Gnostic Errors
In the ongoing Linker-Douthat dispute over Moral Therapeutic Deism and its relationship to the political scene of the last decade, I have to side with Ross (as usual), but Linker’s latest response draws attention to a more significant problem facing religious conservatives and conservatives in general in the wake of the disastrous Bush years, which is the extent to which they have failed to be orthodox and traditional in their theology and religion when faced with the requirements of supporting political allies who espouse radical and heretical ideas.
As I noted long ago, and as Ross has suggested again this week, it makes no sense to blame Christian orthodoxy or traditional Christianity for the religiously-tinged ideology of the Bush administration and the resulting failures of this ideology’s optimistic and hubristic approach to the world. It is no accident that the most strident and early critics of the Bush administration hailed from traditionalist Catholic and Orthodox circles that make Linker’s bete noire of First Things look like the relatively liberal, ecumenist forum that it is. Mr. Bush espoused a horrifyingly heterodox religious vision, one far more akin to the messianic Americanism that forms part of what Bacevich has called national security ideology than it is to anything that could fairly be called orthodoxy. To the extent that Linker’s favorite targets, the so-called “theocons,” were more or less entirely on board with what Mr. Bush was doing, even if they felt compelled to use their own teachings in distorted form to do it, they were not championing orthodoxy at all. One might go so far to say that as they became stronger supporters of Mr. Bush, the less orthodox they tended to become, because the arguments they had to employ to defend Mr. Bush’s outrageous actions and gnostic impulses necessarily ate away at orthodox teachings.
This has created a predicament for the majority of conservative Christians who tended to go along with, if not actively defend, Mr. Bush’s acts and rhetoric. Having identified strongly with him, these Christians–Linker’s “champions of orthodoxy”–ensured that his errors would be imputed to their beliefs, even though Bush had a very different set of assumptions. It seems more reasonable to conclude that the “champions of orthodoxy” were undermining orthodoxy to the extent that they aligned themselves with the gnostic Bush rather than judging the failure of the Bush political project to be a demonstration of the flaws in an alliance between orthodoxy and politics. It might be that somewhere in all of this there is a “cautionary tale about what happens to politics and faith” when they combine in certain ways, but what does religious orthodoxy have to do with any of this? There is a far better argument to be made that the lesson to be learned is that greater fidelity to orthodoxy would have avoided many of the errors of the Bush Era by grounding those Christians who identified with Bush politically in the stable and sobering truths of theologically conservative Christianity.
If Linker insists that Rod acknowledge that traditional Christians in previous eras defended moral injustices in the name of resisting political and social change, he cannot credibly maintain that the Christians who backed and defended a proponent of global democratic revolution can still be counted as orthodox or traditional for the purposes of making criticisms about the mixing of religion and politics today. Linker hopes that Ross will come away with the idea that more traditional and orthodox Christians should “keep their distance from political power,” but this makes sense only if you believe that it was proximity to power rather than the perverse and misguided ideas that were prevailing at the center of power that mattered. Perhaps if there had been more genuinely traditional and orthodox voices whispering to Mr. Bush that he was mortal, warning that pride is one of the most dangerous sins, or explaining to him that chiliasm and gnosticism were grave errors, he would not have been so ready to embark on path of mad revolutionary warfare and global transformation. Orthodoxy had no influence, but naturally Linker believes that it still had too much, which pretty well sums up his misreading of the religious and political landscape today.
Any thoughts on Ron Pauls call to issue letters of marque and create privateers to patrol pirate waters?
Sorry for the OT, It seemed more expediant than emailing you.
It sounds antiquated, but this is precisely the sort of thing letters of marque and reprisal were designed for. It has the advantage of being an enumerated power of Congress, which makes it more defensible legally than half the things the government does. There are legitimate concerns that this would be and would be seen as simply outsourcing the Navy’s role to private contractors, which could create corporate privateering navies that might think they could act as laws unto themselves.
Our Shadowrun future seems to be getting ever closer.
“but this makes sense only if you believe that it was proximity to power rather than the perverse and misguided ideas that were prevailing at the center of power that mattered.”
Aren’t those one and the same in the vast majority of instances, though? How often are “perverse and misguided ideas” not prevailing in the centers of true power, given the nature of power and those who tend to seek it out?
It should also be acknowledged that conservative religious groups could have fought against Bush’s perverse and misguided ideas, but largely chose not to for whatever reason. Bush was forced to back off from social security reform, immigration reform, and the Miers appointment because major factions in the GOP objected strenuously to them. But the prevailing attitude amongst the religous groups within the GOP seems to have been that Bush was “one of us” and thus entitled to uncritical support. Or they were well aware of Bush’s misguided ideas but happened to agree with them.
Which is to say, the hard-right religious groups had and have influence within the GOP, but chose not to exert it.
