• Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta (January, 2008)
• Hartford (June, 2007)
• Selma (March, 2007)
• World AIDS Day (December, 2006)
• Call to Renewal (June, 2006)
• National Women's Law Center (on choice, November, 2005)
• Sojourners Forum Q&A (June, 2007)
• Civil Unions and the Sermon on the Mount (March, 2008)
• Beliefnet Interview (February, 2008)
• Christianity Today Interview (January, 2008)
• Street Prophets Interview (January, 2007)
• UCC Interview (June, 2006)

• "Barack Obama: A Faithful Democrat" (February, 2008)
• "Barack Obama's Profession of Faith" (July, 2006)

• A discussion of his performance at the Sojourners Forum
• A brief note about a couple of articles on his faith journey
• A discussion of his gloss on the Sermon on the Mount and the "obscure" passage in Romans, all with respect to civil unions
• A discussion of Obama as the "Catholic candidate"
• A discussion of the messianism surrounding the Obama campaign
• More messianism
• A link to another blogger who wrote about messianism
• Democrats and "gospel values"
• Obama on abortion
• Commentary on the interviews from early 2008
• Commentary on the Ebenezer Baptist Church speech
• Dreher on Obama's faith
• Churches and the Obama campaign
• "Jesus and Lenin Rolled into One"
• More messianism
• More churches and campaigning
• A brief comparison of Clinton's and Obama's religious outreach
• Michael Gerson on Obama
• Commentary on the Hartford UCC speech:

While he speaks frequently about human dignity, all he has to say about abortion is that Catholic efforts to go beyond it are praiseworthy (so long as they agree with the rest of his agenda) and that religious conservatives use it to divide us, as if they don’t take the issue seriously. He has, in the past (before he was a presidential candidate), had somewhat more nuanced things to say about abortion. He has, in the past (before he was a presidential candidate), been more willing to emphasize the spiritual dimensions of our problems, problems that can be addressed by churches and faith-based organizations, but not necessarily or exclusively by government.

I once thought he might be willing to test the limit of faithful witness in the Democratic Party, to say "hey, we’re all brothers and sisters; let’s respect our differences and find a way to take seriously the concerns of folk who care about the unborn, who worry that we’re playing God when we give carte blanche to the stem cell researchers, and who have honest moral scruples about same-sex marriage." He might not agree with any of these positions, as they’re expressed by religious conservatives, but to hold him to the same standard that he holds those he criticizes, he shouldn’t demonize and dismiss them.

• Sojourners Forum commentary
• Obama the Cosby candidate
• Obama's church and its pastor (April, 2007)
• More on Trinity UCC (March, 2007)
• Peter Leithart on Obama's religion
• Commentary on Selma speech
• Cathleen Falsani on Obama's faith
• First discussion of Trinity UCC (January, 2007)
• Dan Phillips on World AIDS Day speech
• World AIDS Day speech
• Commentary on the Street Prophets and UCC interviews
• Commenary on Call to Renewal speech
• The demographic context for Obama's religious appeal

• The Ur-post on the Call to Renewal speech

That's all folks!

•  

 

Here's a piece I wrote for The American Enterprise Online in July, 2006, analyzing Barack Obama's big speech on religion.  I don't think his views have changed much in the last year and a half.

“Barack Obama’s Profession of Faith”

Joseph M. Knippenberg, Oglethorpe University

 

     Illinois Senator Barack Obama is on everyone’s short list of future Democratic presidential aspirants. Eloquent, photogenic and accomplished, with a compelling East-meets-Midwest-meets-Africa personal story, Obama hasn’t lost any time grappling with the big and difficult themes of American politics. Two weeks ago, he made a major speech calling upon Democrats to reexamine their party’s approach to religion and politics. “Progressives,” he argued, “make a mistake when [they] fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives,” when they fail to come to grips with the fact that “Americans are a religious people.”

 

     Beginning with an account of his own coming to faith as an adult, Obama’s remarks constitute a powerful statement of a “progressive” vision of the relationship between religion and politics. Alternately perspicacious and confused, his statement is important for what it reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to religion and politics.

 

     Obama acknowledges that our religious impulses and inclinations follow from “a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.” We want, he says, “a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to [our] lives.” Standing by itself, this is a complicated and perhaps studiedly ambiguous statement. Does it mean that we have an all-too-human need for significance in the face of our impending nothingness, that, in covering up our loneliness, religion merely satisfies a need? Or does it mean that we’re creatures who have an intimation of our creatureliness and our relationship with our Creator?

