Author: Lee M.

(See here for previous post.)

In chapter 4, “Against Radical Orthodoxy,” Insole argues, um, against Radical Orthodoxy, specifically the claims made by John Milbank, et al. that “political liberalism … is symptomatic of an ontological nihilism” and “that liberalism leads to a social atomism and individualism that can be overcome with the help of a participatory-analogical theology” (p. 128).

For Milbank, liberalism is the condition of the modern human subject facing a world that has been evacuated of meaning, with no transcendent basis for claims about truth, beauty, and goodness. The only way to have meaning, truth, or value, then, is for us to assert them by an act of will. But my assertion of will is bound to come into conflict at some point with other people’s assertions of will. In liberal theory the public realm becomes “secular”–that is, it is the realm in which no one’s conception of the good is permitted to be publicly authoritative and binding, but everyone is permitted to live according to her own lights. This is supposed to provide for a peaceful solution to the struggle between rival conceptions of the good, especially between religions.

But, following postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Milbank thinks that the “peace” of the liberal order actually masks acts of violence. The “genealogical” project of thinkers like Foucault is to “unmask” the mechanisms of social power that reinforce truth- and value-claims. Thus the peace of liberalism is shown to rest on a hidden violence. In the view of the geneaologist, there are no “truths” as such, but rather a never-ending struggle of assertions seeking to wield power. The “secular” space of liberalism is not theologically neutral, but actually conceals a particular theology (or anti-theology).

According to Milbank, once liberalism’s claims to neutrality have been unmasked as a power play, the space is cleared for the counter-assertion of a Christian “ontology of peace.” Instead of competing centers of power, the Christian mythos posits a harmonious “participation and analogical interrelatedness between all levels of a hierarchical and teleological universe.” In the Christian universe, I needn’t experience claims of truth and value as oppressive, because my telos – the inner principle of my being – consists in greater participation in the life of the Triune God. This participation makes possible a harmonious reconciliation of differences, rather than the eternal agonistic power struggle.

Unfortunately, says Insole, by the rules of the Foucaultian game Milbank’s assertion of an ontology of peace is just one more instance of the will to power. Milbank admits that the Christian mythos is “equally unfounded” as the modern ontology of violence, so his move is tantamount to simply making a counter-assertion. The ontology of peace is simply posited, or even constructed, so in what way has he really escaped nihilism? Why is the assertion of the Christian meta-narrative any less “violent”?

Ultimately Milbank wants to insist on two theses: first of all, that there is no need for Christian theology to engage rationally or apologetically with ‘secular’ reason, just because there is no neutral, foundational, rational space in which such a dialogue can really appear. We are simply called to out-narrate other stories, all of which are equally (un)founded. This thesis is justified because of a broad acceptance of the Foucaultian notion of geneaology, where truth claims are identified with power claims; hence Milbank’s comment that ‘one’s only resort’ is ‘to put forward an alternative mythos, equally unfounded, but nonetheless embodying an “ontology of peace”. Which brings us to the second thesis Milbank wants to endorse, which is almost the opposite of the first, because indeed ‘Christianity is the precise opposite of nihilism’. The second thesis is that the Foucaultian conflation of power and truth, the assertion of ontological violence, is wrong when and only when it comes to describing the alternative mythos which is Christianity. In a wonderful conjuring trick Milbank uses Foucault as his ladder to climb high enough above apology and dialogue in order to be in the right space to assert his meta-narrative ‘that-Foucault-is-wrong’ (the ‘ontology of peace’)’ but we can only claim that ‘Foucault-is-wrong’, in this case and in this way, if Foucault is right. (p. 137)

The problem goes deeper, though, because Milbank has already conceded too much to the deconstructive/genealogical project. For the entire Foucaultian argument contains a fatal equivocation on the term “power.” In one sense, power is any exertion of influence on the world. So brute force, bribery, seduction, and rational persuasion are all forms of power in this sense. But “power” can also have a sinister connotation of dominating and oppressing the other. The Foucaultian argument that all truth claims are “really” power plays works only by conflating these two senses of “power.”

