Let’s Talk About Religious Pluralism

Pluralism works in the event that you’ve secured cooperation among groups. That is, no one particular group attempts to force the comprehensiveness of that group’s religion on other religions. It’s difficult to find a group that finds the milquetoast state of affairs brought on by pluralism to be acceptable. There’s an internal sense of fulfillment when Muslims are allowed to govern themselves according to Sharia. But because all groups with almost no exceptions have comprehensive doctrines, we arrive at a very familiar scenario of endless conflict.

Cooperation brings utility, but the dominant strategy is to seize higher utility by defecting from cooperation and exercising comprehensiveness. When you unavoidably have multiple groups with comprehensive doctrines, pluralism, is valuable but unstable. What makes religious pluralism stable? A very strong and heavy-handed state.

It’s important, however, to note that none of this falls afoul of the usual liberal-informed discussions of pluralism and tolerance. To be clear, there is no such thing as neutrality. Instead, the state neuters groups, in order to achieve overarching polity goals—usually peace, order, and good government. As a visual representation, if each religion is a puzzle piece, the state files away the edges of each puzzle piece until they fit together reasonably well. The state is not neutral. Its comprehensiveness is in limiting each of the groups, in order to secure certain goals, as the full expressions of these religions either essentially or practically is the negation of other religions and groups.

What’s curious, though, is that in the presence of substantial incommensurability of values, polity goals (the common good) must be less substantive and comprehensive in nature. If you conceive of polity goals as a ladder, with the top being less comprehensive, and the bottom being most comprehensive, then it seems clear that the more incommensurability present in a polity, the higher up the rung the state has to govern. So in the advent of dozens of dramatically distinct groups, polity goals shift to the reduction of violence and the maintenance of order, rather than promoting spiritual growth in light of a particular Christian denomination.

This is why there is a constant conflict about what makes an ideology secular or not. Is neoreaction secular? Is neoreaction religious? Questions like these are forwarded usually with the context of a polity in mind—that is, if we could concretely envision a ‘neoreactionary’ polity, what would it look like?

As I’ve elsewhere written, this is a malformed question, since it denies proper methodology. Mistakes along these lines fall into two categories: first, there are those who take the sola principle approach. This is concomitant as a tendency with libertarianism outside of the beltway, but even inside the beltway, libertarians are infected with blind application of principles, without a view on how prescriptions have to be modified based on input factors. This makes libertarian policy prescriptions both boring and wrong.

The fantasy is this: economic models apply wholesale in every instance. The reality is that the real world is ceteris paribus.

On the other hand, we have folks who deny the existence of principles and have no clue why regularities occur.

In reality, the methodology should more or less look like this (in its broadest form):

Origination of principles:

Material conditions/input factors -> Principles -> Prescriptions

Use of principles, once principles are firmly in possession:

Principles -> Material conditions -> Prescriptions

Prescriptions can be radically different based on differing input factors and of course based on the epistemological conundrums around coming to a knowledge of input factors. This is why there can be Rawlsian libertarians. Rawlsian libertarians are of course run-of-the-mill Rawlsians, with the key distinction being that they disagree with regular Rawlsians on the input factors, namely: what are the empirical circumstances which empirically secure the difference principle, i.e. where inequalities are permitted, so long as those inequalities benefit the worst off.

For liberal Rawlsians, it’ll be some sort of redistributive state; for Rawlsian libertarians, it’ll be a full embrace of free markets, with the research programme focusing on how some of the most publicly abominable practices actually help the poor, and so are ipso facto justified on a Rawlsian framework: sweatshops, child labor, etc.

To help illustrate is a quote from the always-relevant Saul Alinsky, the figure everyone likes to pay homage to without actually having read:

“I remember an unfortunate experience with my Reveille for Radical, in which I collected accounts of particular actions and tactics employed in organizing number of communities. For some time after the book was published I got reports that would-be organizers were using this book as a manual, and whenever they were confronted with a puzzling situation they would retreat into some vestibule or alley and thumb through the find the answer! There can be no prescriptions for particular situations because the same situation rarely recurs, any more than history repeats itself. People, pressures, and patterns of power are variables, and particular combination exists only in a particular time—even then the variables are constantly in a state of flux. Tactics must be understood as specific applications of the rules and principles that I have listed above. It is the principles that the organizer must carry with him in battle. To these he applies his imagination, and he relates them tactically to specific situations.”

I’ll admit, this has been a bit of an aside, but it was necessary. To return to the neoreaction-as-polity question with this methodology in mind, the answer has to be that it’s not possible to say in the abstract, unless a detailed thought experiment is constructed, in which principles can be applied to detailed and stipulated world-conditions. To insist that in advance your principles are supposed to endorse a fully-fleshed out polity that is applicable in toto just evinces a wrong-headed understanding of principles. That’s what makes the question malformed.

