What's your dangerous idea?

As long as I'm querying the room, let me ask you to talk about your dangerous idea. What do I mean by that? The idea comes from The Edge, which made "What is your dangerous idea?" its annual question for 2006. The idea, as The Edge explains, is this:

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutins are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

This question is aimed at scientists and scientific thinkers, but I don't know why the rest of us shouldn't take a crack at it. Here's my dangerous idea:

That liberal democracy cannot be sustained in a secular, materialistic culture.

This is not a new idea, certainly; John Adams, for one, understood from the beginning that "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Surely few Americans would agree that we have become an immoral and irreligious people. But in 1798, when Adams made his famous remark, it was immeasurably easier to find agreement on what it meant to be a "moral and religious" person. There was a much more uniform understanding of that definition.

Today, not so much. As MacIntyre observed, we have reached the point in late modernity (postmodernity?) in which it is well nigh impossible to reach a stable social consensus on questions of morality, because we no longer have a shared moral framework. Increasingly, we Americans are asked to put our faith in procedures. This is thin stuff, and I have my doubts as to how long it can last.

This is largely what the big "The End of Democracy?" controversy in First Things was all about a decade ago. What started it was a series of judicial decisions that arguably usurped the function of politics. The editors put the point of the symposium starkly: "The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime."

This idea was so dangerous that several prominent members of the First Things board resigned to protest the mere asking of the question. I hope I'm wrong, but I believe we will have to face that question squarely at some point in my lifetime. Ross Douthat picks up on the intrinsic tension between Christians and the American mainstream on this point:

To oversimplify egregiously but not, I think, inaccurately, the modern Anglo-American political tradition came into being because Christians were willing to accept the Christianity-lite political settlement offered by social-contract liberalism - and they were willing to accept it because its major premise, that man was endowed with natural and inalienable rights by Nature's God, was broadly congruent with Christian tradition. In a Lockean-liberal society, the law might not do everything that some Christians would like it to do - compel belief, for instance - but neither would it directly violate basic Christian principles.

There have been tensions in this compromise over the last two centuries, with Christians pushing for more religion in the liberal order, secularists pushing for less. But for most of American history it worked out pretty well, and Christians were at the forefront of the long-running push to ensure that the premises of natural-rights liberalism (which were also Christian premises) found appropriate expression in the laws of the nation - particularly where race was concerned, but also with regard to the unborn, as increasing scientific knowledge about fetal life led to the nineteenth-century bans on pre-quickening abortions. (Or so Ramesh argues; if you want to get deep into the weeds on the question of abortion, quickening, and the common law, go read this post by Bradford Short.)

However, the Lockean settlement was obviously a long time ago, and most of today's liberals no longer believe in the "endowed-by-their-Creator" theory of human rights. Which is why abortion has become such a flashpoint - because it's the place where modern liberals have instituted a utilitarian approach to killing in place of the older natural-rights-based understanding, and the place where Christians are resisting. This explains, in turn, why pro-lifers make liberal arguments even though the source of their conviction is usually religious: it's not because they're dishonestly concealing their Christianity, but because they still think that rights-based liberalism is the common ground between Christians and secularists, and so they naturally attempt to argue on that ground. And the current pro-life frustration, I think, flows from the fact that pro-choicers have half-abandoned this common ground, but often won't admit it.

I see no reason to think that Christians will not continue to lose ground here, arriving quite possibly at the point where broad numbers of us ask ourselves the same question that the First Things editors asked in 1996. And not just Christians: it could easily be the case that if, for whatever reason, Group X decided that it had been pushed farther than its own deepest convictions would allow it to accept, and it had no common moral ground from which to make demands of the mainstream, we could see it breaking away in some fashion -- or at least preparing itself to do so.

To recap: the dangerous idea that I think about a lot is the proposition that liberal democracy cannot survive a polity where binding moral consensus is difficult or impossible. Which is a way of saying that I am pessimistic about liberal democracy surviving in America.

Now, I don't want the thread below to become a discussion about my dangerous idea. I want readers to submit their own dangerous ideas. We'll give the thread a couple of days to grow, then I'll pull several of them out and set up threads devoted to them.