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The ( hureh ami Liberal Democracy
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earth evidently must he of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unre
strained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best
ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of
them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that
one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that
one may leave life a better human being than one started it.17
Now it must be admitted that for those of us identified with religious
traditions the kind of rhetoric Solzhenitsyn used in his Harvard address is a bit
of an embarrassment. It is frankly religious rhetoric and somehow we have
come to think such condemnations of the political order a bit out of place.
Such rhetoric is for matters personal and best left to those institutions that
specialize in such matters—that is, the family and the church. Solzhenitsyn
seems not to realize that our society’s commitment to “religious freedom” is
based exactly on the understanding that the church will not challenge the
primary assumption of our system. The very materialism and banality of
American life that Solzhenitsyn condemns is the price, and not a high price at
that, we must pay in order to make the state neutral in matters moral and
religious. Solzhenitsyn wrongly assumes that the characteristics of the Ameri
can people he finds so unappealing are matters of public concern rather than
religious concern. Politically we are right to take up a stance of self-interest;
morally and religiously we know however that self-interest is not an appro
priate form of life for the rest of our lives.
Thus we console ourselves with the idea that Solzhenitsyn has failed to
understand the genius of our polity because he fails to see the moral advance
represented by the amorality of our politics. His view of us is therefore too
myopic and narrow and he fails to appreciate those ‘‘non-political ’’ aspects of
our lives that should qualify his overly harsh judgments about the shallowness
of American life. Yet I think Solzhenitsyn’s critique remains accurate,18but to
demonstrate that, it is necessary to pay closer attention to our profoundest
political assumptions. For I want to suggest that the moral insufficiencies
Solzhenitsyn finds so destructive about our society are necessarily built into
the founding assumptions of America and have been reinforced by our best
political practices and philosophy.
3. The Moral Assumptions of Political Liberalism
The American political system has been the testing ground for the
viability of liberal theory. To be sure, “ liberalism” is a many-faced and
historically ambiguous phenomenon, and historically and culturally there
were many factors in American life that served to qualify its impact.19But it is