Everything is described as a power struggle: even a charity or a minority justice-based resistance group is understood in terms of this social physics. Inasmuch as everything is accounted for as ‘power’ it seems to be simply a descriptive term, with no more sinister moral connotations than a notion such as ‘gravity’. This descriptive notion of power is used to get the thesis off the ground that ‘power’ operates everywhere. But then there is a movement which associates ‘power’ with oppression and violence, and the term carries strong prescriptive undertones, which seem to make emancipation and peace impossible. The impossibility is not something discerned in the world, but is rather smuggled in at the very beginning prior to any observations. (p. 138)

In other words, we needn’t even play the Foucaultian game to begin with. We’re back to distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. So, according to Insole, Milbank’s assertion of the Christian mythos as the only alternative to nihilism rests on an erroneous description of our condition. And it hasn’t been demonstrated that liberalism is categorically or necessarily nihilistic. As we saw before, liberals like Burke and Acton readily believed in a transcendent order of truth and value but thought that our apprehension of it was limited and fragmentary. This insight, combined with a sense of human fallenness and charity toward the neighbor–not ethical nihilism or constructivism–provides their rationale for liberal politics.

(To be continued…)

Christopher J. Insole, a lecturer in the philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, has written a very interesting book called The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defense of Political Liberalism. He sets out to provide a Christian defense of political liberalism against its neo-traditionalist and “Radically Orthodox” detractors.

The now-standard critique of liberalism is that it is ethically nihilistic, resting on the unbridled will-to-power and that it presupposes an “ontology of violence” in which individuals are locked in a never-ending struggle for survival and self-assertion. This allegedly results in a society of atomized individuals with no shared notion of the good.

As Insole puts it:

Liberalism, according to this conception, is based upon an illusory human subject who constructs order and denies transcendence. The ‘liberal’ focuses on the will at the cost of attending to reason or order. This focus on the will engenders a fetish for freedom of choice and the removal of all impediments to human liberty; consequently, the notion of ‘freedom/liberty’ is emptied of any substantial historical, traditional, or philosophical content. Flowing from this entirely stripped down notion of freedom, liberalism has a voluntaristic account of values and meaning, with ‘ethics’ being a construction by the subject. This voluntarist meta-ethics fosters a destructive individualism and social atomism. In an attempt to distract from the poverty of the liberal conception of freedom, liberals tend to support a psuedo-Messianic/Pelagian progressivism about history, often finding expression in a fixation with technology and economic growth. (p. 1)

While Insole concedes that this may be an accurate criticism of some forms of liberalism, he argues that there are other strains which are not vulnerable to this critique. He focuses on the thought of Whigs like Burke and Lord Acton and, as background, the thought of Anglican divine Richard Hooker to sketch a theologically-informed liberal tradition that is not susceptible to these charges.

Insole defines political liberalism this way:

[T]he conviction that politics is ordered towards peaceful co-existence (the absence of conflict), and the preservation of the liberties of the individual within a pluralistic and tolerant framework, rather than by a search for truth (religious or otherwise), perfection and unity. The crucial ambition of this sort of political liberalism is a refusal to allow public power to enforce on society a substantial and comprehensive conception of the good; driven as it is by its central passion for the liberties of individuals over and above the enthusiasms of other individuals or collectivities. Political authority is wielded on behalf of the people it protects, and is derived ultimately from their consent. (p. 5)

The form of liberalism Insole finds in Burke and Acton isn’t based on an self-constructing subject or ethical nihilism, but on a very Christian insistence on transcendent order, our solidarity in sin, the vulnerability and fragility of the individual, and our incomplete knowledge of ultimate truths. These thinkers insist that there is an ultimate order to the universe, but that we can, at best, discern it only partially. For that reason we should be wary of making any one comprehensive view of the good publicly authoritative. The point is reinforced by our proneness to sin, and the vulnerability of individuals whose identities are, partly or even largely, constituted by surrounding social forces.

