Why Conservatism Needs the Religious Right

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:01:00 -0400

In his book The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse , legal theorist Steven D. Smith coined the term “secular cage” to describe the Enlightenment ideal of a value-neutral public square where religious and philosophical beliefs are off limits. The construction of the cage originally had an elegant rationale: if everyone were to lay aside their subjective opinions and commit only to objective, verifiable facts, then the age of ideological religious wars could be left behind and universal consensus about the common good could be achieved at last.

After centuries of effort, this promised consensus remains as elusive as ever. The cage is rusty, and its inhabitants are restless.

Smith persuasively argued that the project was destined to fail from the start. As it turns out, the ideas of secular public discourse, whether embodied in quasi-religious expressions like “individual dignity,” “equality,” and “human rights,” or in mountains of purely scientific data, are not as objective as we might have supposed. The empirical data and the high-sounding terms alike are, he demonstrates, empty vessels into which public intellectuals, academics, pundits, politicians, and journalists pour their own meanings”meanings underwritten by the very sort of metaphysical orientations the cage was meant to exclude in the first place.

In other words, the secular cage operates as an intellectual black market. Governed by oppressive regulations requiring ideologically neutral arguments, people are forced to smuggle their deepest normative convictions into the public square in steamer-trunks stamped with politically correct slogans that pass scrutiny with customs agents from the Department of Secular Discourse. Invoking “equality” or “human rights” usually does the trick. But there is nothing secular about the contents of the trunks.

Literary theorist and scholar Stanley Fish agrees with Smith: “Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation”secular reasons”and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat likewise observes that secularism hasn’t given up on religious ideology at all. It relies on metaphysical notions bequeathed by earlier generations. “The more purely secular liberalism has become,” he concludes, “the more it has spent down its Christian inheritance.” Elsewhere, he elaborates:

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Why Conservatism Needs the Religious Right