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First Things
Editorial:
Putting First Things First
Copyright
(c) 1995 First Things 51 (March 1995) 11-13
The following editorial appeared in the premier issue of
this journal, March 1990.
"When in the course of human events . . ." Thus Jefferson
and his associates, evincing a "decent respect to the opinions of
mankind," began their explanation of what they were up to. To be sure,
launching a new journal is not on a par with launching a new nation. Nor
do we have any illusions that the whole of mankind will be paying attention
to what we are up to here. But a decent respect for the opinion of those
who do notice calls for a word of explanation.
This is a statement of editorial prejudices. Prejudices, rightly understood,
are prior judgments. They are the considered assumptions that frame what
we're going to do and how we're going to do it. We would be very unhappy
if anyone thought us entirely open-minded. Our judgment that this or that
is true and important inescapably prejudices us against judgments to the
contrary.
At the same time, we do not expect that all our readers will share our
prejudices. If everyone shared our prejudices, there would be neither purpose
nor pleasure in launching a journal. Nor will our considered assumptions-about
religion, public life, politics, economics, moral discourse, the arts,
and how the world works-be evident in every article. Indeed, the purpose
and pleasure of a journal is in engaging alternative assumptions.
Our prejudices will decide the arguments worth making, not the conclusions
that writers reach. We fully expect that among our writers and readers
will be believing Jews and Christians, agnostics, atheists, the politically
liberal and conservative (with all the sub-categories attending both),
and people with wildly divergent views of the civilization of which we
are part. one thing we expect they will have in common, however. They are
people who are persuaded, or are open to being persuaded, of the importance
of religion to public life, and of public life to religion. That said,
we offer a brief statement of editorial prejudices.
Religion and public life. The trick is in making the right connections
between the two. And making the right connections requires a measure of
clarity about what we mean by "religion" and what we mean by
"public life."
Those meanings and connections have everything to do with the title
of this journal. First Things means, first, that the first thing
to be said about public life is that public life is not the first thing.
First Things means, second, that there are first things, in the
sense of first principles, for the right ordering of public life.
The first meaning of First things is that, for the sake of both
religion and public life, religion must be given priority. While religion
informs, enriches, and provides a moral foundation for public life, the
chief purpose of religion is not to serve public life. Here we discover
a necessary paradox. Religion that is captive to public life is of little
public use. Indeed, such captivity produces politicized religion and religionized
politics, and the result, as we know from bitter historical experience,
is tragedy for both religion and public life.
Religion best serves public life by relativizing the importance of
public life, especially of public life understood as politics. Authentic
religion keeps the political enterprise humble by reminding it that it
is not the first thing. By directing us to the ultimate, religion defines
the limits of the penultimate. By illumining our highest purpose all lesser
purposes are brought under transcendent judgment.
That highest purpose can be variously defined, but believing Jews and
Christians might agree that it was well defined in the answer to the famous
opening question of the Westminster Catechism of 1647. The question is,
"What is the chief end of man?" The answer is, "Man's chief
end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." It is hard to improve
on that. Temporal tasks are best conducted in the light of eternal destiny.
Religion points us to the last things, framing the final direction that
informs our decisions about life, both personal and public. The chief service
of religion, then, is to teach us that the first things are the last things.
By religion and public life we mean something like what Saint Augustine
meant by the City of God and the City of Man. The twain inevitably do meet,
but they must never be confused or conflated. Whether at the beginning
of the fifth century or at the end of the twentieth, the particulars of
their meeting are always ambiguous. At the deepest level the two cities
are in conflict but, along the way toward history's end, they can be mutually
helpful. The polis constituted by faith delineates the horizon, the possibilities
and the limits, of the temporal polis. The first city keeps the second
in its place, warning it against reaching for the possibilities that do
not belong to it. At the same time, it elevates the second city, calling
it to the virtue and justice that it is prone to neglect. Thus awareness
of the ultimate sustains the modest dignity of the penultimate.
It is our further prejudice that public life includes much more than
politics. Public life means, first of all, "culture." Our subtitle
could as well be "a journal of religion and culture," except
that culture has come to have a narrower meaning in popular usage, referring
mainly to what is done in theaters, concert halls, and museums. We will
not ignore that cultural in that narrower meaning of the term, but by culture
we mean something more inclusive. Culture means the available truth claims,
explanatory systems, myths, stories, memories, loyalties, dreams, and nightmares
by which society lives. Culture is the cognitive, moral, aesthetic, and
emotive air that we breathe.
