Conservatives rightly recognize that the common good, and thus a coherent politics, requires a shared definition of virtue derived from a shared moral vision and set of values, which in turn must reflect the traditions and character of the nation and its culture. To support human flourishing, that definition of virtue must be one that gives purpose and meaning to life. That purpose and meaning must arise from the fulfillment of obligations and duties rather than merely the enjoyment of privileges and rights, constraining individual behavior and orienting it toward cooperative and productive pursuits.
In American politics, conservatives have tended to insist that religion must supply this call to virtue. We quote frequently from John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 1992, Russell Kirk argued:
If a culture is to survive and flourish, it must not be severed from the religious vision out of which it arose. The high necessity of reflective men and women, then, is to labor for the restoration of religious teachings as a credible body of doctrine.
Writing recently in First Things, Senator Josh Hawley made the explicit case for “Our Christian Nation”:
America as we know it cannot survive without biblical Christianity. The rights we cherish, the freedoms we enjoy, the ideals we love together—all are rooted in and sustained by the tradition of the Bible. Christianity is the electric current of our national life. Turn it off, and the light will fade.
The problem is that this view no longer fits the national character. We live in an era in which faith has fallen out of fashion. I don’t suppose that is an especially controversial statement, but the data is worth reviewing briefly. According to Gallup:
- By more than three-to-one, Americans say that religion is losing its influence on American life. The view is becoming more prevalent with time, suggesting an accelerating decline.
- The share of Americans who say they have a great deal or quite a lot of faith in the church or organized religion has fallen by half, from 65 percent in the 1970s to 32 percent last year.
- Recently, the share of Americans who say they belong to a church or synagogue fell below 50 percent for the first time. In 1992, belonging was the norm, by 70 percent to 30 percent.
We also have a more acute problem, one that requires particular attention: the aggressive secularism of our highly educated managerial elite, which controls the commanding heights of our economy, culture, and media. Many forces play a role here, but I find wholly inadequate the most common explanation, what Kirk called “scientism—that is, the popular notion that the revelations of natural science, over the past century and a half or two centuries, somehow have proved that men and women are naked apes merely.” The elite are by no means unique in their access to this information, but they are clearly unique in their disdain for appeals to faith.
The better culprit is our meritocracy.
The modern meritocracy selects for those who are relatively more adept at reasoning, and especially adept at getting their way through reason. This aptitude makes them hostile to faith, which might disrupt their monopoly on truth. If they were forced into a debate that required them to draw upon faith, they would be unlikely to prevail. Better to chuckle condescendingly.
Further, as the self-anointed winners in modern America, the elite have every incentive to embrace a belief system that positions them as authors of their own destiny. Not only do they deserve all that they have achieved, but they can attribute those achievements to specific decisions made and actions taken. God did not ace the SAT or make partner in six years—they did. Why should he have anything to say about the power they now wield?
Elites end up not just lacking in faith, but hostile to it. They cannot see faith as a complementary means of seeking truth. It must be the antithesis, inherently unreasonable. A case supported by a faith-based argument is presumptively wrong, a concession that no colorable argument from reason is available. Reason must be on the other side. The person making the argument must be unreliable as well, because the resort to faith indicates either an inability or an unwillingness to be reasonable.
Arguments from faith are not merely unpersuasive within the cult of reason that holds overwhelming power in our society. They are disqualifying.
Conservatives have not handled this challenge well. The Reagan era’s fusionist coalition pushed conservative leaders aside to advance its moral case on so-called social issues, while economics became the domain of a fundamentalism that worshipped the free market and its outcomes as moral ends in themselves.
On the social issues, conservatives have lost repeatedly and decisively. When they have won, the winning arguments were not moral ones. The welfare debate turned not on appeals to virtue, but on careful analyses of economic incentives and poverty statistics. The victory in Dobbs was the consequence not of changes in American views on the regulation of abortion, but of legal scholars’ prevailing in a debate about constitutional interpretation and Supreme Court justices’ retiring and passing away at certain moments.
Has a religious argument based in Christian morality won in American politics in the past fifty years? I cannot think of one instance.
Conservatives’ primary response to the challenge posed by secular society has been a two-step: First, re-Christianize society; second, instill conservative virtue. Both Kirk and Hawley call for this program. But as a practical matter, it results in conservatives sidelining themselves pending a religious revival that is nowhere in sight.
As a result, the American right-of-center as a political force in the public square has degenerated into a sterile message driven by the economic libertarians for whom markets are sublime and liberty is synonymous with virtue. The term “right-of-center,” rather than “conservative,” is appropriate here, because the ideology has ceased to be conservative at all. Even the notion of a common good that politicians should define and pursue has become taboo.
Recall Donald Trump’s 2016 inaugural, known as the “American Carnage” address. It is concerned with one thing: power. “We are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.”
Recall Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley on the campaign trail last spring. “The goal of our Declaration of Independence is simple,” DeSantis said. “We, the American people, win. They lose.” Not to be outdone, Haley delivered her own major policy address during the primaries on “America’s Secret Weapon,” which, unsurprisingly, was “freedom.” Here was her stirring call to action: “Real national unity comes from boldly proclaiming our national purpose and persuading opponents to join us. My purpose is to save our country from the downward spiral of socialism and defeatism.”