Insole finds the traces of such an outlook in Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker was responding to the radical Protestants of his day who thought they knew the truth and could identify the saved and the reprobate, thereby creating a purified church. Hooker, by contrast, adhered to the Augustinian notion that, until the Second Coming, the church would always be a “mixed body” containing citizens of the City of God and the City of Man. Our inability to know who’s who should caution us about collapsing the distinction between the visible and invisible church. Indeed, we may well hope that God’s grace will extend to many outside the confines of the visible church.

The conclusion is that humility and mutual regard should restrain us from seeking to impose our particular conceptions of the good on our fellow citizens. We don’t possess the truth in any straightforward way, and our proneness to sin is liable to turn any attempt to institutionalize it into a form of tyranny.

Insole quotes Michael Freeman:

Men who hate vice too much, says Burke, love men too little. Men of excessive virtue may take excessive measures to bring ordinary men into the path of virtue. In the womb of moral puritanism lies the seed of political authoritarianism. Fanaticism, even if altruistic, perhaps especially when altruistic, poses a greater threat to freedom and humanity than ordinary selfishness. Paradoxically, extreme virtue turns into extreme vice. (p. 35)

Which reminds me of this quote from C.S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. (from the essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” in God in the Dock)

The liberal has a tolerance of human frailty which is rooted in a sense that it is difficult for us to know in detail the truth about the good, much less to institutionalize it and make sure people live by it. He is content with a kind of political modus vivendi, allowing people of different beliefs to live together in relative peace, even if they aren’t united in a shared hierarchy of values.

The Augustinianism of liberals like Burke and Acton also protects against a naively progressive reading of history, as though we were moving toward some kind of consummation of peace and prosperity. For them social order is always fragile and in need of reform, but there is no utopia to aim for. And there is no way to publicly distinguish between the saved and the damned, or identify them with any particular group. Their eschatology is radically amillenialist. Insole contrasts this with what he calls crusading liberalism, the view that comes out of Puritan versions of Calvinism which attributes a kind of eschatological significance to the spread of political liberty and democracy (a view which, he notes, is prevalent among “certain American presidents”). Crusading liberalism is messianic and Manichean, while Burkean liberalism is modest and meliorist.

I would suggest that there is a strand of political liberalism which withdraws from using public power in instigating perfectionist and salvationist programmes, precisely because of a sense of our complicity in sin, the conviction that judgement belongs to God, and a desire to show the charity, toleration and generosity towards our neighbour which we ourselves so painfully need, and at times, so little deserve. (p. 70)

Next I’ll talk about Insole’s reply to the criticisms of liberalism that come from the Radical Orthodoxy school.

We’ve become too optimistic, says Steve Chapman:

Throughout our history, Americans have been brave, resourceful and ingenious, but we have also been lucky. Consequently, we tend to take good fortune as the norm – and trust that we will always have it. We assume success, which sometimes blinds us to the possibility of failure. We prefer optimism, which may cause us to discount pessimism, no matter how well-founded it may be.

These tendencies help to explain how we ended up effectively taking over a radically alien country that we knew little about and were not prepared to occupy, much less govern. The Bush administration expected a brief, victorious war and a speedy departure: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the conflict in Iraq “could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” Vice President Cheney promised that we would “be greeted as liberators.”

Those expectations proved to be grossly mistaken. But it wasn’t just the administration that failed to foresee what was coming – outside analysts and the American people also failed to heed the warning signs. How could so many people have been so wrong?

“We had the ‘victory disease,’” says John Mearsheimer, a defense scholar at the University of Chicago. Back in 1990, the nation approached the first war in Iraq with great trepidation, because the most recent major American war, in Vietnam, had ended in humiliation and failure. But this time, we were riding high on a series of triumphs – over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, the Soviet Union in the Cold War, Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The last three victories were especially seductive because they came so quickly and at such a low cost in casualties. Not only that, but we enjoyed unchallenged global military supremacy, giving us the idea we could accomplish anything we chose to do.

Andrew Bacevich makes a lot of this. According to him, the victory in the Gulf War was the culmination of the efforts from various quarters to rebuild the prestige of the U.S. military and to restore military force as just one more element in the policy tool kit in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. This new confidence in military power was reinforced by the various military interventions undertaken by the Clinton administration.

