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[PT 5.3 (2004) 265-274] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

HOW DOES—OR SHOULD?—THEOLOGY INFLUENCE POLITICS?

Jean Bethke Elshtain

The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics Swift Hall, The Divinity School, The University of Chicago, 1025 East 58th St.

Chicago, IL 60637, USA [email protected]

ABSTRACT

The question discussed in this article is whether Christian theology should influence contemporary political debates. The topic is discussed through two practical case studies: (1) technological advances in genetic engineering and (2) the just war tradition and the use of force. In the first discussion, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s unfinished Ethics is employed to demonstrate the importance of substantial theological categories to resist a reductionist technological utilitarian discourse about the body. Intrinsic human dignity is essentially God-given. In the second, Aquinas and Augustine add theological complexity and substance to secular discussions of war and peace. Human caring is more than the protection of the sovereign state. A peace that is only the absence of war can disguise many harmful situations. In conclusion, theological discussion brings nuance, richness and depth to secular political debates so long as theologians go beyond simplistic contributions such as ‘God demands’ or ‘The Bible forbids’.

How does theology influence politics? Or how should it? These are two different sorts of queries. The first would admit of an empirical investigation. An indefatigable researcher could comb through piles of important news- papers and journals of civic opinion to determine whether there is any ‘theology’ lurking therein. This might yield some intriguing findings, depending on how one defines ‘theology’ in such a context. Does a reference to God count? What about good and evil? Human wickedness? Hope—after all a great theological virtue? Or would it be necessary to discern some more complex theological design or warrant to a claim or an argument? It is my view that evoking God does not a theological argument make. Something more robust if not intricately argued, along the lines, say, of Abraham Lincoln’s great Second Inaugural with its biblical cadences, its evocation of the prophets, and its extraordinary proclamation of God’s hiddenness, certainly would.

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Were a President to do this sort of thing today, he would be rounded on by the ‘strict separationists’—even if, say, his purpose was to call up and call forth magnanimity for the defeated side and a certain humiliation about our ability to understand God’s providential designs—as did Lincoln. A wariness has set in about making biblical or theological understandings explicit in the public arena, whether one is a public official or an ordinary citizen, and this is for two reasons. The first reason is a ‘good’ one, namely, our awareness of the fact that, even in as God-drenched a society as America, we are, for the most part, ‘practical atheists’ in the sense that we proceed without the working hypothe- sis of God (in the Bonhoefferian sense) in our everyday lives. We have other explanations for things—much, if not most, of the time. To be sure, most citizens don’t think of these matters in the manner I just noted. They reference instead growing secularism in society as well as reli- gious pluralism as reasons for a certain reticence about dragging God too frequently and too explicitly into political argument. Although it remains the case that America’s religions are overwhelmingly Christian, there are signifi- cant differences between denominations. If to this, one adds the one per cent of Americans who are Jewish, two per cent Muslim, around five per cent agnostic and another five per cent ‘other’, this suffices to suggest caution in too much deluging of civic life with religious discussion of a confessional sort. These, then, are good reasons to step back from proffering primarily religious rather than primarily civic reasons for why one favors or opposes a given policy or course of action in political life. There is, however, a dubious variation on this motif, one that demands religious reasons can never be called up and called on in civic life. The citizen, so this argument goes, must effect a translation from a religious idea to an entirely civic one. The demand in this form comes from those who mistakenly believe that a secular government demands an entirely secularized society stripped of all symbols, markers, and terms of religious (by which they mean ‘Christian’) theology and discourse. Those making such arguments are to be found primarily in the academy, in law schools, and in a few militant advocacy groups. The ‘strict separationist’ school mistakenly presumes that church-state separation requires the severing of religion and politics altogether. Were this hard separationist argument to triumph, it would mean that many American citizens would be precluded from addressing political issues in the language that gives those issues meaning, resonance, and moment for them. For most believers, there is a way of making a religious case for a policy or course of action that stands down from the explicitly confessional but draws upon religiously derived arguments and ideas in making a civic case. With this in mind, let’s move to how theology, ideally, should and does influence politics. The best way to illustrate the argument is to do so con- cretely, through case studies or examples. There are many areas of exigent

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concern in which theological constructs and understandings offer powerful heuristic, interpretive and normative tools. I will take up two areas of con- cern for the purpose of these reflections: (1) genetic engineering and bio- technology, and (2) the ethical restraint and sanction for the use of coercive force.

