Scourage of liberalism?Ross Douthat and Damon Linker are having the first fruitful exchange of ideas I've seen on the web in some time. I will now ruin it with my own observations and additions. In response to the question Ross Douthat posed, about whether any believing Catholic can eat at the table of the modern liberal order that Linker promotes, Linker responded:

  Like every other citizen, you must be willing to accept what I call "the liberal bargain." In my book, I describe this bargain as the act of believers giving up their "ambition to political rule in the name of their faith" in exchange for the freedom to worship God however they wish, without state interference. What does this mean, in practical terms? It means that your belief in what the Roman Catholic Church believes and teaches is irrelevant, politically speaking. It simply shouldn't matter whether or not you think that justice has a divine underpinning, anymore than it should matter whether you prefer Jane Austen to Dostoevsky. In a word, liberal politics presumes that it's possible and desirable for political life to be decoupled from theological questions and disputes.- Damon Linker

That last sentence sounds good - doesn't it? It would be rather difficult for me to enforce a Trinitarian view of the Godhead on everyone in America. If that is what Linker means by theological dispute - than there really can't be much of an argument. 

 But what does Damon Linker mean exactly? Obviously it is silly to suggest that the question of whether justice has a divine underpinning should be of as much political relevance as whether I prefer this or that novelist. But that doesn't seem to be the heart of Linker's point - nor of much relevance.

I'm a bit baffled by the entire controversy about "theo-conservatism" and "thecons." The project that Fr. Neahaus seems to be working at is justifying the place of religious people at this rather cold meal served by the modern liberal state. That is a rather modest goal, no?  On the one hand, Neuhaus must overcome the objections of liberals who would like to see religion banned from the public square. On the other, he fights quietist Christians and traditionalists who think that that modern liberalism is just too dirty to touch. As a matter of practical politics, I'm totally with Neuhaus.

Linker does hit something rather interesting in his first reply.

And Catholicism? Since Vatican II--and especially since the start of Pope John Paul II's pontificate--the Catholic Church has staked out a novel position on these matters. Like most anti-liberal faiths, it has demanded a unity between politics and religion. But it has also maintained that Catholic moral teaching is perfectly compatible with liberalism--indeed, that it is the only solid and sure foundation for liberalism. By contrast, liberalism without Catholicism is, in John Paul's arresting phrase, "thinly disguised totalitarianism."

Catholicism does not so much reject what liberalism affirms as it denies the validity of the distinctions liberalism typically assumes--distinctions between private and public, secular and sacred, reason and revelation. In place of these distinctions, the Church proposes a higher synthesis, all the while claiming that such a synthesis produces a purified liberal politics. This is pretty much what the theocons propose for the United States.

I tend to think that this way of thinking about political life obscures far more than it clarifies. It thus also leads certain Catholics to misunderstand the character of modern politics--in particular, the possibilities it opens up and those it forecloses. - Damon Linker

 Linker is stumbling here as I think it is very difficult to deduce exactly what John Paul II taught on this matter - but he is right that the Church and Churchmen like Neuhaus have staked out a precarious and novel position that I'd like to call "semi-traditionalism" - if that weren't such an awkward term. There has been an uneven tradition, embodied perhaps first by Orestes Brownson, of lashing together a form of enlightenment liberalism to Catholic natural law teaching. It should be explored in depth sometime, without Damon Linker's "heavy breathing" or even the rhetorical demands of a debate held by the New Republic.

My own view is that this attempt to baptize modern liberalism is misguided. Like Daniel Larison, I hold out American small r-republicanism up a productive political model. There is no reason, historical or theological to turn mixed constituionalism into anything more than a wise and practical political form. There is no reason to believe that modern liberalism is ordained in some special way by God. We don't have to believe this in order to remain sane participants in civil society. But for some reason, certain Catholic neoconservatives and certain West Coast Straussians believe we do. I would say that they are promoting an ideology, not Catholic truth or (to use an ugly phrase) gospel liberalism.

In the latest installment, Ross Douthat finally verbalizes what religious conservatives have suspected.

The Constitution discriminates against government actions--banning guns, searching homes without a warrant, restricting the freedom of worship. It doesn't discriminate against government motives.

Yet that's precisely what you seem to think the "liberal bargain" is intended to do--to discriminate against religious motivations in politics in a way that it doesn't discriminate against, say, the motivations of a secular social engineer seeking an earthly utopia - Ross Douthat. 

There seems to be a fundamental suspicion that religious convictions are, for one reason or another (usually expressed in halting, or coughed over mumbling about separation of church and state) inferior to all other sources of political motivation. This hostility is usually unreflective. Anyone who observes modern politics with even slightly open eyes can see that politics are driven by the irrational: hatreds, resentment, group identification, tribalism (whether that be ethnic, religious or class), bigotry of all kings, wish fulfillment - and on and on. Liberals like Linker should thank Neuhaus. Linker may not like the catechism out of which Neuhaus teaches the peasants, but it is certainly more high minded than the "I'd have a beer with this guy. The other dude looks vaguely queer" approach to politics that predominates.