God and Caesar: Selected Essays on Religion, Politics, & Society

5. Is There Only Secular Democracy?

5. Is There Only Secular Democracy? imagining Other possibilities for the third millennium One of the great vices of our age is that we get used to things too quickly. The German philosopher Nietzsche, a master of the dubious aphorism, once remarked that what does not kill us makes us stronger. He held that this was how we know that “someone has turned out well.”1 For most of us, however, and for most of human history, it is truer to say that what does not kill us we learn to live with. Those of a more pessimistic bent than myself are even tempted to claim that there is nothing that human beings cannot accommodate themselves to, whatever their personal misgivings or fears might be in a given instance. The course of democratic life in the West over the past forty years seems to bear this out.Television is a handy barometer of this. In recent times one very popular American daytime television show ran a program interviewing people whose intimate partners are animals , including a man who spoke of his five-year relationship with a horse called Pixel.2 It is not the whole story of contemporary television , of course, and against this example we have to put shows like 68 This chapter was originally an address to the Annual Dinner of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 12 October 2004. Subsequently published in the United States in Journal of Markets and Morality 7:2 (Fall 2004): 321–33, and in Australia in Quadrant 48:12 (December 2004): 8–13. 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1908), in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and OtherWritings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 76–77. 2. Harry Stein, “DaytimeTelevision Gets Judgmental,” City Journal, Spring 2004 (www.city-journal.org). Judge Judy, to name only one, which rate just as well and, whatever their shortcomings, make it very clear that bad behavior—even on television—should not be rewarded. But that daytime television should cover bestiality in the same way as it might cover a school’s Fourth of July celebrations does not really cause us much surprise. This is a long way from the first night of television in Australia in 1956, when the comperes wore tuxedos and it was unthinkable—literally impossible to imagine—that the f-word would become a staple of dialogue in adult television dramas. Other more important examples could also be given. Today Catholic teaching on artificial contraception is incomprehensible not only to secularists and some other Christians, but also to many Massgoing Catholics. It is not that the teaching is unreasonable or difficult to understand, but something more fundamental: many people do not see why the Church should insist on treating contraception as a moral issue of any sort at all. But forty years ago, prior to the United States Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, many American states had laws prohibiting or restricting contraception, and opponents of these laws had failed in every attempt they had made to have them overturned or diluted, both in the courts and in the legislatures. Even in the midst of the sexual revolution the state of NewYork continued to ban the sale of contraceptives to minors until 1977, when the Court struck the law down.3 Treating artificial contraception as morally objectionable is now considered one of those strange Catholic things, like devotion to the Infant of Prague. Only a little more than a generation ago, however, there was nothing strange about Catholic teaching in this area at all, because it was just one part of a wider moral consensus . It was from this consensus that laws against contraception arose. They were not the result of a conspiracy to keep the population ignorant and progenitive, but of democratic deliberation, debate, and decision. only secular democracy? 69 3. Russell Hittinger, “Abortion before Roe,” First Things 46 (October 1994): 14–16. 70 catholicism & democracy The same is true in the case of abortion. Attempts to repeal or liberalize anti-abortion laws, sometimes entailing referenda, were defeated by large majorities in most American states prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. These voters were the same people who voted against racial discrimination and for civil rights measures in the 1960s.4 Since Roe v. Wade there...