Pinning "liberalism" down

My title has the word 'liberalism' in scare quotes because I want to discuss the sort of liberalism that has grown scarier and scarier over the last several decades. I'm not talking about the liberalism of Locke and the American founding fathers, which stressed respect for natural rights and the consent of the governed as necessary conditions for a legitimate polity. I'm not talking about "classical" liberalism, which called for individual liberty, private property, and a free market as the best conditions for promoting the common weal. I'm not even talking about the liberalism of the early-20th-century "progressive" movement, of which New Deal liberalism was the direct heir and whose achievements, like those of prior liberalisms, have the overwhelming support of the American people. As Walter Russell Mead has argued, such liberalisms, while not reducible to each other, intersected in ways that together explain why each unfolded historically within something recognizable as an American moral consensus. That consensus was strong enough to constitute, in Robert Bellah's felicitous phrase, a kind of "civil religion." Requiring both the free exercise and the non-establishment of religion strictly speaking, the old consensus could itself be called 'liberal' in a broad and now-hoary sense. But since the 1970s, it's been unravelling along with the mainline Protestantism that had been its traditional custodian. The result is what I call The Thing that Used to Be Liberalism ('TUBL' for short; with thanks to Mark Shea, who likes referring to "The Thing that Used to Be Conservatism."). As I shall illustrate, TUBL is now out of control.

For that reason, the label 'liberalism', like 'feminism', has become a net political negative. Contemporary liberals and feminists accordingly prefer to eschew those labels in favor of 'progressive', sounding such rhetorically effective themes as "equal rights" and "fairness." And by its very nature, TUBL is hard to pin down philosophically. The main purpose of this post is to show how and explain why.

It is not news to conservatives that, on matters of domestic policy, today's "liberals" are actually authoritarian about everything except sex. On that score, they are as laissez-faire as can be. (E.g., it's become all but impossible to get them to see what's intrinsically wrong with incest and bestiality, apart from the "ick-factor" and the health risks involved. But hey, childbirth can be messy and dangerous too...) It's that discrepancy that's got out of control, and it's not so much liberal as hedonistic. Today's "liberals" want Nanny State to regulate every aspect of life except what goes on in our bedrooms, so that life is safe for the pursuit of a "happiness" understood as maximizing one's preferences consistently with others' maximizing theirs.

In such a scheme, complete sexual autonomy (within the bounds of a vaguely defined "mutual consent") is so important that marriage and family themselves are to be defined simply as what enough people want them to be. They can no longer be seen as having a form or nature prior to what civil law, as the expression of popular will, specifies. And now that all means of birth prevention are available to everybody, nobody should be expected to incur the natural consequence of ordinary intercourse or even cover the full cost of preventing it--unless, of course, one brings a child into the world anyhow, in which case one should be made to pay dearly, especially if one is the father, who might otherwise get off scot-free. But really, there's no reason why things should reach such a pass; if you're poor, they positively should not. Contraception, sterilization, and abortion are much cheaper than children, and if you're poor you'd better have recourse to them, because there's every reason to expect that you and your children, if any, will be net burdens to society (and to yourselves, for that matter). That expectation is not the only reason why "the right to choose" abortion is central to TUBL, but it is why the Obama Administration has decided to require, in the name of "women's health," religiously-sponsored institutions who object to contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs to utilize health-insurance policies covering such things at no charge to the user. Planned Parenthood--which, needless to say, does not help people plan how they will actually parent--is the very embodiment of this mentality. In the bedroom we should all pursue our own vision of happiness, if need be at others' expense; outside the bedroom a de facto utilitarian calculus, enforced by state policy, should govern moral decision-making quite generally.

Except when it shouldn't. I'm always amused when I hear Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cite "universal values" against this-or-that foreign dictator. What makes them think that everybody ought to assign the same weight to certain values as they? The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Why is that more than a piece of paper whose appeal today is understandably weaker than when it was composed? The dignity of the human person? But where are we supposed to find a coherent and reasonable account of human dignity? In philosophy, a discipline whose practitioners cannot agree on whether it affords us knowledge of anything at all? In science, which is morally indifferent in itself? And if in religion, why should we find the deracinated, social-gospel Protestantism of Obama and Clinton more rationally cogent than other forms of religion?

