Fidelity to God: Our Highest Good

Editor’s Note: This essay is the first in a three part series that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here. 

One of the most important sentences in the entire Western canon comes from Augustine. It is a statement written in the indicative voice that many are doubtless familiar with, given its ubiquity. From The Confessions, Augustine states, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Though this sentence is an indicative statement of truth, it also assumes an imperative: we are meant to be in communion with God. For homo religiosus, knowing God is to be human at its fullest. We are to commune with God not because we seek our own supremacy, but because communing with God is what brings peaceful rectitude to the soul. Knowing God quenches our deepest desires to know the glorious and be known by the glorious.

The First Pillar

In the planning and execution for Fidelity Month, it became clear that dedication to God needed to be the first pillar of fidelity. This first pillar reminds us of an architectonic truth: whatever the goods of family, community, and nation represent, their intelligibility must be ordered and understood by what created them and, in turn, best illuminates them: God. The “ordo amoris,” or “order of loves” spoken of in the Christian tradition, insists on the inherent goods of family, community, and nation as ends to be pursued for their own sake. The love they are given, however, is proportionate to the love they are owed. But we owe God our highest affections because it is He who has made us. As we come to know God and conform ourselves to His divine plan, fullness of being comes into view. Scripture deems the knowledge of God as a resplendent good that colors every other experience of our humanity. As Psalm 36:9 states, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.” Communion with God is what lights our path (Psalm 119:105). If we shall not walk in darkness, we must turn ourselves to the light (Isaiah 9:2; John 8:12).

Never more than now is the time ripe to rededicate ourselves to God. It’s what our culture needs most. With religion on the decline, it should come as no surprise that mental health appears more statistically volatile than ever before. Excise or trivialize the most important foundation of a person’s existence—their relationship to God—and it is to be expected that humanity’s sense of balance and purpose would be torn asunder.

Furthermore, in an age of cascading “identities” on endless offer, knowledge of God bequeaths a right and definitive knowledge of the self. Christian theology has a rich tradition of delineating the relationship between epistemology and anthropology, insisting on their essential unity. The two subjects ask: how do we know who we are? Theologians believe that philosophy on its own cannot adequately answer this question. In John Calvin’s Institutes, his famous opening lines sought to demarcate how knowledge of God spills over into an accurate knowledge of the self. For Calvin, they are inextricably bound in a helix-like structure. As Calvin says:

Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while they are joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves” (Acts 17:28). For quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves; indeed, our very being shares in God’s own being. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself.

Here Calvin restates that architectonic truth: God is the font of all meaningful knowledge. Apart from him, we fumble around in the darkness. We cannot explain the obligations that beset us without God as the source of those obligations. As Vladimir Solovyov once remarked, “Men descended from apes, therefore we must love one another.” This is the dilemma of modern man, who craftily detects “facts” but cannot muster objective “values” without reference to the infinite.

Liberty under Law

As Psalm 100:3 declares, “Know that the LORD, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” This indicative is followed by an imperative: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name!” The imperative is followed by an enveloping promise: “For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations” (Psalm 100:5). As we know God as our Creator and praise Him, we exult in His promised love and goodness to us.

Economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell has explained two rival accounts of understanding reality and the cosmos: A “constrained” versus an “unconstrained” vision of the universe. For Sowell, the ways in which individuals can understand their place in the cosmos are a binary between accepting the givenness of an ineluctable moral order—one bounded by truth, order, and obligation—and endless plasticity, wandering, and subjectivity. Man, wont as he is to choose the path of least resistance, is prone to think that living according to passion, desire, and appetite are the summum bonum of existence. In a biblical cosmology, recognizable desires that are present—among them desires for friendship, knowledge, beauty, sexual intimacy, and one’s patrimony—are subsumed within a broader horizon of intelligibility, one of constraint and rightly ordered fulfillment. In the Christian account of the human person, there is only “liberty under law” not “liberty above law.” The Psalmist captures such sentiment in Psalm 119:45: “And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts.” Here, the Psalmist affixes flourishing to a sense of limitation and obligation, grounded ultimately in friendship with God.