This is a blinkered, churlish politics. Even if the message of “We win, they lose” could be electorally successful, there is no actual success here—just endless trench warfare between parties vying for power, with no prospect of offering, let alone delivering on, a genuinely conservative vision for human flourishing.
Frustration over this state of affairs offers the best explanation of recent efforts on the right to restore Christian morality by fiat. These efforts go by various names, such as integralism and Christian nationalism, and disagreement rages over what the terms even mean. But a reasonable, general characterization would be that they propose conducting our politics as if Christianity were the foundation of the nation’s public morality, regardless of contemporary reality. Views of the people be damned, we should simply begin governing as if an overwhelming majority wanted an explicitly Christian morality to shape public policy, and then hope everyone catches up.
Perhaps we should at least credit this impulse with wanting to do something, in contrast to the too-common conservative strategy of simply doing nothing. But what it would do makes little sense, in either theory or practice.
In theory, Christianity offers a moral vision that counters the secular maelstrom of today. Perhaps, but elevating it to public morality would not provide easy answers. It would unleash a new set of disputes over competing interpretations. The West’s track record when it predicates governance on the resolution of intra-Christian disputes is not good. Competing religious claims tend to be less justiciable than empirical ones, except by raw power politics, which historically has meant war.
Some advocates frame the case for Christianity as the foundation for American public life as in fact vindicating the will of the people. The National Conservatism “Statement of Principles” is a good illustration: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” The implication is that the United States—and indeed most Western countries—have Christian majorities, and therefore this vision should obtain.
But this is to confuse religious identity with moral orientation. Yes, a majority of Americans are “Christian,” as are majorities in most European countries. But it does not follow that Christian Americans accept religious faith as the basis for their morality or wish to see such a vision of public morality imposed. Pew Research reports that only 34 percent of Americans look primarily to religion for guidance on right and wrong.
Likewise, Americans reject the idea that belief in God is necessary if one is to be moral and have good values. As recently as 2011, Americans were evenly split on the question. By 2022, a thirty-point gap had opened, with 65 percent now saying that belief in God is not necessary. Neither the United States, nor any other Western democracy, is a “Christian nation” in the sense necessary to legitimate an explicitly Christian political agenda.
This reality leads directly to the practical problem, which might be characterized as either the “I want a pony” conundrum or the “You and what army?” fallacy. It goes like this: So you want your preferred version of Christian morality to be that of the nation? And I want a pony. You want to impose a value system disfavored by the majority of the electorate in a democracy? You and what army?
The main effect of the argument for rooting public life in Christianity is to reinforce the progressive definition of conservative values as inherently religious, and thereby to marginalize them in our secular politics. Of course, some progressive inevitably goes too far, as by condemning the notion that “our rights come from God.” Here is a point worthy of definitive refutation, which conservatives gleefully provide. But the resulting dynamic is a classic motte and bailey. The motte is claiming the personal right to hold a traditional American view. The bailey is imposing Christian belief as the foundation of the nation’s public morality. The motte is secure, but also unremarkable. The bailey is expansive, exposed, and ultimately undefendable. Trying to hold that ground never ends well.
By anchoring our account of virtue in an explicitly religious foundation, conservatives weaken our own cause, quiet our own voice. We are left not only ineffective in countering the left, but derelict in reforming the right, which, denuded of a useful political morality, has for too long veered into market fundamentalism. We conservatives have, perhaps inadvertently and with the best intentions for the nation’s moral fiber, done our part in bringing about the nation’s moral decay. Certainly we have not done much to reverse it.
Still, I am optimistic, for two reasons. My first reason draws upon my own experience. My path to offering a First Things lecture has been an improbable one. As a Jewish kid growing up outside Boston, I thought “Catholic” was just a synonym for “Christian.” If you had told me, “No, no, there are two major kinds of Christian,” I would have said, “Oh, right—Roman Catholic and Irish Catholic.” It was not until friends began reading the manuscript for my book, The Once and Future Worker, that I was introduced to Catholic social teaching.
My book made the case that a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is essential for long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy. “Your argument parallels Catholic social teaching so closely,” one reader told me. I nodded thoughtfully, then rushed off to Google “Catholic social teaching.” I discovered and soon came to love this extraordinary body of wisdom, to which I had never been exposed.
The dignity of work, the importance of solidarity, the conception of the common good: These were my principles, too. But my view was not motivated by religious faith. I know this because, simply put, I don’t have much. I am not a religious person. Don’t get me wrong, I lead a mean Passover Seder. But in terms of participating in a religious community, grasping theology, and having a worldview built around belief in God, I regret to say I have little to offer.
I wish I were religious. I admire tremendously those who are able to center their lives around their faith. It seems to make them better people, and it seems to me a better way to live. It provides an unparalleled foundation for community. I have noticed, as I mentor and advise younger people, how much better formed and more grounded are those who draw upon a wellspring of religious commitment. But religion just never “stuck” for me.
