Barack Obama's widely-noticed speech last week on religion and politics was a pretty good one, I think. Pretty good, I'd claim, even apart from what any of us think about the substance of his policies vs. Republican or conservative policies.
It's no great novelty now for liberals to be touting the importance of religion. But here are a few ways in which, I think, Obama's address is an advance over previous efforts, at least most any by politicians. First, he explicitly recognizes the inadequacy of saying "I can't impose my beliefs on others." He recounts that when in the 2004 campaign he was accused of not being a true Christian,
I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates - namely, I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois.
But Mr. Keyes's implicit accusation that I was not a true Christian nagged at me, and I was also aware that my answer did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs.
He recognizes the long history of religious involvement in politics, and adds: "[T]o say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition." It's nice to hear that point put so straightforwardly by a Senator on the left.
Second, he avoids the liberal politicians' tendency of treating faith as simply a source of motivation for political action (which, in the hands of say John Kerry, looked like a religious veneer slapped on top of a bunch of preexisting political positions). Obama talks about faith as a motivation for social and political action, but he also talks about faith independently as the basis for one's whole person. He discusses this in his own life:
It wasn't until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma.
I was working with churches, and the Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me. They saw that I knew their Book and that I shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me that remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst.
And in time, I came to realize that something was missing as well -- that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.
And if it weren't for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted this fate. But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn - not just to work with the church, but to be in the church.
He also discusses it in terms of the existential answers that faith provides to Americans overall:
[Americans'] religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In fact, it speaks to a hunger that's deeper than that - a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.
Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds - dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets - and they're coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.
They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.
As a corollary to this, he explicitly emphasizes that attacking social problems requires personal transformation of individuals (the disadvantaged and the powerful) as well as the commitment of social resources:
Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting "preachy" may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.
After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness - in the imperfections of man.
Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers' lobby - but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we've got a moral problem. There's a hole in that young man's heart - a hole that the government alone cannot fix.
The essential role of personal transformation in solving poverty and related problems is probably the biggest affirmative element in a conservative approach to those issues, and Obama affirms it -- at the same time as he emphasizes the need for government action.
Finally, at the end of the speech Obama tells an interesting story in which an Illinois voter called him out in 2004 for some unfair and intemperate anti-pro-life language that was then on his website, and Obama admitted this and changed the language. The speech thus finishes with an exhortation for fair-mindedness and charity toward one's political opponents, a theme sounded throughout the text. Both liberal and conservative religious-political activists could use that advice.
There are things to criticize in the speech (even setting aside, as I said, criticism of his substantive political positions). Obama says:
Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
This statement goes too far. Although we can likely all agree that it is generally best for people in a pluralistic democracy to translate their religious arguments into widely accessible concepts, I doubt that "[d]emocracy demands [it]" in each and every case. If it did, a lot of the religious movements and figures Obama cites earlier would have violated the democratic ground rules. In addition, abortion seems a wildly inappropriate example for the point: there are plenty of widely accessible, non-sectarian arguments for prohibiting abortion, and you'd think he would acknowledge that (apart from whether the arguments are convincing). Indeed, although he says something briefly about reducing abortions, there's a noticeable absence of any attempt to defend the pro-choice position once he's jettisoned (as he claims) the stock phrase about "not imposing beliefs on others."
More fundamentally, I hope that Obama's hospitable attitude toward religion in politics displayed in this speech -- including toward those on the other side politically -- would carry over into other contexts as well. I hope he'd call for respect for pro-life religious views not only at a meeting of religious progressives, but at a meeting of NARAL or at the 2008 Democratic convention. But overall, I thought there were a number of good things in the speech.
This looks like a worthwhile resource of quotes from the Founders on religion. The editor, James Hutson of the Library of Congress, is a historian of distinction on the subject. From an interview with Christianity Today:
[The framers had] a wide variety of opinion on a wide variety of subjects. But the subjects on which there was a kind of consensus emerged very clearly in the book. I have found no one among the Founders who didn't believe in Providence being actively at work, who didn't believe that religion was vital for social well-being, who didn't believe in liberty of conscience.
[Q:] Some say that the Founders were mostly Deists, others that they were really born again Christians. [A:] . . . Most of the leading people were not, I suspect, what you would call in today's terms "evangelical Christians." Some of them, however, were very deeply orthodox Christians, such as John Jay, the first chief justice. Elias Boudinot, the president of the Continental Congress and the first director of the U.S. Mint, would qualify as an evangelical Christian under any definition of that term. The population at large certainly was preponderantly orthodox or evangelical, but the founding group was substantially more liberal.
