Recently in Canada, the claim that religious arguments have no place in public debate has been used to deny the legitimacy of religious arguments to oppose the inclusion of gay-friendly books in elementary school libraries,[1] to suspect religious political candidates of harbouring a “hidden agenda,”[2] in opposing abortion, and to prohibit home-school parents from using religious materials as part of their children’s education.[3]

[image1] In determining whether, or the degree to which, religious arguments have a place in contemporary political debate, it is worthwhile pondering the meaning of the following four statements made by prominent figures in Canadian and U.S. politics:

1. “We have waited more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.”[4]

2. “Human rights has emerged as the new secular religion of our time.”[5]

3. “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”[6]

4. “Go into any courtroom, police station or welfare office, and you will find real individuals ignoring the different surfaces of each person they deal with and addressing the juridical equal beneath. They are addressing a moral fiction. Yet it is this fiction, and our devotion to it, that enables us to be just. The entire legitimacy of public institutions depends on our being attentive to difference while treating all as equal. This is the gamble, the unique act of the imagination on which our society rests.”[7]

As these quotations show, clarifying whether religion has a role to play in political debate requires one to be clear on what one means by religion and what one means by politics.

If one takes the common, but unreflective, meaning of the two terms, religion is frequently said to consist of matters of faith that are indemonstrable, whereas politics usually has to do with matters that are open to discussion, persuasion, and are in some way demonstrable. Thus, it is frequently argued that religion should be private and therefore should not play a role in politics, while politics is about things that can be debated in rational form. This arrangement is frequently called the secular form of liberal politics, as opposed to the pluralistic form whereby religious perspectives participate with other voices in debating public policy (and which I shall defend).[8]

The secularist view of removing religion from political debate would result in the following conclusions regarding the four statements quoted above:

1. African-Americans living in the U.S. South must be denied civil rights, including full voting and employment rights, because the Reverend Martin Luther King appeals to God as the basis of their rights. That they appeal to constitution is irrelevant because the constitution simply abolishes slavery. It is silent on other rights.

2. Former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler’s justification for Bill C-38, which legalized same-sex marriage, is illegitimate because it is based on a religion of human rights.

3. The Reverend Martin Luther King’s appeal to the eternal or natural law to overturn legislative acts is irrelevant because such terms are religious in origin. The concepts of eternal law and natural law are a vestige of medieval religious thinking and lack scientific credibility, just as creationism and intelligent design lack scientific credibility.

4. Despite Dr. Ignatieff’s desire to treat people equally, his admission that equality is a “moral fiction” and “act of imagination” means the basis of the laws of Canada are null and void, and just as make-believe as arguments stemming from religion, from the perspective of scientific reason.

Claims 1 and 2 seek to establish human rights on the basis of a divine transcendent source. The Reverend Martin Luther King derives his argument for equality and rights from the Hebrew and Christian Bible. From a secularist perspective, his arguments constitute a prima facie violation of church-state separation. The secularist perspective would marginalize the central figure of the civil rights movement in the United States in the twentieth century.

Irwin Cotler derives human rights from what he calls the new “secular” religion. Cotler’s statement seems at odds with the general sense of secular as related to science. However, the concept of secular political religion is in fact consistent with the central thrust of the scientific Enlightenment that purportedly supports church-state separation. According to philosophers including Voltaire, Turgot, and John Stuart Mill, history is moving in a progressive direction, toward ever-increasing enlightenment, freedom, and the scientific control over the natural world. Many scholars have shown how their views are a form of belief insofar as they presuppose a view of humanity’s historical future that cannot be demonstrated.[9] Secularism makes its own faith-claims, one of which is its faith in progress. Just as ancient societies were bound together using myths about their place in the cosmos, modern “secular” societies organize themselves according to myths, or what Plato called “noble lies,” to give their citizens meaning. According to Cotler, the myth of human rights and equality is the central myth of Canada. However, it is a myth and a form of belief. It is not predicated on science.

