My friends at Mirror of Justice have had a host of interesting posts lately on a variety of issues, many of them involving the recent statement on religious freedom of the USCCB, the question of “who is the Church,” and the recent homily by Bishop Jenky, in which the Bishop said, inter alia:
Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care.
In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path.
MoJ has posted a student comment (I emphasize “student”; I don’t want to be patronizing about it, but although I’m critical of the post I don’t want this to be an arena for nasty counter-comments) defending the homily. It reads, in part:
I do venture to suggest that perhaps Jenky’s words are true. . . . Serious Catholics ought to take Jenky’s suggestions seriously. Does our culture and political order affirm the transcendent dignity of the human person? Or is Jenky right to discern in recent governmental trends indications of a nascent “culture and praxis of totalitarianism”? The bishop by no means intends insensitivity towards victims of Stalin or Hitler’s abominable practices. If anything, by drawing such parallels he intends to generate a greater sensitivity towards the millions of innocent victims of abortion in America—that which has come to be known in some circles as the “American Holocaust.” . . . Notre Dame, as a Catholic university, should follow his example in standing up for religious freedom and against the insidious soft despotism of relativism that pervades mainstream culture. Perhaps if more members of the clergy and scholarly communities had issued “incendiary statements” like this one, some of the gravest atrocities of the past century might have been preempted by a bolder and more conscientious citizenry.
Against these statements, allow me to counterpose a different vision. It’s not my own. It comes from this month’s Virginia Law Review, which has published a speech by the late William Stuntz titled Law and Grace. Looking back on the connection between the culture war and the wars on drugs and crime, which he thinks claimed many unintended victims and did not improve matters any, he wonders whether “we might have fought a different kind of culture war, and a different kind of crime war–wars that were less warlike, with many fewer casualties.” Comparing other culture wars to the civil rights struggle, he writes:
[Martin Luther] King fought and bled and died for the right to have relationship with those who refused relationship with him. He did not seek to punish, though he had every excuse and every right to seek precisely that. He wanted his enemies’ embrace. It’s an utterly captivating vision. And it changed the culture. . . .
By and large, law can do three things: it can punish wrongdoing; it can relieve suffering; and it can promote and protect and, some-times, create relationship. The culture wars of the early and late twentieth century focused on the first of those three roles. King’s culture war focused on the second and third. King got it right, and my generation of American Protestants got it badly wrong. . . .
I believe King’s movement was America’s Good Culture War, one that was fought as such battles ought to be: aggressively and passionately and with deep commitment to principle, and yet also with love for those with whom the movement did battle. Call it the marriage of law and grace. Legal change helped produce social and cultural change—not by locking up evildoers, but by building the beginnings of an integrated national community. Abraham Lincoln, the historical leader whom King most resembles, would have understood. Lincoln fought a terribly bloody war—and yet, as hard as he fought, Lincoln could not bring himself to hate those he fought. They are our countrymen, he liked to say; we should approach them “[w]ith malice toward none; with charity for all”—famous words that define the spirit of the one who spoke them. That spirit, and King’s spirit, have been too little evident in the culture wars of the recent past.
Some might wish for an American future free of culture wars. I do not; I think these battles are worth fighting. But I do wish for good wars: the kind King fought—the kind in which we love our enemies, and fight for the chance to embrace them.
I appreciate that these are romantic words. I also appreciate that loving one’s adversaries doesn’t mean not opposing them. And I can appreciate just how demanding this sort of love is. (A good deal more demanding, in fact, than any of the demands Bishop Jenky makes on his flock in his homily; calling for “heroism,” or for contempt for “Hollywood” and “the media,” is easy, if not lazy.) For one who believes that abortion is murder, how can one not consider oneself to be in a war? (And why not, then, fight it as a genuine war?) For one who believes that certain fundamental rights are an absolute part of human dignity, how can one not resolutely and angrily oppose those who would deny the basic right to marry the worthy person whom one loves? (And why not, then, seek to circumscribe or vanquish the rights of those institutions that oppose it?) And I further note that Stuntz quite rightly said that some battles are worth fighting.
But I still think the best answer one might offer to the student commenter (and to those with similar views across a wide political spectrum) is the one Stuntz offers. You can’t build a world of just and loving relations with others unless you are willing to have and seek loving relationships. The capacity for that seems sadly lacking in our culture these days, in many places.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on April 26, 2012 at 10:27 PM
Comments
Right on. Well said.
Posted by: Jim | Apr 27, 2012 9:47:04 AM