I'm going to renew my friendly debate with Rick over the "obligations of a Catholic judge" issue, this time in response to his criticism of the David O'Brien piece. I agree with Rick that the claim that recognizing the constitutional limits on federal power is "at odds with important elements of Catholic social teaching" is a stretch; among other things, there are important considerations of subsidiarity on the side of limiting the feds. I also agree with Rick that there are federalism limits in the Constitution that are more than just nominal.
But I don't agree that it's enough to argue, as Rick does, that the existence of federalism limits in the Constitution is just "a fact" and therefore a judge who enforces them can't face any conflict with Catholic social teaching. The judge is not just recognizing the existence of those limits as a fact; as I've stressed before, s/he is also implementing those limits and enforcing them on a legislature, stopping the legislature from pursuing (let's assume now) some moral good (or even moral necessity). The question is not whether the constitutional limits exist, but whether the (Catholic) judge should get involved in enforcing them. To turn to the hoary (but I think conceptually relevant) example, a Nazi judge could not enforce anti-Semitic laws or "kill the disabled" laws and defend himself morally by saying he was just recognizing the "fact" of the laws' existence.
The differences from the Nazi, of course, are:
(1) Anti-Semitism and killing the disabled are fundamental wrongs, which makes such laws morally invalid altogether, while limits on federal power are not a fundamental wrong (though they may well lead to bad moral results in some cases). But then that's the issue: are the constitutional limits on federal power to address economic and social needs "at odds with Catholic social teaching"? I agree with Rick that to answer that question "yes" in general is a stretch. But the issue is not just the "fact" that the limits exist. I still think that that's too positivist a position to reflect Catholic moral theory as I understand it.
(2) The Nazi legal system had such pervasive moral flaws that no Catholic (perhaps no moral person) could participate in it at all, while a Catholic judge may and should participate in the decent, if imperfect, American moral system rather than resign (and deny the nation the service of decent Catholic lawyers) over a conflict on one specific issue. That raises again the question whether the judge has available the intermediate position of recusing in the specific case but staying on the bench. I agree that if the only alternative is resignation, then imposing the morally bad (but constitutionally required) rule looks more justifiable. But if resignation is the only alternative, and the argument is "stay in there and impose the bad rule rather than resign, because the system is generally good," that argument has implications for, say, the abortion issue. Under the "stay in there" argument, if Justice Kennedy or some other Catholic justice concludes in good conscience (even if erroneously) that the Constitution or stare decisis require the abortion right, then isn't the justice within moral bounds to say "I will enforce this right rather than resign from the bench and refuse to participate in a generally decent judicial system"? Shouldn't an ABA member angered by the association's embrace of abortion rights stay as a member, rather than resign, because of the other good things that the organization does? I still am concerned that if conservative judges receive some moral leeway because of the value of having their contribution on other issues, then more liberal judges should get such leeway too.
Thanks to Mark for organizing and graciously hosting the John Courtney Murray conference at Villanova, and to Mark and Rick for posting on it. There was a good deal of interesting exploration of concepts like the "freedom of the church" and Murray's positive but wary attitude toward American democracy.
I went in a slightly different direction, one more general but I hope still complementary and relevant to others' concerns. I compared the approaches to Christian social ethics of Murray and Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant theologian, Murray's contemporary, and proponent of "Christian realism." (The continuing relevance of Niebuhr is exemplified by Sunday's NYT op-ed by Arthur Schlesinger, posted here by Michael Perry.) I personally find great explanatory power both in the constructive ethical-political project of natural law that Murray defended and in Niebuhr's critical approach that emphasizes the effect of sin, self-interest, and partiality on all of our moral-political striving. (That's probably why I'm a Protestant blogging, at my friends' gracious invitation, on a site devoted to "the development of Catholic legal theory.")
My paper argues that despite the differences between natural law and Christian realism, they actually share a umber of important commonalities and, with some qualifications, may be profitably combined in Christian moral-political analysis. Our MOJ technical guru Rob Watson has just posted a draft in the "Papers" section to the right. Here's an abstract. (SUPPLEMENT: Thanks also to Patrick Brennan for his conference comments on the paper, which I'll be processing and using to make revisions.)
