Month: May 2005

Memorial Day has occasioned some provocative reflections on the nature of what allegiance, if any, the Christian should give to the secular political order. Pastor John Wright (via Eric) called this the “most dangerous weekend of the year” because it tempts Christians to buy into the mythos of the nation-state, something Pr. Wright deems a parody of the Gospel, complete with its saints, martyrs, and sacrificial economy.

On a similar note, Dwight at Versus Populum discussed an essay by Michael Budde (from the collection The Church as Counterculture, edited by Budde and Robert W. Brimlow) that contends that Christians should withdraw their allegiance from the nation-state altogether, because it divides them by national loyalty and becuase, whatever good the nation-state does, the price it demands is a willingness to kill in its defense.

I think these kinds of arguments often grow out of a “thick” eccleisiology as touted by thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas. On this understanding, the church is taken to be a new, alternative polity that in some sense replaces the polities of the world, at least as far as Christians are concerned (though it appears, as Dwight notes, that Budde would go further than Hauerwas in advocating a kind of Christian withdrawal from secular politics).

On this view the primary (only?) allegiance of a Christian must be to God and his church, not to any earthly community. For Budde it is especially urgent that Christians not participate in or in any way bless the state’s wielding of lethal force. He thinks this is too high of a price to pay for even the supposedly good things that states do such as providing relief to the poor:

If you want to use Caesar’s tools, you must commit to doing more than praying for Caesar’s health–you must be willing to kill (or hire killers) on Caesar’s behalf. Lobbying, voting, legislating, and the like all stand as endorsements, legitimations, and blessings of state-based power. Christians might have an easier time seeing the stakes if the tradeoffs were put more starkly: for instance, how many foreign deaths are acceptable for the defense of Social Security? How many of other people’s children may be sacrificed to protect aid to indigent children in this country? The tradeoffs are never so obvious or so simplistic, but states do offer a roundabout version of the choice to Christians and others: if you want the “good” state (or clan or imperial) programs, you must commit yourself to protecting the state from challenges to its health …. In the world of states, empires, power-wielding clans, and the like, the “good” programs are options, add-ons, luxuries; the essential elements are those of coercion, control, and power that preserve the state itself. Whatever the regime type, in a crisis welfare programs will be abolished long before the police, army, and the prisons. (p. 223)

Budde makes a powerful case, but I wonder if he goes to the opposite extreme from those who would deify the state and demand unconditional allegiance. All Christians agree that there are limits to the obedience we can give to the political authorities, but most would disagree that this demands total abstention from politics.

One such was Jean Lasserre, the French Calvinist and pacifist who greatly influenced Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Lasserre believed that Christians should never kill, but this didn’t mean that they owed no allegiance to the political authorities. In his book War and the Gospel, Lasserre sets out the limits of the Christian’s obedience to the state. Depending on the circumstances, the Christian attitude toward the political authorities can take one of three forms:

1. When the State in its activities and its orders does not violate God’s order, the Church will take an attitude of benevolent submission towards it, implying scrupulous obedience of the State’s orders by Christians.

2. But when the State violates God’s order on one point or another, the Church would be unfaithful to its own ministry and its responsibility towards the State, if it did not clearly protest, reminding the State that it is the servant of God for men’s good, not to aggravate their discontent or their disorder. This protest can be embodied in definite and significant acts. However, Christians must patiently endure without rebellion the injustices of which they may themselves be the victims at the hands of the State.

3. When the State, not content with violating God’s order, tries to make Christians take a personal part in such violation, the Church and Christians must respectfully but openly disobey that demand by the State. This is the price of their fidelity to Jesus Christ.

