Even in secular Australia, some don't accept scientific consensus

Australia is pretty thoroughly secularized. Nearly a quarter of Australians say they are not religiously affiliated, about 70 percent say religion isn't important in their lives, and less than 10 percent are regular in church attendance, a number that's declining. More than 80 percent of Australians said the world would be better of without religion, according to one study, and another report found that half of those born between 1976 and 1990 have no belief in God.

Australia is irreligious, and has secularized pretty much exactly as one would expect if one held to the secularization thesis.

A new study on scientific literacy shows that some Australians struggle with the ideas of evolution, though. This shows it's not true that the United States is the only industrialized country where creationist ideas persist. It also raises questions about the relationship between religiousness and science education.

As Adam Laats writes, "Significant percentages of Aussies, for whatever reason, do not agree with fundamental tenets of mainstream science. Sorry, Bill Nye, but creationism is not 'unique' to the United States."

According to the study, more than 30 percent of Australians don't think evolution is currently occurring. Of that group, 9 percent said they don't believe in evolution, 10 percent they didn't believe evolution was happening now, and 12 weren't sure whether evolution was only historical or not. There are also 27 percent of Australians who think dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time.

The study doesn't do a good idea of contextualizing these survey responses. There have been occasional reports of creationism and Intelligent Design taught in Australian schools, but whether or not these poll's findings can be connected to committed anti-evolution thought or just generally to ignorance isn't clear.

The lack of knowledge wasn't just evolution specific. There were 42 percent of Australians -- and half of all women -- who could not correctly say how long it takes the earth to orbit the sun.

Australians still have a much higher rate of support for the scientific consensus than one finds in the US. But it seems scientific ignorance persists at significant rates regardless of religion's influence in society.

It's been a long, long time since any dominant religious group anywhere has opposed the heliocentric model of the solar system, for example, and yet in the late '90s Gallup found that 18 percent of Americans thought the sun revolved around the earth -- and 19 percent of British people thought that too, as did 16 percent of Germans. In each of the three countries, there were not-insignificant portions of people who didn't know what Nicholas Copernicus knew in 1543.

It's clearly true that sometimes, in some places, knowledge of science is retarded by religious influences.  It turns out, though, that even when religion is marginal or irrelevant, scientific knowledge isn't universally accepted.

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Secular Jesus

A statue of Jesus at a ski resort is not religious, according to a federal court ruling. Or at least not religious enough to matter.

"Big Mountain Jesus," as the statue is called, has become secularized, and over the years has lost the potency it might have once had to seem like a religious message to any passersby.

In the ruling, Judge Dana L. Christensen, an Obama administration appointee, wrote that the statue is "unquestionably a religious symbol" but is not really very religious, lacking any significant symbolic power. Because, "for most who happen to encounter Big Mountain Jesus, it neither offends nor inspires."

The symbol is secular because it's impotent.

Christensen explained:

the statue does not convey any message that individuals visiting Big Mountain whether in the summer or winter might be treated more favorably or less favorably depending on their religious beliefs or affiliation.

and,

The statue's secular and irreverent uses far outweigh the few religious uses it has served. The statue is most frequently used as a meeting point for skiers or hikers and a site for photo opportunities, rather than a solemn place for religious reflection. Big Mountain Jesus is one of the last remaining remnants from the original Big Mountain Ski Resort, and many individuals in the community value its historic significance. For many, it reflects the evolution of the town of Whitefish from a lumber town to a tourist attraction .... Typical observers ofthe statue are more interested in giving it a high five or adorning it in ski gear than sitting before it in prayer.

There are other reasons for the court's ruling that the statue on land leased by the federal government does not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. The Lemon test was applied, there questions about what a "reasonable observer" would infer about the relationship between church and state from the statue, issues of standing, and so on.

This aspect of the case is quite strange, though. It's come up several times now, where those who defend religious symbols in public spaces defend them on the grounds that the symbols are meaningless. You have to wonder about how the Knights of Columbus that went up to the top of the mountain to put of a statue of their Lord and Savior would feel now that that statue is official recognized as a symbol of a town's tourist economy.

Don Byrd, of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said the secularization of the Jesus statue is one reason religious people should be committed to the separation of Church and State. He writes,

The idea is disturbing that a monument to Christ can lose its religious significance, and become an appropriate government monument in the process, due to years of 'frivolity.' This line of thinking underscores why we should not allow government to co-opt religious monuments. In so doing, government doesn't honor religion, it systematically secularizes its expression.

