I want to tell you about Nancy Pearcey's new best-selling and groundbreaking book, "Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity," because it calls for something we really need: It calls for a revolutionary reorientation of the way we approach life's basic questions, how we live in the world, and even how we approach Truth itself. Christians, for example -- especially Christians -- should not allow their faith to become lockedaway inside some kind of ACLU-approved spiritual prayer closet. Or to become even just one aspect, albeit a very important aspect, of their lives. Why? Because Christianity is reality-oriented -- and isn't simply "a truth" or a body of subjective beliefs unrelated to life in the real world. In other words, Nancy Pearcey says, and I agree, that Christianity does not give us merely "religious" truth, but rather truth about total reality. In this sense, "It is total truth." And that's revolutionary.

Pearcey is a scholar, an intellectual, a brilliant writer, and she has an uncanny ability to explain profound ideas in a way that is accessible -- and helpful -- to regular people. She appeared recently at the Heritage Foundation to talk about her book to a standing-room-only crowd. And just last Saturday C-SPAN filmed her in a bookstore near Atlanta as she spoke on "Total Truth: The 2004 Presidential Election." This event is particularly timely, given how the "values" question figured so prominently in the way the election turned out. As we go to press with this email, the latest we hear from C-SPAN is that the network may air the program next weekend -- so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I want to share the transcript of her Heritage remarks with you, because she explains the principles in her book much better than I could ever hope to. What follows below is, first, the press release for the event, and then the transcript of her remarks. If you want to contact her, just email her at npearcey@worldji.com. The book's website is www.totaltruthbook.com.

*** PRESS RELEASE ***
NANCY PEARCEY HITS HOME RUN AT HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Best-selling author and worldview thinker Nancy Pearcey blasted a cultural-political home-run out of the ballpark in her presentation at the Heritage Foundation last week (Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004).

Pearcey explained how her new top-selling book, "TOTAL TRUTH: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity" (Crossway 2004), is key to decoding the campaign rhetoric of the current presidential election. She offered a woman's voice for a rational spirituality that is objective, verifiable, and well-suited to take its case into the public arena of government, law, politics, and science.

Pearcey's remarks on Islamic terror, homosexual "marriage," stem-cell
research, abortion, and why the principles of the Judeo-Christian
worldview have a proper political application kept the standing-room-only
audience riveted throughout the speech. "This is the best talk I've ever
heard," said one audience member. "Brilliant," said a couple from
Northern Virginia -- moreover, the "later question and answer session
showed a gifted author and lecturer at her best."

"I am personally delighted today to welcome a friend and colleague to the
Heritage podium," said Becky Norton Dunlop, VP of External Relations at
Heritage, as she introduced Pearcey. "I have said - and I believe because
I have read the book - that once you have read it, you will live your life
differently." With touching personal candor, Dunlop revealed that, "as I
read the manuscript of this book, which Nancy supplied me, I found myself on more than one occasion crying because she had written things that I believe, and I had never seen them written and expressed so clearly."

The Associated Press interviewed the author afterward and reported on
Pearcey's critique of Democratic presidential contender John Kerry's
subjective view of faith - namely, that Kerry says he is a Catholic but
that he "cannot apply his personal faith to public policy." In her talk,
Pearcey pointed out that Kerry's (and others') approach is inadequate
because it pits "fact" against "value," and stems from a worldview that
fails to explain human beings in how they actually live their lives.

Ryan Zempel, News and Political Editor for Townhall's Conservative Web
Log, said, "Nancy Pearcey's book event [was] great" and that he highly
recommends "checking out the archived video of the event and then ordering a book." Note also that the message of TOTAL TRUTH is laden with strategic cultural and political implications that stretch beyond the
November 2 presidential election.

"TOTAL TRUTH: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity" is
available at Amazon.com and local bookstores. For more information about

"TOTAL TRUTH," including book reviews, media interviews, excerpts,
endorsements, and blog comments, or to listen to radio ads by David
Limbaugh, Phillip Johnson, and Becky Norton Dunlop, see the official
website at www.totaltruthbook.com. Crossway Books can be reached at
630-682-4300.

