Ordered Love

As a longstanding reader of Communio, I urge you to read the whole of Jeremy Beer's article, which begins thus:

For the orthodox Christian, is doing one’s public duty more or less reducible to voting for the most socially conservative Republican on the ballot—and then shutting up about whatever misgivings one might have? Surely not. Yet for many election cycles, this has been often implied by the self-appointed guardians of practicality and political realism. It is even increasingly heard from the pulpit.

The assumptions that lurk behind this idea are that when it comes to ordering public life, modern liberal democracy in its best sense has things basically right. America rightly understood is the highest exemplar of this kind of liberalism. And the Republican Party is our best reasonable hope for defending this liberalism’s political, economic, and cultural accomplishments from its enemies. To question these assumptions is to be naïve or—a favorite epithet—utopian.

This view essentially obliterates the need for prudential judgment, not to mention critical thinking. Thus, a number of Catholic moralists have identified three (the list sometimes expands to four or five) “intrinsic evils”—abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage—against which one has a moral responsibility to vote, and to which responsibility all else must be subordinated. The idea is that if only the right people were in office legislating against such evils, everything would be pretty much fine in the land of the free and the brave.

Well… if this story strikes you as just a little too pat, may I introduce you to David L. Schindler and the Communio school of theology he represents. Two recent books by and about Schindler—Being Holy in the World and Ordering Love, respectively—show how Christians ought to feel liberated to engage the culture in a deeper and ultimately more faithful way.

Schindler certainly agrees that abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and the like are evils. However, unlike our partisan “realists” he does not regard these as corruptions of a liberal worldview otherwise rightly ordered but as the ironic fruit of liberalism’s unwitting metaphysics. By showing how the achievements of America and liberalism in general are grounded in the same intellectual foundations as their failings, and by showing how virtually all parties in the public square embrace the same metaphysical misconceptions, he turns down the apocalyptic culture-wars heat while putting the ephemera of electoral politics in their proper context.