The ruling will likely be appealed.

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Atheists make peace with public monuments

There was some reticence.

Among the atheists who organized to erect an atheist monument at a Florida courthouse, there was some ambivalence about the idea of having a monument. It was a compromise. They had wanted a 10 Commandments monument removed from the courthouse grounds, and had argued against such displays on government property in principle. Such a monument, they said, signaled the exclusion of some citizens. Such a monument meant an implicit government endorsement of religion.

They settled for denying the 10 Commandments its exclusive position in Starke, Florida.

David Silverman with America's first atheist monument.
Credit: American Atheists

According to the Associated Press, "It's a case of if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

Maybe that's a win for pluralism, and equal access, but it's also at least a little bit of a de facto endorsement of the idea of monuments on government land. It would seem to be accepting the idea that a monument in can exist on public property, at least in certain contexts without signaling government endorsement or making some feel like second-class citizens.

The internal conflict can be seen in the public statements about the monument made by the American Atheists. The man who designed the monument expressed this reticence. Ken Loukinen, a regional director of the American Atheists, said "We'd rather there be no monuments at all, but if they are allowed to have the 10 Commandments, we will have our own."

The president of the American Atheists made similar statements. David Silverman told Time Magazine "We don't want to establish this monument; we feel we need to establish it."

The American Atheists have apparently made peace with that position, though, because Silverman announced on Saturday at the monuments' unveiling that there's now a plan to build 50 more monuments on government property in the United States. Silverman said an anonymous donor has provided funds for more atheist monuments, and the group is working to make that happen.

He told reporters he would also support other groups' legal rights to put up their own monuments.

Atheist blogger Hemat Mehta writes that this strategic, though not ideal. He says,

In an ideal world, atheist monuments like this one wouldn’t have to be here. It’s not like American Atheists was pushing to have it installed. It was only when the Courthouse granted special access to a Christian group that AA knew they couldn’t let them get away with it. Same with the rest of the nation.  

If the Christians take down their monuments, the atheists will, too.  

But until then, might as well make Christians feel *really* uncomfortable about the fact that their actions are paving the way for pro-atheist monuments to go up across the country.

There were a few protestors at the unveiling who perhaps could be taken as evidence of more general discomfort with the idea. Some flew Confederate battle flags and had signs with slogans about Yankees. Another, creationist Eric Hovind, reportedly jumped up on the monument and thanked those gathered for giving him a platform from which to preach Jesus. The private group that put up the 10 Commandment monuments has said several times publicly that they're not concerned by this development. They also weren't present at the Atheists' ceremony on Saturday.

Whether there are others who "feel *really* uncomfortable" with the monument and the idea of other such monuments remains to be seen.

The American Atheists, though, seem to have overcome their own discomfort with idea of public monuments, so long as they can have theirs too.

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How New Atheists are like Victorian-era bishops

The secularization thesis -- the most traditional version, rather crude, which predicted religion would disappear from the modern world -- is dead. I don't know that there's a generally agreed upon moment when that theory died. Certainly by the late 90s it was clear to sociologists that while certain social relationships, such as that between the general population and religious authorities, were changing, and that many religious beliefs and practices were morphing and diversifying, religion itself wasn't going away.

About a decade later, there were the New Atheists. While of course this movement made arguments about the validity of theistic beliefs, a major emphasis was actually on the moral imperative of secularization. The argument was that religion was a destructive, negative force that should disappear from the modern world. The New Atheists didn't rely on secularization as an empirical claim, particularly, saying that religion was, observably, disappearing (though sometimes they said that too), but made, more, a normative moral claim that religion ought to disappear.

Is there a connection between the demise of the sociological theory of secularization and the emergence of New Atheists' arguments for secularization?

Philosopher Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, said that there might be during an international, interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of Tübingen this last week.

Asked about the New Atheists during a question-and-answer period, Taylor said:

They are people who are really in a position where they’re, where they have a feeling ... of being besieged. I think I understand why they’re so upset. They had this sense that history was on their side and then this didn’t happen. It’s rather like bishops in the Victorian church and then there was Darwin.... That’s a very interesting phenomena. It used to be the picture, where dogmatic views were dying and freethinkers felt they owned the future. I don’t really understand this development. I’m just reporting on it. But it’s very interesting that there’s been this reversal, so that they now feel besieged.

