Civil war, civil peace, and liberalism: On the Ahmari-French debate

Politics depends on what precedes politics, including religion, and Catholics will not win what we need to win through political strategizing.

(Image: Patrick Tomasso | Unsplash.com)

Does liberalism, the view that makes equal freedom the highest political standard, mean tolerance for Christianity?

Or does it ultimately mean suppression of Christianity in the name of the freedom and equality of non-Christians? The question matters a great deal, because America is a liberal country, and because classical liberalism has been central to American conservatism.

A recent debate on the question began with an interchange between Sohrab Ahmari at First Things, who sees the current state of affairs as a genuine cultural war, and David French at National Review, who holds to the classical liberal conception of the public order as a neutral pluralistic space devoted to equal freedom in which a hundred flowers can bloom.

Ahmari’s side of the argument is stronger. French’s seems to offer more immediate practical possibilities, because it allows appeal to established principles and categories of discussion. That can be useful, as in the case of the litigation on behalf of religious and academic freedom French himself has carried on.

Ultimately, though, it cannot be relied on because it ignores basic realities. Liberal pluralism is an oxymoron. Liberalism cannot be pluralist because like any view it excludes other possibilities. It puts freedom first, without subordinating it to any definite substantive good, and that means its demand for personal autonomy can’t be limited. The public order depends on public attitudes, and the demand for autonomy will define it only if it pervades the moral and religious understandings of the citizens. But if it does, to the exclusion of other understandings, where is the pluralism?

Classical liberal conceptions such as religious freedom give a protected status to religion. They hang on today because of legal precedent, constitutional text, and general inertia, but more and more leaders of thought view them as groundless and retrograde. After all, the very existence of traditional religious views creates an environment that puts people, such as homosexuals, who have traditionally been subject to discrimination at a disadvantage. So why—they say—give such views special protection?

As French notes, his view makes “the government primarily responsible for safeguarding liberty, and the people primarily responsible for exercising that liberty for virtuous purposes.” So his classical liberal view requires limited government and a virtuous populace.

But when has the system of government French’s view requires ever existed? The Constitution says nothing about it. The Federal government was not intended as a complete system of government, but left most functions to the states, which exercised a general police power that included the power and indeed duty of promoting religion and morality. That is why a number of states had explicit religious establishments, and it is why the First Amendment includes, among other things, a promise by the Federal government to leave those establishments alone.

So limited government that maintains a neutral and pluralistic public sphere was hardly a foundational American principle. Nor has it become such except perhaps rhetorically. No one influential in American public life cares about limited government or neutrality. Instead we have a government that raises our children, supports us in times of trouble, decides that “rights” and “health” include abortion and transgenderism, and redefines the family out of all definite meaning.

We also have a government that views remaking human relations, notably the relations between the sexes and among ethnic and religious groups, as one of its basic duties. All respectable public figures agree that government should suppress the practical importance of differences related to sex, culture, and ancestry. Some conservatives complain a little about the ever-growing list of discriminations to be abolished and the ever-more-intrusive measures thought necessary to do so, but the basic principle that fighting discrimination should be fundamental to public policy is universally considered a moral imperative.

But if government is to reform human relations how are the people to be independent arbiters of morality within a neutral pluralistic system? Religion and inherited cultural community have a pervasive effect on how moral issues are understood, and the proper roles of the sexes depend on understandings of sex and family life. Since government is expected to suppress the practical significance of religious, communal, and sexual distinctions, how can it possibly leave cultural standards and expectations regarding religion, morality, sex, community loyalty, and the family untouched?

For example, emphasis on woman’s role as mother and the evils of contraception and abortion burden women’s ability to take part in professional and public life on a basis identical to men. How can a society and government that consider equality of the sexes in such settings an absolutely fundamental value allow free rein to traditional understandings on such topics? And since Catholic doctrine favors traditional understandings more than some other views do, how can such understandings be allowed public influence without favoring Catholicism over the others?
A yet more provocative question raised by the debate is whether American and Western politics now involves “war and enmity,” in Ahmari’s expression, or—as French would have it—should always be understood as deliberation among fellow citizens for their common advantage.