Whether hegemony, or imperium, or whatever we want to call our unquestionable military supremacy, is a good idea or not, the efficacy of “hard power” still has limits, which we may be running up against as we speak.

Via Generous Orthodoxy comes this interesting paper on “An Augustinian view of empire” by religion professor Charles Mathewes. Prof. Mathewes does a good job avoiding the Manichean worldviews of those for whom America is either omnibenevolent or omnimalevolent (which is, really, what you would expect from someone working in the tradition of that arch-anti-Manicheist Augustine).

For starters, he gives an account of al-Qaeda and similar movements that refuses to endorse the simplistic accounts of “they hate us because we’re free” or “they hate us because we’re evil imperialists”:

Islamic terror movements are not nihilistic fascists, as many suggest: they possesses a fantasized ideal, and something like a deliberate strategy, even if the real motive is a recoiling disgust at or fear of others.Yet neither are they driven by Chomskian disapproval of US geopolitics; al-Quaeda expresses a hatred for “the West” that is inspired by what the West represents as well as by what it does. Finally the nature of the war’s violence is different. Al-Quaeda’s violence is not meant directly to effect strategic changes, but to do so only as interpreted by audiences. And the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq seems also in part intended as a message. The violence, that is, is fundamentally symbolic.

None of this denies the literality of the violence: real people die. But the deaths are instrumental to something else; both sides aim to use violence as a way of communicating to a much broader audience, in the Muslim world and in the United States (if not the West as a whole), differing messages. This is a semiotic war–a war by signs, over signs, and in a sense about signs.

For Augustine, signs are related to hope, for signs are promises of the real things to which they refer, and so the fact that it is a “war of signs” has implications both internationally and domestically. Internationally, what seems to US audiences to be a war of terror is more properly a war over hope–a war to see who will most shape the hopes and fears of the populations caught up in it. This is especially pertinent in the Middle East, where it seems cynicism and despair are the general condition. It is not a “clash of civilizations,” even though al-Quaeda would like it to be interpreted as such; it is a civil war in the Islamic world, a war caused by despair–not only in the “Arab heartland” but also in the Muslim ghettoes of Western Europe–a despair about the prospects for a real future for a very proud civilization. And in this civil war, the combatants embody various responses to despair.

Some of the best scholars of militant Islamism argue that the creed of violent jihad, and in particular al-Quaeda’s nostalgia for the caliphate, has already failed in the Muslim world. Whether or not that is true, it is at least arguable that the Bush administration has not helped its cause by the sending cripplingly mixed messages to the Muslim world as well. Certainly some members of the Bush administration believe that the Iraq war was part of a larger new strategy by the United States of “offensive democratization”–a sign in blood that the US has finally committed itself to expanding the democratic sphere to the Middle East–and things could still turn out that way. But so far that seems to be heard by most Muslims only as cynical sickly-sweet frosting on an essentially old, imperialist cake.

Mathewes argues that an Augustinian approach to the situation could help us respond to the threat of terrorism without lapsing into arrogance:

For Augustinians, hegemony and imperium are not in themselves bad things. Order is preferable to anarchy, order generally involves some hegemon, and there is no stable third alternative in this world. Of course order and hegemony can become bad, for Augustinians, if they are misused for ends other than justice and the tranquillity of worldly order. But a geopolitical critique here is not of central importance. Instead we should attend to the more immediate psychological concerns about the apparently inevitable tendencies toward national hubris and demonization in situations of hegemony. If 9/11 is best intelligible as a struggle between fear and hope, 11/9 [Mathewes’ shorthand for the fall of communism and the rise of the U.S. as unrivalled superpower] best designates the struggle in the souls of communities and individuals between faith and arrogance and envy–a struggle that Augustinians see as one over how to avoid idolatry and demonization.

[…]

Augustine worked against both temptations–against the complacency as exemplified in the cosmopolitan-Eusebian attitudes of Christian elites of his day (think of Jerome’s rather campy panic at the news of the Fall of Rome) and also the contrary temptations towards demonization, coded into the Christian Scriptures (especially the Book of Revelation) and carried forward in various sectarian and nativist movements like the Donatists and, arguably, the Pelagians. In all his writings on these subjects, Augustine’s goal was always the same: to refuse the mythology of the state. Political entities are fundamentally secular realities, this-worldly, and are useful in securing us space and occasion to signify our gratitude to God and in praise of God’s glory.

