Month: November 2004

Let me try and give a concrete example of why I’m not clear on the practical upshot of the realist/sectarian distinction.

Last night I was re-reading Stanley Hauerwas’s essay “Abortion Theologically Understood”. His main contention is that the church should not get bogged down in the debate over rights, whether that be the “right to life” or the “right to choose.” Rather, the church should be a community of radical hospitality ready to welcome new life whenever and wherever it appears.

This means, in very concrete terms, that churches should support – financially, emotionally, and spiritually – the women in their midst who are facing unexpected or difficult pregnancies and be willing to continue to support those women and their children.

What it means to be the church is to be a group of people called out of the world, and back into the world, to embody the hope of the Kingdom of God. Children are not necessary for the growth of the Kingdom, because the church can call the stranger into her midst. That makes both singleness and marriage possible vocations. If everybody has to marry, then marriage is a terrible burden. But the church does not believe that everybody has to marry. Even so, those who do not marry are also parents within the church, because the church is now the true family. The church is a family into which children are brought and received. It is only within that context that it makes sense for the church to say, “We are always ready to receive children. We are always ready to receive children.” The people of God know no enemy when it comes to children.

I think this is right on the money and that the church should strive to be the kind of community where no woman ever feels like she has to have an abortion.

However, Hauerwas gives an interesting answer to a question:

QUESTION #1: What about abortion in American society at large? That is, in your opinion, what would be the best abortion law for our society?

HAUERWAS: The church is not nearly at the point where she can concern herself with what kind of abortion law we should have in the United States or even in the state of North Carolina. Instead, we should start thinking about what it means for Christians to be the kind of community that can make a witness to the wider society about these matters. […]

In this kind of a setting, Christians witness to wider society first of all not by lobbying for a law against abortion, but by welcoming the children that the wider society does not want. Part of that witness might be to say to our pro-choice friends, “You are absolutely right. I don’t think that any poor woman ought to be forced to have a child that she cannot afford. So let’s work hard for an adequate child allowance in this country.” That may not be entirely satisfactory, but that is one approach.

Now this is the part I find puzzling. Why can’t I agree that a primary task of the church is to show the rest of society what it means to be a community that welcomes new life and support (say) a partial-birth abortion ban? Can’t we do both?

In fairness to Hauerwas, I don’t know where he stands on such a ban, but if we can lobby for a child allowance (or a living wage or whatever) why not also legal restrictions on the killing of the unborn? The “sectarian” position seems at times to accept the liberal boilerplate that you can’t “impose your religious views” on the rest of society. But it’s not as though only Christians can have reasons for opposing abortion (or supporting economic justice, caring for the environment, etc.). If such a consensus is possible, why not take advantage of it?

One of the central issues Christians have to grapple with in considering their political involvement in the world is the theological or moral status of the social institutions they might seek to influence. Preeminently this means the government, but it may also include corporations and other business, non-profit agencies and other institutional actors in society.

There seem to be two competing visions currently holding sway among Christian thinkers. The first position I would associate with mainline Protestants and most Catholics. Its comes in both Catholic and Calvinist varieties, but the essential claim is that the institutions of society are part of God’s good (though fallen) creation, and like everything else they are groaning to be redeemed. What is required is for Christians to “baptize” these institutions and reform them so that they can serve the ends God intends for creation.

On this understanding, the state in particular is ordained to guard and nurture the common good. The use of political force is thought to be morally neutral in itself, and the task of Christians should be to see that it, as much as possible, is used for good. This was the position of Methodist ethicist Paul Ramsey who argued that the judicious use of force could be the expression of Christian love of neighbor in the political realm.

On this view it makes sense for Christians to cooperate with those who don’t share their particular faith commitments. Often political advocacy will take the form of an appeal to natural law, the idea being that Christian morality is more or less continuous with what everyone already knows through unaided reason.

This view, which might be called “realism”, comes in conservative and progressive varieties, but its adherents are united in seeing the basic institutions of society as God-ordained and amenable to progressive improvement.

The alternative vision is associated with a more “sectarian” position that stresses the distinctiveness of Christian morality and the way of life that followers of Jesus are called to. John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas are probably the best-known advocates of this position (though I think it’s fair to say there are differences between them).

The sectarian sees the state and other social structures and institutions as the “powers” referred to by St. Paul. They are under Christ’s dominion, but remain rebellious and will not be fully subdued until the Last Day. The rebelliousness of the powers is displayed in their proneness to violence and reliance upon coercive means. But Christians are empowered to live outside of the domination of the powers.