During the two decades after World War II, two Christian theologians of public life appeared on the cover of Time magainze: Reinhold Niebuhr in 1948 and John Courtney Murray in 1960. As their appearances suggest, during this time Murray the Catholic and Niebuhr the Protestant were America's most prominent Christian theologians concerning the relationship between religion, morality, and politics. Niebuhr inspired not only two generations of Christian clergy and activists, but also numerous secular statesmen and thinkers who admired his hard-nosed policy and cultural analyses, and some of whom dubbed themselves "Atheists for Niebuhr." Murray, of course, set forth the most prominent account of how faithful Catholics could affirm the American political system and laid the intellectual groundwork for the Church to embrace equal religious freedom as a moral ideal at Vatican II.
Murray and Niebuhr were on cordial personal terms, but each also engaged in polemics directed at the other's writings or school of thought. Niebuhr criticized the Catholic natural-law tradition for rigidity and for elevating contingent features of pre-modern socieities "into the supposedly universal standards of human reason." Murray, in defending the universal propositions of natural law, blasted Niebuhr's Christian realism as a theory that "sees things as so complicated that moral judgment bcomes practically impossible."
The thesis of this paper, though, is that Murray and Niebuhr, natural law and Christian realism, are not as far apart as they seemed. Indeed, the philosophically deepest aspects of the American founding reflect elements both of natural-law reasoning (as Murray emphasized) and realist concerns to structure institutions so as to counter the inevitable tendencies to self-aggrandizement (as Niebuhr emphasized).
After summarizing Murray's natural-law arguments, Niebuhr's critique of natural law, and Murray's responses, I then suggest how the two approaches share significant features, at least once some qualifications and clarifications are made in each. First, Niebuhr was more of a natural-law theorist than he admitted. Although Christian realism emphasizes how moral-political assertions are typically tainted by partiality and self-aggrandizement, Niebuhr himself set forth a universal theory about the perennial dynamics of human nature, and he affirmed the universal validity of certain moral-political concepts sich as equality. Second, although Niebuhr criticized natural-law theory for elevating historically contingent propositions to universal status, recent natural-law approaches have given much greater attention to historical contingencies and differences in the application of general principles. I show how Murray exhibited this historical consciousness and often relied on arguments of prudence and pragmatics that a Christian realist should appreciate. Third, although Niebuhr's appreciation for ambiguity and tension made him reluctant to rely on absolute rules in political matters, later Christian realists affirmed the need for rules precisely to limit the human propensities for self-aggrandizement.
I conclude that natural law and Christian realism both assert that moral-political principles and institutions should rest on assessments of human nature and what will promote human flourishing in the light of nature. Both recognize real, objectively valid moral-political principles -- grounded ultimately in God the creator -- but both can recognize also that these universal principles tend to be general in nature and that applying them to concrete contexts will produce varying specific rules. There remain many differences between natural-law and Christian-realist approaches, but often the differences complement each other, so that a full vision of Christian political ethics can benefit from both approaches. For example, each approach can take account of human nature both in its ideal and its fallen aspects, but natural law will contribute more to explicating the proper ends of human beings, and Christian realism more to explicating humans' fallenness and its consequences.
I argue that at the very least, natural lawyers will give attention to and benefit from reading Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realists, and that those in the Christian realist tradition will give attention to and benefit from natural-law reasoning. A combination of natural law and Christian realism suggests that a moral-political principle or institution is most solid when its justification rests on both the possibilities of human nature and on its negative tendencies. For example, the most powerful case for democracy, in Niebuhr's words, is that "man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, and man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." Similar double-barreled arguments have been be made for institutions such as a qualified free-market economy (by Michael Novak and others) and monogamous marriage (by Paul Ramsey and others).
I close the paper with a brief discussion of why the common project that Murray and Niebuhr shared remains of value in America today. As Robin Lovin has put it, both Murray and Niebuhr argued that "biblical faith provides the ideas about human good and moral responsibility on which the liberal democratic consensus rests. When that concensus is confused or threatened, recourse to the faith that sets its fundamental terms is a necessary part of its self-defense and self-renewal." Moreover, both Murray and Niebuhr articulated their arguments in terms that others could access and evaluate without having already adopted the premises of the Christian faith. Although I do not believe there is any general legal or moral obligation to present political arguments in such terms, nevertheless in a society characterized by religious disagreement, such arguments are more likely to be effective in political debate and lead to productive deliberation about political choices.