“Cosmic Anchoring”

Now, more than ever, we must assert that infidelity to God is what plagues Western man and that what stands as his greatest need is fidelity and right relationship to Him. Without that sure foundation provided by a divine guarantor, the value, responsibilities, and duties that attend to individuals are mere contrivances; they need to be secured to a divine ontology not subject to the vicissitudes of human passions. In other words, Christianity provides the social order with what someone like the non-Christian political theorist Vàclav Havel longed for but could not find—a “Cosmic Anchoring,” a foundation that orders existence, something that political orders hostile to God cannot supply on their own. Christian anthropology, and its emphasis on the human person bearing God’s image, forever changed the equation for the significance of the individual—the human became definitively suffused with moral meaning. With Christianity, as historian Larry Siedentop writes, “Individual agency acquires roots in divine agency.”

We must know God to know our relationship to our family, to our community, and our nation. Nothing made, including the virtues of political community, can be fully understood apart from their ultimate foundation in God. Individuals need God. So do the nations. Democratic virtues that we take for granted as necessary to the American project—among them respect for human dignity, human rights, and the rule of law—all find their origins in Christianity. Outside of Christianity, each concept exists as a vapor hanging in thin air.

So, as we begin this inaugural Fidelity Month, we recommit and rededicate ourselves to God. You were made to know God. He is your ultimate happiness. Knowing God is not a rejection of creaturely good. It is vantage point that allows us to enjoy creaturely good as intended “from the beginning” (Matt. 19:4–6). We are made for an eternal joy that no temporal good, despite what good they do indeed provide, can fully satisfy. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy.”

What does rededicating ourselves to God mean practically? At the risk of oversimplifying matters, we need not make the practical more complex than it needs to be. Perhaps there is a gnawing sense of emptiness that besets you. Maybe you have tried living according to instinct and appetite; maybe that has resulted in what Scripture refers to as “chasing the wind” and “vanity.” As Augustine says above, the sense of emptiness and lack of direction that plagues every human heart is how the law written on the heart tells us to return to God. Empty bottles, one-night stands, and hollowed-out pill containers cannot elide the reality of the conscience, however hard you may try. Come to God. For the non-Christian, “fidelity to God” may mean coming to know Him for the first time. If that is you, there are churches in your community that will be there to share with you the good news of God’s love for you in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

For practicing Christians, fidelity to God may mean recommitting ourselves to the practices that habituate us into deeper relationship. Even when we do not feel like it, we must read our Bibles and pray as a ritual reminder that the first thing about each of us is our ultimate end, not our temporal end. Contemplating God’s works in His Word is good for you. We must go to church, catechize ourselves and our families, and love each other.

As a Christian, I believe the fullest and final revelation of God comes in the person and work of Jesus Christ. I am always grateful for Christ, but the more I grow in understanding human nature—in all its resplendent wonders and spectacular failures—I grow in gratitude for Christ and how He is sufficient in ten thousand ways. The sufficiency of Christ is all the sweeter and more essential to the soul, for He alone is our highest good (Mark 10:18).

The Bible and Book of Mormon Challenged Under Utah Book Ban Law

Last month, a school district committee in Utah decided that the Bible should be removed from elementary and middle school libraries.

Is the American Founding Christian, Secular—Or Something Else?

The question of the relationship between the American Founding’s ideals and the Christian faith is as old as the Mayflower Compact. The line between secular and religious has never been plainly visible in American history. The famous “wall of separation” has never really amounted to more than a picket fence. It is not surprising, then, that declining confidence in American institutions and declining conviction in American ideals has occurred in parallel with declining religiosity in the United States. Any attempt to reverse the former must contend with the ongoing impact of the latter. What, though, is the nature of the relationship between the secular and the religious in American political thought and history?

Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer’s The Classical and Christian Origins of American is an elegantly written, tightly argued, and profoundly thoughtful contribution to the recurring debate over this question. Cooper and Dyer’s deep immersion in the historical and ongoing conversation about the role of religion in American political life, and their contributions to this conversation, will provide a touchstone for scholars and commentators for years to come.

Cooper and Dyer successfully refute the still (somehow) influential interpretation of the American Founding as a secular-not-Christian project. However, they do so without, in this reviewer’s opinion, successfully establishing their preferred alternative, the Christian-not-secular interpretation. There is a vast middle between these two extremes whose existence slips through the authors’ fingers again and again across the book’s pages like a well-greased elephant. This middle option may be described as follows: the American experiment is a novus ordo seclorum that has coexisted with and drawn support from the classical–Christian order that preceded it.

