Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  Irving Kristol points out also that relatively small societies may be able to maintain morality by tradition, but once a society becomes large and complex, particularly if its population is heterogeneous, tradition cannot be adequate to the maintenance of morality and a healthy culture. It is also now obvious that reason alone cannot provide a morality. Moral reasoning, like all reasoning, requires a place to start; it requires major premises. Philosophy cannot provide major premises, though for a long time, since the Enlightenment perhaps, it was thought that reason could and ultimately would do so. The realization that it cannot has begun to sink in and has produced most unhappy results. “Secular rationalism,” as Kristol put it, “has been unable to produce a compelling, self-justifying moral code. Philosophy can analyze moral codes in interesting ways, but it cannot create them. And with this failure, the whole enterprise of secular humanism—the idea that man can define his humanity and shape the human future by reason and will alone—begins to lose its legitimacy. Over the past 30 years, all the major philosophical as well as cultural trends began to repudiate secular rationalism in favor of an intellectual and moral relativism and/or nihilism.”9

  The only other possibility is that men may learn from experience what behavior produces a satisfactory or good life. Reflection on experience can provide the major premises and the minor premises from which conclusions about morality follow. If one is to have a satisfactory life, it is better not to covet your neighbor’s wife. Not only are you less likely to be shot or sued, but if others follow the same rule, you can, with considerable confidence, take serious interest in raising your wife’s children. It is probably possible, in short, to reconstruct most of the Ten Commandments in this way. But to suppose that an entire society may be made moral in this fashion is merely laughable. We are not a community of over 250 million reflective men and women able to work out the conditions of contentedness and willing to sacrifice near-term pleasure for long-term benefits.

  It thus appears, at least for society as a whole, that the major and perhaps only alternative to “intellectual and moral relativism and/or nihilism” is religious faith. That conclusion will make many Americans nervous or hostile. While most people claim to be religious, most are also not comfortable with those whose faith is strong enough to affect their public behavior. That can be seen in the reaction of many Americans to the appearance in the public square of religious conservatives. A letter to the editor, for example, proclaims, “The ‘ardor’ shown by many people of the religious right is often intolerance masquerading as principle. In seeking to impose its ideas about school prayer, abortion and a host of other issues on society at large, the religious right is pursuing a program of bigotry and demagoguery that is antithetical to the U.S.’s pluralistic heritage.”10

  The fear of religion in the public arena is all too typical of Americans, and particularly the intellectual class, today. Religious conservatives cannot “impose” their ideas on society except by the usual democratic methods of trying to build majorities and passing legislation. In that they are no different from any other group of people with ideas of what morality requires. All legislation “imposes” a morality of one sort or another, and, therefore, on the reasoning offered, all law would seem to be antithetical to pluralism. The references to “bigotry” and “demagoguery” seem to mean little more than that the author would like to impose a very different set of values.

  Today’s religious conservatives take Christianity and Judaism seriously, but that does not place them outside a very long moral tradition. C. S. Lewis: “The number of actions about whose ethical quality a Stoic, an Aristotelian, a Thomist, a Kantian, and a Utilitarian would agree is, after all very large.”11 And again: “A Christian who understands his own religion laughs when unbelievers expect to trouble him by the assertion that Jesus uttered no command which had not been anticipated by the Rabbis—few, indeed, which cannot be paralleled in classical, ancient Egyptian, Ninevite, Babylonian, or Chinese texts. We have long recognized that truth with rejoicing. Our faith is not pinned on a crank.”12

  Only religion can accomplish for a modern society what tradition, reason, and empirical observation cannot. Christianity and Judaism provide the major premises of moral reasoning by revelation and by the stories in the Bible. There is no need to attempt the impossible task of reasoning your way to first principles. Those principles are accepted as given by God.

  For most people, only revealed religion can supply the premises from which the prescriptions of morality can be deduced. Religion tells us what the end of man should be and that information supplies the premises for moral reasoning and hence a basis for moral conduct. Philosophers cannot agree on the proper end of man and hence cannot supply the necessary premises. Religion is by its nature authoritative and final as to first principles. It must be so or it would be valueless. Those principles are given on a stone tablet, either literally or figuratively, and, so long as you believe the religion, there is simply no possibility of arguing with what is on the tablet.

  Ortega y Gassett put the importance of authoritative religion very well:

  Decalogues retain from the time they were written on stone or bronze their character of heaviness…. Lower ranks the world over are tired of being ordered and commanded, and with holiday air take advantage of a period freed from burdensome imperatives. But the holiday does not last long. Without commandments, obliging us to live after a certain fashion, our existence is that of the “unemployed.” This is the terrible spiritual situation in which the best youth of the world finds itself today. By dint of feeling itself free, exempt from restrictions, it feels itself empty…. Before long there will be heard throughout the planet a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or something to take command, to impose an occupation, a duty.13

  Hence, among other things, the “politics of meaning.”

