Under his papacy, the Church was also guilty of allowing the rape and molestation of vast numbers of children and teenagers, and of systematically covering the crimes up. It is hard to understand how the leader of any lay organization would have stayed in office after allowing such criminality. But how the leader of the Catholic Church survived without even an attempt at papal accountability is still astonishing. A pope who devoted enormous energy to explicating why the only moral expression of human sexuality is marital heterosexual intercourse presided over the rape of thousands of children by his own priests. What was his response? He protected the chief enabler of the abuse in the United States, Cardinal Bernard Law, and used the occasion of his own Church’s failing to blame homosexuals in general. Attempting to grapple with the real question would have meant a debate about priestly celibacy, homosexuality, pedophilia, and the Church’s disproportionately gay priesthood. But this pope was far more interested in closing debates than in opening them.
I have a personal stake in this as well, of course. I’m a Catholic now withdrawn from Communion whose entire adult life has been in Wojtyła’s shadow. And, as a homosexual, I watched as the Church refused to grapple with even basic questions and ran, terrified, from its own deep psychosexual dysfunction. “Be not afraid,” this pope counseled us. But he was deeply afraid of the complicated truth about human sexuality and the dark truth about his own Church’s crimes. This was a pope who, above all, knew how to look away. But people—faithful people—noticed where he couldn’t look. And they grieved, even as, in the aftermath of this brittle, showboating papacy, they now hope.
Crisis of Faith
How Fundamentalism Is Splitting the GOP
May 2, 2005 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
—Ronald Reagan, January 20, 1981
We have a responsibility that, when somebody hurts, government has got to move.
—George W. Bush, September 1, 2003
Conservatism isn’t over. But it has rarely been as confused. Today’s conservatives support limited government. But they believe the federal government can intervene in a state court’s decisions in a single family’s struggle over life and death. They believe in restraining government spending. But they have increased such spending by a mind-boggling 33 percent in a mere four years. They believe in self-reliance. But they have just passed the most expensive new entitlement since the heyday of Great Society liberalism: the Medicare prescription-drug benefit. They believe that foreign policy is about the pursuit of national interest and that the military should be used only to fight and win wars. Yet they have embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious program of military-led nation building in the Middle East. They believe in states’ rights, but they want to amend the Constitution to forbid any state from allowing civil marriage or equivalent civil unions for gay couples. They believe in free trade. But they have imposed tariffs on a number of industries, most famously steel. They believe in balanced budgets. But they have abandoned fiscal discipline and added a cool trillion dollars to the national debt in one presidential term.
One reason for conservatism’s endurance in the face of such contradiction, of course, is the extreme weakness—intellectual and organizational—of the opposition. Liberalism ceased being a vibrant force in the American public weal two decades ago. The left never recovered from the collapse of communism, the dismal failure of social democracy across Western Europe, and the demise of Japan’s command economy in the 1980s. Domestically, a liberal claim on the presidency never recovered from Jimmy Carter and the first two years of Bill Clinton. Conservatism, broadly understood, has occupied the White House for twenty-three of the past twenty-five years. No unreconstructed liberal stands a chance of winning it in the near future—hence Hillary Clinton’s moderate makeover.
Conservatism has endured also because it slowly absorbed much of the old liberal spirit. Who, after all, are the most vocal moral crusaders of today? Christian conservatives, who deploy government power against all sorts of perceived wrongs—sexual trafficking, AIDS in Africa, gay unions, poor parenting, teen sex, indecent television, and euthanasia, among many. Almost no Democrat speaks with the moral conviction of religious Republicans. And, when liberalism has been outrun on moral fervor, precious little oxygen remains to revive it—especially with austere, patrician leaders like John Kerry and Al Gore or angry pop-culture ranters like Michael Moore.
But conservatism’s very incoherence may be one reason for its endurance. In its long road to victory, the Republican Party has regularly preferred the promise of power to the satisfaction of schism. It has long been pro-government and antigovernment. It has contained Rockefeller and Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. As a governing philosophy, it has been able to tack for decades from statism to laissez-faire, from big government to individual freedom, with only occasional discomfort. Conservatism’s resilience has been a function of its internal ideological diversity and balance. The more closely you look, however, the deeper the division has become in the last few years, intensifying dramatically since last fall’s election. Which is why, this time, the balancing act may finally be coming undone.
Let me be rash and describe the fundamental divide within conservatism as a battle between two rival forms. The two forms I’m referring to are ideal types. I know very few conservatives who fit completely into one camp or the other, and these camps do not easily comport with the categories we have become used to deploying—categories like “libertarian,” “social conservative,” “paleoconservative,” “fiscal conservative and social liberal,” and so on. There is, I think, a deeper rift, and a more fundamental one.