Taylor's suggestion was that the much commented-upon style of the New Atheists -- the "militancy" and aggression -- comes from a sense that history is arcing in the wrong direction. In that way, if not in any other, these public atheists might be compared to American fundamentalists.

For their part, at least some of the New Atheists remain committed to the sociological thesis of secularization that sociologists have now either completely abandoned or dramatically modified (into various neo-secularization theories, including Taylor's own). In an interview to promote their recent documentary, both Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss said they thought theistic beliefs would, eventually, come to an end.

Krauss said, "When I was a kid in the ’60s, I was sure that by now there would be no religion. In a way it’s very surprising that there are these momentary resurgences. I think it’s going to be a long road."

Dawkins was more adamant that religion is vanishing, even if not as evenly and as quickly as was once commonly predicted. He said, "If you look at the broad sweep of history, then clearly we’re on the winning side. I think things are moving in the right direction, probably not as fast as I would like to see."

Only time will tell "who owns the future." There's an interesting question, though, that could be further explored, about how the sense of whether or not historical trends are tending towards or against one's position shape the way that position is articulated and the tenor of the general arguments.

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Charles Taylor

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Wanted: a history of America's irreligious

Lincoln Mullen, who's writing a doctoral dissertation at Brandeis on "The Varieties of Religious Conversion," has an excellent post on Religion in American History on the possibility of a history of the not-religious, the irreligious. As Mullen notes, this is ground I'm exploring with the class I'm teaching on the history of American Atheism. This is a case, though, where the harvest is plentiful, the workers a pitiful few.

Mullen suggests attention should especially be paid to the non-eliete irreligious, if possible. He writes:

Irreligion was far more widespread than just among elites. If we trust work on the historical demography of American religion ... then there is reason to think that American religious history has neglected a lot of people. Simply put, if religion and specifically groups like Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics were growing constantly, and not just from immigration, then they had to grow from somewhere. Who were these secularists or 'nones'? The nineteenth century has bequeathed us competing explanations. The secularist explanation was that the more education one possessed, the further back one had pushed the superstitions of religion. Perhaps -- but only post-Darwin, and then only for elites. Much more persuasive is the shared assumption of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews that ignorance produced irreligion. Many of the vast nineteenth-century evangelistic enterprises, such as the Sunday school (Jewish as well as Christian), the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, the evangelical tract and textbook, and for that matter the public schools, were fundamentally educational. To hear Peter Cartwright tell it, he was constantly encountering (and wrasslin’ with) “rowdies” and skeptics. When colporteurs of the American Tract Society sold Bibles in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in the 1840s, they found many people who, they claimed, “had never heard of Jesus Christ.” What would a religious history of those people look like?

The post also offers and excellent overview of the historical works currently available on American atheist, agnostic, freethinking, humanist, and ethical culture movements, and highlights a few things that are in the works.

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Atheists get granite monument in Fla.

A $6,000 monument to atheism -- the first public monument of its kind in the US -- will be unveiled at a courthouse in Starke, Florida, this month. The monument will stand opposite a 10 Commandments monument.

The largest quote on the monument is from Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the founder of the American Atheists. In the quote, she defines atheism and offers a sort of secularist creed:

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life instead of escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty banished, war eliminated.

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Habermas' secular sources

I maintain that we have good reasons to insist on secular sources for justifying the principles of the constitutions our forms of societies fortunately have for constituting the polity. 

I don't think -- it is not necessary to take resource to religious sources for justifying the principles.

-- Jürgen Habermas

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Understanding the "nones" as a demographic dissent

Some people are very uncomfortable with the category of race. Whether for personal, biographical reasons, they just feel like they don't fit any particular category, or for political or philosophical reasons, they get the US census at the beginning of every decade and balk at the question, What is this person's race?

This reticence, interestingly, does not show up in the final results. The final census doesn't list some small percentage of people as not having a race or as not having answered the question. This is because, as NPR recently reported:

When respondents don't choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on the racial makeup of their neighborhood, among other factors. The method leads to a less accurate count.

A similar phenomena has happened with the new studies of religious demographics, where an increasing number of people have refused to answer the question, the now notorious "nones." Analysts have tried to interpret this response in various ways. The fundamental mistake that has been made, as I have argued, is to treat the people who answer the religious affiliation question this way as a unified group of people.

The problem may go deeper than that, though.



