A Religious Freedom that Teaches Us Not To Share
A Catholic Reflection on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Propositions of Religious Liberty
All of political life is sharing.
That’s not easy to appreciate today when so much of our discourse focuses on maintaining divisions and drawing lines. But the deepest meaning of politics is that it is about a sharing. Political life is about what we have no choice except to share because we dwell together. Our social nature brings us together. That circumstance makes us a community. When we think and work together about our shared life, that is politics.
How do we do this sharing with each other? St. Augustine told us that a community is “bound together by an agreement as to the objects of love.” Our sharing begins in loving something together. But in a pluralist state like ours, how do Catholics, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, agnostics, atheists, and everybody else agree about what to love together and take that first step of sharing?
The answer of our constitutional system has been an open public square that works as a sort of marketplace where we meet as equals, joining our voices in a spirited debate about the questions we face to determine the future of all we share. Historically, we have been encouraged to love that idea together. It is a significant but widely underappreciated detail of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that its statutory authority rests on the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause. The U.S. Government may intrude on a private business to enforce the equality of customers because all comers must be welcomed and no one can be excluded. Business owners must let go of some rights to sustain the principle of community that holds us together. Balancing our rights together in the public square like that is not easy. But Catholics were committed to trying for a long time.
Cardinal Richard Cushing sought John Courtney Murray, S.J.’s opinion in the mid-sixties when the Massachusetts legislature sought to relax the commonwealth’s ban on contraceptives. Murray’s answer was subtle but revealing: Catholics must appreciate the difference between our moral teaching and the public morality that can be enforced by law. He urged Cushing not to oppose the change, advising that “Catholics repudiate in principle a resort to the coercive instrument of law to enforce upon the whole community moral standards that the community itself does not commonly accept.” In particular, Murray said that because other religious groups regard contraception as “morally right,” Catholics would be alone against the change. One group alone cannot make the decision for the whole public. In the public square, we give ground.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said something similar in 2005, just prior to his election. He wrote that Christians might learn from non-Western cultural experiences because, “Ultimately, the essential values and norms that are in some way known or sensed by all men will take on a new brightness in such a process.” When different religious and cultural experiences have struck upon the same truth, that truth will have greater persuasive force than if Catholics voice it alone. To find a “rational or ethical formula that would embrace the whole world” demands that we accept the limits of what we can do alone and how much we need to do with others.
We seem to be losing our determination to accept those limits, or even to recognize them. The distance we have gone in forty years from Richard John Neuhaus’s lamenting the secularization of the public square is showing in the cheering for two decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court this week from certain quarters of our divided church. Where Neuhaus feared a public square without the influence of a religious voice, many of us are celebrating how little the church needs to be troubled by the public square at all.
The implication of both the Little Sisters and the Our Lady of Guadalupe decisions is that religious employers are exempted from obligations to the public square where Murray, Ratzinger, and Neuhaus said we need to be visibly at work with others. The thread that runs through the decisions is this idea: any compromise with the public square even in the conducting of public business (such as employment and participation in the healthcare economy) poses an unacceptable erosion of our rights. Some even have gone further, to celebrate a medieval idea and say, “the Supreme Court didn’t give the Church today anything she doesn’t already have. In the Constitution, free exercise means free exercise. And while the Church chooses to submit herself to aspects of civil law, she has no moral obligation to do so.”
The trouble with this way of seeing things is that it abandons all notions of sharing. Walled up behind the ramparts of our rights, we lose contact with the world and sooner or later we find the world no longer is listening. Integralists are untroubled by this implication, I suppose. But those who want the church to enjoy the peace of this world and to be at work in the world as much as Augustine did should feel differently. This unwillingness to compromise not only abandons and undermines the public square we once hoped to shape, but it also disregards the long teaching of the church.
Christians always have compromised. We construct arguments for just wars despite the preferential option for peace we find in the Gospel. We weigh evil against evil in moral theology, searching for double-effects because sometimes we cannot escape an evil choice. And, we know that rights are counterbalanced by duties to others (Pacem in Terris, 30): our conscience rights give way to the conscience rights of others sometimes because they also are entitled to do what they believe is “morally right.” But we have lost our taste for those compromises. We prefer something different.
Some people have argued that the Supreme Court has shown a healthy commitment “to pluralism and difference” with these decisions. But it seems more true that the Supreme Court has joined too many religious voices in an unhealthy commitment to the centrifugal difference of identity politics at the cost of a public square where we all can meet together on a level playing field, negotiating necessary compromises. Ironically, those religious voices are right in tune with the rest of the world.
Our polarization survives on the certainty of our difference. But for that reason more than any other, the world needs a church that is committed to shaping the public square we share with everyone else and a willingness to compromise on some things for the chance to collaborate with others for the good of the world.