Call one the conservatism of faith and the other the conservatism of doubt. They have coexisted in the past but are becoming less and less compatible as the conservative ascendancy matures. Start with the type now dominant in Republican discourse: the conservatism of faith. This conservatism states conservative principles—and, indeed, eternal insights into the human condition—as a matter of truth. Because these conservatives believe that the individual is inseparable from her political community and civilization, there can be no government neutrality in promoting such truths. Either a government’s laws affirm virtue or they affirm vice. And the meaning of virtue and vice can be understood either by reflecting on the Judeo-Christian moral tradition or by inferring from philosophical understandings what human nature in its finest form should be. These truths are not culturally relative; they are universally valid.
The state, therefore, has a duty to protect, at a minimum, all human life, meaning it must regulate abortion and end-of-life decisions. The conservatism of faith sees nothing wrong with channeling $2 billion of public money to religious charities, as the Bush administration boasts; or with spending government money to promote sexual abstinence as a moral good; or with telling parents in government literature that a gay child may need therapy. Science must be hedged by faith, as the teaching of evolution is questioned and pharmacists are allowed to refuse prescriptions for contraception on religious grounds. And public education must have a moral component. As President Bush said in his first State of the Union, “Values are important, so we have tripled funding for character education to teach our children not only reading and writing, but right from wrong.” The “we” referred to here is the federal government. The alternative, in the eyes of faith conservatives, would be to allow those with a different morality to promote a rival agenda. Since neutrality is impossible, conservative truths trump secular values.
What matters to conservatives of faith is therefore less the size of government than its meaning and structure. If it is harnessed to uphold their definition of the good life—protecting a stable family structure, upholding biblical morality, protecting the vulnerable—then its size is irrelevant, as long as it doesn’t overwhelm civil society. Indeed, using government to promote certain activities (the proper care of children,
support for the poor, legal privileges for heterosexual relationships) and to deter others (recreational drug use, divorce, gay unions, abortion, indecent television) is integral to the conservative project. Bush has added another twist to this philosophy, seeking to expand government programs not only from the top down, but from the bottom up, by incorporating new mechanisms that give citizens more choice. Hence Health Savings Accounts in Medicare and personal accounts within Social Security. If that actually means more government borrowing and spending, so be it. If government must be expanded to give more people a sense of “ownership” within government programs, fine. This is what remains of conservatism’s old belief in individual freedom. The new conservatism of faith has substituted real choice in a free market for regulated choice within an ever-expanding welfare state.
There is nothing especially new about this kind of conservatism. Bismarck and Disraeli pioneered it in Europe in the nineteenth century, using imperial foreign policy, domestic paternalism, and religious piety to cement new majorities. In the United States, it has less of a pedigree, because the power of the federal government was historically far more restrained than in Europe. But the use of government to impose morality is obviously an old American theme—whether in the abolitionist or temperance campaigns or even, to some extent, in Jim Crow laws and the civil-rights movement. A country that has amended its Constitution to forbid drinking alcohol is no stranger to big-government conservatism.
Of course, it is equally true that, since Franklin Roosevelt vastly expanded the federal government, conservatism has been associated with resistance to its power rather than encouragement of its deployment. The conservative wing of the GOP backed states’ rights against civil rights. Conservatives opposed the New Deal. Ronald Reagan equated Medicare with the end of American freedom. The difference today is that acceptance of big government has not meant mere acquiescence in the liberal orthodoxy, but a conscious attempt to use government for moral ends. As Republicans found that it was hard to reduce the size of government, they decided to stop worrying and deploy it for their own goals.
As a result, Republicans now support institutions they previously vilified: whereas they once wanted to abolish the federal Department of Education, now they want to wield it to advance their own agenda on educational standards and morals (no wonder that, in four years, Bush has doubled—yes, doubled—its budget). They are willing to concern themselves with aspects of human life that conservatives once believed should be free of all government interference. In his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush said, “I propose a four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar initiative to bring mentors to more than a million disadvantaged junior high students and children of prisoners.… I propose a new six-hundred-million-dollar program to help an additional three hundred thousand Americans receive [drug] treatment over the next three years.” And the conservative movement, begun partially in resistance to federal intervention in what was regarded as the states’ spheres of influence, today has endorsed dramatic federal supremacy over state prerogatives. The No Child Left Behind Act entailed a massive transfer of power from states to the federal government—not just a difference from Reagan-era conservatism, but its opposite.
No wonder the size of government has exploded. The federal government now spends around $22,000 per household per year—up from a little under $19,000 in 2000. Total government spending has increased by an astonishing 33 percent since 2000. This isn’t all about post–September 11 defense and homeland security. According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, since 2001, federal spending on housing and commerce has jumped 86 percent, community and regional development 71 percent, and Medicaid some 46 percent. One of Bush’s closest confidants and longtime chief of staff, Andy Card, described the president’s own vision of his role as president: “It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a ten-year-old child.… I know, as a parent, I would sacrifice all for my children.” In Bush’s case, paternalism isn’t a metaphor. It’s a commitment worth trillions of dollars of other people’s money.