My interpretation of this group has been to insist on pluralizing the "nones," and talk about how cultural shifts have allowed for a new variety of ways to position oneself in relationship to religion. I.e., there are more people willing to self-identify as atheists and humanists, but there are also increased numbers of religious people who understand themselves to be religious but who aren't affiliated with any group, there are those who are affiliated but uncomfortable with public identification, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and so on.

When I have done that, though, I was still insisting on reading this group as defined in terms of ways of affiliating and belonging, as essentially being a complicated subset of a category but still, despite the complications, in that category of religious affiliation. Perhaps, though, that is what the "nones" object to.

Another way to understand this group is as objecting to religious classifications. Not strictly religious affiliations, though there's some of that, but to the project, in general, of religious demographics. 

Elizabeth Drescher, who I have criticized on this before, makes this point excellently in a recent piece, "None" means "None". After re-reading her more recent piece, and reflecting back on a point that Michael J. Altman made about the implicit problems of understanding the "nones" in terms of affiliation, I'm having to rethink my approach. It still seems fairly accurate, as far as it goes, but the unwieldy complication of the taxonomies of (dis)affiliation cause me to suspect I'm missing the point when someone says "none."

Drescher reports on one interview with a young "none" that's specifically enlightening in this regard:

When I asked if he would see himself as 'spiritual but not religious,' he rolled his eyes and groaned dramatically.  

'I don't want you to be thinking of me in terms of spirituality or religion,' he continued. 'Not my religion—if I have one—not your religion. These designations just should not be part of how we relate to each other no matter what we believe.' So, he eventually concluded, 'You can go ahead and call me ‘none.’ But only if you know I really mean "none" by that.'

The suggestion, I think, is quite interesting: rather than thinking of this group as religious in a specific way, might we not think of them as simply dissenting from the category?

Perhaps the "nones" aren't mainly to be thought of as religious or non-religious in a new or different way, but as a group that has a problem with the question, in much the same way that some protest self-identifying with a particular race.

Those people aren't themselves a new demographic, but rather are saying that they think the category is a problem.

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Culturally contested Christmas

A curious historical fact: the first people to work to "take the Christ out of Christmas," as it were, were not atheists, or crass materialists, or secularists/pluralists trying to diminish the role of Christianity in American culture. They were Protestants.

Protestants were very conflicted about Christmas in the 1800s.

For one thing, many were opposed to the "mass" part of Christmas, i.e., the Catholicism implicit in the holiday. If December 25 was a religious holiday, that seemed to mean accepting the Catholic tradition of the church calendar and the Catholic idea of tradition, the same tradition that led to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the authority of the Pope and the church councils, and all the sundry things Protestants argued should be rejected because they're not in the Bible. The Bible which says nothing about a gift-giving solstice holiday.

At the same time, Protestants felt a strong impulse to take the cultural practice of the day -- the Christmas of the tavern, the Christmas of the department store -- and repurpose them as devotional practices.

This meant that they were at the same time critical of the non-religious celebrations of Christmas and leery of the religious celebrations too.

As Leigh Eric Schmidt writes in Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays:

Through much of the nineteenth century, the Christianization of Christmas was a quite fragile proposition, tentative and fragmentary. Every time a pastor tried to remind his congregation that Christmas was a solemn religious event that 'should be observed in the heart as well as at the hearth, in the temple as well as at the table,' he seemed to have to admit that the most visible observances of the season were 'rioting and vain amusement' -- shooting guns, callithumpian music, practical jokes, heavy drinking and the like. The churches were invariably hard pressed to communicate the devotional dimension of Christmas; the raucous plebeian version of the celebration always threatened to drown them out.

Confessedly, these Protestants in the Puritan mold were partially to blame for the sorry state of Christmas devotion in the colonial and antebellum worlds. The tradition of holiday purgation, long shared in by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and many Methodists, bequeathed a model of thorough desacralization that actually helped Christmas go its secular way in American culture. Time and again these Protestants insisted that Christmas was just like any other day, that it was without 'any peculiar sanctity.' At best, Christmas was an object of 'mistaken piety'; at worst it was the occasion of superstition and corrupt tradition. Given these presuppositions about the idolatry of the ancient church calendar, when low-church Protestant began their home-centered recovery of Christmas in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they often welcomed it back explicitly as a 'social holiday,'not as a 'religious observance.' As one Sunday School publication, the Baptist Teacher, editorialized in 1875, 'We believe in Christmas -- not as a holy day, but as a holiday.'