Even John Rawls, whose work has dogged philosophy graduate students for several generations now, admitted late in life that his vision of the ideal polity logically depended on a "comprehensive world view" he could not justify by reason alone. Many writers have indeed argued that secular liberalism is just living off the moral capital of the Judaeo-Christian tradition it's largely repudiated. As a more honest and radical sort of liberal, the late Richard Rorty knew that and admitted it, while rejecting not only Christianity but the very notion of what he called "Truth-capital-T." All that the acolytes of TUBL seem sure of, beyond the paramount importance of sexual autonomy, is that being an accredited "victim" gives one a special moral claim on one's "oppressors," who in most narratives are white, male, and Christian--a class which, by definition, cannot be victimized, because it represents everything about the past that victims are, and the rest of us should be, rebelling against. But that stance is just self-deconstructed Judaeo-Christianity. I postpone exploration of how the sense of sexual entitlement relates to that of victim-entitlement.

In any case, lust and sentimentality are not enough to explain what's going on here. Consider the following two, rather typical examples of TUBL thought.

Last fall, when the HHS contraception mandate for health insurers was drafted, Francis Beckwith argued that President Obama had thereby abandoned the liberalism he had embraced in speeches given in 2006 and 2009. Thus:

What one finds in these speeches are prescriptions for public discourse derived from a widely held understanding of liberalism that is often and correctly attributed to the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls. What the president is saying is that if you want to restrict another’s fundamental liberty based on reasons that those coerced would be reasonable in rejecting, your coercion is unjustified, even if it is not unreasonable for you to embrace those reasons for yourself.

That sounded reasonable enough at Notre Dame, when the President accepted his honorary JD by gamely defending the "pro-choice" position in essentially Rawlsian terms. But the new mandate abandons Rawlsian liberalism by defining 'religious organization', for purposes of granting "religious exemptions" from the rule, as follows:

(1) The inculcation of religious values is the purpose of the organization.
(2) The organization primarily employs persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.
(3) The organization serves primarily persons who share the religious tenets of the organization.

So, according to the U. S. government, a Catholic hospital, university, or charitable organization that believes its purpose is to actualize the moral commandments of Christ, to love its pre- and post-natal Catholic and non-Catholic neighbors as it loves itself, and to do so by welcoming with open arms all in need of its services, has ceased to be Catholic. The absurdity of this is palpable.

But here's the kicker. Not only does that absurdity, just by being absurd, abandon Obama's earlier espousal of Rawlsian liberalism; it contradicts his own current, stated understanding of the mission of religion in society! Recounting Obama's message at the National Prayer Breakfast not ten days ago, Charles Krauthammer points out: "To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through [HHS Secretary Kathleen] Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all."

Is such obvious inconsistency a sign of insincerity? Many would presume as much. But I think it more likely that Obama just doesn't see the inconsistency. Why not? Because he's "in the grip of a theory": TUBL. Thus one should not impose on people what they could reasonably reject, unless what's at issue is sexual autonomy, which is not just eminently reasonable but also, on utilitarian grounds, important enough to warrant full subsidy. If the religiously retrograde don't see that, then their "conscience" is so irrational as to be unworthy of consideration, save when giving lip service to it is politically unavoidable. Those in the grip of TUBL see nothing untoward about pretending to be Rawlsian when it suits them and dropping the pretense when it no longer suits them. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of sexual autonomy.

Among so many I could pick, another example of TUBL run amok was brought to my attention by Paul Cella.

In his new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 - 2010, Charles Murray makes the following observation:

Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable.

To be sure, Murray is not in the grip of TUBL. And by 'data', he seems to mean the results of scientific research. If so, I should think that new data could be quite relevant to the questions whether marijuana should be legalized and when the death penalty could be justified. But no amount of new data would change my mind about abortion and same-sex marriage. New data cannot affect the questions whether the fetus qualifies as a person and whether same-sex "marriage" qualifies as marriage. Both are essentially philosophical and theological questions for which the pertinent empirical data are already to hand.

