We Need a Politics Grounded in Human Nature to Heal Our Divisions

Freedom, Virtue, and the Common Good

The collapse of liberalism in the Western world is taking place amid a backdrop of accelerating social and cultural decay, for America and the West are undergoing a catastrophic social and religious crisis. The twenty-first century is witnessing the collapse of the most basic of all human social structures—the family. A quarter of forty-year-olds in America have never been married,¹¹ and the only Western country whose citizens have enough children to reproduce the population is tiny Monaco.¹²

The collapse of this basic institution is producing innumerable social pathologies. Hookup culture has largely replaced traditional dating on college campuses, making it difficult for both women and men to find satisfying relationships. Pornography addiction is rewiring the brains of young men in horrifying ways. Spiraling rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse among our spiritually and morally depleted younger generations testify to the antihuman blowback of the progressive way of life.

This social decay is affecting faith as well as family—and Muslims are not immune to it.

The proportion of Americans not identifying with any religion has risen from less than one in ten in 1990 to nearly one in three today.¹³ Nearly a quarter of Americans raised in Muslim households leave the faith—the highest rate of exit from Islam of any country in the world, and probably a good deal higher than the American rate a few decades ago.¹⁴ Divorce rates among Muslims, while probably lower than those of the general public, are also rising.¹⁵

Against the backdrop of this psychospiritual crisis, it is tempting for many communities to hunker down and look after their own, ignoring any wider commitment to the common good. Where religious and secular communities once tried to articulate social and political visions that would also serve other groups’ needs for freedom and virtue, the temptation to see one’s own specific creed triumph at the expense of others—a temptation as much in evidence in wokeness as it is in Christian nationalism—is clearly spreading.

Among Muslims, this temptation sometimes takes the form of circling the wagons—a tendency to abjure responsibility for the spiritual needs of nonbelievers, who are assumed to have chosen their own deracination and decline. This tendency should be resisted—not only because Muslims will inevitably be affected by society’s unraveling but also because Western Muslims are part of the West. Living here, not as guests or resident aliens but as citizens, we have, in addition to rights, duties toward the common good of the societies in which we were born or to which we chose to migrate. Benefiting from Western freedoms and prosperity, Western Muslims have no moral and decent option other than to make the West’s internal concerns our own.

Public Vice and Virtue

The blunt instrument of state coercion, as liberals rightly point out, is not going to rescue us from this crisis. Religious belief must be free in order to be real; you cannot force someone to believe in God or eternal life. Academic demographers have shown that trying to fix collapsing birth rates with direct state intervention would probably require totalitarian levels of interference in people’s private lives.¹⁶ But doing nothing—as if a commitment to freedom precludes the state from even recognizing virtue—is also an ideological nonstarter.

What, then, is to be done? How can a commitment to both freedom and virtue for all be restored to its central place in the life of the Western polity?

I believe we may find an answer in an unexpected and overlooked place: the postwar American conservative movement. Whatever we think of their views on economics and foreign policy, postwar American conservatives articulated a philosophy with the potential to resolve today’s crisis and to balance freedom and virtue in a sustainable way. This philosophy—which “fused” elements of liberalism with those of religious traditionalism—was called fusionism.

The fusionist philosophy, represented by figures like William F. Buckley and Frank Meyer in the 1950s and ’60s, avoids neutrality about morality and ethics on the one hand (indeed, it firmly takes a stand in favor of faith and family) but escapes the trap of religious and ideological coercion on the other.

For fusionists, liberty and virtue are mutually reinforcing. In his 1962 In Defense of Freedom, Frank Meyer argued that freedom from state coercion is a necessary precondition for genuine virtue. Forcing a person to abstain from, say, intoxication or sexual immorality does not—cannot—yield genuine virtue, for virtue is the interior orientation of the soul toward the good.¹⁷ Abstaining from wrongdoing out of fear yields only a deformed will characterized by hypocrisy, the vice known to the Qur’an as nifāq. Coercing people into moral conduct, therefore, makes them mindless automatons.

We might put this point metaphysically: the soul of a person—which for Plato consists of reason, spirit, and appetite—remains disordered for both the evildoer and the one who is coerced. For the person who freely does wrong allows appetite or emotion to dominate their rational perception of the good; but the person whose abstention from evil is motivated only by fear of punishment is still, it seems, dominated by an appetite—namely, a desire to avoid the physical pain or discomfort that punishment may bring.

Thus, fusionism robustly affirms that the state can and should aim at promoting virtue—can and should adopt the inculcating of virtue in citizens as its end—but that it will be most effective in doing so if it chooses means that avoid coercion and respect liberty. So how can government promote virtue—strengthen faith and family and discourage hedonistic and self-destructive behavior—through these libertarian means?

