In my last column, I addressed the conflict among Christians over how much the state ought to promote and favor our faith, and to what degree it must step back and allow religious liberty. There’s a spectrum of opinion here — ranging from the Integralist/ Christian Nationalist far-Right, which wants the government to endorse and even enforce the tenets of particular Christian churches, to the Left, which considers faith a purely private matter between an individual and the universe. I staked out a middle position — a Golden Mean between those historically fraught extremes. Let me repeat that formulation:
The State should enforce the moral judgments that can be defended based on natural law, which is written on every human heart. It should not enforce theological claims that can only be accepted if a person has received the gift of grace from the Holy Spirit that grants redeeming faith.
Why don’t we enforce the tenets of special divine revelation, such as the truth of the Blessed Trinity or the resurrection of Jesus, punishing those who deny them and censoring those who distort them? Because it is unreasonable to demand that someone accede to truths which are naturally impossible to accept without the miraculous infusion of grace from the Holy Spirit that comes with redeeming faith. You can argue all day long on behalf of these sacred truths, but if God has not yet granted a person that grace, your words will be water rolling off a duck’s back. The state can’t determine if a person has gotten such grace, nor can it furnish it to him. So a state is behaving tyrannically by trying to force people to act on such beliefs.
We Are Without Excuse
None of this, however, is true of the natural law, which God wrote on the human heart so that we are all without excuse. You’re not imposing a theocracy when you outlaw theft or murder, even if the Ten Commandments forbidding such evils also appear in Scripture. Every tenet of natural law is a conclusion that a wise person could draw by reflecting rationally on what human beings are, what they need and deserve, what’s good for them, and what harms them in this life and could doom them in the next.
So far, so good. Even the Left admits much of that. Progressives will argue for laws because they see them as grounded in morality — though their moral codes are different than ours. We must argue for laws that reflect man’s genuine nature as an image-bearer of God, with an immortal soul, created for a purpose, who will be judged after he dies. All of those are truths pagan philosophers were able to reason their way to without apostles or prophets. They’re truths all orthodox Christians agree on, not subject to denominational squabbles.
Of course, I won’t try to unpack all the vast implications of natural law. There are specialists in the subject who’ve done it far better than I could. The most approachable go-to source is What We Can’t Not Know, a brilliant explication of natural law and its crucial importance by philosophy professor J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas.
No Lives Matter, This I Know, Because Charles Darwin Taught Me So
Those aren’t truths that most secularists (or progressive Christians) sign onto, however. Here’s the No Man’s Land in the culture wars, with barbed wire and land mines aplenty. If you believe that we don’t have immortal souls subject to judgment, that man wasn’t intentionally crafted by God but spat out by random mutation, then you won’t support laws based on those truths of natural law.
You’ll instead assert that man has certain “natural rights” based on pragmatic, utilitarian, or sentimental criteria. The state must protect those “rights,” whose nature will morph and shift based on the outcomes you’d prefer. So you might assert the right to life of adults, but not of unborn babies — whose ultrasounds you’ll post on Facebook if they’re “wanted,” and whose bodies you’ll incinerate in dumpsters if they aren’t.
Because you deny any teleology (purpose) in nature, you won’t agree that sex was designed for reproduction and lifetime love in a family. Instead it’s simply a mechanism which accidentally evolved — and which we have the right to use however we see fit. You might even invent the “right” for men who decide they are really women to be treated as female by others — whom you’ll be willing to punish if they won’t go along with that idea.
As a Leftist, you’ll borrow bits and pieces from the old Christian ethic, like a magpie choosing the shiny parts you prefer. You’ll avow “compassion” for the poor, sick, and weak — though you won’t be so “extreme” as to extend that to hard cases, like handicapped infants facing abortion. You’ll practice double standards based on the claimed “disadvantages” of groups you consider “vulnerable,” and grant special rights to some groups while stripping them from others. You will do this in pursuit of “justice” even though you don’t believe we live in a just universe, but rather are simply the descendants of the fittest, who survived.
Nobody Has the Right to Do What’s Wrong
By contrast, if you adhere to natural law, you will believe that in principle the state could forbid or discourage activities that aren’t in harmony with man’s genuine nature and the best ways for him to live, based on logical arguments about who man is, many of which overlap with the basic claims of biblical religion. But you’d try as much as possible to argue from rationally, empirically, or historically evident truths, instead of citing religious authorities — which are contested among Christians. What’s the point in my quoting a papal document to a Baptist, much less to a secularist?
How far would you go in crafting laws that follow natural law and restrict activities that violate it? That’s a question of prudence, as even the most committed Christian thinkers have admitted. Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas wondered if outlawing prostitution was prudent, or if such legal bans did more harm than good. You’d have similar arguments about pornography, adultery, gambling, alcohol, and drugs — weighing the good that legislation might do against the costs it imposed, or the overweening power it might grant to the government.
But in principle, that state that restricted evil actions would not be sinning against anyone’s “rights,” since nobody has the right to do what natural law teaches is wrong. You don’t have the “right” to make and sell “adult” videos, and I don’t have the “right” to buy them. Nobody has the “right” to drug himself senseless, commit suicide, or try to change his sex. These actions aren’t harmonious with man’s nature and purpose.
That’s the proper credo of a Christian state, which is exactly what all our Founders thought they were creating, since all of them accepted the authority of natural law. Without it, they knew that ordered liberty was impossible, and the state would descend into anarchy or tyranny. Of course, today’s Left has done us the favor of crafting a hybrid of the two: the Anarcho-Tyranny that prevails in blue states and cities, and throughout most of Western Europe.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.
