by Peter Wehner
As we have seen, Aristotle, Locke, and Lincoln held divergent views on, among other things, the precise role and even the best forms of government. (Aristotle had a much darker view of democracy than Locke and Lincoln, though the latter two were aware of the traps that attend self-government.) Aristotle and Locke disagreed about the degree to which politics should be the work of shaping souls, with Lincoln showing us how the best of each man’s insights can be melded together in practice.
But for our purposes what all three held in common is even more important than their differences: their conviction that politics is a prerequisite for human thriving; that the failure of politics expresses itself in moral, economic, and social ruin; that politics needs to be rooted in a realistic conception of the human person and a correct reading of human nature; and that the qualities to prize in statesmen are prudence, wise judgment, and discernment. They all worried about the passions, zealotry, and mob rule. And they knew that politics, when done correctly, allows humans to flourish in areas beyond politics.
People can choose, if they wish, to go through life belittling politics and convincing themselves that it is a low, degraded, and corrupt enterprise, one that doesn’t work and never will. But that attitude is very much at odds with the lessons we can draw from our exceptional inheritance (of which these three men stand as particularly glittering and illustrious examples); and it is at odds with history and reality.
It would be easy to look at these three exemplars and think they have nothing to do with what we now think of as politics in America. But that would be nothing more than an indictment of how we have come to think about politics. Properly understood, politics has everything to do with Aristotle’s concern for human flourishing, with Locke’s insistence that the legitimacy of government must be rooted in the equality of the human person, and with Lincoln’s commitment to Locke’s proposition of equality precisely for the sake of Aristotle’s concern with the integrity of the soul.
When we flirt with the possibility of deviating from this foundation, what is at stake? It may seem that the struggles and suffering that are happening in the shadows of America’s affluence—the “cocaine babies” I learned about early in my own time in government, orphaned and abandoned children, economically disadvantaged students attending failing schools, people trapped in poverty, the chronically unemployed, victims of gang violence and mass shootings, women who have been sexually assaulted and victims of domestic violence, inhumane prison conditions, homelessness, trauma experienced by returning war veterans—are far removed from the realm of political ideas, from the philosophies and eras of people like Aristotle and Locke and Lincoln. Yet those people’s fate and those men’s ideas are inextricably interwoven.
One kind of political culture takes the fate and equality of each human person to heart; another sees humans as expendable or of differing worth. One political culture attempts to hold its leaders to account for decisions affecting even the weakest; another regards might as right. One kind of political culture teaches an ethic of responsibility; another promotes dependency.
Every generation has to decide whether it will continue America’s noble experiment in ordered liberty or allow the foundation our ancestors built to fracture. Today we are witnessing cracks forming and spreading, due in part to a president who delights in demonization, who himself embodies an ethic of cruelty and selfishness, and whose corruptions are borderless.
Are we ready to do the hard work of repairing these fissures, of firming up our foundation, of taking the necessary steps to make us a more perfect union? This is the question before us. The remainder of this book is my attempt to show how we can move forward.
Chapter 4
Politics and Faith
I’m gonna break [Pat] Buchanan’s neck and leave him in the snow, without any fingerprints.”
Those words, followed by a loud cackle, might sound like they came from a mafia don. In this case, however, they were said by Ralph Reed during a meeting with me and one other person at the offices of Empower America, leading up to the 1996 Republican primary.
Reed—at that time the boyish-looking, smooth-talking leader of the Christian Coalition—had been publicly respectful of Buchanan but privately opposed him and was a de facto supporter of Robert Dole. As Nina Easton pointed out in her book Gang of Five, Reed was not about to let a movement he had helped develop be hijacked by Buchanan.
Buchanan’s stances were protectionist and nativist, his rhetoric divisive and exclusive, which was at odds with what Reed believed a successful Christian political movement should look like. And Buchanan’s eagerness to weigh in on issues like the Confederate flag, which inflamed racial tensions, made Reed uncomfortable. He wanted to refashion the evangelical movement away from the judgmental, off-putting attitudes of Jerry Falwell Sr. and Reed’s boss, Pat Robertson. Yet Reed had to be careful, because Buchanan, although a Catholic, inspired a lot of evangelicals. He was a culture warrior par excellence.
In the end, Dole won the nomination. Buchanan’s candidacy failed, but much of his agenda and approach to politics would eventually be embraced by, of all people, Donald Trump—a foul-mouthed, non-church-attending former casino owner and reality television star who once endorsed partial-birth abortion and was convincingly accused of paying hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star, which took place after his third wife gave birth to their son.
