Santorum distinguishes himself

Santorum distinguishes himself

Former Senator Rick Santorum is trying to distinguish himself from the pack of likely Republican presidential candidates, and so far his efforts have proved impressive. I say this in part because of his recent forthright comments concerning sharia:
Jihadism is evil and we need to say what it is. We need to define it and say what it is. And it is evil. Sharia law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution.
More than almost any other possible standard-bearer, Santorum grounds his remarks in a clear and self-consistent philosophical position. Santorum holds that American liberties are grounded not merely in a resistance to specific acts of tyranny, or Enlightenment ideals about the rights of man, but rather in a robustly theistic notion of what is the good life for man, and what rights he requires to live it. In other words, Santorum's sense of liberty is more Aristotelian than Lockean: Freedom means the power to do the good (or not) without undue outside coercion. On this view, shared as historian M.E. Bradford documented by the huge majority of those who voted for the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, the liberty to practice any religion (or none) flows from the nature of man as a rational being whom God respects as an independent agent—and not a “slave” as Islamic theology would have it.


Here is what Santorum said in January 2011:
There's the secular law, there's man made laws, and then there's a higher law. There's the sacred law, the universal law, the natural law, that we learn in America by and large through faith, through the moral code that faith teaches, but that is discernible through the philosophers, too, through right reason. And that law sits over the secular law, and is one that we have to achieve.... So that when we had slavery in this country, slavery did not conform to the natural law, and as a result there was agitation, always.... This agitation of having secular laws inconsistent with the natural law is something that we've dealt with in America from its very founding. But we have to recognize that there is a place for the articulation of the sacred law, or the natural law, or the universal law, and that they need to be in the public square and they need to be involved in the political discourse because there are moral components to every single law we pass.
For the natural law tradition, our moral code is grounded in an ultimate reality accessible to unaided human reason—which can be helped along by faith to achieve certain key conclusions faster: Hence the Ten Commandments can help the less philosophical man realize the sanctity of individual life, of private property, and marriage, all of which can also be known by reason alone. The only elements of the moral law that believers can, or have any right, to try to legislate, are those that can be shown by such rational arguments—allowing the public square to operate by the laws of unaided reason, even if many of those who enter that public square do so for reasons of faith.

We insist on this set of rational ground rules not just for the practical reason that we lack a sufficient religious uniformity to enact and enforce a theocracy, but because a respect for the dignity of our fellow human beings requires we not impose on them the fruits of private, internal experiences such as faith. Furthermore, the picture of God that lies behind this non-coercive, reason-based approach, is one of a deity Who binds Himself by the laws of reason, Who (as Islam would have it) allows His “hand to be chained” by internal self-consistence. God's reason determines His will, not the other way round—which is why historians of thought call this position “rationalistic” as opposed to “voluntaristic.”

Nor is this picture of ultimate reality the fruit of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment; St. Thomas Aquinas insisted vigorously that God's justice must in some sense be analogous to our own, or else our very use of the word is arbitrary and groundless. It is Muslims who say that Allah could, if he wished, tomorrow empty heaven of the just and put them in hell, restocking paradise with the damned, should he so choose. The insistence of Islamic thought on the absolute power of God to act capriciously is surely connected to the persistence of arbitrary personal rule in Islamic countries. If a civilization's picture of the ultimate, highest authority rests not on reason but power, not on law but superior firepower, it's no real surprise that countries infused by that civilization tend to generate tyrannies; indeed, the real shock would come if any Islamic country ever arose with a robust sense of personal liberty. So far, none has.

Because Santorum is at once a man of faith and a partisan of rational discourse concerning morality, he offers some hope of mobilizing voters from a variety of worldviews who oppose sharia for different reasons. Yes, he will no doubt draw unreflective, partisan Christians, and instinctively patriotic Americans who resent Islam because it is foreign—even if they haven't ever given a moment's thought to the questions outlined above. He will also draw more principled social conservatives who seek something richer than a faith-based approach to arguing over morals. Among those Santorum will alienate are those who cannot distinguish between the “rationalistic” religiosity of tolerant Christianity and the blind, imperialistic faith proposed by Islam. Will the likes of Bill Maher bother to make a distinction between the home-school run by Santorum and his wife, and Islamic madrasas? If opponents of jihad treat every faith as almost equally repugnant, how many Americans will rally behind their cause?

Conversely, religious Americans who wish to distinguish their faith from Islamic credulity must learn to speak not in scripture quotes, blind appeals to custom or tradition, or even cribs from papal encyclicals, and engage their fellow citizens in the rational language of the natural law tradition—as Martin Luther King did, and before him the abolitionists. Win or lose, Santorum is a candidate who can teach religious Americans that valuable lesson—and in the process wake them up to the dangers of a militant, foreign theocracy some would establish here on our shores.