But last week, a correspondent for The Economist who signs him- or herself as 'W.W.' blogged thus about the Murray passage:

I found this exceedingly odd. I can easily imagine what evidence would cause me to change my position on any of these issues....Abortion is far and away the hardest one. I favour legal abortion. I don't think embryos or fetuses are persons, and I don't think it's wrong to kill them. I also don't think infants are persons, but I do think laws that prohibit infanticide are wise. Birth is a metaphysically arbitrary line, but it's a supremely salient socio-psychological one. A general abhorrence of the taking of human life is something any healthy culture will inculcate in its members. It's easier to cultivate the appropriate moral sentiments within a society that has adopted the convention of conferring robust moral rights on infants upon birth than it would be in a society that had adopted the convention of conferring the same rights on children only after they've reached some significant developmental milestone, such as the onset of intelligible speech. The latter society, I suspect, would tend to be more generally cruel and less humane. This is just an empirical hunch, though I feel fairly confident about it. But I could be wrong. And I could be wrong in the other direction as well. If it were shown that societies which ban abortion, or which ban abortion beyond a certain point, exceed societies which don't ban abortion in cultivating a "culture of life", which pays off in terms of greater general humanity and diminished cruelty, I would seriously weigh this moral benefit against the moral cost of reducing women's control over their bodies. Also, if it were shown that abortion tended to damage women's mental and physical health more than forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, I would tend to look more favourably on restrictions on abortion, especially for minors. [Emphasis added]

Now at first I found that passage as "exceedingly odd" as WW finds Murray's. WW never tells us why he doesn't think either fetuses or infants are "persons," but there's nothing to suggest that he finds the very concept of personhood open to revision by new scientific research. Whatever his concept--and I have a fairly good suspicion as to what it is--it's a philosophical one that's "underdetermined" by the data, which only matter for helping determine which entities actually fall under the concept. (I wouldn't be surprised if WW thinks, with Peter Singer, that adult dolphins make it while human babies don't.)

But even odder than such inadvertence is how WW simply takes for granted a particular view about the nature and basis of moral obligation. He thinks, e.g., that "society" can and should have essentially utilitarian reasons for having "adopted the convention of conferring robust moral rights on infants," who cannot be thought merit such rights by nature. But on WW's own showing, such reasons could conceivably be overturned by new data suggesting, somehow, that we'd all be better off for dropping that convention. And the question what counts as "better" cannot be answered, even in principle, by citing anything we should value as distinct from what we actually do value. What's better is simply what's apt to yield what "society" wants. But there's no transcendent criterion for assessing what society--ours or any other--wants. Ultimately, moral reasoning consists in discovering and prescribing the policies likeliest to yield what we want. "Ought" is always hypothetical, never categorical. And so, as Hume put it, reason is and ought to be "the slave of the passions."

The question for the WWs of the world is this: Are there, or are there not, "data" that could determine whether that's the correct view of moral obligation? WW doesn't seem to have considered the question, but those in the grip of TUBL would reject it. It's supposed to be self-evident that freely pursuing the maximization of preferences--whatever they are--is the best we can do, and there can be no obligation higher than, or inconsistent with, the best we can do. Such is the ideal of the radical autonomy of the imperial self. The only admissible limits on such autonomy are those which are necessary in practice for collective preference-maximization. Those turn out to be considerable, of course, which is why TUBL is rather authoritarian. Except about sex.

What makes TUBL so hard to pin down is that it combines sexual libertinism, which is distinctly not Judaeo-Christian, with a statism that's supposedly required for helping the unfortunate. As deconstructed Judaeo-Christianity, the latter requires a discipline and moral earnestness that are otherwise undermined by sexual libertinism and the calculus of preference-maximization generally. Since that combination is ultimately unsustainable, both theoretically and practically, the most fervent prescription of TUBL is to help the poor and the otherwise disadvantaged get rid of themselves by every means of birth prevention. Any amount of philosophical incoherence is accepted for the sake of implementing that prescription. We're only seeing the earliest stages.

Where's the joy?

