I am very glad to report that Jody Bottum wrote up a response to my post from the either day, about the importance of staying engaged in the perhaps-tiring, in-the-trenches efforts to secure better legal protections for vulnerable people. Here is the response, in full:
We do have to worry a little, Rick, about class and professional assumptions here in a discussion of abortion and the culture wars.
Not to poison the well, but you’re a lawyer (and more than that: a law professor, rearing up future generations of lawyers). Why is it a surprise that the pro-life cause looks like a legal argument? The admirable Robby George is a lawyer, and the great Hadley Arkes teaches jurisprudence, and . . . and . . . . The university-professor legal types have dominated this discourse for a long, long time (admittedly with a little help from the Thomistic philosophy faculty, for whom it was a short step from discussing natural-law problems to discussing the logical shortcomings of Casey v. Planned Parenthood).
Not that other kinds of people miraculously avoid falling down the well of professional assumptions. I’m a cut-rate poet and a down-market mystic, and lo-and-behold! I find myself drawn to solutions that call on the poetry of God’s mystical creativeness in the world. However often we pick up a shoe to drive a nail or grab a dime to turn a screw, our tools tend to shape the things we try to build with them.
And yet, I will say this: In the struggle against abortion, you law professors have had the public-intellectual part in your hands for forty years. So how’s it going? Some advances, yes, and a trending of public opinion in the right direction, however murderously slowly. Remember back as late as the early 1990s, when it was common to hear praise for the actual legal reasoning in Roe? It is now routine to find even feminist law professors admitting that Roe was a slurried mess of a constitutional decision, despite its arrival at their desired result. I was there in those days, Rick, and know that the change is due entirely to the efforts of pro-life legal analysts.
But perhaps we should, in a confessional mode, ask ourselves from time to time how many babies we have actually saved. The various Born-Alive acts served to clarify the contradiction—as the Marxists used to say, and as Hadley Arkes intended—of pro-abort thinking. Still, that new clarity was not the motor for declining abortion rates, except perhaps under some theory of the psychological effect of realizing the incoherence of abortion rhetoric. I don’t tend to such Platonic knowledge-ethics myself—Gosh, I’ve been logically self-contradictory all this time; I must change my life!—but even under that un-Pauline moral theory, the connection is pretty abstract. Don’t you find yourself disturbingly sobered, Rick, by the fact that, for all our pro-life work and constant commitment, Philadelphia’s serial killer Dr. Gosnell quite possibly did more to advance the pro-life cause than you or I have ever managed?
Yes, law and policy (to use your nice hendiadys) can save lives, which is why I vote a straight pro-life ticket; offered the choice, I’ll vote for a rabid Socialist dog-catcher, if he’s pro-life, before I’ll vote for a candidate of my own economics and political party, if he sounds like a squish about killing babies.
But there are two mistakes here we can make. The first is thinking that advances in law and policy have any permanence: The pendulum swings, political gains are reversed, the House changes hands, and then what do we do? As for the second mistake, we wander into magical thinking when we suppose that law and policy can drive culture more than a little, when the culture is resistant.
After reading your commentary, Rick, I want to cry, But what about the people on the sidewalk outside the abortuaries? What about the counseling centers? What about the little old ladies in mantillas telling their beads against this evil? What about those urging us to look and see—for God is alive, magic is afoot, and the infant in the womb bears the face of the one through whom all was made?
Perhaps I misread you, when I hear you saying that only your law-and-policy ways of fighting abortion count. But then, I think you over-interpret me when I say to forget the culture-wars crap. Maybe you think I’m being willful, to find in your rhetoric a diminishment of the spiritual. But then, I think you willfully over-read me when you run to accuse me of encouraging despair on the life issues, the most obviously metaphysical of our current evils, from my suggestion that social ethics is a fallow field. The defense of the unborn, as
Pope Francis writes in his new
Evangelii Gaudium, “involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable”—and notice his consistent pattern of preferring sacral terms to legal.