RELEASE: OCT. 26, 2004 EMAIL
THE AUTHOR: npearcey@worldji.com

Heritage Foundation, Book Event

Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity

October 19, 2004

Copyright Nancy Pearcey


Thanks to Becky Norton Dunlop for sponsoring this event. Becky is a very
wise woman who understands the power of ideas. And that's what I want to talk about today. It's become a truism that politics is downstream from
culture, and the theme of my book Total Truth is that we will not be able
to decipher what's going on in day-to-day politics unless we grasp the
dominant worldviews that shape the culture.

Here in Washington, groups are always strategizing how to get past the
gatekeepers, the power brokers who control access to the public arena.
But what many people don't realize is that the most powerful gatekeeper is not a group of people, but in the realm of ideas: It is the dominant
definition of truth. If the position you are trying to advance does not
fit the accepted definition of a genuine truth claim, then it will be
simply filtered out, without any consideration of its merits.

That may sound abstract so let's jump right into some examples. I'll draw
out what I mean by analyzing some of the campaign rhetoric we've been
hearing in this election season.

Most of you probably watched the Democratic National Convention. Recall
the speech by Ron Reagan, son of the former president: Speaking of people who oppose embryonic stem cell research, he said they are "well-meaning and sincere," but their belief is just that--"an article of faith"--and
while they are "are entitled to it," "it does not follow that the theology
of a few should be allowed to forestall the health and well-being of the
many."

What's he saying here? Notice that people are invited to believe whatever
they want--they're "entitled to it"--so long as they are willing to hold
it as a subjective "article of faith," not something objectively true that
should be allowed to guide scientific research.

Several religious conservatives jumped on Reagan's statement--you read the columns, I'm sure. The problem is that they all responded on the level of detail. They argued that the claims being made for this research are far
overblown, medically speaking, that adult stem cells work better, and so
on--which is all true, of course, and they ought to keep making those
arguments. But what the commentators missed was the underlying strategy in Reagan's statement. His unspoken assumption is that any political position based ultimately on a religious worldview is a matter of
subjective faith, and does not belong in the realm of public policy.

In other words, the underlying issue here is the truth status of religious
claims. Reagan is assuming the modernist definition of knowledge, which
says that things like religion, morality, and ethics are not a matter of
genuine truth (as they were traditionally thought to be), but instead are
merely personal "values." This is often called the fact/value split and
we can picture it like this.

THE FACT/VALUE SPLIT
VALUES

Individual Preferences

---------------------------------------------

FACTS

Binding on Everyone


The assumption is that reliable knowledge comes only from the realm of
scientific "facts," which are objective, rational, and value-free. Then
there's realm of "values," which may be personally meaningful, may be part of our cultural tradition--but have no intellectual content. That is,
they do not give us knowledge or information about the world as it really
is. In mainstream culture today, the term "values" has been redefined to
mean literally whatever I value, my personal preferences.

To use a technical term, there has been a shift in epistemology, the
definition of what constitutes genuine knowledge. The concept of truth
itself has been divided into two separate and contradictory categories.
And once religion is taken out of the knowledge realm, and put into the
value realm, then arguments on the detail level simply have no traction.
In principle they do not belong at the table of public discourse. Thus
the late Christopher Reeve, talking about embryonic stem cells, said:
"When matters of public policy are debated, no religions should have a
seat at the table." Notice he was not weighing whether particular
religious viewpoints are right or wrong; he was saying they don't belong
at the table in the first place.

Of course, most secularists and liberals are not quite so blunt. In
America it can still be politically risky to attack religion directly or
debunk it as false. That's why the language of values is so
useful--because it takes religion out of the realm of true and false
altogether. That way critics can assure the public that of course they
"respect" religious belief--while at the same time denying that it has any
relevance to the public realm, where we talk about what we're really going
to do.

There were several striking examples in the presidential debates. John
Kerry responded to a question about stem cell research by saying, "I
really respect your- the feeling that's in your question . . . I respect
it enormously." On abortion: "I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the
belief about life and when it begins . . . I truly respect it." Then the
inevitable repudiation: "But I can't legislate . . . my article of faith."