Almost every American past puberty knows the old Wendy's hamburger slogan: "Where's the beef?" Used as a metaphor, it summarizes part of why I majored in philosophy and came to be still more interested in theology. The other half is summed up by "Where's the joy?" I started asking myself that question about life as a teenager after I had read as much Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton as I could. It's the question more people need to be asking themselves. We all want both, but fewer can articulate the longings expressed by the former than those expressed by the latter.

What I mean is illustrated by a contrasting pair of items from the blogosphere. Such items at least have the advantage of being easy to retrieve.

Consider theologian Rusty Reno's First Things "On the Square" piece Homosexuality and the Moral Failure of Higher Education.  Discussing why the affirmation of homosexuality has become a key benchmark of the rigorous orthodoxy enforced on secular campuses, he concludes:

Thus the need to use a kind of intellectual Agent Orange to destroy even the slightest judgments of immorality, because they reinforce what the voice of conscience keeps telling us, and what we would like to avoid hearing. Those who say that homosexual acts are immoral are oppressors, because their words—however dispassionate, however well-reasoned, however subtly expressed, however concerned for others—agitate consciences and block the free flow of desire.

Indeed, even those who are diffident are under suspicion, because that voice of conscience needs complete support to be suppressed. In the cause of sexual liberation nothing is acceptable short of full affirmation, or at least a scrupulous silence that expresses no reservations.

Sexual liberation is a Gucci freedom. Upper middle class Americans possess the resources to get a great deal of what they want, and part of what they want is sexual liberation. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the modern institution most closely associated with elite culture—higher education—should devote a great deal of energy to removing those who believe in moral limitations.

The well-known phenomenon Reno describes instances a larger phenomenon that philosopher J. Budziszewski calls "the revenge of conscience." Read both pieces in full. Now I am not primarily concerned to argue that peoples' consciences ought to tell them that sodomy, whether practiced by gays or straights, is immoral. I'm not even primarily concerned with the question how to tell the difference between the moral and the immoral. What I'm struck by today is the deep-seated joylessness of the new secular orthodoxy in general, and by that of complete sexual autonomy in particular. I've known plenty of people who live by that ideology. Such autonomy, when lived as though it can really be had, leads to many things—most of them bad. Yet even those who defend it passionately do not argue that it leads, in the long run, to what Lewis called "joy." Even old queens living together in a distant parody of marriage wouldn't tell you it does—at least not the ones I've known. Yet that joy, deep down, is what we all want—even though the self-styled best and brightest are ideologically committed to viewing it as "nothing but" one of the brain's evolutionary adaptations. Nothing-buttery is not tasty.

Now consider, by contrast, this story from Rod Dreher about how God gave him the woman he fell in love with and married. It's almost four years old now, and I wish I had seen it sooner. When I finished it today, I was in tears. What an affirmation of prayer in true faith, and the joy that it leads to!  The story of the Drehers' meeting, love, and marriage is an instance of how God wants things to be, at least for those called to Christian marriage. Whatever is natural, as opposed to what is anti-natural, can be a fit occasion for joy.

But the thing about joy is that you can't get it by striving for it directly. Doing that, in fact, loses it. You get it unbidden, and it leaves one with Sehnsucht, a poignant longing for the Reality toward which even the greatest of earthly beauty and joy only points. It is a law of spiritual nature that one only gains what joy is about by leaving joy aside to do what one must, while offering the resulting abnegation to God and remembering the joy. That's what Jesus did. That's what the ideologues of radical autonomism, sexual or otherwise, cannot do. If they remember joy at all, they think it can be had, or at least preserved, by doing what feels best. Sometimes, that is true—when what feels best coincides, like a husband and wife making love, with what we ought by nature to be doing. But only then. If we seek joy on our terms, we end up with ennui: the intimation of the nihil of evil, not of that Reality which is the source and goal of all.

Sing(er)ing the "real nitty-gritty"

In the late 60s, I believe it was, a pop song call "The Real Nitty-Gritty" achieved one-hit-wonder status. Several singers have done versions of it since, and I've always liked how it can apply to a variety of situations beyond the merely sexual. That song came to mind again as my agreggator offered up a blog post yesterday from the New York Times: "Should This Be the Last Generation?"