Yes, they could have put up resistance and didn’t. That still doesn’t establish that the religious groups in question were/are orthodox or traditional.
I suppose it could be the case that power corrupts in such a way that orthodox believers always become less orthodox as they come into contact with it, but I tend to think that the corruption usually works in other ways. If the first claim is right, that would mean that the best thing to do would be for orthodox Christians to withdraw from politics and do the necessary cultural work to spread and instill this orthodoxy in their own communities. However, we know what that means, at least if we listen to Linker–it means scary authoritarianism!
This is the other way in which Linker misreads things: many of the people who want to affirm traditional Christianity tend to be the ones who are least interested in continuing the futile politicking that has encouraged Christians to neglect the cultural work they could have been doing. They are also the ones who are most likely to criticize abuses of power by the state. What is Linker’s answer? To mock and attack advocates of the “Benedict Option” even more strenuously than he does the “theocons,” because he fails to distinguish between the two groups. That’s amusing enough, considering that his last post was entitled “the art of drawing distinctions.” He wants to have it both ways: Christians should not engage in politics, as Ross would urge them to do, and they shouldn’t withdraw to pursue cultural work, either, as I would advise, but should apparently lie down and do nothing at all.
This reminds me of another point that I would like to return to at some point soon: the secular or religious character of arguments on the right is not what matters to Linker, but rather it is the goals of people on the right that disturb him. If religion never entered into the debate at all, this would not make Linker more or less inclined to accept conservative arguments, because he disagrees with conservative conclusions in general.
Of course, one can imagine that a genuinely radical witness to Christian social teaching that emphasized equitable distribution of wealth, the rights of labor, protection of the unborn and traditional sexual morality and conceptions of marriage would horrify Linker even more, because of its “totalizing” character and its intrusiveness on many different aspects of public and private life.
“That still doesn’t establish that the religious groups in question were/are orthodox or traditional.”
Granted, although perhaps the Linker-Ross discussion suffers from not having definitions for those terms. I was taking “traditional” to simply mean conservative, as the two words are often used interchangeably. I would wager that Linker was also using that definition, hence his connecting the current religious Bush-worshippers (who would certainly self-identify as “traditional” Christians) and the reactionary religious types of the past (ditto). I gather that you mean something else entirely by the term, though.
I agree that the terms are a bit fuzzy in this discussion. Since I am referring to orthodoxy in a more generic or less confessional way, it is not necessarily clear what I mean, either, but I think traditional is easier to pin down.
If we’re being ecumenical, “traditional” should refer to those who ahdere to teachings on morals and doctrine that can be found commonly in the so-called Great Tradition of the three main confessions of Christianity. Such a traditional Christian ought to see Scripture as a revealed authority mediated through the interpretive framework established by the Church and as maintained for the vast majority of Christian history, and he should not indulge in fantasies that the Kingdom can be realized here below. The traditional Christian should be extremely wary of secular rulers who want to claim some sort of divine mission or blessing, but who do not attempt to abide by the demands of justice and God’s law as conveyed through the tradition mentioned above. He would remember the warning about false prophets and the injunction not to trust in princes. Just because a secular ruler invokes God, the traditional Christian does not necessarily assume that the ruler is doing God’s will, even though he acknowledges and respects legitimate secular authority. He is also going to challenge secular authority when it commits acts of injustice that go against the Source of legitimate authority.
I would want to make the distinction between politically conservative Christians (i.e., Republican voters) and theological conservatives (some of whom might conceivably have very different conventional political alignments), and I would want to have a higher standard for what passes for theological conservatism than a few litmus tests on social issues and what-have-you. This would bring us back to a crucial distinction, which both Linker and Sullivan elide all the time, between religious conservatives and fundamentalists.
If someone wants to make the case for the traditional-ity or orthodoxy of Bush supporters, he would need to be more specific about what it is he means and what he is using to determine the boundaries of this orthodoxy. Obviously, there are some other empirical problems with Linker’s analysis when some sizeable proportion of self-described traditionalist Christians of different confessions, particularly Catholics, swung to the Democratic column in the last election (and if, as I suspect, Obama carried the Orthodox vote as Democrats often do). It would certainly complicate things, which may be what Linker wants to avoid.
**To the extent that Linker’s favorite targets, the so-called “theocons,†were more or less entirely on board with what Mr. Bush was doing, even if they felt compelled to use their own teachings in distorted form to do it, they were not championing orthodoxy at all. **
This sounds like, “Real communism has never been tried.” There are always alternate interpretations available, so perhaps Linker should be objecting to right-now-orthodox-Christians, rather than orthodox Christianity.
As an aside, it’s a bit rich to see someone who has lived in as many different denominations as Douthat complain about Therapeutic Deism.