Because I had to make a long car drive this weekend, I had the chance to listen to the whole of Peter Beinart's book The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. It's good on several levels. As readers may know from reviews like this one, the book argues for a revival and adaptation today of the Cold War liberalism practiced by Truman and Kennedy, which took extremely seriously the fight against totalitarianism but also recognized that America could only fight that war effectively if it (1) recognized limits on its own unilateral power and (2), along with military measures when necessary, also promoted economic development (abroad and at home) that would reduce the appeal of Communism. (It's a good question whether there are enough liberals who will go along with Beinart's vision; but it might appeal to a lot of "national greatness" conservatives as well.)
Among the book's heroes is Reinhold Niebuhr, whose Christian appreciation of original sin led him to emphasize that even as America combatted the evil of the Soviet system, it must also recognize its own flaws and capacity for evil acts. (Beinart unfortunately says little or nothing about the theological foundation of Niebuhr's views.) Part of Niebuhr's argument was that those who know that neither side in a historical conflict is wholly innocent will be better able to make the real historical distinction between evil and imperfect good, and will not be paralyzed by the shattering of illusions of innocence. We may be forgetting this lesson again; one worrying phenomenon Beinart mentions is that the Bush administration's moral and practical failings in Iraq may have turned off many Americans altogether on the central importance of promoting Middle Eastern democracy and development in order to undercut Islamic totalitarianism in the long run. It's not a Christian book, of course, and "mak[ing] America great" is by no means our ultimate concern. But a lot of the wisdom in the book about how best to preserve an acceptable level of freedom and justice in the world parallels Christian wisdom about human nature, and could easily overlap a lot with just-war principles.
I've been enjoying other MOJ-ers' posts, but so overwhelmed with a new casebook edition and various other colliding deadlines as to be unable to blog. It's great to have such a wide range of people always carrying the ball forward. Apropos of Rob's reference to the book on medical eugenics ... I recently attended the annual conference of Democrats for Life, which this year focused on their 95-10 Initiative to reduce abortions through policy measures designed to counter economic and cultural pressures to abort. There were good, substantive presentations on adoption, crisis pregnancy centers, child-care and other resources on college campuses, and so forth. Perhaps the most interesting presentation was from an executive of a major disability-rights organization, whose group is "abortion neutral" (and who himself took no general position on abortion), but who suggested that pro-life activists, as a strategic matter, should give more attention to the disability-rights aspect of their cause: i.e. to the pervasive use of abortion, after prenatal testing, on unborn children with serious genetic disabilities. (See this story among others.)
Would emphasizing this be to emphasize the cases in which most people, rightly or wrongly, view as among the most morally sympathetic for abortion? Or, by contrast, is the disability-rights critique a strong logical lever that should make pro-choice liberals more uncomfortable with abortion in general? Such an argument might go something like this: Any critique of abortion of disabled unborn children cannot logically be confined to that case. Scholars and activists who are generally pro-choice but criticize the current prenatal-testing and abortion practices assert that "[p]re-natal testing, and the more recent and less common embryo screening and selection, are justified by mistaken assumptions about the quality of life of people with disabilities, and are demeaning to existing people with disabilities"; parents who "select against a fetus because of predicted disability" far too often erroneously conclude that this child could not be one "'who will enrich us, gladden others, contribute to the world, and make us proud.'" Adrienne Asch, Disability Equality and Prenatal Testing: Contradictory or Compatible?, 30 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 315, 318, 316 (2003) (restating the critique). But the same might be said in many, many other cases in which unborns are aborted because mothers believe that the children's lives and the raising of the children will simply be too difficult or stunted because of circumstances (poverty, many born children already, single parenthood, etc.). If abortion is a troubling judgment of hopelessness about the lives of born disabled people -- troubling even if the parent(s) reaches it after much conscientious consideration -- then it must also be a troubling judgment of hopelessness about the lives of born people in many other circumstances as well. I wonder what others think about this.
On SSRN, Professors Alexander and Schauer post this article on "the ongoing debate in contemporary jurisprudence over whether law, properly conceived, is capable of incorporating morality," for example whether interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause or Free Exercise Clause should follow the best moral/philosophical understanding of equality or religious freedom. They question whether
law can retain its lawness and retain its ability to perform law's essential functions while still being open to the full universe of moral considerations. In a word, we do not believe that this is possible, and thus we believe, and shall argue here, that even when law incorporates morality it can only serve law's primary and essential functions if it has a considerable degree of resistance to the pressure of at least some morally correct moral claims. In other words, we strive here to make the moral argument for law's ignoring of at least some moral arguments in legal decision-making.
