Religious Tests for Having an Opinion

Published on by D. G. Hart

This piece reminded me of a thought I have had for a long time. It first came to me when studying neo-Calvinism and the demands of w-w thinking. But it continued to haunt me when dealing with the logician-paradigmatists over at Deduced Into Church. The thought is that Christian “conservatives” insist that philosophy precedes religion, which of course is remarkably ironic since these believers (both Reformed and Roman Catholic) are arguing for the ultimacy of faith. But to do so they use philosophical arguments about incoherence, epistemological foundations, and moral consistency that wind up making human reason, not faith or Scripture or tradition or Christ, the answer to life’s most difficult questions. Mind you, the question, “how am I right with God?” is hardly the same level of difficulty as “how do I know?” or “how do I become virtuous?”

In the post over at Imaginative Conservative, we see once again the effects of philosophical supremacy applied to fellow citizens, in this case libertarians:

Many secular libertarians hold that if there is a divine arbiter who will judge our actions, then one can’t fully enjoy the freedom, say, to consume pornography and illegal drugs, and engage in promiscuous sex. Philosopher Thomas Nagel made the point well when he admitted, “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

But the impression that atheism or materialism is an accomplished host for libertarian values is mistaken. Individual rights, freedom and individual responsibility, reason, and moral realism: none of these make much sense if reality is ultimately blind matter in motion, if, as Carl Sagan said, “the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Libertarians may be surprised to learn that these core values—if not the entire repertoire of libertarian ideas—makes far more sense in a theistic milieu. But they need not take my word for it. The history of the West supports this view, as do the arguments of leading materialist intellectuals.

Historically, the very idea of human rights and the related idea of equality emerged over many centuries in a theistic and specifically Christian culture. In the West, major milestones include the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights (1791). A specific anthropology emerges from these documents with greater and greater clarity. Human beings are made in the image of God, and as such, should be accorded special rights and dignity manifested in law.

I don’t reject this argument, though I do wonder how conducive it is to Christian orthodoxy (Protestant or Roman Catholic) if the heterodox Christians who primarily conceived of the United States become evidence in support of belief in God. Doesn’t this wind up with a standard of minimal Christian belief rather than one of full-blown orthodoxy? And doesn’t such minimal Christianity wind up turning on fuller expressions of Christianity when they move past belief in God to the Eucharist or limited atonement as sectarian or parochial? In which case, theistic thinking can be just as hostile to serious Christianity as libertarian secularists may be?

But my objection concerns the way this argument may sound to unbelievers, the people with whom we share planet earth this side of the eschaton. If Christians insist that you cannot have ideas about political rights, or civil freedoms, or limited government without prior claims to belief in God, are they not questioning the status of non-believers in the public square? The U.S. Constitution makes no religious test for holding pubic office. State constitutions also now refuse to use religious tests for office holders. So why would Christians want to privilege theistic citizens in public debates while discrediting agnostic or atheistic citizens? Perhaps the better way of expressing that question, since I can see also sorts of ulterior motives for excluding non-Christian citizens from public debate, is why don’t the philosophically inclined Christians sense that their philosophical rigor comes across as another effort to exclude unbelief from the public life?

That’s one side of this recurring thought. The other is the great affinity that neo-Calvinism and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism have in privileging philosophy. Both of those traditions grew up spooked by the French Revolution and carved up the universe between theism and atheism, both fought the Enlightenment with Christian philosophy or w-w, and both left a legacy of antithesis — intellectual, cultural, political. If a gateway drug for Protestant converts to Rome (the anti-revolutionary anti-modern one) exists, it could be neo-Calvinism with its bending the knee to philosophy.

29 thoughts on “Religious Tests for Having an Opinion”

  1. Anti-foundationalism can operate as a kind of foundationalism.

    The metaphysical argument against metaphysics starts with the idea that there is no place to start.

    Hart as “splitter not a lumper”. I like it

    If people cannot be honest with themselves and patient with each other about how they differ from each other, they usually need a historian,

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  4. John Howard Yoder—“There is nothing necessarily wrong with real life in which modes such as ends, means, story, contract, virtue—and others—are mixed together helter-skelter, with no need for one of them always to have priority. “Walk and Word: The Alternatives to Methodologism,” in Stanley Hauerwas, Nancey Murphy, and Mark Nation, eds., Theological without Foundations: Religious Practice and the Future of Theological Truth (Abingdon,1994), p81.

    see also John Howard Yoder, “The Burden and the Discipline of Evangelical Revisionism,” in Louise Hawkley and James C. Juhnke, eds., Nonviolent America: History Through the Eyes of Peace (North Newton, KS: Bethel College, 1993), p35

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  5. If a gateway drug for Protestant converts to Rome (the anti-revolutionary anti-modern one) exists, it could be neo-Calvinism with its bending the knee to philosophy.

