Letters

Middle Game Tactics

Thank you for hosting the post-Dobbs symposium (“Pro-Life Politics After Dobbs,” June/July) of observations and suggestions by individuals who have done so much already for the pro-life cause. As I understand their reflections, they mainly lament the lack of effective political leadership at present and urge supporters of the cause to keep on doing what we’ve been doing, only better.

I would like to suggest something that will have a more immediate and concrete effect on winning votes in the pending referenda through which the pro-abortion forces hope to enshrine unlimited abortion licenses in state constitutions. Picking up on Carl R. Trueman’s “battle…for the popular imagination,” my take is that the popular imagination of voters is more frequently swayed by sound bites than by deep thinking on moral matters. The pro-abortion forces have slogans that sound very American and very tolerant: “Support women’s freedom!” “Support women’s rights!” We in the pro-life ranks are not using any sound bites with as strong an emotional wallop. But there is one available: the parallel with slavery.

By treating them as disposable, mothers treat their unborn babies as slaves. Slavery is something that most everybody is against, and we need to tar the pro-abortion forces with the slavery brush. We need to start using slogans like “Abortion Treats a Baby Like a Slave” to win the sound bite war, make a positive effect on the popular imagination, and succeed in the upcoming referenda.

Frederick W. Claybrook Jr.
washington, d.c.

The “Pro-Life Politics After Dobbs” symposium did not mention some bad news and good news after Dobbs.

The bad news is that many good pro-lifers are pushing for a fifteen-week limit on abortion. That is a mistake because such a limit might stick. There are many well-intentioned folks out there who wrongly think that a child does not exist until it has been “formed,” and a recognizably human form does not appear until shortly before fifteen weeks gestation. So, wherever protection from conception is politically impossible, it would be better to eschew a fifteen-week limit and instead protect life indirectly. For example, high schools could teach that each of our lives began at conception, governments could provide benefits for pregnant women from that point on, and aggressors who attack women and kill their unborn children at any stage of development could be punished. Pro-life officials in Germany have tried with some success to cut down the rate of (decriminalized) abortion by using public education and help for women. That might be the best we can do at the federal level for the time being.

The good news is a mirror of the bad news: Pro-abortion forces have failed to coalesce in support of the fifteen-week limit, a limit that would have amounted to abortion on demand for almost all women and would have had great staying power, as argued above. Instead, they are insisting on abortion at least up to birth, a position that cannot make sense to almost anyone in the long run. Moreover, they have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they are inhumanly hard-hearted—a great political gift to us. Who could vote for any of them after having seen presidential candidate Terrisa Bukovinac’s heart-wrenching photographs of the five late-term babies discovered in the trash at a Washington, D.C. abortion clinic?

Richard Stith
valparaiso, indiana

Migrant Duties

In “Theology of Immigration” (June/July), Brad Littlejohn argues persuasively that our duty to the immigrant has limits, and that if we do not recognize these limits we cannot properly fulfill our concomitant duty to our fellow countryman. He does not, however, address the question—and I’ve not seen it addressed elsewhere—of what duties the immigrant owes to the host country’s citizens, but a proper understanding of those duties can help clarify the proper limits of the host country’s duties.

I would consider the following among the responsibilities of the immigrant: respecting the laws of the host country (starting, of course, with its laws on immigration); having a sufficient understanding of, and appreciation for, the values of the host country such that the immigrant enthusiastically desires to assimilate and live by those values; and claiming asylum only when the danger is imminent and demonstrable.

There must be an explanation from the would-be immigrant as to why his love for his own country does not compel him to remain there and do what it takes to make it better and to keep it his home.

Understanding the immigrant’s duties will help the host-country citizen know when charity to all requires him to say “no more.”

Mark R. Proska
springfield, pennsylvania

Restorative Injustice

No book is perfect, so a book review that surfaces the author’s errors adds to learning. A book review that fails to recount the author’s argument is worthless. A book review that misrepresents the author’s argument is unworthy of publication. Sadly, Josh Abbotoy and Daniel Strand’s review of my book, Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, is of the latter variety (“Criminal Omissions,” June/July).