Do you recognize the strategy? First you placate religious conservatives
by telling them how much you "respect" their faith and feelings--but then
you say that of course mere feelings are not something we can impose on
others in terms of public policy.

To get a handle on this, imagine that you present your position on some
issue and the other person responds, That's just science, that's just
facts, don't impose it on me. Of course, no one says that. But they do
say, That's just your religion, don't impose it on me. Why the
difference? Because science is thought to be public truth, binding on
everyone, but religion is defined as private feelings relevant only to
those who believe it.

The fact/value split provides a key conceptual tool to decode much of the
campaign rhetoric. In a recent Newsweek article Eleanor Clift criticized
President Bush for allowing religious principles to inform public policy
on things like stem cells and abortion, while she praised Kerry: "Kerry
thinks abortion is wrong, but he's not going to impose his religious
beliefs on the country. . . . [Thus] voters have the choice between a
president who governs by belief and a challenger who puts his faith in
rational decision-making."

What's the implication here? That religion is not rational. In fact, the
article is titled "Faith versus Reason." Notice that, at the same time,
Clift is claiming that a secular position is merely the outcome of rational thinking, a result of sheer reason. The problem with this is that reason is not in itself a source of truth. It's just a human ability--the ability to draw inferences from prior assumptions. So appeals like this to "rationality" always mask some prior philosophical assumption, typically some form of materialism or naturalism.

This is especially obvious when someone like Ralph Nader says, "Bush is an unsuitable officeholder. We want him to make decisions as a secular
president." Does anyone think that "secular" here means simply "rational"?

What we see in these examples is that the challenge to religious
conservatism is much more radical today than it was in the past.
Secularists used to argue that religion is false--and one could at least
engage them in discussions about what is true and false. But today
secularists are more likely to argue that religion does not have the
status of a truth claim at all. It doesn't even belong at the table.

Among scientists, there's a story of a famous physicist who once told a
colleague, your theory is so bad, it's not even wrong. It's not even in
the ballpark of possible answers. That's how religious claims are treated
today. They are not even in the category of things that can be rationally
discussed.

Two-Story Truth

We've seen how the fact/value split functions as a gatekeeper, by
determining what is allowed into the public debate in the first place.
What can people do about it? How do they get past the gatekeeper? Let's
examine where it comes from, how it functions, and then how it gives us a
handle on various campaign issues, from abortion to homosexual marriage to Islamic terror.

To grasp the significance of the divided concept of truth, we have to
start by realizing how deeply it is ingrained in the American mind today.
Alan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, once said, "Every school child knows that values are relative. . . . [They] are not based on facts but are mere individual subjective preferences." How does "every school child" know this? Because it's something they pick up every day in the typical public school. On one hand, subjects like social studies and the humanities have been taken over by postmodernism. In English classes, for example, teachers have tossed out their red pencils, and act as though things like correct spelling or grammar were forms of oppression imposed by those in power.

But, paradoxically, if you go down the hallway to the science classroom,
there you discover that only one view is tolerated. For example,
Darwinian evolution is not open to question, and students are not exposed
to the evidence against it so they can decide for themselves. Science is
treated as public knowledge that everyone is expected to accept,
regardless of their private beliefs.

By the time students go to college, they've learned the lesson very well.
Philosophy professor Peter Kreeft of Boston College says the students
coming into his classroom "are perfectly willing to believe in objective
truth in science, or even in history sometimes, but certainly not in
ethics or morality." Do you recognize the split mentality? The vast
majority of students arrive in the classroom with the assumption that
science is about objective facts, but morality is about subjective values.

Back in the 1970s, Francis Schaeffer, in books like Escape from Reason,
explained the divided concept of truth using the imagery of two stories in
a building. In the lower story is science and reason--the realm of
"public truth," binding on everyone. Above it is an upper story of
religion and morality, the arts and humanities. This is the realm of
"private truth," where we hear people say, That may be true for you but
it's not true for me.