Given our contemporary challenges, Augustinians urge on us an attitude of resistance to both poles. They remind those tempted to idolize American geopolitical power that force is not ultimately the divine will but always at best a tragic stop-gap that can only be employed in the knowledge that one becomes answerable for all the consequences of its exercise. (This is why contemporary Augustinians like Paul Ramsey and Oliver O’Donovan simultaneously emphasize a workable just-war theory and yet also a theory that never allows the warrior the illusion of immaculate justice.) Augustinians will also remind those tempted to demonize American power (and idolize something like the international community) that some force is necessary–not to get them to switch teams and root for the USMC, but to acknowledge to themselves that the world is not and will never be the stable and rational place they would like it to be, but stands in dire and urgent need of redemption.

Essentially, Mathewes wants to dissuade us from thinking of the present situation in apocalyptic terms – as something on which the outcome of history depends. The challenge, for Christians, is to defuse “our tendencies toward apocalypticism,” toward seeing our political life in terms of choices between unmixed good or evil.

Isn’t our situation today apocalyptically different? We think so–we are convinced that this moment is the kairos-time. Augustine thinks that all moments should be inhabited as kairotic. But this disappoints us because it dismisses our superbia-funded presentism. Augustine sees this as another apocalypticism of which we should be shriven. Hence perhaps the deepest disquiet, and the newest news that an Augustinian perspective can provide for us just is this insistence that, in some basic way, an Augustinian look at empire today, for all its differences in detail, is little more than more of the same.

That’s the contention of this piece by Wendy Mcelroy (via Speculative Catholic):

Science will not make the abortion debate go away. The conflict is too deep and involves such fundamental questions of ethics and rights as, “What is a human life?” “Can two ‘human beings’ — a fetus and the pregnant woman — claim control over the same body?” and “When does an individual with rights come into existence?” These questions are beyond the scope of science.

Nevertheless, technology can impact the debate in at least two ways. First, it can explore ways to end a pregnancy without destroying the fetus, which may then be sustained; if such procedures became accessible and inexpensive (or financed by adoptive ‘parents’), then abortion rates would likely decline…and sharply.

Second, it may offer “an out” for activists on both sides who sincerely wish to resolve the debate and not merely scream at each other at ever increasing shrillness.

Many pro-choice women, like me, have been deeply disturbed by ultrasound scan photos that show fetuses, at earlier than once thought periods of gestation, sucking their thumbs, appearing to smile and otherwise resembling a full-term baby. Many of us would welcome alternate procedures and forms of ectogenesis as long as they remained choices. And as long as both parental rights and parental responsibilities could be relinquished.

For their part, pro-life advocates who are sincerely bothered by the totalitarian implications of monitoring pregnant women and demolishing doctor-client privilege might well jump at a technological solution.

Such activists may be surprised to find allies where enemies once existed.

Of course, some pro-choice feminists will reject the possibility without discussion, and for one reason. Many states ban abortion once the fetus has achieved viability. Since ectogenesis pushes viability back to the embryo stage, all abortions might become illegal. That would constitute a catastrophic political defeat.

Moreover, many pro-life advocates will oppose new reproductive technologies as dehumanizing, unnatural, and against their religious beliefs.

To date, the most notable thing about activists’ response to new reproductive technologies has been the lack of it, especially when compared to the clamor surrounding every other aspect of abortion. It sometimes seems as though the two extremes want to shout rather than consider solutions.

And so the debate will continue among those unwilling to explore any ‘solution’ not fashioned from their own ideology.

But the extent of the problem may well be diminished by science, by new reproductive technologies that sustain the viability of fetuses removed from women who do not wish to become mothers. Like heart transplants or intrauterine operations to correct birth defects, ectogenesis may taken for granted some day.

The most optimistic scenario is that a not-too-future generation will look back on abortion as a barbaric procedure, and learn the terms ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ from a history text.