My hope is that my loss can be your gain. I write as a conservative committed to the success of the moral vision we share. But I write also as a representative of those of our fellow citizens for whom an appeal to religious faith falls flat or alienates. On their behalf, I want to emphasize that conservatives have an enormous opportunity, if we will take it. We can make the moral case for a politics of virtue, and we need not take on the burden of sustaining an unpopular theological case.
My second cause for optimism is perhaps even stranger: the climate catastrophism, woke dogmatism, and Covid conniptions of the left. These crusades confirm that although modernity has weakened the religious faith on which our public morality once rested, it has done nothing to change human nature, which has always yearned for virtue—and clearly still does.
What happens when people who are desperate for meaning and purpose, obligation and constraint, but who no longer find religious faith compelling, look to their right and see only free-market nihilism, then look to their left and see all manner of exotic moral commitments that claim to rest upon “facts” and “science”? The results are all around us.
Take Covid. The “public health” community offered a clear definition of the common good: minimization of risk. With that definition came purpose and meaning. Each of us was impure, a potential vector of disease, and so it was our duty to conform to various limitations and rituals, all carefully measured and enumerated by “experts.” How did so many seemingly intelligent people fall for this? Talk to them. Ask them. They will respond in moral terms. They will talk about the obligation to protect others and resist the selfish siren song of the “return to normal.”
Consider wokeness, with its commitment to “equity” as the highest good. This ideology offers purpose and meaning by allowing us to acknowledge and atone for sin, repairing past wrongs. Here, too, an extraordinary range of practices, professions, and sacrifices is demanded.
Consider climate catastrophism, with its apocalyptic narrative and each of us cast as a hero, if only we undertake a set of actions that can affect the global temperature about as much as a rain dance would.
Many have observed how these obsessions of the left bear the hallmarks of a religion. But I note them in order to pose a particular question. On the one hand, conservatives are right to mock these frenzied measures and movements. On the other hand, what have we offered instead?
Think about yard signs. The progressive ones read:
Black Lives Matter
Women’s Rights = Human Rights
No Human Is Illegal
Science Is Real
Love Is Love
Diversity Makes Us Stronger
Kindness Is Everything
What would ours say? There are “conservative” yard signs for sale. But they contain no moral vision, nothing to believe in, only an effort to “own the libs.”
Our cupboard is so bare that young men are filling auditoriums to hear Jordan Peterson tell them to clean their rooms. Pseudonymous internet personalities like Mencius Moldbug and Bronze Age Pervert offer the thrill of transgression, but not a workable vision for a political movement that has any hope of governing our country.
The left is unchecked by any cogent account of conservative virtue. As a result, many Americans are progressive by default. They want a morally meaningful politics, but see only oppressor and oppressed, and thus reflexively side with the latter. Meanwhile, the right is increasingly unmoored from conservative virtue, seeing only the strong and the weak, and somehow deciding that the former should triumph. This is how polities collapse.
The problem can be solved. The American soul craves virtue and purpose. The conservative tradition is equipped to provide both. The moment is one of conservative opportunity and conservative necessity, if we have the courage to re-enter the moral arena and fight on broadly accessible and popular terms for what we know to be eternally true.
The way forward does not involve giving the American public a moderated, tempered version of the left’s false moralism. We must insist upon a shared definition of virtue derived from a shared moral vision and set of values, which in turn reflect the traditions and character of our nation and its culture. We must provide an account of human flourishing that gives purpose and meaning to life. That account must emphasize the fulfillment of obligations and duties rather than merely the enjoyment of privileges and rights. We will renew our country when we recover a vision that constrains individual behavior and orients it toward cooperative and productive pursuits.
It is true that, historically, this shared vision and set of values have been expressly religious. But we must recognize that they do not have to be.
We should understand religion not as the moral foundation upon which the nation’s culture and morality are constructed but as the form into which many ideas and much experience were poured—shaping them and holding them upright. With time, those ideas and experiences hardened into a foundation. Yes, some of the best aspects of American society were formed by religion, derived from it and eternally consistent with it. But those aspects—upholding virtue, honoring work, caring for those less fortunate, fulfilling obligations to one’s community—are not innately religious. They are freestanding.
Thus, two distinct arguments may be made for our moral tradition. The religious argument is that our moral tradition has the shape conferred by God and thus is good as a matter of faith. A second argument, from tradition and reason, notes that our moral tradition has stood the test of time; it is structurally sound and capable of bearing great weight. It works.
At this time in America’s history, we need the second argument. It does not entail the abandonment of religion, or concession to the secular. Rather, the secular argument for obligation, constraint, and virtue reinforces the religious one, with each argument balancing the other. A healthy conservatism emphasizes both.
Emphasis on the value and dignity of work offers a clear instance of this complementarity. In Rerum Novarum and Laborem Exercens, Pope Leo XIII and St. John Paul II develop these themes with far greater eloquence and place them in a richer moral context than I ever could in a wonky policy book. But the best economic analysis and social science research points in the same direction—and does so in terms more widely accepted in our society than any theology. Access to good jobs is fundamental to social justice; it is conducive to human happiness; it provides a foundation for family formation. Work increases self-reported life satisfaction and is a key determinant of economic growth. “The Church is convinced that work is a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth,” says Laborem Exercens. “She is confirmed in this conviction by considering the whole heritage of the many sciences devoted to man.”
