My pal David Rieff writes:
I haven't read the comments on your post about the 'religious v. secular people's attitudes toward torture' poll, but selfishly I would hope it would provoke a debate on what I believe at least to be one of the bedrock assumptions of conservatives --- even some conservatives who are not religious in any conventional sense, like my late father, who took this view on 'Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky' principles: to whit, that it is hard maintain a proper moral grounding without God.The poll hardly negates this argument (as I have written you before, implacable atheist though I am, I have no time for the 'New Atheists' like Dawkins or Christopher [Hitchens], and certainly do not believe for an instant that without religion things would be better). But the poll data at the least suggest that faith does nothing to protect people from the immorality of defending torture, and if this is true, then are you talking about faith being the bulwark against immorality generally or only against sexual immorality (e.g. Gay marriage, abortion, etc..)? I don't think it's a trivial question, nor do I think the (apparently) higher proportion of believers who are willing to condone torture can simply be attributed to the higher levels of support for the Iraq war and the Bush administration's policies toward the Jihadis, though this is undoubtedly at least part of the explanation, for, again, even if it is then this surely means that religion is not necessarily the sine qua non for a moral compass.
Great question. Now, before I respond, I want to let readers who may not know that David's father was the great Philip Rieff. Below the jump, I've posted some information about him that gives you an idea of where Rieff pere, a secular Jew, was coming from. I highly recommend you take a look.
Now, to David's questions and points. I think the distinction he draws about conservative/orthodox Christians seeing God as a bulwark against sexual immorality is not only spot-on, but helpful to us orthodox Christians (and I use "orthodox" in the ecumenical sense of all Christians who lay claim to the customary norms of Scripture and tradition, as opposed to progressives). It is all too obvious that whenever orthodox Christians today talk about the decline in "traditional morality," they're talking about sex and sex alone. How much more authentic and Godly would our Christian witness to this culture be if we spent as much time and effort speaking out against other forms of materialism and hedonism, which are equally as unbiblical! But then, that would probably involve having to do more self-criticism and repentance than we are comfortable with.
Having said that, it is regrettable, and possibly even tragic, that one's support of torture correlates with the conservatism of one's Christianity, and with the degree of commitment to one's faith. But on reflection, I don't think it's as surprising as all that. In the regional cultural milieu in which I grew up, the more churchy you were, the more conservative you were likely to be on political and social questions. When I was 12 or 13, and started reading the Bible myself after having had a kind of born-again experience, I was shocked to read material that directly and obviously challenged and rebuked the racial orthodoxies we white folks had uncritically embraced. I can't exaggerate to you how shocking this was to me. How could we call ourselves Christians and live with this blatant contradiction of our faith? But we did, and we didn't even worry about it -- and that was a case that is to my mind a lot less morally complicated than waterboarding a jihadi terrorist.
It's not hard to come up with examples, historical and contemporary, of belief in God not restraining the immoral behavior of His people. This is nothing new; there's a reason God had to send the prophets to Israel. But consider this: Martin Luther King Jr. (whose faith did not constrain his own adulteries) made powerful use of the same Christian teaching to speak prophetically to American Christians, especially Southern Christians, attempting to show them how the way they treated their black brothers and sisters could not be reconciled with their professed belief in Jesus Christ as Lord. Around about ninth grade, I came across a book in the school library about King, read it and thought, "Well, of course! What he's saying makes perfect sense as a Christian." And I knew that God would hold us accountable for what we did, or didn't do, regarding our racial attitudes.
Now, obviously everything depends on which god, or which version of God; it was easy to find Southerners back in the day who sincerely believed that segregation was divinely ordained. Also, we all know believers who are scoundrels, and nonbelievers who are righteous. It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that for every Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Maximilian Kolbe, you have a thousand, or ten thousand, weak or indifferent Christians who risked nothing to stand up to evil. None of these individual examples are decisive on the question David raises: Is religious belief the sine qua non for a moral compass?
The question, I believe, is one of logic, and of course I take the side of Rieff pere, and Dostoevsky: If God doesn't exist, then anything is possible. That is, without an objective and transcendent source of truth and morality, an absolute standard by which our own conduct is judged, then morality becomes whatever works, whatever we like, or whatever we can get away with. Who can say what is ultimately right, and what is ultimately wrong, without reference to God? Torture is always wrong, you say, to which the interrogator responds, "Says who?"
