It would seem that, for the
first time in the history of our republic, we are witnessing here in
the U.S.A. the establishment of a state religion, a religion so
crafted as to delight the heart of a secularist, a religion with clearly defined dogmas,
compliance with whose demands is to be enforced with all of the
coercive powers at the disposal of the federal government. Here
are the dogmas of this new faith.
Dogma
#1: A woman has the right, the unrestricted right, to make
arrangements for the killing of her unborn child whenever such course
of action is convenient.
Dogma
#2: The chief purpose served by the institution of marriage is
the securing of social recognition for romantic attraction, together
with the panoply of benefits accruing to such recognition. The
begetting of children, together with such subsequent upbringing as will
equip them to contribute responsibly to the society in which they will
spend their lives, can be dismissed as of marginal importance.
Thus every man, should this be his bent, has the right to marry another
man, just as every woman, should she be so disposed, has the right to
marry a woman. To suggest otherwise, to imply, for example, that a
man's realigning of his reproductive powers to adapt to another man's
digestive tract is in any way abnormal is to be guilty of a hate crime,
in exculpation of which no appeal to the rights of conscience shall be
allowed, this being an intolerable crime, properly punishable
with fines and/or imprisonment.
Dogma #3:
The sovereign pontiff in this new state religion is the people's hero,
Barack Hussein, now reigning gloriously in the White House.
Dogma
#4: Enemy Number One of the new state religion is, by and large,
the Christian faith and, with special intransigence, the Catholic
Church. Measures must accordingly be taken to compel the recusant
authorities of the Roman Catholic faith to genuflect at the new
religion's altar. (Thus the new Health and Human Services mandate).
All of this represents at least one way of looking at President Obama's
arrogant trampling upon the First Amendment, not to mention his
repudiation of God's Commandments. A formally different but compatible
"take" was recently offered by the political commentator Yuval Levin in
an essay published in that excellent journal of opinion, The National Review. In his
analysis of Mr. Obama's attack on traditional religion and freedom of
conscience Mr. Levin begins by citing the early nineteenth century
French political philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains to
this day a much admired, much consulted and much quoted classic.
In explaining America's unique
vitality and strength, Tocqueville assigns special importance to the
vast proliferation of VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS of every imaginable type
that channel human energy towards productive ends and stand as a kind
of buffer, a PROTECTIVE SCREEN, between the individual citizen and the
over reaching state. Mr. Levin argues that the grand aim of the Obama
administration has been the systematic demolition of that buffer, that
protective shield of free associations, among which first and foremost
are the religious groups, America's churches and synagogues and other
God-centered associations.
Here is what Mr.
Levin has to say.
The Hollow Republic
The National Review,
August 13, 2012
Yuval Levin
President Obama must surely wish he could undo the campaign speech he
delivered in Roanoke, Va., on July 13. That was where he offered up the
view that "if you've got a business,
you didn't build that, somebody
else made that happen." It is a line that could haunt him right
to
November, revealing as it does an unwillingness to credit success and a
hostility toward the culture of entrepreneurship....
This remarkable
window into the president's thinking shows us not only a man chilly
toward the potential of individual initiative, and not only a man
deluded about the nature of his opponents and their views, but also
(and perhaps most important) a man
with a staggeringly THIN idea of
COMMON ACTION in American life.
The president simply equates
doing
things TOGETHER with doing things through GOVERNMENT. He sees the
citizen and the state, and NOTHING IN BETWEEN - and thus sees every
political question as a choice between radical individualism and a
federal program.
But MOST of life is lived
somewhere BETWEEN those two extremes, and
American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human
flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the
MIDDLE GROUND - the family, civil society, and the private economy - to
thrive in relative freedom. Obama's remarks in Virginia shed a
bright
light on his attitude toward that middle ground, and in that light a
great deal of what his administration has done in this three and a half
years suddenly grows clearer and more coherent, and even more
disconcerting.
Again and again, the administration has sought to hollow
out the space BETWEEN the individual and the state. Its approach
to the
private economy has involved pursuing
consolidation in key industries -
privileging a few major players that are to be treated essentially as
public utilities, while locking out competition from smaller or newer
firms. This both ensures the cooperation of the large players and makes
the economy more manageable and orderly. And it leaves no one pursuing ends that are NOT THE GOVERNMENT'S ends. This has been the
essence of
the administration's policies toward automakers, health insurers,
banks, hospitals, and many others.
It is an attitude that takes the
wealth- creation > capacity of our
economy for granted, treats the
chaotic
churning and endless combat of competing firms (which in fact is the
SOURCE of that capacity) as a dangerous distraction from essential
public goals, and considers the business world to be parasitic on
society - benefiting from the infrastructure and resources provided by
the GENUINE common action of the STATE. Of course, the state's
benevolence is made
possible precisely by the
nation's wealthiest
citizens, but the president seems to see that as simply an appropriate
degree of "giving something back." His words and his administration 's
actions imply that he views the government as the only GENUINE tribune
of public desires, and therefore seeks to harness the private
economy
to the purposes and goals of those in power.
This intolerance of
nonconformity is even more powerfully evident in the
administration's
attitude toward the institutions of CIVIL
society, especially RELIGIOUS
institutions involved in the crucial work of helping the needy and
vulnerable. In a number of instances, but most notably in the
controversy surrounding the Department of Health and Human Services
rule requiring religious employers to provide free abortive and
contraceptive drugs to their August 19, 2012 - Pastor' s Page -
continued employees under Obamacare, the
administration has shown AN
APPALLING CONTEMPT for the basic right of religious institutions to
pursue their ends IN ACCORDANCE WITH THEIR CONVICTIONS.
It is important
to recall just what the administration did in that instance. The HHS
rule did not assert that people should have the freedom to use
contraceptive or abortive drugs - which of course they do have in our
country. It did not even say that the government should facilitate
people's access to these drugs - which it does today and has done for
decades. Rather, the rule required that the Catholic Church and other
religious entities should facilitate people's access to contraceptive
and abortive drugs. It aimed to turn the institutions of CIVIL society
into active agents of the GOVERNMENT'S ends, EVEN IN VIOLATION OF
THEIR FUNDAMENTAL RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS.
The rule implicitly asserted
that our nation WILL NOT TOLERATE an institution that is unwilling to
actively ratify the views of those in power - that we will not
let it
be and find other ways to put those views into effect (even though many
other ways exist), but will COMPEL it
to participate in the enactment
of THE ENDS CHOSEN BY OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS. This is an extraordinarily
radical assertion of government power, and a failure of even basic
toleration. It is, again, an attempt to turn PRIVATE mediating
in stitutions into PUBLIC utilities contracted to execute GOVERNMENT
ends.
When pressed to defend its constriction of the rights of
religious institutions, the
administration RECAST THE BASIC DEFINITION
AND PURPOSE of such institutions. The final HHS rule defined a
religious employer exceedingly narrowly, as an
institution that
primarily serves and
employs people of its own faith
and has as its
basic purpose the
inculcation of the beliefs of that faith. This leaves
no room for most religiously based institutions of CIVIL society - no
room for hospitals, for schools and universities, for soup kitchens and
homeless shelters, for adoption agencies and legal-aid clinics.
Religious institutions may preach to the choir, but otherwise they may
not play any role in society. Especially when they disagree with those
in power, they must be cleared out of the space between the individual
and the state.
Indeed, the president and his administration don't seem
to have much use for that space at all. Even the FAMILY, which
naturally stands between the individual and the community, is not
essential. In May, the Obama campaign produced a Web slide show
called
"The Life of Julia, " which follows a woman through the different
stages of life and shows the many ways in which she benefits from
public policies that the president advocates. It was an extraordinarily
revealing work of propaganda, and what it revealed was just what the
president showed us in Roanoke: a
vision of society consisting ENTIRELY
of the individual and the state. Julia's life is the product of her
individual choices enabled by public policies. She has an
exceptional
amount of direct contact with the federal government, yet we never meet
her family. At the age of 31, we are told, "Julia decides to
have a
child" and "benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free
screenings under health care reform." She
later benefits from all
manner of educational, economic, and social programs, and seems to
require and depend upon no one but the president....