I've posted on SSRN this paper about the Establishment Clause. Abstract:
This paper, from a symposium at Washington University (St. Louis) Law School on the Rehnquist Court and the First Amendment, responds to a paper by Professor Jay Wexler on the Court’s endorsement test for the Establishment Clause. The central section of my paper defends a limited version of the endorsement test. I argue that unless the endorsement test is properly understood and limited, it has the critical flaw of putting the Establishment Clause at war with the other religion guarantee of the First Amendment, the Free Exercise Clause. If the Establishment Clause forbade government endorsement of religion in all contexts, it would undermine the government’s ability to give special accommodation to religious practice and thus would severely impair free exercise values. “No endorsement of religion” thus must operate, not as the general requirement of the Establishment Clause, but only as a rule for the particular class of establishment cases involving government-sponsored religious symbols and expression. The no-endorsement test is legitimate for that category of cases, I argue, but only because in those cases it serves the more fundamental goal of protecting a voluntary religious sector independent of government.
Had I been on the jury, I, too, would have voted for life in the Colorado Supermax. But not for the reasons most of the jury cited.
In the Moussaoui case, there were three plausible grounds for mitigation: insignificance, lunacy or deprivation. Insignificance would have been my choice.
He criticizes the "childhood deprivation" ground. He doesn't mention one prudential argument (to which the judge adverted in imposing the jury's sentence): avoiding giving Moussaoui his wish to be a martyr whose fate would inspire other terrorists. Admittedly, that seems not a legally recognized reason for jurors to vote life, but a policy argument for prosecutors not to have sought death in the first place.
Ross Douthat, in a post a couple of days ago, seemed to lay the blame for the administration's Iraq missteps on evangelical Christianity:
[T]he failures of the Bush era haven't just been the result of cronyism, incompetence, and the corruption that festers at the intersection of big government and big business. They have also been evangelical failures, flowing from a surfeit what [Wilfred] McClay calls the "moral radicalism" of the evangelical mind, which is a bit too eager to unleash that "fire in the minds of men" that Bush cited in his Second Inaugural Address. . . . [T]he Iraq War will stand for a long time as a monument to the potential excesses of evangelical thinking - and when it comes to our foreign policy, I hope the next GOP President partakes of a little less of Bush-style missionary zeal, and a little more of that old-time conservative religion.
To which one obvious objection is that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who appear to have driven the biggest blunders, are hardly evangelicals, or religious at all so far as I can tell. (I once sat in a Sunday school class with Rumsfeld in a Chicago Presbyterian church while he was CEO at Searle Corp., but I got the distinct impression his wife had dragged him along.) Arrogance and overconfidence can come from many sources, some of them a lot darker than "evangelical missionary zeal." Douthat later follows up, reiterating but with caveats:
I didn't mean to single out evangelicals as a brand-new scapegoat for the Iraq War -- replacing the Jews, the neocons, the oil industry, the Saudis, Bush's daddy issues, the liberal me-tooers, and so on and so forth. Our invasion of Iraq was, like many wars, overdetermined, with all sorts of people (myself included, until very late in the game) supporting it for all sorts of reasons. But George W. Bush was and remains the central actor in the drama, and I think his personal religious instincts - reform-minded and idealistic, in the mode of evangelicals like William Wilberforce - have at least as much explanatory power as the calculating realpolitik of Cheney or the liberal moralism of Wolfowitz.
Of course, evangelicalism also gets blamed for instilling in Bush a Left Behind-style, "let's bring on Armageddon and Jesus's second coming" attitude, which is the opposite of optimstic reformism. So the evangelicals can't win for losing.
There is not much of [Reinhold] Niebuhr, or original sin, or any other form of Calvinist severity, in the current outlook of the Bush administration. That too is a reflection of the optimistic character of American evangelicalism, and therefore of evangelical conservatism. . . .
But conservatism will be like the salt that has lost its savor, if it abandons its most fundamental mission -- which is to remind us of what Thomas Sowell called "the constrained vision" of human existence, which sees life as a struggle, with invariably mixed outcomes, full of unintended consequences and tragic dilemmas involving hopelessly fallible people. . . . As the example of Niebuhr suggests, such a vision need not reject the possibility of human progress altogether. . . . But it does suggest that it is sometimes wise to adopt, so to speak, a darker shade of red, one that sees the hand of Providence in our reversals as well as our triumphs.