More realistically, new reproductive technologies will just help a bad situation. But help should not dismissed lightly.

Interestingly, in the article I blogged about the other day, Germain Grisez anticipated just such a possibility (the article was written in 1970). He uses the thought-experiment of the “artificial uterus” to distinguish between cases where the fetus is removed (for the sake of saving the mother’s life, for instance), with its death being merely a forseeable side-effect, and cases where the fetus is killed precisely in order to remove the burden of caring for it:

If a person is killed because he is unwanted or because he is considered surplus, clearly the precise intention is to kill. The motive for the killing is to get rid of the one killed; getting the victim out of the way is not an intention other than the intent to kill him, but a formulation of the end for which killing is the chosen means.

This conclusion may become more evident if one considers what would be done in such cases of abortion if there existed an artificial uterus into which the publicly or privately unwanted baby might be transferred. Such a device might be used in cases of genuinely therapeutic abortion. But the unwanted baby would hardly be cared for in this manner. To do so would frustrate the whole point of aborting him—which is, of course, to get rid of him in order that he may not live to make his claim upon his parents and society.

The existence of artificial wombs would also force people who consider themselves pro-life to step up to the plate in caring for children whose parents may be unwilling or unable to care for them. It would also, hopefully, force our society as a whole to rethink the idea of abortion as a “solution” to poverty.

Maybe this is splitting hairs, but I confess to be a little annoyed when some of the most visible opponents of the war in Iraq are people who seem, well, a little off their rockers.

A widely publicized debate (at least on the Internet) pitted Trotskyite-turned-neoconservative fellow-traveller Christopher Hitchens against far-left British MP and mollycoddler of terrorists George Galloway. Galloway drew boos from the crowd (at an event sponsored by a socialist organization!), when he suggested that Americans had it coming on 9/11 (the event was held in New York). That, and the debate was apparently couched largely in terms of which position was more authentically left-wing and “internationalist” (see this account). What normal American thinks in those terms?!

Meanwhile, Cindy Sheehan, instead of trying to build any kind of big-tent anti-war movement appears content to preach to the hard-left choir, recently declaiming that the victims of Katrina were “collateral damage of George Bush’s insane and moronic policies in Iraq.”

Americans who opposed the Iraq war or have come to think it was a mistake, but still think the U.S. has a right and a duty to respond to terrorism, using military force if necessary, and don’t necessarily hate the President (though they may be steadily losing confidence in him), don’t have anyone speaking for them. And I suspect that the rhetoric of people like Galloway and Sheehan will only turn them off.

Christianity Today interviews Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, two major authors affiliated with the Renovaré spiritual renewal movement. They talk about “spiritual formation” as something that’s missing from many churches, and by this they mean taking on the character of Christ.

What do you mean when you use the phrase spiritual formation?

Willard: Spiritual formation is character formation. Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.

Spiritual formation in a Christian tradition answers a specific human question: What kind of person am I going to be? It is the process of establishing the character of Christ in the person. That’s all it is. You are taking on the character of Christ in a process of discipleship to him under the direction of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. It isn’t anything new, because Christians have been in this business forever. They haven’t always called it spiritual formation, but the term itself goes way back.

Is spiritual formation the same as discipleship?

Willard: Discipleship as a term has lost its content, and this is one reason why it has been moved aside. I’ve tried to redeem the idea of discipleship, and I think it can be done; you have to get it out of the contemporary mode.

There are really three gospels that are heard in our society. One is forgiveness of sins. Another is being faithful to your church: If you take care of your church, it will take care of you. Sometimes it’s called discipleship, but it’s really churchmanship. And another gospel is the social one—Jesus is in favor of liberation, and we should be devoted to that. All of those contain important elements of truth. You can’t dismiss any of them. But to make them central and say that’s what discipleship is just robs discipleship of its connection with transformation of character.

[…]

At this conference, I heard some panelists criticize megachurches. I wonder what your take is on seeker-oriented congregations.

Willard: What they do well is establish a public presence that draws many people under the sound of the gospel. They are led by wonderful people who are under the call of God to do the work they’re doing.

