At the barricades

Commonweal, Sept 27, 2002 by Mark A. Sargent

The Clash of Orthodoxies Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis Robert P. George ISI Books, $24.95, 387 pp.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. That seems to be the case with Robert P. George's Clash of Orthodoxies, subtitled Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis. The book's dust jacket reproduces the famous photograph of the dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London shining defiantly through the clouds of smoke and dust rising from the destruction created by Nazi bombing. Saint Paul's classical dome, columns, and pediments, all surmounted by a cross, evoke the beauty and resilience of Western civilization as it defies Nazi barbarism. The contrasts of light and dark and of the dome's perfect form against the smoke's formlessness convey simultaneously the gravity of the assault, the beauty of what is threatened, and the possibility of ultimate triumph. I don't know if George selected this image for the cover of his book, but it does carry the substance and tone of his message.

For George, the "Judeo-Christian tradition" that has dominated Western culture for most of its history, with its classical and biblical foundations and its Christian flowering, is besieged by the new barbarism of "secular orthodoxy." George, a respected constitutional scholar and frequent contributor to First Things and Crisis, wants to defend that older tradition. His goal is to prove that "Judeo-Christian morality is rationally superior to the morality of orthodox secularism." To do this, he insists first upon the Christian philosophical position that faith and reason are not antithetical, but complementary. Doing battle with secular orthodoxy on the ground of reason thus not only allows George to challenge secularism on its own terms, but to prevent dismissal of Christian morality to the private sphere on the premise that it is antirationalist and based on truth claims not shared by all.

Much of the first part of the book is a replay of the familiar debate over the legitimacy of religious discourse in the formulation of law and public policy. George tackles head-on the position associated with liberal political philosopher John Rawls that would exclude from political debate appeals to principles drawn from "comprehensive" doctrines such as natural law. Arguments based on natural-law theory, in this view, cannot constitute "public reasons," and are hence inadmissible in public debate, because they express faith-based truth claims that cannot countenance "the fact of reasonable pluralism." George points out that while natural-law theorists believe that there are "uniquely correct answers," they reach that conclusion through reason and admit the possibility of error in their reasoning. The Rawlsian exclusion of natural-law-based arguments George finds particularly troubling in the case of abortion. Rawls has insisted that "any comprehensive doctrine that leads to a balance of political values excluding that duly qualified right [to an abortion] in the first trimester is to that extent unreasonable." The big problem with this, George emphasizes, is that Rawls's particular "balance of political values" cannot be struck without an "appeal to moral or metaphysical views widely in dispute." The unacknowledged effect is to privilege one set of moral and metaphysical views, namely liberalism's, while dismissing another, namely those of Christian natural law, from the realm of public debate without an attempt to engage its substantive claims. To his credit, George demands engagement, and in this book he engages with a vengeance.

It is at this point, however, that many sympathetic readers may part company with George. He is a thoroughgoing social conservative. For him, a proper application of natural law and rational Catholic philosophical principles leads not only to condemnation of abortion and euthanasia, but also premarital sex, contraception, "nonreproductive type" sexual acts within marriage, divorce, same-sex marriage, and pornography. He also believes that no "strict principle of justice" would prevent the criminalization of noncommercial "private vices" such as fornication, adultery, and sodomy, because there is a public interest in protecting "a community's moral ecology against the corrosive effects on marriage and family life of [such] vices." He concedes that there may be "good prudential reasons not to attack them with the full force of the law," but he insists that there is no principled reason why the law should not forbid them.

George apparently rejects the notion that a paramount personal interest in privacy would provide a principled reason for not criminalizing "private vices." Furthermore, the "Judeo-Christian worldview" requires him to stake out a position radically contrary to the "isms of contemporary American life--feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism, lifestyle liberalism"--which together constitute the "culture of death." This apocalyptic tone is also evident in his critique of judicial recognition of a right to abortion. He insists that "people of goodwill" (whoever they are) must ask themselves whether "our [American] regime is becoming the democratic `tyrant state'" about which Pope John Paul II warned in Evangelium vitae.