Theology and Genetic Engineering

It is difficult to make intelligible the full panoply of powerful arguments against many developments in the area of biotechnology and genetic engi- neering absent theological understanding, most importantly a theological anthro- pology. If we are not God’s creatures—if there is nothing intrinsic and innate about our natures that can be violated—why not clone, or promote eugenics (now called ‘positive genetic enhancement’), or even push for ‘immortaliza- tion’ in order to guarantee that ‘I’—or some version of my DNA/RNA—go on forever? Such projects turn on denial of human finitude, denial of our status as both natals and mortals. Our natures, our very being, becomes the problem. Why? Because it turns out that we are not perfect. Our bodies become raw material to be worked on and to be worked over in a quest for genetic per- fection. For example: one premise—and promise—that drove the Human Genome project was that we might one day intervene decisively in order to guarantee better if not perfect human products. In this scenario, human birth becomes a ‘breeding’ operation in order to achieve better outcomes . We cover such developments, including selective abortion, to weed out imperfect fetuses, under the language of human ‘freedom’ and human ‘choice’. These terms are the lingua franca of politics, at least in the contemporary West. In order to challenge the nature of such choices and the understanding of freedom here involved, one requires a framework that helps one to distinguish between the good and ill uses of freedom and to assess the nature of human choices. After all, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued repeatedly, evil may appear ‘in the form of light, beneficence…’ And the moral theorist may well be ‘blinded by it’. If so, it means we are unable ‘to grasp what is real…’ Even before human beings are routinely cloned—and let’s hope that moment never comes to pass—there are those among us who call themselves ‘progressives’ and believe they are exploring the farthest frontiers of human freedom by insisting that human cloning is a basic right, just another method for ‘creating human babies’, in the words of Harvard Law Professor, Laurence Tribe. If we ban cloning we ‘criminalize’ the choice of those who want to clone themselves. We create a ‘caste system’ of the cloned who would then be marginalized. It is hard to imagine a stranger argument, but it is all too easy to anticipate one given the heavy artillery—choice, freedom, prohibition, mar- ginalization—that comes into play. The cloning possibility is presented as one

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favored by the children of light. The children of darkness who resort to theo- logical argument promote the evil of diminished choice and would, by so doing, ‘marginalize’ clones. These theological naysayers are presented as foes of freedom who must be stopped before they negate an entirely abstract, hypothetical, invented freedom anyone has yet to exercise! Thus we are enjoined to acquiesce in a new and entirely abstract freedom by taking huge strides in the direction of exploding the merest intimation of God-given embodiment and our call to be fruitful as God has commanded. Instead, notions of untrammeled human ‘reproductive freedom’ feed and fuel fantasies of radical sameness and self-replication in contrast to the complex pluralities that emerge from the coming together of human beings and the welcoming of new life in all its diversity. Is it not appropriate to speak of the sin of pride here? Does that add to the argument? Should it influence political outcomes? In his unfinished Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that there are matters of great moment that politics must not violate. The claims of bodily life belong in this category. ‘Bodilyness and human life belong inseparably together’, Bonhoeffer insists.1 Our bodies, scripture teaches us, are ends in themselves and this has ‘very far-reaching consequences for the Christian appraisal of all the problems that have to do with the life of the body’. The most striking and radical excision of the right of natural life is ‘arbitrary kill- ing’, meaning the deliberate destruction of ‘innocent life’. Bonhoeffer notes abortion, killing defenseless prisoners or the wounded, and destroying lives we do not find worth living—a clear reference to Nazi euthanasia and genocidal policies toward the ill, the infirm, and all persons with handicaps. The ‘right to live is a matter of the essence’ and not of any socially imposed or constructed values. Even the ‘most wretched life’ is ‘worth living before God’. Is there a non-theological way to make these points that is equally powerful? Some would argue ‘yes’, that human rights discourse can do the heavy lifting. But if your view of human rights is premised on what John Paul II, through- out his remarkable pontificate, has emphasized—‘the dignity of the human person’—you are back in theological terrain. It is entirely legitimate for Chris- tians to bring such arguments to bear in civic discourse. These arguments are not ‘exclusive’ in the sense that no one else can participate in the debate; indeed, this particular theological argument invites those without religious convictions to bring their alternatives to the table in order to determine what arguments have the greatest critical purchase in a given time and place.

