Mirror of Justice

Prof. Chris Gamwell of the University of Chicago Divinity School and Protestants for the Common Good (PCG) responds to our earlier posts (here, here, and here) on their statement criticizing the Christian Right.  My comments inserted at places:

           My thanks to Tom Berg for inviting attention to the “Statement on the Christian Right” issued by Protestants for the Common Good and to him and Rick Garnett for the thoughtful comments they posted. . . .

            1.  While I appreciate that Mr. Berg could not post the entire statement, it is at some pains to say that the Christian Right, on our use of the term, is not equivalent to Christians evangelicals or Christian conservatives generally.  The former is defined in relation to a particular political agenda, and we are grateful to share with many Christian evangelicals and Christian conservatives political purposes we call our own.  I will be happy to send the entire statement to anyone who wishes to have it, and I can be reached here.

            2.  Nothing in the statement says or implies that a commitment to the formation and practice of private virtues, on the one hand, and, on the other, to mutuality in the sense we advocate are, as Mr. Garnett says, “competitive” or that the former is not, as Mr. Berg puts it, “essential to the latter’s effectiveness.”  As Mr. Berg also noted, the statement explicitly says that “we, too, wish to affirm the importance of personal virtues” and, moreover, do so because we are committed to mutuality:  “We affirm the need for personal character because mutuality is gravely threatened when dedication to intimate relationships, taking responsibility where one can, and charity for those who suffer are widely missing.”

            Thus, the statement does not criticize the Christian Right because it asserts the importance of private or personal virtues.  To the contrary, we object that its political purposes are dominated by the formation and practice of private virtue, which implies that the widespread practice of private morality is sufficient for the good society, and thus many communal sources of empowerment are unimportant or largely unimportant.  On our reading, the Christian Right excludes any significant political concern for poverty, the want of many persons for health care, the massive inequity of income distribution, inequality in educational funding, injustice in the criminal justice system, persisting structural forms of racism, and so forth.

Fair enough -- and I personally agree that the Christian Right overall pays far too little attention to these structural/communal matters.  But let me issue a challenge back:  do groups like Protestants for the Common Good translate their concern for private virtues (and the admission that these are "essential" to communal empowerment) into public policy emphases?  Are such groups, for example, proposing policy solutions -- or even efforts within the Protestant churches -- that directly address the problem of pervasive divorce (which certainly contributes to many social ills, and causes special problems for the most vulnerable)?  The interaction between groups like PCG and the Christian Right still seems trapped in the "either-or" debate when they could look, and perhaps even cooperate on, "both-and" solutions.

Second, we ought not to limit "communal sources of empowerment" to government.  Private social service organizations and other mediating institutions (religious and nonreligious) themselves offer empowerment in a communal setting -- often a more personal and effective setting than that of government.  Indeed, the PCG statement affirms the importance of "a favorable pattern of associations" among the societal conditions that "empower people to achieve, and [that] are the business of justice."  I would hope that PCG could recognize a similar concern on the Christian Right in the form of the "faith-based" initiative, which ideally combines a society-wide commitment (in financing social services through taxes) with the work of mediating institutions (in delivering the services).  (I say "ideally" because the Bush administration is reportedly failing to treat the initiative seriously.)

Prof. Gamwell continues:

            While affirming the importance of private virtues, the statement does not seek to resolve controversial political issues about what those virtues include.  For instance, the statement does not present a political position on abortion or same-sex equality.  This is because those issues, as virtually all specific political questions, cannot be resolved solely by deduction from the inclusive understanding of justice and the common good we present.  Protestants for the Common Good has, in fact, endorsed something like the conclusions (although not necessarily the reasoning) of Roe v. Wade and has argued for the legal equality of heterosexual and same-sex unions.  But the arguments we give for these positions include judgments additional to the general principle of mutuality advanced by the statement, and we believe that other Christians who affirm the same general principle might come to differing resolutions of those specific issues.

            3.  Both Mr. Berg and Mr. Garnett comment that our summary of the Christian Right’s political agenda appears to include, as Mr. Berg puts it, issues of “justice for the broadest human community”—and the concern for abortion is cited by both as an illustration.  We certainly agree that the Christian Right pursues issues that affect the entire community and, in that formal sense, issues of justice.  Were this not the case, it would not be a political movement.  The point is, then, that its understanding of justice is focused on legal encouragement and enforcement of personal moral character, and the intent to have abortions or virtually all abortions legally proscribed is a prime illustration.  A prohibition of abortion would be enforcement of what is taken to be one aspect of sexual responsibility as a personal virtue.  I recognize that, for those who so advocate, the prohibition of abortion would have as its principal purpose “protecting the life of unborn children from lethal violence.”  But it remains that what is enforced is personal moral character, since refusal to do lethal violence to the innocent is certain among the most basic of such character traits. 

            Perhaps the statement should have clarified what it means by personal or private virtue.  We mean habits or character traits whose widespread enactment is, within very generous limits, indifferent to alternative social and institutional arrangements.  If these virtues are taken to be sufficient to a good life, one’s station in the communal structures or power, privilege, benefits, and burdens is not, again within very generous limits, fundamentally important to human flourishing.  Being worthy of trust, for instance, is a moral trait all individuals can exhibit whether the society is equalitarian or feudal—and so, too, are refusal to do lethal violence to the innocent and sexual responsibility.

My point (and perhaps Rick's) about abortion was that in bringing unborn humans into the circle of protection, the pro-life position doesn't merely "affect the entire community"; it actually serves the goals that PCG states as fundamental, namely serving the "inclusive community," "loving all persons as oneself," and "treating each person [as] the neighbor for each one of us."  I would urge PCG to recognize how the failure to protect the unborn is a failure of the very "mutuality [for] all humans" that the organization commends.  Of course, I'd add that if the pro-life position fails to emphasize significant safety-net assistance to women as well, then it fails to treat them as neighbors too.  In any event, I had read the PCG statement to criticize the Christian Right, unjustifiably, for not caring about members of the broader human community except insofar as it wants those people to receive personal salvation and enter the church.  The clarified version here, I think, is more defensible: that the Christian Right does care about justice and service to others, but conceives of this too exclusively in individualistic and personal terms.  Indeed, perhaps the problem is exemplified precisely by the Christian Right's political abortion position, which tends to include restrictions and leave out societal safety-net measures.

            4.  Doubt was expressed about our view that the Christian Right is a threat to democracy because it asserts religious authority as the sole basis for political decisions.  Perhaps the term “sole” was a poor choice, because it suggests that no appeal is made to considerations that might be acceptable to those outside of the Christian community.  The point we had in mind was this: Defense of political positions on the Christian Right at least often includes essential premises that themselves are dependent solely on the authority of scripture or religious teaching and thus cannot also be defended by argument, that is, by appeal to the reason of fellow citizens.  Perhaps this reading is controversial.  So far as I can see, however, the most important tenets of faith and morals are, for the Christian Right, not themselves open to rational assessment, and these tenets are often implicated in the specific political purposes pursued.

I still maintain that on several of the central political issues -- most notably abortion -- the wide range of responsible argument on the Christian Right appeals to premises other citizens can accept.  With abortion, such "publicly accessible" considerations include the facts of fetal development, the presumption in favor of life, the vector of broadening the universe of persons receiving protection, and so forth.  With same-sex marriage, the considerations include the dominant historical nature of marriage, the optimal nature of male and female role models, and so forth (perhaps less convincing, but nevertheless publicly accessible).

Tom