Bringing this back to MOJ ... One Catholic commenter on Douthat's site joined in pinning the Iraq problems on the evangelicals:
Most Catholic conservatives are imbued with an Augustinian distaste for utopian schemes, and seem willing to at least tolerate worldy imperfections, for lack of a better term. Evangelicals, meanwhile, as Ross wrote, do have a more missionary zeal to transform the world.
But I doubt that "Catholicism right, evangelicalism wrong" is much of an answer here either. The most vocal Catholic conservatives in America have defended the Iraq war throughout. It's true that George Weigel and Michael Novak defended going to war on pessimistic or "realistic" grounds (the perceived danger of WMDs) in addition to optimstic ones (the prospect of democratizing Iraq). (See here and here.) But it's hard not to see seeds of overconfidence in their method of analysis as well. Both Weigel and Novak argued that there is no "presumption against war" in just-war thinking, and that if a war is justifiable -- under natural-law principles accessible to all persons of good will -- then it is not a "necessary evil" but rather a positive act of charity and, essentially, ought to be pursued with confidence. This attitude doesn't necessarily lead to arrogance, but neither does it dispose one to be sensitive to the ironies and tragedies that accompany even efforts to do good -- as Niebuhr emphasized, channeling St. Augustine. And that the good of removing Saddam can also generate many ironies and tragedies born of arrogance -- from inadequate troop commitments to Abu Ghraib -- is certainly a central lesson of the Iraq war.
My own view (here) is that things work best when a natural-law approach and an Augustinian realist outlook co-exist and interact, interpreting and correcting each other. It seems to me that Iraq is a case where the application of natural law, in the form of just-war principles, needed to be filtered through, and applied in the light of, an Augustinian/Niebuhrian caution about the dangers of even well motivated acts.
I will make this brief as I think that this issue has been almost exhausted on MoJ. I am very glad to see that Greg agrees that the additional information, which I posted to MoJ, is relevant and helpful with regard to both the issue of whether the BC professors should have objected (publicly or privately) to the past speakers and award recipients cited on MoJ and the issue of whether the BC professors are actling consistently when they invoke Catholic Social Teachings to object to Secretary Rice.
I agree that, if one did a thorough search of the Cardinal Newman Society website, one could find references to the fact that Breyer, Drinan, Dellinger, and Cellucci were given awards or spoke at BC Law School. Nevertheless, the Cardinal Newman Society is not always so accurate. For example, the Culture of Death report, which I previously cited, does contain errors and omissions. The report only mentions Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot as being the Chair of the MacArthur Foundation and does not mention her service for ten years as a member of the Board of the MacArthur Foundation. It does not indicate that Stephen Breyer was the Law School's commencement speaker, not the University's, and it does not indicate that Justice Breyer received an award from the Law School, as I indicated in my post. The report does not discuss the objections raised against Paul Cellucci by Cardinal Law, among others, for his support of the death penalty. The Culture of Death report is available here.
In the latest Books and Culture, John McGreevy of Notre Dame reviews Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, which John finds "a riveting history of the British anti-slavery movement" that secured the abolition of the slave trade in the Empire in 1807. But John also finds that the book has a significant blind spot. Surprise, surprise, it's the centrality of Christian religious fervor to this "first global human rights campaign." (NOTE: The sarcasm there is not aimed at John; rather it's because this is hardly the first time that modern proponents of human rights have overlooked the role of religion in their development.)
Unfortunately Hochschild's first lesson is to make an anachronistic distinction between religious (bad) and secular (good) reform. The anti-slavery moment, he opines, marks the moment when reformers moved from reliance on "sacred texts" to "human empathy." High praise goes to Thomas Clarkson for writing a report "more like a report by a modern human rights organization" instead of a "moralizing tract." . . .
[W]e must banish the image Hochschild perhaps inadvertently forwards: of anti-slavery activists as proto-Amnesty International members straining to escape a culture blighted by religious obscurantism . . . .
In all this Hochschild reflects our own time. Arguably the most important religiously based "reform" effort of the last generation has been the anti-abortion campaign, a movement not high on the agenda of most professional human rights activists. (It's not coincidental that "reproductive rights" has become a pro-choice slogan.) If the achievement of Bury My Chains is to offer a gripping account of the campaign to eliminate slavery in the British empire, its limitation is to read current cultural divisions into a more complex, even alien past.
Tom
P.S. It's terrific to see John, a great historian who is Catholic, writing in the evangelically-based Books and Culture.
