Vox Interviews Shapiro

Ben Shapiro

To cleanse the palate of the sour taste of the recent BBC Ben Shapiro interview, it is perhaps worth looking at an interview of Shapiro done at almost the same time by Sean Illing of Vox. Here, at least, we get to hear the arguments Shapiro makes.

I would not have thought Ben Shapiro would need my help to defend the Judeo-Christian world view. But actually, I think he does a disturbingly and dangerously tepid job of it.

Illing begins by suggesting that the real cause of America’s social turmoil is economic, not, as Shapiro argues, moral. It is because the poor and middle class are being left behind by the current prosperity.

This is often said. I think it is an example of what Jordan Peterson calls “cultural Marxism.” Marx, of course, thought everything in politics, society, and life had its origin in economics. This conditions us to miss far more important factors.

It is actually unclear whether the economic situation of the American lower or middle class has been stagnating, declining, or improving in recent years. Over the longer term, of course, it has been improving. The experts themselves disagree. That being so, the matter is almost certainly not evident to the middle or lower classes themselves, as a Marxian imaginary unitary consciousness. And so it cannot explain their behavior.

People are not robots. They are driven by moral codes and moral choice.

Illing next argues that America is not, in fact, as Shapiro assumes, founded on Christian values in the first place:

“America is a secular republic. The word ‘Christianity’ does not appear in our founding documents. Thomas Jefferson’s version of the New Testament erased all references to the divinity of Jesus.
To say that America is a product of religion and ancient Greece is at the very least woefully incomplete. We’re much more the product of Roman law and secular Enlightenment philosophy.”

This is a familiar error, and so worth addressing. I don’t think Shapiro really properly does. He concedes too much too readily.

In grad school, I took a course titled “American as Theocracy.” I thought the claim was a bit over the top myself, but the two professors who team-taught the course contended that America is a uniquely Christian nation. This is a common claim among historians. The Pilgrim Fathers, and all that. I have heard America referred to as “The Protestant Empire.”

So on what grounds does Illing instead declare America “secular” in its founding?

The French Republic was secular. It sought to close the churches. The American Republic was non-denominational. A huge difference. And the secular republic came to bloodbath and genocide, while the non-denominational one was prosperous, mostly peaceful, and successful. Freedom OF religion is the polar opposite to freedom FROM religion. It makes quite a difference.

A contemporary cartoon of Robespierre personally executing the last surviving Frenchman, the executioner. Monument to Reason in the background.

It is true that the word “Christianity” does not appear in America’s founding documents. It was not then in common use. The word “God,” on the other hand, occurs in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. So, soon after, do “Creator” and “Providence”; this is a Creator God who works through history. The Declaration appeals to God over human law as its authority. The first rebel flags bore the inscription “Appeal to Heaven.”

No God, no American nation. Simple as that. Illing is falsifying things here, and Shapiro does not call him out.

Illing also falsifies Thomas Jefferson’s religion. Jefferson was not non-religious, nor a secularist. He was a Unitarian; not the same thing. In Jefferson’s own words, “I am a real Christian, that is, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”

America is indeed a product of the Enlightenment as well as of the Christian tradition. And, to be fair, Illing is not alone in maintaining that the Enlightenment is somehow separate from and even a rejection of Christianity. This seems to be a common opinion, even among Christians. Shapiro too seems to half-endorse it.

But it makes no sense to me.

Bertrand Russell saw the Enlightenment as the logical continuation of the Protestant Reformation. I think he is obviously right. Calling the Enlightenment a rejection of Christianity is therefore very much equivalent to calling Protestantism a rejection of Christianity. I guess you could do it, but Luther and Protestants generally would violently disagree: no, Protestantism is the REAL Christianity. Most Enlightenment thinkers would say exactly the same thing. Thomas Jefferson did above: no, our faith is the REAL Christianity.

Both movements, Reformation and Enlightenment, were a rejection of established authority. Luther and his hoodies questioned the authority of Church tradition and the clerical establishment, in favour of returning to the Bible, to the tangible evidence. Bacon’s call to experiment, which founded the scientific method, was exactly the same move: dismissing authority in favour of examining the physical evidence for ourselves. Descartes’ call to rely only on mathematical deduction from first principles instead of received authority was the same move. Aka, "The Enlightenment."