 

     Obama’s language often suggests the former and only occasionally the latter. He came to faith, he says, after he realized, as a young adult, that “something was missing” in his own life: “without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.” He “found [himself] drawn,” however, to the African-American church because, “in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, [he] was able to see faith as more than just a comfort for the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.” Note the deprecation of the traditional role of faith and his characterization of it as a kind of “hedge,” or should I say crutch? Religion in this view serves the needs of finite beings, but to be compelling, it has to offer more than that. “As an active, palpable agent in the world,” it has to offer hope for improvement in this life. In Obama’s view, then, the “active, palpable agent” and the “source of hope” is the church—that is, a human organization—not God. Stated in this way, it’s hard to tell the difference between a church and a government, a political party, or a country.

 

     Indeed, when he keynoted the 2004 Democratic Convention, he invited his listeners to adopt the politics of hope and to believe in the promise of the United States of America. If you’re nice, you call this a civil religion.  If you want to be critical, you might call it something approaching idolatry.

 

     What’s more, this understanding of the role of religion by itself offers no obvious principled basis for distinguishing between the concerns of church and state. Religion and politics are intimately related because churches seem to exist mainly as communities struggling for justice in this world.

 

     Were there nothing more to Obama’s understanding of religion, we could dismiss it as impoverished and merely political, perhaps even Machiavellian.

 

     But there is this:

You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it. You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away—because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey.

     Here we have a confession of weakness and finitude that can’t be remedied by any organization or government program. We’re sinners in need of God’s grace, not just more federal spending or, for that matter, bracing speeches about lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps.

 

     This understanding leads Obama to sing the following refrain, which could almost be found in George W. Bush’s hymnbook:

[T]he problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness—in the imperfections of men.

Solving these problems will require changes in governmental policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby—but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we’ve got a moral problem. There’s a hole in the young man’s heart—a hole that the government alone cannot fix.

At first, it sounds like the villains of Obama’s piece are going to be the usual Democratic suspects—the callous corporate types who profit from other people’s misery. As usual, it seems, everyone else is a victim. But then he surprises us. The sinners aren’t only in the boardrooms. They’re on the streets too.

 

     To be sure, he doesn’t simply preach personal responsibility, as if each of us could help himself or herself. But our weakness doesn’t come wholly or solely from our victimization, which can be redressed by social justice in the form of governmental programs. It also comes from our sinful natures, which in this world can be addressed, as George W. Bush would say (and I can’t see Obama disagreeing), by the loving embrace of a faith community. “My Bible tells me,” he says, “that if we can train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it.” We can cultivate a sense of responsibility in young people, a sense that will—if we do it right—stay with them throughout their lives.

 

     It is thus not surprising that he acknowledges the potential effectiveness of “certain faith-based programs—targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers—that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.” Since it’s offered in the context of revisiting the so-called wall of separation between church and state, such language ought to warm the cockles of Chuck Colson’s heart, while giving Barry Lynn nightmares.

 

     Although he notes both the religious and secular versions of separationism, he doesn’t simply follow either. While he cites those who would defend the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world, he seems to approve principally of what he regards as their activism in the world. Avoiding the corruption of the world takes a back seat to being as free as possible to reform it. Eternal life seems to be secondary to a better life in the here and now. We can’t forget, he says, that “the majority of the great reformers in American history…were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause.” Indeed, “if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.”

 

     In the light of this recognition, it’s more than a little odd that he makes the following argument:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible by people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends upon our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

 

     Let me begin my commentary on this rich and interesting passage by taxing Obama with imprecision. Democracy, as the rule of the majority, doesn’t by itself require any self-restraint or self-limitation. Speaking purely democratically, if a majority wishes to adopt Islamic law or—in the view of another prominent Democratic Senator from Illinois, Stephen F. Douglas—slavery, that is its prerogative. As Illinois Republican Abraham Lincoln reminds us, liberal democracy, which demands respect for the rights of individuals, is something else altogether.

 

     For Obama, however, rationalism in politics seems to be strategic necessity following from our pluralism. Because, apparently, we can’t agree on our deepest principles, we should all be reasonable, seeking the sensible, rather than the sublime.  But if “millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice” in religious terms, why is an appeal to reason the practical way to proceed? And if the impetus to political and moral reform comes—often, if not always—from religion, why restrict ourselves to bland and dispassionate rational appeals? Finally, if, as he says earlier in the speech, “our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition,” why not refresh our politics by returning to that well-spring?

 

     Obama says he’s worried about the kind of extremism that genuine religion may demand. Citing the example of Abraham and Isaac, he says that, of course, we’d all bring public authority to bear to protect the child, regardless of what Abraham says he heard:

We would all do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.

Fair enough, but it’s not clear to me that we’re dealing with such extraordinary circumstances in our contemporary political life. Aside from the irony of the fact that the one “religious” issue he cites—abortion—is one in which people allegedly motivated solely by religion are protecting lives rather than sacrificing them, even most biblical inerrantists are capable of either using reason themselves or of finding ground with like-minded rationalists. The Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding, the case against abortion rests on a deep and rich rational foundation. By contrast, the argument on its behalf recurs to protecting something ultimately irrational: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” as Justice Kennedy once put it.

