Negative Freedom = Negative World
Aaron Renn's "Three Worlds" and D. C. Schindler's "Real" Politics
By now everyone is familiar with Aaron’s Renn’s three worlds thesis. Insofar as it goes, the tripartite narrative of American public life vis a vis Christianity is intuitively descriptive. It just kind of works, and everyone knows it. (By the way, I encourage everyone to attend the upcoming conference with Renn, James Wood, and C. R. Wiley up in the Pacific Northwest only days before Nat Con 3! I sorely wish I could justify attending myself.)
Anyway, considering Renn’s negative world, a query: Why, exactly, are Christians now in a negative world? Renn has some ideas but, again, is more descriptive in his pop-sociological style. I wager that, in part—a very large part—it is because we have embraced a purely negative freedom. That’s the necessary antecedent. Allow me to briefly explain.
Reviewing some sections of D. C. Schindler’s, The Politics of the Real—a somewhat odd but intelligent, very Catholic book—in preparation for upcoming pieces and events, a couple of passages from the chapter on religious freedom struck me anew.
Schindler rightly argues that “religious liberty lies at the core of liberalism” functioning as a “bid to replace catholicity with diversity,” with “diversity” functioning as a respect for “all possibilities.” It “trivializes what is ultimate.”
Schindler appropriately recounts the explicitly Christian (primarily Protestant) ethos of early America. Unlike so many scholars, he accounts for the federalist structure of the 1787 Constitution, noting that whilst no national establishment was in play, each over half of the first states championed colonial establishments and the rest featured softer, ecumenical ones. Madison’s and Jefferson’s well-known efforts in the “Virginia struggle” mark, for Schindler, the introduction of the liberal vision, viz., no positive support for religion by the state. In my review of Andrew Walker’s Liberty for All at Modern Reformation I delineated the Jeffersonian indifference, inaugurated circa 1785 which eventually, we must say, won the day. Jefferson was explicit that a posture of religious indifference by the state would lead to the demise of religion itself, a happy result for him.
(As an aside, the political support mustered by Madison and Jefferson was, in my view, disingenuous insofar as anti-Anglicanism was the chief motivating factor. Presbyterians, then politically suspect, seized an opportunity to dispel suspicions of national takeover. Baptists, as always, were not so much advocating Jeffersonian neutrality as they were seeking a slight expansion of the religious franchise in their favor. The point is, on the ground, I’m not convinced the operations were so ideologically pure as evangelicals like to suppose. It was politics, something Americans used to not totally suck at.)
Back to Schindler. Whatever the underlying rationales and personal motivations and shortsightedness of our third and fourth presidents, the final product is what we have now. (We must note too that as the Jeffersonian outlook was progressing in the mid-south, the Federalist opposition to the north was in the process of shooting themselves in the foot. The religious liberty neutrality we have now was certainly present in seed form in the late eighteenth century, but its development wasn’t monocausal, nor was it inevitable. Even the learned men of that era were human, which means they were usually bad at predicting the future. See slavery, which they were sure would die naturally and quickly, as Gordon Wood has convincingly argued.)
Back to Schindler, for real this time. He tracks the progression of religious liberty in America:
“[T]he original separation of church and state… has gone from not establishing a particular Christian denomination [nationally], to not supporting a particular church through more indirect means [e.g., parish taxes or school funding], to no supporting a particular religion at all… to not supporting religion at all. In fact, in more recent years, the separation has come to be interpreted as actively promoting non-religion in all state and federal affairs.”
Enter Renn’s negative world at the end there. The question raised earlier is, historically and normatively, why has this happened?
This harkens back to earlier portions of The Politics of the Real, but the negative world is the triumph of purely negative freedom. Others have outlined types of freedom as Schindler does, though he outlines the familiar taxonomy with some flair tracing origins of each to his recipe for Christianity: Jew, Greek, and Roman.
“Our argument has been that the decisive issue is not whether religion was affirmed as centrally important in the beginning or even whether Christianity was affirmed. instead, the most decisive question concerns the nature of the Christianity affirmed, or more specifically whether the Catholic Church was recognized in its traditional reality, and so as conveying the integral Christian form, embracing the whole of existence and the whole of history.”
