At the barricades

The Clash of Orthodoxies Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis Robert P. George ISI Books, $24.95, 387 pp.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. That seems to be the case with Robert P. George's Clash of Orthodoxies, subtitled Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis. The book's dust jacket reproduces the famous photograph of the dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London shining defiantly through the clouds of smoke and dust rising from the destruction created by Nazi bombing. Saint Paul's classical dome, columns, and pediments, all surmounted by a cross, evoke the beauty and resilience of Western civilization as it defies Nazi barbarism. The contrasts of light and dark and of the dome's perfect form against the smoke's formlessness convey simultaneously the gravity of the assault, the beauty of what is threatened, and the possibility of ultimate triumph. I don't know if George selected this image for the cover of his book, but it does carry the substance and tone of his message.

For George, the "Judeo-Christian tradition" that has dominated Western culture for most of its history, with its classical and biblical foundations and its Christian flowering, is besieged by the new barbarism of "secular orthodoxy." George, a respected constitutional scholar and frequent contributor to First Things and Crisis, wants to defend that older tradition. His goal is to prove that "Judeo-Christian morality is rationally superior to the morality of orthodox secularism." To do this, he insists first upon the Christian philosophical position that faith and reason are not antithetical, but complementary. Doing battle with secular orthodoxy on the ground of reason thus not only allows George to challenge secularism on its own terms, but to prevent dismissal of Christian morality to the private sphere on the premise that it is antirationalist and based on truth claims not shared by all.

Much of the first part of the book is a replay of the familiar debate over the legitimacy of religious discourse in the formulation of law and public policy. George tackles head-on the position associated with liberal political philosopher John Rawls that would exclude from political debate appeals to principles drawn from "comprehensive" doctrines such as natural law. Arguments based on natural-law theory, in this view, cannot constitute "public reasons," and are hence inadmissible in public debate, because they express faith-based truth claims that cannot countenance "the fact of reasonable pluralism." George points out that while natural-law theorists believe that there are "uniquely correct answers," they reach that conclusion through reason and admit the possibility of error in their reasoning. The Rawlsian exclusion of natural-law-based arguments George finds particularly troubling in the case of abortion. Rawls has insisted that "any comprehensive doctrine that leads to a balance of political values excluding that duly qualified right [to an abortion] in the first trimester is to that extent unreasonable." The big problem with this, George emphasizes, is that Rawls's particular "balance of political values" cannot be struck without an "appeal to moral or metaphysical views widely in dispute." The unacknowledged effect is to privilege one set of moral and metaphysical views, namely liberalism's, while dismissing another, namely those of Christian natural law, from the realm of public debate without an attempt to engage its substantive claims. To his credit, George demands engagement, and in this book he engages with a vengeance.

It is at this point, however, that many sympathetic readers may part company with George. He is a thoroughgoing social conservative. For him, a proper application of natural law and rational Catholic philosophical principles leads not only to condemnation of abortion and euthanasia, but also premarital sex, contraception, "nonreproductive type" sexual acts within marriage, divorce, same-sex marriage, and pornography. He also believes that no "strict principle of justice" would prevent the criminalization of noncommercial "private vices" such as fornication, adultery, and sodomy, because there is a public interest in protecting "a community's moral ecology against the corrosive effects on marriage and family life of [such] vices." He concedes that there may be "good prudential reasons not to attack them with the full force of the law," but he insists that there is no principled reason why the law should not forbid them.

George apparently rejects the notion that a paramount personal interest in privacy would provide a principled reason for not criminalizing "private vices." Furthermore, the "Judeo-Christian worldview" requires him to stake out a position radically contrary to the "isms of contemporary American life--feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism, lifestyle liberalism"--which together constitute the "culture of death." This apocalyptic tone is also evident in his critique of judicial recognition of a right to abortion. He insists that "people of goodwill" (whoever they are) must ask themselves whether "our [American] regime is becoming the democratic `tyrant state'" about which Pope John Paul II warned in Evangelium vitae.

This absolutist strain in George's thought generates some important questions. His core concept of a "secular orthodoxy" lumps together "secularists" as disparate as liberals Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, utilitarians Peter Singer and Richard Posner, and such libertarians as Robert Nozick. Taken together, do they really constitute an "orthodoxy"? Similarly, his swipes at "feminism" do not acknowledge, let alone engage, the variety of feminisms, including a robust Christian feminism. Arguments can be constructed from natural law about human equality to support feminist positions inconsistent with George's convictions about marriage and the family.

In asserting the rational superiority of his arguments about abortion, same-sex marriage, and sexual morality George's trump card seems to be what he regards as the correct understanding of the integration of mind and body. He contends that those who would legalize abortion, recognize same-sex marriages, or countenance contraception and "nonreproductive type" sexual acts are captives of a philosophically indefensible "mind-body dualism." George claims that for "orthodox secularism" only the "conscious, desiring, self-aware, and future-directed part of the human being ... is truly the `person.'" For secularists, the body is not part of the "personal reality" of the human being; it is "subpersonal." This detachment, according to George, is implicit not only in arguments for abortion and euthanasia (which implicitly treat the body as something that can be discarded freely) but also prevents recognition of marriage as a "two-in-one-flesh union" of two persons. Only in heterosexual marriage and "reproductive-type" sexual acts, he concludes, can a true "unity of body, sense, emotion, and will" be found. Everything else amounts to an immoral "instrumentalization of sex." Obviously, all this is debatable; what is important is George's apparent belief that his resolution of the mind-body question ends the debate, making it unnecessary for him to engage directly with moral and legal arguments that raise different concerns.

His philosophical resolution of the question of same-sex marriage, for example, does not acknowledge that the specific question is situated in the larger question of the dignity of persons who are homosexual, and that there are both theological and social-utility arguments that may justify recognition of same-sex marriage, or at least legal relationships that approximate some aspects of marriage. Similarly, his persuasive argument that an embryo is in fact human life does not, as a matter of pure reason, indisputably end the argument over abortion. Even those who accept the premise that an embryo is human life may reach differing conclusions about the moral status of that life. Similarly, insistence that an embryo constitutes human life should not preclude recognition that the embeddedness of fetal life in another life raises questions about the mother's autonomy that are morally complex. One may still come to a pro-life conclusion, but to do so simply by asserting that a human life is a human life and therefore deserves the same level of legal protection is too easy.

More generally, it is hard to envision the legal and political system that would emerge from a thorough application of George's principles. He states that he is arguing for an "old-fashioned liberalism" or a "conservative liberalism" that would embody a "liberalism of life" dedicated to "the rule of law, democratic self-government, subsidiarity, social solidarity, private property, limited government, equal protection, and basic human freedoms." It is not entirely clear that a state thoroughly imbued with his social conceptions derived from natural law and Christian philosophy would be genuinely pluralistic, accommodating of difference, and respectful of the belief that law and morality are not entirely coextensive. One suspects that such a state would be quite the opposite.

Mark A. Sargent is the dean of the Villanova University School of Law.

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