Statement 3 speaks to something called universal and natural laws from which human laws must draw. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King explicitly draws from the teachings of Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, two medieval theologians of the Christian church. From a secularist perspective, basing equality on medieval theologians is equivalent to explaining the origin of the human species according to the principles of creationism or intelligent design. Whatever the deficiencies of creationism and intelligent design (and there are many), the comparison is incorrect because the subject matters differ. Creationism and intelligent design purport to explain physical reality, while Reverend King drew from Augustine and Aquinas to understand moral and political reality.[10] Moral and political realities differ from physical reality, and one requires different methodologies to examine different types of reality. I agree with the secularist that one would not look to Augustine and Aquinas to understand quantum physics, but neither would I assume the methods of modern physics or biology are appropriate for fully understanding morality and politics.[11]

According to Augustine and Aquinas, human beings derive their dignity, that which grounds ethical obligations for treating them justly, on them being in the image of God. While they derived the symbol imago Dei from Biblical and classical sources, the idea is prevalent among numerous schools of thought. Just because a concept exists within a religious tradition does not mean it is exclusively a religious concept. Imago Dei symbolizes something primordial about our obligations toward another. Before we can say what we owe another, we must know that we owe another on account of the other being the sort of being that makes moral claims upon us. Aquinas expressed this primal obligation as the right that is prior to the just. Joseph Pieper explains: “The concept of ‘being due to,’ of ‘right,’ is such a primordial idea that it cannot be traced back to a prior, subordinating concept. That is to say, it can at best be described, but not defined.”[12] It is on this basis that Reverend King appealed to eternal and natural laws to defend equality: equality is predicated on his observation (and those of Augustine and Aquinas) that human beings depend on a transcendent order for their dignity.

Contemporary human rights scholars and activists are more likely to look to Enlightenment thinkers to support their ideas. But the most thoughtful of these thinkers, Immanuel Kant, says something quite similar to our medieval theologians. Compare his summary of human dignity with Pieper’s account above: “Humanity itself is a dignity, for man can be used by no one (neither by others nor even by himself) merely as a means, but must always be used at the same time as an end.”[13] For Kant, we ought to treat human beings as ends instead of means, not out of self-interest, but because humanity is a dignity. His insistence on predicating humanity on dignity compares with Aquinas’s claim that right is prior to justice, something primordial about our obligations to others. While Kant wanted to defend dignity and the categorical imperative on the grounds of reason alone, his inspiration and motivation operate within a framework that depends on Christian articulations of transcendence.[14]

Kant maintained religious tonalities while attempting to get away from a religious justification of dignity, which suggests something enduring about religious sensibilities in the way we justify important issues like rights and equality. For this reason, Jeremy Waldron points out that liberal philosophy has yet to develop a successfully non-religious way of speaking of dignity and equality.[15] Insofar as Canadians use the language of rights, dignity and equality, and speak of them in reverential terms, they draw upon a deeper well of thinking that they purportedly reject when they insist on a secularism that removes religious arguments from public life. Canadians act as parasites, or “Edwardians,” when they use religious terms but do not understand, or purposefully evacuate, the religious meanings of those terms.[16] By doing so, Canadians coast, not only on the philosophical and religious traditions that sustain their regime, but also on the deeper inspirations and sources that sustain what they most genuinely cherish.[17]

Michael Ignatieff’s statement concerning equality, Statement 4, clearly expresses this Edwardianism. He claims we get our sense of equality and commonality not from the “abstract human identity of nakedness” or “denuded human suffering,” but, more likely, from human differences, which are expressed through human agency: “So it is not the naked body we share in common, but the astoundingly different ways in which we decorate, adorn, perfume and costume our bodies in order to proclaim our identities as men, women, members of this tribe or that community.”[18] He elaborates “difference” as the “ceaseless elaboration of disguises, affirmations, identities and claims.”[19] Ignatieff does not claim with absolute certainty that difference is the source, but it plays a central role in his “moral fiction.” It is a noble lie he wants us to believe. How strange it is that he wants us to believe what he openly admits is a fiction.

In considering human nakedness and human agency as the basis of dignity, Ignatieff echoes a famous statement of Immanuel Kant: “Two things fill the mind with ever and new and increasing admiration and awe: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.”[20] For Kant, the “moral law within me” is the source of human dignity because it “reveals a life independent of all animality and even the whole world of sense. Conversely, the “starry heaven” “annihilates… my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came, we know not how.” Ignatieff rejects “nakedness” as the basis of equality for the same reason Kant thinks the “starry heaven” annihilates our sense of dignity. Identifying our essence in terms of biological species is weak because biology returns to the earth. Ignatieff, who has first-hand experience of war zones, has seen what happens when people regard one another as mere dirt.

