The Darwinian conservatism of the permanent things recognizes that the desire for religious transcendence is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature. And since the good is the desirable, we can judge the goodness of a social order by how well it secures the conditions for human beings to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires, including the natural desire for religious transcendence.
As I have indicated in previous posts, the Catholic Integralists say that a Catholic Integralist regime is the best social order because it enforces belief in the one true religion in a Catholic confessional state and thus satisfies the natural desire for religious understanding. But they are mistaken because they fail to see that the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world. And there has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement. Surveying the entire history of Christianity, Wikipedia has lists of over 50 schisms and over 40 heresies. Whatever the Holy Spirit might have whispered to popes, bishops, and priests has not been clearly heard by others.
The evolutionary science of religious pluralism supports John Locke's liberal theology of Christianity--that since "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every Church is orthodox to itself," there is no set of universal doctrines binding on all Christians, except perhaps the belief that Jesus is the Messiah; and therefore, there is no one orthodoxy strictly speaking that can be properly enforced by government.
For this reason, a Lockean liberal social order that secures religious liberty and religious toleration is the best regime for promoting the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness. It does this by allowing the cultural evolution of religion in a free marketplace of religion, so that churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market.
And yet metaphysical conservatives must scorn this Lockean liberal understanding of religious liberty and toleration because they believe that a conservative form of religion requires the legal enforcement of the traditional orthodoxy of the one true church. The fundamental problem with this position is that it denies the reality of religious pluralism and mistakenly assumes that all believers can agree in identifying the one truly orthodox church.
This problem was evident at the Kirk Center conference panel on "Conservatism and Religion." Glenn Moots (Northwood University) argued that for American and British conservatives Protestantism must be the only truly orthodox tradition. But then he was followed by Robert Koons (University of Texas-Austin) who argued that the Catholic Church was the only truly orthodox church for conservatives, and the Protestant Reformation was the source of the three great errors that led to modernity--antipathy to medieval scholasticism, radical intellectual individualism, and radical secular egalitarianism (the "priesthood of all believers").
There was no discussion between Moots and Koons on the panel. So there was no attempt to resolve the obvious contradiction between their arguments.
But from listening to their presentations and reading their texts, I could see suggestions of where they might find some common ground. Koons conceded that it was possible to be a conservative Protestant who would deny the three errors of the Protestant Reformation: specifically, Koons identified the magisterial Protestants (Lutherans, Anglicans, and Presbyterians) as Protestants who could reject the three errors. At the same time, Moots spoke in favor of the magisterial Protestants, as opposed to the Pietistic and evangelical Protestants.
But then Koons and Moots did not explain how it is possible to have more than one magisterium. Isn't the magisterium by definition the authoritative Christian orthodoxy of the one true Church? Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines "magisterium" as "the teaching function of the Roman Catholic Church."
Neither did Koons and Moots explain whether or how multiple magisteria can coexist peacefully. As traditionally understood, the magisterium of the Catholic Church requires the Church to enlist the help of governmental authorities in persecuting heretics, which includes all Protestants. At the same time, the magisterial Protestant reformers wanted to persecute all Protestant dissenters and Catholics as heretics. Do Koons and Moots agree with this magisterial rejection of religious liberty?
Would Koons say that the Vatican II statement on religious liberty in Dignitatis humanae is heretical, and therefore that the post-Vatican II Catholic Church is heretical? Actually, some traditionalist Catholics say exactly that. For example, Michael Davies (in The Second Vatican Council and Religious Liberty [1992]) argues that the Catholic Church fell into heresy at Vatican II when it was corrupted by the influence of the "Americanist" heresy promoted by Father John Courtney Murray, S.J. Would Koons agree?
Are Koons and Moots saying that a conservative view of religion requires the legal enforcement of one church's orthodoxy over another's? Are they committed, therefore, to perpetual religious warfare? If not, then don't they have to endorse religious liberty and toleration as the best response to the fact of religious pluralism--to the fact that "every church is orthodox to itself"? In that case, they would have to accept a Darwinian conservatism that secures the freedom of individuals to pursue the satisfaction of their natural desire for religious transcendence.
And, finally, to reiterate a point I made in a previous post, it was baffling to me that while both Koons and Moots praised Scruton for his conservative understanding of religion, they were silent about Scruton's atheism. Scruton's atheistic religiosity is most evident in his writing about Richard Wagner: religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology. Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning. And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption. The incoherent self-deception of such atheistic religiosity is ultimately self-defeating. How can a fake religiosity satisfy our religious longings when we know it's fake?
Is this the dark side of conservatism and religion--that many of the conservatives who are most emphatic about the human need for religion are actually atheists?
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