On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with America and Modernity

7. Religion, Politics, and America at the Millennium

145 7 Religion, Politics, and America at the Millennium In this chapter I would like to reflect on the role of pluralism , especially religious pluralism, in what I take to be the failure of the American experiment in ordered liberty. My argument is that, examined from the vantage point of the turn of the millennium , American claims to exceptionalism and superiority, clustered around the idea of ordered liberty, have proven unjustified. Enough American history has passed to see how the instability, internal incoherence , and inadequacy of the founding American assumptions about God, man, and society daily make the dream of ordered liberty ever more remote. The evidence of profound social disorder, of disordered liberty, lies all around. The jibes against Europe, that in America a fresh historical beginning, freed from Europe’s burdens and mistakes, would sustain something better than Europe had known, a novus ordo seclorum, seem now premature and naïve.1 In America it is most uncommon to admit this. Awareness of the manifold signs of disorder that mark one’s daily life rarely results in acknowledgment that there might be something wrong with the experiment itself. Indeed, the pseudo-scientific language 1. Glenn W. Olsen, “The Meaning of Christian Culture: A Historical View,” in Catholicism and Secularization in America: Essays on Nature, Grace, and Culture, ed. David L. Schindler (Notre Dame, Ind.: Communio, 1990), 98–130. The present chapter originated in a paper given at an American-German Colloquium on Pluralism sponsored by the School of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America, September 18–20, 1995. 146 American Political Culture of “experiment,” especially William Penn’s sacralized language of “holy experiment,” puts off indefinitely any day of reckoning, for one can always say not enough evidence is in on whether the American experiment “works.”2 In the past fifty years the logic of older forms of liberalism, both French and Anglo-American, central to the American founding has been revealed in a radical liberalism unafraid to embrace what always had lain in liberalism’s premises. I use “liberalism” in an etymological way to describe any politics to which the quest for liberty in its evolved modern sense of “freedom from” is central. As Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out, liberalism, although originating historically in attack on tradition and aiming at a social order founded on “universal, tradition-independent norms,” has itself become a tradition.3 In it an initially deficient idea of human autonomy, in which insufficient attention was paid to the relations between the individual and both other human beings and the cosmos generally, has worked itself out in an arbitrary freedom that takes the form of moral relativism and utilitarian and hedonistic domination of others . Similarly, an initially deficient idea of man, endemic to Protestantism but much exacerbated by the Newtonian idea of techne, in which man is not recognized as first of all a contemplative being, has unrolled itself in an almost completely mechanistic view of life in which man is interiorly empty and exteriorly manipulative.4 Even were somehow the developments of more than a half century to be rolled back, we would be left with the earlier liberalisms, which continue to exist, and their flawed view of the nature of human autonomy and man’s relation to God. This would give us as little warrant for hope as were we spectators at a rerun of Daedalus’ experiment. José Casanova may well be right that a worldwide re2 . Gordon S. Wood, “Not So Poor Richard,” New York Review of Books (hereafter NYRB, June 6, 1996. 3. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 335. MacIntyre has observed that virtually all thought in America is one of three forms of liberalism: conservative, liberal, or radical. 4. Cf. David L. Schindler, “Christological Aesthetics and Evangelium Vitae: Toward a Definition of Liberalism,” Communio: International Catholic Review 22 (1995): 193–224. Religion, Politics, and America 147 bellion is taking place against the privatization or marginalization of religion that accompanied modernization and secularization.5 Still, wherever it has occurred, such rebellion has hardly done other than to reassert older cultural forms without engaging the historical quandries that helped generate modernity in the first place. Thus the public reemergence of Evangelical Protestantism in the United States beginning in the 1980s seems aimed at something like recovery of the hegemonic status of nineteenth-century Protestant civil religion. Nineteenth-century civil religion...