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What Hope for the Secular City?

Desiring a Better Country: Forays in Political Theology. Douglas Farrow. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.

 

Desiring a Better Country offers a learned, judicious, provocative, and finally, rousing display of Christian moral reasoning.  The head of Farrow’s subtitle, forays, accurately signals the occasional nature of these five chapters; and yet, his underlying thesis remains strong enough to bind the parts into an intelligible whole.  He argues that both the truth of the gospel and the flourishing of society obligate believers to break, what he names, “the nominalist/secularlist/pluralist stranglehold” on public reason (59).  The feat will be accomplished through intelligent translation and intervention. Our work is to learn to insert into public debate terms and premises that do not easily fit into what Charles Taylor has memorably described as modern culture’s “immanent frame” (59).  This book offers an admirable apprenticeship for those who wish to advance against the sentinels that guard the golden calves around which we are bidden to dance.

Such describes the essays’ general ambition.  The political terrain these chapters cover is more deep than broad.  His first chapter considers whether we can understand, let alone credibly defend, a doctrine of human rights apart from a corresponding belief in God.  Briefly, he answers, no.  Farrow’s dialectical engagement with those who think we can, shows how wistful have attempts to ground rights without religion become.  I’ll elaborate on this discussion in a moment.  Chapter two describes the eclipse of marriage as a public institution.  Should we care? Without a doubt. For among other reasons, the loss of the public standing of marriage means the toppling of one of the few civil authorities capable to shelter individuals from the heat of encroaching governmental concern.  Farrow’s next chapter explores what he perceives to be the inherent contradictions within “normative pluralism” – his term for the founding dogma of the regime whose legal infrastructure mandates that “no one, ideal, or way of life can dominate” (42).

Chapter four considers the past and future prospects of the doctrine and civic defense of religious freedom.  The author thinks it plausible that, as a viable legal instrument, “the language of religious freedom is fading into the twilight” (63).  Chapter five is the author’s most sustained attempt at constructive theology.  Here he takes up the difficult task of showing how Catholics can at once embrace religious liberty without, at the same time, endorsing a state that is merely indifferent to religious truth.  As I will suggest, some of Farrow’s prudential recommendations seem, to my mind at least, to require further development. Finally, the appendix – an admirable example of public theology exercised in the trenches – consists of the author’s expert witness report submitted to the Superior Court of Quebec.  The report was penned at the request of Montreal’s Loyola High School as part of their case to block the provincial government from mandating that the school teach a new, state-imposed, Ethics and Religious Culture curriculum. In sum, fundamental freedoms, the ethics of the family, and educational identity form the core of Farrow’s interests in this collection.

Farrow’s particular gift lies in his power to summon the lumbering spirit of late modernity, marking, as he does, those corners where our institutions have come to be haunted by powers that rule but often do not wish to be named.  Below I’ll explore in detail two of his chapters and end with one suggestion as to where he might extend his argument.

Let’s begin with his opening chapter.  Professor Farrow deftly exposes the poverty of trying to ground rights without God.  He chooses as his chief interlocutor Harvard’s Michael Ignatieff, who happens also to be a recent leader of Canada’s federal Liberal party.  Ignatieff represents that generation of high-minded liberals who retain a commitment to constitutional arrangements without finding inspiration in their pre-political sources.  Ethics, in Ignatieff’s view, needs no support from the gods. Even more, the doctrine of human rights undermines itself when it aspires to rise “above” politics.  That is because, like the old Machiavelli, the new ones who teach at our universities see human rights to be, in the end, “nothing but politics.”  The question for Ignatieff is not even any longer whether we can be good without God; the question has unraveled to whether we can be good without knowing what is good.  So, what service would a non-theologically grounded doctrine of rights offer?  In Ignatieff’s view, it makes explicit widely shared intuitions.  Plainly, intuitions about behavior differ.  And yet, in the West at least, as Ignatieff observes, prohibitions against torture and slavery “derive from our own experience of pain and our capacity to imagine the pain of others.”  In short, law is based upon empathy.

Such hopes, Farrow thinks, are hopelessly naïve.  First, the historical reason: rights-talk is as native to Korea or Beijing as are Mustang Convertibles and Mozart.  Democracy, limited government, and the dignity of the person are notions that might find a home on some distant shores, and they have; but no one can be in doubt as to their port of origin.  They are fruits of Christian culture.  Farrow rightly points out that many contemporary human rights activists fail to see this connection.  The genetic cause of our moral notions should alert us, he believes, to the rational connection between religion and righteousness, or at least, a shared standard of righteousness.  While it is true that the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights was agreed to by communists, no one should be fooled into believing that it could ever be sustained by a culture of unbelievers.

