Some people think that religious belief makes you narrow-minded, parochial. If you think so, try lecturing on human rights to high school teachers in Estonia, a county trying to recover from its period of Soviet domination. My Estonian audience listened uncomprehendingly as I spoke to them about natural right and human nature.
This was no mere academic exercise for me. To visit the site of the “Singing Revolution” of 1992, to talk with a people living freely for the first time in their lives, to put a face on the suffering inflicted by communism, this was my first real boot camp in political philosophy. Under the sponsorship of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, Judge Randall Rader and I tried to help the Estonians better understand the founding principles of American democracy, particularly the ideas that inform our Declaration of Independence—equality, inalienable rights, the pursuit of happiness.
Among the Estonians, however, there was a marked tendency to understand political struggle entirely in terms of competing ethnic groups. Their bottom line was the struggle of Estonians against Russians, not human beings rightfully claiming political liberty after decades of oppression. No doubt we can understand the painful weight of history that deters them from embracing the abstraction of “human equality” in favor of defending their small country against a historical aggressor. Abstractions, after all, the wrong abstractions, had held them hostage for fifty years.
But when I asked them to consider whether they would accept an Estonian dictator in the place of a Russian, the limits of their political imagination were exposed. They caught a glimpse of the principle invoked by Jefferson when he grounded the American call to revolution in the conviction that God is the creator of man, that he provides us with an endowment of “inalienable rights.” In other words, these Estonian teachers began to consider for the first time that political freedom is a natural right for all human beings, not just for a particular ethnic group rejecting the rule of another. Perhaps it was only a sign of my own naiveté that I was shocked at their attitude.
It has been the claim of twentieth-century Catholic philosophers, such as Jacques Maritain, Yves R. Simon, and Etienne Gilson, that Christian belief inspired many of the key breakthroughs in Western thought, ethical, political, and metaphysical. Maritain and Simon, in particular, have explained how Christianity provided the cultural “leaven” which directly stimulated the development of democracy.
My audience was filled with people who had been educated to regard religion as the enemy of political liberation and enlightenment. The notion that Christianity had a formative role in the development of Western democracy and freedom came as something completely new. I began to wonder if their lack of exposure to religious ideas, much less religious practice, had something to do with their inability to appreciate the political importance of our shared human nature. After all, anyone who believes in humans as creatures of God, and equal before him, are only a step away from understanding the political equality of man.
As I left Estonia, it became clear to me that by forcefully suppressing this country’s religious heritage, Communist rule had not only made it more difficult to pray, it had become also more difficult to imagine the natural right to political liberty, the right of all human beings to participate in their government. A Christian nation which believes in the creation of man has a natural advantage when it comes to affirming human equality. A nation deprived of this advantage can only imagine the struggle of nation against nation, and people against people, in other words, the politics of power rather than justice.
Lacking any help in viewing the universality of human claims against tyranny, these people are unprotected against the postmodernism now sweeping Western Europe and the United States. How easily it would be for the radical academics and bureaucrats now junketing through Eastern Europe to spread their gospel of multiculturalism and ethnocentrism. How easy it would be to take the native and well-founded Estonian fear of Russian domination and turn it into the ideology of an Estonian perspective on life which only another Estonian can understand or appreciate, thus impersonating Western feminism and Afrocentricism.
Difference and diversity have become the false currency of this decade’s public policy. Few people have come forth and publicly challenged the diversity hucksters to pay more heed to our common humanity. This silence may be due to the fact that our own nation’s moral imagination has grown impoverished. We may still remember that we are “one nation under God,” but we remember less and less of what that means for our public life.