TWO-STORY TRUTH: UPPER STORY

Private Beliefs

-------------------------------------------------

LOWER STORY

Public Knowledge

When Schaeffer was writing, the term postmodernism had not been coined yet, but clearly that's what he was talking about. Today we might say that in the lower story, we have modernism, while in the upper story is
postmodernism.

The lesson for social and moral conservatives is that people are
constantly filtering what you say through a mental fact/value grid. For
example, when you state a position on an issue like abortion or stem cells
or homosexuality, you intend to assert an objective moral truth--but they
"hear" it as the subjective bias of a reactionary subgroup. If you say
there's evidence for Intelligent Design in the universe over against
Darwinian evolution, you intend to stake out a testable truth claim--but
they say, "Uh oh, the Religious Right is making a political power grab."
People are constantly relegating what you say to the value realm, which
strips it of any objective content.

Where did this split view of truth come from? Where did it originate?
The historical roots go back to the Greeks, but in the modern age the key
turning point was the rise of Darwinian evolution. You see, if natural
causes acting on their own are capable of doing all the creating, then the
Creator is out of a job. There's nothing left for Him to do. And if
God's existence doesn't serve any explanatory or cognitive function, then
the only function left is an emotional one. Religion is something that
can be tolerated for people who need that kind of crutch.

Here's just one quotation from the academic literature on this: A
historian notes that Darwinism caused a shift "from religion as knowledge
to religion as faith." Since "there was no longer any function for God to
carry out in the world, He was, at best, a gratuitous philosophical
concept derived from personal need." Religion became "private,
subjective, and artificial" (Neal Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the
Problem of Creation). Those who are blunt about it, like the Darwinist
philosopher Daniel Dennett, put religion on the same level as fairy tales.
Writing in the New York Times, he said, "We don't believe in ghosts or
elves or the Easter Bunny--or God."

A Secular Leap of Faith

The fact/value split is so widespread, however, that its impact goes far
beyond religion. Let's look at a few examples from secular thinkers.

Steven Pinker, a leader in the field of cognitive science, is author of
the bestselling book How the Mind Works. Pinker expresses a worldview
that could be called scientific naturalism--i.e., nature is all that
exists; there is nothing transcendent to nature, like spirit or soul or
mind. He argues that our minds are nothing more than computers--complex data-processing machines.

At the same time, Pinker recognizes that morality depends on the idea that we are more than machines--that we are capable of making undetermined, free choices. So here's his dilemma: When working in the lab, he adopts what he calls "the mechanistic stance," treating humans as complex mechanisms. But then, he writes: "When those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings."

In other words, when he goes home to his family and friends, his
scientific naturalism doesn't work. You can't treat your wife like a
complex data processing machine. You can't treat your kids like
computers. So in real life, Pinker admits that he has to switch to a
completely contradictory paradigm. Here's how he puts it: "A human being
is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the
purposes of the discussion."

Francis Schaeffer used a graphic image to describe what's happening here:

He said people are making a secular leap of faith. Intellectually they
embrace scientific naturalism. That's their professional ideology. But
it doesn't fit their real-life experience. So what do they do? They take
a leap of faith to the upper story where they affirm a completely
contradictory set of ideas like moral freedom and human dignity--even
though these things have NO BASIS within their own intellectual system.
We can picture it like this:

SECULAR LEAP OF FAITH:
NECESSARY ILLUSIONS

Our philosophy gives no basis for human freedom,

but we affirm it anyway

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SCIENTIFIC NATURALISM

Humans are complex machines

To show how common this is, let's consider a few more examples. John
Searle, a philosopher at USC, says what we have are two pictures of the
world that are "at war" with one another. Science gives us a picture of
the universe as a vast machine, but in everyday experience we make
decisions all the time, even in something as simple as choosing from a
menu. As Searle put it in an interview, "The conviction of freedom is
built into our experiences; we can't just give it up, even though there's
no ground for it. No ground within scientific naturalism, that is. What
he's saying is that he has to take a leap into the upper story.