  Religion supplies the major premises from which moral reasoning begins, but after that trouble may begin. The difficulty is not with the major premises religion provides but with the minor premises that must be provided by secular reasoning and secular disciplines. These are essential to discern what the major premises require for their fulfillment in a variety of worldly circumstances. The reasoning and discernment must be done by both clergy and laity. One reason for humility is that often the persons concerned will lack the essential knowledge and will leap to a conclusion that retards rather than advances the religious value in question. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, long ignored or misunderstood economics, with the result that it advanced such intellectual bloomers as the just wage doctrine, which, if it had been effective, would have inflicted the same harm—unemployment—as the minimum wage. But religious belief coupled with sound secular reasoning is of enormous benefit to a society.

  In that case, it may be asked, why is Americas culture not thriving rather than degenerating? How could Lasch speak of the “gradual decay of religion”? We are, after all, regularly assured that Americans are the most religious people among the industrial democracies; 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God, over half report they pray at least once a day, and more than 40 percent claim to have gone to church in any given week. Surely that demonstrates the continuation of the vibrant religious belief Tocqueville saw, and surely it refutes Lasch.

  The truth is that, despite the statistics on churchgoing, etc., the United States is a very secular nation that, for the most part, does not take religion seriously. Not only may the statistics overstate the religious reality—people may be telling pollsters what they think makes a good impression—but statistics say nothing of the quality or depth of American religious belief. It is increasingly clear that very few people who claim a religion could truthfully say that it informs their attitudes and significantly affects their behavior.14

  The practices and beliefs of the Catholic laity offer a good test case because the Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception, abortion, divorce and remarriage
, and the infallibility of the pope on matters of faith and morals, are unusually clear. Yet it is also clear that many of the laity display the Tocqueville syndrome and “keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience.” A 1985 New York Times/CBS News poll shows that 68 percent of Catholics favored the use of artificial birth control, and 73 percent thought Catholics should be allowed to divorce and remarry, and 79 percent believed you can disagree with the pope on these issues and still be a good Catholic. Catholics even have higher abortion rates than do Protestants and Jews.15 I have no figures on comparative divorce rates, but anyone with a large Catholic acquaintance has seen a large number of divorces. The Church has accommodated itself to this reality, the Zeitgeist, by granting annulments, even of long-standing marriages that have produced children. In short, Catholics’ obedience to their doctrines would seem to run at the same level as Protestants’ to theirs.

  Conformity to the spirit of the times appears to characterize the clergy as well as the laity. In 1968 Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical on birth control that, to state the matter gently, was thoroughly counter to the Zeitgeist and highly unpopular. The American bishops decided to give the position only verbal support and, according to James Hitchcock, a Catholic writer, thereby “made the fundamental strategic mistake which has been the undoing of liberal Protestantism. For over a century liberal Protestantism has steadily surrendered Christian positions deemed incredible by a particular historic age, the better to protect the core of the faith. But in each generation, more such surrenders are demanded, until there is finally nothing left, and surrender itself becomes the chief expectation which liberals must meet.”16 The result, he says, has been the “steady erosion of every distinctively Catholic moral position.” That much seems clear, as the figures above about the disagreement of the laity with Church doctrine demonstrate.

  What Frederick Lewis Allen noted of the 1920s was true for a long time previously and remains true today: religion is declining because those identified with it do not actually believe in it.17 It seems impossible to say that a person believes in a religion when he rejects what the religion proclaims. It is difficult to say that a religion even exists if it keeps giving up its tenets to appease its members and critics. If belief, in some sense, can be said to be present, it is a weak and watery belief that is no match for parishioners’ personal, secular concerns.

  The first question, then, is why belief evaporated, why the West has become so rapidly secularized. A number of factors might be cited, but underlying them and giving them force I would put the advance of egalitarianism and individualism together with the progress of technology that made lives easier. Those of us used to the soft, therapeutic religions of the present day forget how rigorous religion used to be, Protestant as well as Catholic. As life became easier and diversions more plentiful, men are less willing to accept the authority of their clergy and less willing to worship a demanding God, a God who dictates how one should live and puts a great many bodily and psychological pleasures off limits.

  It was tempting for men who wanted freedom from religious prohibitions to accept the idea that science was steadily disproving religion’s claims. The three most influential thinkers of the modern era, men who advanced their theories as science, either were bitterly hostile to religion or espoused theories that could be read to undercut faith. Sigmund Freud assailed religion “in all its forms as an illusion and therefore recast it as a form of neurosis.”18 Karl Marx viewed religion as superstition that opposed the progress of the working class. Charles Darwin offered the theory of evolution that was taken by many to disprove the theory of a Creator. Many people were particularly attracted to what they took to be the message of the new science of psychology: sex is the driving force of life and inhibitions are not only passe but dangerous.