My first instinct was to assume that the intent of the question was only rhetorical, that it was designed to get us pondering the true extent of human depravity. If that's how it had been meant, I would have appreciated it, while still answering it in the negative. But then I saw that the post's author was Princeton philosopher Peter Singer—you know, the guy who sees nothing wrong with euthanasia or even infanticide, but admitted he couldn't bring himself to off his demented grandmother. So at once I inferred that the question was meant seriously by a man who is better than his principles. Those who know Singer's reputation will understand why I inferred as much, and reading the post confirms its title's earnest intent. To be fair to Singer, he affirms his belief that "life is worth living." But he does not take that belief as self-evident. He invites readers to ponder his question along with a bunch of others subsidiary to it. Yet I'm inclined to believe that raising such a question seriously bespeaks an attitude toward life that should be treated primarily as a symptom of spiritual disease rather than as suggesting a serious philosophical thesis.

Since the piece itself is rather short, I shall leave Singer's argument to the reader. I'd rather focus on the premise, plain throughout Singer's work, that makes it possible to raise his post's question: the premise, that is, that the principal good of life is the experience of pleasure and the principal evil of life is accordingly that of pain. Now it's possible to hold, as Singer does, that most people hitherto will have experienced more pain than pleasure in their lives; and if that's right, then a utility calculus could lead one to conclude that most people's lives at this stage of history haven't been worth living. That is what Singer appears to believe. That is what makes it possible to raise his question, which he answers in the negative only by projecting a degree of future human "progress" that will end up shifting the utility balance for most humans to the side of pleasure. But the premise is pretty much stuck on a brand of utilitarianism going back to John Stuart Mill. The arbitrariness and incoherence of Mill's utilitarianism is deftly exposed in a chapter of J. Budziszewski's recent book The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction.

A basic problem with utilitarianism is epistemic: even in its most sophisticated varieties, it requires assessing things from a global, impersonal point of view that we do not and cannot have. (Theodicy in the strict sense of the term is impossible for the same reason, but that's another topic.) There's an additional problem with Mill's and Singer's closely interrelated brands of utilitarianism: the pleasure principle itself. It assumes that the unique and supreme criterion of goodness is undergoing subjectively pleasant experiences rather than doing something of which such experiences, when they occur, would be objectively fitting byproducts. The latter would be the life of love; the former could suffice simply as a life of sensation. But the superiority of the latter cannot be explained in Singer's philosophy. That shows that what we're dealing with is a spiritual disease, not just a philosophically flawed argument. Those who think the superiority of love to pleasant sensation is not evident, or those who think the value of love can be reduced to that of pleasant sensation, share the same disease.

But it's a common enough disease. As the birth rate plummets well below replacement level in much of the "developed" world, it seems many have concluded that no future is better than a present of voluntary sacrifice for the sake of continuing the intrinsic good of human life beyond the present. This, friends, is the real nitty-gritty for the developed world. The choice is between love, understood as holy sacrifice, and nihilism.

Cross-posted at What's Wrong with the World

Lars Vilks, "Gay Muhammad" and "Freedom of Expression"

This past week brings news of yet another fracas involving Swedish cartoon artist Lars Vilks (CNN.com):

When Vilks entered a classroom where he was to deliver a lecture to about 250 people -- all of whom had passed through a security checkpoint to gain admission -- about five people started protesting loudly, Eronen said.

After Uppsala uniformed and non-uniformed police calmed the protesters, the lecture got under way at about 5:15 p.m. (11:15 a.m. ET), Eronen said.

But as Vilks was showing audiovisual material, 15 to 20 audience members became loud and tried to attack Vilks, he said.

As police stepped in, a commotion started and Vilks was taken to a nearby room; police used pepper spray and batons to fend off the protesters, Eronen said. Vilks did not return to the lecture. [Video footage of the event].

Last March, an American woman who called herself "Jihad Jane," Colleen LaRose, was indicted in the United States for allegedly conspiring to support terrorists and kill Vilks.

In a 2007 interview with CNN he had drawn the cartoon of Mohammed with a dog's body in order to take a stand.