My intention here is not to elucidate fully a new theory of morality. That would be a bit presumptuous. But I do want to propose a starting point. I would begin with a line from A Story of Us, a wonderful book by Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson, which traces the parallel cultural and genetic evolutions that have produced modern humanity. At one point, the authors say:
Over the course of human evolutionary history, there may have been some independent-minded women who thought things through and decided to avoid the pain and risks of motherhood. These women are not our ancestors. There may also have been families that decided to do away with the rules and customs that encouraged the raising of children. Our ancestors didn’t belong to families like this. Our ancestors were part of families that believed in the importance of children and worked hard to produce the next generation. That’s why we exist.
That’s why we exist. I find the insight profound: We owe gratitude not only to ancient habits of self-sacrifice and commitment in the abstract, but also to the very concrete and inestimable self-sacrifice and commitment of specific people who dedicated their lives to creating for us the opportunity to experience life at all. This inescapable truth about our dependence on others provides a sound basis for a conservatism that requires no particular faith.
The narrative of personal autonomy that dominates both the progressive left and the libertarian right regards each individual as inherently free of obligations and constraints, beyond respect for everyone else’s autonomy. But that’s nonsense. Each of us owes his life to the long line of ancestors stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, most of whom made sacrifices we can hardly imagine in order to bring forth a next generation, who in turn brought forth the next generation, and on and on to our own time. Most immediately, we have from conception through the early years of our lives made extraordinary demands on our own parents and on many others who willingly took responsibility for our upbringing, and without whose efforts we obviously could not exist nor survive, let alone thrive.
We begin our lives with an incalculable debt. That we did not choose this debt is of no moral import—it is inherent to our existence. And we have only one way of repaying it: to work equally hard to bring about the next generation.
The obligation to be fruitful and multiply can of course be drawn from religious texts. In Judaism, the essential prayer, the Shema, instructs each individual to “love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Teach them to your children.” Someone with faith in God might accept the argument: God says to have children. But the traditions and culture of modern America sustain an equally strong case for this obligation, on the basis of concepts like “paying your fair share” and “sustainability,” or, in the negative, condemnation of the “free-rider” who consumes without replenishing resources held in common.
In On Duties, Cicero writes, “There are some also who, either from zeal in attending to their own business or through some sort of aversion to their fellow men, claim that they are occupied solely with their own affairs, without seeming to themselves to be doing anyone any injury.” He judges them harshly: “They are traitors to social life, for they contribute to it none of their interest, none of their effort, none of their means.” Cicero did not need religious faith to anchor his moral reasoning, nor do we need faith to see its cogency.
Edmund Burke likewise emphasized inherited obligation. “Burke stresses that men are born into civil society without their own consent,” explains Yuval Levin in The Great Debate. “Their rights in that society are a function not of their agreeing to certain arrangements but of their inheritance from their forefathers, who had worked to defend those rights just as members of this new generation should for themselves and their posterity.”
Our obligation to the next generation also provides a basis for prizing tradition. One need only recognize—as any parent quickly does—that children are incapable of autonomous development and crafting their own morality, values, and virtues. They are dependent upon the community of adults around them. Only a community that is itself committed to a shared moral vision can provide a suitable environment for the maturation of children, and only a community that is willing to embrace and work from what it has inherited will sustain those shared commitments. Adults who are concerned only for themselves may argue that an anything-goes morality of personal autonomy and self-discovery is in their own best interest, but they cannot contend that it is what they themselves needed early in their lives, or that it is all they owe to those who are young today.
This same moral reasoning underscores the obligations of citizenship. The concern for and obligation toward fellow citizens sustain a nation. Lofty “America is an idea” rhetoric cannot possibly be true. After all, many people holding the same idea are plainly not American, nor do Americans automatically assume obligations to anyone holding it.
What the citizen of a nation has is not an idea, but rather a legal and moral claim to the accumulated cultural and economic assets of that nation, held jointly with all other citizens. Opponents of this concept sometimes argue that a citizen has done nothing to deserve his inheritance, and thus is no differently situated than anyone else in the world. Being an American is a moral accident, as it were. But our claim to our inheritance rests not in our efforts or choices, but in the intention of our predecessors to grant it—as stated in the United States Constitution, whose purpose is “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Cicero recognized the bonds of solidarity that transcend choice:
We are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims a share of our being, and our friends a share; . . . and as men too, are born for the sake of men, that they may be able mutually to help one another; in this direction we ought to follow Nature as our guide, to contribute to the general good by an interchange of acts of kindness, by giving and receiving, and thus by our skill, our industry, and our talents to cement human society more closely together, man to man.
