Values voters

That’s the term attached to people informed and motivated by faith, by cynical media and politicians who use that term pejoratively. Which begs the question, don’t they have values?

Yes. That’s the point most of the pundits miss. Someone’s values are going to prevail in every test and argument. The question is whose? There’s a lot of analysis about that in the media, but my favorite is by Princeton Professor Robert George in his book A Clash of Orthodoxies. This is a good time to review it, right before the elections.

He contends, correctly I think, that Americans are either informed by Judeo-Christian moral values, or they are orthodox secularists, which has its own value system.

Orthodox secularists typically say that we should respect the rights of others, even as we go about the business of satisfying our own desires. Ultimately, however, secularism cannot provide any plausible account of where rights come from or why we should respect others’ rights. Of course, most secularists emphatically believe that people have rights. Indeed, they frequently accuse Christians and other religious believers of supporting policies that violate people’s rights. We are all familiar with the rhetoric: You religious people shouldn’t be imposing your values on other people. You are violating their rights! If it is between consenting adults, stay out of it! Any two (or more?) people have the right to define “marriage” for themselves. Women have a right to abortion. People have a right to take their own lives. Who are you to say otherwise?

And how often have you been caught trying to answer that one? Orthodox secularists attack people of traditional values, and they usually do it self-righteously.

But on the presuppositions of the secularist view, why should anybody respect anybody else’s rights? What is the reason for respecting rights? Any answer must state a moral proposition, but what, on orthodox secularist premises, could provide the ground of its moral truth?

See the lie at the foundation of the secularist argument?

You may ask, Why doesn’t the secularist cheerfully affirm moral subjectivism or moral relativism? Indeed, isn’t some sort of moral relativism at the heart of secularism?

It’s the perfect argument, which secularists cannot answer. Which is why they usually resort, instead, to getting angry.

If relativism is true, then it is not wrong in principle to have an abortion, but neither is it wrong for people who happen to abhor abortion to attempt to legislate against it or to interfere with someone else’s having an abortion by, say, blockading clinics or even shooting abortionists. Claims of a right to abortion are manifestly moral claims. Claims that it is wrong to shoot abortionists are moral claims. They could possibly be true only if moral relativism and subjectivism are false. So the mainstream of orthodox secularism at the end of the twentieth century has become self–consciously moralistic and nonrelativistic.

It’s a separate but still orthodox moral value system. Only it is secular. Understand the argument, because it is astonishing in its clarity.

…If people shouldn’t violate the rights of others, it must be because doing so is morally wrong, but on the secularist account why is it morally wrong? What is the source of its moral wrongness? The eminent philosopher and Christian convert Alasdair MacIntyre observes that traditions of thought about morality go into crisis when they generate questions they lack the resources to answer. By this standard, orthodox secularism is a tradition in crisis. It generates the question, Why should I respect the rights of others? Yet it possesses no resources for answering it.

As a Church prelate put it several years ago, “liberalism is an exhausted project.” It can’t stand on its false premise of tolerance, and protection of the common good. It is intolerant of religion, but sets itself up as a “pseudo-religion.” And by defining the common of the people, it’s making moral judgments.

…At the end of the day, whatever is to be said for and against secularism, there can be no legitimate claim for secularism to be a “neutral” doctrine that deserves privileged status as the national public philosophy.

So everyone is a values voter. It’s just a question of whose values you want to put into power.