My Notre Dame colleague, Francesca Murphy (Theology) says "no," in this very worthwhile First Things piece. She concludes:
Liberalism is no heresy, and the market exchange from which it emerges does not sin against the light. It is a healthy byproduct of Christianity, and the only means by which Christians can fight Marxist-capitalism, the stage-managed freedom in which the benevolent will of the powerful consults reason, discerns what people “truly” need and want, and then superintends over and administers the always vulnerable freedom of ordinary people. If one were searching for Gnostic heresies, surely this technocratic political economy, which is very much with us today, is a good candidate for anathema.
I viewed last week's horrific violence through the lens of John Inazu's important new book, Confident Pluralism, in which he affirms the importance of certain constitutional commitments (focusing on the right of association and the public forum and funding requirements) and encourages the "civic aspirations" of tolerance, humility and patience. He explains:
Tolerance is the recognition that people are for the most part free to pursue their beliefs and practices, even those beliefs and practices we find morally objectionable. Humility takes the further step of recognizing that others will sometimes find our beliefs and practices morally objectionable, and that we can't always "prove" that we are right and they are wrong. Patience points toward restraint, persistence, and endurance in our interactions across difference.
Judging from my social media feeds and a few face-to-face conversations, the divergence in our perspectives on last week's events is nearly overwhelming. Even among those who are on the front lines protesting police actions, for example, there can be a substantial disconnect. In the Twin Cities, our local #BlackLivesMatter leaders -- already viewed as radical and counterproductive by many whites -- are under pressure for not being radical enough, accused of having embraced "white neoliberal" principles of activism (namely pacifism). That pressure was on display last night, as protests here turned violent. I imagine that many participants on both sides of the debate about police conduct toward blacks would not only place less importance on tolerance, humility and patience than John does, but they might deem those aspirations as unrecognizable given the stakes and nature of the debate.
John has been closer to the post-Ferguson conversations than I have, so I know that his analysis incorporates the current reality of race in our country. From my limited engagement with his framework, three questions present themselves:
1) Under what circumstances does the harm principle serve as a boundary on the aspiration to tolerance? E.g., #BLM protestors may recognize that many of their fellow citizens do not share their belief that blacks are often treated unfairly and with unjustified violence by police, but that recognition is hardly a first step toward tolerance of that disbelief. (A similar point could be made regarding disagreement re abortion.)
2) To what extent is a mutual willingness to learn relevant facts a precondition to humility as a worthy aspiration? When certain beliefs are subject to empirical verification, does that create any sort of burden of inquiry before humility is relevant? Do I need to exercise humility toward my fellow citizen who contends that the Earth is flat?
3) Are there historical conditions under which "patience" is better viewed as a civic vice than as a civic virtue?
California is on the road to passing legislation, aimed at religious colleges' sexual-conduct policies for students, that would create serious conflicts for many of the state's Catholic and evangelical Protestant colleges. I've done an "explainer" article for Christianity Today that describes the bill (it's had a number of permutations) and its likely impact (students at these colleges would face a serious danger of losing their "Cal Grants," which are state educational grants, up to $9,000 yearly, for students from modest-income families). The article is in descriptive rather than normative format, but it aims to make the bill's likely consequences clear.
[W]hat are we to make of a man who is committed . . . to the proposition that truth is attainable by science and that emotional gratification is attainable by interacting with one's environment and at the highest level by the enjoyment of art? It seems that everything is settled for him. But something is wrong. He has settled everything except what it is to live as an individual. He still has to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. Such a man is something like the young man Kierkegaard described who was given the task of keeping busy all day and finished the task at noon. What does this man do with the rest of the day? the rest of his life?
In the painful shadow of the Philando Castile and Alton Sterling shootings, I offer an essay over at America on why Catholic universities should be deeply engaged in today's racial justice struggle. Here's an excerpt:
Today’s university jeopardizes its ability to speak to today’s protestors when it departs from its mission of forming the person. Rising student debt and questionable employment outcomes have caused many families to approach college through a strictly economic lens. In addition there is increasing concern that the identification and cultivation of particular virtues represents a kind of moral paternalism. As a result more aspirational educational goals are pushed to the margins. The hollowing out of the university mission makes it difficult to engage meaningfully with today’s campus protesters. After all, they are not demanding better job training; they are demanding a more inclusive community. This is a deeply moral demand.
The Catholic vision of education has always been about formation—a relational endeavor that is best undertaken in communities marked by dialogue, interpersonal modeling and opportunities for reflection and growth. Knowledge has more than instrumental value, and the student experience aims at moral growth, not just professional preparation. This foundational orientation does not make answers to deep and difficult questions about diversity and inclusion easy, but it means that the deep and difficult questions are not distractions from the educational mission; they are why the church operates universities in the first place.
That's the title of a discerning essay, on our present political situation, over at Commonweal (here). An excerpt:
Neither party, then, offers a compelling vision of human well-being. The Republicans stand up for the unborn and families, but they refuse to address the economic and social roots of abortion and the precariousness material conditions that threaten so many families. The Democrats support basic economic fairness and stand against racism, but they are most animated by the right of each individual to choose their own conception of the good. They are more interested in tolerance and diversity than in true solidarity. Neither party espouses a conception of freedom oriented toward the common good. Libertarians dismiss the very idea of a common good, seeing only a collection of individual people with individual interests. Latter-day progressives start from a slightly different point of view but reach a very similar conclusion; they argue that a commitment to pluralism precludes any notion of a common good. Missing from both views is the deep sense that “we are all really responsible for all.”
