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.
Old Life 