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Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Save America? Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, Zondervan, 282 pp., $19.99

Paul Weyrich, as well as Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson in their recent book Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America? have done the Christian world a service in pointing out what the wider society discovered years ago—the limits of politics in confronting deep moral and spiritual conditions. Where Weyrich, Thomas, and Ed Dobson are wrong is in assuming that what was done politically over the past several decades was tantamount to seriously engaging the culture, which is where the real crisis is located. Politics hasn't failed: attempts to reform culture through politics have failed.

To be fair, neither Thomas nor Dobson nor Weyrich is calling for a complete retreat. But each has presented an argument that will have that effect when heard by frustrated citizens. Thomas and Dobson essentially present the choice as politics versus pietism; Weyrich presents the choice as politics versus separatism. Weyrich is not calling for a healthy, robust counterculture. When he urges moral and religious conservatives to "quarantine" themselves and to "bypass" cultural institutions, he is recommending a subculture rooted in a self-conscious separatism. Both pietism and separatism represent familiar historical patterns in America, and both come very easily for evangelical believers.

Neither retreat nor the status quo is acceptable. The debate should not focus on methods of retreat, but on new models for engagement and new strategies that focus more on culture than on politics in the decades to come. The issue is not that politics is unimportant. It is that even if one succeeds in building working majorities, the lawmaking process can at best suppress the symptoms of cultural disorder; it can do very little about the underlying causes. The most one can hope for in politics is to ensure that government "do no harm," an objective that will keep many good people busy in politics for a long time to come, to be sure.

But politics cannot begin to put the connecting tissue back in society. It is ill-equipped to reconstruct traditional moral beliefs. The best policies cannot recover courtship or marriage, make fathers responsible for their children, restore shock or shame where it once existed, or recover legitimate social authority to institutions that have been hollowed out by a pervasive ideology of individual autonomy. The vast majority of moral problems that trouble us cannot be eradicated by law.

Some imagine the nation in a state of political crisis and long for a Churchill figure to set things right. But our crisis is cultural. Even in the unlikely event that such a figure were to emerge, politics cannot confront a debauched culture in the same fashion that it can offer bold action in the midst of war or depression. In a disordered society, a heavy reliance on political authority to renew the nonauthoritative sector of culture can quickly become more disease than cure.

In fact, the most promising possibility in the debate that Weyrich and Thom as/Dobson have triggered is the emergence of a new politics of prudence, a politics that will be both more realistic in its expectations and more sustainable. The problem has not been expecting too little of politics, but far too much.

True conservatism brings a natural skepticism to the reforming possibilities of politics. It sees as its first job the long-term cultivation of character, culture, and community. It views politics as "downstream" from culture, more reflecting it than shaping it. Conservatism avoids excessively politicizing religion or religionizing politics because genuine religious faith stirs allegiances that transcend nation and ideology. The Scriptures would counsel even more skepticism about both the possibilities of politics and the form in which it should be practiced.

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September 6 1999, Vol. 43, No. 10