A DANGEROUS political strategy is weakening Westerners' moral fiber and may ultimately threaten the very people it is intended to serve. I call it "the politics of chutzpah": First, you assume that two groups have conflicting interests and one must be sacrificed to the other. Then you demand that the group that has the ability to impose its will choose to sacrifice its interests to its vastly weaker rival.
Allow me to choose an example in which I am a member of the weaker group: Certain atheists and other non-Christians demand that the Christian God be excluded from public discourse. Christians are criticized for citing their moral views, grounded in their religious beliefs, as the foundations of their political beliefs. Arguments from religious views to political positions are, on this view, not merely wrong, but illegitimate -- and not because the Christian God does not exist, but merely because non-Christians do.
This means that an individual who believes that the Christian religion is true, and who is committed to the moral doctrine based on that religion, must not present political arguments based explicitly on his moral perspective. At best, he can make arguments that go partway to the root of his view, but not support them with the reasons he finds them compelling; at worst, he may be stuck with arguments that have nothing to do with his real reasons for taking the political positions he does -- or, indeed, no publicly acceptable arguments for the political positions he thinks he is morally bound to support. In short, it is a demand for self-silencing that may lead to hypocrisy.
Not all public debates must be explicitly grounded on fundamental principles. One can often build a broader consensus on a less fundamental principle than on a more fundamental one. For example, we can agree on the principle that the government should protect citizens from attack, even though, if pressed to justify it, some of us may appeal to the will of God and others to the requirements of a rational animal's survival. When there is no reason to appeal to fundamental principles, there is good reason to stick to more widely accepted ones.
But when different fundamental principles lead to different conclusions, as in the case of abortion, the freedom to invoke one's fundamental principles is important. And this is what the politics of chutzpah proposes to take away from Christians.
You might well ask: If -- as I believe -- atheism is true and Christianity false, why is it a bad thing to stop Christians from making laws based on error? Wouldn't laws based on truth be better?
To this there are several responses. The suppression of Christian arguments cannot possibly be complete. And an argument that is not openly made is not openly answered. But there are also important responses that speak to the politics of chutzpah more generally.
The politics of chutzpah is very risky because it has neither an argument nor an incentive to offer the majority. It cannot offer any incentive, because it rests on the assumption that the interests of the majority are incompatible with those of the minority. If the majority ever decides to use its full strength and disregard the interests of the minority, the results will be far worse for the minority than for the majority. If members of any minority want to protect their own interests, therefore, they should reject the assumption of conflicting interests. They should defend principles that are compatible with the self-respect of members of the majority as well as their own.
A morally strong person lives by his beliefs and defends his interests. If we want to live in a society of integrity, we cannot ask our neighbors to sacrifice their principles and their interests in order to avoid offending us. Rather, we must reject the assumption that one person's or group's interests are to be sacrificed to another's. When everyone's interests are correctly identified, they do not conflict. When some of us misidentify our interests, there may appear to be conflicts -- and then the challenge is to rally support for political and social principles from people who can support them without sacrificing or compromising their values. In the matter of religion, for example, we can all insist on individuals' right to believe what they find most convincing and to attempt to convince others of what they think is true. This protects the freedom and intellectual honesty of all of us, including Christians, and the resulting diversity and debate can enrich all our intellectual and cultural lives.Our Constitution handles the matter well: The First Amendment quite rightly prohibits the majority from imposing its religion on the rest of us or giving Christians special privileges. But in those areas that are conceded to be proper subjects of legislation, the rest of us must accept that what people believe does and should influence what laws they support.
Alexander R. Cohen's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at acohen@cavalierdaily.com.
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