In many seeker-sensitive churches, the focus is on getting people to confess Christ as a basis for going to heaven when they die. I don’t want to diminish the importance of that, because you’re going to be dead a lot longer than you’re alive, so you ought to be ready for that.

But it is possible to lose sight of character transformation as a serious element for the people you’re bringing in. We need to do both of those things.

I think when they talk about character transformation, they’re talking about what we traditionally call sanctification. But I wouldn’t want to oppose that or separate it from “going to heaven” as though they were unrelated.

In traditional Christian theology, “going to heaven” and the transformation of character are two sides of the same coin. When we are adopted as members of the Body of Christ we’re given the gift of the Spirit. And the goal of that indwelling spirit is ultimately to transform us into the kind of people who will be fitted for eternal life in the presence of God.

In The Great Divorce one of the themes that C.S. Lewis develops is that people end up not going to heaven because they don’t want to. They simply haven’t become the kind of people who would be happy in God’s presence. For Lewis, “going to heaven” is intrinsically bound up with the kind of people we are. Not that I think Willard and Foster would deny that, but it’s good to be reminded that “character formation” in the Christian understanding has a goal: that “when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

Melinda Henneberger accuses Christian conservatives of “overturning the Gospels” by focusing on sexual morality rather than economic justice:

We as a nation—a proudly, increasingly loudly Christian nation—have somehow convinced ourselves that the selfish choice is usually the moral one, too. (What a deal!) You know how this works: It’s wrong to help poor people because “handouts” reward dependency and thus hurt more than they help. So, do the right thing—that is, walk right on by—and by all means hang on to your hard-earned cash.

Thus do we deny the working poor a living wage, resent welfare recipients expected to live on a few hundred dollars a month, object to the whopping .16 percent of our GNP that goes to foreign aid—and still manage to feel virtuous about all of the above.

Which is how “Christian” morality got to be all about other people’s sex lives—and incredibly easy lifting compared to what Jesus actually asks of us. Defending traditional marriage? A breeze. Living in one? Less so. Telling gay people what they can’t do? Piece o’ cake. But responding to the wretched? Loving the unlovable? Forgiving the ever-so-occasionally annoying people you actually know? Hard work, as our president would say, and rather more of a stretch.

While I’m sympathetic to a lot of what she says here, it’s too simplistic to say that Christians shouldn’t be worried about sexual ethics. Ms. Henneberger seems to buy into the idea that sexual behavior is essentially “private” and nobody else’s business. But why couldn’t conservatives say the same thing about economic behavior – as the libertarian philospher Robert Nozick put it, what is morally objectionable about “capitalist acts between consenting adults”?

The thing is, Jesus, Paul, and the Christian tradition generally don’t really go out of their way to separate “private” sexual morality from “public” matters of economics. Jesus comes down pretty hard on divorce, and Paul’s admonitions regarding sex are well-known. In Acts the church is notably economically egalitarian, but the Apostles also require Gentile converts to refrain from “sexual impurity” as one of the parts of the law that still apples to them.

Of course, this raises the question of who is being addressed by Christian ethics – the church or society at large? Is there a “minimal” morality that applies to everyone, while Christian morality only applies to Christians? But if that’s so, how can we apply Christian teachings on economics to society as a whole but not its sexual ethics (as liberals sometimes seem to want) or vice versa (as conservatives would like)?

W. James Antle III has an article in the American Conservative on the attempts, from adherents of a “consistent life” ethic to Joseph Bottum’s “new fusionism,” to extend pro-life principles to other issues. He cautions against drawing facile policy implications from a general principle of “reverence for life”:

Opposition to the shedding of innocent blood is a moral question, but attempts to order society and international relations justly often turn on prudential questions. One can agree that if human life is too sacred to be snuffed out by the abortionist that there is also an obligation to care for the children who thus enter the world. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the welfare state, especially as constituted before the mid-1990s welfare reform in this country, is the best means to this end.

Similarly, the dignity of human life that is violated by abortion and euthanasia is also affronted by tyranny and oppression. But it does not follow that the proper corrective is U.S. war on a massive scale to effect regime change in oppressive countries.