Listening to the BBC on the radio tonight brought to my mind the effect of the images from N.O. on the world's view of America, especially right now when our government is trying forcefully to promote democracy and progress in the Middle East. The horrible situation at the Convention Center as of Thursday night -- thousands of mostly poor people, stuck in the city often for reasons related to their poverty, with the various authorities seemingly losing control and inexplicably (so far as I can see) failing for two full days to get water and food to the heat-stricken people -- dramatizes the severe problems we ourselves have, "the unacknowledged inequalities" in David Brooks' words. It's more and more apparent that the mess can't be chalked up just to the natural disaster; there have also been disasters involving governments and societal structures, as well as some criminal acts by individuals.
The large number of people around the world who view America's assertion of moral leadership as arrogant and hypocritical will see these images as powerful confirmation for their belief. The terrorists will certainly make hay of it. How can America preach to the world, they will say, when it has such horrible problems festering right below the surface, and inherent in its own system of individualism and competitiveness? Reinhold Niebuhr described the phenomenon almost perfectly more than 50 years ago in The Irony of American History: "The progress of American culture toward hegemony in the world community as well as toward the ultimate in standards of living has brought us everywhere to limits where our ideals and norms are brought under ironic indictment."
It's unfair and unwarranted to treat every moral failing by America as evidence of hypocrisy. No human individual or group can stand for ideals without also failing to meet them. But there's also some legitimacy in asking a nation to fix its own serious problems before -- or at least at the same time as -- it undertakes aggressively to fix others.'
It's now a familiar thesis that Brown v. Board of Education and other federal government moves against segregation were motivated in part by the need to shore up America's image among people around the world who were choosing, during the Cold War, between capitalist democracy and Communism. See, e.g., Mary Dudziak, Brown as a Cold War Case, 91/1 Journal of American History (June 2004), abstract here. Could the new global war against terrorism ever be an impetus to do something more vigorous about poverty here, to improve America's image among the world's persuadable Muslims?
I guess this falls into the arguably-premature category of lessons to be drawn from Katrina, and perhaps it's obvious to all. But watching the horrors on TV, one must be struck by a point David Brooks makes in his N.Y. Times column today:
Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. . . .
Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.
The poor not only face more pervasive challenges in daily life; they tend to suffer more severe complications spinning out from natural disasters (as opposed to the disasters themselves, which fall upon all). I expect there will be discussion in future days of why -- granting that all are suffering greatly in N.O. and Mississippi -- the devastation on the urban poor seems to be disproportionately spiralling out of control and leading to a life-threatening aftermath (as opposed to death from the storm itself). The answers and the remedies will not be simple or obvious. But as we begin to think about the meaning(s) of the hurricane and flood, one of those meanings will have a lot to do with Susan's post quoting John Paul II on the problems faced by the poor:
"It is impossible not to take into account the existence of these realities. To ignore them would mean becoming like the 'rich man' who pretended not to know the beggar Lazarus lying at his gates." He goes on to say that both our daily life and "our decisions in the political and economic fields must be marked by these realities."
Tom B.
UPDATE: Jack Shafer on Slate discusses the issue, including barriers to urban poor residents evacuating the city beforehand (no car, not enough money on hand to take with them, insufficient resources to borrow during the time away, etc.).
On the blog Democracy of the Dead, Justin Dziowgo posts about our discussion whether affirming Roe and Casey as a matter of stare decisis -- say, because the societal reliance on abortion rights has become so great -- would be "culpable cooperation with evil" and thus create a conflict with fundamentals of Catholic faith.
Would such cooperation make him culpable? I would argue that it depends upon the obligations of a judge to the stare decisis principle. If a judge has a moral obligation to that principle due to natural law or civil law, and if it is clear that stare decisis must be applied in this particular case, then it seems that Roberts would not be culpable, for one must still do what they are morally obliged to do even if the consequences may be bad. Any argument that Roberts would still be culpable in these conditions would then seem to rest on a false idea about the power of a Supreme Court justice.
If one argues that he’s morally obligated to follow stare decisis and at the same time is morally bound to overturn Roe even when stare decisis calls for it to be maintained, then they are effectively arguing that he should act beyond his capacity to overturn it. Reductio ad absurdum would suggest that this could cause many problems. Suppose that in addition to stare decisis, there is a legal principle found in the Constitution that upholds the wrongly decided Roe case. Should Roberts override that principle as well? If so, when should he stop? And what if Roberts decides that it is really our form of government that ultimately allows the Roe case? Should he then begin a revolution against the government? In other words, I think the culpability of Roberts has to be measured by the limits of his office.