One way is through using the power of persuasion and example to make vices socially unacceptable. The “bully pulpit” of powerful public offices like the American presidency provides a platform for exhorting people toward better choices. The state might also deploy “nudges” that subtly and noncoercively change the circumstances in which people make choices—warnings on alcohol or tobacco packages or around explicit online content might encourage people to think twice before indulging in a tempting kind of vice. America’s grassroots campaigns against drunk driving in the 1980s and ’90s, for instance, illustrate the power of moral exhortation to shape social norms and to enlist the power of cultural disapproval against harmful vices.

There are also things that public power can do that involve some direct regulation of conduct, which can be consistent with fusionism as long as they do not try to forcibly control people’s private lives. Governments can legitimately seek to improve society’s moral ecology—the cultural environment in which people make choices—so as to make virtue easy and vice less tempting. Restrictions on the public advertisement of, say, harmful intoxicants, pornography, or hookup apps do not try to coercively impose virtuous choices, but they do seek to reduce sources of temptation and perhaps change what people regard as socially respectable. Restrictions on selling alcohol or condoms to minors, or requiring Hollywood-style content labels on media, for example, are regulations that can make virtuous choices easier without coercively preventing adult citizens from choosing vice if they wish.

Although fusionism was developed by Christian and Jewish thinkers, prominent Muslims have also made arguments like the ones outlined above. For a recent example, the Tunisian pro-democracy leader Rached Ghannouchi argues, in a series of dialogues with the American liberal political theorist Andrew March published as On Muslim Democracy in 2023, that “the state’s mission is to make virtue easy and vice difficult but possible.”¹⁸ Why add the very deliberate “but possible” to the end of this formulation if not to acknowledge the fusionist insight that trying to make vice impossible will fail to produce genuine virtue?

Today, however, an influential section of the commentariat has deemed fusionism a “dead consensus”: an idea that they claim has been tried and found wanting.¹⁹ For these thinkers, fusionism failed to prevent today’s cultural crisis because it ceded too much ground to liberal individualism and ended up prioritizing freedom over virtue every time they appeared to be in conflict. But looking at the matter more closely, we can see that the fault was not with fusionism but with the attempt by some thinkers and activists to identify the common good too closely with the concerns of a specific religion.

The Failure of the “Catholic Moment”

Cold War America was essentially a nation of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and a small number of nonbelievers. Today, most Western nations also contain significant numbers of Muslims and Hindus, as well as increasingly large secular populations. But as the Cold War began to draw to a close and America’s culture wars began to heat up, an important strand within the fusionist movement sought to import specifically Roman Catholic concerns into the heart of the common good that government was to promote.

This so-called Catholic moment—an era spanning the late 1980s to the early 2000s, and the title of a 1987 book by the prominent public intellectual and founder of First Things magazine Richard John Neuhaus²⁰—saw a group of thinkers known as the “Catholic neoconservatives” exert outsize influence within the fusionist movement. (These thinkers, who included Michael Novak and George Weigel as well as Neuhaus, were called neoconservative because there was something new [neo-] about what they sought to conserve: namely, the combination of political freedom and social conservatism that they saw in the America they knew and loved.)

For these neoconservatives, Catholics would have a special role to play in developing a public philosophy for the Western world, grounded in the Catholic Church’s long tradition of reflection on the “natural” moral law that it holds to be accessible to persons of all faiths or none. The academic side of the project, therefore, involved philosophers like John Finnis developing a “new” natural law theory that would not presuppose theism or Aristotelianism (let alone Catholicism) while vindicating much of the socially conservative teaching of the Catholic Church on “natural” grounds.²¹ For a time, the project seemed to be working. The Catholic neoconservatives even gained the ear of the evangelical president George W. Bush, who said in 2005, of his views on abortion and stem cell research, that “Father Richard [Neuhaus] helps me articulate these things.”²²

But the Catholic moment came swiftly to ruin. By the second Obama administration, not only was it obvious that faith and family were on a steep trajectory of decline, with America following Europe down its secularizing path, but woke hyperliberalism was also rushing into the public square.

I believe the cause of fusionism’s failure, then, is also the cause of the failure of the Catholic moment: the importing of too many specifically Catholic theological concerns into what was supposed to be a public philosophy accessible to persons of all faiths or none. The new natural law theorists, who provided the movement’s intellectual firepower, developed a sophisticated and nuanced theory that is worth taking seriously. But they also defended some of the Catholic Church’s most controversial and highly demanding moral teachings—the prohibition on contraception, for instance, or the absolute prohibition on divorce—as supposedly knowable through pure reason and a part of natural law accessible to non-Catholics. These thinkers at times even argued that the whole edifice of natural law would make no sense if these controversial teachings were held to be knowable only on the basis of Catholic theology or revelation.²³

For non-Catholics, who understandably viewed these arguments as suspicious, this tended to discredit the wider fusionist project, which came to be seen as a sectarian attempt to import Catholic theology into a public philosophy for a plural society. Secular thinkers especially came to see the social conservatism of the project as a disreputable kind of “theoconservatism.”²⁴

The failure of the Catholic moment is a cautionary lesson. In societies marked by deep religious pluralism, a consensual public philosophy cannot be based on controversial teachings peculiar to one specific religious tradition.