 

     Obama’s use of the example of Abraham is troubling in another respect. Consider something that many parents feel called by God to do—home-school their children. In the eyes of some, home-schoolers—a significant number of them biblical inerrantists—are harming their children by depriving them of all the rights and opportunities, not to mention the “common reality,” that citizens ought to have. Presumably the case for restricting, regulating, or even prohibiting home-schooling can be offered in “rational,” or at least non-religious, terms. I don’t see, on the basis of the arguments he offers in this speech, how Obama could object. Oh, he could say something about pluralism or about the effectiveness of some faith-based programs, but the bottom line for him is this: in our public life, reason can trump faith, but faith can’t trump reason.

 

     This, then, is the basis of Obama’s understanding of the relationship between religion and politics. For Christians, some scriptural edicts are “central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life,” which is marked by pluralism and rationalism. When the church is at odds with the world, or at least with its secular liberal incarnation, it should give in, or at least be quiet, when any significant number of self-professed rationalists object. If you want to counsel your parishioners against abortion, feel free, but don’t legislate your morality (despite the fact that most legislation is based on someone’s morality). If you object to gay marriage, fine, don’t perform any ceremonies in you sanctuary, but leave the state to be influenced by the secular progressives, who will happily accept your support when your views happen to coincide with theirs.

 

     Of course, Obama has a tough audience. Addressing “progressives”—mostly secular, but some religious—he feels compelled to make the best and most persuasive (to them) case for admitting religious witness into public life. If he harbored religious beliefs at odds with those of his primary audience—as he apparently does with respect to same-sex marriage—and if he felt called to act publicly upon them, he might be dismissed as just another “Christianist.” So perhaps he soft-pedals the ways in which prophetic witness might make his particular audience uncomfortable.

 

     I don’t know what’s really in Obama’s heart, or on his mind. I do know that this is as far as he thinks he can go in promoting the religious voice in his party. In other words, I take his speech as offering a vision of the furthest Democrats can go in accommodating religious witness. When, as in the case of poverty policy, it can be deployed moralistically to impugn the motives of those who disagree with expansive government programs, he and his fellow progressives will welcome it. When, as in the case of abortion and same-sex marriage, it yields arguments that contradict the reigning liberal orthodoxy, it can perhaps be respected, but only as a private choice and a private voice in the confines of a sanctuary. He calls for extending to all a “presumption of good faith” but that’s not, it seems to me, the same as actually admitting them to a place at the table.

 

     In Obama’s world, Bob Casey is still on the outside looking in.

I wrote this piece for TAE Online back in March, 2006.

Evangelicals and Catholics: Exit, Stage Left?

Joseph M. Knippenberg, Oglethorpe University

 

     You know that the electoral cycle is beginning to rev up when groups start issuing statements of political principles, attempting to set the agenda for candidates and to influence and mobilize constituencies. Another sign that things are getting serious—in a purely political sense, at least—is prominently placed stories, like these two, about a party’s efforts to court what might prove to be a swing constituency.

 

     Since the Republicans seem at the moment to be on the defensive and the Democrats are feeling their oats, all the action right now appears to be on the left side of the political spectrum. Democrats are reaching out to erstwhile Bush voters in an effort to peel away enough of them to turn the tide in their direction. Two particularly vulnerable constituencies are groups that once upon a time were at home in the Democratic Party—Roman Catholics and evangelicals. The political mathematics here is very tempting: both groups are enormous, comprising nearly half the electorate between them. A relatively small shift in a Democratic direction could make a huge difference in a national election.

 

     A closer look at the 2004 results gives a glimpse of what’s at stake. While George W. Bush won the evangelical vote by a hefty margin (78-22), it was probably his narrow edge among Catholics (53-47) that provided his margin of victory, especially in closely contested states like Ohio. But not all Catholics and evangelicals are alike. The Pew Forum’s post-election “American Religious Landscape” survey divides both groups into “traditionalist,” “centrist,” and “modernist” camps. While Bush lost modernist evangelicals and Catholics (48-52 and 31-69, respectively), he won the other four, with margins ranging from 55-45 (centrist Catholics) to 88-12 (traditionalist evangelicals). While the Democrats are unlikely to make much headway among traditionalists (21% of the electorate), attracting votes among centrists (16%) should surely be possible, as should (it almost goes without saying) expanding their margins among modernists (8%).