The result was an anti-authoritarian movement, on, as far as I can see, Christian principles. It was, after all, in the very original spirit of Christ, who uncompromisingly challenged the authorities of his day. The separation of church and state, non-denominationalism, was instituted by Christ himself: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s; render unto God what is God’s.”

This was no doubt why the Enlightenment occurred in Christian Europe, and not some other place. The principle was inherent in Christianity.

Some Enlightenment figures, it is true, went on to question Christianity itself. But most did not: this was hardly the philosophical essence of the movement. Descartes, Newton, Burke, Berkeley, Pascal, Locke, Pope, Dryden, were all religious men.

And if you are going to see the Enlightenment as a thing apart from Christianity, you cannot then claim, as Illing does, that it origin is instead the classical model, the Roman law.

Enlightenment thinkers challenged Classical authorities far more clearly and directly than any of them challenged Christianity. Descartes or Bacon or Kant were arguing against the authority of Aristotle and Plato, not against Christianity or the Bible. Hume was arguing not against religion or the existence of God, but against cause and effect, which means against both the scientific and the philosophical method.

For Descartes or for later Romantics, in fact, Christianity was the one thing that remained.

America based on the Roman law? This is literally false. The French Republic was based on the Roman law. The American Republic based itself on the English common law, evolved on Christian principles; and appealed to it in the Declaration of Independence.

Illing later points out that most Germans who elected the Nazis were Christians. “Whatever it was that sent that Nazis over the moral abyss, it wasn’t a lack of Christianity.”

I think it was exactly that: a lack of Christianity. Whatever else the Enlightenment might be argued to be, it was definitely not a rejection of traditional Judeo-Christian moral values. Instead, it spawned Latitudinarianism, which made ethics its primary concern. Kant took the same tack. Nazism, by contrast, was explicitly that: a conscious rejection of Judeo-Christian values. They were, following Nietzsche, declared a ”slave morality,” not fitting for a “master race.” Its new “morality” was based on a “scientific” viewpoint: Darwin’s survival of the fittest.

Some Nazis called for a return to paganism, which they falsely equated with “nature-worship.”
The Nazi revulsion towards Judeo-Christian ethics was expressed in large part by exterminating Jews. This was the poison they had supposedly introduced into Aryan culture.

The Nazi holocaust was a barbaric horror in the context of Christian civilization. It more or less reflected the norm in any pagan tribal society. Tribal conflicts are almost always total and genocidal. Far from being caused by Judeo-Christian ethics, or happening despite Christian ethics, Nazism is a graphic illustration of how essential to our civilization Judeo-Christian ethics are. Take them away, and things devolve to Hobbesian terms very quickly. Just as they did at almost the same time a little further east, in the Soviet Union.

Illing:

“The original European fascism (Mussolini in particular) was largely a phenomenon of the Catholic right wing.”

Christopher Hitchens used to say this, but this is slanderous codswallop. Mussolini was openly and aggressively atheist, as was his Fascist movement. He merely sought accommodation with the Church after taking power, and only for political reasons.

More or less the same political reasons caused many Catholics and other Christians to make common cause with Fascists elsewhere at the time, notably in Spain. But not from any natural affinity for Fascism. This was in the context of a clear and present threat from more aggressively atheist Bolshevism, which was in the habit of burning down churches and summarily executing priests and nuns. It simply was the lesser of two evils. In that, their judgement is still very arguably correct. Stalin or Mao, after all, killed more innocents than Hitler.

All morality is a choice between two goods or two evils. Outside of heaven, moral choices never happen in a vacuum.

Illing:

“From my point of view, whether crime is in the name or God or reason or history, it’s the totalizing impulse behind it that we should worry about; it’s the blinding commitment to ideas over people, abstractions over experience.”

“The problem is movements based on unchallengeable assumptions about the way the world is, and how we should behave in it. This is something religion brought into the world, and political ideologies have replicated it.”

Here Shapiro actually agrees. I emphatically do not. This is illogical.

Imagine you are confident that you know the truth. You then can have no problem at all with allowing others to dissent. Nobody wants to punish anyone, for example, for insisting that the world is flat, do they? Or that the moon is made of Stilton cheese? It is merely amusing. You are merely entertained.