For Lasserre, the Ten Commandments provide the standard by which Christians are to judge whether the state is violating God’s order. There aren’t “two moralities,” one for the State and one for the church; rather, the Ten Commandments provide a kind of “floor” beneath which the conduct of the state should not fall:

Gospel morality is above all positive, proceeding from more or less unlimited declarations: ‘And as ye would that men should do unto you, do ye also to them likewise’; political morality is more negative, proceeding from prohibitions: ‘Thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal,’ etc; but they do not contradict each other. It may not always be easy to bring out in practice the agreement between the demands of these two spheres of Christian morality; but in principle there is still harmony between them. The Decalogue is an indispensable control standard for both political and private morality.

Of course this does not at once resolve all problems; there will always be border‑line cases where making a decision is terribly delicate and difficult. But there is one thing which can be said: if my thesis is sound, it at last makes possible the Church’s prophetic ministry: in the name of the Decalogue the Church can appreciate just when the State, servant of God for man’s good, starts betraying its mission, becomes a demonic factor of disorder, and at once forfeits the right to Christians’ obedience. The Church can protest against the State’s abuses by reference not to an abstract conception of man, but to the Ten Commandments‑which are concrete enough to be comprehensible to any State. Thanks to them the Church can make the indispensable critical judgment on the State’s laws and demands‑while leaving it a no less indispensable margin for liberty of action. By fighting‑with spiritual arms, of course, including respectful disobedience‑to make the State itself respect the Decalogue, the Church is rendering it the immense service of recalling to it what are the limits of the political order it is charged by God to establish and preserve.

The political authorities have an indispensable role to play – namely, establishing and preserving political order. In that sense, the church doesn’t replace the state; the political authorities have their own legitimate function. However, the Decalogue provides the parameters that the state may not transgress in carrying out its God-appointed task. He recognizes that states often will transgress these boudaries, and when they do the Christian’s obligation of obedience finds its limit.

Lasserre takes this to include the sixth commandment in its full rigor: the state is not permitted to kill even acting in its legitimate capacity as protector of its citizens. And Christians do not owe the state the obedience of killing on its behalf:

According to the Scriptures, a political order conforming to the will of God is one where, among other things, human life is respected and protected. … Murder is always a major disorder, because it is a violation of God’s Law. We know today, as Calvin did not, that the burning of Servet was a disorder; what would Calvinists give that this fire had never been lit! When the State kills, it is contributing to disorder, even if apparently, according to human wisdom, it is limiting disorder. By killing, it adds an extra disorder to those it claims to be putting down. The sixth commandment has another relevance to politics which will lead us to the same conclusion. We have seen that if constraint is indispensable to the State for carrying out its function, the degree of violence or cruelty implied in the use of this constraint is by no means a matter of indifference. There is a certain limit beyond which that constraint ceases to contribute to order in society. When the State is too brutal, it becomes itself a factor of disorder. The spectacle of what goes on in totalitarian countries is an obvious demonstration of this. Our government perhaps has the right to order that a factory occupied by strikers be forcibly cleared, but when people are killed in this police operation, everyone feels that the State has failed and that the disorder is aggravated, not diminished. For in the sight of God a human life has more value than a factory or a juridical principle. It is the same with the State’s constraint as with certain toxic drugs, which are useful in small doses but lethal in strong doses. But where do you find this fine the State must not pass? Without going into the problem of torture, I believe the line is given us by the sixth commandment, which properly signifies this: when the State reaches the point of killing, it has already passed the degree of violence allowed it for maintaining order in the society it has charge over. By killing, it increases disorder and injustice, whatever its declared or secret intention. Whether it lets itself be maddened by fear, or is clever enough to adopt Caiaphas’ aphorism (e.g. when making war), the State betrays its true mission by shedding blood. It abuses its power, imagines that it is protecting, but is really destroying.

Lasserre doesn’t even deny the state the right to make use of some force, but lethal force he sees as a violation of the sixth commandment. He also commends forms of non-violent resistance as possible alternatives to defending a nation from invasion with lethal force that should be explored.

