Steinfels, Souder, and Natural Law

Amy Welborn has linked to an interesting review, by Peter Steinfels, in today's New York Times, of the new anthology, "One Electorate Under God?" The book is a collection, edited by E.J. Dionne and Jean Bethke Elshtain, of essays on the role of religion in American politics. Of particular interest to Welborn, and also, I imagine, to MOJ readers, are the thoughts of Indiana congressman Mark Souder, responding to Gov. Mario Cuomo, on what Souder and Cuomo take to be "natural law":

Advocating, in effect, a very loose version of "natural law," a tradition historically associated with his Roman Catholicism, Mr. Cuomo spelled out two moral principles that he asserted "would occur to us if we were only 500,000 people on an island without books, without education, without rabbis or priests or history, and we had to figure out who and what we were." These two principles - respect for one another and collaborative improvement of the world - nicely captured Americans' perpetually competing concerns for individual freedom and for community, he said, and "are shared by most if not all our nation's religions." To which Mr. Souder replied that "the notion of a natural law common to all religions" was a particular worldview itself, and one at odds with his Christian faith.

"I cannot relate to the idea of a generic, natural law God,'' he said. "My God is a particularly Christian God." Moreover, Mr. Souder questioned whether all religions really had "a common denominator that is workable in the American political system."

With respect to the anthology as a whole, Steinfels concludes:

What makes this collection easy to sample but impossible to summarize is what, according to the book's editors, explodes a number of prejudices: "Religious voices are not confined to the Right - or to the Left or the Center. Worries about improper entanglement between religion and government are not confined to liberals. Moral passion rooted in faith is not limited to the ranks of religious conservatives."

Rick