Suppose you’re taken to a mountain overlooking a fairly large polity, which is governed with a religious pluralism that has allowed centuries of violence to be somewhat stemmed and controlled. It’s not perfect, but it does the job. Suppose further that you’re a Christian and that you are in possession of a magic wand that can instantly transform the comprehensive doctrines of the state to the comprehensive doctrines of an explicitly Christian state.

Do you wave the wand? Think hard about that. On the one hand, the polity would religious, as opposed to ‘secular,’ and that’s what you want, right? Only heathens would advocate for a secular ideology. On the other hand, there’s the very clear realization that waving the wand would result in stirring up crushing and excruciating conflicts between religious groups that have been settled, albeit uneasily so, by the state.

Suppose you’re taken to a mountain overlooking a fairly large polity, which is composed mostly of Protestants, who share comprehensive notions of the good, although it’s stipulated in the constitution that there is supposed to be a level-playing field between the majority Protestant group, and all other groups. Suppose the very small minority groups filed under ‘other’ use this to their advantage and subvert and antagonize the Protestants.

Do you wave the wand? The answer is much clearer in this case, I think.

Now, it’s possible to say that being a Christian just means implementing principles of peace, order, and good government, and so depending on the material conditions, this could result in religious pluralism, or it could result in a more comprehensive Christian polity. It isn’t clear to me that this is the case. And it certainly is not the case for other religions, which wouldn’t even come close to a view like this.

Moreover, the secular vs. religious divide seems a bloody awful distinction. What makes Christian soccer? What makes a piece of Christian music? Can’t we just have good soccer and good music? What you’re seeing here is a misapplication of categories, which is natural. Every ideology does this. Not a few weeks ago, I found myself in an uncomfortable discussion about the libertarian view of God. That’s about as meaningful as the libertarian view of golf, which would only be a legitimate line of inquiry if an analysis of golf revealed that the game directed its players to chuck golf clubs at unsuspecting players without their consent.

So it seems as though it’s wrong to directly append ‘libertarian’ or ‘Christian’ to these activities, and even wrong-headed to ask the question in the first place, unless there is something in the activity itself that negates the ideology. If soccer itself essentially included a denial of Christ, or requires some other prohibited activities, then soccer is properly unchristian.

It’s a little more complicated in the context of a polity, but not by much. Aquinas, for one, conceived it possible to allow prostitution within a polity. Prostitution! How could he? Error has no rights, isn’t to legalize to encourage? etc. etc.

Human law is neither divine, nor eternal law. Civil statutes have limitations with regard to vice and virtue. If all sins were punishable by law, the state would be thrown in disrepute, and even more violence and decay would be created than would otherwise have existed, had these sins been tolerated or managed differently. The answer about prostitution is that it depends. Insofar as it threatens social order, there’s a clear allowance for it to be put down, unless putting it down in some manner would engender worse conditions than merely allowing it to exist.

In principle, then, comprehensive group doctrines are subordinate to polity goals of peace, order, and good government, and any shifts along the ladder of comprehensiveness have to be calculated in view of actually existent polity-conditions.

Religious pluralism comes in multiple forms. In fact, as bizarre as it sounds, an incentive structure could be designed which permits the extension of rituals or practices based on violence levels, giving each group an incentive to stem violence. There’s no philosophical necessity they be treated equally if they don’t equally contribute to the goals of the state. Not all religions are equal, and not all religions contribute equally. Depending on the composition of the polity, one in particular could be favored over the rest—no, this isn’t Christianity in the United States. It’s Progressivism. The elite, apart from banal and uninteresting formal symbolism for signalling purposes, is manifestly hostile to non-tepid Christian values and devotes itself to a cladistically similar Progressivism. Signalling is to fool middle America, and Progressivism for everything else.

Progressivism is the dominant religion, and all other religions are subordinate. It allows for a formal vertical religious pluralism, although even this is fading based on the selective priorities of the Obama administration, and horizontal pluralism certainly does not exist in areas demographically dominated by the elite. Opposition to same-sex marriage? You’re finished.

Is there any philosophically clean answer as to why we ought to prefer our religious roots? Aside from adaptive efficiency with regard to Europeans, it’s value preferences against value preferences. Why shouldn’t there military chaplains for X religious, too, if the Christians have them? First, what purpose does Christianity serve? It serves to meet the needs of the military, and a substantial number of them are Christian. Advocating for the flying spaghetti monster as a reductio to push the ‘all or nothing’ scenario is missing it. The religion either serves a concrete purpose, or it doesn’t. Chaplains for religion X are psychologically useful, but only if there’s a substantial number of Xs.

There then is the reason that catering to endless whims is destructive on the cohesiveness of the military as a whole.

But still, the final and most convincing reason is that we just don’t like it and don’t want it, and the position of chaplain should ultimately be reserved for the Christian religion. And that’s that.

You mean this isn’t a clean answer? You mean you’re upset that you actually have to concern yourself with the struggle of values over values? A better question is this: did you sincerely think that a satisfactory philosophical answer would have changed your predicament one bit?

The answer is obvious. You are locked in a struggle, and there is no way out.

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