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Last month I wrote extensively in the Public Square about Charles Murray’s important new book, Coming Apart, an analysis of the striking gap between the top of American society (Belmont) and the bottom (Fishtown).

In yesterday’s New York Times Murray answers critics who charge that he explained the problem but offered no solutions. Murray gives four, three of which are pretty thin.

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Our ongoing work on the web and in First Things magazine assures that your religious ideals and convictions have a voice in the public square. To do that well we need your support. Please click and donate.

In a searching reflection on the justice of preemptive military strikes designed to prevent Iran from gaining the use of nuclear weapons, Robert Koons embarks on a line of reasoning not altogether persuasive.

He works his way through the criteria for a just war, and when he comes to “last resort” he observes that the moral substance of just war theory requires a formal declaration of war–a clear statement of military intent–so that the other side, in this case Iran, can back down.

This line of reasoning rules out sudden preemptive attacks. Here is how Koons puts it.

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Our ongoing work on the web and in First Things magazine assures that your religious ideals and convictions have a voice in the public square. To do that well we need your support. Please click and donate.

Our ongoing work on the web and in First Things magazine assures that your religious ideals and convictions have a voice in the public square. To do that well we need your support. Please click and donate.

Our ongoing work on the web and in First Things magazine assures that your religious ideals and convictions have a voice in the public square. To do that well we need your support. Please click and donate.

The Journal of Medical Ethics recently published are article justifying the killing of newborn infants, “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”

Here is the abstract:

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

The authors are from mainstream, establishment universities. The journal is mainstream and respected.

Hard to know what to make of this article. It’s not as bad as it seems. It doesn’t reflect the way the overwhelming majority of people think. It’s been roundly denounced, and not just by religious people.

But it’s also not a good sign. I doubt the journal would have published a moral case for slavery, or one for race-based hierarchies, not matter how well-argued. I doubt they would publish an article arguing the homosexual acts are immoral. However, when it comes to killing newborns, our academic culture thinks it a topic worthy of discussion and debate.

As I said, not a good sign.ˇ

The Huffington Post featured a particularly ugly screed by Frank Schaeffer. He claims to be providing a service to the Republic by exposing “the loony Reconstructionist/Theonomist” agenda of people like Robert George and Richard John Neuhaus.

Schaeffer is a great exaggerator, what with all the hyperventilating about theocracy and “extremism.” And he backs these claim up by not so subtly suggesting that he was a right wing insider himself, and so he’s to be trusted to know what’s what.

For example, he writes, “The late Roman Catholic convert priest Richard John Neuhaus and I often talked when Neuhaus was starting his far right First Things journal.” Then he goes on to say, “I contributed several articles to some of the early issues of First Things.”

Hum. Often talked, is it? And several articles?

But it turns out that Schaeffer did not contribute several articles. He has only one article in the First Things archive. (“Art and the Spirit,” May 1991.)

Did he then “often talk” with Richard John Neuhaus?

Can we trust Frankie Schaeffer to tell the truth about anything?

The indispensable Peter Berger has posted a helpful discussion of the implications of the recent and ongoing controversy over the contraceptive mandate, the main one of which, to his mind, is the further clarification of the common interests of religious people over and against the secularist “base” of the Democratic Party.

Berger reviews the history of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the project initiated by Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson that continues to this day. It’s urgency and purpose, he observes, stemmed less from warm theological fellow-feeling and more from the ways in which an increasingly aggressive secular elite drove together once bitter theological enemies.

Berger sees the trend continuing. Back in the day we saw various battles of orthodoxy—Calvinist vs, well, other Calvinists, or Catholic vs Protestant, and so forth. Now we see the battle between the very idea of religious orthodoxy and secular claims that religion may need to be tolerated (for a time?) but should be brought to heel.

I’m sure that Berger is right. The culture wars stem from the dramatic growth in those who say that have no religion (growing from 3 percent or so in 1960 to something like 17 percent today). They are a very aggressive minority who believe that they own the future, and they have been hammering away on the Judeo-Christian cultural consensus for decades. That’s why we have a culture war, not religious “extremism.”

The good folks at the Pew Research Center recently released the results of a survey that gives us some insight into the public reaction to the contraceptive mandate.

Conservatives are more likely to think that religious organizations should be exempted, while liberals favor requiring contraceptive coverage. No surprise there. Religious people are more likely to support an exemption, the non-religious less so. Again, no surprise.

One interesting piece of data: the supposed concession announced on Friday has not changed very many minds. “The survey shows,” we read in the overview, “little difference in opinions among people interviewed before the administration’s proposed modification on Feb. 10 and those interviewed afterwards.”

In other words, the Obama administration still has a problem. Among those who have heard about the controversy, 73% of Republicans think an exemption should be given. Democrats go the other way, with only 29% wanting an exemption. Independents are split, 46% favoring an exemption, 48% supporting the contraceptive mandate.

