Motus Mentis

Last week our Attorney General, William Barr, gave a speech at Notre Dame on the assault of “secularism” upon traditional religion. He touched on many of the themes I’ve been brooding over in these pages: the withering effect of the death of the transcendent, the natural-rights principles of the American Founding, and the question of whether natural law and natural rights are sustainable ideas without God (I believe they aren’t).

He speaks about the enormous human cost of the empty place in modern life that once was filled by belief in God. (Did you know, by the way, that suicide among young people is up fifty-six percent over the past ten years?)

Readers of this blog will know that I am myself not a believer, though I am not an atheist either. (See this recent post.) But I have come round to a sure belief that the loss of metaphysically transcendent religion has destructive consequences that may well be fatal for human societies.

Government cannot control the passions and appetites of men without descending into tyranny; it is necessary for the existence of a free republic that the people have the moral and civic virtue to govern themselves. They must push back, hard, against their baser impulses — and a nihilistic metaphysics gives them nothing to stand on. The Founders knew this very well indeed, and so Mr. Barr quotes John Adams:

“We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

One thing that must be understood, however, and that Mr. Barr acknowledges in passing, is that we should not think of this as a war upon religion, but rather as a war between religions: between the grotesquely mutated and deracinated Puritanism of modern-day “Progressives” — which has over the past century or so completely washed God out of its creed while retaining the most fanatically missionary aspects of its original form — and religion as the word is traditionally understood.

Read the speech here.