This is from the ancient days, at The Valve (now defunct). It's an extended footnote to: Politics Beyond the Personal: Diversity, Identitarian Rhetoric, and Equality. If you take a dive into the WaybackMachine you can read this post in its original context, where it is followed by some comments.
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Now that we're going hot and heavy on religion, I'd like to take another look at Michaels, who devotes his 6th and penultimate chapter (of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality) to “Religion in Politics: The Good News.” The news is good because, Michaels says, at last he has found something that cannot be assimilated to the identity engine.
I don't have a well-formed argument in mind. I just want to raise some issues.
Religion vs. Culture
The first issue I want to raise is a rather pedantic one about the notion of culture that Michaels has been employing throughout the book. Consider this relatively early passage in the religion chapter. (p. 174):
Like ideological affiliation but more radically, religious identity is very different from racial or cultural identity. The big selling point of cultural identity (the selling point, really of the very idea of identity) is that cultures are essentially equal. That's what makes them different from classes, since classes are essentially unequal - they involve more or less money. And it makes them different from religions too, since if Christianity tells the truth, all other religions must be false.
I find this treatment of cultures and religions as different kinds of entities to be a bit odd. The oddity isn't quite of Michaels's own making - I do believe it to be inherent in the ideas Michaels is critiquing - but it is not clear to me why Michaels takes this at face value.
I would think that most professional social scientists and humanists regard religion as itself a cultural phenomenon - at least in large part, for there is a great deal of speculation these days about possible biological roots for religion. That is to say, from the point of view of these intellectual specialists “culture” is a category that subsumes religion and so cannot be in conceptual parallel with it, as Michaels treats it. I understand that Michaels is not analyzing the concepts of professional intellectual specialists, that he is analyzing politically active concepts, but the fact that he nowhere even acknowledges this somewhat different notion of culture, not even in a footnote, bothers me.
I note that, when intellectual professionals talk of culture in this way, so that religion is a facet of culture, they are also “standing outside” not only any particular culture, but outside of all cultures. Sometimes the stance of a hypothetical Martian anthropologist is invoked in this regard. I further note that, the concept of cultural relativism was originally an epistemological and methodological one. The idea was that you can't understand another culture in terms of your own; you must understand it on its own terms. In taking this stance the intellectual professional is not, of course, called on to adjudicate the truth claims made within various cultures and stated as universal truths.
Of course, the idea that professional intellectuals can “stand outside” has been called into doubt - an issue I've touched on in my earlier piece in this Michaels-fest. If you can't stand outside, then cultural relativism makes no sense as an epistemological principle. It simply collapses into an ontological notion, that all cultures are somehow equal.
So where is Michaels standing in The Trouble with Diversity? Is he attempting to stand outside the political field he is critiquing or is he critiquing it from within? It's not clear to me what kind of issue this is, whether it matters, and how it bears on Michaels's general treatment of religion. It's all a muddle.
Belief and Practice
Then there is the question that's arisen in the discussion Adam Roberts initiated on Dawkins and Eagleton: What is the relationship between statements of belief and religious practice? This is also at issue in Alan Wolfe's review in Slate:
Nor do all religions assign the same priority to belief as evangelical Christians do; observance, for some, is more important than belief, and so long as a society allows them to keep their strict observance, they can easily live together with others of different convictions. And even those who believe that Jesus is the way have come to accept that others can find God in other ways. Since Nostra Aetate (1965), the Vatican has worked assiduously to recognize the validity of Judaism to Jews, and the great bulk of American evangelicals, for all their talk of witnessing the faith, do not routinely tell their Hindu co-workers that they will burn in hell. In a world in which intermarriage is a fact of life and switching congregations hardly worthy of notice, religious diversity is an inescapable fact, not a logical impossibility.
