Bill Barr has a certain religious outlook too.
How does Barr square such conduct with his identification of “moral relativism” as the great enemy of society, the theme of his speech at Notre Dame? The answer illuminates the deep religious structure of Barr’s ideology. The term is a reaction against the liberalizing tendencies of Vatican II in the 1960s. It has a rhetorical advantage—by being against “moral relativism,” one does not have to say that one is in favor of moral absolutism. But its primary purpose is to delegitimize the republican view of democracy as an arena that is neutral with regard to religious identity and belief. It divides citizens into the proper ones who recognize the authority of divinely inspired absolutes (prohibitions on abortion or same-sex marriage, for example) and the improper ones who do not.
Barr’s core belief, shared by Vice President Mike Pence and by the wider evangelical brand of religious authoritarianism, is that the entire American polity is possible only if its citizens are not just religious believers but believers in an absolutist “transcendent moral order which flows from God’s eternal law.” Barr claims that the framers of the Constitution believed that
"free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people—a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles."
This “religious people” is, in Barr’s explication, variously “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian.” It does not include members of other faiths, let alone atheists or agnostics. Just as importantly, it does not include those guilty of what Barr openly calls in that speech “apostasy.” Apostates include, for example, the 77 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning Catholic adults who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and who have therefore committed the mortal sin of moral relativism. Among them is the man who might become only the second Catholic president in US history, Joe Biden, and the voters who might make him so.
All of these people are not, in Barr’s view, merely misguided. Their indiscipline condemns them to an exterior darkness, beyond the realm of the authentic citizenship of the holy elect. Their very existence undermines the true nature of the United States. Since “free government” is not “suitable [or] sustainable” for those who do not accept the divine law as interpreted by conservative Christians like Barr, it can exist only in their absence. The logic is not just that their votes are outside the rightful order of the American state but that they are the malign means to undermine it. To suppress those votes would be to uphold the authority not just of Donald Trump, but of God.
www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/11/05/enabler-in-chief/