Some conservatives, I’m one, recognize that there are people on the right whose conduct and rhetoric contribute to the poisoning of our political discourse, but believe that people on the left are much worse.  Some liberals acknowledge that there are people on the left who contribute to the poisoning, but believe that folks on the right are much worse.  I suppose it’s natural to have an exaggerated sense of the faults of one’s political opponents and a diminished sense of the faults of one’s allies.

We see a bit of this in a column by liberal writer Dana Milbank published by the Washington Post in the wake of the shooting of a Family Research Council employee by someone angry at the organization for its stand on marriage and sexual morality.  But to his very great credit, Milbank pulls no punches in directly and sharply criticizing people and institutions on the liberal side for smearing as “bigots” and “haters” those who disagree with them.

In fact, Milbank goes so far as to say that “the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage, is right to say that the attack is the clearest sign we’ve seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end.”  The entire piece is worth reading.  Milbank’s central claim is sound.  But beyond that, his making it displays impressive integrity.  He surely knows that it will earn him a hefty share of the abusive rhetoric he rightly deplores.

Aurelian Craiutu yesterday posted an interesting essay on Tocqueville at the Library of Law and Liberty blog, covering just a single-page chapter on what the nineteenth-century observer termed “pantheism.” It’s from the second part of the voluminous Democracy in America, and often recieves less treatment than his more widely-read chapters on, for example, how Roman Catholicism’s features uniquely position that faith to offer a credible modern alternative.

By pantheism, Tocqueville did not have in mind the classical definition of this term, i.e. a doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe. He worked instead with a different meaning that had little in common with its philosophical components (emphasized by German philosophers) or with the literary ones (introduced by French writers). The key observation made by Tocqueville was that in democratic times, people have a strong tendency to espouse general ideas and search for rules “applicable indiscriminately and in the same way to several matters at once” (DA, III: 728).

Craiutu’s distinction is helpful, and there’s a rich potential tangent here about the value of pluralism in a world in which we are constantly extolling diversity while enacting greater homogeneity. But to the subject at hand: I would posit that this “pantheism” is still a kind of faith; it is not really in the same category as the quite-powerful “public opinion,” the social influence of which Tocqueville discusses elsewhere. It’s important to understand his view of “pantheism” (while admittedly not the pantheism of the philosophes or sects of antiquity) as still retaining some theological markings because, if one buys Tocqueville’s diagnosis, then he does not consider atheism (not, at least, ‘hard’ atheism, newer or older in variety) to be the primary threat to a culture that is already democratic. (more…)

Yesterday, in Al Smith Scandal?, Anna Williams wrote on the controversial invitation to President Obama to attend the annual Al Smith Dinner. Offering a more critical response are our friends at the Human Life Review, who just posted an article from the upcoming issue which, though written before the invitation, addresses the question.

In Sleeping With the Enemy?, George McKenna reflects on the Church’s relation with the state and particularly with politicians who promote policies in opposition to the moral law and the Church’s freedom. At this point in our history, he argues, a “certain kind of etiquette ought to prevail when representatives of church and state meet with each other.”

The generally philo-Catholic attitude of the last century’s Washington politicians may have produced an excessively cordial relationship between the two estates. One thinks of the annual Al Smith dinners, where presidents and would-be presidents roast and backslap each other as they confabulate with clergy, pundits, and celebrity lawmakers. (more…)

Russell E. Saltzman ponders the question of why God creates:

“What was God doing before creation?” is another stumper but here there are some answers—of a sort. Augustine flat declared it was impossible even to ask inasmuch as there never will be an answer, so there. I like Luther’s better. He ventured the opinion God was off cutting switches so he could flail us when we did ask. (Naturally, God would have had to first create the branches from which the switches were cut, indicating there was hardly a time when God was not creating, but maybe that’s something Luther meant to put across.)

“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”

-Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

Daniel Silliman tackles a problem familiar to this editor: Is it “Evangelical” or “evangelical,” majuscule or miniscule, capitalized or not? The problem encompasses other terms like “deist,” “atheist,” and “charismatic.”

In the chart above, Silliman shows how preferences have swung dramatically through the sixteen- and seventeen-hundreds. Nor, as he points out, do things get any clearer in the twentieth century.

:

Silliman concludes, “I don’t know how much can really be drawn from these graphs. Maybe there are some social facts to be cited as explaining one style or the other at one time or another. The bigger picture, I suspect, is that we just fuddle along. Which I take some peace in.”

That sounds right. We here at First Things capitalize “Evangelical,” not least because it so often appears alongside Catholic and we want a kind of visual parity, and also because they should not have the word to themselves. Catholics and Orthodox also can be evangelical, as we have long insisted.

Anyway, do read all of Silliman’s post (and browse the rest of his blog) here.

Why the Amish Population Is Exploding
Nate Berg, Atlantic Cities

Freedom’s Bundles and Lynchpins
Thomas Farr, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs

We Love Her, That Is All
Sally Thomas, Castle in the Sea

Can You Be a Catholic and Have a Questioning Mind?
Peter Berger, The American Interest

The Assumption of Bertha Huber
Austin Fleming, A Concord Pastor Comments