 

     The Pew survey also offers a clue as to the role explicitly religious appeals could or should play in such an electoral strategy. Traditionalist evangelicals and Catholics overwhelmingly regard faith as an important factor in their voting decisions (85% of the former and 75% of the latter say that faith is the most important, or an equally important, factor). By contrast, 41% of modernist evangelicals and only 21% of modernist Catholics hold this view. The centrists are interesting: 56% of centrist evangelicals and only 31% of centrist Catholics regard faith in this way. It would seem at least that nudging centrist evangelicals over the line toward the Democrats requires an appeal to faith.

 

     No one should be surprised, then, that that’s exactly what Democrats are trying to do, supporting bills in Georgia and Alabama to permit the Bible to be taught in public schools (not devotionally, of course, but for its cultural content), sponsoring legislation to permit the posting of the Ten Commandments (in Tennessee), and generally attempting to frame some of their social welfare issues in explicitly religious and moral terms. They are also reaching out to prominent evangelicals, like Randy Brinson of Redeem the Vote, who are expressing some dissatisfaction with the influential role that business interests play in the Republican Party.

 

     While I have yet to see a coherent Democratic policy program intended to appeal to evangelicals, I have seen others that may provide templates for such an effort. The first is the "Statement of Principles" signed last week by 55 of the 70 Catholic Democrats in the House. Its core consists in these three paragraphs:

We are committed to making real the basic principles that are at the heart of Catholic social teaching: helping the poor and disadvantaged, protecting the most vulnerable among us, and ensuring that all Americans of every faith are given meaningful opportunities to share in the blessings of this great country. That commitment is fulfilled in different ways by legislators but includes: reducing the rising rates of poverty; increasing access to education for all; pressing for increased access to health care; and taking seriously the decision to go to war. Each of these issues challenges our obligations as Catholics to community and helping those in need.

We envision a world in which every child belongs to a loving family and agree with the Catholic Church about the value of human life and the undesirability of abortion—we do not celebrate its practice. Each of us is committed to reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies and creating an environment with policies that encourage pregnancies to be carried to term. We believe this includes promoting alternatives to abortion, such as adoption, and improving access to children’s healthcare and child care, as well as policies that encourage paternal and maternal responsibility.

In all these issues, we seek the Church’s guidance and assistance but believe also in the primacy of conscience. In recognizing the Church's role in providing moral leadership, we acknowledge and accept the tension that comes with being in disagreement with the Church in some areas. Yet we believe we can speak to the fundamental issues that unite us as Catholics and lend our voices to changing the political debate -- a debate that often fails to reflect and encompass the depth and complexity of these issues.

The first paragraph leaves some room for prudential disagreement about means, but calls attention to the historic Christian concern for “the least among us.” Given their position, there’s no doubt that government will play a substantial role in any means chosen to deal with these pressing social problems. The second paragraph studiously avoids any discussion of prohibiting or limiting access to abortion, preferring an elaborate version of the formula favored during the Clinton administration, “safe, legal, and rare,” though with a stress on the first and third terms so as to accommodate the eleven clearly pro-life signatories. With its near-Protestant stress on “the primacy of conscience,” even to the point of disagreement with the Church on an issue as important as abortion (at least 39 of the signatories score high on NARAL’s scale), the statement both captures the relatively low salience of religion among centrist and modernist Catholics and offers an example of how Democrats could appeal to evangelicals.

 

     This "Statement on the Christian Right", offered by Protestants for the Common Good, provides a very sophisticated template for articulating Democratic themes in religious language. Insisting that the “God whom we experience through Jesus loves all the world” and that we express our acceptance of God’s salvific love “by loving all others as oneself,” the statement articulates a vision “of the beloved human community” in which all “live abundantly, [and] have a flourishing life.” This vision of universal love has implications for politics and government:

The Christian vision of justice, therefore, includes laws and policies that provide or promote for all the most general conditions through which people are empowered to enhance their communities. Conditions of safety, health, and

self-respect; material provision and opportunity for work; education; cultural richness; beauty and integrity in the environment; a favorable pattern of associations, including freedom of association; and a community of democratic rights, including religious freedom — these are the general sources that empower people to achieve, and they are the business of justice.

While conceding that “mutuality is gravely threatened when dedication to intimate relationships, taking responsibility where one can, and charity for those who suffer are widely missing,” the statement insists that an overemphasis on individual responsibility and character, an assertion that “private morality is sufficient,” betrays an absence of the love of God. “One can no more love God and lack this passion [for justice] than open a window without letting in the wind.”

 

     In this and many other ways, the statement, written in Chicago, bespeaks its origins in the Windy City.

