In today’s Wall Street Journal, Sohrab Amari opines that progressives are targeting conscience by censoring leaders with unpopular religious opinions. This is a key front in today’s culture wars, and as usual, both sides fail to appreciate the question’s difficult nuances.
I think Amari is right to note that there are issues conservative religious people should be able to raise in the public square without vitriol. Hot button issues such as abortion and gay marriage remain subject to reasonable debate. Many, many religious people have views about those issues that are not palatable to progressives, and the progressives don’t have the only morally defensible views.
But one of the missing nuances is that the problem folks like Amari raise is about political censure, not legal punishment. The politicians highlighted in Amari’s article are not in any danger of criminal prosecution for their expressed opinions. Rather, they are unwelcome in progressive political circles, and progressive politicians criticize them in the public square.
It would be better, I think, if we could debate issues like abortion and gay marriage without overheated rhetoric from either side, but we’re still free to debate. Of course, one of the subtexts in pieces like Amari’s is that legal censorship and the suspension of freedoms of speech and association is just around that corner. There’s room here for an appropriate call for vigilance, but not for alarmism.
A much more difficult missing nuance is that neither Amari nor anyone else really believes that all religiously motivated speech should be expressed without any political censure — or indeed, without any legal censure. Amari is offended that Bernie Sanders publicly questioned President Trump’s nominee for Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought, over a blog post in which Vought said that Muslims “do not know God, because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.” Amari suggests “Mr. Vought’s was a particularly stark summary of the basic Christian teaching that faith in the God-Man is essential to salvation.” Amari finds Sanders’ rebuke of Vought as Islamaphobic “depressing” because he thinks “Mr. Sanders implied that a devout Christian can’t hold fast to his faith’s most demanding claims and at the same time exercise public authority with decency and honor. If you disagree with someone’s theology, in other words, it must mean you hate him.”
But what if Vought were writing about Jews? If Vought’s theology is consistent, he must think the same about Jews as he does about Muslims. For Vought, it must be the case that Jews “do not know God, because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.” I suspect that many serious Jewish people would — rightly — be horrified by such a statement. I also suspect that in a civil society after Auschwitz, we would — rightly — want our political leaders to censure other politicians who claim in the public square that all Jews “stand condemned.”
Now, Vought, I presume, would say that his statement about condemnation is taken out of context because he is referring to a particular doctrine of justification for sin and not to the political sphere. I suspect Vought’s understanding of prevenient or common grace, justification, eschatology, and so-on is confused, that he’s misusing some Pauline language here, and that he’s forgetting Romans 2. Most Christians in fact don’t hold these views as starkly as Vought or Amari suggest, even while still maintaining the salvific uniqueness of Christ (see, for example, the Roman Catholic Vatican II document Nostra Aetate and related statements: “The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth.”). But, fine — Vought can hold some kind of quasi-hyper-Calvinist view about all this if that’s what he thinks. Yet the observation that such extreme or at least poorly explained theological views can have serious implications when expressed by a public figure is not out of line.
Imagine, for example, that a political leader opined that
- White people should be allowed to enslave black Africans, because slavery is approved by the Bible and is the process God has ordained for the eventual Christianization of Africans.
- Women should not be allowed to vote or hold elected office, because God has ordained that only men should be political leaders.
- Marriage between races should be forbidden, because God has ordained differences between the races.
All of these, of course, were opinions previously held and vigorously defended in American politics, and encoded into American law. The defenders of these views often claimed they faced religious persecution because their views were being censured as society changed — and indeed we fought the Civil War over slavery, which both sides viewed in religious apocalyptic terms. Today, we would — rightly — want our political leaders to censure other politicians who express such views.
Or, perhaps closest to home, what if a political leader opined that “all non-Muslims are infidels and must either convert of face execution.” I’m pretty sure that Russel Vought himself would publicly censure this opinion, because it is of course the view of radical Islamic extremist groups such as ISIS. And Vought or anyone else would be right to censure this opinion, because it is abhorrent to a diverse society that values religious freedom. Moreover, expressions of opinion such as this one might even become legally actionable if they incite specific acts of violence.
We could go on with many more examples like these. The point is that Amari’s stark caricature of the problem is unhelpful. Religious people should be free to express specifically religious views in the public square, but at the same time a society of diverse people with different religious views can respond vigorously to religious views that clash with common public values. So long as we’re free to engage in such public debate, and so long as we’re free to form associations with like-minded people and to leave associations when disagreements become too basic, this is a feature of civil democracy, not a bug.
IMG SRC (Constantine holding a cross and sword)= Staro 2, Wikimedia Commons