  The lures of hedonism aside, the intellectual prestige of science was high because of its increasing ability to predict and explain much that had previously been mysterious, and also continually to improve the material conditions of life. Science is assumed to be hostile to supernatural theories. Most people would say that religious belief requires an act of faith while a belief that science can compass all reality does not. A belief that science will ultimately explain everything, however, also requires a leap of faith. Faith in science requires the unproven assumption that all reality is material, that there is nothing beyond or outside the material universe.19 Perhaps that is right, though it seems counterintuitive, but it cannot be proven and therefore rests on an untested and untestable assumption. That being the case, there is no logical reason why science should be hostile to or displace religion. There are, in fact, arguments that materialism as a philosophy is now dead,20 but I need go no further than to assert that the belief that science has demonstrated the falsity or improbability of religious beliefs is itself false.

  Refuting the supposed opposition between religion and science, however, will have no noticeable effect in reinvigorating religion. We have gotten used to its effective absence. Many people go through life with no particular beliefs, and appear untroubled by it. Others have substituted some political movement as their religion—environmentalism, animal rights, feminism, incremental socialism. The churches themselves have turned left. This has been blamed on the Sixties: “The New Left also affected religious life in the West. The Protestant mainline churches turned to the left; the World Council of Churches identified itself with the Third World as against the West…. Liberation theology affected young Catholic priests and nuns who became soldiers in the antiwar, anticapitalist, and anti-American empire movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. While they condemned ‘cutthroat capitalism,’ they seldom criticized ‘cutthroat socialism.’”21 All quite true; the Sixties jump-started the leftist politicization of the churches, but the process was under way before that.

  Clergy and church bureaucrats are members of the intellectual class and look to that class for approval, an approval they cannot win through their merits as religionists, but only through their political attitudes and political usefulness. Too often it is clear that the president of Notre Dame would much prefer the approval of the presidents of Harvard and Yale to that of the pope. On domestic issues other than abortion, the Catholic bishops often look like the Democratic Party in robes. They claim to be for welfare reform, for example, but they oppose the Republican bill for the same reasons the Democrats do. On issue after issue, they line up with the Democrats and against the Republicans.

  The mainline Protestant churches are further to the left. The National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America (NCC), which represents most mainline Protestant denominations, has consistently taken liberal left positions on domestic issues and has been strongly critical of the foreign policy of the United States while much more favorable to the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and other Communist regimes. The NCC

  has taken the ideas of the liberal-left, clothed them in theological garments, and accorded them the status of quasi-dogma. Political “liberation” seems more important than spiritual salvation; sin, now only rarely personal, is often identified with “unjust structures”—capitalism or anything “reactionary”; an earthly kingdom of “justice for the oppressed” displaces or even claims to be the Kingdom of God; and corporations, the military, and the United States are labeled “demonic powers.” Revolutionary movements, on the other hand, are “new thrusts for human dignity and freedom”; revolutionary leaders, the new messiah figures, are “co-workers with God.”22

  The World Council of Churches is, if anything, worse. During the Cold War, the WCC regularly took positions that were pro-communist and anti-United States. The Sixth Assembly of the WCC met in Vancouver in 1983 and adopted resolutions on the war in Afghanistan and the conflicts in Central America, especially the fighting in Nicaragua where the Sandinista regime was instituting a violent communist dictatorship. As Ernest W. Lefever, a political commentator, noted, the WCC’s position on Afghanistan carefully did not blame the So
viet Union for invading, but did call for “‘an end to the supply of arms to the opposition groups from the outside,’ meaning that military supplies to the freedom fighters, primarily from the United States, should cease.” The Russian Orthodox Church, a member of the Council and a tool of the Soviet government, called this “balanced and realistic.” Lefever wrote that the “Central American resolution repeatedly portrayed the United States as the only external aggressive, militaristic, and repressive force in the region”; “Respected scholars on Central American affairs could discern no difference in the WCC resolution and the views espoused by Moscow and Havana.” Capitalism was defined as a system of “economic domination and unjust social structures” that suppresses the “socio-economic rights of people, such as the basic needs of families, communities, and the rights of workers.”23

  The members of the American denominations represented by the NCC and the WCC are far more conservative than the controlling bureaucracies of those organizations. But many of the member church bureaucracies are themselves to the left of the parishioners. There was something of an uproar when a Presbyterian official and other NCC leaders visited the White House, “laid hands” on President Clinton, and prayed for him to be “strong for the task” of resisting the Republican Congress.24 A unit of the Episcopal Church, Women in Mission and Ministry, co-sponsored a National Feminist Exposition, characterized by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Washington think tank, as a “left-wing, partisan political extravaganza” showcasing a “pantheon of radical feminist leaders. “The major agenda item was to “galvanize opposition to the Republican Congress during the 1996 elections.”25