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Next Steps for the Pro-Life Movement

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 06:00:00 -0400

In the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, many pro-life leaders have suggested that now the question of abortion can return to the states, and that it belongs there. Though understandable, this formulation is regrettable. It obscures the fact that our country still needs a national pro-life movement.

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Donald Trump, Principe

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 09:25:00 -0400

Last year, Christian conservatives had serious reservations about Donald Trump. I was among them. But many of us voted for him anyway. For most, the calculation was straightforward. The end—protecting ourselves, our children, and our country from an increasingly hostile progressivism—justified the means, the Trump presidency. This raises a crucial question: May Christians make such a calculation? Or did those of us who voted for Trump on those terms forfeit our Christian principles?

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After Reaganism: What’s Next for Traditional Conservatives?

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 10:40:00 -0400

“I t’s the death of Reaganism!”

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Unconstitutional Catholics

Sat, 01 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400

In late January, the Supreme Court granted review in Glossip v. Gross , a case involving a constitutional challenge to a drug protocol used in the imposition of capital punishment by lethal injection. Under current practice, lethal injection works by way of three drugs: the first sedates the person to be executed, the second paralyzes him, and the third stops his heart. At issue in the Glossip case is whether the sedative—Midazolam—effectively puts the prisoner into a state of unconsciousness in which he will be unaware of the rest of the execution. The state of Oklahoma claims that Midazolam works if given in a big enough dose, but some recent executions, during which prisoners showed signs of distress, call this claim into question. The court will thus have to decide whether the procedure violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments.”

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Bret Stephens Assails Celibacy

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:01:00 -0400

The unexpected resignation of Benedict XVI from the papacy and the subsequent conclave and election of his successor produced a blizzard of public commentary on the state of the Catholic Church, and in particular calls to abandon celibacy as a required discipline for priests, notably in Bret Stephens’ Wall Street Journal column “ A Church, If You Can Keep It .”

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Faith-Based Voting

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I think Mitt Romney’s a good, moral man,” Southern Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress told CNN at last October’s Values Voters Summit, “but I think those of us who are born again followers of Christ should always prefer a competent Christian to a competent non-Christian like Mitt Romney.” Numerous prominent conservatives immediately denounced him for trampling on America’s best traditions of religious tolerance. William Bennett declared at the summit the next morning, “Do not give voice to bigotry.” For such critics, apparently, making an issue of a candidate’s religion violates the principles of our pluralist democracy.

In declaring religion out of bounds, they surely sought not only to protect Romney from the criticism of conservative Evangelicals, but to protect the future Republican nominee, whoever he or she might be, from the religiously based criticism of the left, which has already argued that Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and others are unsuitable because of their supposedly extreme religious convictions.

I have no interest in defending Jeffress, but I believe his conservative critics went too far in declaring off-limits any consideration of a candidate’s religion. There are at least three reasons voters might choose to weigh a candidate’s religious identity: the tribal, the religious, and the political.

First, the tribal. Human beings are by nature sociable animals. That sociability is expressed most broadly as a fellow feeling for the whole human race, or what the ancients called philanthropy . It is expressed more narrowly as identification with the particular political community to which they belong, or as patriotism. And it shows itself even more narrowly, and is often felt even more passionately, as an attachment to smaller groups within the larger community. Human beings have a strong “love of one’s own,” with “one’s own” ordinarily understood in less-than-universal terms.

It is perfectly natural that group solidarity, or tribal loyalties, should influence our voting. In 2008 many African Americans looked upon the election of Barack Obama with special satisfaction, precisely because he himself was an African American. Few among us would condemn this feeling out of hand. In 1960 Catholics looked on John F. Kennedy’s election with equal satisfaction, and we would be judging them by an unreasonably puritanical standard if we condemned them for counting his Catholicism as a point in his favor. Should Mitt Romney be the Republican nominee, many Mormons will want to vote for him partly because he is one of theirs, and who can blame them?

Some might object that the naturalness of our tribalism does not make it good. Perhaps it belongs to our fallen nature, or at least has been tainted by the Fall. Even if this is true, however, it does not mean that we may not indulge our tribal instincts within reasonable and just limits. Not everything in our present nature that results from the Fall must be utterly repudiated. Man before the Fall did not eat animals, yet this practice is now permissible. Private property is an accommodation to our fallen nature, yet no one would contend that for this reason we must disregard our own economic interests when voting. So it is with the extended self-interest represented in our concern with the prestige of our tribe: We may consider it and act on its behalf when voting, so long as we do not thereby intrude on the rights of others.