Adherents of this view are thus more reluctant to become too entangled with state and other institutions. They believe Christians should renounce violence and coercion and are often pacifists. The primary task of Christians is to cultivate a distinctive way of life that will embody an alternative set of social practices such as forgiveness, truth-telling, nonviolence and the sharing of goods. The influence that Christians have on the wider society consists largely of providing an attractive alternative to the world’s ways.

Sectarians do allow for the church to address the powers directly and believe that she should act as the conscience of society, calling the secular state to heed its better instincts and higher principles. But this happens on a pragmatic and ad hoc basis; the sectarian has no blueprint to offer for the just society that could be put into effect by political authorities. (I discussed Yoder’s approach to witnessing to the state in more detail here.)

The “realists” criticize the sectarians for irresponsibly withdrawing from public life in order to cultivate their own garden of virtue. The sectarians respond that they are simply trying to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus; they think the realists have sold out and forfeited their distinctive Christian voice. Moreover, the sectarians would say that the church has the greatest impact on society when it acts as a faithful witness to God’s kingdom.

As Yoder says:

The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience. The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and the other kinds of power in every human conflict; the triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys. The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection.

Both of these positions could be seen as a response to the gradual “de-Christianization” of the West. The realists want to re-assert a natural law morality that they believe provided the moral underpinning of our civilization, while the sectarians argue that Christianity had been co-opted by the “Constantinian” establishment of Christianity as the official or semi-official religion of the West. They see the ending of this establishment as an opportunity for the church to be more authentically Christian.

One might be forgiven for thinking that choosing between these two paradigms is often a function in part of temperament. People of a more “radical” persuasion seem to be attracted to the sectarian option. This includes people on the far “left” wing of Christian thought as well as ultra-traditionalists who emphasize the discontinuity between the church and modern society. Realists tend to be people who are more or less comfortable with modernity and its institutions even if they often strongly object to certain aspects of our contemporary society.

The challenge, it seems to me, is to have one’s political stance informed by cogent theological and biblical reasoning rather than a pre-ordained commitment to a particular political allegiance. I’m attracted to the sectarian vision with its demands for radical discipleship, but I’m also wary of leaving the public sphere to the worst excesses of modernity and the culture of death. And it’s not clear that simply splitting the difference is a possibility either.

What is also not clear to me is where the sectarians and the realists will part ways on specific matters of public policy. When it comes to taking a position on a particular war or piece of legislation, sectarians and realists often seem able to make common cause. Does this indicate that there is less daylight between their positions than they might want to think? After all, both agree that Christians can legitimately seek to influence the conduct of the wider society. I think part of the problem is that I don’t yet clearly understand the full implications of each position.

Bill Keezer comments on this post:

We have to be a bit careful here. Paul in his second letter to the Thessalonians states that those who will not work should not eat. Protecting the poor from predation and protecting them from the consequences of bad decisions are two different things that often are conflated. This is at the root of many welfare state disasters. I do not think it straightforward, if possible, to justify continual handouts from scripture. I think it necessary to investigate more closely the Old Testament concept of justice. It does not necessarity imply rights as it does today.

I think Bill is right here in that some welfare policies are actually counterproductive and fail to help those they’re aimed at. But this, it seems to me, only increases the responsibility of those of us to whom much has been given. Someone who makes bad decisions is in just as much need of help as a hard-working member of the “deserving” poor. It will be a different kind of help, and perhaps not a kind of help best delivered by government bureaucracy. It might involve, for instance, trying to change the environment of children who grow up thinking that dropping out of high school to have a baby or dealing drugs are good ideas.

When I talk about “rights” what I mean is that the poor have a claim on the rest of us for help. How we should respond to that claim will differ with circumstances.

On a related note, see here for a discussion of the effectiveness of recent welfare reform measures.

From the ever-sensible Steven Waldman:

The idea that this was a victory for people who care about morality over those who don’t is galling to liberals because, for many of them, the number one issue in this election was Iraq — and their opposition to the incumbent administration was almost entirely grounded in moral concerns. It’s not like liberals objected because their own family members were dying. Rather, they believe that launching any war unless absolutely justified is profoundly immoral, a position also articulated by the Pope. One can disagree, but I would love the opportunity to watch Anne Coulter tell the Pope his opposition to the war isn’t based on morality. Liberals also believe that a morally indefensible policy was sold dishonestly – a gross moral breach compounded by another. […]

Liberals tend to think that right to life activists are motivated by a desire to control women’s bodies or sex lives, and to impose a religious doctrine. Whether you agree with it or not, the heart of the pro-life position is the belief that life begins at conception, and therefore abortion is murder. Liberals who don’t share that the foundational assumption have a hard time understanding the passion of pro-life voters. Yet they easily admire the radical abolitionists of the 1860s — who were as “rabid” and doctrinaire in their opposition to slavery as pro-lifers are today. Liberals should ask themselves, if they honestly believed that life began at conception, wouldn’t they do exactly what the pro-life forces do?

