Andrew Sullivan has a kind of nice post today about the link between the Bush administration's misdeeds in the war on terror and the nature of its faith. He writes in response to a reader who has sent a long email on the same topic, including the following:

But there is one great dividing line here, between you and me on one side, and Bush and his cohort (and the Christianists and the Islamists and the scientific reductionists, and all the other -ists) on the other: the humility of a faith based on love, with its attendant qualities of acceptance, inclusion and non-violence, and the arrogance of a faith based on fear, with its attendant qualities of judgment, exclusion and, inevitably, violence.

Sullivan agrees:

The battle within faith - between a faith of certainty and order and a faith of humility and wonder - is indeed the great battle of our time.

This struck me, a cultural but non-believing Jew, as a statement of faith which I could wholeheartedly embrace. I mean, I don't agree that it's "the great battle of our time" - I'd say the struggle to keep humans from destroying Planet Earth probably outranks it, even in God's eyes, whatever she may be. But I embrace it as a statement about moral and intellectual attitudes. And what I wonder is this: does Sullivan recognize that agnostics, atheists, and secular liberals also believe in "a faith of humility and wonder" rather than "a faith of certainty and order"?

Rationalism is, at its very core, a philosophy of humility, doubt, and wonder. Nothing could be more scientific than the conviction that we do not understand how the universe works, but that we seek to understand it through observation and discussion; nothing could be more liberal than the conviction that we do not know what moral perfection is, but that we strive towards it by testing our values upon the world and upon each other.

But this isn't quite what I mean to say. My point is that rationalism and secular liberalism are, themselves, types of faith: faith in our ability to trust others, and to trust our own commitment to reason. No scientist can claim to have observed with her own eyes the evidence for every proposition she holds to be true; she must have faith in the truthfulness of generations of other scientists, and in their dedication to following the rules of the scientific community. And the liberal faith that humans are capable of deciding what is best for them, as a community, through the process of free speech and respect for human rights, and by following the rules of a republic, and that democratic participation leads ultimately to the best kind of governance, is just that - a faith. Humans have not shown themselves to be particularly dedicated to reason or to human rights over the last century; the conviction that they are progressively becoming better on these counts is a basic liberal value, a statement of faith in human possibility.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to point out that everybody has values, and the kinds of values Sullivan embraces here as a part of his kind of Christianity are to a great extent the same values I embrace as a secular liberal Jew. I would hope he would recognize that.