Amy Sullivan writes about Democratic efforts to court moderate evangelicals. Her argument about their discomfort with the Republicans gives the lie to the "Republicans are theocrats" line, since she claims, pace Rod Dreher, that Republicans are much more serious about business interests than about religious interests. I can’t dispute the fact that there are "soulless capitalists" in the Republican Party, but I can’t help wondering whether evangelicals will ultimately fare any better with the Democrats. There will surely be a courtship, and there will be some sops thrown, but I’m dubious as to whether the Democrats can overcome their attachment to an essentially secular understanding of personal autonomy.

Of course, the concessions may be enough to detach some more evangelicals from the Republican coalition, at least for long enough to make an election cycle or two more interesting.

What’s more instructive, I think, is the suggestion that serious religious concerns, commitments, and affiliations don’t readily or directly track their political counterparts. Genuinely religious people are not solidly members of any political coalition since their concerns aren’t primarily political. Those who treat them in a merely political way are bound sooner or later to be unpleasantly (at least from their worldly point of view) surprised.

Mike DeBow calls our attention to this speech on Europe and Islam. A snippet:

Put it another way: if you were Osama bin Laden at this moment, why would you leave the comfort of your own cave? Why risk turning on your mobile phone, dialling friends and family in order to plan the next mission, when the West is doing a nice job of self-destructing without you? Why bother beating on the infidels when the infidels are busy beating on themselves. Half a dozen low-ranking troops abuse Iraqi detainees and before you know it the Western elites claim (like Robert Fisk did in Britain’s Independent) that the West now has no moral authority and no right to act. And more and more Europeans nod sagely and agree how awful we are. Angela Merkel gets three hours with the President and uses her time to stand up for those poor little mujahideen holed up in Guantanamo who didn’t fight by the Geneva conventions and so I believe shouldn’t be treated as if they did.

I gather there was some kind of movie awards show on last night--I never pay attention to these things--where the host, Jon Stewart, is said to have bombed badly. I confess to being a fan of Stewart on "The Daily Show," and that, since so many college kids get their only news and commentary from The Daily Show, I often use Daily Show clips in the political science course I teach at Georgetown, notwithstanding Stewart’s professed liberalism. I find it is a good way to loosen up students and get them talking in class.

Well sort of. In Sunday’s New York Times travel section, there is a long article on spring skiing at Jackson, Wyoming. Along the way, this paragraph appears:

With lactic acid searing our muscles, there was only one thing to do, especially since Jackson’s boutiques had all closed. . . That one thing Saturday night was: "Brokeback Mountain," playing at the Jackson Hole cinema. For $7.50 each, we learned just how popular the gay cowboy movie is here in the state in which it is set: we were two of the four people in the audience.

I’m not a Catholic, but I don’t regard Catholics as boring. Indeed, I would argue that the more backtracking in which the developers engage, the less distinctive and hence less interesting Ave Maria Town will be.

More here.

This article by David Pryce-Jones (sorry, registration required) is a brief and useful history of how Muslims came to regard their presence as immigrants in the West as an opportunity to conquer it for Islam. He suggests that the crucial moment was “Ayatollah Khomeini’s seizure of power in 1979,” which shattered the previous live and let live atmosphere:

In his manner, he was confirming that there are a billion Muslims in the world, they have only to make themselves felt as such, and power will then accrue to them, concluding in rightful God-given conquest. More than a challenge, here was an updating of the ancient division of the world into the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb. What he preached and exemplified has spread rapidly through one Muslim country after another, activating those who agreed with his dogmatic vision, as well as challenging those with alternative political, secular, or nationalist definitions of their societies. In response to Khomeini, the struggle for self-definition within the Dar al-Islam has left behind it a huge trail of sectarian and communal horrors in Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, Palestine, and elsewhere.

Including, we can add, Europe and America. If Pryce-Jones is right about the inspirational (to Muslims) character of the Iranian revolution, one is prompted to think that if Khomeini’s heirs succeed in their quest to acquire nuclear weapons, the West will be faced with a much bigger disaster than most people realize. On the other hand, by crushing that quest, the West might go far to reduce the problem of terrorism.

The essay lists some of the signs of the spread of Islam in Europe, as well as many examples of the amazing surrender and abasement of the multicultural European elite to this spread. The reaction of the elites is summed up by the President of the Italian Senate, who sarcastically described the West today as “a land of penitents beating their breast whenever someone strikes them.” (Incidentally, you hardly ever hear about an elite/mass distinction in Europe, one that would parallel our red state/blue state difference: does that exist in Europe?)

Earlier this week, 55 Catholic Democrats in the House of Representatives issued a brief "Statement of Principles." Here’s its core:

We are committed to making real the basic principles that are at the heart of Catholic social teaching: helping the poor and disadvantaged, protecting the most vulnerable among us, and ensuring that all Americans of every faith are given meaningful opportunities to share in the blessings of this great country. That commitment is fulfilled in different ways by legislators but includes: reducing the rising rates of poverty; increasing access to education for all; pressing for increased access to health care; and taking seriously the decision to go to war. Each of these issues challenges our obligations as Catholics to community and helping those in need.

