Christian Politics as Neighbor-Love

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In this post, I offer a second excerpt from my lecture at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, VA on “What Does it Mean to Be a Christian Citizen?” You can read the full text and hear the full audio of the lecture at the Davenant Trust’s website. Here, continuing from the excerpt in yesterday’s post, I develop the second half of Luther’s famous dialectic in The Freedom of a Christian: “dutiful servant of all.” 

Does this mean, then, that the Christian is to float heedlessly above the troubles and travails of the world? “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through”—we’ve heard this sort of line from many Christians in many eras. Is this faithful Christianity? No, for while we must not cling to earthly loyalties and attachments out of fear, as we so often do, we can and must cling to them out of love. Let’s look at the flipside of many of the passages we’ve quoted.

Galatians 5:13-14 says, “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Romans 6 and 7 say, “But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.” (6:17-18) “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.” And of course, 1 John 4:7-8: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

This is the second half of Luther’s paradox: the Christian is the dutiful servant of all. He is worth quoting extensively on this point. Read More

Obamacare and the Task of Responsible Opposition, Pt. 1: The Law of the Land

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 Last week, flush with the successful defense of my Ph.D, disgusted with the news I heard trickling out of my country, and tickled to re-discover the perennial relevance of Richard Hooker’s political wisdom, I lobbed a 2,500-word grenade 3,500 miles across the pond, exposing the stubborn self-indulgence of the GOP’s stance vis-a-vis the government shutdown.  Hooker’s message struck a chord with many readers, but also elicited some predictable protests.  Since returning to my homeland a few days ago, I have immersed myself in the resulting discussions, and in reading whatever would shed light on the current fiscal crisis.  The situation, of course, is too complex, too rapidly-evolving, and too obscured with duplicity and half-truths, to offer anything like a full statement on the debate here.  Indeed, in a salutary development, the posture at which my post last week was aimed—demanding the overthrow of Obamacare—seems to be being rapidly abandoned by Republican leadership, to the outrage of the hard-right agitators who were dictating terms until recently.  It remains to be seen whether the new direction will hold momentum, and if so, whether it will mark the final abandonment of the Obamacare fight by conservatives—though I am doubtful they are ready to throw in the towel just yet.  Inasmuch, however, as the Obamacare question continued to dominate discourse up through early this week, and remains an extremely live issue in many conservatives, I want to use the following trilogy of posts today to expand upon my “Open Letter from Richard Hooker,” clarifying the object of my critique and to answer some common rejoinders I have received.  (Some of the same principles, incidentally, apply to the broader budget-deficit concerns which now dominate debate, but I will leave it to readers to draw those applications). Read More

The Gun Control Debate: Let’s Have a Cease-Fire

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Since the Newtown tragedy last month, American public discourse, apparently feeling that it was at risk, after the election, of falling into a rut of humdrum agreeability—or still worse, rational debate—has fallen to new lows of backbiting, caricaturing, grandstanding, sloganeering, and demonizing.  Liberals rushed to capitalize on the tragedy to advance gun-control legislation, and conservatives responded by painting all this as some ploy to establish a liberal tyranny—to rob us all of our means for self-defense so that the government can establish a virtual dictatorship do whatever it wants.   A moment spent looking around at the other Western nations that have adopted substantial gun regulations should put our minds at ease on this front.  Most notably, in 1996, Australia enacted dramatic gun legislation that involved the government buying the majority of firearms from private citizens and destroying them.  Since then, Australia has shown no hint of degenerating into a Stalinist dictatorship.

Leaving its (rather large) conspiratorial fringe aside, the Right’s rhetoric over the past month has still been dominated by a substitution of sloganeering and fear-mongering for genuine reasoning.  Of course, so has the Left’s, but as a conservative, I find the failures on the Right more depressing, and I’d like to confine my remarks here primarily to addressing those.  There is liberal lunacy to be opposed on this issue, and I salute those who are doing their best to oppose it.  That’s just not my purpose in this post.  

What follows is not an attempt to tell you what to think about the gun control issue, or to engage in any detail with the concrete proposals Obama has advanced or with the complex and debated precedents of Second Amendment law, but only to provide a common-sense framework for how to think about the issue, a framework that seems to be sorely lacking in much of the recent discourse.   I apologize in advance for the length—to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, I wrote a 5,000-word post because I didn’t have time to write a 500-word one.

Argument 1: Guns Don’t Kill People; People Kill People.

This is one of the most frequently-touted slogans on the Right’s side of the debate, and one encounters the basic reasoning in myriad forms:  
Guns are a neutral tool; it’s how they’re used that matters. You shouldn’t punish innocent gun owners for the moral failings of certain individuals.  
Gun violence is a result of a social breakdown, or widespread cultural degradation—the embrace of a culture of violence, the abandonment of Christian values, whatever; only by combatting that can we address the root problem.  
It’s lawless people who commit gun crimes, not law-abiding folks.  Passing laws will only ensure that good people don’t have guns; the bad guys won’t be deterred, and will be as well-armed as ever.

Let me address the slogan itself before tackling each of these related variants.  We might just as well say “Cars don’t kill people; drivers kill people.”  “Alcohol doesn’t harm people; drunkards harm people.”  “Darkness doesn’t rape people or steal stuff; rapists and thieves do.”  Yet none of these facts prevent us from taking measures, often legal ones, to make it more difficult for the potential perpetrators to inflict harm on others.  We make traffic laws and speed limits to reduce the risk of car accidents.  We make laws about where and when alcohol can be consumed to reduce the risk that intoxicated individuals will become a public menace (or perhaps to reduce the risk that they will become intoxicated in the first place).  We install night-lights and surveillance cameras in shops and alleyways so that criminals will be deterred from stealing and raping.  This is how societies operate.  We hope for well-formed, rational, peace-loving citizens, and do our best to cultivate such, but we also take practical measures to mitigate the risks arising from the fact that not all citizens we always be rational and peace-loving.  Of course, the fact that we are dealing with unpredictable, resourceful, and sometimes reckless, sometimes cunning individuals means that any such measures may have limited effectiveness, and may be either badly designed or well-designed.  A universal speed limit of 30 mph might, if actually followed, mean no fatal accidents, but instead it would simply guarantee that no one took speed limits seriously.  Complete prohibition of alcohol was obviously a bad idea.  A society of complete surveillance might reduce crime, but at too great a moral and social cost.  So a great deal of prudence is needed, and it may be that particular gun control policies being touted will be ineffective, or too repressive, or what have you.  And that’s a debate that needs to be had.  But let’s not short-circuit it by pretending that governments have no right to ever regulate behavior for the sake of public safety.

To the “guns are a neutral tool” claim, we should ask “really?”  This is the oldest trick in the book for any defender of any technological invention, but as George Grant effectively argued in “Thinking About Technology,” this is a vacuous claim that avoids the serious task of moral assessment.  Technologies come to be in a particular social context, and are designed to fulfill certain purposes.  When we ask about the moral status of some invention, obviously we are not asking about the moral status of the object as an inert bundle of rods, screws, etc., but as an instrument geared toward the achievement of certain ends within certain practices.  Are those practices good ones?  Are those ends good ones?  To be sure, many technologies prove remarkably adaptable, capable of uses quite different from their original purpose, and thus needing new moral evaluation.  But the gun, unfortunately, is a pretty unambiguous one.  Its purpose is to kill, and that’s about it.  When we move beyond a relatively narrow class of single shot rifles and such to consider handguns, assault weapons, automatics, etc., the purpose is more precisely to kill human beings.  “Neutral” is much too bland a word to use in this context.  The gun is an instrument of evil, although sometimes a necessary evil—killing in self-defense.  To this extent, it is not an intrinsically immoral tool to use, since there are morally licit uses, but it is, we might say, a morally compromised tool, one that warrants society’s careful and suspicious scrutiny.  Are we really prepared to say that a society and government does not have an interest in carefully evaluating the distribution and use of instruments whose chief purpose is the taking of human life?