 

     Nevertheless, the author, a prominent University of Chicago theologian, has his finger on an important tension in evangelical and Christian thinking altogether, one that plays itself out in the contrasts between, roughly, Republican and Democratic (or, if you will, conservative and liberal) approaches to political life. As he puts it, the tendency on the “Christian Right” is to focus inward, on the church and on the individuals who comprise it. Such Christians work out their salvation and respond to God’s call, above all by seeking to discipline themselves and to lead pious lives. They reach out to draw others into their community, into a similar relationship with God. These are surely acts of love, born of a humble dependence upon God’s grace, but they locate the greatest gifts, not in the promotion of worldly human flourishing, but in leading (or rather attempting to lead) Godly lives.

 

     On the one side, then, you have an emphasis on individual morality and self-discipline, on the other, an emphasis on loving social activism. The former often regards the temptations of the world as a threat to sanctity, to be either shunned or reformed. The latter can come to regard this view as bespeaking “narrow and rigid ideas of morality” and seeking to impose “parochial standards of behavior that stigmatize or oppress legitimate differences, barring some from their full chance for distinctive contributions to their communities.” If you’re called, as all would agree, to love the sinner, it apparently is, on this view, hard to hate the sin.

     I submit that Democrats and liberals, if they wish to reach out to evangelicals and Catholics who take their faith seriously, must find a way of accommodating those who take self-discipline and personal responsibility most seriously of all. Lovingly scorning those who can’t help but notice the sin around them and who can’t help but be moved by it to action is not a winning strategy. Calling upon them to love everyone, except in the ways that are most important to them (which they must by all means keep to themselves), might lead those morally and religiously serious Christians to conclude that their political suitors are not similarly serious.

 

     I have no doubt that many inward-looking evangelicals could be more loving and generous to the least among us, though their failings in this regard are far from unique. From what I can tell, many evangelical leaders and denominations are working on that very issue. Evangelical superstar Rick Warren wants Christians to be known for what they’re for, rather than for what they’re against. My own denomination is building its urban and mercy ministries, for both compassionate and evangelical purposes. But the moral and personal dimensions of this faith remain central. If the Democrats don’t make an effort to accept and accommodate them, the other commonalities and bases of strategic political alliance will ultimately not matter. “Family values,” for example, can’t be reduced or limited to economics and social welfare.

 

     Many commentators, most recently Joseph Bottum, have phrased this point in terms of the need for Democrats to be open to pro-life positions, if they hope to win the allegiance of religious centrists. He is surely correct, but there are so many more issues of personal responsibility and moral rectitude on which the “left libertarian” wing of the Democratic Party is at odds with the religious folk their party is courting. I have yet to be convinced that the tent is capacious enough to accommodate everyone.

My second resurrected column from TAE Online is "Thucydides and Us," posted in October, 2005:

Thucydides and Us

 

Joseph M. Knippenberg, Oglethorpe University

 

 

 

     One of the many joys of teaching is the opportunity to revisit the same text, with different groups of students, at different times in the nation’s life.  Our classroom conversations, inevitably informed by the big events taking place off our tiny stage, dwell on, illuminate, clarify, exaggerate, and distort the texts we examine. 

 

     In recent years, the author whose work has sparked the most spirited classroom discussion is Thucydides, whose history of the Peloponnesian War has long been a staple of international relations theorizing.  When I first encountered him in the 1970s, his account of the conflict between Athens and Sparta—the one a democracy at the head of an empire, the other an oligarchy leading an alliance of similar regimes—was regarded as the paradigm for understanding conflict in our bipolar Cold War world.

 

     But the end of the Cold War meant neither the end of history nor the end of Thucydides, who claimed that his work was “a possession for all time,” to be consulted “by any who wish to look at the plain truth about both past events and those that at some future time, in accordance with human nature, will recur in similar or comparable ways.”

 

     After September 11^th, we read Thucydides with an eye to the deliberations a democracy undertakes when it prepares to go to war, focusing on the interplay of hot anger and cool reason, of self-concern and self-forgetting, and on the role of visionary leadership in balancing these forces.  We asked whether and what George W. Bush could learn from the example of Pericles, who calmly led Athens into a war that he did not expect would end anytime soon.

 

     But since March, 2003, it has been hard to avoid thinking about the Sicilian Expedition, a bold or foolhardy—and disastrous—Athenian effort to open a new front before the conflict with Sparta had been decisively resolved.  Of course, we haven’t been alone in thinking about the alleged parallel between the invasion of Sicily and the war in Iraq.  In a column earlier this year, Arianna Huffington wrote about “the disastrous Sicilian Expedition,” marked by “Athenian warmongers” who “were convinced,” on the basis of “scant knowledge,” that “conquering Sicily would be a cakewalk.”  Last year, playwright and journalist Barbara Garson wrote about the Expedition as a “sideshow that involved lying exiles, hopeful contractors, politicized intelligence, [and] a doctrine of preemption.”