Second, Farrow directs us to a set of logical difficulties.  By grounding rights in the intuition that “what is pain and humiliation for you is bound to be pain and humiliation for me” such theorists, Farrow notes, take the right and wrong out of rights.  And that is correct. Pain could never be the foundation for moral order if for no other reason than that pain is always attached to good or bad things.  Every runner knows this.  So do parents, and anyone else called upon to make sacrifices for the sake of others who cannot return payment.  To follow through with this illustration, parents who lose sleep (that’s a form of pain) nursing their child (that’s a noble sacrifice) feel, on the whole, “good” about their “pain”.   But graver difficulties mount.  Suppose we accept for a moment some account of “pain” as the equivalent to “evil”. Suppose then again that I don’t share your intuition about what is “painful”; do I still owe you my care?  And further, to whom, precisely, is my empathy meant to extend?  Dolphins? Bees? Refugees? Unborn children?  Who’s to say?  And on what basis could we say it? Alas, human rights were supposed to ground our legal systems in something above politics.  Yet without God, Farrow concludes, without a divine image in man, it becomes difficult to see how we might discover any stable distinction between rights and wrongs even within politics. The author characterizes well where the post-romantic quest for meaning has left us. The summit of ethical wisdom has been inverted: “Not ‘the truth shall make you free,’ as Jesus said, but rather, ‘freedom will make you true’” (10).

Having dispensed with one godless attempt, Farrow turns to an in-house debate over the proper basis for establishing rights, and adjudicates between two leading Protestant moral theologians, Oliver O’Donovan and Nicholas Wolsterstorff.  Where O’Donovan thinks instruments like the UN Declaration announced the West’s attempt to conceive of justice “independently of moral order,” Wolsterstorff holds the project of subjective rights not only worth saving, but ultimately sanctioned by Biblical authority.  Those who wonder whether Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum is not overly dependent upon Locke will here, I suspect, judge Farrow too insensitive to the problems with the marriage of rights with right.  In any case, while Farrow sides more with O’Donovan, (right “flows from the source of rightness”), he nonetheless disagrees that rights-talk is “irredeemably subjective” (19).  He thinks that the impasse between the pre-modern and Leonine traditions of speaking about justice can be overcome by a more thoughtful reflection on the mediation of Christ.  On the two approaches to justice he gestures towards the site of their reconciliation:

“That they need mediation, that the difficulty is not an imaginary one or a category mistake of some kind, I think we must grant.  An approach from the side of the one and an approach from the side of the many will always need mediation.  And the mediation here must be real and concrete, not merely notional.  Where do the one and the many meet, where do right and rights meet, where for that matter do justice and love meet, if not in Jesus Christ?” (20)

I turn now to Farrow’s fifth chapter.  The author confesses in his Preface that this collection is “admittedly critical to a fault” (xi).  That, of course, need be no fault but merely a reasonable statement of a division of labor.  In this final chapter, “Catholics and the Neutral State,” Farrow comes closest to offering a constructive proposal. Here he begins to sketch the outlines of what sort of country believers may, this side of eternity, seek.  And it is here, I imagine, that his sympathetic readers will feel least satisfied.  Not because readers will feel Farrow’s “forays” where unhelpful; but because they may wish the author to have led them further up and further in. Instead of reproducing the conversations of this chapter let me simply state what I think are his best contributions to the project of faithful public discourse, and suggest where a reader might yet hope for more.

His first positive contribution is a restatement of Christendom’s doctrine of the “two”. He quotes: “Two there are, emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power” (80).  Such was Pope Galasius’ 5th century statement of the division. Although this precept has been under stress since the French Revolution, it has not been revoked. And I think Farrow is correct that it needs a contemporary resuscitation.  The genius of the doctrine lies in its fruitful distinction between powers that must share responsibility but whose authority is never to be united, at least not until the Second Coming. For all our past sins, believers should never tire of pointing out, as Farrow himself points out, that the separation of Church and State is a distinctively Catholic invention.  If certain renaissance popes claimed too much of the city for the Church, secular governments the past two hundred years have claimed too much of the Church for the city.  Monism in either direction is wrong.  Man lives neither wholly under the rule of priests nor fully under the sway of princes. It is wrong for the Church to govern military expenditures because she has more important business to attend; it is wrong for the state to run all the schools because it is not wise enough to direct souls.  And so the tension of the Christian centuries.

