Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political

Chapter One. Belief

CHAPTER ONE Belief Prior to the events of September 11,2001, and the rise of a visibly militant , Islamic fundamentalism, debates regarding the relationship of God and religion to politics contained positions that by and large disagreed only on the role of religion in a democratic society. Even as some liberals joined the call for a return to religion-it was Al Gore who, in 1999, rejected what he called the false choice of "hollow secularism and rightwing religion"l-the fundamental liberal view of religion remained unchanged . For liberals, religious teachings and faith may have a central role to play in a democratic society, but this role involves not so much the doctrinal foundation of this or that social value or policy as it does the salutary symbolism of religion's free and freely tolerated expression. To secure this free expression, liberalism famously refuses to privilege any single religion. The very honor of a democracy, as James Madison once argued, rests on religion remaining "perfectly free and unshackled," entirely outside the jurisdiction of government.2 For someone like Madison , to privilege one religion is tantamount to an act of tyranny-the very antithesis of democracy. In a sense, religion supports the practice of liberal-democratic governance not by participating in or legitimizing it directly but by asking to be left more or less alone. This is why, when liberal political candidates are asked to speak to the animating link between their religious faith and their political policies or decisions, they do so in ways that often show signs of discomfort, of having to display something they do not wear on their sleeve. In an interview, Tony Judt lamented this discomfort, insisting that the Left redress its absent ethical vocabulary by deploying the language of religious morality in political and social policy debates. According to Judt, there is "no reason or principle why religion and what I think of as a sort of socially responsible state should be remotely incompatible."J The problem with the Left, for Judt, is that it minimizes the importance of the moral frameworks in and through which human beings make sense of 37 38 Chapter One political affairs. In his III Fares the Land, he writes, "Debates about war, abortion, euthanasia, torture; disputes over public expenditure on health and education: these and so much else are instinctively couched in terms that draw quite directly on traditional religious or philosophical writings ."4 Rather than "mock the bland ethical nostrums of religious leaders," Judt wants liberals to understand that "humans need a language in which to express their moral instincts."5 When it comes to political decisions, he argues, we need a "moral narrative" that "ascribes purpose to our actions in a way that transcends them," that gives us "reasons to choose one policy or set of policies over another."6 This position has a pragmatic dimension: it responds to the monopoly that conservatives have had on appeals to religiosity , a monopoly that brings with it an incredible political advantage, at least in the United States. In the very genealogy of liberalism, however, the iteration of transcendent , moral reasons for belief is a vexed one. It was Immanuel Kant who articulated the Enlightenment ideal by formulating the axiom that the moral law cannot be an object of representation, that we cannot know the specific actions God sees as good. According to Kant, the moral law ought not to involve any direct specification of the good, since the good can never be an object of impartial knowledge. We might think that the good can be tied directly to a Supreme Being and a set of duties or statutory commands it prescribes-for example, the Ten Commandments or the injunction to love one's neighbor. But for Kant, things are not all that simple. Summarizing Kant's insight, Alenka Zupancic writes, "Once the good comes on stage, the question necessarily arises: Whose good?"? What served as an unambiguous value for someone like Aristotle becomes questionable with Kant. To prevent this question'S emergence, Kant cuts the cord between religion and a positive set of specific, statutory duties commanded by creed, attempting to bring an end to what he referred to as reason's "state of nature ," wherein reason "cannot validate or secure its assertions and claims except through war." The Enlightenment credentials of the first Critique rest precisely in its effort to replace this sectarian state of nature with what Kant called "the peace of a state of law...