In recent years, pro-lifers have awakened to the fact that opposing abortion requires more than lobbying for legal restrictions. It also requires compassionate treatment of women and children and efforts to make the horrible option of abortion seem unnecessary. This is a weighing of means and ends.

But as pro-lifers have tried to broaden their focus to issues far removed from abortion, they have often sidestepped questions about means in pursuit of noble ends. Food, health care, and employment for all are each worthwhile goals. But serious thought is required about the means, especially given decades of evidence regarding the failures of welfare statism and socialism.

I think he makes a fair point. Which policies are actually conducive to the protection and flourishing of human life is a matter of empirical investigation and can’t, by and large, be deduced from moral principles alone. However, that doesn’t mean that issue like abortion, war, capital punishment, and euthanasia are unconnected. For instance, in his essay “Toward a consistent natural-law ethic of killing,” Catholic philosopher Germain Grisez argues for a ethic of killing that unites opposition to capital punishment, most abortions, and strict limits on warfare. The logical connection is that these are all forms of killing and are naturally governed by the same set of moral principles.

Grisez argues that it is never permissible to intend the death of another human being. Killing can be justified only as a forseeable side-effect of another morally licit action aimed at preserving one’s life or the life of another innocent person (or persons). In the case of self-defense, for instance, the morally licit act is the use of necessary and sufficient force to repulse an attack on one’s person; the death of the attacker is not what is intended, only putting a stop to their aggression (Grisez is here following Thomas Aquinas’ account of justifiable self-defense). This line of reasoning, he thinks, rules out capital punishment altogether since the community almost always has alternatives for self-protection that don’t involve killing the offender (e.g. imprisonment, banishment).

He extends the same logic to warfare. Force is justified only as a form of communal self-defense*, and only the amount necessary to stop the aggression of the enemy force. Gratuitous slaughter of enemy soldiers is never justified, and the intentional targeting of civilians is, of course, prohibited. He argues, compellingly, that the U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence is morally unjustifiable insofar as it involves the targeting of civilian populations.

The point of Grisez’s article is simply that the same principles should govern the taking of human life in all cases. The state has no more authority to take human life than individuals would under the same circumstances. Thus no appeal to “realism” can justify loosening restraints on killing even during warfare.

So, devotees of a “consistent life” ethic are not necessarily wrong to see a tight connection between abortion, war, capital punishment, and euthanasia. However, I agree with Antle that things like anti-poverty policy, trade policy, or what have you require a great deal more empirical evidence to determine what will work best. It may be a mistake to make a certain position on those issues part of a whole “pro-life” package.**
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*Grisez doesn’t discuss the case of a nation coming to the aid of a third party, either another nation threatened by aggression or people being threatened by their own government. It’s hard to see how his argument could categorically rule these out as possible instances of justified military action, though.
**Though it is interesting to note that some of the more independent pro-life groups like the NRLC looked askance on welfare reform in the 90s on the grounds that cutting aid to single mothers and “family caps” would result in more abortions, while the more traditionally Republican-alingned groups like the Christian Coaltion supported it.

Call me a free speech absolutist, but this seems like a bad idea to me. I’ve long been troubled by the tendency to make religion into one more marker for the purposes of identity politics. In this country, it tends to, ironically, be religious conservatives who increasingly cry “religious discrimination” when criticized. This is not to say that there’s no such thing as religious discrimination, but positions motivated by or rooted in religion are still fair game for criticism.

Moreover, religion itself has to be fair game for criticism, and even mockery and derision. Religion is not like race or ethnicity for at least two reasons. First, you can change your religion. But secondly, and more importantly, religions make truth and value claims, and in a free society those claims have to be open to public inspection and criticism.

The idea that religion is like race or ethnicity and therefore should be off limits from criticism actually buys into a kind of relativism, because it treats religion as nothing more than a part of one’s identity, rather than something that actually makes a public claim on others. For Christians in particular, the proclamation of the Gospel is a public event, calling its hearers to faith. Anything making those kinds of claims can’t be ruled immune from criticism by legislative fiat.