Leo Strauss’s “Progress or Return” was on my mind this morning as I listened to NPR’s Weekend Edition. (I had re-read Strauss’s great essay this week with a class of students.) Unsurprisingly, there were stories and issues on the latter that might be illuminated by the former.
I was newly impressed by the phenomenological power of Strauss’s essay, a power that was illustrated by a great classroom discussion among students divided (even as individuals) between the two sensibilities. On the one hand, there is the sense of the goodness of some origin, some ancestral ways to which we must return by repenting; on the other, the sense of progress beyond the unenlightened past, the openness to new possibilities empowered by new ways and new technologies. Strauss’s view, I would say (to be ridiculously synoptic) is disapproval of the modern progressive sensibility as an incoherent hybrid of human science and divine infinity; he is at pains in particular to discredit progressive interpretations of Judaism. He does leave the door open for “Plato’s notion that indefinite progress is possible in principle” for philosophy (but not for politics, and thus not for society, morality, religion). Of course the wrench that Christianity threw into these works, from Strauss’s point of view, was to link speculative understanding with religious faith and thus compromise the barrier between progress and return, knowledge and obedience.
These considerations were on my mind as I heard an interview on NPR with the co-authors of the new American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, the famous Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) of Harvard, and his former student David Campbell, a BYU graduate, now Associate Professor at Notre Dame. Here is the blurb I found at Amazon:
“Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse, and remarkably tolerant. But in recent decades the nation’s religious landscape has been reshaped.
America has experienced three seismic shocks, say Robert Putnam and David Campbell. In the 1960s, religious observance plummeted. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, a conservative reaction produced the rise of evangelicalism and the Religious Right. Since the 1990s, however, young people, turned off by that linkage between faith and conservative politics, have abandoned organized religion. The result has been a growing polarization—the ranks of religious conservatives and secular liberals have swelled, leaving a dwindling group of religious moderates in between. At the same time, personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased while religious identities have become more fluid. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings surprising interfaith tolerance, notwithstanding the so-called culture wars.”
As you can see, the argument clearly leans towards “Progress” (in tolerance, interfaith ties, the freeing of politics from religion) and away from any “Return” to a religious grounding of moral and political order. The abandonment by many, especially the young, of organized religion is, it seems the fault of conservatives or reactionaries who presumed to link faith and politics. Likewise it is the fault of religious conservatives, apparently, that the fault line between believers and unbelievers is increasingly the same line that divides conservatives from liberals and Republicans from Democrats. (Note that this “Progressive” argument, like any good old-time American progressive argument, cannot avoid sounding a note of Return: Putnam and Campbell in effect call us back to a time when religion was not a political issue, and when believers and atheists were more or less equally distributed in both major parties. What they don’t seem to see as that this would require a Return to an earlier, fundamental consensus on an underlying settlement concerning the question Progress or Return.)
Another story heard on Weekend Edition concerned an upcoming rally at the Lincoln Memorial by a group of Democrat activists who call themselves “One Nation, Working Together.” It was mentioned in passing, about 11 times, that this rally was in no way a response to Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” (by Returning to God) rally, so it is clear it in fact is such a response. And is it any less obvious that the name is a direct counter to “One Nation Under God”? (Yes, I am aware that the “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s.)
Putnam and Campbell observe that today our most fundamental political cleavage is in an important sense stronger than our religious differences. If a person’s religious affiliation seems to be in tension with his or her political orientation, then the political orientation generally wins out. Conservative Catholics and Conservative Protestants seem to have more in common than conservatives and liberals of the same “denomination.” The authors of American Grace clearly whish that our political differences didn’t go so deep, and one has to sympathize with this sentiment. But is the cleavage between Progress and Return the fault of the political forces of Return that have become visible in the last generation? Or is it the work of many more decades, or even centuries, of Progress?
The notion of Freedom under God long seemed to amalgamate or even synthesize Progress and Return, and thus allowed Americans to avoid confronting the question: Progress or Return? But perhaps no longer, despite the progressive faith of some of our best political scientists.