So we think it true to say that politics is, in largest part, an expression
of culture, and at the heart of culture is religion. Politics is the effort
to give just order to public life, employing the ideas made available by
the culture. And the most communally binding of those ideas are by nature
religious, whether or not they bear the label "religion." Given
these considered assumptions, readers should not be surprised when in these
pages they come across articles and arguments that are not ostensibly "religious"
in the conventional use of the term. One does not always need to talk about
God to be talking about God.
But there will also be talk about God. the intellectual, spiritual,
and political fonts of our civilizational story are Athens, Jerusalem,
and Rome. Modern thought, especially political thought, is notoriously
neglectful of Jerusalem. This poses a particular problem for public discourse
in our society. In the West, and most notably in America, the civilizational
story is borne by and legitimated by the language of Jerusalem. If the
American experiment in representative democracy is not in conversation
with biblical religion, it is not in conversation with what the overwhelming
majority of Americans profess to believe is the source of morality. To
the extent that our public discourse is perceived to be indifferent or
hostile to the language of Jerusalem, our social and political order faces
an ever deepening crisis of legitimacy.
And so another prejudice must be made explicit. Especially in our high
culture, it is taken as axiomatic that ours is a secular society or is
rapidly becoming such. In our judgment, that proposition has everything
going for it except the empirical evidence. For more than three centuries
perceptive observers have been struck by the vitality and pervasiveness
of religion in American life. Americans appear to be incorrigibly religious,
and the evidence suggests that they are becoming more so. However skeptical
we may be about the quality of that religion, to ignore it is to ignore
one of the most salient facts about American life.
Religion comes in many forms: Islam, Native American, New Age, feminist
witchery, novel versions of Eastern spiritualities, and the vague national
piety called civil religion, to name a few. But again, for the overwhelming
majority of Americans religion is, however inarticulately, biblical religion.
For most purposes relevant to our purpose, that means Christianity and
Judaism. We will pay careful attention to the manifold expressions of religion
in America and the world. But this journal, like the Institute that is
its publisher, is essentially a Jewish-Christian enterprise. The intention
of the enterprise is to advance a religiously grounded public philosophy
for this and other experiments in human freedom.
In our catalogue of prejudices, a free and democratic order includes
pluralism. Pluralism is a much abused term. It is often suggested that,
because we are a pluralistic society, we must play down our differences,
pretending that our deepest differences make no difference. That, in our
judgment, is not pluralism at all. It is the opposite of pluralism. It
is the monism of indifference. pluralism is not relativism, and it is the
declared enemy of nihilism. Pluralism is the civil engagement of our differences
and disagreements about what is most importantly true. Against the monism
that denies the variety of truth, against the relativism that denies the
importance of truth, and against the nihilism that denies the existence
of truth, we intend to nurture a pluralism that revives and sustains the
conversation about what really matters, which is the truth.
Recognizing the difficulties in fulfilling that intention, we take
comfort from this story. Once in Chelm, the mystical village of the East
European Jews, a man was appointed to sit at the village gate and wait
for the Messiah. He complained to the village elders that his pay was too
low. "you are right," they said to him. "The pay is low.
But consider: the work is steady."
These, then, are some of our prejudices. There are others, of course.
We do not, for instance, think that intellectual seriousness is an excuse
for being dull. Articles will be scholarly, but not pedantic; thoughtful,
but not boring; often unusual, but not esoteric. We hope to attract a general,
but literate, readership, well knowing that literacy is not so general
as we might wish.
In these pages the reader will find items that report, analyze, instruct,
warn, exhort, and sometimes entertain. But the key word is conversation.
A real conversation, as distinct from intellectual chatter, is marked by
discipline and continuity. Gilbert Keith Chesterton observed that "tradition
is the democracy of the dead." Agreeing with that, we intend to take
on the questions of today and tomorrow, but always in conversation with
the best that has been thought and said in the past. At every historical
moment, the contemporary is afflicted by the crippling conceit of its utter
novelty. We hope First Things will be an antidote to that intellectual
and moral disease.
When in the course of human events something new is launched, a decent
respect for the opinion of others calls for a word of explanation. Of course
this brief statement of what we're up to will be vindicated or falsified
by this and subsequent issues of First Things. We very much hope
that you will be a part of the continuing conversation, and we invite you
to hold us to our word.
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copyright
© 1995-2012
Leadership U. All rights reserved.
Updated: 13 July 2002
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