A primer on liberalism

“Liberalism 101,” by Alan Roebuck, has been published at Intellectual Conservative. In this article, Mr. Roebuck goes through the basics of what makes liberalism (the real though unacknowledged religion of our society) liberalism. Here he explains the liberal view of God. I never thought of it in the direct terms in which he puts it here, but I think he’s exactly right. This is very clarifying:

Liberalism holds that the God of the Bible does not exist. This does not necessarily mean outright atheism; liberals have varying concepts of God. Most liberals believe in some sort of god, but their god is usually “mystical,” that is, a god about whom nothing can be known with certainty, and therefore “God” for them has no ultimate authority. But liberalism definitely denies the existence of the God described in the Bible, because to be compatible with liberalism, “God” must not be “judgmental,” must not require belief in any particular religion, must not send people to Hell (unless they are spectacularly wicked), etc.

How many times have you heard a liberal say, “Oh, yes, I believe in God,” but then immediately and gratuitously and right in your face add: “but I don’t think he’s an old man in the sky with a white beard.” Since no one, at least no one who believes in God, actually thinks of God as an old man in the sky with a white beard, except perhaps when looking at the Sistine Chapel ceiling, what drives liberals to this urgent declamation? It is their pressing personal need to let you know right up front that they do not believe in the God of the Bible, whom they think of as an old man with a beard, because to them that means a personal God, the God who made us, the God of laws, the God who formed the structure of our being, and who wants us to follow his ways. No. God as the source of truth is what the liberals are driven to reject. The God they believe in is deliciously vague, not the source of being, but the source of good feelings, not a bearded old man in the sky, but a Barack Obama in the sky, whose function is to assure them that everything will be ok and that all their needs will be met; but of whom, beyond that, nothing definite can be said.

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Laura W. writes:

I enjoyed reading Alan Roebuck’s primer on liberalism, which showed none of the flashes of rage or paranoia that would appear in a liberal’s primer on conservatism. I also enjoyed Kristor’s eloquent thoughts on traditionalism.

It’s sad the Biblical God suffers such an image problem. He is seen as moral fanatic and nothing more. He wants only virtue and nothing more. Without any knowledge of the Bible, Plato expressed an important truth about the Biblical God that’s lost today: His desire for our happiness. Goodness is the starting point, the place where all true pleasure begins. I agree with Kristor that the false tension between science and religion stands in the way of progress. The false divide between happiness and morality does too.

Gilbert B. writes:

The question I ask myself is “What is the purpose of there being a God?” If there is a God, but people all over the world believe in a multitude of different gods, then at some point the question is asked “Which one is the true God?”

LA replies:

I may be wrong, but I don’t think that people come to a belief in God or to a resolution of these issues through an abstract thought process such as you’re performing (“Can there be a true God if people have different understandings of God?”). They come to belief in God because they experience that he’s there. Dealing with the different ideas about God comes later.

For you, the many different conceptions of God indicate that God cannot be true. But for all men to have the same understanding of God would require that all men be the same in their mental constitution. If I remember correctly from previous comments of yours, you do not believe that all men are the same in their mental constitution. So why should different men’s different beliefs about God indicate to you that God doesn’t exist?

For 100,000 years, men believed that divinities inhabited the cosmos and nature. This was what Eric Voegelin calls the “primary experience” of mankind. It is the common base from which we all start. Then men differentiated the experience of the divine, by articulating the world into the immanent and the transcendent and placing God outside the cosmos. This was the great revelation expressed in the opening sentence of Genesis.

Now, does the fact that the Hebrews and later the Christians had more highly differentiated understandings of God than the beliefs held by all human cultures for the previous 100,000 years, mean that God doesn’t exist?

It’s the same with moral truth. People say, “Oh, there are so many different opinions in the world about what is right and wrong, this shows that there is no moral truth.” No. People need to experience that there is such a thing as moral truth, and then they would be able to absorb the fact that different people, constituted differently and living at different levels of understanding and of culture, naturally see it differently.

At the same time, the differences of moral understanding between different cultures can be overstated, as C.S. Lewis shows in The Abolition of Man, a short book that addresses many of your concerns.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 27, 2008 01:06 AM | Send