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The Purpose of This Book

So, how did we embark on this project? One of us (Keith) lives in Texas and the other (Paris) lives in Illinois, but each holiday season we return to visit family and friends in our home state of Georgia. We always meet a day or two after Christmas to enjoy a good meal and lots of laughs. When we got together in 2016, we were in a more subdued mood. It was in the aftermath of the presidential election that made Donald Trump president of the United States. To us, this event was perhaps the most shocking and puzzling occurrence in our country in our lifetimes. When we got past our initial expressions of incredulity and dismay, we found that we strongly agreed on why this event disturbed us to such a degree.

Donald Trump’s 2015/2016 presidential campaign exhibited an utter disregard for truth by disparaging science, expertise, journalism, and religious practices that did not suit his own ends. Instead, he favored crackpot claims and conspiracy theories. Trump also repeatedly displayed extreme incivility towards his opponent, and, more disturbingly, contempt for any critic, even mocking the disability of a reporter he perceived as hostile. Further, the rhetoric of the campaign was bitterly divisive, exploiting ethnic, racial, and gender divides, playing up to extremist and racist elements, and making alarmist and even paranoid claims.

As we see it, the elements of mendacity, incivility, and divisiveness have been metastasizing in our public life for some time, reaching their loudest and most blatant expression in the Trump campaign. We therefore found ourselves in strong agreement about what is wrong and why it is wrong, despite the fact that we come from very different religious and philosophical viewpoints. That is, we found that we shared much common ground and that we could appreciate and learn from each other’s thinking on these topics, though one of us is an atheist philosopher and the other is a minister of the Gospel. The discovery of such a basis of agreement, in itself, is an important achievement in these deeply divided times.

We are old enough to remember the terrible divisiveness caused by the Vietnam War. We sat together in August 1968 and watched in horror as cops beat antiwar demonstrators in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. The demonstrators chanted “The whole world is watching,” and what the world saw was America apparently coming apart at the seams. As this is being written, clashes between neo-Nazi white supremacists and counterdemonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia were like a flashback to 1968. We as a nation most definitely do not want to go back to those days.

The purpose of this book is to encourage all people of good will, secular and religious, to seek common ground and work together to oppose the dangerous deterioration of our public discourse. At a deeper level, we hope to show that secular and religious thinking is often far more congruent and mutually supportive than is recognized by zealots on either side of the religious/secular divide.

The election to the nation’s highest office of a man we both consider utterly unworthy of any public position had for us one salutary effect. Both of us rediscovered patriotism. Patriotism to us had always seemed associated with jingoism, ethnocentric arrogance, maudlin displays of flag waving, and theocratic insinuations that God is an American. Now we both agree that such arrogance, sentimentality, and militarism are not what makes one a patriot. An American patriot is one that thinks that the Republic created by the founders, despite its many sins and follies, is the embodiment of ideals necessary to preserve, essential ideals expressed in the nation’s founding documents, open to good-faith interpretation.

These ideals are not top-down mandates to honor God and King or to profess the approved ideology, and neither are they mystical appeals to blood, race, and soil. Rather, they are higher-order ideals that allow individuals to follow the dictates of their own conscience and pursue their well-being as they perceive it, so long as such pursuits leave their neighbors equally free to do the same. They must also be willing to defend – through any means conscience will allow – the Republic that is based on such ideals from enemies both foreign and domestic.

Astonishingly, this idea, the American Idea, works. It survived perhaps its greatest international challenge when it faced down the Axis forces and their ideologies based on racial purity in the Second World War. The American Idea survived its greatest domestic challenge, the secessionist insurrection of the southern Confederacy in defense of the profoundly anti-American doctrines of racial hegemony and superiority. The defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 should have meant the end of its anti-American agenda. The election of 2016 was a shocking demonstration that its defeat was far from final.

The presidency of Donald Trump is the greatest domestic danger to the American Idea since the Civil War. Trump’s campaign and presidency are profoundly antithetical to the ideals of the founders. The Enlightenment geniuses that founded this country expressed deep respect for the capacity of the American people for self-government, which capacity requires that the citizens practice the virtues of reasonableness, civility, and tolerance. Trump and all that he stands for (to the extent that he stands for anything other than Donald Trump) are in direct opposition to these ideals and virtues. We therefore see resisting Donald Trump as our patriotic duty, and this opportunity to write in collaboration with each other, is, among other things, an expression of patriotism.

What follows, therefore, is a back-and-forth set of essays in which we state our concerns and proposals and respond to each other. Of course, we are addressing the reader as well as each other. Because this book is an attempt at achieving a meeting of minds, we begin with autobiographical introductory remarks about our backgrounds, our convictions and how they were formed, and on what basis we can find common ground. We felt that a more personal statement would better convey the nature and depth of our convictions than a bare credo or abstract summary. In the main body of the book we focus on the issues of truthfulness, civility, and unity in diversity because we think that these are crucial ideals and that their abandonment spells grave danger to our society. We state why these ideals are important, how they are under attack, and what can be done to support or restore these crucial values. We approach these topics in different but congruent ways, as will be seen as our dialogue develops. Again, our hope is that people of good will, both religious and secular, will acknowledge the values that we share and work together against those who disdain and undermine these values. We feel that the task is urgent and the time for action is now.