But of course we’ve long since left the Christian centuries. The point for us, and the truth Farrow rightly presses, is that the present and pressing danger has come for centuries now not from the side of the Church but from the side of the state.  HHS mandates, human rights commissions, and the lynching of evangelical grandmothers-who-run-florist-shops aside, even a passing acquaintance with 19th and 20th century French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mexican, and more latterly North American politics illustrates well enough who is the real boogey man. It’s no longer the Marxists. It’s certainly not the churches. It’s all of us, along with the army of lawyers and administrators, who prop up our governments’ bloated ambitions. Even those with no love for religion today would be hard pressed to contradict Farrow’s observation that “Liberal democracy has become increasingly illiberal” (92) – well, at least toward those who oppose gay marriage or euthanasia.  Thus, in the effort at rehabilitating religious and intellectual freedoms, the Church’s doctrine of the two contributes to political theory in this way. It disabuses secular rulers of messianic aspirations.  Christians preach eschatology not utopia; we invite rulers of the secular city to look forward to the same hope.

This leads to a second positive contribution of this chapter and of the book as a whole. He helps us name our opponent. Fifty or even twenty years ago conservative Christians and Jews still found refuge in liberal democracies. That’s much less true today. Through detailed analyses of recent legislation, Farrow exposes the liberal state’s pretense to religious neutrality.

One of the cases in which he takes particular interest is the recent conflict between Quebec’s ministry of education and Montreal’s Loyola High School. In March 2015 Canada’s Supreme Court did rule in favor of the Catholic school, but only after a protracted conflict. The conflict was this. The province of Quebec had imposed a new Ethics and Religious Culture curriculum. This required schools to portray all religions as equally important, which is to say, as equally unimportant. Loyola and other parents caught the contradiction. They objected that a Catholic school ought to be able to give deference to Catholic teaching. The state demurred. Eventually the Supreme Court sided with the little guys. And isn’t that nice. Salt is white; pepper is black. We’ve now heard it from a panel of supreme Justices that Catholic parents can tell their children that Catholicism is true.

On both sides of the border we should be glad for the win. But the larger lesson should not be lost. What such legal conflicts illustrate is that “pluralism” is fast displacing “toleration” for top spot in the hierarchy of public values. Not, mind you, the factual pluralism of cultures living side by side, but the ideological pluralism of state-mandated regulators.   Farrow’s essays make evident a truth that is too often flatly denied: the alternative to a theological-grounded secular order is not neutrality; it’s a slide into neo-paganism. It is not difficult to see why. Nicene theology supplied for the West, and in some sense still supplies, the skeleton behind the skin of our body-politic.  Human rights, free speech, and religious freedom, are all goods that arose, Farrow credibly illustrates, because of the long tradition of Christian-thinking about politics. As that skeleton crumbles, so will the face of politics contort into unpredictable expressions, as it has.

Our author explores other examples. He considers, for one, the triumph of gay marriage. What does this presage? Farrow’s rhetoric is forceful. He argues that the recent redefinitions entail nothing less than the “end of marriage”; he predicts, further, that by granting gays equal access, we have authorized “the absorption of civil society into the state itself” (26). Even orthodox Christians will wonder at such conclusions. The end of marriage? The absorption of society? Such inferences may seem alarmist. And maybe they are. Perhaps the gay lobby will rest content with its recent sweeping victories, and, now that they’ve won, we can all get along beside each other. Perhaps the state will remain satisfied not to exploit its new definitional authority. Whatever the case, Farrow is not so sanguine. With the state’s self-assertion over the family, that most ancient of pre-political communities, the author invites us to consider that we have entered an era of what he calls “biopolitical tyranny” – an era in which the state usurps the claims of revelation, of reason, and even of nature herself in its dominion over all things human.

