Personal Virtues and Communal Empowerment

As my own previous post indicated, I share some of Rick's reservations about explaining the Christian Right as interested solely in bolstering "personal virtue" and the work of the Church, and not in empowering individuals throughout, and through, the broader community.  But let me partially defend the distinction asserted in the statement by Protestants for the Common Good.  I've sent Prof. Gamwell a link of our discussions, and perhaps he'll want to respond.

Abortion is a clear place where the Christian Right's concern can easily be seen not simply as upholding personal virtue but also as creating and preserving conditions in which all persons, especially the most vulnerable, can flourish.  You can't flourish if you're not alive, and the unborn are extremely vulnerable.  Interpretive charity, at the least, suggests giving credit to pro-life conservatives (or at least many of them) for being concerned with mutuality and community for all on this question.

But there are some counterarguments.  One is that other items in the Christian Right agenda seem pretty unrelated to any goal of reaching out in mutuality to a broad, diverse society.  A prime example, noted by Prof. Gamwell, would be government religion like public school prayers, 10 Commandments displays, etc., which seem relatively self-serving, or at least Christianity-serving in a narrow sense: concerned with asserting Christianity's status rather than with serving others in the name of Christ.  Doesn't the Christian Right's heavy emphasis on these efforts lead others (with some cause) to interpret everything else it does as self-serving too?  Wouldn't dropping these efforts boost the Christian Right's claim to be concerned with justice and empowerment for all people?  (Thought it might also hurt the pocketbook since the prayers and symbols issues are big for direct-mail fund-raising.)

Second, even on abortion, wouldn't pro-life conservatives be more clearly seeking mutuality for all if they more vigorously and unanimously supported the safety net for women in difficult conditions where abortion seems like a necessity?  Now let me add that I know that many pro-life conservatives do things like operate and support crisis pregnancy centers.  But how widespread and deep is such support -- in the real world, again, aren't too many people happy with just restricting abortions?  And given the moral importance of the abortion issue, why aren't more conservatives open to societal safety-net measures as well as private measures like crisis pregnancy centers?  Why, for example, aren't pro-life people across the board pushing for an array of policies to reduce abortions as in the 95-10 Initiative of Democrats for Life?

Finally, the statement by Prof. Gamwell and Protestants for the Common Good does "affirm the importance of personal virtues," but criticizes how for the Christian Right, "these so dominate the things with which politics should be concerned."  The statement has a point here, in that the Christian Right focuses on personal virtue even in its strategies for serving others.  For example, the evangelical social services that now are seeking more government funding tend to assert, in the words of leading proponent Stanley Carlson-Thies, that "truly useful assistance is thoroughly religious: it is transformative, helping people to turn their lives around, and it does not simply dispense benefits because someone is needy."

In other words, Christian conservatives believe that personal virtue is crucial, not just for individuals' spiritual well-being, but also for communal empowerment and social reform.  I think that the Protestants for the Common Good statement tends to overlook that part of what Christian conservatives say.  At the same time, the statement identifies an important issue in asking whether personal virtue is enough.  As Jim Wallis of Sojourners often asks, why can't social-welfare policies emphasize both personal responsibility and a social safety net?  Why does anti-poverty policy often bog down in "either/or" debates rather than pursue "both/and" strategies?

Tom