Second, citizens, especially those who are most serious about their faith, may reasonably consider the religion of political candidates on religious grounds. They may hope that the election of one of their co-religionists will increase the social prominence of the belief system they hold to be true and of greatest value”not only for themselves but for everyone else. Serious believers cannot be indifferent to whether others accept or reject their religion’s message.

Accordingly, they cannot be indifferent to social conditions that render others more or less open to that message. They will quite reasonably want to promote anything, including having a co-religionist in the office of the presidency, that gives their faith public credibility and effect.

Finally, voters may reasonably take a candidate’s religion into account precisely on political grounds. As journalists and political consultants often say, voters want to be assured that a presidential candidate “shares their values.” Presidents do not merely execute decisions made by others. They are also called to make substantive decisions about the common good, decisions that may leave a lasting mark on the community, for good or ill. Accordingly, responsible voters will consider everything about a candidate that sheds light on his fundamental values, which inevitably influence the political decisions he will make. A candidate’s religion is often a powerful indicator of his deepest moral convictions and hence his understanding of the common good.

Consider the example of one of the candidates at the center of the recent controversy: Mitt Romney. Romney has a mixed record on certain moral issues”such as abortion and gay marriage”that are of deep importance to religious believers and secular liberals. During his Massachusetts political career, Romney presented himself as something of a social liberal. When he began his campaign for president, he seemed to reinvent himself as a social conservative. A secular liberal might argue that while Romney was a politician in a socially liberal state for part of his adult life, he has been a Mormon all of his life. And Mormonism is generally a socially conservative religion. It is likely that his social liberalism was just a concession to a state political culture that he could not hope to change, while his present conservatism is an expression of abiding values that he will bring to the presidency. Therefore, his Mormonism is a reason for liberals not to vote for him. Socially conservative voters could use precisely the same line of thinking to conclude that conservatives can vote for Romney.

Such thinking, of course, does not require any judgment of the truth or falsity of the candidate’s religion. It has everything to do with how religious beliefs, whatever they are, inevitably shape a person’s view of the world and hence how and to what ends he will use his authority. Acknowledging this connection is not bigotry but realism. The responsible voter takes such information into account. It would be foolish not to.

Many of Jeffress’ conservative critics are themselves traditionalists and religious conservatives, and they surely do not exclude religion as completely as their comments on Jeffress suggested. Would they treat as a matter of indifference the beliefs of a professed atheist seeking the presidency? Would they not instead think that questions like abortion and embryo-destructive research will be viewed differently by a person who believes every human life is an accidental by-product of the operations of chance and necessity than by one who thinks that every human life is created in the image of God? Such thinking is perfectly reasonable, and there can be nothing wrong with articulating it openly as a basis for supporting or opposing a given candidate.

To insist that we cannot include their religion among the other criteria used to judge political candidates is inseparable from claiming that religion is irrelevant to the moral and intellectual quality of our public life and culture. This is to say that it makes no difference for a political culture whether its people have one religion or another, or indeed whether they have any religious beliefs at all. Insisting that making an issue of a candidate’s religion violates the principles of our pluralist democracy will deaden our public appreciation of religion’s vital and inevitable role in shaping and guiding our civilization, the preservation of which is supposed to be the goal of conservatives. It will not increase religious tolerance, but it will make voters less able to vote wisely.

Carson Holloway is a political scientist and the author of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press).

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In Defense of Ambition: Esolen’s Curious Overstatement

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0500

Is ambition evil? In an October 2011 essay in First Things that offers an otherwise insightful and provocative critique of Stephen Greenblatt’s theologically tone-deaf interpretations of Shakespeare, Anthony Esolen appears to say as much. This is an important mistake.

Esolen rightly calls out Greenblatt’s ignorance of”or insensitivity to”the great moral tradition of Western civilization. Yet Esolen goes too far, asserting, contra Greenblatt, that “ambition itself is evil. It subordinates others to the good of oneself and thereby inverts the whole message of both Judaism and Christianity.”

No doubt ambition is a dangerous thing, but Esolen’s remark here is an error. This excessive condemnation is inconsistent with common sense, with the classical and biblical tradition on which Esolen draws in his criticisms of Greenblatt, and even, I think, with Shakespeare as well. It is, moreover, a practically harmful mistake, one that undermines the classical and biblical tradition’s power to inform and improve our present culture.