Much more here.

(via Political Animal)

Steven Riddle at Flos Carmeli has a thoughtful discussion of just war vs. pacifism.

One thing that I think needs to be kept in mind in discussions about just war is that, strictly speaking, we should talk about just (or justifiable) acts of war rather than “just wars” simpliciter. As Paul Ramsey argued, war is nothing more than an extension of political force, and is therefore as subject to moral evaluation as any other political act.

For instance, World War II is often held up as the paradigm case of a just war. But the Allies committed acts in the course of the war that clearly violated jus in bello criteria such as the bombing of civilian centers in Germany and Japan. And some have argued that the insistence on unconditional surrender is itself a violation of just war standards because that demands that the opponent give up its sovereignty, effectively ending its existence as a nation. This is destroying the enemy rather than stopping the wrong he is committing.

This doesn’t show that the Allies’ going to war wasn’t, on the whole, justified, but it does remind us that discrete acts in the course of even a justifiable military campaign have to be evaluated one by one. A just cause doesn’t give us a blank check.

Theologian William T. Cavanaugh says that Christians should not look to the state to defend the common good:

The nation-state is neither community writ large nor the protector of smaller communal spaces, but rather originates and grows over against truly common forms of life. This is not necessarily to say that the nation-state cannot and does not promote and protect some goods, or that any nation-state is entirely devoid of civic virtue, or that some forms of ad hoc cooperation with the government cannot be useful. It is to suggest that the nation-state is simply not in the common good business. At its most benign, the nation-state is most realistically likened, as in MacIntyre’s apt metaphor, to the telephone company, a large bureaucratic provider of goods and services that never quite provides value for money.

The problem, as MacIntyre notes, is that the nation-state presents itself as so much more; namely, as the keeper of the common good and repository of sacred values that demands sacrifice on its behalf. The longing for genuine communion that Christians recognize at the heart of any truly common life is transferred onto the nation-state. Civic virtue and the goods of common life do not simply disappear; as Augustine saw, the earthly city flourishes by producing a distorted image of the heavenly city. The nation-state is a simulacrum of common life, where false order is parasitical on true order. In a bureaucratic order whose main function is to adjudicate struggles for power between various factions, a sense of unity is produced by the only means possible: sacrifice to false gods in war. The nation-state may be understood theologically as a kind of parody of the Church, meant to save us from division.

The urgent task of the Church, then, is to demystify the nation-state and to treat it like the telephone company. At its best, the nation-state may provide goods and services that contribute to a certain limited order—mail delivery is a positive good. The state is not the keeper of the common good, however, and we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. The Church must break its imagination out of captivity to the nation-state. The Church must constitute itself as an alternative social space, and not simply rely on the nation-state to be its social presence. The Church needs, at every opportunity, to “complexify” space, that is, to promote the creation of spaces in which alternative economies and authorities flourish.

Last week Keith Burgess-Jackson posted a short entry that took liberals to task for invoking Jesus in support of programs to redistribute wealth:

I’m tired of hearing liberals claim that Christianity supports wealth redistribution of the sort Democrats propose. Perhaps I’m ignorant, but I don’t know of any occasion in the Bible in which Jesus made political recommendations. He appears to have told his followers that they should distribute their excess wealth to the needy, but he didn’t tell them to take other people’s wealth (against their will) and distribute it to the needy. That’s theft! In short, Jesus was addressing individuals, not plumping for egalitarian tax policies. He was persuading, not coercing. He was a moralist, not a politician. Perhaps if liberals spent more time giving of themselves and less time trying to coerce others into giving, the world would be a better place by their standards.

I think a couple of points of clarification might be in order. First, unless we’re willing to say that all taxation is theft (and thus become anarchists), it’s hard to say why taxation to fund anti-poverty programs is any more objectionable than taxation to fund highways, or NASA or the war in Iraq.

Secondly, and more to the point, we have to ask what, from a Christian perspective, are the duties of government with respect to the poor? Keith is right that we don’t have much in the way of direct political pronouncements from Jesus in the New Testament. Though, it should be pointed out, there is the bit about rendering to Caesar, which has usually been interpreted as a command to pay the taxes that are due.

Moreover, we have to remember that Jesus and his disciples lived in a time and place where participation in the policy decisions of the government was out of the question. As citizens in a democratic polity we have greater freedom (and therefore a greater responsibility) to try to influence government policy for the common good.

Most fundamentally though, we have to remember that the God of Jesus is the God of the whole Bible. And the God of the Bible certainly has a lot to say about the way we should treat the poor. In the Old Testament in particular, God demands that we show justice toward the poor, not merely charity. Rulers are explicitly enjoined to defend the rights of the poor and vulnerable, and duties to the poor were incorporated into the Old Testament law.

