Comfortable self-preservation rather than mere self-preservation

Thanks to Rick for calling our attention to Mike Baxter's characteristically trenchant essay "Murray's Mistake".  Baxter's thesis reminded me of how Boston College's Fred Lawrence made a parallel and overlapping point in criticism of Murray:  "Murray never acknowledged that Locke did not basically disagree with Hobbes's 'artificial law of nature.' He did not recover virtue instead of power as the publicly relevant chief concern of political theory.  Intsead he moderated Hobbes's bottom line of self-preservation into comfortable self-preservation."  The result, as Lawrence goes on to explain, is that "[t]he common good and values not able to be 'costed out' get eliminated from the sphere of political discourse and public opinion.  This de facto privatization of Christian values may just be left obscured, albeit unintentionally, by Murray's famous distinction between public order as the domain of legitimately exercised political power and the common good as the domain of public consensus and of social concern beyond the limits of public order."

I'm not clear on why Lawrence thinks that what Murray obscured he obscured "unintentionally."  Be that as it may, Baxter is surely right that Catholics today are not capable of doing what Murray supposed that they would do.  The solution to the current problem requires that the Church do what Murray refused her constitutional room to do.  I'll commend again in this connection Chris Ferrara's magisterial book Liberty, The God That Failed.  In my view and in Ferrara's, the *problem* is the separation of the state from the Church.  The Church-less state that is remitted, on a good day, to mere natural law cannot think adequately, and, on the bad day that is our era, the state gives up thinking altogether and righteously does whatever the majority happens to covet.