In ordinary speech, the word ambition often indicates a desire to win the praise of one’s fellows. Such ambition can lead men astray, as when, for example, they seek to win praise through deeds that merely flatter the passions of an unreflective and enraged mob. Such ambition can also, however, be intimately bound up with a desire to do what is right and just, and a longing to serve others. This is the “ambition” that a young Abraham Lincoln, aspiring to political office, announced to his fellow citizens in 1832: “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”

A different but related sense of the word ambition signifies a desire to rule. This is the meaning with which Esolen is more particularly concerned, and, again, it would be foolish to deny that such a desire is fraught with moral danger. Ambition can be wrong, just as it can be wrong to eat an apple if it belongs to someone else; it can be wrong to have sexual relations with a woman if she is married to another; and it can be wrong to seek to rule if the community already has a legitimate ruler. But none of this means that hunger, sexual desire, or ambition is in itself an evil.

Here, again, America’s greatest statesman provides an apt example. Of Lincoln’s efforts to win a seat in the United States Senate, his law partner, William Herndon, famously said “his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” In 1860, responding to a friend’s inquiry about his presidential intentions, Lincoln admitted that “the taste is in my mouth a little.” Lincoln wanted to be president, but this desire was inseparable from his intention to do good.

We learn from the greatest thinkers in our tradition that man is by nature a sociable animal . Such a being cannot help but to cherish the praise of his fellows, or to feel ambition of the sort that the young Lincoln expressed. Those who feel no such ambitions we call sociopaths. Moreover, as we learn from Aristotle, man is not merely a sociable animal but a political animal: men do not just live together, but they live in authoritative communities constituted by law and by relationships of ruling and being ruled.

Aristotle, indeed, presented magnanimity or greatness of soul”the disposition of the man who knows he is worthy of the greatest honors, especially the honor of ruling”as a virtue . Saint Thomas Aquinas, who noted that honor “is very desirable” and necessary to human life, did not disagree. Even the more otherworldly Augustine was careful to condemn the Romans for their excessive love of honor, holding not that the love of glory should be utterly abandoned, but surpassed by the love of righteousness.

As Esolen suggests, Shakespeare’s moral vision was informed by this tradition. It is therefore hard to believe Esolen’s claim that Shakespeare intended to teach that “ambition itself is evil.” Is this the meaning of Macbeth ? Certainly Macbeth’s ambition was inordinate, and not only because he was willing to murder for it. Shakespeare, however, sets this perverse and selfish ambition alongside more wholesome versions. Is there not in Malcolm a just and noble ambition to overthrow the tyrant and assert his own legitimate claim to rule? Banquo also shows signs of ambition. Yet he is a faithful and noble subject who never lowers himself to a single wicked act.

Esolen’s disdain for ambition has practically harmful consequences. Now more than ever our culture needs the ennobling influence of the classical and biblical tradition, from whose wisdom we have wandered far. That tradition cannot exert this needed influence, cannot speak to our culture’s multitude of lost souls, unless it is presented in its true grandeur and beauty. This is impossible, however, if it is made to seem inhuman through unjust caricature.

Teaching the best citizens to shun social and political leadership seems a sure way to topple an already teetering civilization. Ambition is indeed dangerous, precisely because its objects”honor and rule”are so lofty that they may obscure our vision of what is even higher: love of God and of our fellow men. But this is a reason to purify our ambition, not to condemn it, any more than we would condemn erotic love, patriotism, piety, or any other good that can be perverted.

Carson Holloway is a political scientist and the author of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press).

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Anthony Esolen, Greenblatt’s Curious Omission

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Treating Democracy

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age
by Ralph C. Hancock
Rowman and Littlefield, 346 pages, $90

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Tiger Woods and Plato

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:00:00 -0500

Two weeks ago, the Tiger Woods scandal was returned to the news by reports that Woods was receiving treatment for sex addiction. While many may have welcomed this sordid story’s earlier disappearance, it in fact deserves serious consideration because of what it says about our culture and, in fact, about our very humanity. So far, commentary on possible deeper meanings of the Woods scandal has focused on matters such as our preoccupation with celebrity and the possibility, in a modern media age, of crafting a public personality wholly at odds with one’s real character. As a student and teacher of political philosophy, however, Woods’s sad fall from respectability reminded me of Plato’s account of the human soul. What we have learned about Tiger Woods, combined with what we already knew about him, may not confirm the truth of Plato’s psychology, but it at least confirms its relevance to the human situation even today. Paradoxically, from this most contemporary downfall we learn that our civilization’s most ancient wisdom is still worthy of our careful consideration.

