National Catholic Register
One of the most common claims you will hear in our ongoing national conversation about faith is the notion that faith is “personal” and therefore not a fit topic for public discussion.
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What is “personal” is that which has to do with the person. Persons are fundamentally public and social beings, not private and subjective figments of the imagination. Indeed, persons are, by definition, rational beings in relationship with other rational beings and not atomized “individuals” with no relationship to one another at all.
I get this understanding from Pope John Paul II, a philosopher who spent most of his adult life thinking and talking about the meaning of personhood. Unlike most of our culture, he realized that “person” is not interchangeable with “individual.” But because of this, we must realize that one of the central notions of our popular culture is absolutely totally 180 degrees dead wrong.
I speak of the notion that what is personal is “private” or “subjective” or “esoteric” — unknowable and incommunicable to others.
Much of our political life is based on this false notion of “personal” subjectivity.
Identity politics lives on the idea that if you are not a member of “my special group” you can’t possibly know “how I feel” and therefore you have no right to speak. If you are not black, you have no right to speak about pathologies in the black community.
If you are not a woman, you cannot speak about feminism or women’s rights. If you aren’t homosexual, you cannot address the question of “homosexual marriage.”
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Of course, such thinking is folly. Nobody with cancer picks their doctor on the basis of whether he has “experienced” cancer and therefore has a “right” to treat it. Nobody asks their car repairman if he knows how it feels to be in an accident. What matters is their understanding of the relevant information and how it relates to the common good.
But this idolatry of subjectivism nonetheless still spills over to our religious discourse. People often tend to talk as though “spiritual experiences” and other such “peak moments” are things experienced in total isolation and are impossible to share with others.
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That is why a jury of peers can sit in judgment of a man who has robbed a bank, or committed a rape or shot a man. For every one of them knows what it is to feel the temptations of money, sex, anger, power, rage, lust, greed, pride or fear. Indeed, the only thing that ultimately separates them from the criminal is that, feeling such things, they have not robbed, raped or killed.
In the same way, people need not be great artists to appreciate great art. For the great artist is great not because he makes people feel something no one has ever felt, but because he makes them feel something everyone has always felt.
In just the same way, religious matters will eternally be fit for discussion in the public square precisely because they are entirely about questions like “Who am I?” “Where am I going?” “What must I do?” “Is there a God?” “Is there meaning?” “Is there hope?” “Is there love?” (more)