It does seem to me that Michaels concentrates on doctrine. Consider this long paragraph (p. 180):
The problem, then, with thinking of religious diversity on the model of cultural diversity is that it turns what should be a debate about the validity of different religious beliefs into a consensus about their equal worth and thus obscures their relevance to public policy. It's precisely religion's claim to universality that makes what Neuhaus calls “religiously based public values” matter in American public life. By public, he means first that the religious component should not be privatized; can can't think of someone's faith the way Jefferson famously did when he remarked that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” If my neighbor's belief in God involves also, say, a belief that abortion is wrong, it does and it ought to affect me. It cannot be treated as a merely private fact about him, such as the fact tht he likes Chinese food or opera. And by public, Neuhaus also means that the religious arguments made in the public or political sphere should themselves be what he calls “transsubjective.” “Public decisions,” he says, “must be made by arguments that are public in character. A public argument is transsubjective. It is not derived from sources of revelation or disposition that are essentially private and arbitrary.” Identities can be private - it really does do me no injury if my neighbor is black. Identities are not transsubjective - the things that make me who I am need not make anybody else who she is. But beliefs, Neuhaus rightly insists, are neither.
It is one thing to point out that competing claims to universal truth cannot all be true. At most, only one claim can be true, though it is quite possible that none of the competing claims is true. That is one thing.
But it is not at all clear to me, given the kinds of examples that Wolfe has given, that the question of competing truth claims is the central political question. It is an issue, certainly, but it is not clear to me that it dominates the politics of religion. What are the practical limits of peoples willingness to accommodate competing beliefs and practices? I don't think they are unbounded, nor should they be, but I don't think we can determine those limits through logical examination of doctrine.
Fear of Fundies
Finally, let us consider the specific context in which Michaels is arguing. Though he tends to make his arguments in universal terms, i.e. about truth claims of any and all religions, he isn't arguing about politics in Japan or India or Brazil or France, for example. He's concerned about politics in the United States. In that context, the religious right is the focal point of religion in politics. That religious right consists largely of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, mostly, but not entirely, Protestant.
I've got this vague impression that the fundamentalists and evangelists we (the progressive left) find so fearsome are, to some extent, a figment of our imaginations. For whatever reason, we prefer to demonize them rather than dialogue with them. This is not something I'm prepared to argue in detail, but . . .
Consider the following paragraphs from an article Malcolm Gladwell published last year:
Not long ago, the sociologist Christian Smith decided to find out what American evangelicals mean when they say that they believe in a "Christian America." The phrase seems to suggest that evangelicals intend to erode the separation of church and state. But when Smith asked a representative sample of evangelicals to explain the meaning of the phrase, the most frequent explanation was that America was founded by people who sought religious liberty and worked to establish religious freedom. The second most frequent explanation offered was that a majority of Americans of earlier generations were sincere Christians, which, as Smith points out, is empirically true. Others said what they meant by a Christian nation was that the basic laws of American government reflected Christian principles-which sounds potentially theocratic, except that when Smith asked his respondents to specify what they meant by basic laws they came up with representative government and the balance of powers.
"In other words," Smith writes, "the belief that America was once a Christian nation does not necessarily mean a commitment to making it a 'Christian' nation today, whatever that might mean. Some evangelicals do make this connection explicitly. But many discuss America's Christian heritage as a simple fact of history that they are not particularly interested in or optimistic about reclaiming. Further, some evangelicals think America never was a Christian nation; some think it still is; and others think it should not be a Christian nation, whether or not it was so in the past or is now."
As Smith explored one issue after another with the evangelicals-gender equality, education, pluralism, and politics-he found the same scattershot pattern. The Republican Party may have been adept at winning the support of evangelical voters, but that affinity appears to be as much cultural as anything; the Party has learned to speak the evangelical language. Scratch the surface, and the appearance of homogeneity and ideological consistency disappears. Evangelicals want children to have the right to pray in school, for example, and they vote for conservative Republicans who support that right. But what do they mean by prayer? The New Testament's most left-liberal text, the Lord's Prayer-which, it should be pointed out, begins with a call for utopian social restructuring ("Thy will be done, On earth as it is in Heaven"), then welfare relief ("Give us this day our daily bread"), and then income redistribution ("Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors"). The evangelical movement isn't a movement, if you take movements to be characterized by a coherent philosophy, and that's hardly surprising when you think of the role that small groups have come to play in the evangelical religious experience. The answers that Smith got to his questions are the kind of answers you would expect from people who think most deeply about their faith and its implications on Tuesday night, or Wednesday, with five or six of their closest friends, and not Sunday morning, in the controlling hands of a pastor.
The entire article is worth reading. And you might want to take a look at some of the papers at Christian Smith's website.
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