One could argue that this is false because one is not obligated to follow the evil orders of a superior, and in this case the superior is stare decisis. I think, however, that Roberts would not be following an evil order, for stare decisis is not evil. It is a good principle – presumably – that is allowing an evil to happen, just as doing many other good things allow evils to happen. An example is that my following the good principle of respecting human life keeps me from killing abortionists even though I know that their existence permits other evils.
A few quick responses -- very abbreviated because of the press of other commitments. First, I think that give more credence than Mr. Dziowgo does to the existence of conflicts between prima facie moral duties. Second, as I said before, I don't think that a justice who votes to uphold Roe and Casey merely "allow[s abortion] to happen," as when one refrains from interfering with an abortionist (or, to take another example, when a judge refrains from blocking a death sentence, the ground that the death penalty is constitutionally permissible). The justice actually blocks a legislative effort to stop abortion; the analogy is not to refraining from interfering with an abortionist, but to stepping in to block someone else from doing so.
Mr. Dziowgo also argues that "the Casey decision is slightly different because it makes arguments for why Roe was right and why the right to abortion must be maintained." This is a distinction that, as I said before, I don't see. If anything, it seems more justifiable to adhere to a constitutional decision whose result runs against religious faith because the decision is a correct interpretation of the Constitution than because the decision, though an incorrect interpretation, should be followed as stare decisis.
Finally, even if Mr. Dziowgo's arguments show that following stare decisis is ultimately justifiable and therefore creates no conflict with Catholic faith in this case, I don't think that this conclusion is so obvious -- note it takes several paragraphs to reach the conclusion -- that one should simply assume that Roberts would not feel the conflict. Therefore, it still seems to me too simple to say that in no way would Roberts' religious beliefs ever be likely to have any bearing on the issue.
I appreciate Rick's response to my suggestion that Roberts might well face a conflict between his judgment about Roe/Casey as stare decisis versus his Catholic conscience. Like Rick, I'm not equipped to apply "cooperation with evil" principles to this particular situation (moral theologians out there, write and advise us!). But my initial reaction is to disagree with his argument that there's no reason to question Roberts on Catholicism because "I [Rick] do not see how it would, or even could, 'conflict[] with the fundamentals of [his] faith' for an appellate judge to decline to overrule a wrongly decided case, even one that has contributed to great evil."
Didn't Justice Kennedy do precisely that in Casey -- decline for stare decisis reasons to overrule the basic abortion right of Roe -- and hasn't he been excoriated for doing so as a Catholic? I strongly expect (although I don't have specific quotes to support it) that many of Kennedy's vocal critics think very much that he committed culpable cooperation with evil by upholding the basic holding of Roe.
Or is the Kennedy situation different because the Casey joint opinion also included some passages defnding Roe on its merits? That seems a very slender reed for distinguishing the two instances, since: (1) The stare decisis reasoning was clearly very important to the joint opinion's conclusion (the opinion several times referred to the author's potential "doubts" about the original correctness of Roe). (2) Whether the ruling rests on stare decisis or on the merits, in either case the justice votes to stand in the way of a law that seeks to prevent a very great evil (we're taking the great wrongness of abortion as a given, of course). Can stare decisis really be sufficient to allow the justuce to take such an active step preserving and defending a great injustice? Indeed, I would have thought that if there were any difference, stare decisis would be a less powerful justification for ruling to protect an evil than is the justification that the Constitution on the merits protects the evil. So I don't think it's implausible at all to think that a justice's commitment to stare decisis could be overridden by (and therefore is in potential conflict with) the fundamentals of the faith, especially on a matter such as this.
Again, I'm not saying that this stare-decisis possibility is enough to justify grilling Roberts about his Catholic conscience concerning abortion. (As I said before, there are many reasons to presume against such religion-related questions.) But I still think the issue is more complicated than Rick concludes.
I think that Rick is probably right when he argues that the likelihood of a conflict between Roberts' religious views on abortion and his interpretation of what the Constitution properly requires is not great enough to justify sensitive inquiries into Robert's Catholicism (inquiries that should be at least somewhat disfavored because they are likely to stir up emotions and prejudices concerning other issues, etc.).
I do think, though, that it's a little more complicated than Rick's argument portrays it. Here's his money quote:
The premise for Governor Cuomo's "I can't impose my personal religious beliefs on the Constitution" is, and has been for two decades, that the Constitution actually requires an near-unlimited abortion license. But, it doesn't. If we were talking about a conflict between religious belief and, say, the requirement that Representatives have attained the age of 25 years -- if we wondered whether Roberts's religion would compel him to require the seating of a 16 year old -- then the potential for that conflict might be worth exploring. But we are not.
