Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity and the Human Good (Beginning and the Beyond of Politics) - Softcover

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Ralph C. Hancock is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University, where he teaches political philosophy. He has authored, edited, or translated many books and articles on the interrelation of religion, morality, and politics, including authoring The Responsibility of Reason and translating Pierre Manent’s Natural Law and Human Rights.

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Progressive liberalism claims the authority of reason and of openness to a “diversity” of views and ways of life. But the Love Wins mantra reveals the sacred dogma that underlies the pose of open-minded rationalism: “Love,” understood as boundless acceptance and empathy, excluding all moral judgment, is the new, unquestioned standard of moral judgment. And the prestige of this secular love, impatient with all boundaries and standards, is clearly a residue (however distorted and misapplied) of the very Christianity that secularism must overcome. Secularism is the secularized residue of Christianity. And this residue, in the form of the ideology of “love,” wields amazing dogmatic authority in our supposedly free-thinking secular age. Question every authority, progressive liberalism entices us, but do not even think about questioning “love,” understood as absolute acceptance and non-judgmental empathy, as the sole standard of human goodness. Never in the darkest of Christian “Dark Ages” did an ideological authority envision such a total domination over the human mind and heart as that asserted by the post-Christian humanistic religion of “love.”

The idea that exerts the greatest power over an age is invisible to that age; it defines its horizon and implicitly grounds its judgments. The ruling idea is necessarily sacred and unspeakable in itself, though its moral and intellectual ramifications are on everyone’s lips, and its effects pervade our individual and collective lives. Our indignant refusal of the notion of a sacred ground of action and understanding is by no means evidence of its absence; on the contrary, our flattering self-understanding as infinitely open to other ideas and other ways, as defined by nothing but our freedom from definition, seals our sacred truth in a holy of holies more hidden and more secure than the sacred places of any earlier religion.

More than thirty years ago, Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, secured his status as an academic pariah by pointing out the moral and intellectual trap of “openness” as “our virtue.” No one is more closed, he argued, than a professor or intellectual who brandishes “openness” as his chief virtue – no one except, perhaps, the student or follower who basks in its borrowed glory. Prof. Bloom’s analysis still rings largely true today, but the banner of “openness” has yielded much to the cause of “social justice.” Social justice has, for many, become a religious mission. Bloom was addressing a world in which traditional religious belief still stood as an obstacle to the total sway of the virtue of “openness.” The virtuous elites targeted by Bloom’s critique despised biblical belief too much to address an argument to it, except for the all-purpose formula of “openness.” To be sure, Allan Bloom despised claims of divine revelation only slightly less than his relativist adversaries; he preferred to see biblical religion and the moral traditions deriving from it as a useful sparring partner for his post-Nietzschean philosopher. “[O]ne has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.” Dialectical philosophers, he knew, must have some raw material to work with, after all, some authoritative propositions regarding the Good and the Just to engage and ultimately to deconstruct. He seemed not to realize that a sparring partner whom one has to hold up on his feet cannot provide much real exercise for the soul’s higher faculties.

Allan Bloom’s critique of relativistic “openness” was addressed mainly to a secular intellectual elite for whom Christianity and its moral teaching still represented, not, to be sure, a respected spiritual rival, but still a substantial political force that had to be reckoned with in America, and one that thus provided a reliable foil to reason’s rule, whether one conceived as reason more classically and aristocratically, with Bloom, or more progressively and democratically, with the mainstream academic targets of his critique. For the mainstream, the progressive left, as well as for Allan Bloom’s tiny but philosophically powerful High-Straussian right, religion was understood to be inherently a friend of “traditional morality.” The phony “openness” that held sway in the late 20th century thus still encountered a limit in reason’s grudging recognition of the residual existence of its once great rival and former partner, biblical religion. A little gap still remained in the vast enclosure of relativistic “openness”; the secular religion of Progress was still aware of its Other, of the possibility of appeal to Divine Revelation in support of a traditional vision of morality and politics.

A generation later, we can see this gap vanishing; the mirrored dome of a secular age is closing over our heads, a vast ceiling without gaps or openings that returns every natural impulse of vertical transcendence back upon a horizontal field of meaning. Under the mirrored dome, all virtue, all substantive claims to the good, dissolve into the complicity of the Same and the Other, the Self and the Victim.

(excerpted from the Introduction)