Anti-Climacus

I am going to give some nonsense a better hearing than it deserves, because I think doing so will put some worthwhile points on the table. The nonsense: is liberalism as a secret (or not so secret) Protestant plot to undermine Catholicism?

The response:
1. The original post, and Dreher as well, conflate liberalism's origins and its present status as a political theory. The two are very different. Early modern liberalism is a response to a complex mix of historical and political (and, true, religious) facts. Whether or not it's an appropriate response to those facts is one question. But the attempt to draw a genealogy is a complicated one, not least because the average present-day liberal does not share the religious assumptions of a Grotius, Hobbes or Locke. Let's say at the very least that Locke's reasons might not be anyone else's.

2. Present-day liberalism is marked by a turn to political liberalism, which may be most easily thought of as an attempt to enact policy and find compromise amongst societies that are composed of many different groups, each of which might adamantly oppose the goods and policies desired by other groups. This difference is taken to be a fixed feature of political life, and with good reason. Now, this creates two problems: it creates a difference of opinion over what the right policy outcomes are supposed to be, and it creates a problem of language, because each of those groups tends to describe their ideal policy goals via different language, concepts, etc. On the view of John Rawls, among others, the goal is to have this conversation about policy in such a way as to minimize these differences of language. Hence the creation of what he calls "public reason," or a language that is intended to be accessible to and used by all, that captures the essential features of different moral and political visions without being reducible to any of them.

3. Public reason is supposed to create a problem for people of faith, because it encourages them to use a language other than their own to articulate support for their principles--a neutral language of rights and duties, rather than a fuller language of God's commands and the structure of the world. At best, this is a burdensome doubling--figure out your own reasons for advocating a policy, then 'translate'. At worst, it's disingenuous, or looks that way--use language you don't believe in to attempt to convince others to support you.

4. The original objection, I take it, is that this practice is especially burdensome for Roman Catholicism. Yet I must confess: I can't think of a Christian denomination for whom this should be less burdensome. The RC Christian who is fully appreciative of the arguments of Thomas Aquinas knows that he already possesses a language that is fully appropriate in political liberal circles: the language of natural law. Natural law doubles, with very few exceptions, the teaching of the Magisterium, and does so in language that makes no particular reference to the Catholic conception of truth. Robbie George can give a talk--I've seen him do it--when he talks about abortion as a policy issue and makes no reference to his religious beliefs, just the facts of conception and the reasonable moral conclusions that can be drawn from those facts. The same also applies, in spades, for 20th century figures like John Courtney Murray or Jacques Maritain, who used the language of natural law to argue that Catholicism and liberalism were compatible (at a time when the RC Church itself denied the possibility).

5. So the problem, I think, is not with the issue of language, for which I, as a Reformed Christian who doubts the truth or efficacy of natural law-talk, am in a far worse position than the average Roman Catholic. The problem, I suspect, is with the reality of compromise. Almost no one ever gets entirely what they want, and policy outcomes are usually driven by majority consensus over a long period of time. Slavery is as obvious as moral wrongs get, and it still took nearly a hundred years and a war in order to get rid of it; and even then its effects lingered for another hundred-plus years. I suspect the realistic time frame for any serious and extended moral change (that involves changing individual-level beliefs and behaviors) has a similar span.

6. The problem is not, in this respect, unlike the questions I regularly get from students about the merits of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or the (non-legal, non-binding) Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why make an agreement that is so obviously inadequate, so very likely to fail? Because it's the best deal available at the time: better to make that now and use it as a stepping stone to something else later than wait for the day the perfect deal arises, because that day will never come.