Monday, February 8, 2021

Best Case Scenario: Agree with Decency to Disagree in Principle

Unity in the secular sense is futile and foolish. The ability to unify the diverse can only be grounded in the transcendent: “In God We Trust,” “E Pluribus Unum,” and “One Nation Under God.” Otherwise, it is not unity but only a uniformity that ultimately suppresses views.

You can try to unify a country under an ethnicity or a religion (not always such a good idea as history has shown) or you can unify a country around a great idea that allows for the free expression of ideas from people who are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights, and consent to be governed. But this form of unity needs to be grounded above, so it can be mirrored below. 

When it comes to political divisions, we are principally divided around narratives, human nature, reason, freedom, democracy, equality, and morality. You can't unify these divisions. The tensions must be inhabited under the One.

William Gairdner sums this up as follows, 

“While it may be true that many liberals are religious and many conservatives are not, the secular liberal narrative that all transcendent reality, morality, and law is to be dismissed as myth and banished from the public square remains dominant. Accordingly, the subtext is that secular humanist worship will continue to mean the worship of human progress and will. The conservative view has always been that human beings do better, and do less damage to others, by worshipping a transcendent God and living under a higher moral law they cannot change, than by worshipping themselves and living under a changeable human law that is vulnerable to the will of those who would manipulate them.”

In Gairdner's terrific book The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree, he distills these principle divisions better than anything I've come across. The following tables are from his book: