Christianity and Contemporary Political Life‪.‬

PHILOSOPHIC LIBERALISM subtly but palpably erodes the moral, political, and spiritual life of the regime it helped bring into existence. On the one hand, it powerfully affirms the fundamental legitimacy and desirability of modern democracy and its various attendant goods such as civic peace, religious freedom, self-government, and constitutionalism. On the other hand, it champions a view of freedom that gradually erodes human beings' basic attachment to those inherited extrademocratic goods like religion and morality that liberal democracy must necessarily rely upon for its health and survival. Today that understanding of freedom is routinely identified with a radical view of human autonomy. For this reason, contemporary democracy tends to be both egalitarian and leveling. (1) As such, it not only abhors all natural and moral limits but increasingly those political limits placed on human beings by liberal democracy itself. Christian political thought in various ways can help present-day democrats--Christian and non-Christian--rediscover the necessity, desirability, and nobility of humanizing limits. (2) But in pursuing this rediscovery, Christian political thought must resist the temptation to ape modernity and formulate its own "solution" to what Benedict Spinoza called the theologico-political problem. (3) It must find a prudent way of coming to terms with democracy's discontents and modern philosophy's disenchantment of the world. Max Weber famously traced the roots of this moral and spiritual disenchantment to modern science and its unprecedented success in systematically exorcizing any sense of meaning or mystery in humankind's world. The disenchantment of the world consequently is a reality we experience daily, an inescapable fact seared into our all-too-modern consciousness. In light of Nietzsche's "annihilating critique" of the "last men" who naively believed they "had discovered happiness," Weber somberly concluded there was no intellectually honest way for late modern humankind to think that reason could discover any vital sense of meaning or value in the world. (4) As Weber jeeringly remarked, who "believes in this?--aside from a few big children in university chairs and editorial offices." (5)