Faith and politics can be tricky

Benjamin Franklin once said, "The way to see faith is to shut the eye of reason." To the faithful, this statement may seem an insult, as it seems to present two exclusive antitheses, which would logically necessitate that the faithful are unreasonable and reasonable people don't have faith. If so, I'd probably have to say that old Ben Franklin was wrong. The operative premise of a "Catholic, Jesuit, Humanistic" university is that the relationship between faith and reason is not mutually exclusive. One recalls a statement from our own Fr. Spitzer, who said recently, "Faith without reason breeds superstition, while reason without faith becomes nihilistic."

I am not arrogant enough to pretend that I have the mental capacity to resolve enduring questions about faith and reason in The Bulletin, but I do want to reflect on how a peculiar phenomenon affects our approach to my major field of study: politics.

Implicit in both of the above quotes is the idea that some people approach faith with the view that, when it comes to God, evidence and logic don't matter. I doubt I will ever forget the feeling of flat disbelief I felt when I first heard Tertullian's statement, "I believe it because it is absurd." This perspective on faith has been around long enough to merit a title: fideism. It's the school of non-thought you can blame for any religious discussion that ends with the cop-out, "It's just my faith."

I have always been skeptical about fideism, a characteristic that makes the very short list of things I have in common with the Catholic Church (we also both drink on Sundays and believe in God). Then again, so long as I saw fideism as something constrained to questions of faith, I didn't really care about it.  But there is a method of non-thinking in this country that could appropriately be called "political fideism." This, by contrast, has got me fuming.

It seems to me that an awful lot of Democrats are Democrats because their parents were Democrats (or because they came to college and it was the "in" thing to do). The same goes for Republicans (except becoming a Republican isn't the "in" thing to do at college). It seems people pick political parties in much the same way as they pick out a shirt at a department store. Empty-headed subjectivism has led to the rather silly belief that every opinion is equal to every other opinion, and the choosing of opinions is simply a matter of preference. I do not count myself an exception to this unfortunate state of affairs, though I do give myself credit for being willing to re-examine my beliefs on the basis of forthcoming evidence.

 However, this isn't just about choosing a party. It's also the establishment of beliefs in particular circumstances. At least some people opposed the health care bill because they believed it would create death panels. This, despite being objectively untrue, is a very persistent myth. To this day, opinion polls tend to find that about 40 percent of people think Barack Obama wants to kill granny.

Then again, CNN found that around 27 percent of Americans doubt that the president is an actual American, and a Scripps Howard and Ohio University poll found that about one-third of Americans believe the federal government was behind 9/11. All of this wouldn't bother me if this kind of belief remained private and the people in the above groups had the good taste not to vote, but such is not the case.

And thus, my typically libertarian worldview collapses. I just can't seem to tolerate someone espousing views in the absence of factual backing. At least some of these questions have objective answers. We now know that there were no death panels and Barack Obama is an American citizen. Yet many people choose to believe the contrary. I think it's about time that we rescinded the extraordinary indulgence granted them by pretending that belief in the absence of evidence is, necessarily, a good thing. Beliefs ought to be challenged, opinions ought to be reconsidered and nothing ought to be accepted "on faith." The Catholic Church rejected fideism years ago, and that was concerning questions of the supernatural for which empirical evidence is very hard to find. Politics does not suffer this limitation and yet seems to produce the same backward perspective. It needs to stop.