Natural Law

Despite ultimately missing the bullseye on the question whether the Founding is ultimately a Christian or secular project, the book makes noteworthy contributions on the relationship between natural law theory and American political thought. The first of these occurs in the introductory chapter’s treatment of the question “What is Natural Law?” In addition to providing one of the most succinct and accessible descriptions of natural law available in recent literature, in this section the authors very helpfully highlight natural law’s relevance to American constitutionalism, in contrast with “Hobbist” absolutism. Cooper and Dyer define the natural law as “the moral law for human beings known to reason through rationally apprehended goods, rationally discerned moral obligations, and the freedom of the will to choose to obey or disobey this law.” By tethering moral obligation to reason rather than force, the natural law requires political constitutionalism rather than absolutism—“reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force,” to quote the first Federalist essay.

The authors’ discussion of the pamphlet debates in the decade preceding the Declaration of Independence is also excellent. They successfully establish the importance of natural theology to the colonists’ arguments throughout this time. They also show how natural theology informed other important lines of argumentation (such as debates about the British imperial constitution). Of particular note in this context is the illuminating discussion of James Otis, who, along with another James (Wilson), provides a central case for the authors’ overall account. Cooper and Dyer expound insightfully on Otis’s belief in the existence of a “supreme ruler of the universe” who governs all of nature—inanimate as well as human—through necessary laws. Just as rocks fall to the ground, so human beings are naturally drawn to moral goods and bound by moral obligations. This framework is, the authors show, essential to appreciating Otis’s arguments about the British imperial constitution and the rights of the colonists.

The book’s treatment of sovereignty and constitutional theory is another signal contribution to scholarship. Cooper and Dyer persuasively establish the direct relevance of natural law theory to the concept of popular sovereignty, connecting popular sovereignty to American constitutionalism in clear and compelling terms. Drawing primarily on James Wilson and James Madison, they explain how popular sovereignty relies on individual sovereignty, and how individual sovereignty in turn was conceived by these leading theorists of the founding in the context of both natural law and natural rights.

When it comes to constitutional authority and interpretation, the authors successfully illustrate how their natural law-based account speaks to current debates about the American Constitution. This occurs through a nuanced discussion of the “voluntaristic originalism” espoused in various ways by constitutional scholars such as Bruce Ackerman, Keith Whittington, and Randy Barnett. While agreeing with these scholars on the importance of popular sovereignty in establishing constitutional legitimacy, Cooper and Dyer argue persuasively that “the people’s constitution-making power [was] an exercise of reason rather than will.”

Secondary, Dispensable Causes?

It is in the context of this discussion of sovereignty that the aforementioned greased elephant enters the room most forcefully. Orestes Brownson, as Cooper and Dyer explain, elaborated on the theological doctrine of “secondary causation.” This is the idea that God creates certain things (“substantial existences”) that then act as causes for other things. Human beings are good examples of secondary causes, because they act through reason and free will to accomplish their own purposes. Human beings’ role as secondary causes is, as the authors note, closely connected with Aquinas’s definition of natural law as “a form of participation in the eternal law.”

Cooper and Dyer emphasize the fact that human beings’ causality is secondary, subject to and ordered teleologically toward the prime cause (God). The magnitude of God’s primary causality and the primacy of His purposes end up eclipsing the significance of secondary causality in the remainder of this and related discussions throughout the book. The ontological dependence of secondary causes appears to translate into their ultimate dispensability or irrelevance because, after all, the buck ultimately stops with God.

The authors wrestle frequently with the idea that the natural law is supposed to be accessible to unaided reason, and the attendant idea that reason is supposed to be able to gain knowledge and guide action apart from revelation. What, then, is the relationship between reason and faith, or between natural law and eternal or divine law? If you have the latter, do you really need the former? If the latter really exist, do the former have independent existence at all? Does the possession of faith eliminate the need for reason, and does the recognition of the eternal or divine laws obviate the need for the natural law? Is reason really just faith’s substitute for the nonbeliever, and natural law really just divine law’s substitute for the non-Christian?

These and related questions hover over many of the book’s discussions, and the authors’ persistent hesitation to address them leads to the “missing middle” problem that plagues the book’s overarching account. Whenever a non-theological concept comes into contact with a theological one, its significance effectively vanishes. Secondary causes collapse into the Primary Cause, natural theology becomes a branch of revealed theology, political ideology becomes religion, the state bows to the church, and the natural law is baptized Christian.