In the opening paragraphs of their review, Abbotoy and Strand contend that my reliance on the neighbor-love command was defective because I failed to “provid[e] the relevant concepts, distinctions, and elaborations” connecting love with the law. In fact, my book contends that the fundamental way we love in the legal context is by judging cases accurately, meaning that the law must rightly define right and wrong and rightly adjudicate whether someone committed wrong. I go on to explain that, given our fallibility, accuracy depends on due process. How much process is due, and how much error can we tolerate? To answer those questions, I invoke the doctrine of double effect and just war theory’s treatment of collateral damage to argue that the process due consists of all reasonably available procedural means for ensuring accuracy. The means reasonably available will depend on the financial, scientific, and other resources in a particular cultural context. Even then, the process will misfire if the fact finder is biased, and so accuracy requires impartiality—that is, judging cases based on the acts committed rather than the personalities involved. Still further, accuracy includes punishing the convicted in proportion to the wrong committed. I distinguish between backward-looking proportionality (that looks at the severity of the wrong done) and forward-looking proportionality (that looks at the amount of punishment needed to restore the convict to the community). Finally, relying on the writing of Irenaeus, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and an exegesis of Romans 13, I argue that accuracy demands accountability for those government actors who commit injustice in their administration of justice. Perhaps the reviewers disagree with this framework. But it was dishonest to claim that I offered no “concepts” or “elaborations” on the neighbor-love command.

Equally baseless was the suggestion that I did not “fully appreciat[e] the depth of either Niebuhr’s or Augustine’s realism.” In fact, I note that Niebuhr’s realism “seeks to balance the seriousness of the second Great Commandment and the reality of life in a fallen world.” Indeed, it is a Niebuhrian and Augustinian humility about what a justice system administered by sinners can accomplish that leads me both to deem morally acceptable some degree of judicial error and at the same time to warn against an over-zealousness that “commit[s] injustice in the pursuit of justice.” Or as I stated in the closing pages of my book, “Whatever justice we obtain in this life will be relative. It will be incomplete. It will be imperfect. The justice of this life, like our love in this life, will fall short. We are Christians, and so we are also realists.”

The issue is not my full appreciation of the realism of Niebuhr and Augustine, but rather the reviewers’ refusal to accept its implications for a criminal justice system. Man’s sinful nature should inspire a humility about government’s capacity for good and thus an instinct for limited government—whether in crime control, economic regulation, or foreign affairs. We must neither arrogate to ourselves more authority than God has delegated to us nor pridefully overestimate our ability to solve and punish all crime. Rather, we must, when we lack the means to judge accurately in accordance with due process, leave the matter to God, from whose sight nothing is hidden and who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

The review ends with a guilt-by-(manufactured-)association drive-by, contending that while I “may not” (in fact, do not) subscribe to critical theory, my policy recommendations share much in common with those who do. I suspect critical theorists also agree with me that water is wet. But since I do not employ critical theory authors or arguments to reach my conclusions about either water’s liquidity or the justice system’s needed reforms, the reviewers’ invocation of critical theory is hard to see as anything more than a slur. In a similar vein, the reviewers suggest that someone could invoke my ethic of love in support of defunding the police, knowing full well—but never advising their readers—that I suggest nothing of the sort. To the contrary, I commend the coercive power of the criminal law, when employed proportionally against actual evildoers, as an example of Augustine’s “harsh benevolence.”

I am confident that my book is imperfect. This review, however, was unpublishable as a critique of my work because it is dishonest in its recounting of it.

Matthew T. Martens
vienna, virginia

Josh Abbotoy and Daniel Strand reply:

How to respond to Matthew Martens’s complete dismissal of our review of his book? We read his book cover to cover and we found much to appreciate. But, as would any scholars worth their salt, we chose to address what we saw were the fatal flaws in the argument—the most fundamental being a failure to engage in a robust and serious way with the legal, ethical, and theological tradition. We stand by that critique, Martens’s protestations aside.