As far as “punishing” innocent gun owners, we come back to my point above about cars, alcohol, surveillance cameras.  Living in community, in society, imposes certain limitations on one’s behavior.  If you live alone on a ranch in the Yukon territory, then you’re basically free to barrel down the wrong side of the road at 100 mph.  But once you live among other people, such pure freedom is not an option.  Even if you’re a perfectly safe and careful driver, you have to obey traffic laws.  Why?  Because the law, by its very nature as law, has to bind all impartially.  Which means that laws will sometimes need to be passed in order to restrain the actions of a few which thereby impose an inconvenience on all.  This is regrettable, but it is less regrettable than the alternative—in which no one was restrained and peace-loving citizens, instead of bearing the inconvenient burden of regulations, lived in perpetual fear of violence.  Again, both justice and prudence will be necessary to determine when such regulations are appropriate and effective, and sometimes, they will be foolish.  But there is no a priori reason why “innocent” members of society cannot be inconvenienced by laws intended to reduce the risk of public harm.

What about the claim the the root causes of gun violence are much deeper than mere access to guns, so we should be addressing the root of the sin, not the instrument that it happens to use?  This presents us with a simple false dichotomy.  Obviously, we should to reduce the root causes of all evil behaviors, at every level.  To the extent that mental health is an issue, we should work to make sure treatment is available.  To the extent social or family breakdown is an issue, we should find ways to build stronger communities and networks of support.  To the extent, violence in the media is an issue, perhaps we should work to reduce that (although this might involve considerably more government interference than gun control would).  Where general spiritual decay and the loss of the gospel is to blame, we should seek to re-evangelize our nation.  By all means, do all these things (some of which will involve purely private initiative, while others may involve government action as well).  None of these needs to be pursued to the exclusion of one of the others, and certainly, none of them need exclude concrete action in the present to make access to lethal weapons more difficult for the violently-inclined.  Again, to apply the same logic elsewhere reveals its vacuousness—just because the root causes that lead to drunk driving are not cars themselves, this doesn’t mean that we don’t sensibly take measures to restrict alcoholics’ ability to drive. 

The last claim—”only those disposed to be law-abiding will obey the laws, so they’re useless in restraining evil”—is perhaps the most plausible in the current situation, but if broadened into a general principle, would destroy the basis for all laws.  If it were in fact true that laws only serve as guidelines for the virtuous, and have no effect in restraining the vicious, then there would be no point in passing them.  No point in outlawing theft or rape or assault, because those disposed to thieve and rape and assail would ignore the laws.  But in fact, the very opposite is the case.  The existence of vicious dispositions is the reason why we have positive law in the first place.  Richard Hooker puts it well:

“Laws politic, ordained for external order and regiment amongst men, are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard of his depraved mind little better than a wild beast, they do accordingly provide notwithstanding so to frame his outward actions, that they be no hinderance unto the common good for which societies are instituted: unless they do this, they are not perfect.”  

In other words, the purpose of coercive laws is precisely to restrain the outward actions of those who are otherwise not restrained by inward compunction to do good.  Of course, there are bad and good ways to do this, and often less is more.  Hyperactive attempts to police outward actions in Prohibition and in the war on drugs had little effect in restraining the evils it meant to, and led to a host of other evils.  Perhaps guns are another such area.  (Although I will note just in passing that the analogy with both of these fails at one key point: alcohol, and especially drugs, are considerably easier to smuggle, suggesting that restrictions on guns would be at least somewhat easier to enforce.)  But let’s decide this by evaluating the concrete policies that are proposed, not by proclaiming a priori that the law is useless in restraining evildoers.

Argument 2: The Only Thing that Can Stop a Bad Guy with a Gun is a Good Guy with a Gun

This argument does not rest content with defensively shooting down the idea of gun control, but takes the offensive, contending that in fact gun proliferation is the only way to a safe society.  What has surprised me most about this argument is how often I have found it on the lips of Christians, whose faith consists in the conviction that it was in fact  a single man’s non-violent act of self-sacrifice that constituted the most effective “stopping of bad guys” in the history of the world; that indeed, in this sacrifice is the power to overcome evil altogether in the end.  Now, I don’t want to go all woolly and pacifist on you.  I don’t in the end believe that Scripture teaches that just because Christ overcame his enemies by the sacrifice of the Cross, violence is never justified. But what Scripture certainly teaches us is to reject any form of an ontology of violence, an account of the world that understands violence as inescapable and supreme, such that only more violence can overcome it.  Because we live in a world of sin, there will be times when force must be used to restrain force—indeed, government regulation of guns is itself founded upon coercive authority—but this is not something to be gloried in, and we should look for ways for the force to achieve its end without bloodshed or taking a life.  Certainly, therefore, the rhetoric of this claim is out of line, and not something that should attract Christians.  The mindset it represents is reminiscent of the Cold War era political realism, which still infects so many American conservatives—the idea that the only way to ensure world peace was to make sure that you wielded a bigger stick, or a bigger hydrogen bomb.  If we ever find ourselves automatically prone to think that more lethal weaponry and more violence is the best solution to a problem, we should stop and examine whether we truly have the mind of Christ.

Now, rhetorical overreach aside, what if you’ve got a guy on a shooting rampage—wouldn’t you rather have a good guy with a gun nearby?  To be sure, if we focus myopically on the moment of the violent shooting rampage, then of course it may seem a truism that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  But this is to short-circuit the whole debate, which is about whether there are ways of preventing the shooting rampage in the first place.  It’s worth noting, for starters, that this argument runs counter to the conservative argument above, which asserted that we must fight violence at its root—sin, mental illness, social isolation, etc.  Looking at the broader context, sometimes it will take a pastor or a psychiatrist or a mother to stop a bad guy with a gun.  Or maybe it will take a government-mandated background check.  The problem with this argument, then, is it takes it as proven that no gun control legislation could possibly succeed in curtailing gun violence, and on this basis jumps to the conclusion that, if you’re going to still have gun violence either way, you’d be better off having as many deterrents in place as possible.  But again, this is to beg the question.  

In any case, though, considering how prominent this argument is, let’s assess for a moment its plausibility.  We have lots of school shootings, we are told, because schools are “gun-free zones”—would-be killers know that this is the place to go.  You don’t see mass murders at gun shows now, do you?  I must say that I’m quite skeptical that this empirical claim will hold up once we move beyond slogans to careful reasoning.  At the broadest level, the claim that a more thoroughly-armed populace translates into greater public security does not seem to stand scrutiny.  After all, the US has the world’s highest rate of gun ownership and the world’s highest homicide rate.  Not that one can draw a very clear correlation in that direction either, as gun control advocates would like to; a glance at worldwide statistics shows that there are clearly many factors involved.  In any case, though, declining homicide rates throughout the developed world over the past few centuries seem to owe primarily to a more thoroughgoing imposition of the rule of law, expansion of police forces, etc., not to any proliferation of weapons ownership.  More concretely, we should ask how effective a more widely-armed populace would have been in preventing recent mass shootings.  As for the Colorado cinema shooting in July, it strains credulity to argue that a handful of moviegoers, reflecting beforehand on the wisdom of carrying along a weapon to their midnight showing, would have had the skill and the presence of mind, not to mention the night vision, to whip out their weapons and take down the shooter when he lobbed smoke grenades and opened fire during the film.  A more likely scenario is that additional bystanders would’ve been shot in the frenzy.  Even in a society where a large proportion of citizens bore arms, there will be times and places that present a high concentration of unarmed or unprepared victims, and would-be killers will hone in on those places.  In the absence of a concerted attempt to arm teachers, schools will be another such place.  

