The Abrahamic Faiths and the Acid of Modernity

Last updated on: December 20, 2019 at 12:49 pm by John Ehrett

The Abrahamic Faiths and the Acid of Modernity 2019-12-20T12:49:36-05:00 John Ehrett

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Over the last few months, I’ve had the pleasure of reading three fascinating books that touch on questions of faith and public life, from the perspective of very different theological traditions. Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism chronicles the unsettling resurgence, on both the far left and far right, of virulently anti-Jewish views. Asma Uddin’s When Islam Is Not a Religion explains how Islamic belief, in the American political zeitgeist, is either stigmatized as a totalitarian political project or appropriated as a token of intersectionality. And R.R. Reno’s Return of the Strong Gods, taking a slightly more meta-level perspective, tells a broadly Catholic story about the tragedy of World War II and the Western turn against any philosophy reeking of “ideology.”

Despite the different traditions from which their authors hail, at the heart of all three books is a common understanding about the place of religious identity in an individual’s life. Weiss, Uddin, and Reno all grasp that faith commitments are central to personal identity in the most elemental ways—so central that other value commitments, when they conflict with religious duty, must yield. Those not truly steeped in a faith tradition of their own will necessarily have difficulty grasping its central influence in the committed believer’s life. (Failure to understand this leads to dull and superficial political analyses, like this particular disaster of a piece from Vox‘s Zack Beauchamp, that confuse correlation and causation.)

Notably, Weiss, Uddin, and Reno all grasp that it is possible to practice their faiths within the limitations of a pluralistic political regime. While it is certainly possible to conceive of a political system where religious convictions and political realities perfectly align—whether taking the form of an explicitly Jewish state like Israel, a state governed by Islamic sharia law, or a Catholic integralist or Reformed theonomist regime—the actualization of such a theo-political utopia is not a salvific imperative (that is, something without which salvation is impossible).

Nevertheless, the authors’ beliefs do not overlap perfectly with the norms of “polite society” in a liberal democracy. All three authors—more or less—recognize a certain disconnect between some of the beliefs they hold and the interpretations of those beliefs espoused by certain highly public figures who routinely invoke their same faiths. One might say, for instance, that Weiss, Uddin, and Reno have more in common with one another than each of them does, respectively, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi, and Ilhan Omar.

What grounds this divergence? Progressive religious traditions, broadly speaking, share an evolutionary, semi-Hegelian approach to theology that H. Richard Niebuhr called the “Christ of culture” mentality—a theological paradigm that understands divine purpose as fundamentally bound up with the outworking of democratic political processes. By contrast, the scandal of traditional—one might even say “conservative”—theological conviction is the assertion that there are certain moral and metaphysical principles that are fully insulated from democratic consensus.

The difference between these two theological models implicates how one thinks about the old Marxist slogan “the personal is political.” In the simplest sense, the slogan is unavoidably true: if the political life is intrinsically bound up with the moral life, as the classical theological-philosophical tradition has typically held, then personal conduct inevitably has “political” ramifications (how one lives, in short, always indirectly shapes one how relates to others). But what it cannot mean, for the orthodox believer, is that the most personal thing of all—religious conviction—is something up for grabs within the flux of the democratic/electoral process. And this, I think, is what those traditionalists who criticize the “politicization of everything” are really getting at—they’re affirming a belief that some things aren’t just worth voting for, but worth dying for.

Whether at the ballot box or the gulag, you will never persuade a practitioner of Orthodox Judaism that the Torah is not the revealed truth of God, convince a conservative Muslim that Muhammad was not actually a prophet, or talk a traditional Christian into declaring that Jesus did not rise from the dead. To the believer, it simply does not matter that these truth-claims are impervious to change in the face of social evolution or are inherently “exclusionary”—that is, if true, they entail that other faith traditions are flatly incorrect. What matters is whether the claims are true in themselves, not whether they promote the “democratic values” of liberty and equality. (Faiths might very well promote such principles incidentally, but they are not justified on that basis.)

And this is the kind of conviction that a certain type of politically-minded person finds intolerable, because such a priori convictions can never perfectly align with a regime that emerges out of democratic processes and that is changed by them. In a democratic system, the person of faith is always, in some sense, a citizen of two realms—rendering to Caesar (or vox populi) what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. That is the issue with which practitioners of the three Abrahamic faiths (as well as others) must now contend. Fortunately, Weiss, Uddin, and Reno all understand this at a deep level—and their new books provide a firm foundation for grappling with it.

Political Theory

Previous Post

December 2, 2019

The Best Books I Read This Year (2019 Edition)

Next Post

December 28, 2019 How to Tell Good “Star Wars” Stories

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Culture Ecclesiology Education Imagination Movies Political Theory Scripture Uncategorized Worship

Select a Month December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 June 2019 April 2019 January 2019 December 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

In 1 John, how do we know what love is?

Select your answer to see how you score.

God sent his Son God first loved us Jesus Christ laid down his life for us The Holy Spirit teaches us