There is a yawning chasm between what the book purports to do and what it actually does. The book’s introduction says it aims to fill a gap by providing a comprehensive Christian framework for evaluating our criminal justice system. In this respect, Martens bit off more than he could chew. The history of ideas is a treacherous sea to traverse, and anyone who attempts to cover thousands of years should expect rough sailing. If you invoke Augustine and then assiduously avoid thousands of years of debate and development, can you really be said to have done the work? Martens skims in and out of topics that have been covered at great length, evincing a cursory knowledge and, at times, no knowledge. One does not have to do everything in a book, but then the goals of the book should be dialed back and the claims narrowed. If not the author, the book’s editors should have done this.

For instance, invoking the term “double effect” is not sufficient. How is that concept used? Is it historically and conceptually accurate? Does the invocation evince awareness of the complexities and debates that surround its conceptual and practical application? Just war scholars continue to debate its use to this day.

The aphorisms that Martens derives from Scripture and Augustine are unobjectionable as far as they go. But the book is detached from centuries of outworking in the context of Christian societies. The limited interactions with Aquinas and the magisterial Protestants—to say nothing of the sheer absence of interactions with more proximate greats like Blackstone or Story—are inexcusable for a book purporting to be a primer on the Christian view of criminal justice. We invoked the “defund the police” movement not to assign such views to Martens, but to illustrate the point. Sundered from the ballast of our deep civic and theological tradition, Martens’s policy conclusions reasoned from Augustinian truisms are highly contestable, and the book doesn’t tackle the questions where the real action lies.

This sleight of hand is what makes the book deficient. Martens’s apparent aim—advocacy for center-left criminal justice “reform”—is presented as the “Christian” approach. But he fails to put the relevant arguments on the table.

Rather than reading the words on the page, Martens reads between the lines, rebutting our review with claims of personal character failure rather than addressing the substance of our review. We intended no ill will. If truth-seeking is our goal, then we must be honest and forthright.

Adults at Play

Something that stood out to me about Veronica Clarke’s description of fan fiction, and the loneliness and fantasy that surround it, is that fanfic readers—as well as its writers—are playing (“The Fanfic Temptation,” June/July). More than storytelling, or even collaborative storytelling, it is imaginative play. It is the text-based equivalent of playing house, of dressing up, of carrying your baby doll around like she is your baby and not just a doll.

That is why fan fiction often feels so different from other art forms, why it is not “just” fiction writing. Whereas art often aims at a finished product, play revels in the process, in the sheer joy of make-believe. There isn’t a “craft” of fan fiction. Instead, there are rules, as though you are in a game.

It is tempting to think that what sets fan fiction apart is that it is, in the language of fan studies scholars, “transforming” a pre-existing media property or how it plays with the boundaries of intellectual property. But it is deeper than that. We are witnessing adults play. Fandom is just one of many places that make it easier to play and find playmates. This may be the most striking thing about today’s connected world: We are always playing.

We play with our identity, our sexuality, our food, and our environment. It is as if we all live in what Donald Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst, called a “potential space”—this weird zone between our inner world and outer reality. He saw this kind of play as a lifelong process, not just the domain of children. These online spaces are like playgrounds where we feel safe enough to explore our imaginations. Through this lens, fan fiction is neither a waste of time nor merely an expression of loneliness; it is how we engage with the world. The question for me, then, becomes: When does all this play become maladaptive?

Katherine Dee
chicago, illinois

Faith over Fear

R. R. Reno’s “Finding Truth Amid Lies” (June/July) describing Dr. Clare Craig’s intellectual and spiritual awakenings during the Covid years brought back memories of the secular admonitions to “follow the science” that so many accepted without question or reservation. Though not specifically mentioned, the media’s constant barrage of Covid fearmongering advanced the mass, unquestioned “science following” and related vaccination and quarantine mandates. Among these unpleasant memories, a pleasant one was the occasional appearance of a vehicle bumper sticker with the simple yet hopeful message: “FAITH OVER FEAR.”

Had this message been more prevalent, particularly among church hierarchy and other religious leaders who dutifully “followed the science” while failing their congregations by closing their churches, the spiritual and societal damage may have at least been attenuated with a bit of discernment. Hopefully, Reno’s coda that “There’s a new openness to the God who will not fail us” and the bumper sticker message of faith’s precedence over fear will abide.

C. W. Helfeldt
rockledge, florida

Image by Gari Melchers licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.