It should also be obvious that it does little good merely to have a weapon—you need to be thoroughly-trained in its use, or you are likely to do more harm than good.  Given that even highly-trained soldiers and police officers usually take a few moments to gain their composure when they are fired upon, it seems clear that we would need not merely to arm teachers and other would-be civilian guardians of the peace, but offer them thorough training in firearm use and combat situations.  Such a thought experiment quickly veers into the realm of the absurd, as we contemplate schools where teachers are no longer hired on the basis of their ability to teach and to mentor young children, but by their resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Advocates might respond that this is a caricature—the mere fact that some teachers might be armed would act as a powerful deterrent against potential shooters.  But given that many of these shooters are deranged and even suicidal, it is hard to see why we should be so confident in their rational response to potential deterrents.  In any case, regardless of whether an armed and trained populace were a viable proposition, we should pause and consider for a moment if that is really the sort of society we would want to live in.  As a powerful article in The New Yorker  put it, “When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.”

In any case, there are many reasons for believing that the proliferation of weapons would reduce violence on the whole.  The good Christian doctrine of total depravity should caution us against such optimism.  It might be going a bit far to say that each of us is a potential killer, but more of us are than we’d like to admit.  Anyone who has a serious anger problem, or who, liable to become unhinged by sudden grief or a broken, is not really a the sort of person you want to be carrying a deadly weapon around town.  There are relatively few people who are liable to commit mass murder, but there are plenty who, under the right circumstances, and with a weapon ready to hand, might commit a crime of passion, or might use lethal force in “self-defense” when the situation did not call for it.  Even if every armed teacher or cinema-goer could be completely trusted only to use their weapon in self-defense, could we assume that they could all be trusted to ensure that no one else ever got access to their weapons?  Fill schools with armed teachers, and you’re inviting any deranged and violent young male to sneak over to his teacher’s desk when she’s not looking and pilfer the weapon.  Again, perhaps there are certain concrete measures we could take to ensure more deterrents to aggressors in high-risk areas, but these should be carefully and specifically argued for, not defended by recourse to the principle that more guns always equals more safety.

Argument 3: But the Second Amendment says…

The fact that the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, guarantees the right to bear arms certainly circumscribes this discussion somewhat.  We are not free to deliberate in a vacuum about what would be the most ideal or prudent policy in the abstract.  Or rather, we can so deliberate if we wish, but sooner or later we will have to consider not merely what is ideal but what is legal.  Not, of course, that the Constitution is un-amendable.  Although practically speaking, it is hard to imagine a repeal of the Second Amendment, it’s worth pausing on this point for a moment to ask whether such a repeal could possibly be just.  Many conservatives, it seems, are liable to confuse constitutional rights with natural rights, and to number the right to bear arms along with those inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  This, however, is problematic.  I’m uncomfortable with “rights” language to begin with, but adopting it for the sake of argument, it is generally understood that natural rights must undergo a certain conditioning and limitation when they are translated into political rights.  That is to say, I always have a right to life, but once I go from being a solitary nomad to a member of a political society, the terms under which I can pursue this right are limited.  I can’t in ordinary circumstances just kill and eat my neighbor’s cow when I’m hungry, for instance.  Moreover, in the forming of political society, we delegate the exercise of certain liberties to our representatives and rulers.  Rather than pursuing life, liberty, and happiness as individuals, we exercise a corporate agency; national defense is perhaps the preeminent example.  Here, rather than attempting to each defend ourselves individually against the threat of external aggression, we pool our resources and authorize certain people to fight on our behalf.  That doesn’t mean that if an enemy combatant somehow made it into our backyard, we couldn’t do our best to fight him on our own, but we wouldn’t prepare for that eventuality.  There is no reason in principle why internal security should be different.  If a society decides that it wants to exercise the right of self-defense against criminals through its police forces, and not through an armed citizenry, such a law would not, it seems to be, violate the law of nature.

The Second Amendment, therefore, is a human law, and as such in principle changeable.  In considering its applicability today, we should keep in mind two dictums from Richard Hooker.  First,

“Whether God bee the author of lawes by authorizing that power of men whereby they are made, or by delivering them made immediatly from him selfe, by word onely, or in writing also, or howsoever; notwithstanding the authoritie of their maker, the mutabilitie of that end for which they are made doth also make them chaungeable” (LEP III.10.2).  

In other words, simply to appeal to the Constitution doesn’t settle the discussion.  If God himself had declared the Second Amendment, it might still be changeable, if the end for which it was made no longer pertains.  What is that end?

Well, it depends whom you ask.  From my position high up in the cheap seats, it looks like there’s room for disagreement even among legal scholars on the question, but that it’s hard to deny that the main objective of the amendment was tied in with the affirmation of local militias.  The grammar of the amendment makes this fairly hard to argue with—”A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”  Early American militias served two potential purposes.  The first was to provide protection, not primarily against internal threats (criminals) as against external threats (attacks by natives, primarily), though in some places, the threat of slave insurrection may also have been part of the picture.  The second, certainly around the time of the Revolutionary War, was to start insurrections, against governments perceived to be tyrannical—militias were there to hold rulers to account with the threat of armed insurgency.  The first purpose seems to be essentially irrelevant now, and if this were all the Second Amendment was about, then on Hooker’s principle, it would be essentially a dead letter.  What about the second?  Given that it was precisely the potential for such insurrections as Shay’s Rebellion that led to the Constitutional Convention, we may safely assume that many founding fathers were not too keen on this function of militias.  Aside from that, however, should be we keen on them today?  Remarkably, an awful lot of conservatives are; in recent gun-control debates, one hears this rationale for gun ownership explicitly invoked.  The ethics of rebellion is complex subject that I couldn’t possibly go into now, but suffice to say that historically those calling themselves “conservative” have been highly suspicious of armed revolution, as have, all the more so, those calling themselves Christians.  Christian political theory has always found it extremely difficult to find a Biblical justification for popular revolt, and Christians today should be wary of breaking with that tradition.  

Perhaps, though, the Second Amendment was framed also to the end of ensuring private means of self-defense against ordinary criminal threats.  Well then, that end remains unchanged, so the law must as well.  Right?  Hooker’s second principle interjects here:

“lawes are instruments to rule by, and instruments are not only to bee framed according unto the generall ende for which they are provided, but even according unto that very particular, which riseth out of the matter wheron they have to work.  The end wherefore lawes were made may bee permanent, and those lawes neverthelesse require some alteration, if there bee anye unfitnes in the meanes which they prescribe as tending unto that end and purpose (Ibid.).”

In other words, it could be a perfectly just law for a perfectly just end, an end that still applies, and yet the law may need to be changed?  Why?  Well, subsequent experience might demonstrate that the law was in fact ill-suited to achieve its purpose, that it has done more harm than good.  Or, it might be that although once well-suited, society has since changed to the extent that the law no longer effectively serves its purpose.  Weapons today are not what they were in 1790.  Back then, a mass shooting was unthinkable—you could fire one shot, and while you laboriously reloaded, there would be time for a dozen unarmed bystanders to tackle you.  The conditions of modern life have changed dramatically.  For one thing, we have a much more sophisticated and effective system of public law enforcement than back then, and so have less need to rely on private self-defense.  The vast majority of us today will go through our entire lives without any need to draw weapon in our own defense.

None of this is to contend that the Second Amendment is necessarily obsolete.  In certain respects, it will have enduring relevance.  But these need to be carefully parsed out and argued for—we get nowhere merely by invoking the amendment like a magic word and pretending that gun-control advocates have no respect for law.  Of course, even if we did deem the Amendment mostly obsolete, it would still impose constraints on how far gun control legislation could go, and this is an important point to make.  There are certainly some in the current debate who might like to see all guns banned, and would like to do so without repealing the amendment.  To these, it is the duty of true conservatives to point out that the laws of our ancestors still bind us, whether we like them or not, until they can be undone by proper authority.  Good old Hooker can be relied upon to remind us of this principle too.  Nonetheless, we are not left with the alternatives “No guns” or “unrestricted guns.”  The language of the amendment itself presupposes the existence of careful regulation in this area, so it is regulation does not ipso facto constitute an infringement of the right. 