I think Lasserre’s perspective provides a helpful corrective to the view of someone like Budde (even if one doesn’t go all the way in embracing pacifism). The advent of the new age through Christ’s death and resurrection certainly “de-sacralizes” the claims of all earthly authorities and relativizes the allegiance owed by Christians to those authorities. The loyalty owed to any political community is, at best, penultimate. But Christians can still support the state in its legitimate functions of creating and preserving a political order and earthly peace. This stance seems to avoid both “sectarianism” and making the Gospel irrelevant to the conduct of politics by invoking a kind of “two-tiered” morality.

Speaking of abortion (and I’m not usually that interested in discussing it on the ol’ blog, but we’ll make an exception today), one thing that puzzles me is these congressmen who claim to be “pro-life” but favor embryonic stem cell research:

Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R., Calif.), a conservative who described himself as “100 percent pro-life,” choked back tears as he recalled meeting a seriously ill 6-year-old girl at a congressional hearing on medical research.

“I don’t want another 6-year-old to die,” he said haltingly. “I want to save life.”

Rep. Lane Evans (D., Ill.) endorsed the bill in a voice distorted by Parkinson’s disease. Rep. James R. Langevin (D., R.I.), another self-described “pro-life” lawmaker, spoke from his wheelchair about the promise of stem-cell research.

“Stem-cell research gives us hope and a reason to believe,” he said. “I believe one day a child with diabetes will no longer face a lifetime of painful shots and tests. I believe one day families will no longer watch in agony as a loved one with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s declines. And I believe one day I will walk again.”

I’m not saying you couldn’t make that into a coherent position, but it’s pretty much the opposite of my intuitions. As far as I’m concerned, not funding the industrial-scale creation, destruction, and harvesting of nascent human life is pretty obviously wrong, not to mention creepy.

Abortion, however, I find to be much more of a gut-wrenching issue. Mainly because one important aspect of it involves a person’s control over her own body.

But if these “pro-life” law makers think that it’s wrong to destroy/kill an embryo in a woman’s womb, how can it possibly be ok to do it in a petri dish? What’s the relevant difference? Since stopping (or even just failing to fund!) ESCR doesn’t involve the kind of coercion that would be required in outlawing abortion, it seems, to me at any rate, much more clear cut.

(Though props for consistency to, inter alia., Reps. DeLay, Burgess, Akin, Hyde, and Oberstar.)

That was the claim made by Christian ethicist Glen Stassen. Stassen and others inferred that an increase in “economic injustice” because of Bush’s policies was the culprit.

But according to this (via Amy Welborn) that claim is, well, false:

Politicians from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Howard Dean have recently contended that abortions have increased since George W. Bush took office in 2001.

This claim is false. It’s based on an an opinion piece that used data from only 16 states. A study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute of 43 states found that abortions have actually decreased.

(Needless to say, the Alan Guttmacher Institute is hardly a bastion of anti-abortion propaganda!)

In Slate William Saletan argues that President Bush is being inconsistent in opposing embryonic stem cell research (or at least federal funding thereof) and supporting the death penalty. According to Saletan, if Bush thinks it’s wrong to “take a life in order to save a life” he ought to extend that logic to the death penalty.

Matthew Yglesias mentions the obvious rejoinder, namely that the death penalty involves the taking of a guilty life (or at least it’s supposed to), whereas human embryos, if you agree they are fully human lives, are innocent and can’t be said to deserve death. However, Yglesias also points out that hardly anyone thinks that it’s always wrong to cause the deaths of innocents, since during war most people accept that it’s permissible to kill some number of innocent people, at least unintentionally. This, however, led to some confusion in the comments thread, with people wondering who is “really” innocent. Someone even mentioned that according to the doctrine of Original Sin, no one is really innocent.

This misses the point, though. The distinction between guilty and innocent for the purposes of just war theory has very little to do with who, if anyone, deserves death. This is why the combatant/non-combatant distinction, while not perfect, is preferable.