It is true that I’m not going to gin up an outrage anymore about the awful things they’re doing in the Women’s Studies department at Southwestern North Dakota State University (SNDSU)—the very model of a culture-wars issue over the last forty years. Someone recently leaked to me Laurence Tribe’s internal Harvard memo to Dean Elena Kagan in response to an article I wrote almost a decade ago about
plagiarism in one of his books. The memo is full of juicy tidbits, including Tribe’s throwing under the bus one of his most faithful student acolytes. But I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough about Harvard law school to write up the culture-wars attack I would once have.
And how is that to give up the fight? Continue your work, Rick, by all means. But would you feel we’ve betrayed the unborn if, before all that, we mentioned that hymns to God are sung in the trees and rivers? That the graves will give up their dead? That existence itself figures the Trinity, in how we live and move and have our being? That Christ was crucified and yet he rose again?
Murder is an old, old story, our friend Leon Kass once remarked. His point was that we must resist acts that redefine the human process (designing our descendents by cloning embryos for implantation and eventual birth, for example) even more than we resist acts that simply kill (cloning embryos for destructive medical research), however vile they may be.
I think I know what Kass meant and even why he said it. But it’s just a little too cold-blooded for me. Hyper-rationalism is not our friend here, and neither is “the myopia of a certain rationalism” that Pope Francis just noted. As we fight over process, we can begin to think process is the point—when saving babies is the point of the pro-life fight, thereby participating in part of God’s plan to save our souls.
Forgive me then, Rick, if I continue to propose that ordinary prayer and everyday awareness of the reality of God are more likely to find willing ears—if I preach the metaphysics of Christianity rather than the law-and-policy-betrayed social ethics of tattered old Christendom. In fact, you’ve joined me
on this side of things before. Why not again?
Thoughts welcome, from readers and other MOJ-ers.
"[P]ublicly recognising divine revelation is an entailment of the Kingship of Christ on which, despite its difficulties in a post-Enlightenment society, we must not renege." Thus writes Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP. I agree with Fr. Nichols's judgment, of course, but I have to wonder whether any other contributor to this blog also agrees. Enthusiasts of the First Amendment's agnosticism will have a hard time on this one.
The context of Fr. Nichols's statement is here, an exchange titled "Did Vatican II Usher In Our Secular Age?" It's worth a very careful read. I admire the authors' efforts to liberate Dignitatis Humanae from the Murray-inspired misreading that dominates the scene and attempts to distort doctrine.
Christ's Kingship isn't *just* "in the end" (Cf. here): it is NOW. "[W]e must not renege," as Fr. Nichols reminds us. I agree with Rick Garnett (here), the culture wars must continue. Charity and justice require that the Church be militant -- charitably and justly -- to adjust the culture and shape its direction for the common good, including public recognition and worship of Christ.
Fr. Nichols's interlocutor, Moyra Doorly, has some trenchant things to say about the regnant hatred of the Church. Christophobia is the diagnosis that comes to mind.
As expected, the Court agreed to consider HHS mandate cases. The Court agreed to review the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases. http://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/112613zr_ed9g.pdf
Pope Francis has issued an Apostolic Exhortation entitled EVANGELII GAUDIUM.
The Pope presents the "Joy of the Gospel" in its wholeness, which has been the theme of his pontificate from the very beginning. Among many other things, including our obligations to the poor and the duty to establish and maintain just economic, political, and legal orders, the exhortation addresses the proper understanding of marriage--explicitly rejecting the "emotional bond" conception of "marriage" that underwrites revisionist ideas such as no-fault divorce and same-sex unions--and the obligation to defend the life of the child in the womb. Anyone who feared or hoped that Pope Francis intended to change (which would not be possible) or soft-pedal the Church's teachings on these matters might want to note carefully what he says.