Thus, Ignatieff appeals to agency and difference as the basis of dignity or what he calls “supreme value.”[21] Yet, differences, especially expressed as agency, express inequality, as shown in the debates over the rights of the disabled and the unborn. For example, Sue Rodrigues appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada to extend her the right to be euthanized because her body was wracked with ALS.[22] Her body is unequal to a vigorous and healthy body. Such inequality is a major reason why some people support euthanasia for the chronically ill or those who appear to be in a permanent vegetative state: people with vigorous and healthy bodies - those able to “decorate, adorn, perfume and costume” their bodies - judge those without them as lacking in dignity and living a life not worth living. People with vigorous and healthy bodies regard dignity as rooted in the ability of individuals to remain active and to make choices. This is frequently called “extrinsic” or “subjective” dignity, or what Ignatieff calls “agency.” People who seem incapable of mental or physical activity, those who lack agency, are thereby deemed lacking in dignity. Those who defend the dignity of the disabled appeal to “objective” or “intrinsic” accounts of dignity, and frequently draw from religious arguments to support their views.[23] If it follows from the position of “extrinsic” or “subjective” dignity that the disabled have no dignity, then defenders of the disabled point out that they, arguably society’s most vulnerable members, would have no defense against state-enforced programs of euthanasia, sterilization, and eugenicist projects that have characterized massive breaches of human rights in places like Nazi Germany as well as in Canada.

Ignatieff understands such dangers, but his appeal to “difference” is insufficient. He means the “ceaseless elaboration of disguises, affirmations, identities and claims” to express a recognition of the mystery of otherness, and in this sense it compares with the imago Dei symbolisms of Augustine and Aquinas, and dignity of Kant. However, treating selfhood as a ceaseless construction of disguises – of self-creativity –1) relies too much on human strength and self-assertion as the basis of dignity and 2) provides an extremely thin sense of the being to whom we owe justice: what kind of notion of selfhood gets articulated by a ceaseless play of disguises? Is there anything behind the disguises? Moreover, disguises are meant to hide and to deceive. Why should we respect one who deceives? Ignatieff hedges on this question because he speaks of “ceaseless elaboration” instead of “ceaseless deception.” “Elaboration” implies continuity of a self behind the disguises, but Ignatieff fails to provide an account of what hides behind the masks.

Ignatieff’s hedging reveals his Edwardianism because it shows him drawing upon the deeper sources of dignity and equality – imago Dei – while at the same time rejecting them. By appealing to this dance of disguises as the human self, Ignatieff appeals to a postmodern dream that human beings are autonomous authors or creators of their identities and their values. His is a genteel version of the Promethean dream that is associated with the likes of Nietzsche (no friend of egalitarianism) and even has its roots in Kant. Even so, what Ignatieff overlooks is that this Promethean dream of self-sufficiency, which rejects the past in the belief in its self-creativity, ironically draws upon the past in Jewish and Christian understandings of divine creativity, except now it is man who thinks he has divine power of creativity.[24] The irony of this Promethean dream is that postmodern man actually received, or stole, the idea he creates from a tradition, which undermines his claim that he has power to create. The Promethean dream, which appeals to a large number of Canadians who view themselves as autonomous moral actors who make their own choices, is a self-deception. Ignatieff’s Edwardianism, which implicitly draws upon imago Dei, allows him to be more sober than Prometheus. His account of difference allows for decency because difference can also be an expression of belonging, which means the source of difference lies beyond sheer human will (by a smidgeon).[25]