I.e., Roberts need not be driven by Catholic faith to reject Roe; he can (and should) reject it merely because it's an incorrect interpretation of the Constitution (unwarranted, as RIck earlier says, by "text. history, or structure"). I certainly agree with this judgment about the wrongness of Roe. But two complications.
First, the issue of stare decisis. There is some possibility that in applying his best understanding of the legal considerations concerning overruling of precedents, Roberts might conclude that there is a case for preserving Roe on stare decisis grounds, even if it was originally wrong. A senator might plausibly ask, "If you reach that conclusion as a matter of stare decisis principles, but this conflicts with the fundamentals of your faith, what will you do?" This possibility -- however unlikely -- fits with my general sense that the extent and contours of Roberts' commitment to stare decisis is the most crucial single issue in the entire upcoming hearings. (And it's a wild-card issue because theories of stare decisis are way underdeveloped compared with theories of constitutional interpretation on the merits.) Perhaps the answer in return is, "Roe is so wrong that Roberts is not going to be drawn to upholding it based on stare decisis considerations." That may be -- again, I certainly don't want to minimize the constitutional wrongness of Roe -- but it nevertheless seems to me that this is more complex than the argument as Rick puts it.
More broadly, the question put to the nominee is not precisely, "If your religious faith conflicts with what the Constitution requires, what will you do?" but rather, "If your religious faith conflicts with your best understanding of what the Constitution requires, what will you do?" What the senators want (and should want) to know is that the nominee will follow his/her best understanding of constitutional method to its logical conclusion, notwithstanding any distortion or misdirection from extra-constitutional sources. So the question is not so much whether Roe is right constitutionally (and a nominee's faith might misdirect him or her to the opposite result). The question is somewhat more subjective: whether the nominee conscientiously, after engaging in his best attempt to interpret the Constitution, would conclude it's right (but then be so misdirected). Thus my reaction is that Rick, in simply pointing out the constitutional wrongness of Roe, is not quite asking the right question; you can't smuggle in your own evaluation of the merits of the issue (however correct that evaluation is). Rather, since the question is whether the (prospective) justice's judgment would be distorted or misdirected, the question is what would Roberts conclude about Roe as a matter of constitutional interpretation. (Again, the answer may be -- and this seems probably right -- that Roberts would himself think Roe wrong, as an original matter, for the same (good) reasons that Rick offers. But again, although this may not change the ultimate conclusion, it does make the argument more complicated, it seems to me.)
Earlier posts by Michael P. and me on Pat Robertson have been tallied on Unpartisan, a "blog aggregator" that collects posts from political blogs concerning prominent issues. They divide blogs crudely into "from the left" and "from the right" (no category for "from the perspective of Catholic legal theory"), and they classify MOJ as from the left. One might think the algorithm producing the classification is based on features of the individual post: for example, on the occurrence of the words "evangelical" and "crackpot" within 12 words of each other (as happened in my post). But actually, according to Unpartisan's FAQ page, classification is of the whole site and "is determined by which types of blogs you link to and which link to you. If the majority of sites that link to you are known to be conservative and the majority of sites that you link to are known to be conservative, you get lumped in with the conservative blogs." This supposedly "tends to work close to 98% of the time" (an oddly-qualified sentence). Rick, Richard, Michael S., and other consistently right-minded MOJers: MOJ ends up on the left even though Rob and I try to help your stats by linking to blogs like Christianity Today and Evangelical Outpost. You better step up your linking! (Smiley face here.)
Andrew Sullivan notes with horror that someone as unbalanced in his views as Pat Robertson ran for President a couple of times and did quite well. If Robertson is still seriously in the loop for Republicans on political issues, that's bad. But there is a recognizable type in American politics, the person who runs a credible campaign for President and then goes loony and squanders all credibility afterwards. Here in Minnesota we have produced two of the great specimens, Harold Stassen for the Republicans and Eugene McCarthy for the Democrats -- both of whom ran a series of increasingly bizarre campaigns for office after their initial credible runs for the presidency.