" "I don't think it should not be a problem to insult a religion, because it should be possible to insult all religions in a democratic way, " says Vilks from his home in rural Sweden.

"If you insult one, then you should insult the other ones."

His crude, sketched caricature shows the head of Prophet Mohammed on the body of a dog. Dogs are considered unclean by conservative Muslims, and any depiction of the prophet is strictly forbidden.

Vilks, who has been a controversial artist for more than three decades in Sweden, says his drawing was a calculated move, and he wanted it to elicit a reaction.

"That's a way of expressing things. If you don't like it, don't look at it. And if you look at it, don't take it too seriously. No harm done, really," he says.

When it's suggested that might prove an arrogant -- if not insulting -- way to engage Muslims, he is unrelenting, even defiant.

"No one actually loves the truth, but someone has to say it," he says.

Vilks, a self-described atheist, points out he's an equal opportunity offender who in the past sketched a depiction of Jesus as a pedophile.

The Pope's blow against intolerance

Now that there's been time to reflect, you just gotta love it.

Defining our enemies

Most serious Christians are what Luther said: simul peccator et justus, at once sinners and justified. I know I am. Luther's error was to hold, in effect, that that's the best we can hope for. By contrast, the more ancient traditions of both Catholicism and Orthodoxy maintain that we can and ought to be truly and progressively sanctified, with our free cooperation, by that grace which is nothing other than the Trinity's self-communication to us. But Luther's point helps to remind us that, once we are beyond childhood, our chief enemy in the spiritual life is ourselves. Our external enemies, chiefly Satan and his minions, have only as much power over our souls as we choose, consciously or no, to give them. The same goes, I believe, for what's left of Christian civilization today.

Pace the callow evasions of our political and academic élites, our chief external enemy today is militant Islam, which is committed to our destruction as a civilization and has openly said so. I shall not debate whether, in the final analysis, Islam can be anything other than that. I think it undeniable that it is not. For one thing, whether the means employed are violent or not, Muslims as such are committed to the "struggle" (jihad) to win the world for Islam. That follows from Islam's being an essentially missionary religion. But the same could be said of Christianity, which is also a missionary religion; hence militancy, in the sense operative in the phrase 'the Church Militant', is not what distinguishes Islam from Christianity. The distinguishing feature of Islamic militancy is that it seeks to make Islam, precisely as such, the explicit basis of political authority wherever it is the dominant religion. For a long time, to be sure, Christians were wont to do the same with regard to their own religion; but save in a few isolated pockets, that approach has been given up, as it should be if Christianity is true. We've learned our lesson. Yet the Muslim world, the Umma, has not learned the lesson. Nor do I think it can. That is the main, underlying reason why the Umma has such a hard time repudiating al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It is the main reason why "Islamic" parties are gaining ground even in ostensibly secular states such as Turkey and Indonesia. All over the Muslim world, we hear more and more calls for imposing sharia, even on non-Muslims when possible. Even now, Christians in Iraq are reduced to the options of oppression or flight; Sunnis and Shi'ites, who seem to agree on little else and continue fighting each other, seem to agree on that much. That's the attitude which is steadily gaining the upper hand throughout the Umma.

Such a totalitarian and ineradicable feature of Islamic militancy is the polar opposite of the ideology that now dominates the Western world: secularism. The core principle of secularism is not the separation of church and state as institutions; most of us believers in the West agree that such separation is good for both. I for one am glad that the papacy no longer has temporal authority and that I live in a country whose constitution ensures religious freedom. For when religion is not adopted freely, according to individual conscience, it is to that extent an obstacle to human flourishing; and that's why people brought up in any given religion ought to think critically about it if and when they can, so that they can make their choice in an informed and adult way, consistently with their God-given dignity. But I object profoundly to secularism. For the core principle of secularism as an ideology is what I call autonomism: the proposition that man himself can and ought to define the basis of the state's legitimacy, without any necessary basis in or reference to a moral law higher than himself. From that standpoint, appealing to any "higher law"—such as what the Declaration of Independence terms "the laws of nature and of nature's God"—as the basis of the state's legitimacy is an unacceptable infringement on freedom of thought and conscience. Of course it is rarely explained why we should consider that moral judgment binding if we happen to disagree with it; the few explanations I've seen are patently inadequate even on their own terms; for they can be and have been used to justify the worst sort of tyranny—always, of course, in the name of "the majority," or the Volk, or the oppressed, or something like that. Secularism is worthless as a political ideology because its autonomism reduces in turn to moral relativism, which can justify anything and therefore nothing. We cannot truly secure the dignity and freedom of the individual unless we acknowledge the Authority, the "Higher Power," that they come from, and why we have no right to defy that Authority.