Ownership and Imago Dei

This phenomenon is especially evident at a few key moments in the book. The first is the book’s recurring references to the imago Dei doctrine in the Book of Genesis. The authors see a connection between this principle of revealed theology and the secular idea of human dignity. Cooper and Dyer consider this connection in discussing Locke’s theory of property, and particularly Locke’s disagreement with the idea that children are owned by their parents. They dismiss the Lockean argument that “there is something intrinsic to persons barring them from being owned by their makers” because “[t]o be an imago Dei does not per se shield one from being owned, because by that very fact one is owned by God.”

This is not quite true, though. It is not by virtue of being made in a certain way—as an imago Dei—that human beings are owned by God; it is by virtue of being made by God simply. Squirrels are similarly owned by God because they are made by God, but they are not made in God’s image and likeness. Moreover, being made in God’s image and likeness might shield one from being owned by another creature without shielding them from being owned by God. It is possible, as Cooper and Dyer note in citing one of my articles, to be simultaneously owned by God and to own oneself in a way that excludes ownership by other human beings.

This difficulty reemerges at the end of the book, when Cooper and Dyer state that “[t]he Declaration and other founding era sources clearly rooted the value and dignity of persons in a transcendent Creator, who was the source of value in the world, and apart from whom that world did not have value. Human dignity was and is, at bottom, a theological concept.” This passage perfectly illustrates the missing middle problem of the book’s account. Of course it is true that without the Creator the world wouldn’t have value; but this is because the world wouldn’t exist at all. Does the fact that squirrels wouldn’t have bushy tails without the Creator mean that the bushiness of squirrels’ tails is a theological concept?

The question here is similar to the question that separates the voluntarists and the rationalists, and that Cooper and Dyer consider at length: is creation good because God created it, or did God create this way because it was good to do so? Is there some secondary goodness in creation that is related to but not identical with the primary goodness of God? In the case of human dignity we seem to have a clue in the biblical account of creation in the imago Dei. Every being other than God is created, but only human beings are created in God’s image and likeness. The simple fact of creation does not bestow any special dignity on human beings that is not shared by all other creatures. It is the unique fact of creation in God’s image and likeness that roots the concept of human dignity in the Bible. But what does it mean to be created in God’s image and likeness? The Bible does not say. Human dignity is thus a theological concept in one way—because the meaning of creation in the imago Dei presumes some knowledge of God—but it is a philosophical concept in another way, because the question of what God’s image in humanity is is nowhere revealed directly by God.

A Missed Middle

A recognition of the missing middle would also have allowed Cooper and Dyer to more successfully account for some key elements of the American political tradition that are either excluded, downplayed, or otherwise mishandled in the book. One of these is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which is alternately dismissed as “an outlier” despite its incredible popularity and influence, and then rescued as being centrally concerned with biblical interpretation. Another is Abraham Lincoln’s civil religion, which is affirmed to be “in essential continuity with the classical Christian natural-law philosophy” without substantial argumentation, despite the fact that Lincoln would probably be even more difficult to bring into the Christian natural law fold than Jefferson was (and he has an entire chapter dedicated to him).

Lastly, there is the book’s concluding statement that “sectarian confessional states . . . are, in our view, in principle within the ambit of prudence as a constitutional arrangement.” Although the authors do, to be fair, describe and qualify this approval in such a way as to distinguish it substantially from the position of church–state integralists, this statement sits very uneasily with key strains of the American political tradition. One need look no farther than James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Liberty, or Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (not to mention the First Amendment itself) to appreciate the fact that Cooper and Dyer steer wide of the course set by American Founding thought on this question. The reason for this is the same as in the case of accounting for people like Paine and Lincoln or explaining the concept of human dignity: because the purposes of the secular state are ultimately ordered to those of the church, the intrinsic meaning and value of the former become subsumable into the meaning and value of the latter.

One of the most important achievements of the book is that it keeps questions and debates like these alive for scholars and citizens in the United States today. As the rise of the “religious nones” continues, and as American ideals continue to be mocked by some as the baseless imaginings of hypocrites, the time is ripe for reopening the question of the relationship between American Christianity and American politics. Cooper and Dyer have given us an excellent place to start.

A Small NY University Fired Employees For Using Their Pronouns in Emails

After Houghton University fired two employees for listing their pronouns in emails, some alumni have protested the decision as un-Christian.

Ep. 317: Character Philosophies in Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” (Part One)

Following up on our live episode, we further ponder the 1869 novel, revisiting the "problem of evil" arguments and how the various brothers cope with an imperfect world.

Plus, we relate Dostoevsky's views of freedom and ethics to those of other existentialists.

