PLURALISM AND FAITHtidimensional pluralism. He finds organized religion, particularly Christianity, to provide
an essential source of value to America and Western civilization. And he focuses on weak-
nesses in American education, attacking in strong terms the ‘‘secularism’’ and ‘‘anti-
Americanism’’ of the ‘‘professoriate.’’
Bennett, like Strauss, looks back to a time when values were solid and the middle
class had self-confidence. His descriptions of decadence resonate with those Strauss gave
of the 1950s and 1960s in America. Unlike Strauss, however, he does not measure moder-
nity against the ancient Greek world. Rather, he measures the present against the 1950s
in America, the period in which Strauss himself saw classical virtues succumbing to the
rootlessness and relativism of modern liberalism. When you read Bennett alongside
Strauss, seeing the same terms applied to different eras, you discern how efficacious the
relentless use of that rhetoric can be by those hell-bent on occupying the authoritative
center around which other minorities are expected to revolve.
Bennett, unlike Strauss, is not wary of the electronic news media. He lives on and for
it. This gentleman, who loves to gamble, would bet a large sum against my wager on the
positive relation between pursuing an expansive ethos of multidimensional pluralism and
the survival of democratic civilization. I think that today it has become even more impor-
tant to mobilize a cross-state citizen movement to press Israel and the United States to
support either a new state of Palestine or a greater Israel with equal citizenship for all
residents. Such a direction is not only just to the occupied residents of Palestine, it is also
important to the future of democracy in the United States and Europe. InWhy We Fight,
written shortly after the trauma of 9/11, Bennett proceeds in a different direction. He
explains why it is necessary to wage aggressive cultural and military war against the evils
of Islam. The American reaction to the trauma of 9/11 has filled him with hope, for he
discerns a new unity of purpose in America.
The war on terror, he says, is above all a religious war. In that war, America must be
wary of the liberal distinction between moderate and extreme Muslims, in either the
Middle East or the United States. The first attack against America in 1993 ‘‘should have
brought home the folly of the then fashionable distinction between ‘moderate’ and ‘ex-
treme’ Muslim militants and the absolute need to ‘err on the side of caution’ in protecting
the safety of our citizens.’’^15
Bennett, like Strauss, has been critical of secularism in the West because it does not
give enough importance to religious faith in supporting essential republican virtues. He
would be pleased to know that at least 58 percent of Americans say that you cannot be
moral unless you believe in God, while the figure is only around 13 percent in France.^16
He would also be pleased to learn that 81 percent of Americans believe in hell, though it
might trouble him that less than 1 percent think they themselves are going to hell. Given
Bennett’s previous focus on the indispensability of religion to public life, it is fascinating
to see how he now thinks the Islamic world needs to undergo ‘‘the equivalent of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment,’’^17 though he is hardly confident it will do so.
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