Mirror of Justice

On the Desirability of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy

Fascinating op-ed in today's LA Times (registration required) on the role President Bush's faith plays in his decisionmaking in the war on terror:

In many respects, questions about the role of faith in Bush's presidency are a replay of those raised during Ronald Reagan's administration, when the former president called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and talked about a spiritual battle against communism. Critics then predicted a possible nuclear Armageddon caused by a president bent on fulfilling prophecy. In reality, what Reagan's faith brought him was a deeper understanding of the Cold War, that it was less about missiles and geopolitics than about core principles. His faith morally clarified the superpower conflict, and according to some dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, encouraged them to further resist the Soviet system.

Faith has played an equally important role in Bush's administration, morally clarifying for him the war on terrorism and encouraging patience in the light of tremendous pressure. But Bush's critics have it backward: It's not so much that Bush thinks God is on his side; rather, he wants to be on God's side and make the correct moral choices. He doesn't think God has given him a blank check; rather, to make the correct decisions, he believes he must study and embrace Judeo-Christian principles. ...

His friend Doug Wead, a former aide to George H.W. Bush, recounted for us a discussion he had with the current president a few years ago on the story of the good Samaritan. Wead was reminding Bush of the story about our moral obligation to help strangers in distress when the president, in typically blunt fashion, asked: What if we got there 20 minutes earlier, when the traveler to Jericho was being attacked. Don't we have an obligation to help him then too? Such thinking not only influenced his decision to liberate Iraq but also fueled his commitment to combat AIDS in Africa. ...

Bush read [Oswald] Chambers devotionals throughout 2003, and Chambers is hardly what you would call a hawk. "War is the most damnably bad thing," Chambers wrote. "Because God overrules a thing and brings good out of it does not mean that the thing itself is a good thing." Far from making Bush gung-ho, his Bible readings create an unusual cocktail of courage and patience. ...

Even those who don't share Bush's religious convictions should see them as a good thing. His faith compels him to wrestle with ethical questions that less religious men might simply ignore. And his strong faith offers us visible guideposts by which we can evaluate his performance as president. Find me a commander in chief who lacks core convictions rooted in something greater than himself, and you'll have a leader who lacks an identifiable moral compass and will, accordingly, be prone to drift off course.

I urge you to go read the whole thing, even at the cost of complying with the Times' intrusive registration requirements.

Still More on Kerry

Martin F. Grace, a professor at Georgia State, emailed me a thoughtful contribution to our continuing conversation regarding Kerry's "Catholic problem":

I think one can have a freedom of conscience that might allow one to dissent from church teaching while one is attempting to discern the truth. I think this is what Sen. Kerry may have been referring to when he asserted his right to have a freedom to dissent.

But, Professor Grace points out, the freedom to dissent is not unfettered, at least for those who take their Catholic identities seriously:

I think the issue for me is that I can dissent and I can earnestly attempt to figure out what my conscience is telling me, but I do not campaign against the positions the church takes. It might be a sin in the classic sense to make people (with imperfectly formed consciences) believe that it is ok to do action X because other famous Catholics do x. In the old days the word scandal is used to describe this type of behavior. I am not a scholar of Vatican II ( I just lived through it as a kid), but I can not believe that the teachings of Vatican II actually gives one the unconstrained right to dissent --especially if it flies in the face of a long held truth or a Bishop's teaching.

The trick, of course, will be to identify the point when someone actually is engaged in a "campaign against the positions the church takes." I assume that Kerry would insist that he is simply carving out space for individuals to maintain their own freedom of conscience, rather than actively subverting long-held truths. Obviously, many observers will find that hard to swallow.

Rob

More on Kerry as a "cynical nonbeliever"

My reluctance to embrace Duncan Frissell's second-guessing of Kerry's faith (see "Kerry's Faith as Pretense?," below) has prompted reader reaction on both sides of the debate. Patrick H. Stiehm writes to note his agreement with my comments and to remind us that entering into another individual's mind and conscience in the mode of judgment "is God's place not ours, even if we happen to be a bishop." Mr. Stiehm notes that he is "very uncomfortable with the whole tone that the debate over Kerry's Catholicism is taking," but he suspects "it is only going to intensify."