The citizen does not pay up front for his inheritance, but rather accepts a set of obligations—of gratitude toward the nation and its heritage, of responsibility to all other citizens, and of repaying the debt through preserving and improving the nation and leaving it better for the next generation. Every citizen enjoys an implicit commitment from his fellow citizens to fight and die for him if need be, and he is in turn committed to fight and die for them. All agree to abide by political decisions made collectively, through a process that they likewise inherited. We are bound to our constitutional system of government as if we ourselves had created it.
This account of inherited obligations sustains a conservative definition of the common good and of human flourishing. It establishes commitments that give purpose and meaning to life, and in doing so provides a basis for constraining individual behavior and orienting it toward cooperative and productive pursuits. It is my hope that this account of virtue might serve as a starting point for a broader conservative morality and set of political claims that are well suited to address our social decay.
This account is capable of earning widespread acceptance by Americans. It answers the contemporary need for a politics that transcends the narrow individualism of our present culture, and it does so in a coherent, compelling, and—yes—attractive way. Lack of family formation and declines in community solidarity are at the heart of what ails Americans across socioeconomic classes—the elite as much as the working class. A conservatism that emphasizes inherited obligations to the next generation and to the nation does require sacrifice, as any coherent and compelling ideology should.
Ordinary citizens are ennobled by efforts to transcend self-interest, and they are eager for the purpose and meaning that comes with making indispensable contributions to the common good. The sacrifices necessary to meet our obligations to each other and to those yet to be born are a kind that people are fully capable of making and, importantly, that they will benefit from making. We are not asking for a vow of poverty or a bayonet charge against machine guns.
Measures of mental health, happiness, and social well-being strongly suggest that progressive morality is leaving people unfulfilled. Getting married, having kids, orienting your life around their flourishing—of course there are costs, but those costs are far outweighed by the benefits that flow from membership in strong families and communities. Fulfilling these obligations is actually good for your finances in the long run. It’s good for your health, good for your life satisfaction.
The problem is not that what our ancestors achieved, generation after generation, has somehow become unachievable or undesirable. Rather, we are hobbled by fallible human decision-making coupled to a poorly formed culture that, beyond failing to shape and guide people, actively steers them away from their obligations and toward a warped model of self-actualization. As conservatives, it is both our obligation and our opportunity to speak to problems such as these in a language that people understand and in terms that persuade.
Oren Cass is founder and chief economist of American Compass. This essay was delivered as the 2024 First Things Lecture in Washington, D.C.
We Need Religion
by David Novak
Oren Cass wants to restore to our morally fractured society and culture a “moral vision,” one that is “widely shared.” It’s an honorable ambition. But who does he think shares this moral vision? He argues that it may be shared by some (not all) religious people and by some (not all) secular people. Perhaps it can be arranged on an ad hoc basis. But I’m skeptical that such a moral vision can achieve full cogency without theological principles.
According to Cass, the basis of a shared vision is found in a common commitment to “the traditions and character of the nation and its culture.” Religious people can be committed to a moral tradition because they reject the secularist notion of autonomy as self-invention, recognizing instead our natural dependence on our ancestors, on those with whom we live in community, and on our descendants, who will continue the tradition we transmit to them. Secular people can be committed to a moral tradition because they can accept its norms as reasonable, as constituting a coherent way of life, validated by historical experience. As conservatives, they reject the modern notion that the past must justify itself anew. Instead, moral innovations must be justified (argued for). That is, any innovation must be consistent with what has been shown to be true and good experientially, what “has stood the test of time; [what] works.”
On this basis, Cass speaks of “two arguments [that] can be made for our moral tradition: One, . . . as a matter of faith . . . two, . . . from tradition and reason.” The religious person sees his dependence resting first and foremost in God’s creative goodness; the secular person understands his dependence in terms of social and personal development. Thus, a central question arises, the implicit challenge of Cass’s lecture: If a commitment to “tradition and reason” is the necessary commonality that makes possible a shared moral vision between religious people and secular people, why then is there a moral need for religious faith at all? What do we gain from a religious commitment that we have not already gained from a Ciceronian commitment to moral virtue? It would seem that religion adds nothing essential.
Put differently, if we can get the shared conservative outlook on strictly secular terms, why speak of “the complementarity of the religious and secular,” and of each “balancing the other”? Cass goes so far as to say that “by anchoring our account of virtue in an explicitly religious foundation, conservatives weaken our own cause.” It would seem that the religious person threatens the shared moral vision rather than participating in it as an equal partner.
Cass justifies the accommodation of the religious perspective on historical grounds. Religion once provided the “form” that allowed the secular substance to become solid and enduring. Now the religious element is no longer necessary. In his words: “Historically that shared vision and set of values has been expressly religious . . . [but] it doesn’t have to be.” In other words, a religious perspective is neither a necessary nor a sufficient justification for the common traditional moral vision he proposes for conservatism. (It is insufficient because “a majority of Americans” do not “accept sectarian religious faith as the basis for their morality.”) It seems Cass allows the religious perspective to have a say only because a diminishing minority of Americans still depend on their religion to supply them with moral norms, which are at least “consistent with [the shared moral vision].” And the participation of those often called the religious right is still neededto make this shared moral vision politically viable.
