William Barr on Religion and Morality

I recently mentioned the remarks, delivered Feb. 26th, of U.S. Attorney General William Barr about his view of the relationship between religion and morality. After checking out his speech on the DOJ's website, I found a lot there worth highlighting (full remarks here).

Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Remarks at the 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention

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It seems to me that the passionate political divisions of today result from a conflict between two fundamentally different visions of the individual and his relationship to the state.  One vision undergirds the political system we call liberal democracy, which limits government and gives priority to preserving personal liberty.  The other vision propels a form of totalitarian democracy, which seeks to submerge the individual in a collectivist agenda.  It subverts individual freedom in favor of elite conceptions about what best serves the collective.

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The wellsprings of [liberal democracy] are found in Augustinian Christianity.  According to St. Augustine, man [who Barr later characterizes as "stubbornly imperfect and prone to prey upon his fellow man"] lives simultaneously in two realms.  Each individual is a unique creation of God with a transcendent end and eternal life in the City of God.  We are created to love our Creator in this world and become united with him in eternity.  As Augustine writes in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

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. . . as our robust vision of liberal democracy came to fruition in 1789 [the foundation of the American Republic], another conflicting vision was taking shape.  This has been referred to as “totalitarian democracy.”  Its prophet was Rousseau, and its first fruit was the French Revolution.  In the two centuries since, totalitarian democratic movements of both the right and the left have appeared.

Totalitarian democracy is based on the idea that man is naturally good, but has been corrupted by existing societal customs, conventions, and institutions.  The path to perfection is to tear down these artifices and restore human society to its natural condition.

Soon after this point, Barr begins a pointed exploration of the relationship between religion and liberal democracy and his thoughts are worth quoting more fully. I have italicized and emboldened statements that I think are especially relevant to our class.

As I discussed in a speech I gave last fall at Notre Dame, while the Framers believed that religion and government should be separate spheres, they also firmly believed that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government.  As John Adams put it: “We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.  Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

Tocqueville was especially emphatic on this score.  He believed that religion was democracy’s most powerful antidote to any tendency toward a tyrannical majority hijacking the system for despotic ends.

How does religion protect against majoritarian tyranny?  In the first place, it allows us to limit the role of government by cultivating internal moral values in the people that are powerful enough to restrain individual rapacity without resort to the state’s coercive power.

Experience teaches that, to be strong enough to control willful human beings, moral values must be based on authority independent of man’s will.  In other words, they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.  Men are far likelier to obey rules that come from God than to abide by the abstract outcome of an ad hoc utilitarian calculus.

These fixed moral limits did not just apply to individuals, but to political majorities as well.  According to Tocqueville, in America, religion has instilled a deep sense that there are immovable moral limits on what a majority can impose on the minority.  It was due to the influence of religion in America, he explained, that no one “dared to advance the maxim that everything is permitted in the interest of society.”

Thus, as one scholar observes, Tocqueville concluded that “democracy requires citizens who believe that the rules of morality – and hence the rights of their fellow citizens – are not merely convenient fictions,” wholly dependent on the will of men, but are instead rooted in the immutable transcendent truth.

Thus, it is safe to give the people power to rule, but only if they believe there are moral limits on their power.  Tocqueville’s call to preserve this moral system is not, as scholars have explained, “a rejection of pluralism; it is an effort to preserve the moral and religious foundation on which a successful pluralism can exist.”

There is another way in which religion tends to temper the passion and intensity of political disputes.  Messianic secular movements have a natural tendency to hubris.  Their goal is to achieve paradise in the here and now.  Those who participate in these movements believe their goals are so noble, they tend to see their opponents as evil and believe that any means necessary to achieve their objectives are justified.  That is why the most militant agents for change are entirely comfortable demonizing their opponents and are all too ready to destroy those opponents in any way they can.

This is not to deny that religion can also lead to self-righteousness.  Of course it can.  But religion usually has a built-in antidote to hubris in the form of sharp warnings against presumption.

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Religion also tempers the acrimony of our politics by making clear that what happens here on earth is only transient – not eternal.  “Remember, Man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Unfortunately, this vital moderating force in our society has declined over the past several decades.  In recent years, we have seen the steady erosion of religion and its benevolent influence.

Some of this has been caused by the misinterpretation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of our Constitution by our courts.  Instead of recognizing the benefits of religion to a healthy society and seeking to accommodate religion, we seem to have adopted the posture of official hostility to religion.  That is directly contrary to the Framers’ views.  As Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote in 1798: “The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion.  Without it there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”

While most everyone agrees that we must have separation of Church and State, this does not require that we drive religion from the public square and affirmatively use government power to promote a culture of disbelief.  As Tocqueville would have predicted, this weakening of religion is contributing to ill-temper in our political life.

Video of Barr's full remarks below: