I would change “the” to “a” in the first sentence, but I emphatically agree that some sort of modus vivendi would be an acceptable alternative to the sort of charitable and hospitable Toleration that I would prefer, and that it is up to Christians to take the initiative to seek this and find it.
I suspect the main danger to our freedom to practice our faith publicly comes precisely from this culture-war mentality in which Christians always approach their neighbors solely in a mode of hostility, thus legitimizing and reinforcing ther hostility to us. Our only hope is to defuse the culture war, and that will only happen if Christians approach their neighbors (they will not go first, we have to) and say, “we don’t want to be locked in this struggle with you. We can share this country.”
(source: Notable Points of Agreement | Hang Together)
However, I have to say that from a Catholic perspective, it simply doesn’t look like this. Our leaders have, if anything, spent too much time trying to do exactly this: you have no idea how much surprise and betrayal there was when, after advocating for something like Obamacare for decades, the bishops discovered that the administration was planning to target their institutions! To me, this was a profoundly encouraging moment: the Church was suddenly startled awake, and began to re-articulate its basic principles in ways that reminded the faithful that these were consequential. We need more like this, not less.
American Catholics are not immigration hawks, on average, now or historically; we are the ones who most often speak up for “the stranger in your midst.” We are staunch pro-lifers, but our methods here are not Operation Rescue. Our work begins with serving everyone–until someone decides that serving in a Catholic way is not acceptable, and finds a rule to exclude us. (Mentioning only briefly the matter of the WASP habit of automatically excluding Catholics.)
And, in daily life and work, “sharing” time and place is what I do. I talk to and serve and teach lots of people: colleagues at Oklahoma State, students, folks at the coffee shop, [Baptist] family, [Catholic] friends from church, Confirmation candidates I tutor, other Christian educators. We talk about how to use research in writing effectively, about how liberal education ought to prepare students, about the dangers of mere deinotes or techne or even sophia without phronesis, about the limits of “critical thinking” and the need for humane understanding, about justice in its transactional and social dimensions, about science fiction, about comics, about gardening, about coffee roasting, and so on. And with the exception of the occasional person who, before getting to know me at all, attempts to recruit me to a cause or provoke an argument with me, I get along with them all (jerks running people off the road with pickup trucks on I-35, on the other hand, are hard to recognize as “neighbors” at all). I don’t insist on discussing only Christian or Catholic works, or limit my lit classrooms to works that have no “objectionable elements”; nor do I let contemporary cant outweigh serious consideration of what writers from Vogel to Austen to St. Vincent Millay to Charlotte Smith have to say about the continuing problems of being human creatures. I constantly work to help students reason from whatever truth, goodness, and beauty they grasp, whether by moral intuition or by popular perception, to any “next step better” I hope we can reach from there: from grasping that Ibsen’s Nora has really seen the difference between the wedding-and-kids they have and the marriage they ought to have intended, to grasping that both Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet feature an urgent need to discover the real situation amid powerful forces urging irresponsible action. We reason from “that’s a good observation” to “you must do better,” and if nothing else I hope that this trajectory of reasoning–this insatiable moral thirst–gradually informs their thinking as they reach the serious phases of marriage and kids, phases this culture does everything to prevent from having their salutary, reality-enforcing effects.
So, I agree in principle that “we can share this country” is the better part of “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” Just the same, saying this with our hands in the air to those who regard our “share” as a strictly notional, de-institutionalized, publicly inconsequential “freedom of worship” is–well, it’s like making a statement at a sentencing hearing, like pleading with the firing squad. To “share” will have to mean something that actually permits us to institutionalize our principles, in some real and publicly consequential times and places.
I wish for what Greg advocates. Someone prove to me that it’s possible.
Because I hope I will be a martyr, or a team player, as necessary; but I will not be the one who throws down my last weapon, or my last argument, or my choice rhetorical ploy, or my appeal to Caesar, just because I wish I could.
Acting as useful idiots for the church’s enemies is not what I’m advocating, and in pointing out that it doesn’t work, you don’t reduce my confidence in the path I’m advocating because that’s not the path I’m advocating. That’s not “we can share this country” but “please kill us last.” It feeds the persecution of the church just as much as culture-warriorism. The solution is to be neither. Admittedly, models for that are few, though not nonexistent. But I don’t see any alternative to trying. We don’t know whether we can bulid moral consensus. We do know that culture-warriorism is a cure worse than the disease.
Hence I don’t feel any doubts about whether “we can share this country” is possible. None of the other options is a correct course of action, yet we know God created us as morally responsible agents in an orderly universe, and thus a correct course of action must exist. Whether it will work is, of course, in God’s hands. That’s not our department. Our department is to act faithfully regardless of whether it works.
I am literally asking that you (metaphorically) draw me a picture. What can this look like?