On marriage: "The family is experiencing a profound cultural crisis, as are all communities and social bonds. In the case of the family, the weakening of these bonds is particularly serious because the family is the fundamental cell of society, where we learn to live with others despite our differences and to belong to one another; it is also the place where parents pass on the faith to their children. Marriage now tends to be viewed as a form of mere emotional satisfaction that can be constructed in any way or modified at will. But the indispensable contribution of marriage to society transcends the feelings and momentary needs of the couple. As the French bishops have taught, it is not born 'of loving sentiment, ephemeral by definition, but from the depth of the obligation assumed by the spouses who accept to enter a total communion of life'”.
On the sanctity of human life: "Among the vulnerable for whom the Church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenseless and innocent among us. Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this. Frequently, as a way of ridiculing the Church’s effort to defend their lives, attempts are made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative. Yet this defense of unborn life is closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right. It involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development. Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems. Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defense of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be. Reason alone is sufficient to recognize the inviolable value of each single human life, but if we also look at the issue from the standpoint of faith, 'every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance to God and is an offence against the creator of the individual.'"
The complete text of the exhortation in English translation has been posted on the Vatican website.
HT to Patrick Langrell
Monday, November 25, 2013
At First Things, I offer in response to the recent outrage in Argentina a brief reflection on "our elder brothers in faith":
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/11/25/our-big-brothers-in-the-faith/#comments
In this piece, at Patheos, Jody Bottum returns to one of the themes that ran through his recent and much-discussed Commonweal piece on same-sex marriage. The piece is called "Preaching Social Ethics: Boring and Doomed." "Christianity is fundamentally a metaphysics[,]" the piece states. "Christendom is mostly an ethics. Our trouble these days is that Christendom is broken."
As with the Commonweal essay, it seems to me that this piece says some important things that are true . . . but also some things that are potentially misleading. Certainly, as Jody writes (with more flair than I'm able to muster), Christianity is not just about what we are and are not supposed to do; it's about what and Who is. But, Jody closes with this:
Forget the culture-wars crap. It was a fight worth having, back in the day when there was enough Christendom left to be worth defending. But such as American Christendom was, the collapse of the Mainline has brought it to an end. Start, instead, with re-enchantment: Preach the word of God in the trees and rivers. The graves giving up their dead. The angels swirling around the Throne. Existence itself figuring the Trinity, in how we live and move and have our being. Christ crucified and Christ resurrected. All the rest can follow, if God wants.
I realize it's kind of the thing these days to declare one's weariness with, or to announce the futility and wrongheadedness of, "culture-wars thinking." And, again, such declarations are understandable. Christians should not be happy about warmaking and the nastiness, division, snark, and pain that attend today's politics and controversies are nothing to be happy about. Far better, and far more pleasant, to relish the world's enchantment than to argue about the ministerial exception or to complain about the latest silliness (or worse) being imposed on our children by the Edu-blob.
Still, I think it is important to distinguish between (a) giving up on complaining about the coarsening of culture and (b) giving up on the important work of moving law and policy in a direction that better protects vulnerable people. Such movement is, in some places, possible and it saves lives. Everyone who knows and reads Bottum's work knows that he is deeply committed to human dignity and to the pro-life cause, but there's a danger, I fear, that some will hear him to be saying that working for this kind of right-direction movement in the law is "crap."
Yes, there are failures of metaphysics at the root of the problems that are often seen to be "culture" problems. There are also constitutional and legislative and executive failures. Our current abortion-law regime reflects a flawed "metaphysics," but also sloppy constitutional interpretation and misguided politics. This side of Heaven, I don't think it is an option for pro-lifers to walk away from responding to the latter. The fight to improve - to the admittedly limited extent we can - our positive laws so that they better protect the vulnerable is not inconsistent, it seems to me, with appreciating the deeper roots of the problem.
This Pope, it seems to me, has not suggested that Christians settle for unjust laws and murderous policy. (If he did, in any event, he would be wrong to do so.). Sure, we should be winsome and attend to witnessing, not merely arguing. But to just walk away because we would rather (as we both would) write about other things hardly seems the lesson of the Good Samaritan.