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 142-64. All citations from Bonhoeffer are drawn from these sections entitled ‘The Natural’, ‘Natural Life’, ‘Suum Cuique’, and ‘The Right to Bodily Life’, respectively.

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For Bonhoeffer as a Christian theologian, it is the Incarnation that redeems the natural world and the penultimate, the here and now in which we make our way during our earthly sojourn. The unnatural he takes to be an assault on the penultimate, on our embodied, earthly existences. When life detaches itself from our embodied forms, it destroys itself: untrammeled will triumphs over reason and the penultimate is destroyed. Harming the body harms the self at its depth. Noting that the dignity and givenness of bodily life means one must appraise ‘all the problems that have to do with the life of the body, housing, food, clothing, recreation, play and sex’, Bonhoeffer reminds us that we can use the bodies of ourselves and others well or ill.

The most striking and radical excision of the integrity and right of natural life is ‘arbitrary killing’, the ‘deliberate destruction’ of ‘innocent life’. Guilty life is another matter, for the mandate of government demands that government remove from the community those who pose a danger to society, through incarceration and even capital punishment. This treatment of those who willfully harm others is not arbitrary. The examples Bonhoeffer gives of ‘arbitrary’ taking of ‘innocent life’ I noted above, together with Bonhoeffer’s reminder that even ‘the most wretched life’ is ‘worth living before God’. Other violations of the liberty of the body include physical torture, arbitrary seizure and enslavement and deportations, separation of persons from home and family—a full panoply of horrors which the twentieth century dished up in abundance. The fragment by Bonhoeffer on the natural is powerfully suggestive and worth pondering—by all, whether believer or no—as an alternative to those cultural dictates that declare any appeal to nature or the natural as a standard illegitimate by definition. Theological arguments of such power and topicality are, in fact, needed more than ever as society ponders many developments that are invariably presented as glittering promises and undeniable progress when, in fact, they may pose direct and distinct threats to the integrity of the human person and to human life itself. Bringing arguments of such complexity into civic debate is no easy thing. There are, however, some points of entry. Bonhoeffer rather uncannily anticipated the crude standard of utility that dominates so many contemporary discussions when decisions are made as to whether to go forward—or not—in certain fields of endeavor, including ge- netic engineering. Bonhoeffer criticizes the utilitarian standard for it turns human beings into means to be manipulated for the ostensible good of society. In Bonhoeffer’s era this meant the triumph of the Nazi Reich over the human person and his or her most fundamental right, that to natural life itself. We have our own forms of what Bonhoeffer called ‘social eudemonism’ along these lines: many, including some of the most articulate proponents of utili- tarianism, assume that it would be better for everyone if the unfit were never to be born as society would yield a net benefit. Similarly, it would be better for

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the unproductive elderly to ‘choose’ to die; then, too, society would benefit. This measure of utility is extended to the family level: it would be better for the family not to have to care for a disabled newborn. Utility wedded to ‘blind voluntarism’ overestimates human willfulness and undermines our humanity in the process—so Bonhoeffer argued. Concerned religious and non-religious citizens alike recognize that we require powerful and coherent categories and analyses, which challenge cultural projects that promise a technocratic agenda promising human con- trol over all of the natural world, including those natures we call human. An image of perfection through manipulation of the stuff of life has crept into the arguments of those pushing a ‘forward-looking’ agenda that sees in any brake on genetic technologies an unacceptable constraint on freedom. Wrapped up in a quest for control, immersed in the images and rhetoric of choice and self-possession, we will find it more and more difficult to ask the right sorts of questions if we lose rich languages of opposition, such as that embodied in Christian theological anthropology. Calling upon theological- based arguments of this sort in the public square looks to the common good and reminds us that the proper use of freedom demands limits to freedom. It would be churlish on the part of those who believe no religious argu- ments should enter the public arena to brand a serious discussion of human embodiment, nature and ‘the natural’ as theological, therefore sectarian and exclusive. Of course, our situation is not Bonhoeffer’s. He had on display before him a direct causal link between arguments that demeaned or diminished embod- ied integrity and state-sponsored evil practices. But the first step down this road lay in finding no necessary value in life itself. That, in turn, permitted the Nazi state to construct itself as the final horizon of meaning. The state could determine which lives had value and which did not. Bonhoeffer understood the importance of maintaining firewalls of a conceptual, theological and ethical sort to forestall such developments. Nor would he let us off the hook. The prevalence in our own time of crude utilitarianism affords examples in abundance of the sorts of arguments and claims that Bonhoeffer repudiated and saw as evidence of nihilism, hatred of God and creation, yielding loathing of the limits to human life itself. So-called ‘positive genetic enhancement’ repudiates any limit. Our technologically driven vision of a genetic utopia forms a seductive cultural mind-set, a cultural horizon that yields evaluations that slowly but surely undermine our ability to welcome life in all its messy variety and to see all human lives as worth living. If I am even partially on target in these arguments, it is ever more important that theologically based arguments challenging the cultural and cultural imaginary play a part in a robust public debate.