Yet, in implicitly drawing from imago Dei, Ignatieff also rejects it, as indicated in his rejection of “nakedness.” While our nakedness can reveal inequality (e.g., differences of vitality, strength, etc.), it also reveals our vulnerability. We are all subject to sickness, disease, hunger, cold, isolation, and other vicissitudes of human existence we suffer in silence. These are expressions of human weakness, which Ignatieff dismisses when he rejects the notion that human rights is based on “instincts of pity for denuded human suffering.”[26] While Ignatieff may be correct in questioning the reliability of “instincts,” is it any wonder that the inspiration for human rights develops in cultures that have long contemplated the meaning and mystery of human vulnerability in “denuded human suffering”? Does Ignatieff not recognize in this language the figure and suffering of Jesus Christ and the “suffering servant” of the Israelite prophets, not in terms of an abstract species but in the concrete person?[27] Do we not need rights precisely because we are so fragile, because the autonomous agent is in fact a “moral fiction”? Superman does not need human rights. Ignatieff reveals his Prometheanism when he fails to see this mystery in “nakedness,” and chooses “agency” and “difference” instead. This turn toward agency, while tentative, might reveal not so much skepticism toward instincts as contempt toward weakness. However, his Prometheanism is genteel, or Edwardian, because it draws upon a culture with some habituation in seeing the mystery of that suffering, which restrains “agency.” Relying on the culture while corroding it is an untenable position, and helps explain Ignatieff’s appeals to “moral fiction” and “gamble.” However, Ignatieff’s Edwardian “moral fiction” also confirms Jeremy Waldron’s argument that nonreligious ways of speaking of human rights and equality are insufficient, and that considering religious ways of speaking about them would help us sustain the moral and political principles we cherish.

Increasingly it has been the strategy of liberal democracies to maintain peace by taking contentious issues like religion off the table of public debate. The drive to make religion private is part of a liberal strategy of finding a common basis on which a diverse population can sustain a common way of life. Extreme sectarianism, Puritanism, and apocalyptic theologies can contribute to what Thomas Hobbes called “the seditious roaring of a troubled nation”[28] because their adherents no longer see themselves as a sharing a common world. However, at what point does the liberal strategy end up disenfranchising religious people? At what point does the liberal strategy become an overextended secularist strategy that ends up provoking “seditious roaring”?[29] The modern liberal state has expanded its powers and its role in people’s private lives so much that it is easy to see how a call to remove religion from public life implies removing it from private life as well. For example, does government provided health-care require all obstetricians to perform abortions? Is there no room for obstetricians to avoid this practice on the grounds of religious conscience? Moreover, as physics, genetics, and reproductive technologies advance and our abilities to manipulate genes, biological traits, and matter advance, it will become increasingly difficult to evaluate or even recognize the ethical implications of these actions if our very views of human nature are reduced to biology and matter.[30] To prohibit religious arguments for human dignity from participating in public debate is to submit ahead of time to the technological imperative of the conquest of nature.

Liberal democracy draws upon religious and philosophical principles of right, dignity, and equality that liberalism has difficulty defending on its own terms. Numerous scholars speak of the crisis of liberalism, which refers to the persistent failures by liberal philosophers (as opposed to partisan liberals or Liberals, though there may be those as well) to provide a comprehensive defense of liberalism.[31] Instead, they, like Ignatieff, speak of “moral fiction” and “gamble.” Thus, it is strange that we find rigorous efforts to eliminate religion from liberal public life at the very moment liberal philosophers seem incapable of providing a defense of liberalism. Seen in this light, calls to eliminate religion from public life consist of an illiberal “circle the wagons” strategy: a short-term strategy to consolidate a collective, supposedly secular, identity from the religious “other” when those driving the wagons – our secular liberal intellectuals – know full well that theirs is a losing strategy.[32]

With this in mind, let us return to our four statements with a more nuanced understanding of religion and politics that adheres more adequately than secularism to liberal principles of pluralism and dignity:

1. Rev. King’s Letter appropriately uses “God talk” by appealing both to America’s constitutional tradition of equality and to the language of the “laws of nature and nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence.

2. Human rights arise in a culture with a strong tradition of fighting for and respecting the dignity of all. Whether dignity should be grounded on a secular ideology or religious tradition or on something else can only be decided by a culture of dialogue in the institutions that sustain that dialogue and debate.

3. Unjust laws mistreat the human person, whose dignity transcends the enactments of Parliament, Court, or other governmental agents.

4. Appeals to postmodern “moral fictions” or “noble lies” to sustain the political principles we cherish the most are insufficient, and largely the result of a secularist turn away from the religious and philosophical sources of the human person that have sustained those principles over the centuries. As a society we need to get beyond our complacent acceptance of being lied to with moral fictions, and instead return to a serious reconsideration of the moral, philosophical, and religious debates concerning human dignity, equality, and rights.