A New Humanism

A new fusionism, then, will need to be less Catholic in that it will need to avoid trying to justify the distinctive and demanding moral teachings of Catholicism—or of any faith. In fact, I think that the best foundation for a healthy public philosophy that has a chance of commanding consensus will not even—in light of the deepening and seemingly irreversible disagreement among Americans about the very existence of God—presuppose theism.

What it will presuppose is the theistic anthropology that grounds a vision of man as in need of both freedom and virtue, inclined both to integration into the structures of family and faith and to the freedom to affirm these structures on the basis of his own judgment, rather than through coercion. This anthropology is shared by the major Abrahamic faiths but is also embraced by some citizens with no faith at all. Something like this idea has recently been articulated by the Protestant theologian Carl Trueman in his call for a public philosophy grounded in a “new humanism.”²⁵

Trueman’s new humanism is centered on a particular vision of human dignity. In this vision, respecting human dignity requires not just the avoidance of religious coercion but also the recognition that humans are inherently embodied creatures who flourish through family relationships and the pursuit of meaning, not through mindless hedonism and self-indulgence. The intrinsic and innate value of human life provides reasons to oppose euthanasia, the embodied nature of man supplies a clear rationale for opposing transgender politics, and the understanding of human flourishing affirmed by the new humanism implies that pornography and hookup culture undermine virtuous and healthy living. Opposing such practices, of course, means not that the government should necessarily ban them—but that it has reasons to discourage them through various means.

This human dignity—which consists not just in our capacity to recognize virtue but also in our capacity to choose to recognize it—provides powerful support for the fusionist vision of government as a noncoercive custodian of the common good. Policies and public education campaigns to promote this good are a core responsibility of government, but this promotion should not involve the coercive imposition of outwardly virtuous behavior on adult citizens, for coercion destroys the very ordering of the soul that virtue aims at.

And this new humanism does not—and in my view should not—try to get us to embrace more controversial, specific, or demanding forms of social conservatism. Reasonable people will continue to disagree about divorce, contraception, and other fraught questions—just as they disagree about theology and revelation. Fusionism 2.0 will have modest, but achievable, goals.

It is here that Muslims can make a distinctive contribution to our nascent “Abrahamic moment.” The notion of the human fiţrah, or innate natural disposition toward the good, can help explain why—despite the diversity of religions, philosophies, and cultures in the world—we should expect to find, and continue to observe, rebellion against ideas that too radically deny the innate value of human life, our embodied natures, the dignity of human sexuality, or the importance of family. A consensus on these basic values is far more likely to be stable than an attempt to erect a social order on their denial. Because Muslims do not believe in original sin, but rather see the nature humans actually have as also the one we are supposed to have, the Islamic tradition is particularly well placed to identify this natural human disposition and articulate how it might manifest itself in the new, Abrahamic fusionism.

All just political orders involve compromise; none can give every community everything it wants. All sides in our present culture wars, then, will have to make sacrifices. Social conservatives will have to cede to progressives a space of personal freedom, even if that freedom is used in a way they regard as degrading and destructive. Religious traditionalists who want a “public square re-ordered to… the Highest Good” will have to accept that different communities and traditions will specify the details of this good in different ways.²⁶ (America’s traditional “civil religion,” in which public life was based on a stripped-down theology shared by the country’s major religions, might provide an example of how this could work.)²⁷ Liberals, too, will have to make a major concession: not every departure from government neutrality about the good is “illiberal.” Lumping the social conservatism of a thinker like Trueman together with the mad schemes of the Catholic integralists is a grotesque distortion. Even liberals who hold progressive views of personal morality and reject the virtues affirmed by the new humanism should at least accept that noncoercive attempts to promote these virtues do not threaten the entire liberal project.

As the West reels from the failure of a bankrupt liberalism on the one hand and the prospect of a deranged authoritarianism on the other, believers in all faith traditions, and nonbelievers who hold on to an elevated and dignified vision of humanity, should work together to articulate the new public philosophy that we so desperately need. We can learn from the failure of the Catholic moment and make this moment one that embraces the goods that are most genuinely common, promoting and preferring these goods in our public life while also recognizing that they cannot be forced upon people through coercion. The Abrahamic moment will be one that embraces the fusionist insight: that freedom and virtue go together.