The war in Iraq

Person and Freedom

An interview with Elisa Buzzi, who has studied the religious and cultural tradition of the United States for years. Starting from a judgment of Fr Giussani’s on the positivity of life taught by American history, questions arise: What is the origin of this positivity? What contradictions have been generated? Opening up to a new perspective, so as to be “neither under illusions nor cynical about the empire”

EDITED BY MAURIZIO CRIPPA

The March morning I met with Elisa Buzzi to talk about America, its religiosity and “positivity,” was the day Bush’s ultimatum to Iraq ran out. The night I sat down to the computer to write was when the bombers started flying over Baghdad. “No to war, Yes to America.” This is a judgment to be looked at more closely, at a time like this, with America saying Yes to war and the Pope asking people to say No, and explaining the reasons-not only religious, but also political-for his Christian realism; and with America seeming to ignore this realism to start down the path of a mission that is not only political, but also religious. In all this, Fr Giussani’s recent words echo in the head and heart, when he pointed out that “the history of America teaches us a positivity of life that is an example to the rest of the world,” and that “in it is the opportunity for an education that truly saves the desire for peace and justice.” For years, Elisa Buzzi has studied the fascinating and contradictory religious and cultural history of the United States. She starts with a premise, “What struck me most about Fr Giussani’s words is that they are a judgment. They are not dictated by a ‘feeling,’ or a moral sentence. They are a judgment in the fullest sense of the word, which is born out of a profound knowledge of the reality of America, its religious origins and their development, albeit sometimes contradictory, albeit within the experience of limitation or corruption.” So let’s try to understand this positivity and this opportunity, maybe putting politics aside for a moment.

The first thing is the “positivity” of America, or what is called in secular terms American optimism.
Behind this sense of positivity is an ideal of freedom, understood as the possibility for each person to adhere to his own destiny, to experience truth and fulfillment (also in a practical sense). Or, to put it better, the possibility for every person to make a new beginning. This ideal has a religious foundation, to be sure, but it also has other reasons. Think of the desire of those who immigrated for economic or political reasons, and the idea of the “land of opportunity.” This “opportunity” embraces also the value of the person and his “ethical” commitment to use his energies for self-fulfillment.

Therefore, a religious start onto which a secular kind of “optimism” has been grafted…
This is the great “American way of life,” that has been called a “secularized Protestantism.” It contains a positive component and also its limitation, as the great American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said when he spoke of the “religion of modernity” and also of the “moralists’ illusion,” because it is a vision based on the denial of the possibility of sin; at a certain point it tends to forget about the always-possible corruption of freedom, the possibility of doing evil.

This is an Enlightenment type of temptation that is tragically clear in European history; in American history, a bit less…
The Enlightenment is certainly another basis of American culture, but in the less ideological form it took in the English-speaking countries. Thus in America, the religious and secular views did not come into conflict. Niebuhr said, “We are the most religious and also the most secularized nation.” This is a real paradox.

If we wanted to put it in historical and cultural terms…
English-speaking rationalism is not the opposite of Protestantism, but a derivation from it; rather, it is a sort of heresy within Protestantism. It is a heresy because rationalists like John Locke were in fact heretics; they advocated Trinitarian and Christological heresies; they were all Monophysites. Moreover, rationalism affirmed itself as the re-emergence of a neo-Pelagian moralism that starts out from Calvinism. This moderate-Enlightenment tradition is present in the Founding Fathers, those who wrote the Constitution in 1787, along with the great Puritan tradition. From this is born the American ethos. This original identity later underwent a transformation, not without drama and contradictions, toward the “secularized Protestantism” we mentioned earlier. But, of this religious-secular root, the great idea of freedom remains.

The idea that America has conceived of itself as a “chosen nation” is also part of it, this Messianism that weighs heavily on international politics these days.
Let’s start from the conception that Puritan America has of itself: a new beginning, a pure religious and social experience, superior to that of corrupt Europe. The Puritans did not at all flee from persecutions; they left in order to live a more radical reform. Today, this mentality is even more accentuated in the evangelical denominations and sects that certainly count in Bush’s electorate. But it is a feeling that is also part of Enlightenment culture; it was there in Thomas Jefferson, who was a deist. It is the founding myth of America.

Let’s go on to the idea of freedom and power.
A positive factor that religion has brought into the American ethos is a very realistic view of the weight and ambiguity of power. As one of the Founding Fathers said, “We must not give mortal man more power than we want him to use, because he will surely use it to the fullest.” It is an anti-Jacobin idea: there is not a good power that liberates man. The aim of the Constitution was not to obtain a perfect government, but to avoid the evils that can derive from any government strong enough to threaten the community or citizens. It is no coincidence that the history of the Supreme Court is full of sentences in this direction, tending to limit the power of the government.

Is this true also for relations between the Church and the State?
The idea of the “wall of separation” between religion and state was not born in the ideological sense of the European Enlightenment, but as a radical protection of the individual, and religion itself, from political power. There are admirable Supreme Court sentences indicating, for example, that among other things, “freedom to differ cannot be limited to marginal issues” and is higher even than the national interest, even during wartime. In the same vein, on the question of education, the Court has reiterated over and over again that the child is not a product of the state, contradicting all official American pedagogy, which is, for example, one of the most negative parts of the American ethos.

A great opportunity and the risk of its corruption… What does it mean to have a judgment, and not a prejudice, about America?
As early as the eighteenth century, one of the great American Puritan theologians noted bitterly that a true Christian society “does not last longer than a season.” I remember that one day Fr Giussani quoted this phrase, saying, “It is the saddest and most realistic judgment that can be given.” The judgment is that this positivity exists, but can decay; it cannot affirm itself without Christ present. This is not a mechanical matter, a question of religious social engineering, but of education to freedom.

Let’s get back to today. It is undeniable that on the war, but also on the matter of what it implies of the “religious,” standing with the Pope is precisely the opposite of standing with Bush. Niebuhr, with St Augustine, said that one must be “neither under illusions nor cynical” about the empire…
It is clear that today we are seeing also a heightening of the moralistic dualism of Protestantism we discussed earlier. But to say, as some have said, that we have gone back to the Pope against the Emperor is not true. It would be mechanistic; it is like pitting an ethical principle against a political one. First, this is not the case; and second, at a certain point the political principle would win. On the contrary, a judgment is the presence of another reality, the reality of the Church, also within the empire, because only Christ has the strength to overcome all dualisms, falls, and messianic illusions. The one is necessary in the other. This is Christian realism.