COLUMN RIGHT / GEORGE WEIGEL : Three Crises Not Grist for a Social Engineer : Reconstructing a ‘civil society’ is commendable, but not if it’s a return to the nannystate.

When the wife of a liberal Democratic President praises a conservative Republican campaign manager for his deathbed condemnation of the “ruthless ambitions . . . moral decay . . . (and) spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society,” cynics are tempted to roll their eyes and turn the page.

The cynics are sometimes right: There is often a tinny, contrived character to much of what passes for religious and moral debate about American society and politics. But in the case of Hillary Rodham Clinton and her “new politics of meaning,” the cynics (and the rest of us) should pay a little more attention. For Mrs. Clinton’s metaphysical and moral speculations, whatever else they illuminate or obscure, open a window onto three crises in our public life.

The first is the spiritual crisis of rights-based liberalism. Much of what calls itself “liberal” in American politics still takes as its ideal the (intensely religious) civil-rights movement of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma. Paradoxically, though, many post-Great Society liberals have become hostile to the notion that democracy has anything to do with enforceable (much less religiously grounded) public moral norms. Thus “liberalism” has become synonymous with the pursuit of an America in which our society’s traditional moral foundations are systematically chipped away in the name of an ever-expanding menu of personal rights--the endless possibilities of making me into me.

But it has now become painfully clear that men and women cannot live by rights alone. Rights without moral responsibilities means anarchy. The Imperial Self, seeking only its own pleasures, means loneliness and loutishness. Mrs. Clinton recognizes some of this. But isn’t the crisis of “meaning” that she deplores in no small part the crisis of a liberalism without moral anchors?

Then there is the crisis of liberal Protestantism, that venerable cluster of denominations of which Mrs. Clinton’s United Methodist Church is a prominent example.

Ever since World War II, the churches of the old Protestant “main line” have experienced a dramatic collapse of membership--a demographic free-fall largely driven by a theological free-fall. Churches that no longer believe it possible (or desirable) to preach the classic truths of Christianity are in something of a fix. And so they begin to explore the endless possibilities of making Christianity “relevant” or “useful,” an impulse that has led to some curious intellectual adventures over the years (liberal Protestantism once pondered, with a tolerant eye, the “death of God”).

A dead God, though, is of little utility in remaking society. Thus alliances have been forged, in recent years, with New Age religiosity and “post-modern” feminism. And the goal of the new Reformation, in Mrs. Clinton’s terms, is nothing less than redefining the meaning of human life at the turn of the millennium. But isn’t that utopian formulation itself the expression of a religious yearning that has come unstuck from the classic doctrines and moral realism of Judaism and Christianity?

Then there is the crisis of politics. As President and Mrs. Clinton frequently remind us, they are proud members of a generation inspired by the Kennedy Camelot, with its promise of activist government by the best and the brightest. Yet activism plus moral and generational arrogance equals not the new era of personal responsibility to which Mrs. Clinton summons us, but an assertive and omnipresent nanny-state, scouting out the endless possibilities of making other people what I think they ought to be. (Social engineers we have had before. But social engineers who want to redefine the meaning of human life?)

Drawing on Czech president Vaclav Havel, Mrs. Clinton calls for a reconstruction of “civil society” as the fountainhead of democratic renewal. But the institutions of “civil society” are, by definition, non-governmental: the family, the church and synagogue and mosque, the voluntary organization, the neighborhood association, the independent school. If these institutions seem atrophied today, might it be because so many of their functions have been usurped by the nanny-state, or declared unconstitutional by a judiciary committed to defending the Imperial Self?

Our public life has indeed been impoverished by the weakening of “civil society.” But the best thing to do for civil society is neither to “reinvent government” nor to redefine the meaning of human life. It is to get government out of the way of our “mediating” institutions so that they can do the job of moral education and community-building that is properly theirs.