I’ve been thinking about
this NY Times piece on Josh Hawley (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/opinion/josh-hawley-religion-democracy.html?smtyp=cur&smid=fb-nytimes)
ever since it was called to my attention last week. I’ve mulled it over and round and again and
again, and it tells me very little more about Hawley than I already knew.
But it does tell me a
good deal about were religion is in America today: namely, poised between two
pretty terrible fates.
On the one hand, there
is the caricaturish fate of religion in the hands of those who want to anoint public
leaders as Messiahs. Some who see this
happening (generally of the left) fear (or feared) that this will all come too
true: that we’d end up living in a veritable handmaid’s tale of biblically-inspired
tyranny. Yet to any person with much
religiosity in them, it was evident that this was never a likely fate. The Christianity being preached by those in
public office was hardly deep enough for that.
Religion was in danger of becoming empty of content.
On the other hand, there
is the opposite fate, when all meaningful moral content is seen as
religious. That indeed is what happens in
Stewart’s piece on Hawley. While taking
sure aim at Hawley for brushing everything with religious strokes, she also indicates—via
her attack on Hawley’s attack on Pelagius and Kennedy—that any judgement of
another’s freedom to choose their way of life, or define their own concept of
existence, is detrimental to a “modern, liberal, pluralistic societ[y].”
Now I admit, as a
Catholic, a modern minority that has at various times and places enjoyed
hegemony and persecution, I do enjoy many things about living in said modern,
liberal, pluralistic society. However,
if Stewart is right that such societies are endangered every time we judge one
another’s freedom to choose a way of life, or define another’s concept of
existence, then they are not ultimately sustainable. Fundamentally, every society involves certain
basic rules: don’t infringe on other’s life and property, for example. And if I choose a way of life that involves murder,
robbery, and pillage, then my modern, liberal, pluralistic society has ever right
(and indeed a duty) to clap me in irons (or at any rate, flexicuffs).
There are going to be
some moral absolutes in any society, however liberal and pluralistic. The trick is to getting everyone in society
to agree on what those are. And a lot of
it can be trickier than we’re willing to acknowledge. If my neighbor lights up on his porch every
day, so that my kids are exposed to the smoke when the wind blows over our
fence, do I have a claim against him? Does
it matter if it’s pot or tobacco? We can
all agree that people have a right to wear whatever they want in their house—but
what about their front yard? Are laws
against “indecent exposure” legitimate in a modern, liberal, pluralistic
society? What about public drunkenness? What about dressing in drag, then? What about wearing a swimsuit to the grocery
store? What about going armed to the grocery
store? What about stalking? What about verbal harassment? What if I want to put a ten-foot-tall Jesus,
or Santa, or Buddha, or Thomas Jefferson in my front yard? Or toll church bells every hour on the hour,
or have a Muslim-style call to prayer that can be heard down the block? And who gets to define all of these things?
The simple libertarian
answer to these questions usually goes something like, “owners of businesses
get to make their own business rules, and everyone else gets to move if they
don’t like the neighborhood.” But as
anyone who’s bought or sold a property knows, moving is much easier said than
done; and for many people it may not be economically feasible to live in a
neighborhood that manages to avoid, say, litter and tramps. So we have laws about littering, and we build
homeless shelters; and suddenly we’re living in a modern, liberal, pluralistic
welfare state.
The point is simply
this: the whole question of how I choose to live is not, never has been, and
never will be simply based on my own ability to choose my own way of life and
define my own concept of existence. Simply
by living I rub elbows with my neighbors; and indeed, the more pluralistic my
society, the more questions are going to arise as to how much of a right
I have to live my life the way I want to, because the more different my
neighbors and I are—the more pluralistic my neighborhood is—the more likely it
is that we will rub each other the wrong way.
(Disclaimer: In
actuality, I have nice neighbors. We all
happen to be fairly quiet. But it could
easily have been otherwise. A few blocks
down the street, for instance …)
So Stewart’s shade on
Hawley—whatever its justification in his specific case—is actually rather
dangerous. It suggests that the easy solution
to the problems of the republic is for everyone to live and let live. Maybe, if life is kept tamped down to a few
very basic details. But as soon as you
think about the things we crazy human beings actually want to do, it becomes
apparent that the problem is not that we all might be too religious. It’s that we might not be religious enough to
love our neighbors, and treat them well, despite the fact that we all have
different definitions of existence and different modes of life.
Blog linkup here!: https://rosie-ablogformymom.blogspot.com/2021/01/just-because-new-linkup.html