Our task, then, is to determine, within the constraints provided by legal precedent, under what conditions the right to bear arms may most prudently be exercised today.  This will require careful legal scholarship; it will require careful empirical investigation of the nature and causes of gun violence, of the effectiveness that various preventative measures have had in different times and places; it will require thoughtful political consideration of the unforeseen consequences of gun legislation, of the extent to which it will reduce civil liberties as a whole or encourage the growth of bureaucratic law enforcement behemoth.  All of these considerations need to be weighed in the balance, and from different judgments regarding them, a variety of plausible proposals, some quite conservative, others more liberal, may be advanced.  A careful debate needs to be had about these proposals, for a great deal may hinge on them.  But let’s not short-circuit that debate by ignoring both common sense and the basic principles of political theory and jurisprudence.  And above all, let’s not shame the name of Christ by identifying the “Christian” cause in the public debate with a commitment to individual rights and to violent solutions to violence.

The Abortion Question

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In response to my recent Post-Apocalyptic Musings, my friend Ben Miller asked an earnest and important question: “given his [Obama’s] strong pro-abortion stance, isn’t it the case that a vote for him was clearly a vote for abortion? I’m not saying that everyone who voted for him was consciously pro-abortion, but it’s an unmistakably prominent part of what he stands for. I don’t see how a Christian can support a leader who’s a vocal proponent of holocaust.”  A similar sense underlay my friend Daniel Alder’s post, where he felt confident that if pastors were doing their job right, almost no church member would vote Democrat, because it was unthinkable for any faithful Christian to support a pro-abortion agenda.  In this, of course, they speak for millions of American Christians, deeming that there is simply no way to conscientiously vote for a pro-choice candidate, however preferable he might be on a range of other issues.  

 In my post, I lamented the “chasm of mutual incomprehension” that had opened up in American public life, and I am convinced that nothing is so paralyzing to life together as incomprehension.  Disagreement can be extremely fruitful and edifying, but incomprehension is sterile and provokes only frustration.  When we cannot understand why something has happened or why someone would say or do something, we are prone to become angry, and impute the worst possible motives as a way of trying to make sense of the situation.  Unable to comprehend why any rational person would do something, we find ourselves increasingly unable to think of them as a person, and thus unable to love them as a person, although we have little difficulty loving even our worst enemy if we understand what motivates him.    

It is probably safe to say that no single factor has contributed as much to the creation of this chasm of incomprehension, at least for Christians, as the issue of abortion.  The politicization of abortion, I believe, has been deeply harmful for American public life—for it has done very little in the end to mitigate the abortion problem, but it has done a great deal to dissolve the possibility of rational debate and mutual understanding in American politics and society.  So, although I am deeply sympathetic to Ben and Daniel’s concern (it was indeed one decisive reason that I did not vote for Obama), I would like to make a stab at trying to dispel a bit of the fog around this issue.  As I want to be thorough, I will confine myself primarily to the narrow question, “How could a Christian vote for a pro-abortion candidate, even while disagreeing with his policies?”  Such is the spectrum of opinion on the matter of abortion that many Christians will see this as a silly discussion with an obvious answer, and will be far more interested in discussing whether the pro-choice position is a viable one.  To other Christians, this latter discussion seems almost unthinkable.  Unfortunately, I will only touch on it briefly in my conclusion, though perhaps I can try to address it more fully another time.  But hopefully this inquiry, at least, may constitute a small baby step toward mutual understanding among Christians on this issue.

 

Before proceeding, let me first reassure my readers that I view abortion as a grave moral evil, tragic and disgusting, and consider many of the campaigners for abortion rights to have deeply compromised moral sensibilities, to put it delicately.  The following may seem like a dry academic argument to the effect, “It’s not that big a deal after all.”  That is not my purpose.  Abortion is a very big deal, and the task of saving lives from it is an urgent one.  But neither is it the only moral issue confronting our society, so there is no virtue in so single-mindedly dedicating ourselves to its opposition that we become incapable of making sound moral and political judgments on other fronts.


So, let’s first untangle the question, “How could a Christian vote for a pro-abortion candidate?” or, to use Ben’s wording, “Given Obama’s strong pro-abortion stance, isn’t it the case that a vote for him was clearly a vote for abortion?”  The contention here is that one cannot really say, as many Christians clearly have said, “I am voting for this candidate who happens to support abortion, but I am not voting for his support of abortion.”  Now, I would suggest that in Ben’s case, this question contains a couple of unvoiced premises.  Without those premises, and as it currently stands, the conclusion is not at all compelling, for it would seem to imply that our British, Canadian, Australian brothers and sisters—indeed, many foreign Christians, of many nationalities—are necessarily wrong whenever they vote for a pro-abortion candidate in their elections, as they often do.  Is that really the case?  And if so, why not?  Although I think Ben’s claim was much more specifically targeted, let me take some time to say why not, since I think many American Christians have not bothered to think this through, and I think it will help illuminate what’s really at stake.  

 It may help if we abstract from politics for the moment.  Let’s ask then whether it would be appropriate, if one were a stockholder, to vote for a new member of a company’s Board of Directors if one knew him to hold pro-abortion views (assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is not a company directly involved in the abortion industry)?  Or, how about, at the risk of trivializing too much, to vote for an American Idol contestant whom one knew to hold pro-abortion views?  Few would argue, I think, that these views should in any way constitute an automatic bar to a Christian endorsing such a candidate.  If anyone did argue that, on the basis that a Christian should never offer support to a person of such obviously depraved morality, I would suggest that this would be a very arbitrary stand to take, given that the other candidates might be of equally depraved morality on other issues (e.g., greed, toleration of adultery, love of violence, whatever).  Indeed, it is on this basis that I have little patience with Christians who go on boycotting crusades against any company that, say, gives money to Planned Parenthood.  I understand the sentiment, but why single out this single moral issue, while turning a blind eye to companies that engage in complex tax evasion or exploitation of workers? 

 Now, it would not be arbitrary if abortion did indeed constitute a uniquely grotesque perversion of morality.  For instance, I can imagine someone plausibly arguing that even for something as inconsequential as an American Idol contest, one could not support a contestant who advocated, say, rape or pedophilia or the torture of innocents.  Merely holding such views would render a person morally repugnant to a degree that no Christian should want to identify with them.  Is abortion such an issue?  I believe not, though I shall only have time to touch on this for a moment in the conclusion.

Assuming, then, there would be no automatic bar to supporting a pro-choice American Idol contestant or corporate board member, there might still be a contingent bars, of at least two types.  First, let’s imagine that one knew that this board member did not merely privately support abortion, but was an activist, and hoped to use the resources of the company to advance the cause of abortion—perhaps by giving very generously to pro-abortion causes.  In this case, one would be opposing the candidate not on the basis of his private failures of moral reasoning, but on the basis of the harm likely to be done from his gaining a leadership position.  In such a situation, voting for him might be construed as material cooperation in evil, just like knowingly providing a getaway car for a bank robbery.  Unlike the getaway car, however, it would probably be judged far, rather than near material cooperation—you would be supporting a man who probably, given the opportunity, would allocate funds to help support organizations that might well use those funds to offer more abortions—in many cases, to people who were already trying to get abortions anyway.  Even if it were merely far material cooperation, though, one would be forced to judge just how much harm he might actually do, over against the other goods he might bring.  For instance, perhaps he was committed to generous philanthropy in general, and would also try to give large donations to very good causes; or perhaps the other candidates, while not supporters of abortion, might be inclined to donate to other wicked causes; or perhaps he was the only candidate with the business acumen to keep the company running (assuming, for the sake of argument, that it were an otherwise good company doing a service to society).  Perhaps, in short, great good would come from his election; might this outweigh the harm that might come from his use of company funds to support abortion?  Possibly, possibly not.  Or perhaps the company’s policy was already to fund abortion charities, and there was little evidence the other candidates would change it. In view of such uncertainties, this would be a matter on which Christians could quite plausibly disagree.  Some Christians might support the candidate on the grounds that he would do much more good and less harm on the whole than the other candidates; some might support the other candidates on the opposite grounds; some might conclude that when they were all such bad apples, one should just keep one’s distance and vote for none of them.  So the first contingent bar is: likely to materially advance the abortion agenda by means of policies to an extent that outweighs any foreseen other goods.  (Before moving on, it’s worth pausing to notice that although this seems like a rather silly example, given that almost no stockholder ever bothers to vote on their Proxy ballot, or to research the candidates at all, perhaps this just shows to some extent our inconsistency, or unhealthy fixation with politics.  I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Board of Director choices that I’ve had the opportunity to weigh in on as a stockholder were actually more consequential, in terms of the harm that might be done or averted, than some of the political candidates I’d had the opportunity to vote for.)   