Again, Schindler’s outlook is proudly Catholic. He makes no bones about this, as he shouldn’t. But we can accommodate his argument to a more general case. Indeed, earlier in the book the more general point is made that,
“The appeal to God without the establishment of a particular sect in the [Declaration of Independence] appears to promise… peace. It represents the liberation of all possibilities, the inclusiveness of all possible traditions and culture [on offer at the time, at least].”
It is an embrace of diversity as a value in itself. But Schindler points out, all traditions are welcome only insofar as they neutralize themselves. That is, insofar as they do not make overly comprehensive claims on public life.
This is all true. Much of Schindler’s grander thesis precludes Protestant ascent and is otherwise not quite convincing. But on this he is right.
In other words, to avoid devolution into the negative world, the neutral world must be resisted. Yet, it was there at the beginning. We might say—I do say—that for Christianity to not be treated with the hostility characteristic of the negative world, it requires an establishment. Full stop. Christianity must be materialized in a particular form (yes, political) for it to maintain its presence and combat the sort of salutary neglect that Jefferson wanted (and practiced as a means of destruction). The promotion of religious liberty as neutrality, as negative freedom from the demands of established, visible forms of Christianity (i.e., denominations) is gnostic insofar as it dislikes the materialization, politicization of the church. Such Gnosticism can only be combated by its opposite, a real establishment that insists otherwise.
Now, whilst Schindler honestly recounts the denominational composition of the early republic, he does not return to it again to consider fairly whether that original, state-centric model would have been workable had it been more dutifully cultivated and protected—and had things like the Second Great Awakening, Civil War, and Industrial Revolution not all happened in such rapidity of sequence. I think the federalist model with establishments at the state level and a soft, ecumenical Protestantism at the national level was worth a real shot, one we only got to really try for a generation.
The negative world results from negative freedom because negative freedom disarms the mechanism of maintenance for a positive world, a positive order. These things aren’t organic—whatever Baptists pretend. They require cultivation and (prudent) persistence. I add the prudence qualifier because there are times when, for the sake of peace and stability, externalities force concessions. This was, by in large, not the case in our narrative. At bare minimum the process of dechristianization and thorough disestablishment (cultural and formal) were artificially expedited by an adoption of negative religious freedom as the ideal, governing conception of not only church-state interaction but the socio-religious tenor—or lack thereof—of public life.
The negative world is not just lamentable happenstance, the inevitable result of regime cycles. It in self-induced, to our chagrin. Practically, then, negative freedom solutions cannot possibly offer a corrective.
As I explain in my review of Walker’s book, an indifference toward religion by the state relegates religion to the private realm. Relegated to the proverbial closet, religion suffers from oxygen deprivation; as Schindler rightly insists, the Incarnation demands a visible, publicly manifested Christianity. Inevitably, however, there are dissenters—we call them cHrIsTiAn NaTiOnAlIsTs now—and only a true stoic like Jefferson can really maintain a condescending indifference toward them. Our contemporary, less learned and cultured and austere, elites are trained in the Cathedral to be rabid and ruthless even to the point of self-sabotage. That’s the tenor of the negative world, unabashed hostility. The thing that inaugurated the neutral world was disestablishment. A return to the neutral world, which is what evangelical proponents of Jeffersonian religious liberty wittingly or unwittingly promise, could only ever reproduce the preconditions for the negative world, where socio-political indifference (i.e., disestablishment, the outlawing of positive state support for a particular form of religion) always leads. That which doesn’t matter isn’t worth investment; that which isn’t worth investment is superfluous; the reassertion of the superfluous is illogical; the illogical, reasserted too forcefully, oftentimes is perceived as dangerous. That’s the negative world.
Underlying much of this is the absence of a good doctrine of Providence and doctrinal development in American evangelical. Put another way, it is an impatience with the human element of the visible church, it is an elitist distaste for judgment calls, so to speak, in that it demands a pristine sequence of decision making or none at all, an inhuman insistence. But that is for another time.