Rev. James Dobson's criticisms of Obama's nuanced position on religion in politics radically distorts the senator's view. Obama's position is very similar to that of philosopher Jürgen Habermas in an article titled "Religion and the Public Sphere" in which he argues that secularists should not expect citizens of faith to put aside all their religious convictions in political debate and action, but also that arguments from religious perspectives should be 'translated' into terms that are universally accessible to all citizens, including atheists. What that means is NOT, as Dobson misleadingly alleges, that citizens and politicians can argue for laws or policies only from premises on which everyone already agrees -- that would be impossible, since there is too little on which we all agree. Rather, it is best understood as a proscription on political argument from revealed doctrine alone, with no "secular rationale" whatsoever (Robert Audi). For arguments that merely cite scriptural or clerical authority are on a par with statements of pure preference or desire, meaning that they do not give other citizens a reason intelligible to them to respect and obey the resulting law. Citizens who end up in the minority on some vote do not need to agree with their opponents' arguments for the resulting law or policy, but they do need to be able to understand their opponents' arguments as providing reasons for everyone to accept that law or policy. If 51% of the population says merely "We just want law X" or "we desire X" and that's it, then they have not offered any public reason for X at all. That's tyranny of the majority. One form of such tyranny is the rule of faith in various revealed creeds: let's call this popular theocracy. Dobson does not even recognize that this could be a problem.
Dobson is also wrong to imply that this debate is about the Constitution, nor did Obama say that it is. The issue is a moral one: what do citizens owe one another in democratic deliberation on a conception of democracy adequate to resolve the "tyranny of the majority" problem. The Constitution written in 1787 was designed to overcome coordination problems with the previous Articles of Confederation, not to spell out a full conception of democratic justice. However, the separation of church and state in the First Amendment does force us to face these underlying moral issues: should that separation extend to the reasons that citizens cite and rely on in political action and debate? Obama's position on this, like Habermas's and my own, is a moderate one; Dobson's is an extreme view that would see no violation of the church-state separation ideal in a nation in which a religious majority forced other minorities to follow their creeds and articles of faith that are backed with no argument other than pure religious authority. As long as no one is forced to attend a church they don't like, then the First Amendment is satisfied according to Dobson and his kind. But the ideal of public reason and government that is neutral between faiths requires a lot more than this minimal freedom of exercise provision.
I have a detailed forthcoming essay on this matter that responds to a large body of philosophical work on the issue by Rawls, Audi, Quinn, Wolterstorff, Greenawalt, Eberle, Weithman, and others including Habermas. No one familiar with this literature and its nuances could view Dobson as anything but the extreme ideologue that he is. He obviously has no familiarity with this philosophical literature, whereas Obama clearly does.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
This is an important issue, and I appreciate your clarification of the philosophical credentials of Obama's position. I have to admit, though, that I've never found any non-trivial position on it very satisfying. Three worries:
1. The demand that religious believers 'translate' their views into secularly acceptable terms presupposes that the views can be translated without loss, which I find highly doubtful. Much depends on the views in question, of course, and some views will be less disadvantaged than others. If a view cannot be translated without loss or distortion, then people who hold it are automatically excluded from participating in politics with a good conscience. Either they can keep silent or they can produce 'translations' that they don't really believe. None of this would be especially problematic if we were to insist that any view that couldn't pass the test couldn't be true. But the motivation behind this view is supposed to be that we aren't deciding what is and isn't true, just what can and can't earn a place in the space of public reasons.
2. How important is it to distinguish between 'public' and 'political' action and discourse and specifically legal arguments? To my mind, the debate about the place of religious reasons in public debate suffers from a failure to distinguish these. I am inclined to accept something very like the Obama-Audi-Davenport view when it comes to law, but it seems preposterous to me to insist that people should not make religiously grounded public arguments about what people should do. Perhaps this distinction is already built in to the ideas of 'public' reasons and 'political' action, but I fail to see why we should think that the law is peculiarly public and political.
3. The whole debate sometimes strikes me as founded on the false assumption that religious believers are peculiar in having irrational moral and political beliefs, while secular folks base their views on reasons. Most secular people, I think, would not be able to supply a sophisticated rational defense of the fundamental moral views underlying their politics; it's true that they won't defend their views by citing scriptures, but in many cases their arguments will not have significantly superior rational credentials. Of course, the debate is supposed to be about the acceptable kinds of public argument, not about the sources of someone's views. But the Audi-Obama-Davenport view would begin to look a bit unsavory if it were to tell citizens that it doesn't matter why they really believe what they believe, just that they have to craft some clever arguments in its favor. A political culture that actively encouraged citizens to view public discourse as a realm of manipulative rhetoric would not be a political culture that I could happily support.
You can see that these worries return to the same problems. Ultimately, I just have trouble defending the view by starting from some allegedly neutral stance. I have a much easier time defending what is just about the same position from within a substance philosophical and religious perspective. Since I believe that fundamental moral and political truths do not (and could not) depend in any direct way on anything distinctively theological, I see no point in appealing to revealed knowledge to justify any moral or political position. The difference that revelation makes to ethics and politics is not the kind of difference that we could effect through laws and ordinary political institutions, and attempts to do so are more likely to corrupt religion than they are to corrupt politics. These are not, of course, views that I can appeal to in order to justify keeping distinctively religious justifications out of political argument. Yet the alternatives seem endlessly problematic.
I look forward to your future work on these questions.
Post a Comment