 

     And then there was Penn political scientist Anne Norton’s dark warning about the allegedly baleful influence of the neo-conservative students of Leo Strauss:

            The story of the Peloponnesian War, as Straussians once told it, was the story of a

lovely arrogant city, gone down to ruin in the pursuit of empire.  Athens, the free city, in love with novelty, is led astray by an errant student of Socrates.  He offers Athens the temptations of imperial power.  Athens falls, and the shame of the Melian dialogues, the suffering of its prisoners in the quarry, plague, and ruin fall upon it in return.  This was the story as Straussians told it in my time.  They tell it differently now.

We are on the Sicilian Expedition.

 

     I like my history a little more complicated and a little less simply edifying. 

 

     Huffington and Garson are surely right that Alcibiades, “the errant student of Socrates” and “warmonger,” seriously underestimated the challenge posed by the conquest of Sicily.   And Norton is right that Athenians were carried away by the prospect of conquest: “a passion for the expedition afflicted everyone alike…[a]nd so, because of the extremes of eagerness among the majority, if anyone felt at all unhappy he was afraid of seeming unpatriotic by an opposing vote, and he kept quiet.”

 

     But Thucydides is far from presenting the expedition as a foredoomed failure, an act in some tragic morality play, a just punishment for Athenian ignorance and hubris.  Athens, he argues, could have succeeded in Sicily, but domestic political rivalries, driven in some measure by petty personal jealousies, deprived the expedition of the leadership it needed.  Alcibiades “as a public person managed the war with the utmost skill,” but his opponents “as private individuals detested him for his behavior, and by entrusting the city to others, they ruined it in short order.”

 

     If I were to leave it here, I would be no better than the moralizing critics of the war in Iraq, simply counterposing my preferred prooftexts to theirs. 

 

     Fortunately, Thucydides offers us much richer materials for reflection about the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy.  When the war begins, Pericles, the preeminent Athenian statesman, counsels restraint.  If we tend to the empire and undertake no new adventures, he says, we can prevail in a long war of attrition, as we can impose greater costs on the Peloponnesians than they can impose on us.  This looks like sound advice, until you consider that it takes someone of Pericles’ stature to sustain such a policy, remaining calm, unruffled, in control, and influential as public opinion varies with the vicissitudes of war.  Not surprisingly, Pericles’ policy requires a Pericles at the helm. 

 

     But since he was already an old man at the outset of the war, it was imprudent of him to expect to see it through to its conclusion.  As it happened, he died relatively early in the war, when a plague ravaged Athens.  His successors quite predictably lacked his stature and hence his capacity to pursue a consistently restrained policy. 

 

     For all his judgment, foresight, and clarity, Pericles didn’t consider what would happen after his death.  Had he done so, he might have been willing to undertake a risk—like the Sicilian Expedition—that would have so changed the constellation of forces as to bring the war to a successful conclusion.  Unlike the frankly ambitious and flamboyant Alcibiades, Pericles could likely have fended off the domestic challengers who undermined the Expedition’s prospects of success.  The Athenian Empire would have weathered this challenge, falling not to the Spartans and their allies, but later to the Macedonians or the Romans.

 

     What can we take away from this aspect of Thucydides’ story?  In the first place, we can be reminded how hard it is for a democracy to conduct a consistent long-term policy.  Public opinion varies with the fortunes of war, unreasonably inflated when things appear to be going well and unreasonably deflated when things appear to be going badly.  Almost always ill-informed and concerned above all with their own affairs, people can also be flattered and misled by politicians, who can gain influence and power by promoting a change that only they can bring about.  In the ordinary course of things, as one leader supplants another, policies will change, for good reasons and ill.

 

     The appropriate response to this feature of democratic political life is neither to surrender to the game nor to envy the tyrants who can hold power for the long term without paying attention to what people think, but to seize the opportunities for bold action when they present themselves.  By acting boldly, a leader can change the constellation of forces to which his or her successors must respond, either forcing upon them a consistency to which they otherwise wouldn’t be inclined or forthrightly addressing challenges with respect to which they would be tempted to temporize.

 

     In all of this, Thucydides cautions, we should not expect perfection, either in the information leaders have or in the motives that animate them.  Even good and admirable statesmen have their limitations.  Every decent leader who marches across Thucydides’ stage is ambitious for honor, defining the public good in ways that he is (or considers himself) uniquely suited to promote.  If I have a hammer, then our most pressing problem must require a nail.  This is not to say that it’s impossible to distinguish between public service and naked, narrow ambition, just that we shouldn’t, in Thucydides’ view, expect the public servant to be a paragon of utterly selfless virtue.

 

     In the end, then Iraq may well be our Sicilian Expedition, but not in the ways the war’s most vehement critics suggest.  We are in the midst of what we have been told is a long-term war on terrorism with no guarantee that we can or will pursue a consistent and coherent policy to its conclusion.  Why not boldly open a new theater of conflict if it can either hasten the resolution of the war on terror or limit the opportunity of successors lightly to change policies?

