The Weekly, February 5, 2024
Hi all,
Here's something of interest from Jeffrey Stout: So one of the defining problems of public life in a democratic system is "how do people who disagree about so many things meaningfully debate, let alone create, public policy?" John Rawls, one of the preeminent moral philosophers of the past 75 years, sought to answer this question through the concept of "public reason."
What public reason means—and I'm summarizing a ton here—is argument that follows from principles that are shared by everyone within the democratic polity. If we can find shared principles that all of us agree on and that we reason from, then we can form authentically democratic policies that all people affirm because they are founded on principles shared by everyone.
Of course, if we adopt this approach it would mean that religious argumentation is out of bounds because not all members of the polity affirm the beliefs of any one religion. (Rawls softens this claim later in life, but ultimately still arrives at the conclusion that religious arguments can't be the final or ultimate reason for supporting a public policy proposal.)
The problem, Stout says, is that this principle actually bars a great many examples of courageous moral public speech from the public square. For example, does MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" pass this test? Clearly not. Does the "I Have a Dream" speech? Probably not. How about Lincoln's Second Inaugural? I suspect not. But if your principle for how to reason publicly in a democratic system about questions of public life and policy tacitly says that much of what MLK said or what Lincoln said is actually illicit public speech... well, something has gone seriously wrong, I think.
So what is the alternative? Stout proposes that religious arguments should simply be allowed to stand in the public square. That isn't to say that every policy proposed on religious grounds should be adopted, obviously. That's a separate matter. But it is to say that a respect for freedom of expression as well as freedom of religion likely means letting religious believers make arguments about public life that are explicitly rooted in their religious beliefs.
In one passage, Stout is especially prescient. Note that he is writing this in 2004:
The contractarian position has a descriptive component and a normative component. The descriptive component is an account of what the norms of democratic political culture involve. It distils a rigorist interpretation of the idea of public reason out of various commitments that are found in that culture. The normative component endorses a principle of restraint as a consequence of that interpretation. I worry that religious individuals who accept the descriptive component of contractarianism as a faithful reconstruction of what the norms of democratic political culture involve will, understandably, view this as a reason for withdrawing from that culture. Why should one identify with the democrati cprocess of reason-exchange if the norms implicit in that process are what the contractarians say they are?
I believe this thought is in fact one of the main reasons that antiliberal traditionalists like Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and JOhn Milbank have largely displaced Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and the liberation theologians as intellectual authorities in the seminaries, divinity schools, and church-affiliated colleges of the wealthier democracies.
We are about to reap the social consequences of a tradtionalist backlash against contractarian liberalism. The more thoroughly Rawlsian our law schools and ethics centers become, the more radically Hauerwasian the theological schools become. Because most of the Rawlsians do not read theology or pay scholarly attention to the religious life of the people, they have no idea what contractarian liberalism has come to mean outside the fields of legal and political theory. One message being preached nowadays in many of the institutions where future preachers are being trained is that liberal democracy is essentially hypocritical when it purports to value free religious expression. Liberalism, according to Hauerwas, is a secularist ideology that masks a discriminatory program for policing what religious people can say in public. The appropriate response, he sometimes implies, is to condemn freedom and the democratic struggle for justice as 'bad ideas' for the church. Over the next several decades this message will be preached in countless sermons throughout the heartland of the nation.
The thought I had after finishing this is that Christian intellectuals scrambling for some way forward regarding public life have spent 30 years following Hauerwas or something like the New Natural Law school around Robby George. But I think Stout might be what we needed all along.
Here's why: So if you make the move Stout describes Hauerwas as making here, you in many ways just opt out of democratic life altogether. Significantly, I think the years since 2004 have shown that there are non-Anabaptist, non-pacifist versions of the move Stout is describing. But those moves tend not toward radical Christian communal living, but toward totalitarianism—thus the Integralists with Rome and the Christian Nationalists amongst the Protestants. Just consider the way many Christian nationalists sneer at "democracy" on social media or Adrian Vermeule's discovery of a living constitution in defense of his preferred Catholic state.
On the other hand, you can see the error that the George school makes here as well. What this group ends up saying is something like this:
OK, we agree to the Rawlsian principles of public dispute. But also we still want to say religious stuff in public and we want law to align with what we believe is true and just as informed by our religious beliefs. So how we'll handle this is that we will repackage all our religious teaching as 'natural law', say that 'natural law' is part of 'public reason' and we'll have it.
At the risk of being crass, this strategy effectively makes of natural law a kind of laundering device, as if (Breaking Bad reference incoming) Walter White's drug money is "religion" and the laundromat is "New Natural Law." (This scheme worked about as well as Walt's, incidentally.)
The problem is basically everyone knows this is what they are doing and so no one really buys it because they know the limited natural law arguments are not altogether sincere since they're also obviously repackaged Christian arguments that have only been lightly secularized.
To be sure, I sometimes benefit from their writing. There's something valuable in trying to restate Christian ideas or argue for Christian ideas without availing yourself of biblical language or the historic terms of the church. Yet as a solution to the problem created by Rawls, I don't think this strategy works on a theoretical level and I also think it has quite obviously failed on the practical politics level.
What is needed, instead, I think is an ability to tease apart Stout's "descriptive" and "normative" components, which is precisely the direction Stout himself goes in his book.
Reading
Books
Stout, obviously. Also finishing up MLA's recent book and finishing my re-read of Hitchens's Letters to a Young Contrarian. I'm likely going to be cracking Davey Henreckson's Immortal Commonwealth this week as I prep for the trip and hopefully will finally be getting to Bowlin's Tolerance Among the Virtues soon.
Articles
Will Selber on the military's recruitment woes
Tracing Woodgrains (Substack pseudonym) on why the GOP is doomed
Sebastian Milbank on Richard Hanania
Hannah Anderson on perfidious middle men
Lars Doucet on losing his son
Michael Cuenco on why we (still) live in Lenin's world
Thomas Ward on what the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies get wrong
Allison Schrager on the introvert economy
Elsewhere
I have an intense week ahead of me: I need to wrap up my essay on bureaucratic speech for the Davenant volume on That Hideous Strength. I also have quite a lot of reading to do still before the DC event in March (if you'll be there let me know! I'd love to meet some readers while I'm out there) and desperately need to catch up on some editing for the site and the next print issue. I'd appreciate prayer for a clear mind and focus during my work time this week.
Also, if you are in the DC area or know it well and have recommendations on kid-friendly things to do, let me know. Our nine-year-old, Wendell, is going to be tagging along on the DC trip and we have some free time planned but haven't yet decided on what to do. I was thinking the Spy Museum and then walking around the National Mall. But if there's other essentials (preferably near Capitol Hill—we won't have a car so will be walking or Ubering everywhere) let me know.
Under the Mercy,
~Jake