It seems evident that what politics is like depends on circumstances, including agreement on common goods that is sufficient for political cooperation. Ahmari believes such agreement no longer exists, and under such circumstances fruitful public discussion breaks down and “the only way is … to fight the cultural war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”

French seems to believe Christianity forbids such a view, because it commands love of neighbor. But he is a decorated military veteran. Has he rejected his former profession and embraced pacifism? If so, he has abandoned politics, which inevitably involves contentious choices and coercion, and he should not pretend otherwise.

French refuses to recognize how serious a problem fundamental differences regarding the common good can be. “While governments should of course seek the common good,” he says, “they do not and should not have the brute coercive force to ‘re-order’ the public square to achieve that good as they define it.”

But why does saying that government and other social institutions should adopt an understanding of what is good that is in line with moral reality mean more “brute coercive force” than other possibilities?

Also, what can he mean by seeking the “common good” when he believes in pluralism and the neutrality of public spaces? Sohrab Ahmari, Peter Singer, Elizabeth Warren, and Jeffrey Epstein disagree fundamentally with French over what the common good demands. Does pluralism and neutrality mean that their views should all have equal status in public life? If so, how does government go about seeking a common good that is so lacking in coherent definition?

Such objections seem insuperable. But the difficulty for Ahmari and those who agree with him, as many point out, is what to do to promote a more favorable setting for traditional Christianity than French’s classical liberal approach allows.

Those on Ahmari’s side may no longer believe in liberalism as a theory, but seem to maintain a certain faith in popular self-government through liberal institutions. The mission of First Things, for example, is to provide a public voice for the traditionally religious that enables them to take a fruitful part in public discussion. How does that work if we are all at war?

It is hard to know what any of us can do other than go with what’s available. And that is a reason for reservations regarding talk of war, enmity, and the spoils of victory. When you lack power you rely of necessity on weapons of the weak like persuasion and appeal to abstract norms of justice. That’s what, among others, the early apologists did.

But Ahmari may simply mean that the “say something and then apologize when progressives complain” approach goes nowhere. If so, he is right. If you favor something you should say so, and if it’s not realistic to think it will be realized any time soon it is all more important to say clearly what it is. How else can it acquire a public presence?

As Saint Paul said, we should preach the word in season and out of season. If the substance of what we say causes offense, that is all the more reason to say it if it is true and important. It will give people something to think about that may eventually bear fruit.

And perhaps that is the ultimate lesson of this debate. Politics depends on what precedes politics, including religion, and Catholics will not win what we need to win through political strategizing. Instead, the only way forward is to know what is good, beautiful, and true, declare it publicly, promote it where we can, and live by it. How it all turns out after that is not up to us.


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About James Kalb 148 Articles
James Kalb is a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism(ISI Books, 2008), Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Angelico Press, 2013), and, most recently, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church (Angelico Press, 2023).

8 Comments

  1. Totalitarians and subversives (communists, marxists, crony financiers, muslims, talmudists) have for decades been corrupting our government, finances/currency, schools, media, religious institutions, and global corporations. Their perfidious influence has indoctrinated millions away from divine Logos and onto the path of disorder and destruction. Conversion of the totalitarians to Christianity is highly unlikely at present. A peaceful separation between those who seek Logos and those who do not, perhaps through our 10th Amendment, would be preferable, but history shows this outcome also to be unlikely. If violence is used against us, self defense akin to the Crusades, Lepanto, or Reconquista/Inquisition would almost certainly be justified. If we are unable or unwilling to defend ourselves, there is a not insignificant probability that our fate may be similar to the suffering experienced by innocents in Russia 1918-1953, Turkey 1915-1923, China 1966-1976, or Cambodia 1975-1979. Read “The Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn for an idea of what the future could be like for you and your children.

    Totalitarians eventually destroy themselves, so there is hope that those who seek Logos will flourish again. The question is: how much suffering might we allow/tolerate in the meantime?