There is some way to test this empirically, and it is easier to gauge these things when it comes to religious doctrine because the definitions and boundaries of church teaching are reasonably clear. If just war theory, for example, does not permit Christians in good conscience to support a war of aggression, Christians who support a war of aggression by perverting or reworking just war theory to make it seem acceptable and just are not championing orthodoxy. They are replacing orthodoxy with something else and calling it orthodox.
There are two things you could say about such a move at that point: Bush supporters may have started out orthodox, but compromised their orthodoxy in order to defend his policies, or they were never orthodox but merely pretended to be so. Unless Linker would actually like to argue that support for the war in Iraq is perfectly consistent with orthodox Christianity, despite the clear and consistent rejection of this war by leading Catholic authorities among others, he has to take account of how Christian Bush supporters deviated from orthodox Christianity to maintain their support for his war.
If someone were to say, in response to criticisms of Byzantine or Counter-Reformation policies, that the authorities engaged in these efforts were not in a very meaningful sense orthodox, then you would have a point in likening this to ideological denial. One might even point to such periods in the past as an argument against enforcing orthodoxy, but at least we would be debating the actual enforcement of orthodoxy. The idea that the Bush years saw anything of the kind is just fantasy fed by a strange fear of a theocracy that virtually no one wants to create.
Ross has been part of two “denominations” as far as I know–the one to which he now belongs, and the one before that. That’s not very many.
[...] Perhaps unsurprisingly, Daniel is right: Mr. Bush espoused a horrifyingly heterodox religious vision, one far more akin to the messianic [...]
Yes, I think that’s right. I suspect the commenter actually meant to speak of Rod, though, who has been a member of all of … three denominations.
There is some way to test this empirically, and it is easier to gauge these things when it comes to religious doctrine because the definitions and boundaries of church teaching are reasonably clear.
True enough in theory… but you don’t see Catholic prelates arguing that war and death penalty-supporting politicians should be denied communion, and getting a pile of attention from national media for their efforts. If only, say, 2% of the electorate shares your views, then it does make sense to discuss “orthodoxy” as standing with Bush and movement conservatism. Maybe this is a temporary consequence of the “culture wars, pick a side” rhetoric of the past few decades.
This is a familiar conversation; movement conservatives aren’t recognizably conservative, either, but self-identified conservatives and the most prominent self-proclaimed conservative leaders have succeeded in changing the meaning of the word in current political discussions.
Whether or not bishops are denying pro- (aggressive) war and pro-death penalty politicians communion is a question of how well *they* are enforcing their own teaching among their members. That might be cause for criticizing certain bishops for being inconsistent or unduly focused on abortion, but it doesn’t make those positions any more consistent with church teaching. We can still judge whether or not the politicians and other public figures (in this case, Catholics) are adhering to the teachings in these instances, regardless of how well their ecclesiastical authorities are doing in holding them accountable as members. At the very least, the people taking these positions cannot get the credit/blame for holding the orthodox view.
Daniel,
The definition of “traditional” in your reply of April 15th, 2009 at 12:39 pm, is so broad as to encompass any number of “traditions” which have been at times rather less restrained in the advocacy of war than the “tradition” that you accept, whereas there are lots of people who consider themselves traditional or orthodox Christians who reject the just war tradition that you cite in your reply of April 15th, 2009 at 12:51 pm. In a way, I think you are simply defining away the problem.
But set that aside. Even if one were to accept everything you say, then the result would be to exclude the vast majority of current Christians in the U.S. from being “traditional” or “orthodox” Christians. Assuming that that is true, I’m not sure exactly where that leaves your argument (and Ross’s). It’s one thing to advocate more orthodoxy or adherence to tradition, but quite another to make it happen. Especially since the various protestant denominations that call themselves Christian conservatives don’t really seem to have that tradition at all. (Catholics, OTOH, do have it, though even there calls for adherence to that tradition fall on mostly deaf ears.) In other words, in the already unlikely event of some sort of religious revival in the United States, I don’t think we would have an increase in what YOU would consider “tradition” or “orthodoxy.” Really, to a large extent the nation was populated (initially, at least) by people who dissented in one way or another from that tradition.
So what both you and Ross end up doing is contrasting a (mostly) theoretical orthodox Christianity to the actual existing lukewarm deism that predominates in the U.S. That isn’t a fair or useful contrast.
A separate point, which I don’t have time to develop right now, is that people on both sides of the debate tend to make a similar type of mistake in these debates – blaming the “other side” (orthodox Christianity, secularism, “Moral Therapeutic Deism,†whatever) for trends and events which either (a) are human nature, to which people of all creeds are susceptible to, or (b) are caused by broader cultural trends divorced from religious belief. I mean, both consumerism and American exceptionalism are overwhelmingly popular in the U.S. among virtually all creeds (as well as among secularists too). Sure, some dissenters base their dissent upon their religious beliefs, but there are plenty of secularists (and probably even some Moral Therapeutic Deists) who are also non-interventionists and or who have problems with consumerism.