The Journal of Family and Economic Issues has published an intriguing study testing the famous birth-control-pill-as-technology-shock theory articulated by George Akerlof/Janet Yellen in 1996. Remember that Akerlof and Yellen had argued that the emergence of the pill in 1960 followed by liberalized abortion laws into the 1970s were to blame for the precipitous rise in single motherhood into the 1980s. (By contrast, Charles Murray had blamed increases in welfare benefits, and William Julius Wilson, lack of employment.) I write about all this as it relates to Catholic teaching here.
Economist Andrew Beauchamp tests Akerlof's theory in reverse, analyzing the lack of state abortion funding on rates of single motherhood: “The results showed that women in states that removed public funding saw decreased single motherhood and increased cohabitation among women giving birth. Estimates showed a 13 percent lower chance of being single following a birth in a state where funding was removed. This policy impact is substantial. If the entire sample were to experience a removal of abortion funding, these estimates would imply that the probability of cohabiting or marrying among low-income mothers would increase by between 12 and 18 percentage points conditional on giving birth. These estimates mean that among the children of low-income mothers, the fraction of children living with both biological parents at the time of birth would rise by 10 percentage points.”
Not a particularly auspicious title for a post on a Catholic blog, it's true. But Tom and I don't see things too differently, though he is as usual more optimistic than I am. I think he undersells what can be read from the Stormans cert. denial. And the denial of cert. in Ben-Levi v. Brown (again with a J. Alito dissent). And the denial of cert. in Big Sky Colony, where I was also pleased to join another excellent amicus brief spearheaded by Tom himself urging review of the Free Exercise Clause issues. The Court just doesn't want any part of these issues right now.
But Tom's post makes me think that perhaps atrophy may actually be the best option on offer. Tom writes that "moderate-ish" liberals might be able to combine with the likes of Justice Alito to hear a case involving "state/local government action against Muslims, or against some other group that everyone agrees is a religious minority." That is because "liberal opinion" has accepted the various third-party-harms theories being floated about, and because of the expansion of the idea of harm "that modern welfare-state liberalism regards as 'public.'"
I think I agree with most of Tom's description here. Tom is probably right that, e.g., Christians with certain specific beliefs about sexuality are not and will never be, in the "liberal opinion" he refers to, the sort of viable "minorities" thought to deserve FEC protection. That "liberal opinion" is powerful now, growing, and likely to influence the ideological profile of the Supreme Court directly and indirectly for years to come. If that is true, then perhaps we should root for atrophy, if not death. Better the Smith rule, which at least has the advantage of being clear and reasonably predictable, than the rule of "liberal opinion" masquerading as constitutional law. Indeed, perhaps religious accommodation has always been infected by something of this quality. We accommodate when we don't really care--for prison beards, oddballs, and tiny, exotic sects to which nobody really pays attention. When we do care, we find ways not to accommodate (harm! third parties! dignity!). And as the ambit of the "public" increases, it becomes easier and easier to make claims about third party harms, particularly when those harms cut to the quick of "liberal opinion."
A participant in our colloquium in law at St. John's this spring, and a noted critic of religious accommodation (someone, as it happens, whose views in general don't often match up with my own), suggested that if given a choice between non-discriminatory religious persecution and religious discrimination, he'd opt for religious persecution. I can't say I agree. But this exchange makes me understand that view much more clearly.
Here's a short piece of mine, just out in U.S. Catholic, on the question of churches' tax exemptions. A bit:
But our tradition of exempting churches and religious institutions from taxes is justified and important. The separation of church and state is not a reason to invalidate or abandon these tax exemptions but is instead a very powerful justification for retaining them.
The Supreme Court’s precedents and popular opinion have been shaped, for better or worse, by Thomas Jefferson’s figure of speech about “a wall of separation.” This saying has often been misunderstood and misused. Still, Jefferson’s metaphor points to an important truth: In our tradition, we do not banish religion from the public square and we have not insisted on a rigid, hostile secularism that confines religious faith to the strictly private realm. We do, however, distinguish between political and religious institutions. They can productively cooperate without unconstitutional entanglement. . . .
. . . A political community like ours, that is committed to the freedom of religion and appropriately sensitive to its vulnerability, takes special care to avoid excessively burdening these institutions or interfering in their internal, religious matters. It’s not that churches’ contributions to the public good make them deserving of a tax-exempt status; it’s that, given our First Amendment, secular power over religious institutions is and should be limited. Governments refrain from taxing religious institutions not because it is socially useful to “subsidize” them but because their power over them is limited—and because “church” and “state” are distinct.
The point of church-state “separation” is not to create a religion-free public sphere. It is, instead, to safeguard the fundamental right to religious freedom by imposing limits on the regulatory—and, yes, the taxing—powers of governments. After all, as Daniel Webster famously argued in the Supreme Court (and the great Chief Justice John Marshall agreed) the power to tax involves the power to destroy, and so we have very good reasons for exercising that power with care—especially when it comes to religious institutions.
I thought this piece, by Ross Douthat, was excellent. My own sense is -- and the post-Brexit commentary has pretty much confirmed this sense -- that Catholics (or, Catholic intellectuals anyway) tend to be at least warm to, and even enthusiastic about, trans- and international groups, structures, and initiatives (e.g., the United Nations, the E.U., etc.) and so are often concerned about what they perceive as particularistic nationalism (which can, certainly, sometimes be cause for concern). Still, I think Douthat is spot-on when he says (and this is just a taste of the piece):
. . . Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.
The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.”
This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe. . . .
I'll only add, echoing Douthat, that I experience more of what seems like genuine human diversity through my (beloved) youth baseball-softball program (rec league, not "travel") than I do at academic conferences in our global super-cities.