Marvin Minsky at MIT is famous for his punchy phrase that the human mind is nothing but "a three-pound computer made of meat." But he takes a secular leap of faith as well. In The Society of Mind he writes: "The
physical world provides no room for freedom of will." Yet "that concept
is essential to our models of the mental realm. [And so] We are virtually
forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false."

This is an astonishing statement. Because of their experience of their
own human nature, people are forced to affirm certain things--like moral
freedom--even when they "know" these ideas are false, based on their
naturalistic philosophy.

This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in
life, the things that make us truly human--like freedom and dignity,
meaning and significance--have been reduced to nothing but useful
fictions. Necessary illusions. Convenient falsehoods.

Of course, the very fact that these thinkers have to make a leap of faith
ought to tell them something. It means that scientific naturalism is not
an adequate worldview. After all, the purpose of a worldview is to
explain the world. And if it fails to explain some part of the world,
then there's something wrong with that worldview.

The Worldview that Drives Homosexual "Marriage"

We've talked about where the split view of truth comes from; now let's
apply it to several campaign issues. For example, why is homosexual
marriage on the front burner today? The answer is that the social
sciences have been taken over by the same split that we just
diagnosed--with philosophical naturalism in the lower story and postmodern relativism in the upper story.

After the scientific revolution, social theorists began talking about
crafting a "science" of society as well. Newtonian physics pictured the
material world as atoms bumping around in the void under the force of
attraction and repulsion, and so this became the model for the social
world as well. Civil society was pictured as so many human "atoms" who
come together and "bond" in various social relationships.

SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY:
ATOMISTIC INDIVIDUALS

Relationships are created by choice

-----------------------------------------------------------------

"SCIENCE" OF SOCIETY

Modeled on Newtonian Physics

This explains why the early political modern political philosophers, like
John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, defined the original human condition as a "state of nature," in which there is no civil society, no family, no marriage. We are just atomistic, disconnected, autonomous individuals.

But if this our natural state--if we are originally and inherently
autonomous individuals--then where do social relationships like marriage
come from? Answer: They are created by choice. And if we create marriage by choice, then clearly we can also recreate it by choice. We can
redefine it any way we want. Thus Dick Cheney defended homosexuality
recently by saying: "People ought to be free to enter into any kind of
relationship they want to."

To highlight how radical this concept of marriage is, contrast it for a
moment with a more traditional one. For example, the biblical concept is
that marriage is a pre-existing social institution built into our very
nature. We don't create it so much as we enter into it. (Remember that
wonderful older phrase: We "enter the holy estate of matrimony.")

However, most Americans today accept some form of social contract theory, even if they don't know it. Ethics professor Eric Springsted finds that, "Without ever having read a word of Locke, [students] can reproduce his notion of the social contract without a doubt in the world." This
implicit worldview is a key force driving the movement for homosexual
marriage, and unless we deal with it head-on, we will be treating symptoms instead of causes.

The Autonomous Self and Ethics

Let's look at some issues in bioethics. It was Rene Descartes who first
applied the division we've been talking about to the human person. He
treated the physical body as nothing but a glorified machine (a view still
very much with us today, as we saw earlier). But he treated the mind as
an autonomous power that in a sense uses the body in an instrumental way, almost the way you use a car to take you where you want to go.

In the 1970s, ethicist Paul Ramsey noticed that this Cartesian dualism had
become the underlying worldview in abortion, genetic engineering, and all
the other life issues. Pro-life groups have typically thought the ethical
battle was over getting people to agree that the fetus is human. But
today abortion advocates are perfectly willing to say the fetus is
physiologically human. However, that fact is regarded as irrelevant to
its moral status, and does not warrant legal protection. The deciding
factor is "personhood," however that concept is defined.

THE LIFE ISSUES:
PERSONHOOD

Warrants Legal Protection

------------------------------------------------------------

PHYSIOLOGICALLY HUMAN

Irrelevant to Moral Status

This is why Kerry agrees that "life begins at conception," and at the same
time accept abortion. As he said in a Peter Jennings interview, the fetus
is "not the form of life that takes personhood, in the terms that we have
judged it to be."