But not only did Buchanan win in the long run against Ralph Reed’s 1996 vision of how Christians should engage politics; today Reed is one of Trump’s key allies, a bridge to the white evangelical world. The evangelical world has in turn rallied around Trump, supporting him for president in even greater numbers than it did George W. Bush, a lifelong conservative who spoke easily and openly about his relationship with Christ. As a result, white evangelicals got a seat at the table of power, something that in his life Jesus never did. But this ascent to power has come at a devastating cost to evangelicalism’s moral integrity and credibility, damage that might take generations to heal, if it ever does. To put the case bluntly, evangelicals and others were correct to say that religion should inform politics—but they let down their guard against politics corrupting religion.
What happened?
PROMISE AND PERIL
From Aristotle we learned that politics is both a necessary and an inherently moral enterprise since it is centered on a vision of what is good and what we should aspire to. Traditionally, many Americans have looked to Christianity to provide the language, values, and aspirations for how we define what is good and right for our nation. And so it’s not at all surprising that in America, which throughout its history has been one of the more religious countries in the world, religion and politics would be intertwined.
Actually, “intertwined” is something of an understatement, because the dynamic between religion and politics in the United States is unique. Inspired by John Locke’s ideas of tolerance and the limits of government, which were adapted and implemented here in America mostly through the creative work of James Madison in the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment, America’s combination of the separation between religion and politics alongside its protection of religious minorities has made it the exception among developed nations: a flourishing religious culture in which no one sect serves as the “established” faith for the nation.
This balancing act is one of our greatest achievements.
Still, precisely because of religions’ centrality to our national culture, when religion itself is corrupted, it creates problems that extend beyond religion. It seeps into our political and cultural life—as we have seen in current events.
In this chapter, unlike the previous ones, I will be donning two hats, wearing my religious hat in addition to my political one. As is true for many Americans, I cannot easily separate these subjects, since what drives my sense of right, wrong, duty, wisdom, goodness, and care for others cannot be neatly separated into buckets, one marked “sacred” and the other “secular.” To get our pol
itics right, it helps to get our religion right—and it is clear to many of us right now that neither side is getting things quite “right.”
Worries about the influence between religion and politics have been with us from the beginning of our history, including our recent history, and they go in both directions. From their inception in the 1970s, groups like the Moral Majority were viewed as judgmental, censorious, and selective in their moral concerns. Critics of the religious Right feared it wanted to impose a theocracy and was willing to use faith as a partisan cudgel. Dispensing God’s grace and redemptive love wasn’t the real agenda, critics claimed; it was about gaining and holding raw political power.
Over the last few years—particularly during the Trump years—concerns about how well faith and politics mix have been reinforced and deepened. Those who want there to be a great, even unbridgeable distance between faith and politics come from two very different points on the spectrum. There are some, often but not exclusively secularists, who believe religion is a grave threat to politics; and there are some, almost all of whom are Christians, who worry that entanglement with politics is doctrinally problematic and will corrupt faith.
Those in the former category make several arguments, including invoking the history of religious wars. Following Europe’s bloody wars of religion, Enlightenment figures such as John Locke (whom we met earlier in the book) and others in England and on the European continent argued that religion and politics needed to be separated, that (at most) faith belonged in the private but not the public sphere, and that mixing the two invariably leads to conflict. This was an understandable response to a particular historical moment.
The underlying danger, from this perspective, is that religious passions stir up political passions, which are difficult enough to control. Those who are religious believe they represent God’s side while their opponents represent Satan’s, which makes accommodation nearly impossible. It frames political disputes as between the children of light and the children of darkness, between the righteous and the malevolent. Furthermore, this argument goes, religion is a license to discriminate, an engine of intolerance, repression, and mindless moralism.
From the other direction are those who insist that politics should be kept at a distance from religion to protect the purity of faith. Their views are rooted in part in theology, the belief that Jesus’s kingdom was not of this world and we are therefore called to be separated from it. Jesus was not a political figure, after all, and neither should we be.
This argument rests on the belief that the primary Christian contribution is to be a model for another kingdom, embodying “kingdom values” and not becoming entangled with the compromises inherent in dealing with the kingdoms of this world. They believe that if we take Jesus’s words literally we must abide an inevitable tension with life in this world, so the involvement needs to be minimized. Otherwise we are in danger of giving up Christian distinctiveness.
These concerns have some legitimacy; it’s not as if they have been invented out of nothing. Sometimes religion has had a pernicious influence on politics, and sometimes being involved in politics has damaged the integrity of faith. But there is also a different view to consider on this question—a more positive and constructive way to view the involvement of faith in public life.