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War and Justice

I have written at some length about the just war tradition and its two parts— jus ad bellum and jus in bello elsewhere, so I will not rehearse these here.2 I assume everyone has at least some passing familiarity with these categories. Jus ad bellum refers to whether or not a resort to force is justifiable. A response to a direct act of aggression, casus belli, is the most familiar, and justifiable, but there are others, including protecting the innocent (those in no position to defend themselves) from certain harm. These innocent need not be one’s own nationals. In addition, a war must be declared by legitimate authority; guided by right intent; and concluded with a non-vindictive peace. Jus in bello refers to the way a war is fought. The two most important criteria are discrimination and proportionality. Discrimination requires that non-combatants are never the intended targets of a military action. Proportionality limits the force to be brought to bear: it must be proportional. Force beyond what is needed to ‘do the job’ should not be used, and so on. Many argue that you no longer require a theological justification for these just war requirements, they having long ago been absorbed into the war convention and numerous international conventions and agreements. This is essentially the claim of a leading contemporary just war thinker, the political theorist Michael Walzer. Challenging this claim, religious just war thinkers insist that you cannot appreciate the ground on which just war argument stands, nor the fullness of this tradition, without serious attention to its theo- logical underpinning. The secular just war thinker would respond, in turn, that the tradition has become free standing without any measurable loss in either its force or its efficacy: so, at least, is their claim. Does the more theo- logically grounded just war thinker have a comeback that justifies paying attention to theology in the heat of debates about war and the resort to force? Consider the following. In his major work on Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer3 sets up what he calls ‘the legalistic paradigm’. Essentially, this is a framework of analysis that makes ‘aggression’, defined more or less as the crossing of the boundary between one sovereign state to another, the ‘only crime’ states can commit against one another and the casus belli par excellence. A paradigmatic example was the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Iraq committed the crime of aggression by crossing the border into Kuwait and annexing the country. The international community responded because a member of the United Nations—members must be sovereign states in order to be fully- fledged members—had been violated. We know the story here. Sovereignty in

2. Most recently in my Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003). 3. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

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this scheme of things is the supreme political good for it protects political independence. Within prevailing secular just war thinking, the good of politi- cal independence is not only worth defending, it must be defended. Would St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas find this recognizable? Probably they would see a family resemblance to their own arguments. But what is conspicuous by its absence is caritas (love of neighbor) and the obligations that flow from it. The violation of others—strangers—may trigger the use of force to protect the innocent from certain harm. This is a requirement of neighbor- love, not a legalistic stipulation that flows from the presupposition of sover- eignty. This obligation extends beyond the boundaries of one’s own polity to encompass the innocent in other countries that may require protection, assis- tance and active intervention if they are being brutalized, murdered, terrorized or threatened by overwhelming or despotic force. And the reason one would risk men and treasure to this end is precisely because human beings are creatures of immeasurable, God-given worth. Without such a high valuation of the dignity of the human person, this obligation of caritas would carry none of its force. In the sections of his massive Summa, in which St Thomas discusses justi- fication for, and limits to, the use of force, Aquinas calls this interdiction ‘the repression of wrongdoing’, and he applies it to offensive as well as defensive use of force. A passive toleration of massive injustice and wrongdoing in the name of ‘peace’ is, for Aquinas, a serious offense. Theological understandings make more complex just war debates and arguments. Aquinas’s great prede- cessor, St Augustine, claimed that war may be resorted to in order to preserve or achieve peace—and not just any peace, but a just peace that leaves the world better off than it was prior to the resort to force. For early Christians like Augustine, killing to defend oneself alone was not enjoined: It is better to suffer harm than to inflict it. But the obligation of charity obliges one to move in another direction. To save the lives of others, it may be necessary to imperil and even take the lives of their tormenters. The latter response is the appro- priate way, suggests the just war tradition, to meet the challenge of systematic violence. As theologian Joseph E. Capizzi writes: ‘According to Augustine, nonviolence is required at the individual level and just-war is mandated at the societal level’.4

