Making Religion the Problem
International New York Times | 2 April 2015
One of the issues that I didn’t get around to in the last two weeks, while writing way too many words on the question of whether economics or culture explains the decline of marriage and the two-parent family in America, is the question of what, if anything, conservatives actually think we should do about the problem if it is primarily a cultural one. This is the question raised, for instance, by this Damon Linker column, which argues that “scolds” of the right don’t have a plan, beyond pointless hectoring, to build the kind of familial-communal order we’d prefer.
Linker’s question deserves a long and detailed response. (This piece from
my friend Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry is a beginning, but it doesn’t have the
insane prolix detail that I’d like to eventually bring to bear). But
since this week we’re all debating — well, or “debating,” in many cases —
religious liberty in an age of same-sex marriage,
I’d just make a modest point that’s specific to the current
controversy. Whatever else cultural conservatives would have us do to
mend the country’s social fabric, they wouldn’t have us take
the path that’s opened up during various Obama-era debates, in which
traditional forms of religion (my own included) are increasingly
treated, in law and culture, as an dangerous obstacle to policy
objectives and a major social problem to be solved.
Right
now, if you look around the United States, you’ll see a landscape in
which religious practice has declined and traditional religious
institutions have weakened relative to where things stood sixty years
go. This decline is a complicated thing; the story could fill a book.
But the weakening of institutional faith is clearly entangled, in
various ways, with changes in family structure and communal life,
particularly among the working class.
At the same time, traditional religious institutions and communities still exist, as a kind of weakened counterculture, even as the various experiments in more “liberal” and “modernized” forms of faith have — so far, to be fair; the future is unwritten — been less than successful overall. (And not only within Christianity.) These more traditional communities don’t usually seem to have much cultural influence beyond their immediate borders; in what I’ve termed “the religious penumbra”, the expanding cultural space where people sort-of believe but don’t really practice anymore, the social trends are mostly depressing. But where a religious counterculture does have real purchase on people’s lives, it seems — yes, selection effects matter, and causality is complicated — to have a strongly positive influence on the kind of indicators, marital and otherwise, that form the heart of both Charles Murray and Robert Putnam’s arguments about America’s social crisis. (And for the purposes of debates about culture and economics, it’s worth stressing that the social impact of religious practice, per Putnam and others, seems to get stronger as you move down the ladder of class.) The paradigmatic, though also outlying, example of this pattern is Mormon Utah, but the same effect shows up for less geographically-concentrated communities: Weekly mass-going Catholics, frequent church-going evangelicals and other groups like them are more likely than others to be outliers and exceptions amid the broad post-1960s social trend.
Now these
conservative communities are, again, very much a counterculture, and
their immediate prospects for growth are not necessarily bright. And the
fact that their weakness is clearly driven by both the sexual
revolution and certain socioeconomic trends makes it complicated and not
entirely intuitive to propose their ideas as a solution to those same dislocations; at the very least, there’s a much longer conversation there, and in the meantime everyone should become a Mormon isn’t the first answer to the social crisis that I’d urge readers to ponder or policymakers to embrace.
But going forward
people in positions of authority, political and cultural and corporate,
do have a choice about how to deal with these kind of communities, their
members and their institutions and ideas … and particularly how to deal
with the fact that many of those ideas really are in tension with the
elite consensus, and sometimes the culture-wide consensus, on issues
related to sex and marriage and abortion and homosexuality and more.
One possibility, the one I favor and have argued for (for
self-interested but hopefully principled reasons as well), is basically
to allow a fairly wide latitude for these religious subcultures, with
legal protections and a general tolerance that makes it relatively easy
for the observant and traditionalist not only to worship and find
fellowship but also to run businesses, schools, colleges, hospitals,
etc. in accordance with their beliefs.
The other
possibility — with, yes, a range of scenarios in between — is to treat
these subcultures as dangerously oppressive forces even in their
weakened state, and take steps to weaken them further and/or force them
to change. Some of those steps would be undertaken in the name of
avoiding any imposition of religion on customers or employees of
religious-run institutions; that’s basically today’s liberal argument
regarding Hobby Lobby or the Little Sisters of the Poor or the
occasional wedding vendor or luckless pizzeria owner, and it’s slowly
being extended to debates over hiring at Catholic schools, the
leadership of campus religious organizations, etc. Then other steps,
like some of the possibilities I listed in Monday’s post,
could be undertaken as a more direct attempt to undercut traditionalist
institutions’ financial viability, in ways that would make it much
harder for them to operate the way religious groups are accustomed to
operate today. And then other steps still … well, we’ll leave it there.
This second,
higher-pressure approach need not be driven by an outright hostility to
these faiths and organizations and churches; up to a point, at least,
some of the people involved would probably argue that a process of
slowly-ratcheting legal and social pressure would be good for
Catholics or Presbyterians or Orthodox Jews in the long run, because it
would encourage them to finally drop the outmoded ideas, the relics of
barbarism, standing in the way of their long-term cultural flourishing
and demographic success. (Just as Mormonism did just fine after
jettisoning polygamy under political pressure, these voices would argue,
today’s traditional churches could get back to playing a helpful, healthy role in American civic society
just as soon as they realized that they didn’t need to be so backward
on a few issues related to sexuality and wedlock.) But this attitude
would also coexist, as it already does, with a more secularist
sensibility that regards the societal benefits of faith as an
ineffective and often oppressive substitute for a well-functioning
Scandinavian-level welfare state, and that would be
essentially indifferent to what happened to traditional churches after they were marginalized or induced to change their moral vision or theology.
From the perspective
of the cultural conservative, though, inclined (whether for reasons
sociological or theological) to believe both that the traditional moral
vision can’t be unraveled so easily and that once effectively unraveled
it’s unlikely to deliver the same kind of human goods, the motives and
expectations behind the pressure on conservative religious bodies are
somewhat irrelevant. No matter the long term intentions, the immediate
reality would be that our society’s leaders and lawmakers would be
treating one of the forces currently holding (however weakly) social
disintegration at bay as a bigger social problem than the disintegration
itself; they would be choosing the consolidation of the cultural
revolution even at the expense of the goods that the revolution’s
holdouts and dissenters still seem to deliver to an awful lot of people.
And whatever else we
might do about America’s social crisis, the cultural conservative
would submit, rather vehemently, that maybe we shouldn’t do that.
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