Grace and the Parthenon Marbles

Most consider museums places to spend a quiet, untroubled afternoon, not hotbeds of international controversy. But especially when it comes to ancient art, there is intense disagreement between the nations from which the art originated and the museums across the world that house such antiquities. “The world is divided on this question,” explained James Cuno in his 2008 book Who Owns Antiquity?, with “museums, private collectors and art dealers” on one side, and “archaeologists, academics, and source nation cultural ministers” on the other.” Museums generally feel that preservation and wide access to cultural heritage justify the retention of most objects. Countries of origin view these antiquities as their rightful patrimony and vehemently fight for their return home.

Among these disputes, which I like to call the “Art Wars,” one has been particularly interminable, and especially heated of late: the controversy over the British Museum’s so-called Elgin Marbles. These remarkable sculptures from the Parthenon and other Acropolis structures date from the fifth century BC and exemplify the zenith of classical art and thought. Whether they were stolen (as some insist) or rescued (as others do), the marbles arrived in London at the start of the nineteenth century due to the intervention of the British diplomat Lord Elgin (1766–1841). The Greek state asked the British to return the marbles in the 1980s, and the controversy has simmered since then. Initially, the British complained that the Greeks did not have a suitable facility to hold the marbles, and so the Greeks built one. In recent negotiations, the British have considered return of the Parthenon Marbles on a long-term loan agreement. Rumors swirl, private meetings are convened, and the public debate carries on.

What is missing from the Parthenon Marbles debate and other skirmishes in the Art Wars is an understanding of how grace might play a role in settling these disputes. Such an absence is not surprising, for presumably “neutral” museums—founded in the Enlightenment in the wake of the European wars of religion—were designed in part to avoid any theological appeals. But grace might help anyway. If the British government were to freely give the marbles back to Greece, it would not only illustrate recent claims for the sound moral character of the British; it would also set a good precedent for similar debates taking place among other museums and nations.

Finders Keepers

In The Telegraph, Oxford ethicist Nigel Biggar recently made an eloquent case for the British Museum to keep the Parthenon Marbles. Biggar’s account is notable not only because the author is an accomplished scholar, but because he is also a theologian and Anglican priest. Biggar might therefore be expected to bring in some robust theological vocabulary to the debate about the Parthenon Marbles, but (at least in the Telegraph article I am responding to here) he does not. Instead he disputes what he considers a poorly researched book that accuses the British of “cultural despoliations and war crimes.” Biggar’s case for retention of the marbles amounts, it seems to me, to finders keepers:

The case for retention is this. The Acropolis, on which the Parthenon stands, had been used by the Ottomans as a strategic military base for centuries. In 1687, under siege by the Venetians, a gunpowder store in the Parthenon exploded, destroying part of the building. The Ottoman authorities cared so little that the antiquarian debris was still littering the ground more than a century later when Elgin’s agents arrived on the scene. What’s more, the latter found Ottoman soldiers damaging the remaining sculptures as they prised out the lead from the clamps holding the marble blocks together, in order to make bullets. Elgin had secured from the highest official in Constantinople authorisation to take away “any pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures”.

Now aware of the vulnerability of the sculptures, he persuaded the city governor, in the presence of an official from the sultan’s court, that this open-ended permission extended to those, too. The work of removing the Marbles then proceeded in full public view over two-and-a-half years from 1801. The last shipment to London left nine years later. Had the authorities objected, they could easily have stopped it. But they didn’t.

Because of this, Biggar feels that the British Museum should keep the Parthenon Marbles. After all, it is only thanks to Lord Elgin that they even survived.

Barclay’s Gift

So far in the debates about the Parthenon Marbles, no one to my knowledge has brought up the idea of a gift—yet this very concept could provide the path for settling the dispute. A gift transcends guilt, shame, or restitution. A gift rules out the language of “demand,” for no genuine gift can be demanded. As theologian John Barclay lays out in his magnificent 2017 tome Paul and the Gift, ancient Greece—which carved the Parthenon Marbles—did not have a very rich understanding of the gift. “[T]o give to the stingy,” so thought the ancient Athenians, to give “to those who cannot or will not give back, would be as useless as ‘sowing seeds in the sea.’”