As has been regularly pointed out, the so-called "war on Christmas" is pretty specious. It is the case, though, that the meaning of Christmas is and has always been culturally contested. In its practice, this holiday is often conflicted, with multiple meanings, divergent rituals, discordant customs, and perpetually competing interpretations.

It's common today, for example, to find evangelicals at once upset that Christmas has been "commercialized" and that Wal-Mart clerks don't recognize the religious nature of the celebration in their standard customer greetings. This isn't a new thing, though; the conflict over what Christmas is has a long history. And it's not only the case of a conflict between the American Protestant majority and others, be they Catholic or non-religious. The conflict runs even through American Protestantism itself.

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Presentation in Chicago

A bit of shameless self-promotion:

Exploratory Sessions (A18-232)
Per Smith, Boston University, Presiding

Theme: Irreligion, Secularism and Social Change
Sunday, Nov. 19 – 1 – 2:30 PM, McCormick Place West, room 178A, Chicago

"Scholars of religion from a variety of disciplines are increasingly focusing their attention on the relationship between the religious and the secular. So what would a sustained discussion of 'the secular' look like within the American Academy of Religion; and moreover, how would such a discussion be relevant to religious studies? This exploratory session seeks to provide modest answers to those questions by example. On the heels of the year of the protestor, the session explores how 'the secular' is implicated in and affected by social transformations. How did social change make the secular possible? How have the demands of 20th century social movements shaped emergent forms of secularism? How do contemporary social movements provide fertile soil for secular theologies of resistance? And how are contemporary irreligious identities evolving within a social context that considers them deviant?

Daniel Silliman, University of Heidelberg
The Possibility of Secularity and the Material History of Fiction 
Petra Klug, University of Leipzig
The Dynamics of Standardisation and Deviance using the Way U.S. Society deals with Atheists as an Example 
Jordan Miller, Salve Regina University
Occupying Absence: Political Resistance and Secular Theology 

Responding: Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Social Science Research Council

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Ritual, money, & the death of a pet

By some accounts, the function of religion in daily life, and especially of religious ritual, is to lend solemnity to otherwise puny, pallid human moments.

I think of this as the Peter Ivanovich theory of religion, named after a character in Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Iliyich. Ivanovich, at the start of the story, finds himself at a funeral and "like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself."

This is religion as a response to what could be called existential awkwardness. Ritual being what you do when you don't know what to do. The idea is that religion and/or ritual serve to mark, to recognize the seriousness and importance of a moment that would, without that mark, not seem that important at all. There is, in the act, an insistence that something is important and meaningful, despite how it might seem.

This is how I would see pet funerals, the practice of treating deceased pets to the same processes and ceremonies traditionally reserved for humans.



In a mostly horrid bit of journalism, Business Week recently re-discovered the industry of pet funerals, as seems to happen somewhat regularly. Mostly this piece is a baseless trend story, written up as a will-you-believe-this-ridiculousness?, without actually demonstrating much interest in understanding what might explain this "phenomena" or why people, apparently lots of them, want funerals for their cats and dogs and pot-bellied pigs and hamsters.

There's one interesting moment of insight, though. At the very end, Bob Walczyk, the apparently empathy-less owner of Forever Friends in Green Bay, Wisc., notes that services such as his allow people to solemnize their pets' deaths and lives, and to do something, perform some act, that declares the importance relationships with their pets.

Except, for Walczyk, what allows people to mark out meaningfulness in the face of apparent meaningnessless isn't religion, and isn't ritual. But money.

As the reporter writes,

"the most valuable secret he’s learned after years in the business, Walczyk says, is that selling a pet funeral means never offering the lowest price. Customers aren't looking for value; they're looking for quality.  

 "'We're the most expensive place in town,' Walczyk says with a laugh. 'And everybody still comes to us.'"

Maybe one should update Tolstoy: "All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to spend money."

One way to think of this would be as a market essentially functioning to replace religion in modern life. I wonder, though, if it might not be more helpful to broaden the standard understanding of ritual, to think about how consumption can also be ritualistic, and how, whether people are religious or not, there's still this need to mark out aspects and moments of life as different, and rituals still serve this important, Peter Ivanovich-function in people's lives.

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The new irrelevance of Rick Warren

There's something really about odd Rick Warren's explanation for why he's cancelled the planned Obama-Romeny forum. The megachurch pastor and best-selling author had announced he would reprise his role as presidential job interviewer, but now he won't.