The change of definition of marriage is a change in the definition of man as such. Man is no longer male and female. Man is simply this person or that person: an individual bundle of desires who is the bearer of corresponding (if often conflicting) rights. (27)

What follows when ‘gender’ is wrested from biology? Farrow’s claim is that, with the redefinition of family, essential definitions of ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘child’ have now become subject to judicial oversight. And I confess this seems hard to deny. As marriage is de-sacralized, the state is bound to become re-sacralized. As the biological tie between parent and child is loosened, the legal apparatus enforced by government becomes every-body’s glue; or as he puts it, “blood relations are exchanged for mere legal constructs” (34). His exploration raises uncomfortable questions that our judges have not forthrightly considered. If publicly privileged love-partnerships need no longer take into account biology, what other sexual expressions must we learn to bless? Why not polygamy or even bestiality? Whatever we call our new regime, we can be sure that it is not neutral. The liberal state has become dogmatically pluralistic; it has reduced man into a merely-desiring animal; and it is ready to silence opposition through sanction.

So much for the neutral state. Our final question: Should Catholics wish the city was on our side? Now that we have named the idolatry of the “normatively neutral” polity, for what shall we hope? I conclude with a few critical observations, which amount to a challenge to Farrow to make more explicit the logic of his premises. Now to be just, Farrow’s main text spans about one hundred pages and only the last four are singularly dedicated to developing his positive reply, what he calls a “third way.” This is a position that lands, he tells us, between (some) conservative Catholic thinking and that variety of post-conciliar thought that rests content with a religiously neutral polity. Farrow’s main work has been to clear the ground, so to speak, a task admirably executed. Still, I’m not sure what to make of his alternative.

Part of the difficulty that a Catholic political thinker must face is that the magisterium’s most authoritative statement on Church/State relations, Dignitatis Humanae, remains an unfinished document. Its opening paragraph communicates something of its two-fold interest. The first theme, more prominently developed within 20th century papal thought, concerns the proper “immunity from coercion” in matters religious. This is a theme, we might observe, that at the time of its promulgation in 1965 (when half the world’s Christians lived under regimes that forbid Bibles and jailed priests), could hardly have been neglected. The second theme, named but not explored, has more to do with the state’s positive duties toward religion. Hence, at the opening of the document the council fathers note that, while recent papal reflection will be developed, this text “leaves untouched” the traditional Catholic doctrine “on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the Church of Christ” (DH, para 1). That promise has proved easier to declare upon than to deliver. For one thing, part of the “traditional” doctrine includes such things as confessionally Catholic states, one of many valid constitutional arrangements that the document conceives (DH, para 6).

How are these dual thrusts to be united? Dignitatis Humanae does not really say. And neither does Farrow. Farrow situates his own position between what he regards as two extremes. One is the “social kingship” interpretation of Christian politics. In this view, Christians accept that the Church should “demand that the society and the state” recognize Christ’s rule over human affairs (93). In Farrow’s interpretation this is the view that reigned roughly up through to the magisterium of Leo XIII. The other extreme lies in the “neutral state” view. This was the position championed by the famed Jesuit, Fr. Murray, who argued that all publically-endorsed organs of society ought to refrain from favoring one religion over another. Both extremes, Farrow says, share an “eschatological deficit” (96). Where the older position tends to the idealization of the (Christian) state, the new one, the one more tempting for us, creates a vacuum “open to inhabitation by ideological demons” (96).

Here is my first difficulty with Farrow’s proposal. This way of framing the alternatives seems too confined. I leave to the one side the Fr. Murray thesis. To the other side, the “social doctrine” view admits, manifestly, multiple instantiations. Indeed, if that tag intends to gather within its arms the 15 or so centuries of political thinking from Constantine to Robespierre then the wisdom of wide fields of fruitful experience has still to be harvested.

The “social doctrine” view is more pliable than he gives credit. Prior to the Second Vatican Council the Church learned to pursue her mission under innumerable forms of government – from the rule of chiefs, to emperors, governors, magistrates, and yes, even liberal prime ministers and democratic presidents. Even more, given Farrow’s own arguments I’m unclear as to why the social doctrine alternative should be so quickly dispatched. It’s of course possible I’ve not correctly understood his criticism. And perhaps Farrow only means that excesses committed in its name ought not to be repeated. If that is all he means, I whole-heartedly agree. (I don’t think anyone in the Vatican is contemplating a revival of the Inquisition.) But let us be clear about this. A return to a Christendom model – where basic Christian propositions about God and man are enshrined in a constitution – need not entail active persecution of atheists and Moslems, or the burning of witches, though I doubt we’d want to grant ‘The Religious Society of Witches’ 501(c)3 status.

