Andrew Sullivan argues rather persuasively in The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How We Get It Back that U.S. conservativism is under threat from those who want to put God into our politics. The religious right (and those that pander to the religious right for political gain) are undermining what has made America so great and free in the first place: the balance of powers that prevents no one person nor ideology from being in a position to enforce their wills and idealism upon the rest of us.
For Sullivan, one of the great counter-intuitive insights of our founding fathers (carried on in conservative thinkers like Oakeshott) is to not base our founding principles in virtue.
Instead, the job of the laws, lawmakers, and law enforcers is simply to keep other people from interfering with our own rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is quite a lucky and amazing development. Blessedly, there’s no insistence that any of us obey the will of God in our politics, nor that any of us are particularly noble, courageous, nor virtuous apart from the minimal interference of the state to protect us from those who would interefere with our lives, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…
I don’t have a quarrel with these ideas so much as…
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I have a quarrel with these ideas…
1. Sullivan roots his thinking in the doubt of religious faith. He is a practicing Catholic who promotes a broad interpretation of Catholic doctrine that highlights a humble, ever-doubtful and tolerant pursuit of truth and free thinking.
Why this doubt must occur within Catholic doctrine and Christian teaching is not at all clear to me. For religious believers there is the matter of submitting the will in faith to God…and also to the authority and hierarchy of the church. This is non-negotiable.
2. As someone who supports gay marriage, Sullivan has another problem. The right of gays to marry is also supported by the gay rights movement and almost by entirely by liberals. The gay rights movement is perhaps not even organized enough to demonstrate the many illiberal tendencies of other, more established gender and racial movements on the left. Black nationalism, gender feminism, latino nationalism etc….can pose just as serious of a threat to our liberal institutions and freedoms as the religious right. I submit that gays aren’t even there yet…and the liberals who support gay rights aren’t about to invest energy into the conservative soul…