Indeed, relativism is why the secular liberals of the West, especially in Europe, have such difficulty coming to grips with the challenge posed by militant Islam. As relativists they are reflex multiculturalists; as such, they instinctively believe that if we would just be nice to the Umma, giving ground and money here and there while fighting only the most violent of the terrorists, then the threat would gradually fizzle and we could all resume enjoying our comforts and gadgets. Such an illusion, if indulged long enough by enough people, is fatal. It undermines the will to resist, and that's just what our militant Muslim enemies are counting on. They are right to hate secularism—and right to believe that Islam is stronger than secularism. The former has a spiritual energy and motivating force that the latter cannot sustain. Resurgent, militant Islam is indeed the just scourge of the secular West.

Our primary enemy, therefore, is within: our desire to set things up for ourselves independently of that God who can be known in the natural light of human reason. That is true on an individual level; that's why we're sinners, to the extent we are, and we all are. On the collective level, it is that God, and only that God, who must be acknowledged as the basis of the state's legitimacy. Although the God of divine revelation is infinitely bigger than that, he at least that—and only respect for the laws of that God, the God of "ethical monotheism," suffices to preclude tyranny. But secularism won't even allow us that much of a foundation. Only if we defeat that enemy within can we find the will to resist our chief external enemy, our just scourge, for the right reasons.

The two new fronts in the global war for freedom

Some Americans know, and all should know, something said by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." When passed, what that meant to people was that the Congress may not regulate or abolish established state churches, may not make any particular religion illegal, and may not require anybody to be religious. Since World War II, of course, the Supreme Court has made utter hash of the two quoted clauses, so that American jurisprudence has no coherently applicable criteria for balancing freedom of religion with freedom from religion. But that is, one hopes and prays, a temporary problem. The fact remains that both freedom of religion and freedom from religion are inherent human rights respected in principle by basic American and international law. They are so respected in virtue of that acknowledged dignity of the human person which makes it intrinsically immoral to force people to act against their consciences. Such rights constitute an irreducible element of human freedom. And it is just that freedom which is now under threat from both the religious and the irreligious in today's world.

During the Cold War, most people could and did recognize worldwide Communism as a threat to freedom. Despite the protests of pacifists and some major lapses along the way, U.S. policy toward Communist countries was designed to protect the freedom of our way of life. The verdict of history is that we succeeded. Nowadays, many recognize the so-called "war on terrorism" as another protracted effort to protect the same from violent Islamic extremists, who seem to be growing more numerous by the year. What many fail to recognize, however, is that we have but are failing to exploit the moral high ground in our war with the Islamists.

In most Muslim countries, non-Muslims do not have the same freedom of religion as Muslims. The world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia, extends considerable freedom to non-Muslims inasmuch as the country's size and diversity has bred a culture of relative tolerance between religions. But in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the public practice of non-Muslim religions is not tolerated; conversion from Islam to any other religion is punishable and often punished by death. And the majority of countries in which Muslims comprise a majority lie closer to the Saudi/Iranian end of the spectrum than to Indonesia's. Even in Egypt and Syria, where ancient Christian communities still exist and are tolerated to a degree, Christians are dhimmi: they live with certain legal, educational, and economic disadvantages making them second-class citizens. And in Palestine and Iraq, Christians are finding themselves having to emigrate in droves if they want to have decent lives at all.