The point is that just war theory licenses lethal force only against those who are actively taking part in some act of aggression. This is why a conscripted soldier, who in terms of desert may be just as innocent as a civilian, is a legitimate target, but someone going to his job in a pencil factory isn’t. The goal is to stop the aggression, not to inflict punishment on those who most “deserve” it. The reason that it’s wrong to directly target the innocent (i.e. usually civilians, but also, e.g. the wounded) is that they aren’t a threat.

Granted the line can become fuzzy. One might argue that a civilian working in a munitions factory is a legitimate target. But this doesn’t show that there are no clear-cut cases. A nursing home is not a legitimate target even if all the residents support their government’s war policies and are perhaps less “innocent” than the conscript soldier.

This is different from the death penalty, though, since the offender is already in custody and presumably no longer engaged in the act which might require lethal force to stop. The death penalty is usually justified on the grounds of its deterrence effect and/or on the grounds that the offender deserves to be executed on retributive grounds. In the latter case moral guilt is obviously crucial, but that makes the case different from that of war.

Joseph “Jody” Bottum has an article in this month’s First Things on what he calls “the new fusionism” – the alliance between pro-lifers and neoconservative foreign policy hawks. The “old” fusionism, of course, was the alliance between libertarians and traditionalists that formed the core of the post-war conservative movement. National Review theoretician Frank S. Meyer was the most forceful exponent of “fusionism” – the idea that there were good philosophical, not just tactical or strategic, reasons for libertarians and traditionalists to form a political alliance.

Bottum concedes that it’s possible to be a hawk on the war on terrorism and pro-choice (e.g. Rudy Giuliani, Joseph Lieberman) and, conversely, to be anti-abortion and opposed to the “maximalist” view of the war on terror (Pat Buchanan, John Paul II). Nevertheless, he thinks that there are good philosophical (not just political) reasons for opponents of abortion and proponents of a forceful foreign policy aimed at defeating Islamic terrorism and fostering a broader democratic revolution in the Middle East and beyond to be on the same side:

[A]t the level of political theory, there’s a reasonable connection between what we do at home and what we do abroad—or, at least, between the attitudes that cause us to enact certain domestic agendas and the attitudes that drive our foreign policy. A nation that cannot summon the political will to ban even one particularly gruesome form of abortion is unlikely to persevere in the grueling work of building international democracy simply because it seems the moral thing to do. And a nation that cannot bring itself to believe its founding ideals are true for others will probably prove unable to hold those ideals for itself.

The abolition of abortion and the active advance of democracy have more in common, I believe, than is usually thought. But even if they are utterly separate philosophically, this much is true: They both require reversing the failure of nerve that has lingered in America since at least the 1970s, and success in one may well feed success in the other.

The goal in either case is to restore confidence in—well, what, exactly? Not our own infallible rightness, surely. But neither can we live any longer with the notion of our own infallible wrongness. We need to restore belief in the possibility of being right. There’s a reason the leftist Christian magazine Sojourners started life in the 1970s as something called the Post-American. Many religious activists in those days seemed to have reached a point where they couldn’t tell an admirable patriotism from the murderous ideologies of nationalism—and, besides, if you squinted hard enough, social defeatism looked like a secular version of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. The result was hardly what they hoped for: a cynical policy of Realpolitik abroad and a culture of death at home.

The connection, then, seems to be a desire for a renewed moral confidence, an ability to make judgments, to call evil by its name. And a shared opposition to the enervating moral relativism that (supposedly) infects the Left.

Bottum concludes:

The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right—this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals. These facts still remain: The sense of national purpose regained by forceful response to the attacks of September 11 could help summon the will to halt the slaughter of a million unborn children a year. And the energy of the pro-life fight—the fundamental moral cause of our time—may revitalize belief in the great American experiment.

There are any number of criticisms that could be offered of Mr. Bottum’s analysis. For starters, some conservatives might (and have) questioned whether a nation that permits the slaughter of millions of unborn children is fit to spread its way of life accross the globe.