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Roman Polanski, Hollywood, and the Mystery of the Missing Outrage

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:37:00 -0400

The arrest in Switzerland of Roman Polanski, and his possible extradition to the United States to stand trial for the rape of a minor, has stirred a surprising public controversy. While many commentators have expressed satisfaction that he might be called to account for his crime, others, especially those in Hollywood, have come to Polanski’s defense. The controversy itself is not so surprising as the character of the defense. After all, it is no shock that many would celebrate the prospect of a long delayed reckoning in the case of a child rapist. At the same time, it is not unheard of that Polanski would have his defenders, given the long time that has elapsed since his misdeed, the distinguished nature of his career as a director, and the fact that he seems to have kept out of serious trouble with the law for the last three decades.

What is surprising, however, is to find Polanski’s partisans reacting with indignation to his arrest and possible prosecution, as if he were a victim of some great injustice. It is understandable that some would feel pity for him. Here is a prominent and accomplished man, who committed a terrible crime many years ago, and who finds that it has, near the end of his life, finally caught up with him. Stated in this way, Polanski’s story sounds like the outline of a tragedy, and tragedy, as Aristotle observed, tends by its nature to evoke pity in the audience. Such pity need not be rooted in moral complacency, but in an admirable appreciation of the human frailty that we share with the wrongdoer”in our sense that we, too, might have been capable of such things, and might have come to face a similar punishment. Indeed, confronted with the spectacle of Polanski’s arrest, we might be moved to pity, and to a profitable self-reflection, by the realization that we all have done things for which a just reckoning is due, and that we will have to face that reckoning here or hereafter.

Pity, yes. But indignation? This is strange, and it compels us to ask how we can account for the inclination of some in Hollywood righteously to condemn those who would bring Polanski to justice. The reasons are no doubt complex, and they probably include a sincere but misguided compassion”one that pushes pity too far by not only sympathizing with the wrongdoer but excusing his conduct. Nevertheless, this controversy should not pass without our observing that Hollywood surely has deep self-interested reasons to defend Roman Polanski. Put simply, Polanski’s sins are inextricably bound up with Hollywood’s own sins. If he is guilty, Hollywood is, in some measure, guilty as well.

Most obviously, if Polanski deserves to be legally prosecuted after all this time, then he certainly also deserves, and has deserved all along, the informal and lesser punishment of exclusion from decent society. This is, I think, the sense that most people would have of the matter. I teach in a university, and I suspect that if somehow a child rapist who had evaded prosecution were found to be on the faculty, not many people would be signing up to co-teach classes with him or inviting him to serve on committees. Hollywood, however, has not shunned Polanski. He has rather been treated, not just recently but for some time, as a fellow artist, a worthy collaborator, and an honored creator. If Polanski is guilty of some terribly immoral act, then Hollywood has itself been guilty of an unseemly (at least) moral complacency. And since there appears to be no way to deny that he actually committed the crime in question, Hollywood’s only way to maintain its sense of self-respect is to act as if what he did is not that serious”and accordingly to act as if an effort to prosecute him must be a monstrous injustice.

These observations, however, do not explain why Polanski was not shunned in the first place. No doubt there are some acts for which Hollywood would declare even a gifted artist to be persona non grata . We must ask, then, why Polanski’s entertainment industry colleagues have behaved all along as if his crime were not a weighty matter. I would suggest the following explanation: the embrace of sexual liberation necessarily diminishes our horror for rape, and contemporary Hollywood has been nothing if not ardent in its embrace of sexual liberation.

Traditional sexual morality depended on the assumption that human sexuality possessed an objective moral nature and seriousness that all human beings were obliged to respect and that society itself was entitled to protect through law and custom. Sexual liberation rejected such notions, claiming instead that in matters of sex the acts of consenting adults were none of society’s business. That is, the sexual liberation movement denied sex all intrinsic moral content and reduced sexual morality to the requirement that the consent of the participating parties be respected. The problem, however, is that once traditional sexual morality has been swept away, it is not clear that a solid respect for consent can be maintained.