The Christian understanding of grace amplified the notion of the gift in ways that were hitherto only dimly imaginable. At least six such ways, in fact. Barclay spells out the Apostle Paul’s notion of grace, describing its “six perfections.” These include (1) superabundance, that is, an extravagance of scale; (2) singularity, that is, the giver gives not due to a recipient’s merit but from the giver’s own goodness alone; (3) priority, meaning the gift chronologically precedes any initiative of the recipient; (4) incongruity, which is to say, “without regard to the worth of the recipient”; then comes (5) efficacy, that is, grace achieves its aim of imparting benefit to the recipient; and finally, (6) non-circularity, that is, grace escapes any quid pro quo arrangement.

What is lacking in Biggar’s informative account, which appeals at points to Christian principles, is just this kind of grace. The British Museum did indeed rescue and preserve the so-called Elgin Marbles. They could come to the conclusion that their reward for doing so was keeping them for over two centuries, but that now it’s time to simply give them back as a gift.

Biggar’s case for keeping the marbles at the British Museum stems from a desire to defend the British Empire’s actions against detractors who have unfairly condemned it. But this concern does not preclude the British Museum’s returning the marbles to the place where they came from on the basis of grace. In fact, to do so would illustrate the good that Biggar claims the British Empire frequently exemplified. Such magnanimity would beautifully correspond to Barclay’s first two perfections of grace, (1) superabundance and (2) singularity. If they act quickly, that is, before any Greek legal claims are successfully filed, the British might even fulfill Barclay’s category of the chronological (3) priority of the giver.

Unworthy Recipient?

Biggar seems to suggest that Greeks are less than worthy, not having a legitimate ethnic or ideological connection to the creators of the sculptures. “The Marbles have no single, authentic meaning,” he claims. “They meant contrary things to ancient Greek peoples. They mean something different to contemporary Greeks.” The marbles cannot therefore represent the “essence of Greekness.” Fair enough. A more worthy Greek recipient would not accuse the British of brazen theft; nor would a worthy Greek recipient angrily demand the marbles’ repatriation while opportunistically deploying political theatrics at press conferences in Athens to win elections. (The Greeks have done both these things.)

But again, in Barclay’s economy of grace, marked by (4) incongruity, the fact that such worthiness is not evident just does not matter. In fact, a lack of such an attitude only strengthens the case for returning the Parthenon Marbles on the basis of their being an unmerited gift.

The penultimate perfection of grace according to Barclay is (5) efficacy, imparting benefit to the recipient, and this would be a clear result of the marbles’ return. London is a well-trafficked city to be sure, but Athens is also a major world destination. The Acropolis Museum is already beautifully staged to meet the same eye-level display that the marbles currently enjoy in London. Biggar suggests that Athens should use video technology to replicate the marbles (something the Acropolis Museum already does). But why couldn’t London take up Biggar’s idea and use video technology to replicate the marbles upon their return to Greece?

Finally, Barclay’s last perfection of grace is (6) non-circularity. What would the British Museum get for returning the marbles? It does not matter. Perhaps nothing. Pagan notions of the gift, famously illustrated by the three circulating charites, expect recompense. But in the Christian economy as elucidated by St. Paul, one does not give to get something in back. Even so, the wonder of grace is that the benefits accrue anyway. While it might be considered disappointing to have future British sons and daughters settle for the copies that Athens must settle for today, perhaps it would not be so disappointing after all. Future British children might even look to the skyline of London, with St. Paul’s Cathedral gracefully crowning her varied crenelations, and conclude—thanks to the preservation and return of the Parthenon Marbles—that their country chose to live by the principles the original St. Paul espoused.

It might here be objected that to expect God-like grace from a mere institution is unrealistic, even presumptuous. Rest assured, despite its holding of precious biblical artifacts, I am well aware that the British Museum is not divine. But while Paul’s notion of grace is first a record of God’s activity, it also invites human emulation, even for those beyond the church. Demanding as grace may be when applied to the antiquities controversy, we need not wonder about the alternative. What Cuno called the “bouillabaisse of good intentions and [unenforceable] bureaucratic ambitions” will boil well into the future. Absurdly enough, one of its creations is actually called the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation. With due respect to no doubt meticulous annals of the ICPRCPCORCIA since its inception in 1978, nothing cuts through red tape like grace.

In sum, Biggar correctly dismantles shallow arguments for the return of the marbles that are premised on guilt; but he fails to imagine a magnanimity that would return these sculptures to their original home premised on grace. Grace is a gesture that the pagan culture that created the Parthenon Marbles was unable to imagine—and unfortunately, the culture of modern museums frequently seems unable to imagine grace as well.