I mostly side with Farrow. The neutral state proposition could hardly satisfy the aspiration of Christian witness. But neither can the Church, so Dignitatem Humanae tells us, repudiate her long-standing view of the duty of “men and societies” toward the true religion. In this matter, I do not see a “third way”. So, here is my alternative suggestion. What the current crisis of liberal democracy requires is a nuanced rehabilitation of the pre-20th century tradition of political wisdom, not, I hasten to add, in order to disregard those positive developments the Church has more recently proposed, but to demonstrate, as Dignitatem Humanae does not, how the two thrusts can be brought into an attractive harmony. This, in my view, is where tradition-conscious theologians and political philosophers need to set their shoulders to the plow.

I come to my second query. When it comes time to name what should replace the present malaise, it is not clear that Farrow actually wants what he asks for. In general, Farrow leans away from Fr. Murray’s neutral state thesis (87). He tells us, positively, that the Church must demand the state not violate the natural law. This already does ask for a lot. To declare that the secular state ought to look to the Church as the interpreter of natural law is to open a generous account. I wonder if Farrow really means us to draw so many payments? Such a state would publically honor God. Presumably, prayer would be back in the schools. Probably, we could have no divorce. Certainly, abortion and the pill would be prohibited, etc., etc. Such laws would seem odious to many, but at least all could see how their parts form into a consistent whole. When Farrow becomes more specific, however, only lines down, he seems to draw back. He tells us, for one, that believers “do not seek to force their will upon the city,” and further, that the faithful would not ask that governments “translate the teaching of the Church into the law of the land”. Again, he argues that if opposition should arise, Christians “do not even demand a crucifix on the wall of the legislature” (99).

Such precepts do not seem to flow from his more basic principles. If we are going to say that Christianity, in some sense, carries political implications, then law will invariably serve as one of its instruments. Politics is about the application of wisdom to power. And power in some sense entails coercion. It certainly need not imply unreasonable or vicious force, the ‘hard’ coercion repudiated by Dignitatem Humanae; but a regime whose constitution enjoined the natural law as the Church understands it would seek through its judgment, de facto as well as de jure, to impress some goods upon its citizens while withholding others.

Dignitatem Humanae names two thrusts: How to join them? How might the secular state give God his due while respecting the religious liberty of man? I hope Farrow writes a sequel. In the meantime, let me gesture toward one instructive discussion that points to how these two thrusts might unite. I refer here to the Catechism’s treatment of the Sunday obligation.

The Catechism is clear that the Church has much to instruct the state in its ordering of time. The structure of the week is to be informed by Catholic ritual. Government should mandate time off for Sunday worship. Shops ought to close. Even if you don’t happen to employ Christians, employers are asked to respect Sunday as a day of rest so that employees can have “time for leisure”. Now, some may wonder whether the document is not coy in its use of language. Nonetheless, when the Catechism proposes the translation of canon law into civil codes it justifies the move by appeal to “religious liberty”, in this way:

Sanctifying Sundays and holy days requires a common effort…. In respecting the religious liberty and the common good of all, Christians should seek recognition of Sundays and the Church’s holy days as legal holidays. They have to give everyone a public example of prayer, respect and joy, and defend their traditions as a precious contribution to the spiritual life of society. (CCC 2187, 2188)

No thumb screws here; but neither are the folks in charge of managing city ordinances left free to their own devices. My guess is that few non-believers would see the connection between their right to “religious liberty” and the government’s promotion of holy days. If my Jewish neighbor, for example, found Walmart closed next Sunday because the State of New Hampshire decided to ban shopping on Sundays, I’d bet he’d cry foul. Even more, if the state forced him to close his shoe store next August 15 my guess is he’d feel a little like he was being “coerced”. Yet, this is the teaching. Is this not an example of the Church “forcing” its will upon the city?

Should we hope for a new Christendom? Well, call it what you will. Farrow rightly encourages us to consider anew and to desire again a better country, even one here, in the time-between the times as we await the coming of the Lord. And for that we can be grateful.

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Dr. Ryan N.S. Topping is Professor of Theology and serves as Director of the Benedict XVI Institute for the New Evangelization at Newman Theological College, in Edmonton, Canada, where he also previously served as Academic Dean. He has published ten books on Catholic philosophy, culture and education, including Rebuilding Catholic Culture: How the Catechism Can Shape our Common Life (2012), The Case for Catholic Education (2015), Renewing the Mind: A Reader in the Philosophy of Catholic Education (2015), and The Elements of Rhetoric (2016). His latest book is Thinking as Though God Exists: Newman on Evangelizing the Nones (2023). Dr. Topping and his wife have ten children.

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