Sexual liberation’s inability to sustain its initial insistence on consent can be traced to a certain tension, if not an outright contradiction, in the case for sexual liberation. On the one hand, we are told that what consenting adults do together is no one else’s business because sex is no big deal. Society was wrong all along to think that it mattered enough to regulate with such strictness. On the other hand, the very notion that sex is no big deal seems to be undermined by the case for sexual liberation itself. If sex is really no big deal, then why does it matter that it should be liberated? Indeed, if sex is of no great importance, it is hard to see why the case for its unshackling should be made with such energy and even indignation. This observation reminds us that sex is definitely a big deal at least in the sense that it is a powerful human desire that most people experience as essential to their happiness. When the sexual urge demands, they are powerfully tempted to give in. Hence the power of the sexual liberation movement’s appeal. The problem, however, is that once we have sacrificed so much to this powerful appetite, it is not clear why we should not sacrifice everything. If the demand for sexual pleasure is so compelling that we can throw overboard moral principles that extend back to the very roots of our civilization, it is not clear why we would insist that it stop short and respect the consent of individuals. In short, sexual liberation conjured up a spirit of moral nihilism to liberate the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure, and it is not at all certain that such a spirit can be commanded to behave once it has been summoned.

Moreover, we arrive at the same problematic destination by a different path when we accept at face value sexual liberation’s insistence that sex is no big deal. For, if sex in itself is really no big deal, then it is hard to see how forcible sex can be a significant concern. Our horror for rape depends to a large extent on a presupposition that was also the basis for the traditional sexual morality that authorized society to regulate even sexual acts between consenting adults: the sense that human sexuality possesses an intrinsic moral dignity”even a sanctity”that no one should degrade. More specifically, it was believed that sex was properly understood as a way of communicating life to new human beings and of communicating a permanent loving commitment between spouses in marriage. The belief in these lofty purposes was the core of the sense of the sanctity of human sexuality. And it was this sense of sanctity that justified both societal disapproval when consenting people wrongly degraded sex from such an act of love to a mere source of pleasure and society’s even greater horror for those who perverted sex so far as to turn it into a means of pleasure through violence.

Sexual liberation seeks to strip sex of this weighty dignity so that adults can enjoy it without any serious moral commitment, yet at the same time insists that such enjoyment may not be pursued in violation of the consent of one’s partner. It is, however, almost impossible to maintain such earnestness about the importance of consent once sex has been stripped of its intrinsic moral content. Of course it is usually wrong for one person to compel another to do something that the latter does not want to do, but we cannot maintain a belief that such compulsion is a very serious wrong unless it is done in relation to something very important. No one would approve if one person forced another at gun point to share a meal or take a walk in the park, but no one would think that either of these wrongs would constitute the same kind of horrific violation as rape.

Similarly, everyone agrees that government should not force citizens to profess beliefs that they do not really hold. Nevertheless, nobody would think that government goes so far wrong in compelling people to say that blue is their favorite color, whether it is or not, as when it forces them to show approval for political or religious beliefs that they do not really hold. We expect freedom of belief and opinion, but we sense that it is especially important in relation to politics and religion because these are matters that are at the core of our humanity. Here, as opposed to matters of mere taste, we cannot easily distinguish violations of our consent from violations of our very selves. So it is with sex. We recoil from rape not just because it involves a violation of a person’s abstract right to consent, but because it does so in relation to something of the deepest human importance. At least, that is how we react so long as we retain our sense that sex is something of the deepest human importance, and not equivalent to a meal or a walk in the park.

There can be little question that many in Hollywood have abandoned the traditional understanding of the sanctity of human sexuality. That abandonment is evident in much of the entertainments that Hollywood makes and sells, in which casual sex is commonly presented as simply unproblematic and part of the normal fabric of life. We reasonably suspect that such assumptions are active in the lives of many of those who write, produce, and market such entertainments. It is little wonder, then, if the members of such a community find it hard to appreciate the gravity of Roman Polanski’s offense.

Carson Holloway is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author most recently of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press).

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First Things RSS Feed - Carson Holloway

Next Steps for the Pro-Life Movement

Donald Trump, Principe

After Reaganism: What’s Next for Traditional Conservatives?

​Unconstitutional Catholics

Bret Stephens Assails Celibacy

Faith-Based Voting

In Defense of Ambition: Esolen’s Curious Overstatement

Treating Democracy

Tiger Woods and Plato

Roman Polanski, Hollywood, and the Mystery of the Missing Outrage

Unconstitutional Catholics