Barack Obama’s perceived move towards the center has irked some among his legion of supporters who have backed him because they thought he was a genuine liberal who would stand before Americans and convince them that liberal policies are good. On FISA Bill which enshrines immunity clause for telecommunication companies, on Iraq, on gun control and on abortion, Barack Obama seems to be following the centrist course. Some of the reactions from these supporters are valid; and some aren’t.
On FISA, for example, the senator hasn’t upheld his promise to filibuster the bill if it contained the immunity clause. But on some of the other issues, some of the supporters were attacking Obama for turning his back against what they thought were his principles rather than what his actual principles were. That they thought, without evidence, that Obama shared their beliefs on these issues was their problem, not his.
I, however, trust that Obama’s changing position on the role of religion in public life is the most confounding and troublesome. This change of position was highlighted in the past two weeks. First came the popularization of Obama’s relatively old speech on the role of religion in politics by the dishonest "fruit cocktail" attack of one of the last breeds of "redneck" evangelism - James Dobson.
It was the time when the rumor machine was head-spinning with Obama’s interest in the presidency, and the media was obsessed with this and speculations about the senator’s supposed readiness. While they were hurrying him and his staff with questions about his dream of becoming the first African American president, Obama delivered one of the most important speeches of his political life. In this Call to Renewal address, he made the case, in a way which measured up to the standards of a talented former University of Chicago Constitutional Law lecturer, for justifactory liberalism. Justifactory liberals believe in the Idea of Public Justification. I take the following as the most striking part of the address.
Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing. And if you doubt that, let me give you an example.
We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.
Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God's test of devotion.
But it's fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.
That is a breathtaking representation of the Idea of Public Justification: the idea that a citizen has to provide public justification for his favored coercive laws. This idea is not beyond debate among justifactory liberals. Some like Charles Lamore subscribe to an intolerably burdensome procedure of public justification. They say that a citizen ought to restrain from supporting any coercive law if he fails to find a public justification. Others, however, choose the more reasonable Doctrine of Pursuit which puts a constraint on an individual to pursue public justification before supporting coercive laws. From my reading of the whole text of the speech, Obama is not a Lamorian.
What are the implications of Obama’s "then-held" view? I used "then-held" because some of the subsequent speeches and behaviors of Obama reflected a discomfort – whether poll driven or not – with the speech I quoted. It to me seems that Obama’s speech requires from citizens not to provide religious reasons only to the enactment of policies and laws. They ought to come up with a rationale which is non-religious. It doesn’t follow from his views that citizens should not support laws and policies based on their religious views. In fact, in the speech, he criticizes for asking believers that they should put their religious creeds and teachings outside the door of the public sphere. What Obama’s view would do is ask the believer who supported a certain law or policy based on his religious views pursue a non-religious rationale to back his religiously supported view of the policy and the law. Obama doesn’t ask the believer to withhold his support for the policy or the law if the non-religious reason fails to convince his compatriots. The sincere pursuit of public justification is enough.
Does this view concur with Barack Obama’s recent vow to "empower faith based organizations"? A lot of liberals thought his initiative fails Justice Brennan’s "Lemon Test", and therefore; infringes the constitution. Obama, who knows his constitution very well, has promised to apply the tests in his programs. I don’t think there is sufficient reason to say that his plan is unconstitutional without knowing the full details of the plan. The recent speeches on the initiatives can only show us his intellectual commitment to the initiatives.
What is troublesome is his reason for the intellectual commitment to the initiatives. On one of his speeches justifying his plan, he said, "while I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn't be fulfilling God's will unless I went out and did the Lord's work." There can’t be a better example to show a citizen supporting policies based solely on his religious view than this quote. It would have been different had Obama said that in a different context. But the quote was used in the specific context of justifying the intiative. By providing a religious rationale for his initiative, Obama has failed to respect the demands of the pursuit of public justification; hence democracy –in his own words.