 

     Of course, Thucydides also reminds us of another important domestic element in the conduct of foreign policy.  People are much more likely to support vigorous action if they are genuinely convinced of the justice of their cause.  Naked ambition and aggression will not do.  This does not mean that right and wrong are easy to discern or that anyone’s motives are pure and simple.  But Thucydidean realism demands that we make the effort at discernment and that our leaders take the task of justification seriously.

 

     The debate over Iraq can be waged over the justice and prudence of the war.  Thucydides is a source of uncomfortable questions and hard lessons for both sides.  If we take our responsibility seriously, we won’t dodge them.

For about a year, I wrote a weekly column for the now-defunct The American Enterprise Online.  There was a time when I could be confident that they could still be found on the site or in a Google cache, but that time is past.  I'll begin to post at least some of them here, in case anyone is interested.

In honor of the response to Mitt Romney's speech, about which I blogged up a storm at No Left Turns, I'm posting a column from June, 2006, entitled "Contending Originalisms: Secular vs. Christian America":

“Contending Originalisms: Secular vs. Christian America”

Joseph M. Knippenberg, Oglethorpe University

 

     Not too long ago, I read Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming, an account, as the subtitle puts it, of “the rise of Christian nationalism.” Goldberg, clearly an urban secularist, worries that folks on the religious right will dismantle the America she regards as a secular state that is “one of the Enlightenment’s proudest legacies.”

 

     On the other side of the barricades, her opponents often claim that America is a “Christian nation,” that our government and Constitution are built on Biblical or (in the oddly ecumenical formulation of the much-decried Texas Republican Party platform) “Judeo-Christian principles.”

 

     To attempt to settle this debate in the course of this column would be to descend to the level of the combatants, citing proof-texts for one or the other side. As it happens, of course, there is—inconveniently enough—evidence available to support both views. As David T. Holmes observes in his recent (and well-received) The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, many of our founders—especially (but not only) the Virginians—displayed marked deist and Unitarian tendencies. But there were others—among them Samuel Adams, John Jay, and Patrick Henry—who were devoted adherents of Christian orthodoxy.

 

     What “we the [non-elite] people” believed is a different story altogether, and one equally hard to capture in soundbites. Respectable historians offer pictures of American religiosity in the colonial and early republican periods that are quite complex. Some, like Holmes, note that a vast majority of American Christians during the colonial era were influenced by John Calvin. Others, like Mark A. Noll, point to the growing influence of a uniquely American evangelicalism from the time of the Great Awakening on. Still others, like Jon Butler, argue that it is easy to overstate the religiosity, not to mention the orthodoxy, of the colonial and revolutionary eras.

 

     One of the few things of which I am certain is that men like Thomas Jefferson, a notorious Deist who was quite unsuccessful in keeping his religious views secret, didn’t speak for the vast majority of their fellow citizens. A significant portion of America’s political and intellectual elite may have for a time been on its way to some sort of Enlightenment secular rationalism, but there was a substantial gap, not only between them and the rest of the country, but even between them and their wives and daughters, many of whom, as Holmes argues, were faithfully orthodox in their belief and practice.

 

     Such considerations are important in today’s debates for a couple of reasons. In the first place, secularists who cite the rationalism and religious unorthodoxy of the founding generation thereby approach a kind of “originalism,” implying that the Constitution ought to be understood in terms of the intentions of the Founders. If they were rationalist and/or lukewarmly religious, then the document ought to be read so as to comport with this understanding.

 

     Of course, one can respond that, strictly speaking, the views of those who voted to ratify the Constitution are at least as important as those of the document’s drafters. So far as I can tell, no one has made the argument that the men who assembled in the various states to debate and ratify the Constitution were as heterodox as were at least some of those who assembled in Philadelphia. If we actually care about what the Constitution meant to those who ratified it, then the religious opinions and actions of a few leading men are interesting, but hardly decisive.

 

     This leads to the second way in which these arguments are said to be significant. The debate is less about the actual meaning of the Constitution’s words than about the “spirit” animating them. To care too much about the words is “strict constructionism,” anathema to many of today’s liberals. On this view, as it was written and adopted, the Constitution embodied an as-yet imperfectly realized project. Its logic would develop and its implications would unfold over time. If it was an expression of minds decisively influenced by the Enlightenment, then, regardless of the precise views held by its adopters, it’s the Enlightenment spirit that ought to predominate in its interpretation. Stated another way, the argument is less about the words in the Constitution than about American political culture, which could be said to constitute our “regime.”