And this is where we get to a specific point Philip Rieff made in his critique of our therapeutic culture: the "remissions" (that is, the "thou shalt nots") of a cultural order must be experienced as binding. That is, it's not enough to say, "God forbids this;" those who believe it must also believe that at some point, they will be judged for violating the divine command. If they don't, then the moral prohibition loses its ability to restrain.
This is important not when it's easy to do good, but when doing the right thing is hard. Take abortion. Some cynics say, not without good cause, that for most people, abortion is wrong except in three cases: Rape, incest, and My Situation. It's easy for a Christian to believe abortion is a grave evil, if not faced with the prospect of abortion for herself, or his or her daughter. But what happens when the Christian's 14 year old daughter gets pregnant by her boyfriend? What happens when the Christian herself is raped, and made pregnant? In those cases, choosing life would be much more difficult. This is when the divine law is especially necessary to keep us from doing evil when it appears to us that from that evil, much good can come. [UPDATE: Mark Shea quotes Chesterton: "We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong."]
And so it goes with torture. I believe there are non-religious reasons that one can and should oppose torture. But in a psychological climate of intense fear, it may well be that the only thing that keeps us from doing evil is that we fear the judgment of Almighty God more than anything else. In fact, I can think of specific instances from my younger years, which for modesty's sake I won't recount, in which it was only the fear of God that kept me from doing something that would have been profoundly immoral, and in another case, to turn away from a particular besetting sin.
In conclusion, even though there are many examples of righteous unbelievers, and regrettably countless examples of unrighteous believers, I believe that human nature being what it is, belief in God is, in fact, the sine qua non of a moral compass, at least on a philosophical level. If God does not exist, how are we to know what is permitted and what isn't, and more to the point, what authority can restrain the will to power if not the fear of God?
Your thoughts welcome. Please, let's keep this philosophical, and not snide or snipey. Below, the Philip Rieff stuff I promised:
From Richard John Neuhaus's remembrance of Rieff upon his 2006 death:
For all the intellectual panache, however, there was something more sobering about Philip Rieff, for which the right word may be prophetic. While we were preoccupied with our therapeutic games, it went largely unnoticed that our culture died some while back; the ideas, habits, and traditions that sustained and vivified it have been shattered and can't be put back together. Culture began with renunciation and ended with the therapeutic renunciation of renunciation.Rieff, a Jew, believed that Christianity supplied the best bet for a sustainable culture, but that's all gone now. In a 2005 interview with the Chronicles of Higher Education, he says he does not believe that an authentic religious culture could be resurrected, no matter how hard we might try. Following Marx, Weber, and Freud, he argues that modern prosperity, cities, bureaucracy, and science have completely transformed the terrain of human experience. People who try to practice orthodox Christianity and Judaism today, he says, inevitably remain trapped in the vocabulary of therapy and self-fulfillment. "I think the orthodox are role-playing," he says. "You believe because you think it's good for you, not because of anything inherent in the belief. I think that the orthodox are in the miserable situation of being orthodox for therapeutic reasons."
I'm still reading the last book, but I think Rieff is saying that it's all over. I don't think he's right about that. I hope he's not right about that. But he could be right about that. At the very least, it is a possibility to be considered when proposed by one so thoughtful as Philip Rieff. Christ never said of Western Civilization that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
I don't think Rieff was right about the orthodox "being orthodox for therapeutic reasons," because if that were true, it would be far easier in this world not to be an orthodox Christian (whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant). But I think his insight is worth thinking about in context of this torture argument: are we who count ourselves among the orthodox truly committed to Christian orthodoxy, as we understand it, or do we only cite orthodoxy when it's easy, i.e., when it conforms to what we already believe, or wish to believe?
Also, here's a link to a 2005 Guardian interview Rieff did, cited in Neuhaus's post. Excerpt:
Rieff, it should be explained, sees the world as having developed through three successive cultures, or what he calls "ideal types". "The first, historically, is the pagan, or pre-Christian world," he says. "The second the Christian culture and all its varieties. And finally the present Kulturkampf, which is the third culture."Are we, then, in a state of barbarism? "No, we're not. But we're near it because we treat the past with considerable contempt. Or nostalgia. One is as bad as the other."