Postmodern Sexuality

The same reasoning underlies the liberal approach to sexuality. The body
is treated as simply an instrument that is used by the autonomous self for
giving and receiving pleasure. In a popular sex education video (â?oWhat
Kids Want to Know about Sex and Growing Upâ??), sex is defined as
"something done by two adults to give each other pleasure"--a definition
that easily allows for homosexuality as well ("two people of the same
gender giving each other pleasure.").

In fact, the cutting edge today is the idea that gender is a social
construction--and thus it can be deconstructed. "This is seen as
liberating, a way to take control of one's own identity, rather than
accepting the one that has been culturally 'assigned'," writes Gene Edward Veith ("Identity Crisis," World, March 27, 2004). "At some colleges," Veith goes on, "students no longer have to check 'M' or 'F' on their health forms. Instead they are asked to 'describe your gender identity history'." The body has become an instrumental tool that the autonomous self can use in a variety of different ways.

Contrast this to the Christian concept of the human person, in which human identity consists of self and body inextricably linked--a psychosomatic unity. The New Testament teaches the resurrection of the body, which implies that ultimate redemption is not to be saved out of the material world, as in Eastern religions, but to become whole and integrated persons inhabiting a new earth.

How Women Started the Culture War

One chapter of my book deals with women's issues, and is titled "How Women Started the Culture War." The dichotomy we've been talking about has been applied not only to the human person, but also to the organization of modern society. Here's how sociologist Peter Berger puts it:
"Modernization brings about a novel dichotomization of social life. The
dichotomy is between the huge and immensely powerful institutions of the
public sphere [the state, large corporations, academia, and so on] and the
private sphere" [the realm of family, church, and personal relationships].

This division took place after the Industrial Revolution. Think of it
this way: In pre-modern times, work was not the father's job, it was the
family industry. Husband and wife worked side by side, and raised the
children together.

With the Industrial Revolution, however, work was moved out of the home
into offices and factories, creating the competitive, secularized, amoral
nineteenth-century world of business and industry. Men followed their
work out of the home, of course, which meant they were the first to become secularized in their overall outlook as well. This is when the stereotype arose that religion is for women and children.

There developed what was called the doctrine of "separate spheres," where men would go forth to labor in the public world, while women would preside over the private realm of home and family. They would be the moral guardians of society. When the British novelist Francis Trollope visited America in 1832, she said she had never seen a country "where religion had so strong a hold upon the women or a slighter hold upon the men."

This also explains the rise of widespread reform movements in the
nineteenth century, which historians refer to collectively as the
Benevolent Empire--and which was largely staffed and supported by women. For example, the Temperance Movement was largely a matter of women trying to bring their hard-drinking men home from the taverns, back to the family hearth where they belonged. Abolitionists focused their most flaming rhetoric on male slave masters taking sexual advantage of slave women. Movements to outlaw prostitution and abortion in the nineteenth century cast fallen women as victims and men as cruel seducers. And so on.

In essence, women were seeking to re-moralize the public arena by drawing men back to what are now called traditional values. The public arena of business, industry and politics was becoming secularized, and women were fighting back. They were trying to bring family values into the public arena. The leader of the Women's Christian Temperance Union urged women to "make the whole world Homelike." In that sense the culture war we're fighting today was started by women back in the nineteenth century reform movements.

Roots of Islamic Terrorism

What about Islam? How do we account for the rise of Islamic terror? In
the wake of September 11, many commentators began lumping the various religions together, accusing all of them of being socially destructive. A book climbing the bestseller lists right now, called The End of Faith by Sam Harris, simply asserts, as if by definition, that religion is
"irrational," it is belief "without evidence," it is a "conversation
stopper." Once someone raises the subject of religion, you can't talk to
them rationally any more.

Apparently, Harris is not familiar with books on apologetics; they're full
of rational arguments for the existence of God. But the point is that
this kind of misunderstanding is precisely that happens when you accept
the fact/value split. If you put religion in the upper story of personal
values, then the actual content doesn't matter. All that matters are the
feelings of comfort and belonging that religion produces . . . or the flip
side that worries us today about Islam--feelings of outrage against the
infidel.