Cass is correct. I share with him a moral vision based on obligation. But as a practicing and believing Jew, I’ll pass on Cass’s offer to include me and those like me (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) by means of a politically expedient grandfathering. Instead, I think the relationship runs the other way: His view can be included as a dependent descendant of a religiously informed public philosophy. As a religious person, I connect my obligations to God to my obligations to other humans (past, present, and future) in a way that contributes something vital to the moral vision we share with those who do not make that connection. The upshot is a more robust understanding of political life than can be attainted by those who, like Oren Cass, keep their religion (at least their religious practice) and their morality separate.
Jews (and Christians and Muslims) like me do not say that our morality is necessarily derived from our religion, but rather that our religion necessarily presupposes our morality. For me, the great twelfth-century Jewish theologian Maimonides stated this truth most clearly. He taught that humans do not immediately need to assert the divine origin of generally known and accepted moral norms. Those norms can be acknowledged and accepted according to our innate “rational inclination.” But ultimately humans need to acknowledge and accept these rational norms as themselves commandments of God, who creates the universe by commanding it into existence, and who commands humans to live in the world as a just and peaceful dwelling. Acknowledgment of the divine origin of rational norms of human behavior alone satisfies our natural metaphysical need to appreciate how what is rational on earth participates in God’s wise governance of the entire universe, which God has deemed to be “very good” (Gen. 1:31). This acknowledgement of the correspondence of moral truth with the created order as a whole is what gives ordinary moral action its cosmic significance.
This metaphysical acknowledgment does not do an end run around morality. We are not encouraged to adopt a merely speculative stance that transcends ordinary duties. Humans are related to God (for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as communal beings. We must already be living with others in a morally coherent way if we are to be related to God in a metaphysically coherent way. Moral reasoning is necessary for us as communal beings, and perhaps Cass identifies useful sources for that moral reasoning. But by itself, just and proper relations to others are not sufficient for us as creatures in relation to God. Our nature impels us to answer two questions. How do I relate to my fellow man? And how do I relate to the source and origin of all reality?
Religion cannot be left to the side. Both the moral and the metaphysical dimensions of human existence, functioning together, are essential to the human nature and human flourishing of which Cass speaks so affirmatively. What he writes is rationally compelling and politically prudent. But it is not existentially sufficient. A fully formed moral vision must address the religious dimension of human nature.
David Novak is J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Professor Emeritus of Religion, Philosophy, and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
To See Things as They Are
by Michael Hanby
First, an admission: I have no idea how to save America and therefore no blueprint for constructing a conservatism adequate to the task. Indeed, I am inclined to think that the American social and political order is ill-founded and that a politics premised upon the systematic exclusion of the deepest truths is destined to fracture and fail, though what “failure” means is admittedly an open question. And in my darker days, which are not infrequent, I worry that we have already destroyed our civilization and just don’t know it yet. At the very least, we have already done things (such as elevating the abolition of man and woman to a constitutional principle), are in the process of doing things (such as annihilating the common language, the common history, and the common world that are the preconditions of any political community), and are on the precipice of doing other things (such as slouching toward rule by algorithm), from which it will be difficult to recover.
I state these reservations up front not to counsel quietism and hopeless resignation, but to liberate the possibilities of thought from the burden of political success. This admission places my comments on Oren Cass’s lecture in a different literary genre than the lecture itself inhabits. Cass does have a blueprint for constructing a renewed “secular” conservatism, a conservatism of the common good and of obligation to future generations. This renewal may well be informed by, but not depend upon, Christian faith for its intelligibility or justification. I do not wish to contend against this possibility. And he believes this vision can appeal to the native moral impulses that animate Americans of all political persuasions, that it can attract a larger swath of our fellow citizens to conservatism’s moral vision than an explicitly theological appeal, and that it might help restore the nation to something other than the collective madness we are now experiencing.
I concur in the substance of Cass’s moral vision. Unchosen obligation surely must play a role in any account of civic life that seeks to deliver us from our self-enclosed individualism. And I share his dissatisfaction with the fideistic justifications for that account often given by the American right. I agree with his assessment that the “muscular Christianity” of integralism and so-called Christian nationalism is a fantasy, given both contemporary reality and the fact that this is the very sort of thing American liberalism was constructed to prevent. And so—though it might come as a surprise, given my priors—I concur in the need for a vision of the good that does not depend upon an overt appeal to the Ten Commandments and that is intelligible and compelling to people of different faiths or no faith.
Nevertheless, I have deep misgivings about both Cass’s diagnosis and his prescription. At the surface level, it seems that he underestimates both the breadth of our civilizational disintegration and the depth of our world-weariness, and therefore overestimates the significance of the moral impulse animating our divergent political options. From the point of view of traditional philosophy, the inclination toward some vision of the good is a universal facet of human nature, formally speaking, and to this extent unremarkable. The material differences of vision are what matter. And it is not clear why a people that sacralizes abortion, eschews marriage, and increasingly regards children as a sin against the climate—or a society that willingly manufactures children without mothers and fathers, then sterilizes them in a vast, unaccountable science experiment—should feel obliged to the next generation or the future of the species. Perhaps Cass thinks that the Darwinian and naturalistic justification for this vision might somehow appeal to the religious secularity of technocratic nerds. I’m less sanguine.
