In the port city of Patras, western Greece, a pagan and a Christian sit down by the wine-dark sea to flesh out the ethics of restriction.
Pagan: It does seem to me that a consistent Catholic traditionalist would have to prefer life in an Islamic empire to one in a post-Protestant European nation. Why care that masses of Muslims are swamping a first-world country like the Netherlands if the attitudes they bring along with them, on issues like the family and same-sex marriage, are ostensibly so much closer to the light of God than the appetites of decadent North Europeans?
Christian: Most Catholics would be horrified by the prospect of living in a majority Muslim country. To suggest that they have more in common with the inhabitants of Pakistan than they do with the kind of Dutchmen who frequent the Red Light District, which is to say a good many of them, is only true when pitched at a level of generality that conceals as much as it exposes. True, they are both monotheistic, both hold socially conservative attitudes, both believe in pro-natalism, and so forth. These similarities are not nothing, but they do mask a lot of the vital details which quite justly set Muslims and Christians apart from one another.
Catholicism is more than compatible with an understanding of Islam as a parasitic, conquering form of heathenism. If anything, it’s obligatory.
Pagan: True enough, the conservative Christians I’ve encountered seem to regard that assessment of Islam as far more politically correct than acknowledging that, say, Indians bear too much of a post-imperial grudge to be safely admitted into Britain in large numbers. Quite why this should be is rather mysterious. I can’t for the life of me grasp how it makes any fundamental moral difference whether one restricts immigration on religious or ethnic grounds.
Christian: It’s because Christianity is quite happy to assert its superiority over rival belief systems. Modern Christians, living in the shadow of the Holocaust, struggle to extend that to areas where, instead, we’re talking about immutable characteristics. They’ve been as hoodwinked by the post-war fetishisation of minorities as everyone else, and, at a certain level, the neo-Nietzscheans are right to say that the demonisation of majorities, the stigmatisation of any vitalist assertion of identity or in-group preferences, is parasitic on a bastardised reading of the Gospel—albeit one that would have been quite foreign to earlier Christians, from Aquinas to William Gladstone. A virtue like charity can mutate into pathological altruism much more easily than, say, weight-lifting or brute tribalism.
Pagan: Well, that makes it even harder to sustain. The demographic realist does not have to assert superiority; merely the fact of difference and tribalism. Quite why anyone should think dogmatic chauvinism about one’s religious beliefs morally superior to demographic realism and the assertion of a national right to self-determination in one’s own homeland is not apparent.
Christian: This is why I think demographic realism is compatible with the teachings of Christ. Questions of superiority, as you say, are quite irrelevant. What I’m trying to explain is the psychology of the more nervous post-war Christians.
I think it stems from the fact that, since all religious people regard their own faith as true, they are also likely to think that a society organised around its tenets will be better than the alternative. As such, rival faiths—particularly if they’re very different and make no secret of their hostility—are quite rightly feared for posing a threat to the existing order. The problem is that a single-minded focus on religious belief will produce an immigration system concerned only with confessional allegiance and nothing else. Adrian Vermeule thus writes about giving “lexical priority” to Catholics at the U.S. border, whether they are from Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa. Prospective immigrants, in other words, should be assessed on the basis of their creedal commitments, for these are the possible possessions of any man who chooses to adopt them. By that same token, it is unfair to discriminate at the border on the basis of identity, which no foreigner chooses. They prioritise nomos (νόμος) over demos (δῆμος), if I can put it pompously.
Pagan: In that case, I challenge them to invert all of their intuitions about morality tomorrow, and we’ll see how credible doxastic voluntarism—the idea that you can simply will your beliefs into being—really is. Plus, if that’s a correct assessment, they’re not distinguishing religious restriction from ethnic restriction on grounds of truth, it seems to me, but rather on grounds of voluntary endorsement. This puts them squarely back inside the liberal normative domain of which they’re allegedly so scornful. “You can voluntarily change your religious beliefs, but you can’t change your ethnicity; ergo, it’s permissible to select for the former but not the latter.” Total libbery! If they want to reintroduce autonomy and consent-based morality, that’s all well and good. Just don’t pretend to be post-liberals.
Christian: Surely you don’t think there’s no distinction between a confessional allegiance and an identitarian one? I’m not sure one has to be a liberal to grant that.
Pagan: I think there’s a normative difference on grounds of choice. And choice amidst moral uncertainty is precisely what these people claim we need to dethrone. So, to make it the focus of their case against demographic realism does strike me as utterly incoherent.
