Crowley, Chapter 1

SO much to say about this... I'll run out space.

Where was this book a couple of weeks ago? In 8010, we had a nice discussion about whether or not there are just some issues that one can not argue productively. Abortion was a salient example, of course, and implicit in that was the old yarn about not arguing about politics or religion (abortion is arguably *the* intersection between the two in a Venn diagram of American politics, with same-sex marriage closing in on it in recent years). Yet here is Crowley picking up that very concern in Chapter 1: "On (Not) Arguing About Religion and Politics," where she explains why this has become the case and why she believes it's a threat to democracy (I tend to agree). The main concern Crowley addresses here: "this moment in American history... a discursive climate dominated by two powerful discourses: liberalism and Christian fundamentalism" (2). While I'm not sure how successful Crowley will be in her goal to valorize rhetoric as an anodyne for the schism between the dominant hegemonies she sees in liberalism and apocalypticism, she sure knows how to turn a phrase. There are pages in my copy where there are more underlined lines than not.

While I don't agree with everything Crowley says, one gift she has, in my opinion, is an ability to write thick description--she really articulates for me several observations that I have myself internalized, but never put into words. She puts nicely something I was trying to say last week when she asserts that "Liberalism is the default discourse of American politics because the country's founding documents, and hence its system of jurisprudence, are saturated with liberal values" (3), which are, "According to Anthony Arblaster... freedom, tolerance, privacy, reason, and the rule of law" (5). I agree with that assessment, as with the (not controversial) view that the "Right" (excuse the simplification) has "achieved astonishing results" both in elections and in "morphing... the term *liberal* itself" (6). I think she's on to something, too, when she posits that one of main points of contention between the two hegemonies she constructs is that liberalism, because it values "individual rights, equality before the law, and personal freedom" thus "has little or nothing to say about beliefs or practices deemed to reside outside of the so-called public sphere" whereas "fundamentalist Christians" (that term can be a point of contention) "aim to 'restore' biblical values to the center of American life"--both public and private. Thus the "central point of contention" between the two hegemonies "involves the place of religious and moral values in civic affairs: should such convictions be set aside when matters of state policy are discussed, or should these values actually govern the discussion?" (ibid). The "conceptual vocabulary" of liberalism was a hegemony because it historically has gone without saying, but this "version of Christian fundamentalism, driven by apocalypticism, is in hegemonic contention with liberalism because it motivates the political activism of the Christian Right" and that this challenge has been largely successful, " rendering "the terms and conjectures of liberalism available for examination and possible rediscription" (5). In other words, liberalism has been the default position (though it's rife with its own problems--including its being situated in reason, a situating that excludes engagemente with any discourse that is not so situated); implicit in liberal discourse are many of the values intrinsic to democracy; the challenge to liberalism by Christian fundamentalism thus is largely a challenge to those democratic principles.

I think Crowley does a nice job of summing up who exactly it is that she's implicating in her construction of Christian fundamentalist hegemony, though she takes a while to get there (relatively speaking, considering how many people she probably lost on the way in): "The variety of Christian belief that I'm interested in here typically flourishes among conservative Protestants called 'evangelicals' or 'fundamentalists'" (7) and by fundamentalist, she borrows William Connolly's definition: "a general imperative to assert an absolute, singular ground of authority; to ground your own identity and allegiances in this unquestionable source; to define political issues in a vocabulary of God, morality, or nature that invokes such a certain, authoritative source" (12). Both liberalism and Christianity can be fundamentalist, as any belief system which is foundational in nature can be. Here Crowley makes a nice move in stating that "Ideological foundations are exclusive only if they are taken to be noncontingent--that is, if they are taken to apply nonconetextually or universally"; that "hence antifoundationalism is not coherent unless it is read as a critique of belief systems that posit universal or noncontingent foundations"; that is to say those belief systems that Crowley, using Elizabeth Minnich describes them: "take a given starting point as universal" and so "must also assume that any being whose subjectivity is not legitimatized by that starting point is of secondary or lesser worth"; as Crowley, summing up Minnich, puts it deftly, "When a metphysics informs a politics, those who are marginalized by its foundational ideal or ideals can be constructed by policy as invisible or worse, as worthy of subjegation and defeat" (13). Crowley disagrees with Minnich that antifoundationalism is a "rational position," positing that it is instead "an ethical preference" (ibid). This discussion reminded me of a description of postmodernism--that it is "nothing if not an ethical position" (Robert Eaglestone, in _The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, page 182).

I was puzzled, though, by the lack of discussion of the term *neoconservative* here, a discussion which would seemingly dovetail nicely with her discussion of the conflation of religion and politics and her contention that "during the 1980s... interpreters of biblical prophecy modified the apocalyptic narrative in order to suggest that political involvement was necessary in order to hasten the advent of the end time" (8). She includes a note following that line instructing the reader to "see chapter 4" but my scanning of it was for naught and when one turns to the index, the only listing for "neoconservative" is from one of the endnotes--it contrasts neoconservatism with *paleoconservatism* but it sums up the former as "economic and nationalistic conservatism" without any discussion of how the term can be productively related to Crowley's discussion--namely, that *the* central issue of much neoconservatist screed has been national policy towards Israel (and that any one who criticizes neoconservatism or indeed even uses the term is often labled an ant-Semite) with a reconcilation between those architects of neocon policies who are indeed Jewish with those who are fundamentalist Christians, including those involved in the Project for the New American Century and the current President of the United States. The term itself is controversial, as is linking it to national policies toward Israel, but the subject itself *is* relevant to her discussion of theonomy (see the links below for a more intelligent assessment):

http://www.slate.com/id/2137208/
http://www.slate.com/id/2160462/

I'm interested to see how she develops her contention that rhetoric is better-suited than liberalism for engaging "apocalypticism"--she uses broad strokes in asserting that rhetoric "does not depend solely on appeals to reason and evidence for its persuasive efficacy" and that rhetoricists understand "the centrality of desires and values to the maintenance of beliefs" while liberalism is based on reason and leaves little room for beliefs not grounded in it (4). Rhetoric, she contends "will work better in the present climate than liberal argumentation because it offers a more comprehensive range of appeals, many of which are considered inappropriate in liberal thought" (ibid) and how she'll develop Mouffe's "agnostic pluralism" (I've ordered Mouffe's book), which has as its "prime task" not the elimination of passions from the public sphere but intead the mobilization of "those passions toward democratic designs" (22).