Even more significantly, you won't find most Muslim scholars willing to accept what the Pope calls "reciprocity." They don't think that Muslims should grant non-Muslims the same degree of religious freedom that Muslims generally enjoy in countries where non-Muslims are the majority. This is why, for example, they take for granted that they may, can, and should build mosques in Rome, but at the same time it is unthinkable to them that Christians be allowed to build churches in Mecca or even that the Jews rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, it is in the very nature of Islam to reject the idea of religious freedom as understood not only by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—to which many nominally subscribe—but by Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae. And that is probably the major reason why we must fight the war on "terrorism," which is really a war with those Muslims who take jihad to entail violent as well as non-violent means of spreading Islam. There is virtually zero chance that Muslims will, as a whole and as a matter of principle, accept the principle of reciprocity even as they demand religious freedom for themselves.

We have ample historical precedent for this fight. Thanks to the courage of countless knights, peasants, and churchmen, most of Western Europe was never conquered by Muslim armies. The Crusaders simply went on the offensive, taking the battle to the Holy Land even though their greed and divisions eventually made their conquests unviable. Spain, which had endured some measure of Muslim rule for centuries, fought for centuries to drive Muslim satraps out of Spain and eventually succeeded. When the Ottoman sultans tried later to grab big bites out of Western Europe, they were repeatedly and sometimes miraculously defeated. At nearly every stage in the millennium-long struggle, everybody who was anybody knew the stakes and did what had to be done—even if they also did some things that needn't and shouldn't have been done. But I don't see that kind of insight and resolve today. Westerners on the whole do not understand that Muslims on the whole, while enjoying the benefit of Western ideas about religious freedom, will never subscribe to those ideas fully and hence will never be placated by the sort of "tolerance" that presumes a willingness to reciprocate. True, the so-called "terrorists" are not terribly popular among Muslims; but that is because of their means, not their ends. And there will always be Muslims willing to use those means.

That is why our politicians need to have the cojones to let people publicly say whatever they think about Islam, no matter how negative, even as absolutely anybody may now publicly say what they think about Christianity, no matter how negative. But only a few even in America have those cojones, and it gets them into trouble. In several European countries, saying such things about Islam will land you in jail—but not, of course, saying similarly nasty things about Christianity. Indeed and conversely, actively professing traditional Christianity on certain points, such as following the Bible in denouncing sodomy as an "abomination" before God, will get you prosecuted for a "hate crime" even if you win in the end. Even in my home town, New York, it is illegal to display Christian symbols on public property during Christmas but legal to display Muslim symbols during Ramadan and Jewish during Hannukah. We are in danger of becoming dhimmi by virtue of that "tolerance" which is intolerant of the majority.

Indeed, that trend reflects what's been happening among our secular, cultural élites. Recently the atheism industry has got more aggressive: there's been a spate of propaganda denouncing "religion" as evil largely on the ground that its "intolerance" causes violence and social stagnation. (See, e.g., Sam Harris' book The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins' TV series The Root of All Evil?) On the popular level, even Elton John has got into the act, insisting that "organized religion" has "always bred hatred against gays." Presumably he supports suppressing the freedom of his fellow citizens to profess publicly what the Bible and the natural law say about sodomy. So, religious freedom is also threatened by those who are only willing to tolerate forms of religion they deem sufficiently tolerant. At the same time, however, they seem willing to tolerate Islam, which is a minority religion in the West and therefore, in the liberal mythos, a fit object of tolerance. Hence the New York decision, made by secular-minded jurists. But apparently no form of traditional Christianity, even ones that renounce religious violence, is to enjoy the same degree of tolerance.

In the case of both Islamists and secularists, then, we confront a double standard that threatens the basic and inherent right to religious freedom: Islam is to be tolerated even when it is intolerant, and traditional Christianity is not to be tolerated even when it is tolerant. I can understand the double standard on the part of Muslims; they do not, after all, even pretend that they ought not to have one. At least they're consistent. But in the West, the double standard not only accelerates the erosion of morality in general and of the family in particular, thus weakening the moral basis of our society, but also weakens our resolve to resist the violent adherents of a religion that really is objectionably intolerant. Accordingly, one front in the new, global war for freedom is external: the war against Islamist violence; but the other is internal, against our own secularists. If we lose, the fifth columnists will have the society they deserve.