If it comes to a debate, you know you can easily win that argument, so you want to have it, and in good humour. You get to show how clever you are.

If you even believe in or care about truth in the first place, you want to hear all views out. You do not want to fight them. If you are wrong, you need to know.

If you or anyone wants to force “your truth” or “their truth” on others, it can only mean one thing: either they do not believe in truth, or they are certain of the truth, but are certain that whatever they themselves are asserting is not true.

This is the opposite of the religious stance. It is the postmodernist stance; it is the relativist stance. You can call it religion, but you are simply lying.

Relativism, not supposed certainty about anything, was, for example, at the core of Nazism. What else does Illing or Shapiro think it meant when Nazis talked about “Jewish science” and “Aryan science”? For them, there was no objective truth in science; that was their starting assumption. Truth was whatever this or that person or group wanted it to be, and they would then if possible impose their “truth” on others.

Mussolini said in so many words: “Fascism is relativism.”

Illing:

“The history of religion is the history of human beings using their faith as an unchallengeable excuse for the worst crimes imaginable. Slavery, conquest, misogyny, child slaughter — these all receive divine sanction in the Bible.”

Again, shockingly, Shapiro agrees. He even says “of course that’s true.” I emphatically dissent.
The Devil, of course, can quote Scripture for his own purposes. But for this assertion to be true, you would have to believe there would be fewer sins if there were no moral codes, or fewer violations of the rights of others if there were no government and no laws.

How crazy is that? Want to try that in your town?

Illing further misrepresents the Bible, which expressly prohibits child slaughter. And for a good reason: because it was the norm in every other society at the time. That’s what you get if you reject Judeo-Christian values. Illing is blaming Judeo-Christian ethics for the very thing it opposes.

As to slavery, conquest, and misogyny: the Bible and Christianity has indeed traditionally been read and understood to prohibit wars of conquest. It was also traditionally understood to prohibit slavery. Christianity stands alone in the world, historically, in opposing that institution; it was an appeal to Christianity that abolished it everywhere. Women’s position in society has almost always been markedly better in Christian cultures than in any other known to man.

No doubt, Illing imagines that if we dropped Judeo-Christian morality, we could do even better. Possibly. Based on what alternative moral code? On none? We’d better know clearly what our substitute is, and all sign on, before we knock down the structure we have built. Otherwise, we are just acting like spoiled children.

Illing:

“there’s nothing about science or the scientific method that requires religious presuppositions.”

Shapiro responds that this is a “pretty good argument.” Again, I do not agree.

Science absolutely requires the prior assumption that the physical universe is ordered, meaningful, and has a design. It must accept or assume that 2 plus 2 will always equal 4, and causes have effects, or no experiment means anything. It must accept that our sense perceptions correspond in a meaningful way to some external reality. That is, it requires the assumption of a designer, a Creator God; as Descartes demonstrates, it must further assume a Creator God who is morally good, or our sense perceptions cannot be trusted.

It was this presupposition, historically, of a Creator God who speaks to us through his creation, that led to the development of science and the scientific method. This is the reason why science emerged in Christian Europe, and not in some other part of the globe. Most other cultures, non-monotheistic cultures, consider the physical world an illusion.

Even had it not been so, and so purely as a historic fact, nevertheless, the success of science in practical terms would prove that a benevolent Creator God indeed exists.

Illing:

“You write: ‘Contrary to popular opinion, new discoveries weren’t invariably seen as heretical or dangerous to the dominion of the Church; in fact, the Church often supported scientific investigation.’ But that’s a strange claim since many scientists were burned at the stake.”

Shapiro answers, “No, I don’t disagree with that.”

By thunder, I do. Can Illing or anyone else name even one scientist who was ever burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for their scientific inquiries?

Not Galileo. He was not burned at the stake, to begin with. He was put under house arrest. And not for any scientific speculation, but for theological speculations arising from them. Copernicus, after all, proposed the same scientific theory, and was lauded by the Church.

Not Giordano Bruno. He was burned at the stake for a clearly heretical theology; for saying there was no Trinity, no creation, no creator God, and no heaven or hell at death. It is a painful stretch to characterize him as a scientist, or these views as scientific.

And not anyone else.

The Catholic Church has always been the patron of science. All else is Black Legend.