Even as theological understandings complicate the argument about war and justice, they complicate the debate about ‘peace’. When peace advocates say they want peace, what are they talking about? No war? But peace can cover

4. Joseph E. Capizzi, ‘On Behalf of the Neighbor’, Studies in Christian Ethics 14.2 (2002), pp. 81-108. See also Richard B. Miller, ‘Aquinas and the Presumption Against Killing and War’, Journal of Religion 82.2 (April 2002), pp. 172-204. Miller agrees that a presumption against violence frames just war thinking and must always be brought to bear when consider- ing the resort to force.

Elshtain How Does—or Should?—Theology Influence Politics? 273

enormous and horrific harms. As Augustine puts it: ‘Peace and War had a competition in cruelty. And Peace won the prize’. Within the theological understanding of war and peace, peace, too, must be subjected to critical scrutiny. Not everything called ‘peace’ is worthy of either endorsement or perpetuation. The primary responsibility of government is to provide basic security: ordinary civic peace. St Augustine calls this form of earthly peace tranquillitas ordinis. This is not the perfect peace promised to believers in the Kingdom of God, the one in which the lion lies down with the lamb. On this earth, if the lion lies down with the lamb, the lamb must be replaced fre- quently, as Martin Luther opined with his characteristic mordant wit. The just war tradition, refined over the centuries by Christian theologians, became secularized, though not stripped of ethical content, when it was ab- sorbed into the thinking of international law and many of its ethical restraints were encoded in both the Geneva and Hague Conventions. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the just war tradition had become part of the way in which much of the world spoke of war and peace questions, especially such matters as noncombatant immunity, proportionality, and the treatment of prisoners. International law currently states that intentional attacks on noncombatants violate not only recognized rules of warfare but universal humanitarian standards. What the explicit, theologically grounded just war argument brings to the table at present helps to somewhat ‘defamiliarize’ people who have a too pat and flat view of the tradition, reminding one and all that just war is about the restraint of force; about the preferential option for the use of force if the alternative to such is a ‘false peace’ destructive of human lives and dignity on a significant scale; about protecting the innocent and not just one’s own citizens; about the tragic dimension of statescraft; about the fact that on this earth we can attain only a comparative, not an absolute, justice. This means we should preserve an appropriate humility about what we can accomplish—even in a just war. Should theology influence politics? Yes. Why? Because it helps to make more complex and more nuanced our understanding, our debates, and—per- haps—our policies. Is there a way to bring these theological issues to bear without deploying an explicit theological language or categories? Of course, this has been done and is being done. Does a significant loss of meaning, richness and depth follow when the theological dimension is repressed or squeezed out? The burden of these brief reflections suggests that, yes, there is such a loss as there is no one-to-one translation of powerful theological con- structs into non-theological language. The implication for political argumen- tation is that theologically grounded discourse and arguments from which theology is expunged should contend as interlocutors in the public arena, enriching and challenging one another.

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The more robust the absorption of complex theological understanding into civic discourse, the more nuanced will be that discourse. We are all the poorer if a flattened-out, highly secularized political discourse that limits itself to a horizon set by the state or by popular cultural imaginings, and an overly simplistic set of religious stipulations of the ‘God demands…’ or ‘The Bible forbids…’ sort, dominate political speech. We are all the richer if complex theological understandings and rich civic concepts contend with one another.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, a position she has held since 1995. Prior to that, she taught at the University of Massachusetts and at Vanderbilt University where she was the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in the College of Liberal Arts in the history of that institution. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale. Professor Elshtain holds nine honorary degrees and in 1996, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Ethics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Capizzi, Joseph E., ‘On Behalf of the Neighbor’, Studies in Christian Ethics 14.2 (2002), pp.

81-108. Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World

(New York: Basic Books, 2003). Miller, Richard B., ‘Aquinas and the Presumption Against Killing and War’, Journal of

Religion 82.2 (April 2002), pp. 172-204.