BUILDING ON A FIRM FOUNDATION
Despite the fact that our nation was formed right after Europe’s religious wars, most of the American founders—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, and others—argued that religion was essential in providing a moral basis for a free society. Typical was the sentiment of John Adams:
We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.1
Religion was, in the words of Jefferson, “a supplement to law in the government of men” and the “alpha and omega of the moral law.”2 Washington put it this way: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports . . . And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”3
To be sure, the key figures in the American founding opposed theocracy and wanted neutrality toward different religious sects. They supported the prohibition on religious establishment in the Constitution’s First Amendment. Yet they also believed religion played a useful private and public role and was even an essential element in education. There is simply no disputing that religious faith shaped our national ideals, from the Puritans through the Declaration of Independence to the work of Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
Of course, simply because the founders made these claims doesn’t mean they were correct. It could also be that they were right in their time but their arguments no longer apply in our time; that religious faith was a positive force at the founding but has become less of one today.
Let’s see if their arguments hold up in today’s world, then. The strongest case for religion in public life comes from the moral instruction needed in guiding our politics—religion helps ground politics in morality. Without this grounding, it’s more difficult to appeal to fixed moral points. It has never been clear to me, for example, how one can make a persuasive case for justice and the moral good—even for the proposition that all men and women are created equal—without an appeal to God and transcendent truth, since it’s not clear what the grounding for truth would be.
My point isn’t that atheists can’t be good people; clearly they can, and many prove that every day. Many, in fact, live lives of greater moral integrity than people of faith. I’m making a rather different point, which is that it’s difficult for them to offer a compelling case for inherent human dignity and worth. What is their argument against capriciousness and injustice, tyranny, and the will to power, absent a Creator?
I have posed to atheist friends of mine—including the late Christopher Hitchens, who authored one of the most popular caustic attacks on God, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything—several interlocking questions. How does one create a system of justice and make the case against, say, slavery, if you begin with three propositions: one, the universe is created by chance; two, it will end in nothing; and three, there is no external source of authority to which to resort?
Christopher was a polemicist and a man of dazzling intelligence, and I found him to be more charming and less abrasive in person than in print. (One of the more enjoyable conversations we had was about faith, C. S. Lewis, and the British journalist and later convert to Christianity Malcolm Muggeridge.)
Christopher would typically respond to the question I posed to him by challenging the person asking it to name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. He would then ask them to consider all of the wicked statements made and evil actions performed by people precisely because of religious faith.
Of course, it’s perfectly legitimate to point out that religion can be corrupted and has been used for awful ends. And I have readily conceded that nonbelievers can act ethically and do so all the time. But that still doesn’t explain what a nontheistic moral code would be grounded in.
Let me press the point further: If you were a materialist or a relativist, why would you have any confidence that your beliefs were rooted in anything permanent or that they applied to you and to others? How would you respond to a Nietzschean who said, “Your belief is fine for you, but it is simply not binding to me. God is dead—and I choose to follow my Will to Power. You may not agree, but there is no philosophical or moral ground on which you can make your stand.”
How do you get from the “is” to the “ought”? How do you avoid the trap laid out by Ivan Karamazov: If God does not exist, “everythin
g is permitted”?
Even supposing human beings have moral instincts and a moral sense based on human evolution and biology, why would you choose to follow them? We have lots of instincts—some noble and some base. Why would you choose the more noble ones, like cooperation and sympathy, tolerance and fair play, instead of, say, using power against those you have authority over? Why not rig the game to advance your own self-interests? Why not cheat on your wife if you derive pleasure from it? “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked,” C. S. Lewis said, “what says ‘I want’ remains.”4
Steve Hayner, the former president of Columbia Theological Seminary and a spiritual mentor of mine who passed away in 2015, told me something that adds an important layer to this discussion. We believe we have worth because we are created in God’s image, he said. But even more basic is the declaration that we have value simply because God values us.
Gold is valuable because someone values it, not because there is something about gold that has intrinsic worth. Sure, gold is aesthetically beautiful and has particular physical qualities that set it apart (it is highly conductive, for example, and noncorroding). But gold would not be valuable if it were not thought to be so by someone. In this case, value is attributed to gold by us and would lose its value if we collectively decided it no longer had value. But human beings are of worth because we are valued by God. Indeed, Christians believe God demonstrates the value of humanity by his continuing involvement with us.
It is God’s attributive quality of worth that underlies Christian and Jewish anthropology. Humanly derived values create comparative worth, which opens the door to an economic or utilitarian assessment of the value of an individual. Divinely attributed values convey intrinsic worth. According to Hayner, our worth was not derived from culture or circumstances. Here, worth comes from understanding all people as precious in God’s sight.