Christian: Let me have another go at explaining why I think the Christian Right is generally more anxious about Islam than they are about, say, Nigerians, Indians, or whatever non-European immigrant group it happens to be. The distinction for them, insofar as I understand it, is fundamentally one between what people believe and what people are. And since post-liberals are more interested in confessional allegiance—which can be changed (not, they would presumably concede, in line with voluntaristic whim or idle fancy, but in line with meditation and experience)—than they are in immutable characteristics, this makes them vulnerable to a theologised version of civic nationalism. I think all of this is wrong—or at any rate insufficient. They fail to take into account both the reality of human tribalism and the Christian duty to your own people: “If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house,” says St. Paul, “he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.”
Pagan: But again, the whole point of post-liberalism is to dethrone autonomy. If the crux of the post-liberal case against demographic realism boils down to an appeal to the normative significance of voluntary choice, I don’t see how that can be pulled off outside the liberal framework. These people are going to have to be liberal imperialists with a Christian inflection, not post-liberals.
Christian: It’s not the fact of choice they care about; it’s the fact that—for them at least—the correct choice has been made. Choice is a precondition for what they value, not what they value in itself. Those who have made the wrong choice, by the Christian commonwealth’s light at least, will be left out in the cold.
Pagan: That sounds like sophistry. If choice is irrelevant, then they can’t appeal to it to distinguish their brand of immigration restrictionism from that of an unapologetically tribal pagan.
Christian: If it’s a precondition, it’s not irrelevant.
Pagan: Then we’re back to conflicting truths. The post-liberal Christian has his metaphysically extravagant claims about being an emissary of God on earth. The pagan demographic realist has his measurable empirical facts about human tribalism and group differences. I know which I regard as having more epistemically respectable foundations for coercive measures at the border. Plus, if there’s only one option, in what meaningful sense is it a choice? And how is it a choice in any sense that is normatively relevant to sustaining this argument more precisely?
Christian: Who says there’s only one option?
Pagan: The correct choice has been made, you said.
Christian: Only one true option. People are free to make errors. All religious people, with some eccentric exceptions, regard the rest of the world as preaching false religion. This doesn’t mean they are forced to believe that the rest of the world does so under duress—unless you regard error as a fetter on freedom, which many theologians do. But I take it we’re both talking about negative liberty in this case.
Pagan: I’m still struggling to see how this sustains their case against the demographic realist. The whole point of invoking the voluntary aspect of religion, it seems to me, is to help themselves to liberal intuitions about the moral relevance of autonomous choice. In other words, they’re saying it’s fair to treat people differently based on choices in a way that it isn’t fair to do so based on immutable characteristics. This can only be sustained if you think autonomous choice has a normative significance that their entire philosophy denies. If you can’t choose your sexuality, why isn’t it unfair to treat you differently based on that? “Because some sexualities are objectively worse and fairness tracks objective truth, not choice,” comes the reply. They’re playing a double game: denying the relevance of choice when it suits them but falling back on it at other times.
Christian: I’m not saying it sustains their case. If I were, I’d join them in agitating for a multi-ethnic Holy Roman Empire 2.0. As for your points about choice, it’s possible to think that choice is normatively important without thinking it’s normatively sufficient. For post-liberals, of course, the more important thing is what people believe, not that they do so freely. But if they don’t do so freely, it hardly makes sense to call it belief.
That’s why I called it a precondition for what they value: belief. Maybe this exposes them to the rejoinder that they’re helping themselves to liberal intuitions. But it’s the sort of intuition you find in Plato as well, and he was no lily-livered lib. But I agree with you that there’s a general wooliness and confusion on this subject in many Christian circles. It angers me to high heaven.
Pagan: Which would you find a more compelling answer from a foreign government if they denied you entry to their country?
(A) “You have objectively false beliefs about God.”
(B) “We know, or have a probabilistically justified belief, that your presence here in significant numbers would make our lives a lot worse in various ways—fiscal, social, cultural, political, environmental, criminological, etc.—that reflect measurable facts about tribalism, group differences, and the laws of supply and demand.”
Once you strip away the appeal to voluntarism, the latter seems a much more respectable basis for restriction to me.
Christian: I think they’re both respectable. I also don’t think you’ve steel-manned the post-liberal position. “You have beliefs contrary to our sincerely held beliefs about the nature of the good around which our society is organised” would probably be a fairer summary than the one you give in (A).
In any case, I regard it as legitimate to pay attention both to prospective immigrants’ beliefs and to their ancestral identity, not least because in practice they’re so often bound up with one another. Tribalism, after all, is a significant factor when it comes to belief. I wouldn’t say it’s determinative. But by God does it condition the readiness with which certain beliefs are held over others.
Pagan: I say, what do you suppose is causing those puffs of smoke on the horizon?