For the second contingent bar, let’s look at that American Idol competition.  Can one imagine a scenario in which (assuming one were a die-hard American Idol fan, determined to vote for one of the contestants, in which case one might have issues worth addressing) one ought not to vote for one on the basis of her advocacy of abortion?  Yes, I think so.  For let’s consider the fact that an American Idol winner gains a very prominent podium in our society, an opportunity to speak out (albeit rarely very coherently) about what she’s passionate about.  Perhaps even more importantly, she becomes an “idol”—someone that people respect, for whatever reason, and want to emulate.  That being the case, she is capable of doing a great deal of harm merely by standing for morally depraved behaviors, even if she has little role in practically facilitating them.  (Of course, it might well be that she would also practically facilitate them, like the corporate director we saw above, by means of charitable contributions and the like, but we’ll leave that consideration aside here.)  If the contestant’s advocacy of abortion, then, were so strong or high-profile that, by supporting her, you were likely to raise up an influential spokesperson for abortion, or a widely-adored symbol of the pro-choice cause, someone who made it “cool” to be pro-choice make the cause of abortion more respectable, this might well constitute grounds why a Christian should *not* support such a person.  This is particularly the case in the example we have given, since there is really no reason why one should feel the need to vote for an American Idol contestant…this being so, to take the time to support such a morally compromised contestant would be like going out one’s way to support vice.  Of course, there would be other conditions—e.g., a presidential election—in which one might otherwise have very good reasons to support this candidate.  In that case, one would have to weigh the goods in question against the likely evils to result from helping to elevate to prominence of a spokesman for abortion.  Again, this would be a difficult judgment to make, perhaps even more difficult than the question above, since one would be weighing a very intangible factor (how powerful is this figure as a symbol of the pro-abortion cause?) against other more concrete factors.  One can imagine Christians who otherwise largely agreed on a wide range of issues coming to different judgments on this question.  The second contingent bar then is: likely to materially advance the abortion agenda by lending it respectability or prominence to an extent that outweighs any other foreseen goods.

(It should be noted that this second consideration loses significance to the degree that the vice in question becomes a cultural norm.  That is to say, imagine a pop star who was an outspoken supporter of abortion in the 1950s.  At that time, this would have been a very bold and, to most Americans, appalling position to take.  Anyone with such views at that time would have been almost certain to stand out, to become a symbol of this depraved cause, so that she was no longer just a pop star, but known as the “pro-abortion pop star.”  Nowadays, however, abortion has become culturally accepted enough that it is highly unlikely that an individual pop star’s advocacy of it would be sufficiently striking to merit much public attention.  The same, to some extent, is true of political figures.  To elect an openly pro-choice president forty years ago, would have been a much more shocking statement than to do so now.) 

From this second point arises a closely related concern, which might be thought to constitute a third contingent bar to voting for someone who approved of abortion, and which, I suppose, is a large part of what’s going on when people say that “a vote for Obama is a vote for abortion.”  To re-use the American Idol example, imagine if the outspoken pro-choice contestant became so identified with this “cause” that a vote for her could only be considered an endorsement of the cause, a message a Christian certainly wouldn’t want to send.  There are no doubt times which such can happen—when a particular issue generates so much heat and controversy that one cannot really separate the individual from the issue, cannot pass judgment one way or another on the individual without seeming to take sides on the issue.  In such a circumstance, a Christian would no longer be able to say, “I am supporting this candidate who happens to support abortion, but I am not supporting abortion,” which is the disjunction we have been assuming throughout the discussion thus far.  Therefore, no Christian could in good conscience cast such a vote, as it would appear to send a message that they could not send.  I think that this is how many on the Christian Right currently think about the abortion issue.  However, I think this argument fails, both empirically and theoretically.  Empirically, I do not think it is really the case that in America today, a Democratic candidate, even one as clearly pro-choice as Obama, is so identified with the abortion cause as to be almost indistinguishable from it.  Or rather, he is, but only in the minds of his fervently pro-life opponents—and perhaps in the mind of his most fervently pro-choice supporters. The majority of the American electorate does not think that way, and would have little trouble understanding the reasoning of someone who said, “I do not support abortion, but I will vote for Obama for other reasons.”  Theoretically, I think it fails because one’s own intentions always remain free and separate from others’ fallible judgments about them.  Just because someone thinks that when I act in such a way, I must intend evil, does not mean I cannot act in that way, intending something else.  We are to avoid the appearance of evil, but that’s the great thing about our voting—it’s private.  If I am convinced that I need to cast my vote in such a way that would appear to others to be a vote for evil, then I just cast my vote privately, without broadcasting for whom I voted.  Or, if I do broadcast it, I explain my reasoning clearly and carefully.  Therefore, the third contingent bar—likely to appear as an endorsement of a position I cannot endorse—fails.  (Nonetheless, this is still worth taking into account as one decides how to vote.  If one has trouble, in one’s own mind, abstracting the candidate from the morally reprehensible agenda one sees them as representing, then one certainly can determine on that basis that one would rather not vote for them.)

  

All of this should clarify for us what a vote against a pro-choice candidate isn’t or shouldn’t be: it is not a refusal to associate oneself with someone who has morally objectionable views; or a refusal to take any action that may indirectly result in the advancing of wickedness—both of these, consistently advocated, would require a complete withdrawal from public life.  On the contrary, it is a refusal to advance the agenda of someone who has morally objectionable views that they are likely to put into practice or publicly advocate to an extent that will do great harm outweighing any other foreseen goods.

This being the case, it should now be readily apparent why many of foreign brothers and sisters need have little compunction in voting for candidates who support abortion.  In many of their settings, abortion is in many cases a matter of settled policy, and there are few elected representatives interested in opposing it.  If none of the candidates available is planning to make much change to abortion policy, one may lawfully vote for the candidate one expects to do the most good on other fronts.  Indeed, in such a setting, voting for a candidate who supports the status quo abortion policy is only in a very distant sense any kind of material cooperation with evil, since the evil being done is quite separate from the actions of the candidate.  Likewise, if we turn to the second contingent bar, since abortion is not, alas, highly controversial in many of these societies, even an outspoken supporter of abortion would attract little notice.  In Britain, for instance, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which a candidate could become a symbol of the “abortion cause” (there not really being such a recognizable cause) to the extent that one must avoid lending him one’s support.  In their circumstances, then, it is rarely the case that a given candidate is likely to materially advance the abortion agenda either by means of policy or by lending it respectability or prominence to an extent that necessarily outweighs any other foreseen goods.  Of course, that is not to say it is never an issue.  There are still plenty of live political issues related to abortion here in the UK and other European countries, and there may be some candidates vigorously advancing an expansion of abortion rights, whom Christians should avoid supporting on those grounds.  But in general, it’s not likely to be a highly relevant consideration.  Note also that this is not a call for European Christians to give up on this issue, because they’ve already lost the battle.  It merely means that for most of them, opposition to abortion will likely have to take other forms besides political activism, at least until such time as legal opposition to abortion again becomes a viable platform.

