Atheists, agnostics, and conservatives

Over at The Corner, there has been an ongoing discussion of Heather McDonald's piece in the American Conservative. McDonald is a contributing editor at City Journal and writes frequently about immigration issues.

Her AC piece was on the plight of the atheist in the conservative movement:

It is often said, in defense of religion, that we all live parasitically off of its moral legacy, that we can only dismiss religion because we are protected by the work it has already done on our behalf. This claim has been debated ad nauseam since at least the middle of the 19th century. Suffice it to say that, to many of us, Western society has become more compassionate, humane, and respectful of rights as it has become more secular. Just compare the treatment of prisoners in the 14th century to today, an advance due to Enlightenment reformers. A secularist could as easily chide today’s religious conservatives for wrongly ignoring the heritage of the Enlightenment.

A secular value system is of course no guarantee against injustice and brutality, but then neither is Christianity. America’s antebellum plantation owners found solid support for slaveholding in their cherished Bible, to name just one group of devout Christians who have brought suffering to the world.

So maybe religious conservatives should stop assuming that they alone occupy the field. Maybe they should cut back a bit on their religious triumphalism. Nonbelievers are good conservatives, too. As Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has advised, it should be possible for conservatives to unite on policy without agreeing on theology

The Corner has gone back and forth on this (because they have their non-believers over there as well), primarily fallling back on the question of whether morality is necessarily tied, either explicitly or in its foundation, to Judeo-Christian roots.  Ramesh Ponnuru, for example, says at one point:

This notion that the same western morality would exist if the nation were founded exclusively by atheists is tenuous at best, as is the notion that the  Enlightenment itself would have taken its form if we could strip all Christian influences leading into it from the cross forward.  [It’s true] that we can’t prove that it wouldn’t have turned out that way.  We can’t prove any such negatives, but I have to believe that this at least sounds a  little crazy to. . . anyone who will likely read it. What I don’t get is how secularist conservatives get around multiculturalism, deconstructionism and all that.  That is to say, once you take God out of the equation I think all the rages of literary criticism make a lot of sense.   Something has to be fixed in place to assert something, and for religious people what is fixed is God, and what we know of him through scripture. Conversely, as the multicults say, if nothing is fixed than nothing can be asserted (not even the notion that nothing can be asserted). So if . . . one believes that all behavior boils down to subatomic particles and electrical charges and nothing else, then everything about conservatism is just fashion that happens to make us feel good.  You can certainly be conservative and behave in a moral manner without being a Jew or a Christian, but at a certain point the philosophical arch just falls apart.

Today, the posts have taken a slightly different turn as Mark Steyn and others pose the question thusly: if atheism almost always means a contempt for religion and believers, can that sensibility be a fit with "conservatism?"

In a way, this is just one more aspect of the "defining" conservatism conversation of the past decades, a conversation that does not interest me a great deal, except as a student of social movements in general - it is always interesting to see where people and ideas coalesce and then fall apart, and how people can hang together for the sake of their shared interests, despite the many other interests that might divide them.

But any conversation can bring out thoughts with a deeper resonance, and so it is with Michael Novak's response to McDonald, which is understanding, sympathetic and meditative. It is not about conservatism, but about the true nature of faith, and he ends this way:

The fundamental question of our age is this: Can humans really maintain a civilization if a predominant majority live etsi Deus non daretur, as if there is no God? If there is no God, humans are likely to live one way, at least in a few boundary territories, such as life, family, and daily, humble self-sacrifice. If there is a God (the true God, no false gods before him), at least some—and not altogether minor—decisions are likely to be taken in a quite different direction, along a different axis.

The answer to the question “Who am I, under these stars, with the wind upon my face?” is quite different in the two cases. To choose not to believe is to choose for oneself an identity quite different from the identity of one who chooses to believe.

Both choices, springing from the most profound of inner sources, are worthy of infinite respect. From the Christian and Jewish point of view, the Creator himself set before every single individual this inalienable choice and thus gave to every human being a dignity higher than that of any other creature on this earth.

This difference in radical choices is, therefore, the epicenter of human dignity. Each person is created free. This fact demands more than tolerance—more than the mutual agreement, for reasons of peace, merely to put up with (tolerate) each other. It requires, not tolerance, but something higher—mutual respect.