Permitting religious arguments in political debate is not simply a matter of throwing a bone to a noisy minority in the hope that, because their viewpoints are outdated, they will soon fall into the silence of irrelevancy. Rather, it is necessary to permit religious arguments in political debate for the basic reason that liberal democracy depends on a plurality of arguments and positions to sustain a healthy regime. Unlike our Edwardian proponents of the noble lie, religion takes seriously the Socratic question of how a human being, and a human society, ought to live. The level of their seriousness depends also on adherents of religious communities being open to having their traditions questioned, challenged, and having something persuasive about them both in terms of their arguments as well as the model lives they aspire to lead and to be a shining example for the world around them. Keeping this pluralism open is especially important at a time when liberals themselves are unsure as to what counts for a healthy liberal regime, and religious arguments can help all of us understand that.

[1] Chamberlain v. Surrey School District #36 (1998), 60 B.C.L.R. (3d) 311

[2] Iain T. Benson, “ Christian Activists Get Party Nominations: Woo, Scary,” Centre Articles, vol. 82, May 27, 2005, Centre for Cultural Renewal (http://www.culturalrenewal.ca/qry/page.taf?id=37&_function=detail&sbtblct_uid1=102&_nc=3950ab1bd7dc849c4bfd02f17fbcc2ff)

[3] Iain T. Benson, “Restricting Parent's Home Teaching of Religion to Their Children: How Democratic,” Centre Articles, vol. 24, April 16, 2004, Centre for Cultural Renewal (http://www.culturalrenewal.ca/qry/page.taf?id=37&_function=detail&sbtblct_uid1=39&_nc=3950ab1bd7dc849c4bfd02f17fbcc2ff).

[4] Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf). I thank Dr. David Klassen for pointing me to this and a few other sources discussed in this paper. He provides a more sustained argument for religion and human dignity and equality in his paper, “Rights Talk and God Talk: Religious Faith and Natural Rights,” paper presented to “Pluralism, Politics, and God: An International Symposium on Religion and Public Reason,” Newman Centre, McGill University, September 13-15, 2007 (http://www.davidklassen.net/files/Conference_paper_--_Rights_Talk_and_God_Talk_David_Klassen.pdf).

[5] E.g., Irwin Cotler, Speech to Parliament of Canada, Hansard, (37^th Parliament, 2^nd session) October 28, 2002 (http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?pub=hansard&mee=16&parl=37&ses=2&language=E&x=1#Int-309675).

[6] King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

[7] Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution, (Toronto: Anansi, 2000), 139.

[8] For clarification on the difference between monistic secularism that privatizes religion, and pluralistic secularism that has a role for public participation by religious voices, see Wilfred McClay, “Two Concepts of Secularism,” Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2000, 24(3). The British Columbia Court of Appeal used this article in overturning a lower court’s decision that ruled religious voices have no role in debating public policy on account of Canada’s supposed “secular” character. For further reflections on the problematic character of “secular” in legal and political thinking, see Iain T. Benson, “Notes Towards a (Re)Definition of the ‘Secular’” (2000), 33 U.B.C. L. Rev. 519; Benson, “Considering Secularism,” in Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society: Essays in Pluralism, Religion, and Public Policy, ed., Douglas Farrow, (Montréal-Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2004), 83-98; Douglas Farrow, “Of Secularity and Civil Religion,” ibid., 140-82. See also my “Harmonization of Heaven and Earth?: Religion, Politics, and Law in Canada,” (2000), 33 U.B.C. L. Rev.: 663-98.

[9] This story has been told numerous times. Most recently, by Michael Burleigh (Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War, (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006) and Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror, (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007); most in-depth, by Eric Voegelin (Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5, ed., Manfred Henningsen, (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000); History of Political Ideas, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vols. 19-26; Order and History, vols. 14-18. On secularism and progress in Canada, see the articles by Benson, Farrow, and Heyking cited above.