 

So now, let’s turn finally back to Obama.  Four basic questions will affect our judgment of the Christian’s duty in this case.  The first is, “To what extent is Obama likely to advance abortion by means of policy decisions?”  The second is, “To what extent is Obama likely to advance abortion by lending it respectability or a prominent defender?”  Ben Miller, I take it, considers the answers to both of these questions to be, “To a great extent,” and it is on this basis that he feels able to say, “Given Obama’s strong pro-abortion stance, isn’t it the case that a vote for him was clearly a vote for abortion?”  But we must ask two further questions.  The third is, “To what extent are we already like Europe?  To what extent is abortion now settled policy, accepted practice?”  The fourth is, “What are the other viable candidates (in this case, Romney) likely to do about abortion?”  

Taken together, the third and fourth enable us to reframe the first and second as follows:  “To what extent is Obama likely to advance abortion by means of policy decisions relative to what would happen if he were not elected?”  The second is, “To what extent is Obama likely to advance abortion by lending it respectability or a prominent defender relative to what would happen if he were not elected?”  Once framed this way, the difficulty of reaching a clear answer, that should bind the consciences of believers as they consider voting, becomes readily apparent.  Because I do not think that any of these questions admit of easy answers, I will not attempt to hash them out in detail, but will merely outline a few points.

Thinking again in terms of four questions, how might we answer the first?  Obviously, Obama is pro-choice, and has already as President enacted policies that favor that agenda, most notably the provisions in Obamacare that leave religious institutions having to help fund abortions.  Just because abortion is already law in the US doesn’t mean it can’t be made worse by making access to abortions easier and more universal, and unfortunately, many in the Democratic Party, including Obama do seem committed to doing just that.  The President’s power to appoint judges is of course also relevant, as his selection of pro-choice justices renders it ever more unlikely that Ro v. Wade could be overturned.  I am not convinced by claims that Obama is militantly pro-choice, bloodthirsty for the expansion of abortion in a uniquely sinister way, as many on the Right seem to think, but the general orientation of his agenda is undeniable.  It is worth noting, incidentally, that it really matters little for this discussion what Obama’s private views are—perhaps personally, he really does dislike the idea of abortion, and wants it to be “safe, legal, and rare,” and is acting only under pressure from the NOW and other constituencies.  It would be nice if that were true, and would affect, perhaps, our assessment of his own moral sensibilities, but it makes little difference to our assessment of the impact of his policies. 

Regarding the second, too, we must go on the basis of public presentation, rather than private beliefs, whatever they might be.  That includes, unfortunately, campaign ads.  Of course, everyone recognizes that campaign ads are cynical vehicles of short-term manipulation, and people ought perhaps therefore to put little stock in them.  But they are a key way in which a candidate presents himself, his message, and what he stands for to the American people.  The fact that the Obama campaign decided to run so many ads defending abortion, and castigating Romney for his opposition to it, unmistakably painted Obama as the representative, the champion, of the pro-choice cause.  For him to win under such circumstances meant at least in part a victory for that cause, helping affirm it and lend it respectability.  Using someone like Sandra Fluke as a poster-child reinforces the message that “reproductive rights” are cool, and Obama is all for helping women expand them.  For some Christians I know, it was this identification with the cause of abortion by the Obama campaign, more than any particular policy decisions on the issue, that was a deal-breaker for them.

If we consider the third question, though—”to what extent are we already like Europe?”—I think many realistic Christians, particularly of a younger generation, take a pretty sober assessment of where America is now at on the abortion issue.  Are we really likely to overturn Roe v. Wade now, after forty years?  The political prospects are daunting enough alone.  But worse, it is widespread cultural acceptance of abortion that constitutes a greater obstacle than any purely political difficulties.  There is an extent to which law can affect morality, to be sure, and sometimes, law can outrun morality, as it were, insisting on conduct which does not yet command a general consensus, in hopes of creating that consensus.  The Civil Rights movement is a good example of a case where this seems to have generally worked (although some would argue that federal government policy here was too much, too fast, with long-term harmful effects on both races).  Many would cite also Wilberforce’s successful prohibition of the slave trade, but we mustn’t forget that this took twenty years of sustained effort, and was only successful when Wilberforce realized that first public perception must be re-shaped, the cultural consensus must be altered, before legislation could ever be successful.  There are many other cases in which attempts to ban a practice by law, when the citizenry were not convinced, failed abysmally—Prohibition being perhaps the most notorious.  In general, I would say that the trajectory of a society is one of the things that matters most here.  In Wilberforce’s time, factors were already at work that were moving English society in a direction that disposed them to be able to perceive and confront slavery as a grave moral evil.  Likewise in the Civil Rights movement—the public consciousness, while still stubbornly racist in many areas, was turning already in favor of the cause when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.  Because of this, the law was able to succeed, by and large, in requiring people to be moral when they didn’t want to be, and in continuing to reshape the moral consensus.  Sad to say, the moral trajectory of the American people right now is not toward a greater condemnation of abortion.  Sure, there are some signs that some progress has been made, that a majority of Americans now would consider themselves pro-life, but the majority is slim.  And perhaps more decisively, the general worldview of Americans, with the premium value they place on choice, individual liberty and “rights,” and their general distaste of having the “government” dictate anything to them, renders it unlikely that the pro-choice cause is going down anytime soon.  Even attempts to restrict abortion piecemeal, by raising the age required, or by requiring parental consent, and that sort of thing, have often run into intractable opposition.  That’s not a reason why we shouldn’t continue to fight the cause, and on every front.  But it means that perhaps we are not now at the point where we should consider a presidential election likely to make a decisive difference one way or another.  It also means that we’re at the point where we’re pretty jaded as a nation, and the mere fact of having a pro-choice President may not materially alter people’s perceptions of the issue very much.

Likewise, if we consider the fourth question,”What are the other viable candidates (in this case, Romney) likely to do about abortion?” there were two reasons to be skeptical in this case.  The first is that Romney is a weasel and a flip-flopper, who seemed intent above all on getting elected, and once elected would be intent above all on staying in office.  That being the case, I don’t have great faith that, if he found confronting abortion to prove too difficult or controversial, he would had quietly shelved the issue.  Perhaps that’s overly-cynical, but it is at least an understandable judgment to reach, and remember that our purpose here is simply to show that there exist multiple rationally-defensible answers to these question.  Second, we have to be honest about the fact that we have had 24 years of Republican presidency—at least 16 of which made a fairly strong claim to represent the interests of the “Moral Majority”—since Roe v. Wade was passed, and have seen essentially no positive effect from it.  We’ve even had a conservative majority on the court, but seen it show little indication to revisit the issue or overturn the decision.  Even if we granted that Romney was at least as reliable a pro-life candidate as Bush II or Reagan, that obviously wouldn’t show much.  Yes, it is likely, that especially with the appearance of Obamacare and such, there are issues of particular policy where Romney could influence things positively, but we should not expect anything particularly dramatic.  It is of course also the case that, thinking in terms of the second question, it might help the pro-life cause to have such a visible public advocate.  On the other hand, so entrenched are the two camps now, that it might make little difference.  

 

Where does all this leave us?  How do we answer the questions, “To what extent is Obama likely to advance abortion by means of policy decisions relative to what would happen if he were not elected?” and “To what extent is Obama likely to advance abortion by lending it respectability or a prominent defender relative to what would happen if he were not elected?”  My own personal answer was that I thought Obama could still do enough net harm on this front that I was unwilling to vote for him, but I was also unwilling to drop all other considerations and vote against him on this basis, as I spelled out a week and a half ago.  But I can readily understand arguments in either of the other directions—those who think that, given the weight of other issues, a vote for Obama was defensible, despite his abortion stance, and those who think that Obama’s position on this issue was likely to do so much imminent harm or Romney’s so much imminent good, that they felt obliged to vote for Romney.   

I hope that I have succeeded at the very least in demonstrating the complexity of the issues that must be sorted through before a summary judgment on this question is reached.  And I hope therefore that we might be more able to comprehend and accept the judgments of fellow Christians who weigh these considerations differently.  We may still disagree, but at least we needn’t be paralyzed by incomprehension.