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I’ve taken a look at the supposed concessions made by the Obama administration about required insurance coverage for contraceptives. Here’s what the White House fact sheet says:

The President will also announce that his Administration will propose and finalize a new regulation during this transition year to address the religious objections of the non-exempted non-profit religious organizations. The new regulation will require insurance companies to cover contraception if the religious organization chooses not to. Under the policy:

o Religious organizations will not have to provide contraceptive coverage or refer their employees to organizations that provide contraception.

o Religious organizations will not be required to subsidize the cost of contraception.

o Contraception coverage will be offered to women by their employers’ insurance companies directly, with no role for religious employers who oppose contraception.

o Insurance companies will be required to provide contraception coverage to these women free of charge.

Hum. Religious organizations will not be required to subsidize the cost of contraception—and women will get the coverage FREE OF CHARGE. Is that because contraceptives and a system for delivering them and processing insurance paperwork COST NOTHING?

This is a charade. Insurance companies will obvious raise overall premiums to provide adequate income for the “free” contraceptives. So religious organizations that pay the premiums will indeed be subsidizing the cost of contraceptives.

I find myself exasperated. Why is the Left so committed to the goal of free contraceptives for women?

Our colleagues and fellow laborers in the Lord’s vineyard, Timothy George and Chuck Colson, have written a powerful and effective open letter to their evangelical brethren.

It’s a powerful testimony of Christian unity that, however divided we may be on matter of theology and church order, Evangelicals and Catholics can stand shoulder-to-shoulder to resist the imperial ambitions of modern liberalism.

Thanks, Timothy and Chuck, for your support.

We seem to be in a season of judicial sanity. As Jeremy Tedesco, the lawyer who argued the case reports, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that vindicated the claims of Julea Ward.

Ward was a counseling grad student at Eastern Michigan University, and when she used the recommended procedures to refer a gay couple that she felt she could not counsel appropriately because of her Christian beliefs, she was summarily tried and executed by the faculty—in other words expelled from the program.

In a strongly worded opinion the Sixth Circuit reversed a lower court decision and reinstated Ward’s lawsuit. As the court put it: tolerance is a two-way street. Professors can’t insist that all values and life-style choices are equally valid, and then turn around and punish those who happen to be Christians.

Read the rest of Tedesco’s account here.

Some legislators in Colorado have filed suit to overturn the Colorado Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, a cap on spending and taxation that requires voters to approve increases directly by way of a referendum.

It’s a sign of the times. As the post-War middle class dominated social and political consensus has come unraveled in recent decades. (The financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent explosion of government spending put an exclamation point on this unraveling.) The upshot is a greater and greater gap between the governing class and everybody else, with the truculent populists in the base of the Republican Party that has made Mitt Romney’s life miserable (and frightened the Republican establishment) being the most vocal and obvious example to date.

A representative democracy works well when the representatives function in accord with the same political intuitions—and incentives—as those they represent. For many complicated reasons, that’s less and less true today. For example, in a place like Colorado a there are communities and constituencies that have won big-time with globalization. (Think Boulder.) They want increased spending, in large part because they can afford it. Not so Pueblo or Grand Junction.

Moreover, as is the case in Washington, Denver has a permanent population of bureaucrats and lobbyists whose interested are strongly aligned with spending. This is true of any state or local government that collects and spends a lot of money. Legislators get socialized into the permanent government.

Because our society is undergoing deep structural changes, the permanent government (which always protects legacy spending) is more and more out of sync with middle class social reality. Thus the gap. Thus the demand for referenda. Thus the legistators frustrated that too much democracy gums up everything.

Today’s New York Times reminds us that the Jesuits haven’t gone entirely off the rails. Their exposé exposes the fact that Fordham has resisted compliance with a New York state law that requires insurance coverage that pays for birth control pills. Nice to know that on this issue they’re keeping the C in Catholic up at Rose Hill in the Bronx.

Of course this conflict between Planned Parenthood Jihadists and Catholic institutions is now going national. The HHS mandated health coverage requires birth control as a “preventive service.”

The absurdity of all this has united Catholics, as Fordham demonstrates. It’s hardly a hard line institution, but the strange notion that birth control is an essential health care imperative is something any intelligent liberal, Catholic or otherwise, should reject.

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Michael Greve at the American Enterprise recently posted in a Liberty Fund blog a trenchant analysis of the recently announced HHS regulations that will compel all insurance policies to cover contraception, sterilization, and morning after pills

He provides a very lucid analysis of the way in which vague statutory language about preventive care for women turned into preventing pregnancy and then got written into regulations.

Follow the progression: first comes a statutory text of sufficient ambiguity to keep the Catholic Health Association, representing Catholic hospitals, on board in support of the ACA. (Now that it’s been had, one hopes the association has learned its lesson.) Then comes an administrative creep forward and a de facto delegation to a private organization of known disposition, whose perceived authority and expertise provide cover for the bureaucracy. Then comes the wholesale, underhanded adoption of the interim rule.

By Greve’s reckoning, this travesty is of a piece with the entire agenda of Obamacare. It can’t be implemented, because its a Rube Goldberg contraption, and because dysfunctional as written, what does get done will get done by regulatory fiat.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, history professor Sara Ritchey makes much of the fact that married Anglican clergy will become Catholic priests under the new Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.

Ritchey provides some useful historical background that outlines the early medieval shift to an all-celibate clergy. But I was struck by her naive ignorance of the recent history of the Catholic Church. The existence of Priests’ wives should, she tells us, provide the occasion on which “a real conversation about the continuation of priestly celibacy might begin.”

Might begin? In the first place, the new Ordinariate doesn’t inaugurate a new era of married priests. The Catholic Church has in fact been ordaining married Anglican and other Protestant ministers for more than a decade now. But more importantly, the “conversation” about priestly celibacy was rather fully engaged in more than three decades ago. Perhaps in the splendid isolation of some academic precincts it still goes on, though only in a one-side way of the progressives talking to themselves. Meanwhile, the rest of the Church regards the conversation as having been in some respects useful, in some respects frivolous, but in most respects over.

The National Catholic Reporter is almost always predictable, and their choice for 2011′s “person of the year” was true to form: Elizabeth Johnson.

Johnson, a professor of theology at Fordham University, is a standard issue Catholic Theological Society of America theologian, which means a bit of simplified Karl Rahner and lots of talk about contextualization mixed with progressive social attitudes. Yawn. Her great achievement in 2011 was to have her 2007 book, QUEST FOR THE LIVING GOD, criticized by the USCCB doctrine committee as promoting a theology not in accord with Catholic teaching.

So that’s were liberal Catholicism is these days: circling the wagons. Writing and publishing the book wasn’t such a notable thing for Elizabeth Johnson to do. Ah, but to be criticized! One hears the cries of “censorship,” and “oppression.” As the NCR story tells us, after the official criticism of her book was released, “the Fordham faculty rallied around her, as did the leadership of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the College Theology Society, each issuing supportive statements.” The NCR as well wants to play it’s supportive role. Thus Elizabeth Johnson as victim, oops, I meant to say person of the year.

I wrote about this minor dust up in a recent Public Square (The Changing of the Guard, Aug/Sept), drawing attention to a Commonweal symposium that featured the fevered hyperbole of the Catholic theological Old Guard and the rather more measured and intelligent analysis put forward by Fritz Bauerschmidt.

It’s this contrast that’s the real story here. The Catholic Theological Society of America was once a serious academic organization. Today it’s a Trade Union for Dissent. How dare the bishop criticize theologians! Left with very little of interest to say in the current intellectual and ecclesial context, the Trade Union for Dissent can rouse itself to denounce any who would make the quite obvious observation that the substance and trajectory of their theologies are not in accord with the Church. Yawn.

Here’s the basic data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

Among the 57% of Iowa caucus-goers who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians, Santorum finished in first place with 32% support. Ron Paul garnered 18% of the evangelical vote, while Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry each received 14% of the evangelical vote.

I’m not someone who pays close attention to every inning of the long political game. But the data seems clear. A Catholic candidate got a great deal of the Evangelical vote.

What this suggests to me is that the “religion factor” has shifted. Today Catholic, Protestant, and Jew make little difference. I’ll go out on a limb and say that Mormon makes little difference. (Muslim does make a difference, a big difference, but that’s for another time.) What seems to move voters is a combination of authentic piety, or at least the appearance of genuinely believing, and clarity about crucial moral and social issues.

I’m convinced that an Orthodox Jew could win as many votes from Evangelicals in Iowa as Santorum did—assuming of course that he had similar unequivocal views about the key issues of concern to Evangelicals.

The same is probably true for a Mormon. I find it hard to believe that Romney got fewer votes from Evangelicals because he was a Mormon rather than a Catholic. As the former governor of Massachusetts Romney has a track record of compromise, accommodation, and silence (if not outright agreement) with liberals on all sorts of issues, some economic and some social. That—and not Mormonism—was his liability among Evangelicals in Iowa.

In any event, it ain’t 1960 anymore. Pious Baptists in places like Houston or Des Moines don’t seem worried about the nefarious influence of priestcraft. These days it’s just religious conviction plain and simple that arouses loyalty among some voters—and anxious antipathy from others.

I imagine that Leon Wieseltier and I disagree about many things. But I’ve long found him to be a reliable enemy of cant. I was not disappointed by his recent Washington Diarist column in The New Republic.

He takes Duke University philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg and author of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions to the woodshed.

We had a fine and hard-hitting review by Edward Feser back in the November issue (Scientia ad Absurdum). Feser observed, as does Wieseltier, that Rosenberg simply asserts an untenable scientism, which means the presumption that because science explains things so effectively, the only things that exist are those that science explains.

Here is Feser’s devastating assessment:

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You really have to check out this very clever and well-done video, The Fight of the Century.

I’m not a fan of rap music, but it’s a supremely verbal musical idiom that works well with the substance of this music video, which is the difference between F. A. Hayek’s free market approach and the use of government intervention endorsed by John Maynard Keynes. What I found especially engaging is that John Papola and Russ Roberts, the producers of this video, begin with the classic debate about how and why we eventually pulled out of the Great Depression, but then turn to more fundamental questions. Economics and politics (in the deep, Aristotelian sense) are linked, and they draw out the moral dimension of the great economic debate. Keynes: unemployment is not a statistic; it’s real people, and waiting for markets to correct themselves reflects a very cold and remote attitude. Hayek: “I want plans by the many, not by the few.”

The fight ends with Keynes declared the victor, which has been in fact the case in government policy over the last couple of years, though this marvelous video suggests that Papola and Roberts think Hayek has the best arguments. As I said, very clever and well-done.

Over at the New York Times “Room for Debate” page, Tim Shah and Tom Farr observe that our liberal counterparts are often tempted to define democratic culture as, well, liberals talking the way liberals talk.

Drawing from Barack Obama’s meditations on the role of faith in public life, they give us his conclusion: “What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.”

It’s the standard Rawlsian boilerplate: universal values, public reason, and so forth. I can understand the impulse. Civic responsibility seeks to promote the common good, not private interests, and the common good is, well, common, and in that sense universal. But it’s a mistake to translate a virtue—civic responsibility—into an epistemological principle or criterion.

It’s a mistake because the principle or criterion that promises to be formal—only universal truths, only public reasons—ends up being substantive. By the reasoning of nearly all Catholic thinkers, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are universal truths accessible to natural reason. Thus a good Rawlsian should allow me to make public policy arguments based on these universal truths: obligatory philosophy of religion classes in high school, for example.

That I don’t make these arguments stems from my prudential judgment that such policies would be either ineffective or counter-productive, which is to say contrary to the common good. It’s these sorts of judgments—we all make them all the time—that makes public advocacy responsible and appropriate for a democratic society.

In some circumstances an explicitly Christian and theological argument serves the common good. Martin Luther King, Jr., provides the most obvious recent example, with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural providing another. In other circumstances the most responsible arguments are empirical—the debate leading up to the Welfare Reform Act in the 1990s provides a good example. In still others it’s a philosophical argument that serves the common good, the pro-life argument being a current example. There is not formula, no criterion, not principle that can tell us what bests promotes the common good. That requires good judgment, which is a virtue.

You can imagine my surprise this Christmas weekend when I discovered an essay on ancient and medieval spiritual theology in the Sunday Book Review section of the New York Times. In “The Noonday Demons, and Ours,” Brandeis English professor John Plotz reminds us that temptations toward distraction, dissipated attention, and unproductive work are not unique to our age. It’s true that monks in the Egyptian desert during ancient times weren’t tempted to check facebook or shop on the internet, but like us they identified the “noonday demon,” the vice of acedia or sloth, as it is known in the spiritual literature of Christianity.

As Plotz points out, its a complex and seemingly contradictory vice. Imagine yourself unable to get out of bed to go to work. That could be acedia. Or imagine running around doing errands when you should be sticking to an important task. That’s acedia as well. What unifies lassitude and busyness is a common consequence: both prevent us from doing what we should do, and often from what we actually want but can’t discipline ourselves to do.

Acedia—which means literally without care—may be the cardinal vice of our postmodern era. So I argue in my own essay, “Fighting the Noonday Devil.” And in Fighting the Noonday Devil, a recently published collection of my essays, I offer meditations on love and loyalty, the motivating cares that help us fight the carefree vice.

Patrick Reilly and Rick Garnett mix it up over how best to respond to the aggressive way that Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and Human Services has crafted regulations that stipulate what employers must include in the health insurance policies they provide. The long and the short of it is that the regulations require payments for contraception, day-after pills, and other drugs and procedures that are contrary to Catholic moral doctrine.

Catholic and other religious institutions have pushed back, asking for revisions, the details of which get us pretty deep into the legal weeds. You know that you’re on to something serious when the conversation turns on how to interpret and apply section 414(e) of the federal tax code! In any event, check out the back-and-forth at Mirror of Justice.