More fundamentally, though, Bottum seems to me to be arguing against a strawman. Most people who dissent from the neoconservative project of global democratic “revolution from above” (as ersatz neocon Christopher Hitchens has called it) do not think Islamic terrorism or extremism are good things. And most of them think the U.S. has the right and duty to prosecute a vigorous defense of its citizens against the threat of terrorism. Where they disagree is in thinking that purusing a vast scheme of regime change and nation building is either necessary or possible. Recall that it was the threat of weapons of mass destruction being passed to terrorists that generated the support for the Iraq war. All the talk of liberation and democracy was ancillary and largely after the fact.

I also find it strange that Bottum, who I believe is a Catholic, seems so unconcerned that his own church fails to see the connection between an aggressive moralistic foreign policy and a culture of life:

No one could accuse the Catholic Church, for instance, of being soft on the life issues, but the Vatican was strongly opposed to the United States’ intervention in Iraq—to the point of hosting a state visit in Rome and Assisi by Saddam Hussein’s vicious deputy, Tariq Aziz, in February 2003. Much of the Roman curia seems to have fallen into a functional pacifism that threatens a damaging loss of the traditional Catholic theory of just war. But, even with such confusions set aside, this much is obviously true: Every war, just or not, involves killing. Though the doctrine of what used to be called the “seamless garment of life” has worn threadbare over the years, there is surely a coherent position that insists on opposition to both the culture of death and American intervention in Iraq.

The accusation of “functional pacifism” is a common one. It seems to mean that the Church’s teachings on just war are so stringent that they rule out virtually all modern wars. And this is supposed to count as a criticism of the theory rather than an indictment of modern war! Does Bottum think just war theory is legitimate only if it permits a certain number of wars? Or only if it blesses all American wars?

I don’t deny that there was a good humanitarian case to be made for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. The arguments from Iraq’s “sovereignty” seemed pretty disingenuous. But can Christians concerned about the sanctity of life brush aside the tens of thousands of casualities that the Iraq war has caused as a mere “side effect”? I think Bottum owes us a critique of just war theory, or at least an account of how the destruction wrought by the war comports with the requirements of proportionality and discrimination.

It’s the refusal to take seriously the relationship between means and ends that I find most troubling about the neoconservative approach to foreign policy. It’s almost as though as long as the ends are exalted enough (democracy! freedom!), we can dispense with worrying about the means we use to acheive them and whether they are morally permissible. One of the reasons that so many Christians are staunchly opposed to abortion and other aspects of the “culture of death” is that they beleive, with St. Paul, that we can never “do evil that good may result.” Some acts, such as torture or the intentional killing of innocents, are always forbidden. They will be rightly skeptical of any foreign policy that asks us to be complicit in the commission of such evils.

“So what did you do on your trip to Canada?” Why, saw Revenge of the Sith of course!

I admit, I liked it. It had more of that old-time Star Wars feeling than either of the other two prequels.

Some reviewers have commented that Anakin’s fear that Padme was going to die in childbirth was an unsatisfying explanation for his “fall.” But I thought it was rather Augustinian. For Augustine, sin is turning away from the infinite Good and toward an inordinate attachment to and disordered love for finite goods.

For Anakin, rather than being content with finite goods like love and marriage as the finite (but real!) goods they are, he sought to extend them toward the infinite. In seeking to extend life unnaturally he demonstrates a disordered love. This leads him to disregard other moral constraints on his actions, creating a downward spiral.

Apart from that, there was plenty of bad acting and cheesy dialogue. And I think Lucas overdoes the CGI backgrounds. (Hoth and Tatooine seemed so much more real than virtually any of the settings in the prequels!) Still, a partial redemption of the series.

I’ll be away from the ol’ computer for about the next week; off for a trip to our beloved neighbor to the north via a little New England driving tour. Adieu!