Actually, this is all leading up to my recommending a fascinating book that I read early this summer, Eugene McCarthy and the Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism (by Dominic Sandbrook, Anchor Books 2004, paperback ed. 2005). Some readers may already know, but I didn't, that McCarthy started out as a Catholic intellectual, teaching political theory at my own University (then College) of St. Thomas (after dropping out of an abbey and seminary) before going into politics. The author traces the varying effects of Catholic social thought on McCarthy, his first political incarnation (Catholic-inspired) as an anti-Communist liberal, and then the later permutations into anti-war candidate in 1968 and eventually, from the late 70s on, quack. The thesis of the book -- that, as suggested by the title, McCarthy's rise and decline are representative of the fortunes of American liberalism in the same period -- is enlightening, especially the idea that McCarthy 1968 marked a decisive shift of Democratic Party energy away from working-class issues and toward the reform emphases of upper-middle-class intellectuals. But the thesis that McCarthy is representative also sits awkwardly with the book's portrayal of McCarthy as unusually mercurial and anti-social, and concerned less with issues than with personal status and slights. At any rate, I commend the book to anyone interested in Catholic social thought and its relation to 20th-century American liberalism, the Democratic Party, etc.
Pat Robertson's TV comments that the U.S. should assassinate Hugo Chavez ("If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it") are a reminder of how easy it is for a crackpot to rise to a place of prominence in the evangelical Protestant world. (These of course aren't the first examples of Robertson making wacked-out statements (go here and jump to to "A controversial public figure").) I don't know how much to be disturbed by this, because Robertson's political influence (for example, in the Christian Coalition) seems to have waned a lot in recent years.
To relate this to our blog's concerns: The crackpot phenomenon is possible because, as pointed out by historian Nathan Hatch (The Democratization of American Christianity), evangelicals have a strong populist streak that permits the rise of leaders who are not necessarily well grounded in the main channel of Christian thought, and who certainly are unconstrained by any broader Christian institutional perspective. "Populist" is pretty euphemistic as applied to Robertson's comments on Chavez, but they do seem to reflect -- as opposed to any sort of Christian thought process -- a gut-level response to "take out" anyone who we Americans think might be a threat to us. In that sense, the comments grow in part out of the general populist nature of American evangelicalism. I tried to explore this a bit in the "Religious Conservatives and the Death Penalty" piece linked at the right:
Unlike Roman Catholics, evangelicals do not have a single institutional body speaking theologically for their community, let alone an individual like the Pope, who so speaks. Instead, American evangelicalism is a complex "mosaic" of many different groups with different leaders who enjoy influence not because of an institutional position, but because of their ability to appeal to the rank-and-file of believers. In the words of historian Nathan Hatch, evangelicalism has historically been a "democratic" movement: decentralized, populist, distrustful of tradition and of formal theological reasoning. As Hatch has shown, these tendencies run as far back as the massive revivals of the early 1800s among common folk, the "Second Great Awakening," and the tendencies remain apparent today. . . .
As Professor Hatch notes, the populist orientation of evangelicalism has always meant that charismatic preachers could attract followers and dominate their thinking, much as charismatic political figures can rise to power through populist appeals to voters. Hatch shows how this "authoritarian mantle" was exercised by some nineteenth-century preachers, but he also sees it in the careers of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. . . .
The reliance on "common sense" intuition has advantages, especially in keeping Christian faith vital among average people rather than just among the committed few. But it also means that evangelicals' religious attitudes can be strikingly shaped by the culture surrounding them rather than by the distinctives of the Christian message. What seems to be simply common sense is typically the product of cultural assumptions so natural that one does not even see that they exist, like the air we breathe. A prime example in modern politics is how so many southern white Protestants failed to overcome the racial prejudices of their region during the civil rights era, notwithstanding the New Testament teaching that "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek." Indeed, it has been argued that evangelical religion became dominant in the South from the 1800s forward only by adopting preexisting features of southern culture, such as an emphasis on honor, masculinity, and the legitimacy of violence. Likewise, because evangelical churches are "democratic" institutions highly accountable to their members, they can be more captive to the community's general social attitudes than is a more hierarchical church. Again, the civil rights era provides an example: Roman Catholic bishops in several southern cities ordered the desegregation of their parochial schools in the early 1950s, a number of years before the general, largely Protestant society in the South accepted the process in public schools.
Fortunately, the decentralized structure of evangelicalism also means that someone like Robertson doesn't run the whole show. And the institutional-hierarchical orientation of Catholicism certainly isn't optimal in all situations; it can tend in the direction of monolithic and slow responses in some cases where flexibility may be more appropriate. But the Catholic structure is generally better at discouraging a bishop from developing or publicizing wacked-out views like Robertson's. (Which makes it all the more disturbing that the structure failed, at the very least, to constrain some bishops in their mishandling of child sex abuse cases.)