The single most influential architect of this conservatism, Karl Rove, sees this as a virtue, not a problem. In a recent speech to conservative activists, according to John Heilemann of New York magazine, “Rove rejected the party’s ‘reactionary’ and ‘pessimistic’ past, in which it stood idly by while ‘liberals were setting the pace of change and had the visionary goals.’ Now, he went on, the GOP has seized the ‘mantle of idealism,’ dedicating itself to ‘putting government on the side of progress and reform, modernization and greater freedom.’ ” The model for Rove’s conservatism, in other words, is liberalism. The difference is merely how government directs its vast power, and for whom. In some cases, where the conservatism of faith seeks to use government power to protect the weak, it is indistinguishable from liberalism. It is no accident, I think, that left-liberals like Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader embraced the cause of Bush’s federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. And it is equally no accident that sincere internationalist liberals see much to admire in Bush’s hyperliberal foreign policy, or that long-standing campaigners for action against HIV/AIDS in the developing world have been pleasantly surprised by his activism and generosity. The fact that the president almost never publicly worries about levels of public spending and debt is also music to traditionally liberal ears. Only bitterness has prevented many on the left from seeing that this administration is on their side on many issues. Or, perhaps, that this president has brilliantly co-opted liberal rhetoric for big-government conservatism.
What other kind of conservatism is there? The alternative philosophical tradition begins in precise opposition to the new conservatives’ confidence in faith and reason as direct, accessible routes to universal truth. The conservatism of doubt asks how anyone can be sure that his view of what is moral or good is actually true. Conservatives of doubt note that even the most dogmatic of institutions, such as the Catholic or Mormon churches, have changed their views over many centuries, and that, even within such institutions, there is considerable debate about difficult moral issues. They understand that significant critiques of human reason—Nietzsche, anyone?—have rendered the philosophical quest for self-evident truth even more precarious in the modern world. Such conservatives are not nihilists or devotees of what Pope Benedict XVI has called “the dictatorship of relativism.” They merely believe that the purported choice between moral absolutism and complete relativism, between God and moral anarchy, is a phony one. Their alternative is a skeptical, careful, prudential approach to all moral questions—and suspicion of anyone claiming to hold the absolute truth. Since such an approach rarely provides a simple answer persuasive to everyone within a democratic society, we live with moral and cultural pluralism.
For conservatives of faith, such pluralism can allow error to flourish—and immorality to become government policy—and therefore must be limited. A conservative of doubt, however, does not regard the existence of such pluralism as a problem. He sees it as an unavoidable fact of modernity, an invitation to lives that are more challenging and autonomous than in more traditional societies. Even when conservatives of doubt disagree with others’ moral convictions, they recognize that, in a free, pluralist society, those other views deserve a hearing. So a conservative who believes abortion is always immoral can reconcile herself to a polity in which abortion is still legal, if regulated. Putting government power unequivocally on the side of one view of morality—especially in extremely controversial areas—must always be balanced against the rights and views of citizens who dissent. And, precisely because complete government neutrality may be impossible on these issues, government should tread as lightly as possible. The key in areas of doubt is to do as little harm as possible. Which often means, with respect to government power, doing as little as possible.
Doubt, in other words, means restraint. And restraint of government is the indispensable foundation of human freedom.
The modern liberal European state was founded on such doubt. In the seventeenth century, men like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke looked at the consequences of various faiths battling for control of the moralizing state—and they balked. They saw civil war, religious extremism, torture, burnings at the stake, police states, and the Inquisition. They saw polities like Great Britain’s ravaged by sectarian squabbles over what the truth is, how it is discovered, and how to impose it on a society as a whole. And they made a fundamental break with ancient and medieval political thought by insisting that government retreat from such areas—that it leave the definition of the good life to private citizens, to churches uncontaminated by government, or to universities that would seek and discuss competing views of the truth.
In the modern world, where disagreement among citizens is even deeper and more diverse than three centuries ago, conservatives of doubt see their tradition as more necessary than ever. As the fusion of religious fundamentalism with politics has destroyed Muslim society and politics, so, these conservatives fear, it threatens Western freedom as well—in subtler, milder, Christian forms. Conservatives of doubt are not necessarily atheists or amoralists. Many are devout Christians who embrace a strong separation of church and state—for the sake of religion as much as politics. Others may be Oakeshottian skeptics, or Randian individualists, or Burkean pragmatists, or libertarian idealists. But they all agree that the only solution to deep social disagreement is not a forced supremacy of a majority or minority, but an attempt to keep government as neutral as possible, power as close to people as possible, and as much economic power in the hands of the private sector as possible.
For such conservatives, divided government is therefore critical. Judicial checks on democratic majorities are as vital as legislative checks on executive abuse. (They are just as queasy removing such parliamentary checks as the filibuster.) The same goes for keeping policymaking as close as possible to states and localities. Why? Because human knowledge is fallible, and those closest to the issues are more likely to get solutions right than people a long way away. The notion that the federal government should actively endorse one religion’s perspective on social policy would appall such conservatives. So would the idea that individual states cannot legitimately experiment with policies on which there is no national consensus—such as stem-cell research or marriage rights.
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