On the other hand, Frank Wilson asks "what exactly does [Kerry's] faith consist in?" He explains:

I can well understand how a Catholic politician might reluct to vote for making abortion illegal. But to positively support abortion in every way possible is quite another matter. Kerry's record is quite simply pro-abortion. Moreover, it appears he was never granted an annulment of his first marriage. . . . And I think it should be possible to distinguish between a profession of faith and a pretension of it. Especially when a person does not publicly adhere to the rules of the faith in question.

My disagreement with Mr. Wilson may center simply on how we frame the inquiry. Should the policy positions of purportedly Catholic politicians cause us to challenge the politicians' standing within the community of faith, or should they cause us to challenge the sincerity of the politicians' faith itself? I still believe that the former is the more appropriate avenue, and that the latter path not only verges on the presumptuous, but also is largely unnecessary as a means of speaking truth to power.

Mr. Wilson also challenges my assertion that Bush, not just Kerry, is guilty of religious posturing for political gain. I admit that the posturing is more obvious by Kerry because he does not naturally (from what I can tell) make his faith a visible part of his public role, whereas Bush has made his faith a thread that runs throughout his public identity. And while much of Bush's religious imagery is unobjectionable, even inspiring (I'm thinking of his post-9/11 speech to Congress), that does not negate the political component. And in particular contexts like the marriage amendment, I maintain that posturing is the appropriate term, even if I have no doubt that Bush's underlying faith commitment is sincere.

Rob

Villanova 04 CST/Law Conference

I'll be posting shortly the formal call for papers for the October 04 Villanova CST/Law conference, focusing on the topic of subsidiarity.

Kerry's faith as pretense?

Duncan Frissell emailed me with a decidely more cynical view of Kerry's Catholic problem (see earlier posts), wondering whether Kerry actually is a "cynical nonbeliver." Over at the Technoptimist blog Duncan pursues this point further:

Kerry has said that, as an elected official, he must separate his personal religious views from his actions as a legislator and that it is not 'appropriate in the United States for a legislator to legislate personal religious beliefs for the rest of the country.'

But, I assume, it is OK for a communist legislator to legislate his personal communist beliefs for the rest of the country?

Why don't faithless Catholic politicians simply say that they are imposing their beliefs on us but that those beliefs are not the beliefs of their church; that (in fact) they don't share most of the beliefs of their church; and that they only maintain the pretense of faith for crass political advantage.

Duncan is undoubtedly correct that there's an element of crass political calculation in the religious posturing of Kerry -- as well as Bush, I submit -- but I'm hesitant to head down the road of second-guessing the sincerity of anyone's -- even a politician's -- professed faith commitment. (Goodness knows folks would have been justified in doing the same to me at various points in my life.) I'd rather take politicians at their word, and keep the debate to the consistency (or lack thereof) between their actions/policy positions and the core tenets of the particular faith tradition they claim.

Rob

Taylor on Secularism

This is a belated response to the recent post discussing Jacoby on Secularism. Listed under my name in the articles sidebar is a review of Charles Taylor's recent book, "Modern Social Imaginaries," which will be pulished in COMMONWEAL shortly. Taylor's great subject in this book, as in his others, is modernity and its malaises. He grapples with the meanings of the "secular" and "secularism" throughout his work, and in a far more nuanced way, apparently, than Jacoby. Here's the first paragraph of my review, to give you a taste:

Charles Taylor is our leading interrogator of modernity. In a series of important books, he has
carefully teased out modernity's origins, its character, and the moral dilemnmas it presents. A
critic as well as an interrogator, he uncovers the spiritual flatness, instability, and atomism
at the heart of our secular age, and urges retrieval of ways of understanding the world, and the
place of the individual in it, that Western culture has lost. Taylor, however, is no neotraditional
romantic about the past. His quarrel with modernity is a lover's quarrel. He finds much about it
ennobling and hopeful, as well as much that is debasing. His work is a call for understanding and
realizing a fuller range of human possibilities within the moral order of what he calls the modern
social imaginary: our common understanding of what legitimates our social arrangements.

One of the puzzles about Taylor, however, is understanding precisely where he stands on religion. I speculate a bit about that at the end of my review:

[I]n Taylor's terms the Catholic sacramental imagination, filled as it is with intimations of eternity,
is profoundly antimodern. In the Catholic worldview, the miraculous is always present in the
quotidian, even if elusively. The Catholic sacramental imagination has remained "enchanted,"
seeing each soul embedded in the communion of saints, and flourishing not just in ordinary time,
but in sacred time with all the souls that have gone before. [Note: Taylor describes the modern,
secular world as "disenchanted."] Taylor does not write as a believer in this book, but in his call
for retrieval of a useable past he implicitly calls for a new social imaginary in which the individual's
horizons are not limited by the radical individualism, rational instrumentalism, and spritual
flatness of the modern, secular world. "Modern Social Imaginaries" leaves the reader wanting to
know more about how Taylor might imagine an alternative to modernity, but perhaps it would
look something like the enchanted Catholic social imaginary that has found a way to resist the
radical claims of modernity while remaining part of the modern world.

