FATHER ROBERT BARRON Faith and Culture I’m sure you’ve heard by now of the controversy surrounding Brit Hume’s remarks a couple of weeks ago on the Fox News Sunday program. The panelists on the show were asked for their predictions and hopes for the coming year, and Hume, a veteran political analyst, weighed in on the Tiger Woods tragedy. “Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think, is a very open question. … He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery... .’” Judging from some of the reactions on the political left, you’d think that Hume had recommended that Tiger become a Nazi. The blogger Andrew Sullivan criticized Hume for his “pure sectarianism;” Washington Post media writer Tom Shales called him a “sanctimonious busybody” who had “dissed half a billion Buddhists;” MSNBC’s David Shuster just hung his head and called Hume’s intervention “truly embarrassing;” but MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann took the cake, comparing Brit Hume’s public advocacy of Christianity to “Jihadism.” The roots of this visceral reaction to explicitly religious speech in the public square stretch back to the mid 17th century, to the time just after the wars of religion. For roughly 100 years, the European continent had been ravaged by a series of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. In the wake of that terrible period, many leading intellectuals — Descartes, Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, to name a few — became convinced that sectarian religion is inherently violent, and they endeavored as a consequence to find rational and non-violent ways of adjudicating religious disputes. One of their strategies was to propose readings of classical religion that emphasized the purely ethical and “reasonable” features of the Bible and set aside what they considered its irrational and supernatural elements. The Bible produced by Thomas Jefferson, in which offending passages had been removed, is a very good example of this approach. But a second strategy — on display in almost all of the constitutions of modern liberal democracies — was to conclude a sort of peace treaty between religion and the secular state, the terms of which are roughly as follows: The state will tolerate the practice of religion as long as religious people agree to privatize their faith. In other words, religious belief is fine as long as it does not assert itself publicly or politically. To give the philosophers and political theorists of modernity their due, religious people have had, at best, a spotty record when it comes to working out their differences peacefully. Indeed, the Sept. 11 attacks, perpetrated by religious people acting in a supremely irrational and violent way, confirmed the wisdom of the secularist arrangement in the minds of many. However, Christians cannot finally accept the modern peace treaty, precisely because faith, by its very nature, informs every aspect of life. When St. Paul declared that Jesus Christ is Lord, he meant the Lord of everything: the public and private dimensions, politics, economics, entertainment, etc. Christ’s sovereignty — which is the sovereignty of the Creator God — cannot legitimately be limited to some purely “spiritual” realm of one’s private conscience, nor can it obtain simply within the fellowship of Christians. The Christian faith has been, from its earliest days, public and missionary in character. “Go,” Jesus said, “and preach to all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” For Christians, therefore, the question is not really whether they bring the faith out publicly, but rather how they do so. And here is where we run up against the extremism of a Keith Olbermann, who simply cannot imagine an alternative to utter privatization of religion than “jihadism.” For him and his colleagues on the left, it is simply a zero-sum game: either the faith is a hobby privately practiced or it is the occasion for holy war. What they have overlooked is the real possibility of having a religious argument in public, like the ones that we have publicly all the time regarding politics, economics, entertainment and sports. As long as religion is understood as private, it’s not really a subject of argument, for it is then best construed as a matter of taste, like one’s preference for meat over fish. But if it makes public claims, it can and should be argued about. Evidence should be marshalled, claims should be assessed, criteria of reasonableness should be invoked and all people of good will should be invited into a non-violent and non-coercive discussion of the matter. And this, it seems to me, is precisely what Brit Hume was doing on Fox News. He was not proposing legislation requiring all people to become Christian; he was not urging that the arm of the state should be used to force Christianity on the nation; he was not threatening Tiger Woods with violent retribution if he dared to disagree. Rather, he laid out what he took to be compelling reasons why the Christian faith would be a good thing for the golfer to consider. He was, in short, making a public argument about religion. May his tribe increase.