A G K Y R A

Time Magazine this week has an excerpt from Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, to be published by Crown Publishers. The title of the excerpt is “My Spiritual Journey,” and he talks about his campaign to be elected U.S. Senator from Illinois (against Alan Keyes), the religious background of his family, the important need for progressives and Democrats to engage in public discourse about religion and religious values, and other things. I didn’t follow his campaign a few years back, and I know next to nothing about Mr. Obama personally. I am interested in his views on religious discourse in a pluralistic society like ours. A story about several encounters with committed but respectful pro-life evangelicals leads into the article.

I want to be fair, so I need to disclose that I can’t help but be suspicious of such a shrewdly crafted olive branch to religious Americans. I’m suspicious of all politicians of all parties in all circumstances, so this is just an application of that overarching suspicion. The excerpt is part of a forthcoming memoir that strikes me as premature. Obama is relatively young and probably near the beginning of his national political career. It has become almost standard in recent years for aspirants to high office to publish a memoir, and since Obama’s piece about his spiritual journey reads so sincerely, generously, reflectively, even self-critically–but all without taking a firm stand on any substantive issues–it’s hard for me to take it as more than campaign literature. Those, then, are my personal prejudices.

That said, whatever Obama’s motivations may be, political or otherwise, they don’t matter to the soundness of his ideas. Let’s look at what he actually says in the text.

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. … If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. (59f.)

He then says that evangelicals who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible might find this “rule of engagement” difficult to abide by, but that it is required because faith and reason “operate in different domains and involve different paths to discerning truth” (60). He uses the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as an example of what he means. Abraham heard God tell him to sacrifice Isaac and had the faith to obey. If we, by contrast, were to see anyone try to kill his son today, we would call the police. Government would be obligated to prevent Isaac’s sacrifice because God doesn’t reveal himself to everyone at the same time. We wouldn’t all be aware that it was God who had told Abraham to do it. Obama’s conclusion is that, “the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that are possible for all of us to know, understanding that a part of what we know to be true … will be true for us alone.”

It all sounds so nice! What are the problems with Obama’s views?

First, the illustration of Abraham and Isaac is a red herring. Most evangelicals never advocate for public policy that is based on someone’s supposed private revelation from God. The issue isn’t that some people have revelation from God that other people don’t know about, it’s that different groups knowingly affirm different things as authoritative. The Bible for us, the Koran for Muslims, universal values forged on the anvil of rational argument for Obama. (I say most evangelicals don’t advocate for policy based on private revelation because some charismatic Christians do claim to have private revelations from God in which he gives instructions for other people: “God told me that you should give more money to the church.” It’s possible that they could do the same with public policy.)

Second, specifically with regard to abortion, evangelicals’ objection to legal abortion is just an extension of Obama’s observation that it’s a public wrong to kill your son. He’s right: if we saw a man about to sacrifice his son, we would be obligated to try to save the child. That is precisely what the pro-life movement is trying to accomplish.

Third, his requirement that policies be based on universal values “accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all” is either completely meaningless or would mean the government couldn’t do anything. What exactly could we all agree on other than very general overarching principles such as what Obama says he is “absolutely sure about–the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace”? Sure, we all affirm those values, even people who are unaware of having any religious beliefs at all. Any policy, however, can be defended under one or the other of those umbrella values. The broad interpretation of those values, therefore, doesn’t actually change anything about our public discourse.

If, on the other hand, Obama means that we should all have to agree on something before the government makes it policy, then how do we implement his suggestion? We don’t have unanimity about abortion, so what should the law be until we have unanimity? Should the default mode be to leave it legal or make it illegal? Historically, abortion has not been legal, so should it then be kept (re-made) illegal until we reach a total consensus? Or, should we leave everything legal, as libertarians would prefer, until we all decide to make something illegal? What’s more, what if we don’t agree about what the default status should be?

It’s really not a very helpful suggestion. Moreover, it doesn’t make his commitment to legalized abortion any easier to understand. It seems that Obama is trying to defend his pro-choice stance to Christians by saying that he is just waiting for them to express their pro-life argument in universal terms that everyone can agree to–and until then, he has to support legalized abortion. We need to ask, though, why he would default to that position.

What exactly is the problem Obama is trying to solve? Is it what to do with religiously-motivated public policy proposals? Just as my opinion about Obama’s motivation in publishing this memoir has nothing whatever to do with the value of his suggestions, a person’s religious beliefs have nothing whatever to do with the value of his ideas. People are always going to disagree, and that’s why we have institutions in this country that allow us to work out our disagreements and make policy that shouldn’t trample on the rights of people with a minority interest or viewpoint. To exclude religiously-motivated policy proposals at the outset would exactly be to trample on one of the most fundamental rights–the right to advocate for our point-of-view as participants in the process.

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