Unfortunately, in this post, I have worked only within the sphere of assumed agreement that, ideally, we should want to legally ban abortion; I have not had the time to address the other, even more paralyzing source of incomprehension, and I shall only touch on it for a brief moment before concluding.  This is that there are some people, including some faithful Christians, who would genuinely support not merely a candidate who happens to be pro-choice, but pro-choice policy as such.  Perhaps for many Christians on the Right, this position at least remains so morally depraved as to be incomprehensible.  Of course, there are two forms that this might take—a belief that abortion should remain legal, although it is immoral, and a belief that abortion is not immoral.  Although I believe the former position is flawed, I would argue that a plausible case could be made for it, especially given certain assumptions about the nature of law that are increasingly dominant even among today’s Christians.  Even the latter view, I would want to point out, although an example of serious moral blindness, is not a unique or uniquely incomprehensible one.  Many of our Christian ancestors defended slavery, and even the slave trade, positions we now find repugnant and in many cases almost incomprehensible.  But it was only because their opponents were willing to seek to understand their sinful reasoning, and considered them capable of persuasion, that this evil was overcome.  When I hear some Christians railing about evil abortionists, I wonder sometimes if they’ve ever actually known anyone who was pro-choice.  A few, I would grant, truly merit the adjective “evil,” and deserve nothing but the most fervent opposition.  To most others, however, we owe a willingness to listen and learn, even while opposing.  There are some rational links in the chain of logic that would lead one to that position, and we must take the time to understand them if we are ever to successfully win hearts and minds.  

 

All of this, perhaps, has been a rather tedious way of saying not very much—“It’s complicated.  It depends.  Let’s disagree respectfully.”  Perhaps I am merely stating the obvious, but nowadays, it seems even the obvious needs stating.   With the conclusion of this third very lengthy post on contemporary politics (making up for my recent neglect of the subject on this blog), I propose to take a blogging hiatus for a week or two, while I’m away at ETS, AAR, and SBL, and then celebrating Thanksgiving and my arrival at the quarter-century mark.  I will try to reply to any comments here, but may be much slower than normal.  

Love, Law, and Christian Liberty

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A couple of weeks ago, I tracked down a remarkable document which has been almost entirely overlooked by scholars, a set of “Propositions or articles framed for the use of the Dutch Church in London” on the subject of Christian liberty and related doctrines.  These articles were occasioned by a dispute over the use of godparents in baptism in the Dutch Strangers’ Churches in London, which raised fundamental questions about Christian liberty, adiaphora, and ecclesiastical authority and led ultimately to a schism.  The Dutch ministers therefore drew up a set of articles, attempting to express the magisterial Reformed understanding of these doctrines, and submitted it to the review of the leaders of Reformed churches in Heidelberg, Bern, Lausanne, Zurich, and Geneva.  After incorporating many of the suggested revisions, which were primarily of a stylistic, not a substantive nature, the resulting document was published under the auspices of Edmund Grindal, the Bishop of London with jurisdiction over the Strangers’ Churches.  It thus can lay claim to comprising a kind of pan-Protestant, or at least pan-Reformed, consensus statement on these issues, and encapsulates teachings that we find in Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Vermigli, Bullinger, and others.  

The key points of the Dutch articles may be summarized as follows:

 1. That Christian liberty is spiritual, which means, among other things, that it consists in a free submission to  constraint, not a freedom from all constraint.  This constraint may be that of divine law, which the Christian must follow, though as a result of rather than a means to justification, or, may be imposed by men, in things left indifferent by divine law.

(Art. I: “CHRISTIAN liberty is not a wandering and unruly licence, by which we may do or leave undone whatsoever we list at our pleasure; but it is a free gift bestowed upon us by Christ our Lord; by the which, the children of God (that is, all the faithful), being delivered from the curse of the law, or eternal death, and from the heavy yoke of the ceremonial law, and being endowed with the Holy Ghost, begin willingly of their own accord to serve God in holiness and righteousness.”

Art. IV: “Conscience is the feeling of God’s judgment, whether that a man be assured out of the word of God of that judgment, or that he make it to himself rashly or superstitiously. But whereas it is the duty of Christians to observe the commandments of their Lord, that indeed is properly called a right and good conscience, which is governed by the word of God. Whereby it cometh to pass, that every faithful man by that revealed word doth examine and weigh with himself, both what he doth, and also what he letteth undone, that he may judge of them both, which is just, and which is unjust.”)

2. Things indifferent are not void of moral content, therefore, but take that content from variable circumstances, and by virtue of those circumstances, exert a moral claim on us.

(Art. V: “Indifferent things are called those, which by themselves, being simply considered in their own nature, are neither good nor bad, as meat and drink, and such like; in the which therefore, it is said, that the kingdom of God consisteth not; and that therefore a man may use them well or evil: wherefore it followeth, that they are marvellously deceived, which suppose they are called indifferent, as though without any exception we may omit them, or use them as often as we list, without any sin.”)

3. There are two main ways in which this claim comes about—(a) the law of charity, by which we are bound to use adiaphora to the edification of our neighbor, and (b) human law, by which we are bound to use adiaphora in accord with the commands of civil or ecclesiastical authority.

(Art. II: “Therefore, sith that he which is the Son of God is ruled by the Spirit of God, and that the same Spirit commandeth us, we should obey all ordinances of man (that is, all politic order, whereof the magistrate is the guardian), and all superiors, which watch for the health of our souls; yea, and that according to our vocation we should diligently procure the safeguard of our neighbour; it followeth, that that man abuseth the benefit of Christian liberty, or rather, is yet sold under sin, who doth not willingly obey either his magistrate or superior in the Lord, or doth not endeavour to edify the conscience of his brother.”

Art. VIII: “Generally, the use of these indifferent things is restrained by the law of charity, which is universal.”

Art. IX: “Specially, the use of these things is forbidden by ecclesiastical or civil decree.”)

4. By virtue of both of these, what is in itself free for the conscience becomes per accidens conscience-binding as an indirect command of God, since he commands us to love our neighbor and to obey the magistrate.

(Art. VI: “Things otherwise indifferent of themselves, after a sort change their nature, when by some commandment they are either commanded or forbidden. Because, neither they can be omitted contrary to the commandment, if they are once commanded, neither omitted contrary to prohibition, if they be prohibited; as appeareth in the ceremonial law.”

Art. IX: “For although that only God doth properly bind the conscience of man, yet in respect, that either the magistrate, who is God’s Minister, doth think it profitable for the commonwealth, that something, otherwise of itself lawful, be not done, or that the Church, having regard to order, comeliness, and also edifying, do make some laws concerning indifferent things, those laws are altogether to be observed of the godly, and do so far forth bind the conscience, that no man wittingly and willingly, with a stubborn mind, may, without sin, either do those things which are forbidden, or omit those things which are commanded.”)

5. However, to prevent tyranny, human authorities may not make laws in adiaphora arbitrarily, but only for purposes of edification, civil order, or ecclesiastical order.

(Art. XI: “They, which for any other cause either command or forbid at their pleasure the free use of indifferent things, than for one of these three, that is, neither for edifying, nor for policy, nor ecclesiastical order; and especially those which do rashly judge other men’s consciences in these matters; offend heinously against God and against their neighbor.“)

6. Conversely, because the conscience is bound only insofar as these purposes are at stake, the Christian remains at liberty if the circumstances giving rise to a law no longer pertain, and it can be disregarded without causing offence.

(Art. X: “And sith these things are not ordained simply for themselves, but in respect of certain circumstances, not as though the things themselves were of their own nature unlawful things (for it belongeth only to God to determine this) in case those circumstances do cease, and so be that offence be avoided as near as we can, and that there be no stubborn will of resisting; no man is to be reproved of sin, which shall do otherwise than those ordinances: as it is plain, by the example of David, in a case otherwise flatly forbidden, when he ate the shewbread.”)


