Let me begin by saying how much I’m enjoying EJ’s book. I’m about two-thirds of the way through Souled Out, and I have already learned a tremendous amount. It’s an incredibly thoughtful book, clearly the product of the many years its author has spent carefully considering religion and politics. But I have one critique that I’d like to offer the group.

EJ does an admirable job of showing that, even on the touchiest “values” issues, like abortion and gay marriage, there is more common ground between liberals and conservatives than one might expect: “Cultural liberals are as appalled as anyone else that their children might watch X-rated movies or cruise dangerous Web sites. Cultural conservatives who have gay friends cannot abide prejudice against homosexuals. Opponents of abortion often cannot find it in themselves to condemn a woman they know who has had an abortion for a reason they understand. Some supporters of abortion rights find the issue morally troubling nonetheless and might never choose to have an abortion themselves.” (All of which reminds me of Barack Obama’s 2004 convention speech: “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states.”)

EJ also rightly argues that morality and religious belief inform not only this relatively narrow set of sex-related concerns but broader worries about society and modernism: “People on the left and on the right are equally forceful in decrying self-centered individualism, consumerism, new pressures on the family, and the decline of community.” And he insists (again rightly) that many public policy issues, such as efforts to alleviate poverty, are moral issues as well. On such matters, religious-minded liberals and conservatives have long disagreed about the role of government versus the role of the individual, but they have agreed that there is a moral obligation to act. There ought to be no reason why they cannot agree that “[t]he poor suffer from high rates of teen pregnancy, fatherless families, and family breakup”—that is, maladies for which the cure is greater personal responsibility—“and they suffer from unjust social structures and large changes in the economy that produce greater inequality.”

But, if religion should enable, rather than preclude solutions, why the culture war (or, at least, the perception of one)? According to EJ, the answer is partly that Bush-era religiosity has been defined by “a form of absolutism and ideological litmus testing that came in the way of practical solutions.” For example, “an insistence on abstinence as the only solution to the problem of teenage pregnancy got in the way of programs that might reduce teen pregnancy by combining abstinence education with programs promoting contraception.” If politicians were able to eschew such absolutism—to, say, fight to lower the number of abortions even while leaving abortion itself legal—they would demonstrate that they are “capable of living up to their highest calling, which is to seek practical forms of moral seriousness.”

My concern is that such an approach requires an appreciation of the value of doubt, as well as a devotion to (or at least a respect for) empiricism. One must be willing to accept that one’s beliefs may be wrong, and one must believe that data and experience have a lot to teach us. While that is an approach that some serious religious thinkers may have been able to reconcile with their faith, it hasn’t been part of conservative ideology, either its religious or secular components, for quite a while. The absolutism that EJ laments is not simply a function of George W. Bush, or even the Religious Right writ large as it has manifested over the past three decades. Rather, it has been a function of modern conservatism going back to its inception in the 1950s (a period, incidentally, that EJ chronicles wonderfully in his book, Why Americans Hate Politics). For example, even as a bipartisan consensus developed around containing the Soviet Union after World War II, conservatives pursued a policy of rollback because even containment (let alone negotiation) was seen as a compromise with evil. More to the point, conservative traditionalists at the time, like Richard Weaver, argued explicitly against Enlightenment thinking, in part because they thought that its emphasis on rationalism led to social planning which in turn led to communism—but also because they did not think that “scientism” was compatible with an appreciation for the transcendent.

Now, if Pope Benedict can acknowledge that we all operate within the parameters of the Enlightenment, then the Right’s rejection of empiricism—and all the damage that it does to effective public policy—is not simply a function of religion, which is good. But it also means that the problem we face is greater than the appropriate role of faith in God; it is a problem of excessive faith in ourselves. EJ writes that the Religious Right has been chastened by the reaction to its more extreme positions: Minnesota’s rejection of a ban on almost all abortions, and national disgust with the Right’s disgraceful overreach during the Terry Schiavo case. And, on foreign policy matters, there are certainly hawks who have reassessed their certitudes post-Iraq. Yet I have not been overwhelmed by conservative calls for self-reflection, even as the conservative movement itself seems to be fracturing in the wake of Bush’s second term and the GOP’s presumed nomination of John McCain for president.

In other words, it does not seem to me that doubt, an essential ingredient for the compromises EJ advocates, has made a resurgence. And, so, while I am heartened by the surge of both progressive religiosity and the willingness of some conservative Evangelicals to refocus their concerns onto issues like global warming, I wonder whether that shift—however monumental—will be enough.