The last sermon cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave before becoming pope Benedict XVI was to the Conclave of Cardinals that was to elect him to the papacy the following afternoon. For myself and the other one billion members of the Catholic Church, that sermon now stands as a manifesto for Benedict’s tenure; a manifesto in which laid out a view of the Church under siege:
“Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching,’ looks like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goals one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
The new Pontiff’s rhetoric is not original. We hear the same complaint from religious leaders and conservatives politicians in many countries. We are told that “people of faith” are victims of defamation and discrimination campaigns. The epithet of fundamentalism is used to exclude individual believers from public office and their views from political debate. Standing up for fundamental values (so the complaint goes) is punished by a society (or in some versions of the complaint, an immoral elite out of touch with a decent citizenry) whose only remaining credo is: “anything goes.”
This charge is leveled against liberals throughout and beyond the liberal democracies. In the United States, conservatives cry foul when secularists put up a fight against the appointment of judges who let their jurisprudence be guided by their religious values. In Europe, a particularly salient incident was the controversy over Rocco Buttiglione’s candidacy to the EU Commission. Conservative commentators have reacted with accusations of a “secular inquisition” and “secularist fundamentalism.”
This frequent complaint, nevertheless, becomes more poignant when expressed by the supreme leader of the Catholic Church. I and other political liberals must therefore warn, loudly and clearly, that in repeating the claim, the Pontiff relies on a very dangerous game with words.
Take first the Cardinal Ratzinger’s use of the word “fundamentalism.” Cardinal Ratzinger was implying that conservative Catholics are accused of fundamentalism simply because they have a “clear faith…which does not follow the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties.” That statement may be more simply put as: “They call as fundamentalists because we believe in certain fundamental truths.”
This is not so. When liberals call an ideology fundamentalist, it cannot be simply because it takes certain principles as fundamental and true. After all, liberalism does, too. We mean by fundamentalism any ideology that takes a single set of principles as fundamental for the entire organization of social life—in particular for the political organization of society. Fundamentalism holds that God’s commandments of morality in private conduct also constitute the source of authority in the public space, the res publica. Therefore, the opposite of fundamentalism is not relativism, but liberal secularism, which denies that divine authority can be the source of law.
This brings us to the second dangerous confusion in Ratzinger’s sermon. Not only does he deliberately conflate principled beliefs with fundamentalism. He also conflates liberal secularism with relativism. His puzzling reference to dictatorship can only be aimed at how liberal democracies rule out religious doctrine in creating their laws. But that secularism is liberal, not relativistic.
Liberalism cannot be relativistic, for it consists of certain fundamental principles that it holds to be true: The equal dignity of all human beings, the existence of individual human rights, and the principle that the only legitimate political authority derives from the consent of the governed. It is because of their uncompromising belief in the truth of this last principle that liberals refuse to let religious beliefs—including even their own—become the ground on which laws and policies are made. Liberals will not let the ultimate sanction of the state—physical violence—be the means by which religious and moral beliefs gain acceptance. Liberals say: Give to God what is God’s; give to Caesar (that is, to the state) what is Caesar’s.
Religious fundamentalism denies the distinction; it gives it all to God. And at this point, the particular religion no longer matter. Islamic fundamentalism, just as much as Christian fundamentalism, wants the word of God to be the foundation of both private and public, worldly and clerical affairs.
Liberalism is uncompromisingly anti-fundamentalist. But is not anti-religious—a sensible liberalism does not deny the state a role in supporting religious communities, for example, as long as it treats all equally. Nor does liberalism have to applaud the egoistic kind of individualism that is a worrying part of Western consumer culture. And finally, a true liberalism does not ignore the admitted dangers of relativism and its logical consequence: Indifference to evil.
Pope Benedict XVI, of course, realizes all of this. That is why it is such a pity that he chooses to make liberalism his enemy, when it could be such an important ally precisely in combating relativism and indifference.
m and indifference.