This, however, is to make things rather neater than they appeared in fact.  For in point of fact, a great deal of tension attached to the connection between the two laws mentioned above in point (3)—the law of charity and the law of authority.  Is the latter merely valid so long as it remains a subset of the former, as points (5) and (6) imply?  Moreover, although the Dutch articles could speak of “either ecclesiastical or civil decree” in adiaphora as essentially parallel, it was far from clear just how these two were to be correlated.  Both   In fact, these two problems are closely related, as shall readily appear.

Luther and Melanchthon, as Bernard Verkamp has noted, were keen to deny to ecclesiastical ceremonies not only a necessity of means (intrinsically necessary to good standing with God) but also a necessity of precept (necessary to good standing with God merely by virtue of being commanded by church authorities).  Accordingly, Melanchthon will not use the rather clericalist language of the Dutch articles, by which we have an direct obligation before God to obey the commands of ministers, just as we do of magistrates.  To be sure, we can be bound outwardly in ecclesiastical adiaphora, but this obligation proceeds only from the principle of charity, from the demands of peace, order, and edification—while the concrete nature of these demands may happen to be determined by the command of authority, the connection is contingent, rather than necessary.  Therefore, in ecclesiastical matters, Melanchthon will endorse the reasoning of point (6) above—that should the demands of authority and the demands of charity cease to overlap, the latter may be dispensed with, so long as peace can be maintained.  Interestingly, however, he will not take this tack when it comes to civil affairs, for it would seem to disrupt the fabric of human society far too much if individuals were allowed to judge for themselves when laws were no longer binding.  Accordingly, to the principle of charity, he adds what we might call the principle of wrath, which he finds in Rom. 13:5—that to disobey civil authority is to disobey God and risk His wrath: “These are clear words, showing that obedience is necessary, that disobedience hurts the conscience, and that God condemns it.”  Indeed, he sees no need to qualify the conscience-binding character of these laws as indirect, but attacks “many dreamers [who] have written that worldly commandments do not bind us to eternal punishment, for man can punish no one eternally!”  At other points, however, he suggests that there are certain civil laws which are only contingently or circumstantially binding, or else that if civil laws can never be safely disobeyed, it is because to do so will always disrupt peace and cause offense. If so, this suggests that in fact, even in civil laws, it is only the principle of charity that necessarily binds us to their observance. 

Nonetheless, Melanchthon did not satisfactorily resolve this ambiguity, and because of his heavy stress on the intrinsically conscience-binding nature of civil laws, maintained a discontinuity of sorts between ecclesiastical and civil laws, which he otherwise treated as essentially the same, as adiaphorous ordinances of the “civil kingdom.”  In this scheme, it remained ambiguous what was to be done with civil authorities made laws regarding ecclesiastical ceremonies, as in the Adiaphora Controvery and the Vestiarian controversies.  The republication of Melanchthon’s scholia on “Whether it be a mortal sin to transgress civil laws” as part of conformist propaganda in the Second Vestiarian Controversy, then, hardly resolved the fundamental question.

 

In his Institutes, John Calvin had tackled the problem more directly and clearly, denying that there was any fundamental difference in the way that ecclesiastical and civil ordinances related to the conscience, but some ambiguity remains.  Both, as Calvin makes clear in Book III, chap. 19, “On Christian Liberty,” are to be understood as matters of the civil kingdom or “external forum,” wholly different from spiritual matters that occupy the “forum of conscience.”  Calvin’s discussion of ecclesiastical laws in IV.10 shows him to be far from VanDrunen and other advocates of the “regulative principle,” who make the “forum of conscience” co-extensive with the institutional church and rule out man-made laws and ceremonies within it.  On the contrary, such ordinances are absolutely necessary, since any human society requires a “form of organization . . . to foster the common peace and maintain concord.”  The particular form, however, is widely variable depending on circumstances, and accordingly our obligation to obey such laws is not necessary, but contingent.  Calvin’s treatment of this issue is close to that given in the Dutch articles, which are almost certainly drawing on the Institutes here.  In their decree regarding meat sacrificed to idols in Acts 15:20, says Calvin, the Apostles do not lay down a new law binding on the conscience before God, but rather “the divine and eternal command of God not to violate love.”  This command is being specified into a particular requirement in present circumstances, and in those circumstances, the Christian is bound to obey; but the circumstances being changed, so that charity no longer concretely demanded these actions, the law could be disobeyed without sin.  

Unlike Melanchthon, Calvin makes the same distinction of contingency and necessity with regard to civil laws, recognizing that Romans 13:5, if read the way Melanchthon and others appeared to, would threaten the principle of Christian liberty in ecclesiastical laws as well, seeing as both shared the nature of human law: “Moreover, the difficulty [of defining conscience] is increased by the fact that Paul enjoins obedience toward the magistrate, not only for fear of punishment, but for conscience’ sake.  From this it follows that consciences are bound by civil laws.  But if this were so, all that we said a little while ago and are now going to say about spiritual government would fall.”  Therefore, the same restrictions must reply to both: “human laws, whether made by magistrate or by church, even though they have to be observed (I speak of good and just laws), still do not of themselves bind the conscience.  For all obligation to observe laws looks to the general purpose, but does not consist in the things enjoined.”  This “general purpose,” however, is not spelled out by reference to the law of love, but by reference to “God’s general command, which commends to us the authority of magistrate,” although like Melanchthon, Calvin would probably equate the two, arguing that love of neighbor requires subjection to the magistrate, who advances the common good.

 

While all parties acknowledged the value of a certain division of labor between ecclesiastical and civil authorities, given that ministers would be best placed to identify what edification and order demanded in matters pertaining to worship and church government, and magistrates better suited to judge in matters pertaining to more strictly civil affairs, the asymmetry we have just seen posed a problem.  For if the demands of charity, edification, and order in these two spheres clashed, the civil magistrate held the trump card: the divine testimony that to disobey the ruler (within his legitimate sphere) was ipso facto to violate the demands of charity.  Accordingly, we find an increasing tendency to suggest that even in adiaphorous matters, ecclesiastical authorities have an autonomous, divinely-given jurisdiction over church ceremonies and polity.  We see this in the second of the Dutch articles, where God’s command to obey “all superiors which watch for the health of our souls” is put on the same par as His command to obey “all politic order, whereof the magistrate is the guardian.”  Later on, in article 23, they state explicitly that “It belongeth only to the Consistory, to be occupied in making new laws of discipline.”  Indeed, in article 20, the Dutch ministers imply a juridical authority for the clergy in their sphere that is equal to and separate from that of magistrates in their sphere: “In the Church of Christ, that is to say, in the house or city of the living God, the Consistory, or fellowship of governors, consisting of the Ministers of the word, and of Seniors lawfully called, sustaineth the person of the universal Church in ecclesiastical government, even as every magistrate in his commonwealth.”   

Such authority for ministers in making church laws, would seem to run flat contrary to the original anti-clerical impetus of the doctrine of Christian liberty, and could only be reconciled to it by emphasizing that this authority was not arbitrary, but closely bounded by Scripture.  Accordingly, we find the articles repeatedly emphasising that in making such constitutions, “judgment [must] be taken out of the word of God, what may or ought to be done, or not done” (Art. 8).  Of course, to emphasise this, as we have already seen, was to call into question their status as adiaphora in the first place.  Moreover, since all adiaphorists had admitted that divine positive law could in principle render a matter that otherwise would be indifferent (for instance, some aspect of church polity) to be in fact necessary, and therefore out of the discretion of the magistrate, it was possible to argue that divine law in fact required such an autonomous, Scripturally-regulated clerical jurisdiction.  In the wake of their failures in the Vestiarian controversy, it was just this that some of the English dissenters would begin to contend.

 

(This post is in lieu of a thorough analysis of and commentary on the articles which I have been planning to post on The Calvinist International, but which I have been prevented from finding time to write.  The above exposition will likely be part of chapter 2 of my thesis.)