Secular progressive, liberal, religious right….what do these mean?

Let’s clarify terms. We sure hear them a lot in politics and political reporting in the media, and like all ubiquitous words or phrases (like “choice” or “reproductive rights”, for example), they take on a meaning that we have to engage, if we want good discussions and debate. I’m reading a book right now that makes the point over and over “it’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.” Well, I partly agree with that. But what you say is important, too.

So I’m on the Drew Mariani show today on Relevant Radio and we’re talking faith and politics and get some good callers. All of them were engaging, and the people clearly feel strongly about the subjects involving faith and politics. Good. But when we’ve just about run out of time, a woman calls and wonders why I’m saying something that I didn’t think I was saying! It was about the term ‘secular progressives’ and who it applies to and how it’s used. She attributes it to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, and he’s probably the best-known user of the term. But the term (and variations on it) is used in a lot of analyses. With too little time to explore these labels before the end of the show, I strongly recommended my favorite book to explain these things, “The Clash of Orthodoxies” by Princeton Professor Robert P. George. It’s a serious read, so be prepared.

But that’s the idea….be prepared. The upcoming presidential election will be powerfully decisive for this country, and it’s getting closer, especially the primaries that will determine the two final candidates. Which is why we’re seeing so much media coverage about “values voters” and the “religious right”. Like this.

So what, exactly, does the term ‘secular progressives’ mean? Essentially the same thing as liberal. Robert George explains it well, defining it in terms of competing (or clashing) belief systems:

This clash of worldviews characteristically pit morally conservative Jews, Christians, and other believers against secular liberals and those who, though remaining within religious denominations, have adopted liberal ideas about personal and political morality.

Before going further, I want to point out that the caller made the good point that there are ‘people of faith’ who believe in progressive values. So, she said, they shouldn’t be called ‘secular.’ Confusion is understandable. George explains:

Orthodox Jews, conservative and evangelical Protestants, faithful Catholics, and eastern Orthodox Christians today find themselves allied with one another in defending, say, the sanctity of human life or the traditional conception of marriage against their liberal co-religionists who have joined forces with secularists of various stripes to support such things as legal and publicly funded abortion, physician-assisted suicide, no-fault divorce, and the social acceptance of homosexual and other forms of nonmarital sexual conduct.

Does the predominance of orthodox Christians and Jews on one side of these conflicts, and of secular liberals on the other, indicate that the battle is between the forces of “faith” and those of “reason”? Secularists frequently depict the struggle in these terms…

Here he notes, clearly, that faith and reason are not only not exclusive, they are “mutually supportive”.

My criticism of secular liberal views is not that they are contrary to faith; it is that they fail the test of reason.

The beauty of George’s argument in this book is that he proposes “reasonableness as the criterion of moral validity”.

Indeed, my claim is that Christian moral teaching can be shown to be rationally superior to orthodox secular moral beliefs…

My aim is to offer a philosophical defense of Christian morality; and to put forward a challenge to the secularist worldview that has established itself as an orthodoxy in the academy and other elite sectors of Western culture.

And that nails it, because the secularist worldview – though now held by some who “remain in religious denominations” – has itself become an orthodoxy of belief.

Secularism aims to privatize religion altogether, to render religiously informed moral judgment irrelevant to public affairs and public life, and to establish itself, secularist ideology, as the nation’s public philosophy.

Secluarism itself, George writes…

is a sectarian doctrine with its own metaphysical and moral presuppositions and foundations, with its own myths, and, one might even argue, its own rituals. It is a pseudo-religion.

As I’ve said before, the elections are not between “values voters”, and “tolerant” folks. Everyone holds some values. And someone’s values will prevail.

Sanctity of life is primary to the Judeo-Christian moral worldview, and it can be defended by reason as well as tradition.

The wrongness of abortion follows from the truth–fully accessible even to unaided reason–that the life of a human being is instrinsically, and not merely instrumentally, good…

Reason affirms that if any of us have a right to life, then all of us have it; if we have it at one stage of life, we have it at every stage of life; if we have it in the middle of life, we have it at both edges….

There is no rational basis for distinguishing a class of human beings who have a right to life (and other fundamental human rights) and a class of human beings who do not. This is the moral core of the great “self-evident truth” upon which our nation was founded: the proposition that all human beings are “created equal.”

Catholic social justice can fall on the liberal or conservative side, depending on the issue. But it rests on the fundamental right to life. Arguments for a well-ordered and just society without that cannot be called anything but incoherent.