We envision a world in which every child belongs to a loving family and agree with the Catholic Church about the value of human life and the undesirability of abortion—we do not celebrate its practice. Each of us is committed to reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies and creating an environment with policies that encourage pregnancies to be carried to term. We believe this includes promoting alternatives to abortion, such as adoption, and improving access to children’s healthcare and child care, as well as policies that encourage paternal and maternal responsibility.

In all these issues, we seek the Church’s guidance and assistance but believe also in the primacy of conscience. In recognizing the Church’s role in providing moral leadership, we acknowledge and accept the tension that comes with being in disagreement with the Church in some areas. Yet we believe we can speak to the fundamental issues that unite us as Catholics and lend our voices to changing the political debate -- a debate that often fails to reflect and encompass the depth and complexity of these issues.

I assume that the statement was drafted so as to gain the largest possible number of signatures; hence the reference in the first of the above paragaphs to the different ways in which the commitment to the basic Catholic social teaching could be embodied in laws and policies. Reasonable Catholics can disagree about how best to promote these ends. We may not be sure about which measures work best, about which levers in human nature we should be pressing now. (See, for example, this conference.)

But it strikes me that there’s a difference between accommodating prudential disagreements about how to achieve a prospective good and silence regarding legislative efforts to limit access to abortions. There’s no reason why one cannot both undertake efforts to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and move toward taking abortion off the table as a last-resort means of birth control. The statement’s silence regarding the latter is telling. Taken together with its almost-Protestant emphasis on "the primacy of conscience," the statement amounts to an evasion of the Church’s clearly-stated position on abortion.

Steve Dillard and Robert Araujo get it. I’m not sure that E.J. Dionne, Jr. does.

I wonder as well whether there are any Catholic members of the House who didn’t sign this statement.

Update: See this article and this article, as well as the first comment below. I pretended to be a social scientist for a few minutes and found the following: there are probably only 71 Catholics in the House at present (Robert Menendez having moved to the Senate and not having been replaced yet); and one, Madeleine Bordallo of Guam, is not a voting member. That leaves 15 Catholic Democrats in the House who didn’t sign the statement. Of the fifteen, six (Costello and Lipinski of Illinois, Cuellar of Texas, Kanjorski and Murtha of Pennsylvanis, and McNulty of New York) are pronouncedly anti-abortion (having earned a score of 25 or less from NARAL in 2005); one (Hinojosa of Texas) is a "moderate," earning a 45 from NARAL; the other eight have scores ranging from 85 (Kaptur of Ohio) to 100 (Bishop, Higgins, and Rangell of New York, Dingell of Michigan, Kucinich of Ohio, Tauscher of California, and Visclosky of Indiana). Of the signatories, 39 are on the high end of NARAL’s range, five are in the middle, and 11 look like pro-lifers (Langevin of Rhode Island, Kildee and Stupak of Michigan, Ryan of Ohio, Doyle and Holden of Pennsylvania, Taylor of Mississippi, Marshall of Georgia, Salazar of Colorado, Oberstar of Minnesota, and Lynch of Massachusetts).

While NARAL scores are a bit problematical as measures of a representative’s real position on abortion (I bow to anyone who has local knowledge that would correct or refine my classifications), they’re the best I can do on the fly. Given the political cover that the statement gives to Catholic representatives who score high on NARAL’s scale, I’m most interested in why eight of them didn’t sign. Are they the most "radically" pro-abortion Catholics in the House? Or the least willing to concede anything to those who believe that it’s possible for reasonable people to disagree about social welfare policy? I’m curious. Anyone know anything about the particulars?

Update #2: See Wheat and Weeds for another interesting point: there’s nothing in the statement about the principle of subsidiarity (see the quotes from the W&W post here), as well as this longer exploration of the tensions between subsidiarity and the welfare state.

I survived hosting our conference, thanks to the able and efficient assistance of our PR Office, housekeeping crew, and food service (great lunch!). I enjoyed reconnecting with old friends, including one I hadn’t seen since 1979. The Oglethorpe and Berry students and alumni acquitted themselves well as presenters, commentators, and questioners.

From my rather idiosyncratic point of view, the two most interesting issues broached during the course of the day were these. First, while many argue that liberal education is in substantial tension with civic education (raising and examining questions that the latter has to regard on some level as settled or closed), is it not the case that the former depends upon the latter, not only materially but intellectually? We always begin within an horizon constituted by moral and civic education, even if we engage with it critically. And our critical engagement itself can’t be sustained unless its material conditions are protected. We professors and students can’t do what we do without those who are protecting our freedom. I’m always grateful for the risks they take and the sacrifices they make.

The second issue, which hovered around the whole conference was crystallized by a question Peter Lawler posed to our Cicero’s Podium debaters (video will be posted soon at this site). Jim Stoner and Jerry Weinberger agreed that a free society requires something, Jim arguing for the traditional virtues (courage, moderation, justice, and prudence) and Jerry for self-interest properly understood, which is to say somewhat as Benjamin Franklin would have understood it. Both conceptions of "virtue" seem to operate within an horizon that recognizes human finitude, but Franklin and modern biotechnology both look forward to the infinite expansion of human life and power. Would the freedom from human limitations promised by biotechnology liberate us as well from the demand to be virtuous, certainly in Stoner’s but also in Weinberger’s sense? If we become creators, not creatures, above all, why must we be courageous, moderate, just, and prudent? If we explode all our limitations, what would it mean to understand our self-interest properly? Good questions.