first robot stories, offered the Three Laws of Robotics, which are: (1) No robot will harm a human or, by inaction, allow a human to come to harm. (2) No robot will disobey a human unless it conflicts with the First Law. (3) No robot will allow itself to be harmed unless it conflicts with the first or Second Laws. All of his stories were explorations of the meaning and implications of these laws of action.
The movie screenplay explores the application of the First Law to a robot supermind, which controls all other robots through real-time links. The central robot concludes that the greatest threat to human beings is their own conduct, and so it decides that it must take control of humanity for its own good. And anything that Will Smith does to try to frustrate its plan is clearly a risk to its plan for humanity, so it must use its resources to stop him and any other rebel against its power.
As well-intentioned as government may be, when it gains too much power over our lives, its best intentions are precisely the source of greatest danger to human freeedom. A Supreme Court, a Congress, or a President who think they can sacrifice human freedom in favor of human caretaking are the same kind of danger as was posed by the allegorical super robot in the movie. We have seen Democrats who, in the wake of elections that they lost, concluding that Republican and conservative voters don’t know what it in their own best interests. Obama bemoaned that as the condition of many people in Pennsylvania, as he spoke to San Francisco Democrats. The next step of logic is plain: People who don’t know how to take care of themselves must be made wards of the State.
TVHall on 10 Jun 2009 at 9:34 pm #
Your analysis is cogent as usual coltakashi. However, the origin of this mindset is much older than Asimov. And it should come as no surprise that is has a familiar ring to it. For it is the same proposal which was rejected by us all the first time we heard the presentation.
In the mortal state, liberty will always lead to some falling short. And there will always be those eager to attempt to rectify this inequity in return for power and glory. Along with these, there will also be those willing to trade their liberty for a sense of security, false though it may be.