I’m all for backing critiques that converge (it’s more-or-less what I do for a living), but if that is not to be immediately co-opted, then those critiques must always be accompanied with explanation of their convergence (i.e., significant similarity amid difference). Otherwise, we are just allowing the entire field of meaning to be specified by those who do not admit the categories necessary for the articulation of truth.
And I’m all for applauding popular culture that speaks truth, and other modes of constructive creative engagement, but there must be an ongoing work of articulating the True, Good, and Beautiful that relates their final reality to these partial and transient expressions, or we simply become a certain pattern of noises among the rest. How do we make a place for these explanations and articulations? How can we do it, without educating and advocating in a distinct mode? And how can we do that without an institutional presence and a right to make that presence felt?
Put differently, do we want “moral consensus,” that is, a recognizeable set of shared understandings (i.e., with “family resemblances” and not “space aliens” variability) on right and wrong based on real facts of life? Or do we want “procedural due process” that subjects fundamental disagreements to a set of legal steps, and dubs the outcome “justice”? Or do we just want to attempt to mitigate the harms of fundamental conflicts by providing ample room to separate from one another and institutionalize various viewpoints until the Gamaliel Principle can sort them out?
Because right now the dominant institutional position is to use (and egregiously abuse) “procedural due process” and a denial that any “outside” to liberal hegemony can exist to mandate participation in whatever can be gamed into law, and that process in no way resembles a consensus-forming discourse. I would like to change that, but I see no way to do so, though I advocate regularly with my students to find a way to do so. And in the meantime, I suggest to my friends in the faith that we be planning radical alternatives to a civil society which increasingly is neither civil nor sociable for us.
I really don’t think you are advocating surrender, and in my post I tried (albeit with my battery dying I didn’t multiply words trying, hence also some missing links) to insulate you from that criticism.
I don’t see what the viable alternative is meant to be, though. I’ve tried to outline my proposed alternative (and will keep trying) and to sketch in my present and uncomfortable situation, but I cannot see in what concrete manner yours differs from mine. I understand that some steps in our reasoning and rhetoric differ, but I don’t see the brass-tacks convergence or divergence.
And it’s important to me to try to get this down to cases, because whether I approach it from a pragmatist, a Lockean, or a Thomistic point of view, I cannot coherently decide what means to employ without concrete expectations about the end–to be evaluated based on desireability, achievability, etc.
I agree that being aggressors in “culture war” is folly. I also believe that only one party is necessary to make war; two are only necessary if there is to be any doubt about the outcome.
(and, only incidentally, because I think I may be misreading some shorthand, I do not see how it follows from what I understand of your view, or your compelling scholarly reading of Locke’s method, that any transcendent good is involved, here. That is, I see no evidence that this potentially beneficial “compromise” is actually “right” in a way that makes it worth doing without regard to consequences. In fact, I would have said that it was essential to your position that it *cannot* be so.)
In any case, I could not agree that a rhetoric of conciliation is the only right way to deal with fundamental moral conflict. As long as Christ is still coming with a sword proceeding from His mouth, as long as among His promises to His saints is rule, it cannot be *in principle* wrong–though it may well be *imprudent* at almost all times and places–for there to be secular power in service of the eternally True, Good, and Beautiful. In fact, there is no non-tyrannical reason for a government to require obedience other than its subservience to just such a divine order. And there cannot possibly be any fundamental human right to commit a mortal sin; it is impossible that the secular arm’s forcibly forbidding such should, in itself, ever violate a real human right. Even if doing so *under certain circumstances* might be wrong, it cannot be *in itself* wrong to do so.
And that is why, in the case where it *would* be wrong or imprudent to appeal to the secular arm to do so–which I think it would be, in our case–I still have no problem urging people to “be wise as serpents, harmless as doves” about their involvements in the world. It is quite prudent to remind regimes that Christians obey government precisely “for the Lord’s sake,” a principle which limits that obedience as profoundly as it commands it (hence most of Christendom’s strong rejection of Caesaropapism). We–as Church and as families, and in our neighborhoods first–ought to be living in a way that embodies the good definitively enough that it can provoke embrace or martyrdom from the regime, and if toleration is the via media, that’s totally acceptable.
And when we do that, we must definitely also find that we have principled reasons as Christians to advocate a charitable and hospitable Toleration as a policy (and that doing so in no way requires us to pre-emptively surrender to the violent and nihilistic who aim to destroy that charity and hospitality).
But as matters stand, we have strayed into the position where begging for toleration or pre-emptively surrendering are the obvious options, and from that position there can be no principled compromise. We have to retrench at a faithful and consistent position even though we know it will not be tolerated, even though many of us have failed to adopt that position in the past; and make the case for a better way; and then we can let the chips fall where they may.
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