    • Harald,
      Talmudists? Are you referring to experts in the oral tradition of Judaism? I hope not. If so, please explain how rabbis are subversives against Yahweh?

      • Just another bargain-basement anti-Semite who let his mind rot through internet addiction. Seeing ‘globalist’ Jews behind every shadow while gleefully electing politicians and supporting businesses who do everything he just said he hates.

        Why these people are the core of the “traditionalist” and “conservative” constituency is a semi-mystery, outside of the fact that they are all likely old and pine for their younger days.

  2. When the historian Hannah Arendt interviewed ADOLF EICHMANN, the captured overseer of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jews, she found him to be “quite ordinary, commonplace, and something neither demonic nor monstrous.” He was not vicious; he simply didn’t care. He was distant; he was—-neutral.

    Arendt concludes that his participation in the demonic was due less to choice than to a HABIT of thoughtlessness—-which she understands as our way of “protecting (ourselves) from reality.” We avoid moral dilemmas through the numbing habit of neutral forgetfulness. The culturally induced habit of amnesia and “whatever.”

    Kalb asks about this VACUUM of cultural and political neutrality: “But if government is to reform human relations how are the people to be independent arbiters of morality within a neutral pluralistic system?”

    Where there is such a vacuum—-the ideology of neutrality—-the crematorium smoke eventually finds its way in through all the cracks: abortion, euthanasia (voluntary and involuntary), gender theory, political Babel.

  3. Harald –

    While one can see the evidence for the “totalitarianism” in Islam, and the political ideologies you named, there is no evidence for that with respect to Judaism.

    Perhaps your “lumping” of the people you call “Talmudists” into this grouping indicates that there is different reason why you are concerned about Jewish people?

    A half step further, I suggest you ought to approach things from the point of view of ideas (e.g., Marxism, Islam and Judaism) instead of “incarnating” these ideas into groups of other people (Marxists, Muslims and Talmudists), because then everyone would understand clearly what your real point is.

  4. Thank you Mr. Kalb for persistently communicating the Catholic way of Liberty.

    An enormous problem and threat to the “David French” option seems to be that the courts, and especially the contemporary “Supreme Court,” are filled with judges (like Anthony Kennedy) who are devoted, wittingly or unwittingly, to promoting radical individualism, at the expense of liberty.

    The political evidence (in parentheses) in the wake of Kennedy opinion about liberty rings false: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence (except if you are a Christian cake baker), of meaning, of the universe, and if the mystery of human life.”

    Indeed, that Kennedy and 4 other judges thought that they had the right as judges to define marriage is unbounded totalitarianism.

    A pursuit of the “French” option requires a rejection and thorough recalibration of the cult of “supreme deference” paid to courts and judges, which have become enclaves for political tyranny. Yet such rejection and recalibration is extremely difficult, because of the tyrannical political power that has now emerged via CEOs and boards of global corporate enterprises like Apple and Google, who couldn’t care less about liberty.

    So the questions become: is the “David French” option a recipe for suicide, and is the “Ahmari” option a path to civil war? Is there a way to preserve and protect liberty, without losing liberty?

  5. There is a number of very different things, all called liberalism.

    Some things are agnostic – they do not intercede into religion while they seek to maintain basic freedoms, realistic economy, and so on. Think of Adam Smith. Such a liberalism can form basis of conservative politics and it can go well with Christianity.

    On the other hand there is anti-theistic liberalism based on pragmatism, behavioralism, and so on. This liberalism is compatible with socialism. Or very pro-socialistic: history shows us these liberal applauding Mao, Stalin, Third Reich (eugenics, bank management). This liberalism in incompatible with Christianity – and it is not especially clever to assume some “liberal virtues” when these people deal with Christians. Solution to this tensions is possible only through dialectic: Christianity transformed into neo-modernist liberal theology. Contemporary Church works in good old medieval mode of “two truths”: the big one – liberal and very, very little one, even catacombal one sometime – dogmatic truth of God Jesus Christus and His Ressurection, unblurred Evangelium, nonpaganic style of life.

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