Indeed, it is not at all clear that the fundamental problem with America is one of “political morality,” which brings me closer to the heart of the matter. Not only does Cass’s proposal belong in the genre of political strategy, where “what is” and what one “ought to do” are necessarily tempered by what one thinks “will work,” but he conceives both the fundamental problem and its solution through the lens of those very same forms of knowledge—economics, the social sciences, public opinion research—that the meritocracy regards as authoritative. Taking the metaphysical and epistemic premises of those disciplines (unconsciously) for granted, he acquiesces in meritocracy’s self-understanding, reaffirms its most basic assumptions, and unwittingly recapitulates the fundamental problem in his proposed solution. And he misses the root of our political crisis.
The dichotomy between the “cult of reason” and a sectarian or irrational “faith” is axiomatic—and, as Cass points out, quite useful—to the meritocracy and to liberal order more generally. It is how liberalism perpetually legitimates and renews itself, which is why we have predictable “theocracy” scares every few years. And it is why the proposition that men and women are real is now regarded as an article of religious faith, whereas a Supreme Court nominee who has been a woman her entire life can think—or pretend to think—that she cannot know what a woman is without the aid of a biologist.
Contrary to the meritocracy’s congratulatory self-understanding, what is excluded from this dichotomy is not religion, which continues to play its useful role as liberalism’s foil, but reason itself—that is, a reason that can apprehend an abiding order of being and nature and thus a normativity other than mere statistical normativity. The eclipse of reason has grown more acute as the power of the meritocracy has increased, but the crisis it represents is endemic to the American project and has distorted American Christianity from the beginning, leaving it little choice but to express itself in the positivistic and fideistic forms that Cass rightly finds objectionable or to empty its own substance by fitting itself to the obligatory thoughtlessness of American public reason. The dichotomy between faith and “reason,” in other words, is what is left over after reason has become wholly technical and pragmatic. The fundamental crisis confronting our technocratic body politic is not moral, but intellectual. It is not, in the first instance, a crisis of public morality, but a crisis of public philosophy—not merely political philosophy, but the natural philosophy, aesthetics, and, yes, metaphysical judgments inherent in every politics, a crisis generated by the pragmatism that is by no means innocent of such judgments, a pragmatism that defines the American spirit.
It remains an open question whether this crisis, which is essentially philosophical, can be overcome. We are governed by a semi-cultured, half-educated, intransigent elite oblivious to the deepest premises of their own thought. Perversely, this same elite nevertheless enjoy an insight that is formally correct. They rightly suspect that “truth,” as traditionally understood, presupposes an abiding order of being and therefore God, which is precisely what makes truth at least partially but universally accessible to “natural” reason apart from faith. Hence the growing suspicion that “truth,” when not qualified as “my truth,” “truth from a white male perspective,” and so forth, is just another mask for fascism, by which we now seem to mean reality itself.
I fear that Cass vests unreasonable hope in a morality untethered from any commonly recognized reality—untethered, that is, from metaphysics. There is no reason to think that a “moral vision” superimposed upon a reality conceived of, for all public and practical purposes, as a meaningless material substrate will fare any better than the “faith” he sets aside as politically ineffective. In order to determine “what is good,” we must first determine “what is,” and contrary to our technocratic conceits, this is not a question that science, or the New York Times, or Gallup, or Pew can answer for us. Whether or not there exists a path for conservative political success, the path through the minefield of our disintegrating civilization depends upon the recovery of a form of reason capable of seeing things as they are and the courage to call them by their proper names.
Michael Hanby is associate professor of religion and philosophy of science at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America.
Why Not Both?
by R. R. Reno
Oren Cass tells us that conservatism’s best hope rests in resolutely secular arguments, and he pens rather warm words against those of us who have the temerity to venture theological rationales for conservatism. In my estimation, he is right about the importance of nonreligious arguments. They are the bread and butter of ordinary politics. But he underestimates the importance and appeal of religious themes and insights.
Most political decisions turn on judgments about what best promotes prosperity, maintains order, and conduces to the commonweal. These matters are amenable to reasoned debates. Will tariffs improve the prospects of American workers by raising wages? Or will they lead to higher costs for household goods, lowering the working man’s standard of living? Can industrial policy be implemented wisely, or will it inevitably be captured by special interests? These are not theological questions.
Natural reason also addresses moral questions, which bear on social policy. As Cass notes, we live in an individualistic culture. Earlier generations took for granted a life trajectory that involved marriage and children. That presumption no longer holds, and the fact of the matter is that today we need to make arguments for why government policy should encourage and support marriage and childbearing. There are arguments from economic prosperity: A vibrant economy requires a rising generation of workers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. There are arguments from cultural continuity: Without children, we cannot transmit our way of life. There are psychological arguments: A family places demands on parents, to be sure, but empirical studies indicate that the happiness won by family life outweighs the sacrifices. And there is the argument Cass makes, a sociocultural version of the second of the five ways to prove the existence of God. (Nothing is the cause of itself.)