This attitude
toward MEDIATING institutions is by no means novel or unique to
the
Obama administration. It has been
essential to the PROGRESSIVE cause
for more than a century, and indeed has been an element of more
radical
strands of liberalism for far longer than that. As far back as 1791,
Thomas Paine, in defending the French revolutionaries, complained of
the distance that traditional institutions established between the
citizen and the regime, which he described as an "artificial
chasm
[that] is filled up with a succession of barriers, or sort of turnpike
gates, through which [the citizen] has to pass."
Conservative voices
have defended these mediating layers PRECISELY FOR creating such
barriers, which can GUARD the citizen from direct exposure to the
se aring power of the state. Alexis de Tocqueville CELEBRATED America's
bewildering array of associations, institutions, and corporations of
civil society for their ability to offer individual citizens some
PROTECTION from the domineering sway of political majorities.
Edmund
Burke, Paine's great nemesis, argued that such mediating structures also express in their very forms the actual shape of our society -
evolved over time out of
affectionate sentiments, practical needs, and
common aspirations. "We begin our public affections in our families,"
Burke wrote. We pass on to our
neighborhoods, and our habitual
provincial connections. These are inns and resting-places. Such
divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a
sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great
country in which the heart found something which it could fill." To
sweep them away and leave ONLY the citizen and the state would rob
society of its sources of warmth, loyalty, and affinity, and of the
most effective means of enacting significant social IMPROVEMENTS.
This
difference of opinion about mediating institutions is no trifling
matter. It gets at a profound
and fundamental difference between the
Left and the Right. The Left tends to believe that the great
advantage
of our liberal society is that it enables the application of technical
knowledge that can make our lives better, and that this knowledge can
overcome our biggest problems. This is the technocratic promise of
progressivism. The Right tends to believe that the great advantage of
our liberal society is that it has evolved to channel deep social
knowledge through free institutions
- knowledge that often cannot be
articulated in technical terms but is the most important knowledge we
have. For the LEFT, therefore, the
mediating institutions (and at times
even our constitutional forms) are OBSTACLES to the APPLICATION of
liberal knowledge. For the RIGHT, the mediating institutions (and our
constitutional forms) are the EMBODIMENT of liberal knowledge.
The
Left's disdain for CIVIL society is thus driven above all not by a
desire to empower the state without limit, but by a deeply held concern
that the MEDIATING institutions in society - emphatically including the
family, the church, and private enterprise - are instruments of
prejudice, selfishness, backwardness, and resistance to change, and
that in order to establish our national life on MORE RATIONAL grounds,
the government NEEDS TO WEAKEN AND COUNTERACT them.
The Right's high
regard for civil society, meanwhile, is driven above all not by a
disdain for government but by a deeply held belief in the importance of
our diverse and evolved societal forms, WITHOUT WHICH we could not hope
to secure our LIBERTY. Conservatives seek mechanisms and
institutions
to bring implicit social
knowledge to bear on our troubles, while
Progressives seek the authority and power to bring explicit technical
knowledge to bear on them....
To ignore what stands between the state and the citizen is to disregard
the essence of American life. To
CLEAR AWAY what stands BETWEEN the state and the citizen is to
EXTINGUISH THE SOURCES OF AMERICAN FREEDOM. The president is
right to insist that America works best when Americans work TOGETHER, but
government is JUST ONE OF THE MANY things we do together, and it is
only rarely the most important of them.
[ Emphasis added ].
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Yuval Levin is the editor of National
Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This article appeared in the August 13, 2012, issue of National Review.
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