Peter J. Boyer in the New Yorker is WRONG on Obama
Editor, New Yorker:
Peter J. Boyer’s article “Party Faithful” (8 September) was to me profoundly disturbing, since it is confused through and through, and its pseudo-sophisticated, insider tone blinds Boyer to massive errors.
Boyer quotes Douglas Kmiec, a Catholic, as saying “religion is necessarily a source of morality”. Boyer doesn’t mention that Catholic doctrine has always maintained that “natural law” can be known and followed outside the Church, and does not depend on faith.
In general, Boyer’s article is exactly the sort of pseudo-strategy that is destroying Obama’s lead as I write. Sure, Karl Rove’s strategy of keeping the base fired up wins elections. But Boyer doesn’t define Obama’s base, because this would force him to recognize that Obama’s base consists not only of religious people but also of the unchurched, many of whom are far more “moral” than many of the saved in fact. And in both sets there are thousands of people who ask what has happened to the separation of church and state.
Trying to steal pieces of a base is not having a base.
Instead, from tank rides to “reporting for duty” to “not my pay grade” it is the strategy of paid buffoons who lose elections for their clients, whom they makeover into buffoons like them, who despite their professorships seem to have skipped Catholic high school. And, the buffoons get paid for this nonsense; nice work if you can get it in this depression.
If “Christianity” wins, then it shall proceed by the logic of events to start a discussion of who is the better Christian, and this will reintroduce the Catholic/Protestant divide into American politics. My ancestors fled Germany to escape its culture wars of a dominant Protestant, Prussian establishment on Bavarian Catholics. Must we suffer it all again?
And how much of this ignorance of the learned must we endure? Erasmus witnessed where it leads when that gentle humanist saw Luther’s protest used by the power-mad to grab power. Kmiec’s belief that “morality can’t exist without religion” is Hobbesianism, a cynical use of religion to grab and hold power. It is not Catholic doctrine. And Obama as I write needs to reconnect with his base pronto.
Natural Law
Both St Thomas Aquinas and Kant believed that the reasonable man would follow natural law. But Americans don't believe this, post Darwin. They confuse reason and short-term appetite.
Natural Law
From http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09076a.htm (Catholic encyclopedia):
"Founded in our nature and revealed to us by our reason, the moral law is known to us in the measure that reason brings a knowledge of it home to our understanding. The question arises: How far can man be ignorant of the natural law, which, as St. Paul says, is written in the human heart (Romans 2:14)? The general teaching of theologians is that the supreme and primary principles are necessarily known to every one having the actual use of reason. These principles are really reducible to the primary principle which is expressed by St. Thomas in the form: "Do good and avoid evil". Wherever we find man we find him with a moral code, which is founded on the first principle that good is to be done and evil avoided. When we pass from the universal to more particular conclusions, the case is different. Some follow immediately from the primary, and are so self-evident that they are reached without any complex course of reasoning. Such are, for example: "Do not commit adultery"; "Honour your parents". No person whose reason and moral nature is ever so little developed can remain in ignorance of such precepts except through his own fault. Another class of conclusions comprises those which are reached only by a more or less complex course of reasoning. These may remain unknown to, or be misinterpreted even by persons whose intellectual development is considerable. To reach these more remote precepts, many facts and minor conclusions must be correctly appreciated, and, in estimating their value, a person may easily err, and consequently, without moral fault, come to a false conclusion. "
That is: the natural law is (prescriptively) applicable in Catholic theology to all people, and since it undergirds the possibility of society, it has to be followed, normatively, not because Christ died for our sins (the essence of Christianity) but anthropically, almost but not quite in Kant's sense: if man violated the natural law society would become Hobbes' war of all against all, and we wouldn't be here to consider the natural law.
This means that Kmiec is technically speaking inventing a new form of "Americanism" where the old form, which was the belief that Americans could divide their loyalty between Pope and President and not pray for the conversion of the United States to Roman Catholicism (strange but true).
His heresy is the claim that without formal religion, man would not obey the natural law, but Catholic doctrine doesn't teach this.
In fact, we were taught in Catholic school that "virtuous pagans" existed and while not saved went to "Limbo" where they existed without the pains of Hell.
This doctrine was recently rejected but I believe that post Vatican II the Church does NOT preach Catholic belief as a precondition for salvation.
Whereas Kmiec seems to be more of a Protestant fundamentalist who preaches no salvation without church membership, a formal "religion". For him there would be no possibility, I think, of a "virtuous pagan".
Conservative Roman Catholics seem to be retreating into the "Jansenist heresy" which taught "no salvation outside the church" in 17 century France. Since many Jansenists fled to Canada, and tthe diocese of Quebec had authority all over North America until the mid 19th century, this heresy had a great deal of influence over American Catholics.