Is there any way back, or around the barriers that confront us? "I don't know whether what I've called the second culture can survive as a form that is respected and practised."
And is the third culture the end of the road? Rieff is not to be drawn into prophecy. "I don't know. It remains to be seen." He says it with the air of a man who only knows that he won't himself be around to see what the future holds.
What, then, is it about the third culture that is so ominous?
"It's characterised by a certain vacuity and diffidence. The institutions which were defenders of the second world, or second culture - I think cultures are world creations - have not offered the kind of defence or support that would have been more powerful than therapeutic forces. So Christianity becomes, therapeutically, 'Jesus is good for you.' I find this simply pathetic."
Are therapeutic cultural drives, then, what one might describe as hedonistic?
"Yes, many of them are pleasure driven. But they are not unintelligent. They may be pleasure driven but there's a limit to their stupidity. They don't act in a way that is blatantly destructive or self destructive. Nor do they ostentatiously deny the past. Christianity in America, for example, has in one sense never been stronger. But I don't believe that 'Jesus is good for you, Christ is good for you' is good Christianity. It's therapeutic Christianity. You can find therapeutic motifs in dozens of examples of Christianity around you today."
His own president, of course, is one such example.
"Oh, absolutely. And proud of it. And he's perfectly sincere. He is president and this is a prime example. I am not going to hammer away at this naive man's beliefs. The prey is too easy."
So is Philip Rieff a pessimist?
"I don't know that I'm pessimistic. Therapies are better than nothing".
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Rod, would you not agree that a man who is treacherous and a liar in his most intimate human relationships, and who is dishonest in his professional life, has ALREADY embraced a morality that "amounts to doing whatever you can get away with and whatever your conscience will permit you to do"? Murder would just be icing on the cake. It's not as if he'll become a good man by deciding not to commit murder. He'll still be a poor excuse for a human being, just not a murderer--yet.
And a dedicated craftsman/artist who envies a hack has left the path of wisdom. Socrates already pointed this out, a long time ago, and he didn't believe in a Christian God. The misery of being a bad human being is far greater than any apparent benefit that can be won by doing evil. A wise man knows this. When you begin to wonder if it's true, you need to check your premises.
I used to think, as you do, that people have to have their consciences formed through punishment and threats, to induce fear, or else they'll grow up to be monsters. Fortunately, I changed my mind about that when I had children of my own. What really forms a conscience in a person is the experience of being loved and cared for, which awakens the capacity to love in return and to see that other people are human like yourself. Teaching children the skills and habits they need to become effective adults is part of that love. But fear and pain aren't very good teaching tools for any constructive purpose.
I find Dr. Science's commentary entirely compelling, undoubtedly because it's just what I would say. The causality goes pretty much the way he describes. The fault I find in Rod's rebuttal is that I don't regard the fear of punishment as part of the continuum of moral development. Behavior based on a desire to do good does not develop from one based on fear; such a desire replaces motivation stemming from a desire not to be punished.
We regard fear of punishment as "normal" for children or all of us because nearly all culture inculcates such fear; that doesn't make it right. Insofar as behavior identical to that stemming from a desire to do good comes from fear of punishment by God, it cannot be regarded as particularly "moral"--it's just fear and anxiety. And I cannot applaud a system that creates a certain behavior out of fear, even if dressed up as fear of the Lord, just because the behavior corresponds to my idea of right and wrong. We have to get beyond abuse as a way to deal with ourselves and others.
A more interesting question would be how did Rod move from acting out of fear to acting out of a desire to do good. I am myself not certain of what I mean by that, but it's very clear that many people in the world have no fear of eternal punishment and act in what look like very moral ways--their conscience appears to be identical to that of a good Christian. So how's that happening?
sigaliris
It seems to me there's just a big bell curve, with the fat section composed of conformists doing what SOCIETY requires, although they call it "God." At one end, you have the people society condemns as criminals and the damned. At the other end, you have a few saintly souls who are equally alien to the fat middle. I don't think one can rightly point to them as what all Christians aspire to be, however. If all Christians were actually striving toward that goal, this would be a very different-looking world.
That's essentially what I said in some other post on this discussion, although I forgot about the people at the bottom of the curve. Something like 80-90% of everyone are just following some vague morality laid out to them by someone, they're not really sure whom.