October 2nd, 2010 | 4:25 pm
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October 3rd, 2010 | 12:59 am
Of course, you are right to suggest that the current divisions between Americans along political lines cannot be blamed just on the rise of conservative religion in the 1970s. Conservative religion was not the only ideology which began to grow rapidly in the 1970s.
I think it was during in the 1960s that leftism started to supplant the classical liberalism which had dominated mainstream “liberal” politics pretty much through the Kennedy years. Though leftism, or “progressivism” had been around for much longer, especially among intellectuals, the determination of 1960s radicals to dominate universities, often by becoming faculty, changed the university experience for later students.
I think this contributed to the phenomenon of young people rejecting organized religion in the 1990s. There are a lot of less-educated young people in the conservative evangelical churches in our town. Going to college may be a key to rejecting churches which tend toward conservatism.
Victor Davis Hanson comments on today’s “Angry America” and the “sermonizing generation”:
Ed Driscoll points out religious overtones at the One Nation rally today.
October 4th, 2010 | 11:03 pm
Putnam and his partner seem to be reaching with this, and into outright incoherence. Interfaith linkages are somehow becoming more important, but polarization is still increasing (with moderate religious types disappearing), and yet we must still all say that the culture wars are “so-called.” Oh, and THE single explaination of the decline of organized religion in the aughties was the linkage of evangelicalism and right wing politics? Well, it was a problem, but by no means the only one. Nor was it very avoidable. And no mention of the death of the mainline?
I’m sure Putnam bundles his concepts more subtly than Ralph reports here, but this is not promising. Sounds like complexified Alan Wolfe.
October 5th, 2010 | 6:43 pm
Personally I think that we should Return Progress back to God but that’s my Canadian .2 opinion but I’ll let God worry about “IT” cause I’ve got enough on my plate and I’m willing to bet that most of you do also. :)
Peace
October 5th, 2010 | 8:17 pm
I think the problem is much deeper than most people realize. Progressivism in its many forms began to invade organized religions some time ago. And since Progressive dogma has been taught in most universities for several decades, thier language and categories dominate everything. The end result is that few of us can even write or speak with any kind of moral coherence. We fall back on well used Progressive nostrums almost every time. Young people’s rejection of thier childhood religion reflects in my belief a rejection of Progressivism Light (which is what most orthodox religions are). There can be no “return” because in most people’s eyes their is nothing to return to. Progressive thought makes any alternative mode of existence impossible to imagine.
One of the reasons why Islam finds so many converts is that it has not succumbed to Progressivism.
October 6th, 2010 | 8:31 pm
As was pointed out in a recent First Things article, referring to America as a nation “under God” comes form the actual spoken version of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, inscribed on the inside wall of the Lincoln Memorial, and was NOT a creation of Congress in the 1950s. Furthermore, as Lincoln’s speech was a recapitulation of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, it was fitting that it should refer to God, since the words of the Declaration most often quoted refer to all men as being “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain Unalienable Rights”. The Declaration, not the Constitution, actually created the United States of America, and that founding document announces emphatically that this is a nation founded “under God”, based on the concept that the order of sovereignty goes, first, God, then the people God created and “endowed”, then the governments created, in turn, by the people. This is the rationale for the ability of the people of the United States to be able to reject allegiance to Britain, because the charter for their government can be revoked by the people, by authorty of the rights vested in the people by God.
The corollary of God as sovereign is that the people are accountable to God for the way they govern themselves. That is implicit in the closing words of the Declaration, in which the signers declare their agreement in the sight of God.
Abandoning the theory of divine sovereignty and divine endowment of rights opens the field of public debate for the socialist idea that men can aspire to control all circumstances of life, through the coercive instrument of government.
October 9th, 2010 | 10:27 pm
You said that you are aware that “under god” was only added recently; I feel compelled to ask if you were aware that the supreme court only allows it because it is “ceremonial deism”? In case you are unaware, the courts have ruled that it should be allowed in the pledge because it is purely traditional and has lost all religious meaning.
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