But to say that treatment of the poor is a matter of justice and not just charity seems to imply that the poor have rights to, at least, the basic goods needed to live (e.g. food, shelter, basic medical care) and to participate in the life of the community. A society that fails to provide this could not be considered just. And if the government is that agency charged with defending the rights of its citizens, then it’s hard to see why the government should not act as the guarantor of last-resort of these basic rights.

This doesn’t mean that existing government programs are the best way to help the poor. It appears that some of them have been counterproductive in many ways. And it also doesn’t settle the question of what level of government (local, state, federal or some combination) is best equipped to address poverty. But it does seem to mean that there is a public moral responsibility to combat avoidable, involuntary poverty.

Also, the fact that the government has responsibilities in this area doesn’t excuse the churches and other institutions from engaging in acts of charity. The church does well not to expect the state to usher in the Kingdom of God. In fact, the church provides a more credible witness to the state when it can point to how the poor in its own midst are cared for and how everyone’s needs are met. But the church can still work for relative improvements and incremental advances in securing justice.

At the end of the day this is just one more instance of the question of whether Christians or people of other faiths have the right to bring their religiously-informed “moral values” to bear on matters of public policy. If they can do so with respect to abortion or same-sex marriage, why shouldn’t they do the same with respect to poverty, a concern that is far more prevalent in the Bible?

Since the new conventional wisdom seems to have us all sorting ourselves into our little red and blue camps, I thought it would be a good time to revisit this essay from Frederica Mathewes-Green.

The overriding conflict of our time is not that between democracies and totalitarianism, not between those who are for human freedom and those who seek to repress it. Rather the overriding conflict of our time is the same as that from the beginning for it is the conflict between those that would remain loyal to God’s kingdom and those that would side with the world. And the world is exactly those people and institutions claiming that Christians too must be willing to choose sides and kill in order to preserve the social orders in which they find themselves. As Christians when we accept that alternative it surely means that we are no longer the church that witnesses to God’s sovereignty over all nations, but instead we have become part of the world.

—Stanley Hauerwas

Here’s Wesley J. Smith on the latest developments in the “right to die” movement:

The international euthanasia movement’s first principle is radical individualism. The idea is that we each own our own body and hence should be able to do what we choose with our physical self — including destroy it. Not only that, but if we want to die, liberty dictates that we should have ready access to a “good death,” a demise that is peaceful and pain-free. […]

Phillip Nitschke is another prominent euthanasia advocate who reveals the euthanasia movement’s radical individualist mindset. Nitschke is known as the Jack Kevorkian of Australia, and for good reason: He believes in death-on-demand. And like Kevorkian, he has not limited his “death counseling” to the terminally ill. This included, most notoriously, a woman named Nancy Crick who made headlines when she announced on Australian television and internationally through her website that she would commit assisted suicide because she had terminal cancer. But when her autopsy showed she was cancer free, Nitschke admitted he and Crick had known all along that she wasn’t dying but pronounced that medical fact “irrelevant” because she wanted to die.

Nitschke’s radical individualist mindset was demonstrated most vividly in a June 5, 2001, interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, in which he asserted that suicide facilitation should be available to “anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved [and] the troubled teen.” Toward achieving this end, funded abundantly by the Hemlock Society of the United States (now merged with Compassion in Dying into the newly named Compassion and Choice), Nitschke experimented with developing a “peaceful pill” that could be used to commit a pain-free suicide. According to Nitschke, the peaceful pill was to be for anyone who wanted it, even asserting in NRO that it “should be available in the supermarket so that those old enough to understand death could obtain death peacefully at the time of their choosing.”[…]

United States advocates like to pretend that legalized facilitated death will always be limited to the actively dying when nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering. But this is highly unlikely. Once one accepts the noxious notion that killing is an acceptable answer to the problem of human suffering, how can it possibly be limited to the terminally ill?

After all, disabled people, the elderly, and those with devastating existential grief caused by, say, the sudden death of family members, may suffer more profoundly — and for a longer period of time — than the terminally ill. If “self-deliverance” is, in principle, okay for those who experience less suffering for a shorter duration, then how would we justify denying termination to those who would seem to have a greater claim to receiving help to die?

I think Smith is right to point to a kind of radical individualism as one of the philosophical underpinnings of this movement. I would add to that the idea that human life is only worth living if it is devoid of suffering. An idea more diametrically opposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition is hard to imagine. Even paganism found nobility in suffering. If we make the lack of suffering the sine qua non of life we will truly have become Nietzschean last men.