It's one universe
Garvey, John
JOHN GARVEY IT'S ONE UNIVERSE Where the godly & godless can talk The place of religion and religious discourse in a secular society is a subject of constant debate. At one extreme are those who...
...When religion was allied to power this love was made more difficult...
...According to Fish, "If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism's table where before you were denied an invitation...
...He rejects the "currently fashionable notion that people live in, as it is said, realities created by incommensurable traditions of discourse...
...For example: "A prolife advocate sees abortion as a sin against God who infuses life at the moment of conception...
...Their opposite numbers are those who would see the law reflect specifically religious concerns, including the institution of prayer in public schools and the teaching of creationism instead of, or at least alongside of, evolution...
...He simply found that one set of arguments made more sense than another...
...To put the matter baldly, a person of religious conviction should not want to enter the marketplace of ideas but to shut it down, at least insofar as it presumes to determine matters that he believes have been determined by God and faith...
...I have to admit that I have been tempted to something like this opinion, particularly where debates over abortion are concerned, but it is, finally, wrong-headed, and Neuhaus answers Fish persuasively...
...Atheists become believers...
...At one extreme are those who believe that the wall between church and state is infinitely high, that religion is appropriately considered a subjective matter of personal taste-something done privately, between consenting adults-and that it should never intrude upon the public realm...
...That is the simple phenomenon of people who at one level change their minds, and at a more dramatic level are genuinely converted...
...it may be one of secularism's gifts that it freed religion into a place where dialogue was made absolutely necessary...
...You engage people at the point where they are en-gageable and then hope that they might be moved, step by step, toward the fullness of truth...
...We believe in "the love that moves the sun and the other stars," to quote Dante, and the secular culture puts this on the table along with the schoolboy atheism of Carl Sagan and says it's all a matter of taste...
...He might also have mentioned such apologists as Saint Justin, or the use of Greek philosophy by the Fathers, or of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas...
...Duke University Professor Stanley Fish (author of Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change, Oxford) argues against Carter and Marsden that the religious and liberal, secular realms are so completely different in their first assumptions that dialogue is impossible...
...One thing, finally, makes me believe that Neuhaus has it right...
...Saul becomes Paul...
...but Neuhaus is right...
...The dialogue between religious belief and the world within which it finds itself is ancient, and Fish's incommensurate realms of discourse much more recent...
...It didn't work very well for Saint Paul, in fact...
...First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus argues that dialogue is not only possible, but for believers is an imperative grounded in faith...
...It doesn't always work, of course...
...But better this frustration than either a theocracy or the total victory of secularism...
...Neuhaus points out that people who are "committed to opposing major premises are not thereby operating by opposing systems of logic...
...The argument is an important one, because there are obvious difficulties with being a believer in a culture which treats belief as a matter of personal whim...
...but it will still be liberalism's table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will be hers...
...A particularly interesting recent issue of First Things (February 1996) addresses this question in more depth than is usual...
...No conversation between them can ever get started because each of them starts from a different place and they could never agree as to what they were conversing about...
...The idea of tolerance is alien to genuine religion, Fish argues, and the religious and secular person are arguing from premises so radically different that they inhabit separate universes...
...Something in lived experience can move us from one place to another in a way that Fish's approach does not account for, and Neuhaus's does...
...He responds to Fish's claim that religious intellectuals must finally want the marketplace of ideas to be shut down: these intellectuals "might respond that it is their interest and their duty to transform the marketplace, but before transforming it they must gain entry, and to gain entry they must demonstrate that they understand the existing liberal rules that need to be changed....There is a level at which conflict can be replaced by conversation, and only by entering the exchange of ideas can one discover where that level might be...
...A friend of mine told me once that he had moved from being "reluctantly pro-choice to being reluctantly prolife...
...a prochoice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs...
...Somewhere in between, and much more compelling, are such writers as Stephen Carter and George Marsden, who, while remaining sensitive to the separation of church and state, believe that religion has been marginalized, that it can and should be part of our public discourse...
...Incommensurable means that there can be no accurate translation from one discourse into the other...
...Believers are called to the demanding work of learning not only to respect but even to love those with whom we are in deep disagreement...
...he should seek to rout it from the field, root and branch...
...There are preliminary moves appropriate to what some Christians call 'pre-evangelization.' The venerable pre-cendent is Saint Paul in the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17...
...The religious person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism...
Vol. 123 • March 1996 • No. 5
