Crossing Weak Bridges and Blaming The Wrong Party
This morning at First Things‘ “On The Square” blog, editor Joe Carter attempted to use his recent reading of William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” to excoriate the current state of the conservative movement. Before I launch into my critique, I must first plead guilty to Carter’s initial charge that few have read the book – I have not. I will work very hard here to limit my critique to Carter’s post and not the underlying book. I have today ordered the book and you can rest assured it will move to the top of the reading list when it arrives.
I want to address Carter’s comment on three levels:
There is a big difference between the university and the conservative political movement.
Carter seems to think that arguments Buckley applied to Yale University somehow apply with equal force and reason to a political movement:
God and Man is a polemic with a simple, inflammatory proposal: Because Yale actively undermines the students’ faith in Christianity and the free market, the alumni should withhold financial support from the university. The corollary was obvious: Yale should do something about these professors.
[...]
How remarkable that the thesis of a book that helped launch the conservative movement could, less than half a century later, be completely repudiated by people who claim to be the author’s intellectual heirs. But that is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that they repudiated only part of it. They’ve foolishly discarded Buckley’s emphasis on Christianity but retained, as they should, his love of free enterprise.
A university is intended to be both an educational and an ideological institution. One reason universities are founded is to preserve and expand an ideology, and in some cases a religion. Our government is designed to be without inherent ideology, and it certainly is not purposed to preserve any particular ideology or faith. It is intended instead to be the battlefield on which ideologies compete and to preserve the rules of that battle so that it does not result in the abuses and failings that the Founders had seen in the colonial era. Our nation is an experiment to find out if those of differing ideologies can exist as a nation and have that nation continue to function well.
One cannot simply assume the same roles and purposes for a university and our government. That our government did, for a lengthy period of time, serve to preserve and promote a specific Christian ideology is a function not of the government itself, but of the citizenry it serves. The fact of the matter is that the specific Christian ideology that the government did preserve for all those years won, over and over, the battle the government was designed to host. Simply put, most Americans subscribed to the Christian ideology that the government preserved and promoted. They also managed to apply pressure by many means – some of which Carter rightly names – to their ideological opponents not to fight back
That simply is no longer the case. Polling shows that most people still claim an adherence to Christianity in one form or another, but what it means to be Christian has grown expansive and those that do not claim to be have become increasingly adept at fighting on the governmental battlefield. Which brings me to the second level I want to address.
The failures of faith that Carter rightly points out are better laid at the feet of the church than at a political movement.
Carter seemingly makes this point himself:
Buckley understood that Truth not only does not always trump falsehood, but it can never win unless it is promulgated.
Indeed, Christianity must be promulgated, over and over and over again – but that is not, nor was it ever, the job of government. Such promulgation is, however, the job of the church and the university that Buckley was battling for in his book. The fact that Christianity’s authority in public debate has waned so lays at the feet of the church failing to maintain it as the prevailing ideology of the land.
The church has done so in many ways, and this blog is not the appropriate place for me to air my many criticisms of how the Christian church generally has abandoned its duties in this age. However, among those abandonments is the large scale abandonment of responsibility for education. My own alma mater gave up its church foundations many decades before I attended – Why did the church let that happen?
Politics, the necessary first step of governance in our nation, demands the building of a coalition sufficiently large to prevail at the polls. If that coalition is to be exclusively, or even predominantly, of the Christian ideology then it is up to the church and its many arms like the university to see to it that there are enough people holding that ideology to constitute a majority. The fact that such a majority cannot be pulled together now means the church has fallen down on that job.
The question becomes what to do in light of the current political realities. You see, the fact is that as our ideological opponents continue to get better at the battle, they are using their increasing political power to remove our opportunities to even enter into the debate. Whereas we historically applied pressure in many social and educational ways to suppress opposition, they appear unafraid to use the power of law to completely eliminate opposition. If those in politics and governance that adhere to our Christian ideology must remain meek about that ideology in order to build the necessary coalitions, then so they must to even have the opportunity to preserve our ability to fight back.
But those in politics and governance should not be fighting alone. As they fight to preserve our access to the battleground, we should be working to promulgate our Christian ideology – different fronts and varied battle plans, but the same war. They can only do their job if we do ours.
Veiling personal attacks makes them no less personal.
Finally, Carter’s previously quoted sentence:
How remarkable that the thesis of a book that helped launch the conservative movement could, less than half a century later, be completely repudiated by people who claim to be the author’s intellectual heirs.
cannot be interpreted as anything else than a direct swipe at the good people of National Review – the magazine started by Buckley. The magazine is known for its fiscal conservatism, but its faith is equally apparent. It is ironic that Carter’s post appeared on the same day as NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez’s “God and Women at Harvard” appeared at that site. K-Lo’s interview with a female Harvard grad entering a convent is quite spiritually uplifting and does not in any way shy from being a bold pronouncement of faith.
Carter comes dangerously close to calling into the question the genuineness of the faith of those at NRO and those that agree with them. What political issues one considers most important and the political strategies one employs to carry the day simply is a not a measure of one’s commitment to his or her religion – any more than it would be reasonable to say that the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl under Tony Dungy because of his very vocal commitment to his faith while they lost under Jim Caldwell because he was not so loud about his.
Posted in Doctrinal Obedience, Political Strategy, Understanding Religion | Comment on this post » |
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