Because:

"We created the civil forums to promote civility and personal respect between people with major differences .... The forums are meant to be a place where people of goodwill can seriously disagree on significant issues without being disagreeable or resorting to personal attack and name-calling. But that is not the climate of today's campaign."

Isn't this completely backwards, though? There's a lack of civility, so the forum is supposed to promote civility, but there isn't civility, so the forum is cancelled. But if what the forum was intended to accomplish were a fiat accompli, then what would be the point?

It's a strange argument.

One suspects something else must be going on.
Perhaps it's the politics of a Warren interview event for the respective campaigns. There was a report the campaigns nixed the thing, not Warren, and he's announcing he's cancelling it as a way to save face.

One could see how the whole thing would be just problematic for Obama and Romney. Neither of them really stood to gain. Obama would likely face hostile questions on same-sex marriage, which came up last time, when Obama's position was much more amenable to Warren than it is now. And abortion again too. These aren't the issues Obama is campaigning on, and his answers are not likely to swing any voters or motivate any of those in Warren's audience in his direction. At best, I guess, Obama could placate social conservatives, though it's hard to see how that happens. For Romney, too, the possible pitfalls seem much more serious than the potential gains. He could face hostile questions about his Mormonism. He could get attacked on his inconsistent record on social conservative issues, or even the current positions he espouses such as abortion being acceptable in cases of rape. It's hard to see how Warren steers the conversation towards the topics Romney wants to talk about.

It seems that the sense is that this campaign will not be won on the kinds of issues Warren cares about. But it could be lost on those issues.

Another way to think about what's going on here is that Warren just has failed to make himself a plausible public gate keeper. A certain amount of neutrality is necessary for one to be a respectable, acceptable host of a forum. When Warren was positioning himself as a "post-culture war" kind of evangelical, who took a more liberal position on issues such as the environment or AIDs in Africa, there was at least an argument he'd be even-handed in his criticism of the candidates. As someone more publicly associated with opposition to California's Proposition 8 and saying that Obama administration's policies amount to a "crumbling of our constitution's first guaranteed freedom: the freedom of religion," he doesn't seem like someone who's going to be good at facilitating a conversation. He doesn't seem to be moving past the culture war in any meaningful way.

The loser here is Warren, given that he still seems to want to be a power player, a power broker and king maker. His position as religious authority on the public square has evaporated in the last four years. Whether it's the politics that have changed or Warren himself, his ability to exert an influence here is gone.

Maybe he's not the only loser, though. I thought that, in the last election, the respective candidates' answers to Warren's question about evil were maybe the most interesting and really the clearest things said about underlying, governing philosophies.

While it's ridiculous and ahistorical to think this campaign is somehow dirtier or more aggressive than others, or more that way than ever, that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. It would have been nice to hear the candidates try to thoughtfully answer some big, fundamental questions. If Warren could have done that, it could have been a good thing.

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X is in the general interest

"I shall begin by assuming that the proposition: 'Recommendation X is legitimate' has the same meaning as the proposition: 'Recommendation X is in the general (or public) interest,' where X can be an action as well as a norm of action or even a system of such norms (in the case we are considering, a system of domination). 'X is in the general interest' is to mean that the normative validity claim connected with X counts as justified. The justifiability of competing validity claims is decided by a system of possible justifications; a single justification is called a legitimation. The reconstruction of given legitimations can consist, first, in discovering the justificatory system, S, that allows for evaluating the given legitimation valid or invalid in S. 'Valid in S' is to mean only that someone who accepts S -- a myth or a cosmology or a political theory -- must also accept the grounds given in valid legitimations. This necessity expresses a consistency connection resulting from the internal relations of the justificatory system."

-- Jürgen Habermas, "Legitimation Problems in the Modern State."

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Protecting belief

"Christian theology never expressly identified God and nature; but the point is that natural theology and nature-preaching had implanted within Protestantism an increasingly strong leaning in this direction. Ministers often forgot Calvin's warnings, misunderstood Edwards, ignored Bushnell; natural theologians wanted not just to glorify God in nature but to see Him there ....

In the end, the most influential church leaders tried to protect belief by making peace with modernity, by conceiving God and His purposes in terms as nearly compatible as possible with secular understandings and aims. A minority insisted that a transcendent God must utterly elude human grasp."

-- James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America.

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