The Sacred vs. the Profane, Part 2

David Brooks writes about Lincoln's struggle with religion in today's NY Times column Stuck in Lincoln's Land.

Today, a lot of us are stuck in Lincoln's land. We reject the bland relativism of the militant secularists. We reject the smug ignorance of, say, a Robert Kuttner, who recently argued that the culture war is a contest between enlightened reason and dogmatic absolutism. But neither can we share the conviction of the orthodox believers, like the new pope, who find maximum freedom in obedience to eternal truth. We're a little nervous about the perfectionism that often infects evangelical politics, the rush to crash through procedural checks and balances in order to reach the point of maximum moral correctness.

Bland relativism? Smug ignorance? Eternal truth? Where is the common sense in all of this? When did we lose our sense of right and wrong to the point where evangelical crackheads have made us question our own sense? Doubt is the essence of faith. Without doubt, there could be no faith, because the very definition of faith implies that there is a question. Those who find "maximum freedom in obedience to eternal truth" are only free from the struggles of thought. They are slaves to dogma, blinded to shades of gray, lost in a maze of circular logic that serves to imprison them. To them, freedom=slavery. Lincoln struggled with his doubt throughout his life, and this struggle helped him make sensible decisions.

The key to Lincoln's approach is that he was mesmerized by religion, but could never shake his skepticism. Politically, he knew that the country needed the evangelicals' moral rigor to counteract the forces of selfishness and subjectivism, but he could never actually be an evangelical himself.

Unfortunately, this "moral rigor" is no longer counteracting these forces. The same people who are preaching "moral values" in this country are the ones who are practicing rampant corporatism, where profit comes before people. You have people (like DeLay) who have no ethics, people (like Frist) who pushes an agenda without knowing compromise, and people (like Rev. Dobson) whose "moral values" include hatred of anyone with whom they disagree.

One lesson we can learn from Lincoln is that there is no one vocabulary we can use to settle great issues. There is the secular vocabulary and the sacred vocabulary. Whether the A.C.L.U. likes it or not, both are legitimate parts of the discussion.

He should have said, "whether the ACLU or the religious right likes it or not..." because both sides are guilty of this. One side thinks "God" is a bad word, and the other thinks "God" should be spoken as every other word. We have lost all sense of reason in today's religio-political discourse. We aren't even allowed to debate what "God" is without the crackheads screaming that we are "atheists" or "godless" when we express our doubt.

Brooks has a major oversight in this column- Lincoln did not live in the time of mass media. Lincoln surely would have been denounced by his evangelical contemporaries had CNN showed him reading Voltaire or some other atheist. The media has had a great role to play in the loss of rationality in political discourse in this country. Fortunately, some bloggers are starting to bring some reason back into discussion. (Others are full of hatred and irrationality, so this could go either way. Hopefully, sensible blogging in Middle America will catch on.)

Oh, and the founding fathers would appreciate if Americans would re-introduce their religious beliefs into political discourse.