Religious Duty and Political Liberty

History would seem to have demonstrated the indispensability of religion to a free society. Yet the lessons of history are not always obvious. Supporters of democratic government and free markets cite the religious origins of the Founding Fathers' political philosophy, the role of religious ideals of freedom in social reform efforts like the civil rights movement, and the repression of religious activity by communist totalitarian regimes intent on depriving their citizens of any ideas that could be used as a basis for a moral critique of despotism. Nonetheless, like opposing theologians engaging in a battle of Biblical proof-texts, opponents of religion argue that it is detrimental to liberty, citing such historical events as the Inquisition, the current inter-religious strife in Bosnia and India, and censorship incidents ranging from the Catholic Counter-Reformation's "Index" to the modern American Religious Right's efforts to ban certain texts in schools. Rather than being able to point to immediately obvious evidence, as a scientist could to validate his hypothesis, defenders of religion are obligated to examine both the theory and the practice of religion and politics in order to elucidate the complex but essentially positive relationship between religion and a free and virtuous society.

However, this need for self-justification is not unique to religion, though our largely secular culture often implicitly supports the view that religion is the one element of our political and social ideology whose rational foundations are dubious. By contrast with this suspicion about religion's epistemological and political status, our so-called "civil religion," i.e. the belief in the desirability and superiority of the free society, is taken for granted (except perhaps in left-leaning academia). When some justification of the free society is called for, the ones most commonly heard are the rationality of the democratic-capitalistic system and the prosperity it brings (relative to other systems); yet these secular rationales are actually only explanations as to why some find the free society desirable or profitable, not real moral justifications. Freedom, democracy, capitalism, prosperity, and reason--the classic American creed--are taken for granted as natural and good goals of human activity, whereas in fact, as Richard J. Neuhaus writes,

Similarly, the above-mentioned traits of the free society are not in themselves a justification for its continuance, without some greater notion of virtues and values to which capitalism, rationality, and the like would be means. Democracy, reason, freedom, and the others are all procedural, not teleological. Rationality, for example, distinguishes capitalism from communism because the capitalist system, unlike the communist one, is not a self-destructing economic system that impoverishes society's productive element. Yet the ability of a social system to perpetuate itself efficiently and rationally is no guarantee of its virtuousness.

A social system requires a moral justification in order to have universally acceptable and objective legitimacy, for a merely utilitarian justification always begs the question "useful for whom?" and ends up making the society's validity dependent on its serving the self-interest of some of its members. By contrast, a society that sees itself as legitimated by a moral principle has a stable and universally binding ideal not dependent on political fashions and power relations. Looked at in this light, it is not religion but the free society that requires justification, and what is more, a justification in terms of something outside itself. Neuhaus writes:

Of central importance here is the notion of a society depending on an "authority not of its own creation." As the sociologist of religion Peter Berger has written, all cultures require a "plausibility structure," an implicit and generally unquestioned set of beliefs that makes the current social and cultural ordinary world seem, if not inevitable, at least not arbitrary or unstable.³ These beliefs are the society's legitimating authority. In a free and virtuous society, i.e. a society whose political and economic freedoms are intended as means to the moral freedom of its citizens, the legitimating authority must be a transcendent ethical one. What is meant by "transcendent" is the independence of these ethical ideals from any specific political order, and the resulting availability of these ideals to serve as a critique of the political order when it falls short of its moral goals. Since all purely man-made standards can be relativized simply by stepping outside the community that gave rise to them or by pointing out the limited jurisdiction of the human authority figure that established them, the transcendent ethical authority legitimating the free society is necessarily a supra-human religious one if it is to be enduring and universal. The free society is called free because the political, economic, and moral freedoms it safeguards are guaranteed to all its citizens as basic human rights. This political philosophy implies that no class of people is born to be subject to another, and that instead all are in fellowship in the service of one binding supra-human authority. Thus Tocqueville called the Christian influence on American life "one of the most favorable to equality of condition among men," because

Despite these arguments, some might contend that religion (a term whose etymology is "binding together") is in itself hostile to liberty. Though the authority of religious ideals relativizes and weakens that of human governments and thus helps prevent political tyranny, there remains the question of whether this same submission to religion merely replaces political with emotional and intellectual repression and servitude. This question arises when we forget that the relationship between liberty and duty is a dialectic and not a dichotomy.

In the political realm, one person's right to exercise a certain freedom implies the duty of others to refrain from infringing on his rights and his corresponding duty to respect others' rights in the same way. No liberty is secure unless it is an inalienable universal human right, yet its universality imposes on the possessors of that liberty a restriction in the form of a moral obligation to respect the rights of others.

Similarly, in the personal spiritual realm, the individual who recognizes his moral duty to God as supreme enjoys the ultimate and awesome liberty of possessing a conscience which he alone, unfettered by human decrees, is free to bring into harmony with the source of goodness. The free society rests on this reciprocal relationship between liberty and responsibility, which is the basis for democracy (political self-government) and capitalism (economic self-government). This moral freedom can only be generated by a religious sense of moral responsibility which gives the individual soul an irreducible transcendent importance (similar to the Puritan's treatment of the individual soul's struggle as involving the entire world's salvation). Peter Berger writes on this theme:

The political consequence of the individual's God-given responsible liberty is the free society, in which no one exists merely as a means to others' ends. Tocqueville wrote that religion allows a society to have less restrictive laws while preventing the spread of the idea that "everything is permissible for the interests of society."⁶ Human existence requires order, both in the individual life and in the society, but due to the acceptance of binding religious standards, this order can come from within the free conscience rather than being imposed from without by a paternalistic or oppressive human authority. This principle of responsible self-government distinguishes the democratic capitalist free society from both fascism and left-wing statist movements. It comes as no surprise that the most dangerous of such movements in our century--Stalinism and Nazism--both waged war on the Judeo-Christian religious heritage, Stalinism by outlawing all religion and Nazism by attempting to eliminate Judaism. Lord Acton summarized the free society's dependence on religion thus:

In theory, then, religion establishes and nurtures the liberty of individuals and of the society. However, the objection mentioned at the beginning of this essay has yet to be answered. Given religion's salutary effect on the development of a free and virtuous society, why have so many employed it as a tool of repression? In actual fact, religion has no monopoly on this phenomenon. Both religious and secular movements too easily change from philosophy to ideology, as the proponents of some noble and liberating cause come to identify themselves too closely with their righteous ideal and imagine that everything they do to further their own aims also furthers their cause. Religion is not immune from this general human weakness because religion, though rooted in the transcendent, is expressed through human institutions and activities. Rather than blaming religion for the arrogance of some of its representatives, one should recognize that the religious doctrine of human subordination to God provides the only firm critique of man's dangerous impulse to deify himself and dehumanize others. By calling us to rise above this fundamental flaw in human nature, religion enables us to imagine and work towards a free and virtuous society that truly promises justice and liberty to all.

Jendi Reiter (first place winner), is a 1993 graduate of Harvard College with a major in Comparative Religion and a minor in Chemistry. A grant recipient from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a National Merit Scholarship. She has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Southern Poetry and Grasslands Review.