The mistake here is to put religion in the upper story in the first place.
If you consider the actual content of various religions, you discover
significant differences. Consider Muslim philosophy. During the Golden
Age of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, Muhammad's armies
annexed territory from Spain to Persia and parts of India. In the
process, they absorbed the thinking of these places as well. A flow chart
from an Islamic web site shows the various lines of influence--the
influence of Hinduism, of ancient Greek philosophy, and perhaps most
important, of Neo-Platonism, a third century synthesis that merged both of
these together. Since "neo" means "new," you might think of this as the
New Age movement of the ancient world. It taught the quasi-pantheistic
doctrine that the world is an "emanation," or radiation of being, from a
nonpersonal spiritual essence--the Absolute or The One--somewhat as light is a radiation from the sun. Even today, many Muslim philosophers are neo-Platonists, especially among the Shiites and Sufis, including the most prominent Muslim philosopher today, Sayyed Nasr.

The reason this is so important is that the ultimate origin of the world
is either a someone or a something. It is either a personal Being who
thinks, plans, chooses, and creates, like the God of Judaism and
Christianity. Or it is a nonpersonal substance, like matter in Western
materialism, or like the Eastern concept of a nonpersonal spiritual force
or essence. What philosophers like Sayyed Nasr are saying is that Islam
was influenced by Eastern concepts of a nonpersonal God. Martin Lings, a convert who has written several books on Islam, says: "A Vedantist
[Hindu], a Taoist, or a Buddhist can find, in many aspects of Islamic
mysticism, a 'home [away] from home.'"

These different conceptions of the divine have dramatically different
social consequences. A nonpersonal beginning tends to lead to a low view
of the human person: A cause, a movement, or a civilization is always
greater than the individual--which means individuals can be sacrificed for
the greater good of the whole. A disregard for human life. By contrast,
if God is a personal being, then you have a basis for putting the highest
priority on the rights and dignity of human persons.

The word assassins comes from a medieval group of Shiite Muslims who,
according to Bernard Lewis, were the first to turn their method into "a
system and an ideology." They called themselves fedayeen, a term that
modern Islamic terrorists have intentionally revived and adopted.

Failure to grasp these ideas is the main reason secular commentators havehad so much trouble interpreting the events of September 11. Those who accept the fact/value split and reduce religion to feelings simply do not have the conceptual tools to make sense of the world.

Total Truth

Why aren't religious conservatives out there making this case? Why have
they been so slow to recognize the impact of the divided concept of truth?
The answer is that it has seeped into their own thinking as well. They
often call it the sacred/secular split. To give just one example, I
recently read an article by a young writer who had just graduated from a
Christian high school. On the first day of class, she said, my theology
teacher drew a heart on one side of the blackboard and a brain on the
other side. He told us that the two are as divided as the two sides of
the blackboard--the "heart is what we use for religion and the brain is
what we use for science."

Obviously, religious people have to start by cleaning their own house. To
gain a public voice, they will have to recover a unified view of truth
that asserts the objectivity of religious truth claims. They need to be
willing to stake out a cognitive territory, and then be prepared to defend
it.

Here in Washington, people often want to deal with politics on the level
of mere tactics and policy. But to have real impact, we have dig deeper
to the underlying patterns in the way people think. The culture war is
driven by a cognitive war--a clash of worldviews. So I will end where I
began by emphasizing that politics is downstream from culture (a phrase I
borrowed from my friend Bill Wichterman, Policy Advisor to Senator Frist).
To bring about political renewal, we must begin with cultural renewal. We
have to directly address the divided concept of truth that functions as a
gatekeeper to keep certain ideas out of the public debate altogether. We
have to recover a sense that truth is a unity--that the universe is a
single intelligible structure that includes both a physical order and a
moral/spiritual order. On that basis, knowledge can once again become a
unified whole, big enough to explain all of reality, all of human
experience. As I put it in my book, we have recover the concept of Total
Truth.