[10] In fact, a strong case can be made that creationism (and less so, intelligent design) are in fact social myths, despite their attempt to explain geology and biology. Creationism in particular is a social myth created in reaction to an implication of Darwinism that human beings, since they descend from animals, lack dignity. Creationism uses a pinched reading of the Bible and of scientific data to support a social view and in this sense it must be understood as a social myth, perhaps analogous to Michael Ignatieff’s desire to make a myth or “moral fiction” out of ”difference” (analyzed below). On creationism and Darwinism as social myths, see Lee Harris, “Why ‘Theology is a Simple Muddle,’” TCS Daily, August 19, 2005 (http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=081905B).

[11] On what an Augustinian political theory might look like, see my Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).

[12] Joseph Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 47.

[13] Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trans., James Ellington, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1964), 127.

[14] David Walsh, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 212-219.

[15] Jeremy Waldron, “Religious Contributions in Public Deliberation,” San Diego Law Review 30 (1993): 846-47.

[16] Iain T. Benson applies “Edwardianism,” an English, largely post-Romantic, literary genre that infused immanent phenomena with transcendent meaning, to contemporary political and culture discourse. See “The Use of Religious Concepts in a Post-religious Age: Canada’s Continuing Edwardianism,” Centre Articles, vol. 125, September 25, 2006, Centre for Cultural Renewal, (http://www.culturalrenewal.ca/qry/page.taf?id=37&_function=detail&sbtblct_uid1=159&_nc=3950ab1bd7dc849c4bfd02f17fbcc2ff)

[17] By making this dual claim, I am not arguing Canada is or ought to be a “Christian” nation. The Canadian Founders, being good classical liberals, understood that sectarianism could rip apart the regime (See Frederick Vaughan, The Canadian Federalist Experiment: From Defiant Monarchy to Reluctant Republic, (Montréal-Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003), 134-51; Janet Ajzenstat, The Political Thought of Lord Durham, (Montréal-Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1988), 35-41). Even so, they, like contemporary politicians and activists, were practical men (and today, women) who did not always realize or think about the deeper justifications of their own political positions. For an extended analysis for this “compactness” in the liberal tradition, see Walsh, The Growth of the Liberal Soul.

[18] Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution, 41.

[19] Ibid., 53.

[20] Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans., Lewis White Beck, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 166.

[21] Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution, 53.

[22] Rodriguez v. British Columbia (Attorney General), [1993] 3 S.C.R. 519

[23] On intrinsic or objective dignity, see Leon Kass, “Defending Human Dignity” Bradley Lecture to American Enterprise Institute, February 5, 2007 (http://www.aei.org/events/filter.foreign,eventID.1376/event_detail.asp). On extrinsic or subjective dignity, see Peter Singer, How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest, (New York: Prometheus Books, 1995).

[24] See Boris DeWiel, “Athens vs. Jerusalem: A Source of Left-Right Conflict in the History of Ideas,” Journal of Political Ideologies, February 2004, 9(1): 31-49, and Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1968).

[25] Ignatieff, Rights Revolution, 54.

[26] Ignatieff, Rights Revolution, 43.

[27] See Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans, 2000). Of course, Christian experience presupposes Jewish experience. See David Novak, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, Order and History I, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 14, ed., Maurice Hogan, (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001 [1956]).

[28] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. VIII.

[29] Janet Ajzenstat argues that much of the tumults Canada has suffered in the past decades (i.e., lack of confidence in institutions, constitutional wrangling, factionalism) have been the result of a form of political romanticism that expects too much from political life (Janet Ajzenstat, The Once and Future Canadian Democracy, (Montréal-Kingston: McGill University Press, 2003) and The Canadian Founding, (Montréal-Kingston: McGill University Press, 2007)).

[30] For an account of what a world where this occurs might look like, see Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

[31] In addition to Walsh, see J. Judd Owen, Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism: The Foundational Crisis of the Separation of Church and State, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

[32] A particularly brutal but candid admission of this strategy is offered by John Barber, “Tory’s Proposal a Call to Arms for Secular Humanism,” Globe and Mail, September 6, 2007, A12 (http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/LAC/20070906/BARBER06/Columnists/columnists/columnistsNational/3/3/3/). A more refined example is found in Mark Lilla’s call to retrieve Hobbes in the secularist Kulturkampf against evangelicals and other “messianic” religious figures (The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, (New York: Knopf, 2007)).