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.
Monday, November 25, 2013
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.
I am grateful to Michael for noting yesterday's Feast of Christ the King. In my experience, preachers in Catholic parishes don't know quite what to do with this Feast. Usually, the day's "message" or "theme" has been (again, in my experience) somewhat privatized, and homilists have tried to translate the idea of Christ's "kingship" into (something like) the importance of making sure that our lives are not ruled by other gods and that we commit to "putting Jesus first in our lives" (and, certainly, we should).
And yet . . . especially in light of the current (and much needed) focus in the Church on religious liberty and the realities of both aggressive secularism and persecution, it's worth (re-)reading Quas Primas, the encyclical of Pope Pius XI that instituted the feast day in 1925, and remembering that this institution's purpose sounded more in political theology than in personal piety and devotion. This Feast is, among other things, a reminder that government is not all, that there are things which are not Caesar's, and that everything, in the end, is "under God.
This one-page bulletin insert, "That He Would Reign in Our Hearts," put out this year by the USCCB, does a good job, I think, of tying together the "public" and "private" dimensions of the Feast.
Viva Cristo Rey!
Friday, November 22, 2013
I've learned about an interesting new project called CREDO, which is "a society of research economists interested in the conversation between the Catholic faith and economic research as it applies to the economy, the Church, and broader society":
The five-fold goals of CREDO are:
- To foster a community of Catholic scholars interested in this conversation
- To promote the dissemination of economic knowledge and findings into the public discourse of the broader segments of the Church leadership and laity
- To foster awareness and reflection on the principles of Catholic social thought and their relationship to the normative evaluation of the economy
- To help mentor young Catholic research economists or others interested in these areas
- To act as an available resource for competent, non-ideological, non-partisan economic expertise for Church leaders and organizations engaged in social and economic issues.
Check it out!