    Yeah. After all, Paul was doing the very defense of the Faith at the Areopagus.

    Three cheers for those who live to defend this Faith that we love. May we never grow tired in supporting and indeed standing firm as warriors for Christ and him alone.

    Many thanks, Darryl.

    1 Cor. 8:2

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  7. Pingback: Spooked by the Enlightenment | After Existentialism, Light

  8. Philosophy doesn’t have to be neo-Calvinist, and there are good and bad uses of this common activity, as there are true and false philosophies. So there’s a little counterthrust in praise of philosophy.

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  10. diggy, Dreher went gooey on Kuyper.

    “I keep hearing Kuyper’s name and thought invoked by the most thoughtful Protestants I know when it comes to commenting on public life.”

    Doh!

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  13. If a gateway drug for Protestant converts to Rome (the anti-revolutionary anti-modern one) exists, it could be neo-Calvinism with its bending the knee to philosophy.

    Aquinas is the antidote to that Barthian fideism.

    JBudziszewski: Naturally I taught my students Thomas Aquinas, but I found it difficult to do so. The problem was that his arguments presented such a strong appearance of truth. For the very beauty of this appearance, I had to exercise strong discipline not to weep. One of my students in those days asked permission to put a personal question. “I’ve been listening carefully,” he said, “and I figure that you’re either an atheist or a Roman Catholic. Which one is it?”

    You can see why, when I finally returned to Christian faith, I wanted that one foot in Catholic tradition.

    Yet return also meant recovery of lost elements of Protestant belief, and I couldn’t see my way to Catholicism proper.

    I had the common Protestant idea that Catholicism teaches “works-righteousness”–that we earn our way into heaven, apart from the merits of Christ–that if we just earn enough “virtue points,” we’re in. It took a long time to get over such misunderstandings.

    Q: Thus far we’ve been talking about the intellectual origins of your return to the faith….

    Budziszewski: When you speak of “intellectual origins,” you’d better put scare quotes around the phrase. For several years after returning to the faith, it disturbed me that I wasn’t able to give a coherent intellectual account of why I had done so. That came much later…

    see also
    http://rscottclark.org/2014/02/ht611-reformed-scholasticism/

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  14. David, don’t worry. I won’t rat you to the neo-Cal authorities.

    Seriously, I’ve learned a lot from philosophers, just not much theology, liturgy, exegesis, or pastoral theology.

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  16. Let’s map this out:

    diggy thinks neocals and romanists are philosophical buddies.

    Neocals are anti-foundationalists and not fond of Aquinas.

    Tom thinks Aquinas is the antidote to fideism (putatively including neocals) and Hartism.

    Whew! Welcome to post-modernity.

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  20. diggy, I’m thinking your use of “neo-Cal” is too broad. Most evangelicals who use worldview thinking are foundationalists to the core. The Jesuits know how to take advantage of that.

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  22. Tom thinks Aquinas is the antidote to fideism (putatively including neocals) and Hartism.

    Whew! Welcome to post-modernity.

    Foundationalism? Iggs?

    Really necessary introducing another ism?

    Then again, post-modernity..

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  24. diggy, I think you can chalk that up to a couple reasons. Youthful idealism and a rejection of their evangelical parents cheesy therapeutic religiosity (which isn’t a bad thing). Not in the same league as Plantinga or Woltersforff. I don’t even think the Jesuits could dent them at this stage.

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  25. iggy, now you’re invoking Plantinga and Wolterstorff? But Tea Party politics would never get a hearing from w-w’s academic defenders. You’d only be getting votes at the Coalition.

    But I understand. It feels good to belong to something large and intellectually in charge. We’re here for you.

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  26. diggy, I’m an individualist. The Tea Party was started by libertarians. C’mon man, try to keep up.

    The funny thing is is that your hyper confessionalism is the opposite side of the coin of Bryan’s love of il papa. A mile wide and an inch deep.

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  28. GAS-X, says the fellow whose politics are embodied by Sarah and Glenn. But where are confessionalism’s pandering celebrities?

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  29. But the one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer, but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does…If you are fulfilling the royal law according to Scripture, YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF, you are doing well… So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgement will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy, mercy triumphs over judgement.

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