I notice sometimes the cool blog kids will post a list of the hep tracks they have in their iPod or computer or some other newfangled contraption. As a variation on this theme, I thought I would list the twelve CDs I currently have in my little portable CD case thingie just for kicks:

• Essential Lynyrd Skynyrd (2 CD set)
• Led Zepplelin IV
• Muswell Hillbillies, The Kinks
• Faith No More (personal mix)
• Unchained, Johnny Cash
• Tales of a Traveler, Blue Mountain
• Scarlet’s Walk, Tori Amos
• Satellite, P.O.D.
• The Essential Jerry Reed
• A Long Way Home, Dwight Yoakam
• Edward the Great, Iron Maiden (best of)

The New York Review of Books is going to become the first major American media outlet to (finally!) publish the “smoking gun” memo of Tony Blair’s government. The memo indicates that the decision by the Bush administration to go to war with Iraq had been made as early as July 2002, and that the justifications (WMD, ties to terrorism) came afterwards.

From the memo:

C [a British intelligence agent] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

The accompanying story suggest that the confrontation with the UN was engineered largely in order to provide a legal pretext for the war, not to avoid it:

Thus, the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible. War had been decided on; the problem under discussion here was how to make, in the prime minister’s words, “the political context …right.” The “political strategy” — at the center of which, as with the Americans, was weapons of mass destruction, for “it was the regime that was producing the WMD” — must be strong enough to give “the military plan the space to work.” Which is to say, once the allies were victorious the war would justify itself. The demand that Iraq accept UN inspectors, especially if refused, could form the political bridge by which the allies could reach their goal: “regime change” through “military action.”

Tom Dispatch has been permitted to make the NYRB story available early here.

Julian Sanchez and Matthew Yglesias both ponder the oft-made argument that it’s inconsistent or hypocritical to be against legal abortion but in favor of the death penalty. Sanchez says that there’s nothing logically inconsistent about opposing abortion while favoring capital punishment while Yglesias argues that it’s fair game to ask anti-abortion death penalty proponents to live up to their “culture of life” rhetoric.

On the one hand, Sanchez is right that it’s possible to draw a morally significant distinction between killing an unborn child and executing, say, a convicted serial killer. (Interesting that almost no one makes the argument that the truly consistent position is to favor both legal abortion and the death penalty!)

Still, I think Yglesias is onto something when he points out that if you embrace the notion of a “culture of life” then you should at least be uncomfortable with the death penalty.

I would argue that the connecting thread is a strong presumption against the taking of human life. As Methodist Bishop Timothy Whitaker has said:

When John Wesley gave the General Rules to the people called Methodists the first thing he told them was to do no harm. In order to show evidence that we are a people who are being saved by God we should do no harm.

The rule to do no harm directs those of us who are Christians to practice non-violence. A Christian is someone who is horrified by violence, refrains from violence in her or his own life, and seeks to restrain violence in the world insofar as possible.

The practice of non-violence is advocated in many religious traditions and philosophical teachings down through history. More than that, it expresses the will of God who is revealed in the story of the Bible.

This horror of violence would make a people formed by a “culture of life” very hesitant to take the life of a fellow human being. This is sometimes combined with the idea that ready acceptance of killing in one sphere of life will spill over into others. There are differences of opinion among those who adhere to a “consistent life” ethic as to whether there are ever circumstances which permit the taking of life. The Catholic tradtion, as expressed in the catechism, allows that in some cases war and capital punishment may be legitimate responses to aggression, but only when other means of defense are unavailable.

But both groups can agree, I think, that to “seek to restrain violence in the world insofar as possible” would require that we seek alternatives to abortion, capital punishment, war, and euthanasia, even if perhaps under some circumstances they might be necessary. It does seem that conservatives can be too comfortable with war and capital punishment, while liberals too easily accept abortion and euthanasia. A “culture of life,” on the other hand, would not accept the prevalent rationalizations for the alleged necessity of these forms of violence.