Some people call this God, some people explicitly reject that, and yet they'll believe almost the same thing except what to do Easter morning.
There is another 5-10% who actually sit down and reason out morality. They might do it by reading religious books, or philosophical texts, or simple rational thought. I, as a Christian, believe we are created in the image of God and that human beings inherently can reason out the rules. But regardless of the reason, people tend to come to the same general principles, even if the religious people add 'believe in God' and the atheists add 'don't believe in God' to those rules.
And, of course, there are the people with no morality, who don't care about other people at all. Many of them just ignore rules, others are 'rules lawyer' and attempt to follow the letter of rules as opposed to the text, and still others have found (Or even founded) a set of 'rules' that says they are correct, like Social Darwinism.
Oddly enough, this is true of laws, too. And, really, everything. Most people accept things as they are, and a minority doesn't and attempts to reason things out and live their life better, or make society better(1), which another minority attempts to grab all they can. (And sometimes that last group comes into power and breaks everything.)
And the fact that a political party has hijacked part of this 'middle', by the use of money and promise of power and influence for certain church leaders, and has now educated some of this middle to serve their own purposes is rather dangerous, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of people now think torture is acceptable.
The fact these people claim to be 'Christians' is not really relevant, except in the damage it's doing to the church. As the people damaging the church do not actually care about 'the church', but their own political power, that is not relevant to them.
Seriously, people, this isn't some hyperbole. I'm hoping this poll open up the eyes of right-leaning Christians as to what what's going on...the Republican party is essentially hijacking their members and teaching them whatever they want, in the guise of Christianity. I can't underemphasis exactly how dangerous this is for Christianity.
1) Don't always think this is a good thing. We know what the road to hell is paved with.
Dr. Science is right, what we're dealing with here is authoritarianism. Other useful resources on that question (although I expect that Dreher probably disdains them) are Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of the stages of moral development, and George Lakoff's distinction between those who see God as an "angry father" and those who see God as a "nurturing parent."
What the Pew poll reveals is a contradiction at the heart of Dreher's grand project, i.e. vindicating the "Truth" that he wants us to recognize as standing above human desire and the institutions and values of a culture -- particularly a decadent culture like ours. The problem is this: As I discussed in an earlier reply above, uou have to refer to some authority for an account of that truth. God may or may not speak directly to individuals, but He/She speaks to humankind as a whole only through scriptures, churches, or traditions, and there is no escaping the problem of having to choose which of these to accept as the true custodian of God's commands.
In calling on people to bow to the Truth, then, Dreher is actually calling on them to defer to some authority that claims to be in possession of that Truth (or of some means for reliabily discerning it). Unfortunately, the people most likely to defer to authority are authoritarian people, and -- whether you explain this in Altemeyer's terms, or Kohlberg's, or Lakoff's, or someone else's -- those are also the people most likely to support or tolerate abuses of authority, like government-sponsored torture. (Or church-sponsored, in an earlier era.)
In short, you can't really have the deference to the "Truth" without deference to authority, which you can't have without authoritarianism, which you can't have without people who are OK with a U.S. president running a torture regime. So when Rod Dreher reads the Pew numbers and gets a sinking feeling, he is merely reaping what he is helping to sow.
Rod, the notion that we need fear God's judgment in order to be moral simply doesn't strike a chord with me. I beleive deeply in God, but I simply don't believe that God punishes anyone. I believe that God is love, and practices total and perfect forgiveness of all sinners, regardless of how deep and profound their sin. I think that all the religious nonsense about God's judgment, hell, vengeance, etc., is just human beings projecting their own sinfulness upon God. Thus, to be moral out of fear of God's judgment is actually itself a form of sin, of "missing the mark", of Godlessness. Yes, it might stop some people from doing bad things, but it doesn't make them into Godly, loving people, just fearful people who imagine God is ready to pounce on them if the do the wrong thing. This produces a perverted form of religious observance that lacks true love and the saving Grace of God's unconditional forgiveness. Likewise, it produces a social morality that cannot produce a truly mature, human, loving world.
This is not to say that there are no natural consequences to doing bad things, but they are not God's punishment, they are just the results of inflicting harm on oneself and others. Murdering another person harms oneself far more than it harms the other person, in my view. Not seeing that is what causes people to do evil.
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