Responses from Taylorites welcome.

-Mark

Gay marriage: labels matter

Last week I helped lead a faculty-student discussion on gay marriage, and one trend in the participants' comments struck me as worth noting. Somewhat to my surprise, among both liberals and conservatives, the label "marriage" really does seem to matter. Noting that opposition to gay marriage is often intertwined with religious conceptions of marriage, I floated the idea that government should get out of the marriage business entirely, recognize only civil unions, and leave "marriage" to religious and other intermediate communities to define and implement. There was widespread resistance to this idea. Participants had some difficulty articulating why it matters, but almost all of them conceded that they do not simply want a certain set of legal rights and privileges surrounding their state-sanctioned relationship; they want to be married, and they want to be married in the eyes of the state, not simply some subcommunity of the state. I'm not sure what significance to take from this, other than that it underscores the difficulty in distilling the debate to a question of comparable bundles of rights. There seems to be an inescapable moral dimension to the recognition of gay marriage, regardless of whether one opposes or supports the concept.

Rob

A New Blog

As most readers know, the Supreme Court ruled recently, in Locke v. Davey, that -- in a nutshell -- the Constitution does not require Washington to permit a college-level scholarship recipient to major in theology. It turns out that the young man who brought the case, Joshua Davey, decided to go to law school, and is now a first-year student at Harvard. And, he has a blog.

Rick

Wieseltier on the Pledge

The New Republic's gifted and prolific -- and often caustic -- Leon Wieseltier (some of you will know him from his cameo on the Sopranos last week) has a provocative essay on the Pledge case in TNR's upcoming issue. Here's a link to the essay. It is well worth a read, and echoes many of Rob's points (made in several posts, below).

Rick

UPDATE: For typically insightful, and blunt, comments on Wieseltier's essay, see this post by University of San Diego law prof Tom Smith.

The New York Times on Kerry's Catholic Problem

It seems that the New York Times covers religion from three different angles: 1) ignoring it completely; 2) portraying religious believers as though they have two heads (both of which are devoid of a brain, of course); or 3) portraying religious beliefs as relics propped up to function as tools of institutional self-advancement and/or oppression. Today the Times jumps in on the Kerry as Catholic coverage, and seems to have opted for angle #3. In a news article (not an op/ed, mind you), the paper of record gives us these nuggets:

"President Kennedy had to overcome accusations from non-Catholics that he would follow the bidding of the pope. Now, Mr. Kerry faces accusations from some within his own church that he is not following the pope's bidding closely enough."

"The senator is aligned with his church on many social justice issues, including immigration, poverty, health care and the death penalty. But he diverges on the litmus issues, like abortion and stem cell research, that animate church conservatives and many in the hierarchy."

As we can now understand from the Times' insight, there is no cohesive web of beliefs, but simply a smorgasbord of pet causes, some favored by the liberals, some favored by conservatives. The Times also provides a quote from Rev. Drinan suggesting that the dispute centers simply on whether Kerry himself measures up as a Catholic, rather than on his public support for policies that contradict the moral anthropology on which the Church's body of teachings is based:

"Kennedy settled the problem that a Catholic couldn't become president . . . That's not an issue now. The issue with Kerry will be, is he good enough as a Catholic."

The article underscores the extent to which we tend to overlay our common understanding of partisan politics onto debates that transcend simple notions of power, strategy and self-interest. And while I'm confident that the Times is not particularly interested in delving more deeply into the issues at stake here, once again we see the need for greater public familiarity with moral anthropology.

Finally, the article makes it obvious that Kerry has no hesitation proceeding down the path he's laid out for himself. As an (admittedly unenthusiastic) supporter of his candidacy, I admit that he's not showing a lot of nuance or angst over the tension between his faith and his politics when he has his spokesperson say: "Senator Kerry is a person of faith, he's a practicing Catholic, and his religion is an important part of his life and of Teresa Heinz Kerry's life. And they've always recognized that separation between the public and the private."

Rob