A reader writes:
I enjoyed reading your take on last night’s Democratic "faith-off." I know you enjoy it when others come around to your way of thinking, but in this case I must admit that I’m enjoying you coming around to mine. I’ve long felt that the left’s approach was as theocratic as the Right’s, although they were generally careful to label it something else. I don’t think Bush
has brought religion into politics, but he has removed the veil from it, first from his own party and now, by reaction, from the Democrats. It has always been about whose moral values would win out, and in each case those values are based upon faith, even if not by that name. (Even such secular areas as environmentalism are based in faith: that nature should be preserved, that the natural state is better, etc.).
Your book ("The Conservative Soul") sees the danger clearly coming from the right but you’ve missed it from the left. Either one would make a cruel and tyranical ruler. For that very reason I am very grateful that the founders of this nation saw fit to fill the Constitution with checks and balances designed to limit through tension the natural instincts and behaviors of men. The right can’t ever pull very far ahead because of the left, and vice versa. The annoying battles that we see take place in Washington are there by design and they serve us well.
I have never been very worried about your "Christianism" for this very reason. Sure, a dictatorship of such "Christianists" would be very bad, but not only does the Constitution forbid it but also the opposition, which would provide an equally loathesome dictatorship itself.
Yes, and no. I have a long record of opposing faith-based politics of the left. Of course, it has not always been explicitly Christian. The use of the state to coerce politically correct, i.e. morally righteous, thinking was, in many ways, my main obsession in the 1990s. I opposed all of it, from hate crime laws to "blank slate" social policy. There’s a reason the gay left disliked me. "Virtually Normal" is an attempt to wrest the argument for gay equality from the left. It’s a case for gay equality, but also a polemic against well-meaning, big-government liberalism. The reason my attention turned to the right in the new millennium is because they were in power and turned out to be even worse than the liberals before them, in their readiness to use government to save souls. My lodestars are limited government, individual freedom, and the fundamental understanding that the world will never be a much better place than it is today because of the actions of any government. The key is avoiding the damage that utopianism can bring and the certainties and delusions that a faith-based politics encourages – whether on the religious right or the religious left.
And, yes, the Constitution is the ultimate bulwark against both temptations. Which is why it remains, for me, the greatest small-c conservative achievement of the West. And it is also why I tend to get very exercized when people mess with it.
The Dish 