5 Comments

David Nickol
February 16th, 2012 | 9:08 am

I wouldn’t have thought it possible for someone to say something strikingly original about the contraceptive mandate and religious liberty, but Patrick Deneen manages it in The Problematic Rhetoric of Religious Liberty. To use the old cliche, he is thinking outside the box—the box being classical liberalism, the overarching philosophy largely subscribed to by both American liberals and conservatives.

Michael PS
February 16th, 2012 | 11:49 am

Patrick Deneen has gone to the heart of the matter.

As Blondel pointed out, “one cannot think or act anywhere as if we do not all have a supernatural destiny. Because, since it concerns the human being such as he is, in concreto, in his living and total reality, not in a simple state of hypothetical nature, nothing is truly complete (boucle), even in the sheerly natural order.”

If we do not insist that religion is comprehensively, inclusively pertinent to the human condition, we shall, inevitably, acquiesce in the Liberal’s privatisation of religion.

Ray Ingles
February 16th, 2012 | 1:29 pm

Deneen writes:

It borrows strongly from sources of private religious devotion that lays no claim to public witness, in keeping with liberalism’s dominant mode of allowing acceptable religious practice so long as it remains outside the public square.

Is ‘specific government policy’ the whole of the ‘public square’?

Benighted Savage
February 16th, 2012 | 8:24 pm

Deneen writes:

“Catholicism is one of the few remaining voices of principle and depth that can articulate an forceful and learned alternative to today’s dominant liberal worldview. That it truncates those arguments for the sake of prudential engagement in a contemporary skirmish should not shroud the nature of the deeper conflict. That conflict will continue apace, and Catholics do themselves no favors if they do not understand the true nature of the battle, and the fact that current arguments aid and abet their opponent.”

Deneen’s version of liberalism is so vaguely stated it could easily be mistaken as characterizing the whole of the American Republic’s political and legal system since the 1789 Constitution. His dissatisfaction with how the American Experiment has articulated itself since seems to result in his criticism of Conservatives who — horror of horrors! — defend religious liberty from an overzealous Obama administration by referring to protections guaranteed in that Constitution under the First Amendment. Given all this and his closing bellicose rhetoric — “skirmish,” “battle” — I can only conclude that Deneen sees the American public square as a battlefield where the primary opponent is the US Constitution and the native traditions which nourish it.

Michael PS
February 17th, 2012 | 3:43 am

Benighted Savage

The root of the Catholic objection is well summarised by Hilaire Belloc’s description of the Anti-Clericalism of his day

“Such Anti-Clericalism proceeds, I repeat, from a recognition in the Catholic quite as much as in his opponent, that Catholic life is not normal to a society unless Catholic morals and doctrine be supreme therein…. She proposes to take in men’s minds even more than the place taken by patriotism; to influence the whole of society, not a part of it, and to influence it even more thoroughly than a common language. Where She is confronted by any agency inimical to Her claim, though that agency be not directly hostile, She cannot but oppose it. “