And so social conservatism does not require theological arguments. The pro-life cause offers an obvious example. Opposition to abortion is rooted in moral reasoning and the evident facts of biology. The same holds for opposition to gay marriage, rampant pornography, drug legalization, and transgender hysteria. My conservatism on these issues stems from reflection on the realities of nature and the negative effects of the progressive project. I might appeal to the second chapter of Genesis when speaking about the fundamental importance of male–female complementarity. But I do so because the biblical witness so succinctly and powerful states a fundamental truth that every civilization has honored.
And I take Cass’s point about our meritocrats. The majority of recent graduates of Harvard Business School, Yale Law School, and other elite-generating institutions haven’t the slightest idea about Christianity—aside from the preconception that it’s a bad influence on society, one that generates “clingers” and other retrograde personalities standing athwart progress. This attitude means that, in many contexts, explicitly religious arguments can be counterproductive. If I may cite a biblical passage: Jesus told us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Prudent politicians, activists, and policy wonks must know their audiences, tailoring arguments so that they gain traction, which may mean putting the accent on the technocratic reasons that win over technocrats.
Nevertheless, without religious voices in the public square, the political life of the West will be impoverished.
Consider courage. Obviously, nonreligious people can be courageous. But in the last twenty years of public contestation over gay rights, abortion, marriage, and the mutilation of children in the service of transgender ideology, a significant majority of those who have spoken clearly and firmly on behalf of a conservatism of obligations have been religiously motivated. Their arguments may be secular, but their spines are stiffened by faith. Fear of the Lord arises in the hearts of those who know and feel our deepest obligation, which is to our Creator. Such a heart is trained to feel a profound obligation to moral truth.
Consider humility and moderation. These virtues are not the exclusive province of religious believers. But faith encourages them. Eric Voegelin identified the unfortunate tendency of modern politics to become “theologized.” He saw that a progressive mentality too easily imagines that we can engineer society, even human nature, to attain a this-worldly perfection. Against this hubris, religious faith is the most reliable antidote.
As Reinhold Niebuhr often observed, original sin is a core Christian doctrine that enjoys a great deal of empirical support. It reminds us that even the purest motives (including our own) are tainted with self-interest. The best laid plans are undermined by ineradicable human perversions. More often than not, the best we can achieve is a modest remediation of injustices.
Belief in divine providence reinforces humility and moderation. In his Second Inaugural, Abraham Lincoln frankly acknowledged the grave evil of slavery and the debt of guilt it had imposed upon the nation. But he did not provide a way of balancing moral accounts. Only a foolish pride could pretend to do so. Such matters are in the hands of God, whose plans and purposes are beyond our knowing. We are not impotent: We can bind up wounds, seek peace, and restore what justice can be restored. But we need not (and must not) imagine that the political life of a nation can attain perfect justice—or limitless prosperity and unfettered freedom.
Richard John Neuhaus founded First Things to ensure religious people a strong voice in American public life. Sometimes we speak religiously, as Lincoln did. But more often than not, when the topics are political and social, we appeal to reason. Recently, Brad Littlejohn penned arguments for restricting immigration. He drew upon the Christian tradition, not in an appeal to authority, but because the Christian tradition is a trove of moral wisdom. As St. Thomas teaches, God’s revelation serves two purposes. It teaches us the truths of salvation, which we cannot otherwise know. And it re-teaches us the truths of natural reason, which original sin has obscured. Thus another virtue not unique to religious believers but nurtured by faith: wisdom.
Charity—selfless love—is considered a supernatural virtue, and rightly so. Only God’s grace can free us from our bondage to self-love. But a society leavened by Christianity encourages a more modest virtue, one that looks down toward those who need our help, rather than up toward those who can help us. Catholic social teaching calls this disposition the preferential option for the poor. Again, many nonbelievers have this disposition. As Cass observes, it animates wokeness, which develops elaborate hierarchies of privilege and oppression. But history suggests that concern for the poor, the lame, and the outcast is not natural. “There but for the grace of God go I,” expresses folk wisdom that need not have theological sources. Nevertheless, it can’t be doubted that religious observance encourages a nation’s citizens to temper the all-too-human worship of wealth and power.
There are times when it is serpent-wise to be dove-innocent. Yes, we need to make secular arguments to promote the common good and renew our country. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. American society has long been leavened by religious ferment, which has inspired, galvanized, and tempered public life in all sorts of ways. Boldly to cite verses from Genesis or the Psalms may cause Ivy League technocrats to wince. Yet even they can feel the way in which the words of Scripture elevate our gaze. We should not underestimate the concrete goods—courage, humility, moderation, wisdom, and charity—that are encouraged when we place our secular arguments within a transcendent horizon. To talk of God can startle our paradoxically fractious and complacent elites—and in so doing knock our present society out of its unhappy ruts.
R. R. Reno is editor of First Things.
Image by Giovanni Paolo Panini, public domain. Image cropped.