 

     While I have my doubts about this as an approach to adjudicating disputes about the meaning of our Constitution, I am willing to enter into the larger question of what we can learn from the Founders about the role of religion in our political culture. I’m willing, in other words, to inquire into the cultural “project” upon which they would have us embark as a nation.

 

     What’s interesting in this regard is the private and public support many of them gave to religion. Thus for example Holmes informs us that Benjamin Franklin “contributed to the construction budgets not only of every church in Philadelphia but also of the city’s one synagogue.” Others attended services with reasonable regularity and even served as vestrymen in their churches. Michael Novak reminds us both of George Washington’s insistence that his troops “regularly attend divine Worship,” and of these immortal words from his “Farewell Address”:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men & citizens.

 

     Opinions like this help explain political actions like these two, undertaken by the first Congress that met under the Constitution. As is well-known, that first Congress proposed the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, which provided, first of all, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The meaning of the Establishment Clause’s odd locution has been much disputed, but it surely prohibits Congress from establishing—compelling public support of—a national religion and likely also prohibits it from overturning the state establishments that existed a that time. The latter action would have to be undertaken by the states themselves; the last didn’t do so until 1833. Thus in our federal system the First Amendment originally meant not a uniform, judicially-enforced “separation of church and state,” but rather simply a prohibition of the establishment of a national religion.

 

     It’s also worth noting that the First Amendment also singles out religious freedom, which isn’t understood, as it often now is, as just a particular instance of freedom of speech or expression. Protecting it was especially important to those who supported and adopted the Bill of Rights.

 

     But the prohibitions and protections in the First Amendment weren’t understood to prevent Congress from repassing the Northwest Ordinance, which provided, in agreement with Washington’s views, that:

Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Imagine that: our Founders, those creatures and proponents of the Enlightenment, fully expected schools supported by their communities to promote religion.

 

     If, then, there is a spirit of the Founding to which we’re supposed to hearken, it’s one that is, on the whole, quite friendly to public expression and support of religion. The Founders recognized its importance, both as an expression of the innermost longings of the human soul and as an essential support for the civic virtue on which our republic relied and, one hopes, still relies. They would have approved this part of Justice William O. Douglas’ opinion in Zorach v. Clausen, if not necessarily (and surely not unanimously) the largely separationist framework in which he embedded it: “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”

 

     In sum, while it may well strain credulity to claim that at least some leading members of the founding generation were orthodox religious believers, it is equally incredible to regard them as rigidly bent on an absolute and inflexible separation of church and state, a wall high and impermeable. Whatever their private beliefs, many at least acquiesced in and sometimes even encouraged public expression of and support for religion. They respected, admired, and worked with men like Samuel Adams (to be accurate, the beer label should say “Brewer, Patriot, Orthodox Calvinist,” which might give both sides of our current struggle a thing or two to think about). They loved and shared intimate moments with women whose religious orthodoxy they respected and did not discourage.

 

     To my friends on the Christian Right, I say: you don’t have to claim on behalf of the Founders things that are hard to confirm in order to find support in our past for a public square that welcomes religious belief, expression, and behavior. If your intention is to defend the rights of believers to worship and witness as they please, and to have the proverbial “level playing field” as they seek to influence public policy, the often unorthodox and certainly not evangelical men of the founding generation certainly offer you plenty of aid and comfort. Your reform efforts are squarely in an American tradition that includes abolitionism, the Civil Rights Movement, the Social Gospel, and the temperance movement.

 

     To my friends on the secular Left, I say: a good portion of the moral energy that sustains our democratic republic has its roots in religious faith. The Founders recognized that, and were able to accommodate and work with it. Remember the words of George Washington:

[L]et us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of a peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

 

Michael Gerson's op-ed in today's WaPo summarizes the theme of his new book: there are two strands of contemporary conservatism, small-government libertarianism and Roman Catholic social thought (the best devolped form of Christian thinking about political and social life):

Various forms of libertarianism and anti-government conservatism share a belief that justice is defined by the imposition of impartial rules -- free markets and the rule of law. If everyone is treated fairly and equally, the state has done its job. But Catholic social thought takes a large step beyond that view. While it affirms the principle of limited government -- asserting the existence of a world of families, congregations and community institutions where government should rarely tread -- it also asserts that the justice of society is measured by its treatment of the helpless and poor. And this creates a positive obligation to order society in a way that protects and benefits the powerless and suffering.

This obligation to protect has never, in Jewish and Christian teaching, been purely private. Hebrew law made a special provision for the destitute -- requiring that a portion of harvested crops be left in the field to be gathered by the poor. The Hebrew prophets raucously confronted the political and economic exploitation of the weak.

A significant portion of the Republican Party and the American public is influenced more by the social teachings of the Jewish and Christian traditions than by the doctrines of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Religious conservatives, broadly defined, p