If someone whispered to Harold Ford, Jr. — before a consummation in failure to be elected the junior United States Senator from Tennessee this November — that divine intervention was a resort, the congressman might have assumed that an endorsement had already been secured. "We got something else at work," announced Ford at a rally, one week after imparting his campaign manager's confidence in party doxology: "He said Republicans fear the Lord; he said Democrats fear and love the Lord." The King of Kings bid Brother Ford follow a path out of public servitude, and so it was.
About the same time, Heather Mac Donald, fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, had published a commentary piece on politics and religion, and religion and religion. Writing that "Democrats have been trying to show that they, too, have God in their hearts" since an electoral defeat two years before, Mac Donald related the open confessions of Harold Ford, Hillary Clinton and something on Capitol Hill called the Democratic Faith Working Group.
What does a candidate's witness mean, she asks: "That he is a good person?" No disagreement between the religious and irreligious on that; both are wary of pretenders. Offer a general remark about "evangelism" to someone under 70 years of age and there is a fifty-fifty chance you will have to clarify — the seminarian calling, or the telecast hustle? This, in the first few paragraphs, was timely and more contemporary than the rest of the article which, as the opinion of Mac Donald and declared "secular conservatives," still stands.
So Mac Donald takes a sharp turn. Pretense isn't what bothers her. The mere interjection of religion she calls a "conversation-stopper." Her doubt that "a sincere belief in God prevented behavior we now view as morally repugnant" leads an injunction on theological influences entering policy, discourse, and something-other-than-God forbid, one's own mind. The stuff goes past skepticism to plain contempt, flush and terebinthinate.
Discrediting religion needs a captious eye for failings — however central human flaws might be to Christianity, which takes the brunt — and Mac Donald has got one. On repugnance, we are informed that "There were few more religious Americans than antebellum slaveholders and their political representatives; their claim to a divine mandate for slavery was based in unimpeachable Scriptural authority." A false one, as bondsmen were a regulation of the Mosaic laws against which the apostle Paul remonstrated in his letters to the Galatians.
If the misapplication of a tool invalidated its utility, we would have no use for fire, knives, hammers, automobiles, piano strings — let alone religion. Mac Donald is conflating piety, devotion, with pietism, affectation; or else doesn't mind the difference. Were the popular culture of urban blacks not meretricious and patricidal, "the sad state of the inner city" might illustrate the irrelevance of religious obedience. Mennonites, Amish and Quakers don't have the same problems; Quakers' ancestors having used the same book as the slavers to oppose the lien on men's lives.
But one might suppose Scriptural inspiration would be dismissed by Mac Donald as incidental. "It is a proven track record that makes conservative principles superior to liberalism, not the religious inclinations of their proponents." Secular rightism, taken beyond a personal stance, is a narrative of coincidences. Imagine memorizing Paul Hindemith's Sonata for Alto Horn in Eb and Piano, playing the piece without need of music for several years; and upon reaching a sufficient level of confidence, denying Hindemith's authorship or the authenticity of a score, instead maintaining that given enough musical insight a student could construct every note, rhythm and phrase for each of four movements all by himself. After all, if Hindemith's music were so compelling wouldn't anyone come to a similar conclusion?
Mac Donald thinks George Bush's avowal that "God wants everybody to be free" is "disquieting" because of a disjuncture from "worldly evidence." The president had at least two reasons for saying what he did. First, the formulation is neither novel nor strange, inscribed by Thomas Jefferson in 1776 as "certain unalienable rights," endowed by the Creator, of which "liberty" is one. Rejected by some in dialectics, free will has endured in Western thought, often proposed as self-evident and inviolate as it is providential — Mac Donald has other statements to impugn before turning to Bush's. Second, the president is not the only one judging his actions according to guiding principles. Mac Donald may not, but many millions do listen to clergy. Adjutants of the late Pope John Paul II decried the liberation of 25 million in Iraq as "a crime against humanity," the pope himself "a defeat" therefor. Mr. Bush has an interest in exegetical defense.
A-ha! Unresolvable contention! Mac Donald, who has elsewhere called the Bible "open-ended," adduces the defeatist platform of unsuccessful Senate challenger Ned Lamont. "If opposing candidates declare themselves supplicants of the divine will," she asks, "how will a voter decide who is most likely to receive divine guidance?" As they would anything else, yes? Mac Donald is welcome to submit subjects in the humanities settled beyond dispute. In the meantime, she can contemplate Pope Benedict's speech on faith and reason.
"The scientific ethos," the pontiff said in September, "is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity," by which "theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith."
Values, for Mac Donald, "are best grounded in reason and evidence, not revelation." But logical deduction is to moral philosophy what a thresher is to harvesting — a dumb machine reliant on input. If we are governed by a universal system, which is it? Islamist fascists specialize in promulgating every facet of living; or there is, for one, the Bible.
Go strictly on evidence? Empiricism leads to dutiful nescience, where human dignity becomes just one of several competing suggestions for what in the world to do with people. Barge into a discussion on a college campus, or most anywhere in Europe, or within the United Nations Human Rights Council, and you may interrupt an exercise in rationally concluding that man has no natural rights to enterprise, speech, property or life itself.
A little farther on, Mac Donald assures that "the Golden Rule and innate human empathy provide ample guidance for moral behavior." The command to do unto others as one would have done to him is correctly attributed to Jesus of Nazareth and his preaching; incorrectly when used to imply that Jesus taught nothing else. Alone, the Golden Rule instructs a relativistic pact of mutual non-intervention through which Party A, so long as he remains unmolested by Party B, shouldn't reproach the persecution of Party C by Party B; or else is not empowered to stop certain activities of Party B that will lead to B inflicting pain on C.
Only "innate empathy" can intervene, and as sure as there are those few totally without it, we have no such comfort. Ayn Rand understood that "There is no such thing as the right to enslave," but in 1957 Whittaker Chambers, reviewing Atlas Shrugged, wondered if Rand didn't know why: "Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world. ...If Man's heroism (some will prefer to say: human dignity) no longer derives from God...then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity."
From postulate to party to policy to perfect world, we can pick and choose among the materialistic detestations that the last century alone had to offer. Chambers captured the irony in the arch-individualist's oeuvre overturning her thesis. God, even the idea of a divine sovereign, is a great consolation: unlimited power wielded without fault or extremity — while man takes ahold of just a little and makes himself into a cynosure, first tumescent and then implosive, always baneful. Absent something grander, there is only the self, and that vehemence is in Mac Donald, chafed because "America's rules of religious etiquette demand that we acquiesce silently in a believer's claim of revelation." How dare they. Even the Constitution is a skeptical writ, insofar as the Founders "left God out of the Constitution," when in fact the document carefully indemnified religion against proscription or marginalization, or weird theophobia, like that of Heather Mac Donald.