Maybe this is why it is the church, not the museum, that seems more capable of noncompulsory charity. Late last year, Pope Francis, choosing against a loan, simply gave back the pieces of the Parthenon in the Vatican collection to the Orthodox Archbishop of Greece (who will return them to the Acropolis Museum). Perhaps the Pope had been reading St. Paul.

Image credit: Archibald Archer, the Parthenon Marbles in a temporary Elgin Room at the British Museum, 1819. Public Domain.

Do Goods Have an Inherently Just Price?

Today’s essay is the second of four in a series by James E. Hartley on what literature can teach us about economics. You can read the first here.

Now comes deceit betwixt merchant and merchant. And thou shalt understand that merchandise is in many sorts; that one is bodily, and that other is ghostly; that one is honest and lawful, and that other is dishonest and unlawful. Of that bodily merchandise that is lawful and honest is this: that, whereas God has ordained that a reign or a country is sufficient to himself, then is it honest and lawful that of the abundance of this country, men help another country that is more needy. And therefore there must be merchants to bring from that one country to that other their merchandises. That other merchandise, that men exercise with fraud and treachery and deceit, with lies and false oaths, is cursed and damnable.

—Chaucer, “The Parson’s Tale”

Last week, we looked at the current discussion of the nature of wealth by exploring the very old idea that wealth is not distributed properly. As we saw, that idea was as common in ancient Athens as it is today. We also saw that to a significant degree, the proper distribution of wealth hinges on the question whether high levels of wealth are acquired in an appropriate manner or not.

Everyone knows that some fortunes are made by illicit means, and few (if any) defend thieves. But, is wealth acquisition by people engaged in perfectly legal business ever immoral? For example, if the price of oil rises because of a disruption to the supply chain or production, there are loud cries of price gouging. The accusation of price gouging hinges on the idea that there is an inherently “just price” that the seller is departing from. Price gouging is thought to be immoral because buyers are being charged far more than the appropriate price. One implication of this view is that making a profit (especially a large one) is wrong because it probably means that the seller is charging far more than the good’s “just price.”

This idea that selling goods for more than the just price is immoral is ancient, and it was expounded by a variety Christian thinkers beginning with the Church fathers and culminating in Aquinas. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales illustrates this view, giving examples of how greed and desire for profit are morally blameworthy. As we will see, the “just price” framework doesn’t map neatly onto economies, but its legacy lingers on anachronistically in today’s economic debates.

The Just Price

When Chaucer describes the pilgrims in the “General Prologue,” he labels them by their job titles rather than their names. Chaucer’s age was a time of great change in the economic life of Europe. Earlier generations primarily comprised rural, agricultural workers. In those days, life was inextricably tied to the land. One worked outside, and a person’s willingness to work hard was an essential part of his or her moral character. Chaucer portrays this earlier age through his ploughman, a common rural laborer, who is a model of hard work and impeccable Christian virtue.

Chaucer’s contemporaries would have recognized the ploughman as a relic of a bygone era. By Chaucer’s time, economic life was becoming increasingly dominated by the towns. Craftsmen had begun to eclipse ploughmen as the paradigmatic profession. As craftsmen grew in importance, they organized themselves into guilds, associations that regulated both the method of production and the products sold. To work in a medieval town meant to join a guild whose power over what you could do was great. Specialization was the rule, and jobs were rigidly defined. Chaucer includes a quintet of guildsmen among his pilgrims, whose characters are clearly antithetical to the ploughman’s. Rather than quietly committing to work hard, the guildsmen are obsessed with status. These guildsmen are also obviously all prosperous. Interestingly, for all their moral shortcomings, there is no hint that their professions rely on scams or cheating. Chaucer does seem to condemn the guildsmen’s desire for gain and their avarice. But their occupations themselves are seemingly innocuous.

In this historical era, then, economic life is rigidly divided into specific professions. Hovering on the fringes of this economy, though, was a profession that was inherently morally suspect: the merchant. Merchants were people who would buy goods from one person with the intention of selling them to another. By buying an item for a lower price and selling it for a higher price, the merchant could make some profit.

As everyone at the time knew, any individual who buys a good to resell it for a profit was worthy of great condemnation. For example, the sixth-century Roman statesman Cassiodorus declared that merchants were an abomination. Similarly, in remarks falsely attributed to St. John Chrysostom explaining why Christ cast people from the temple in Matthew 21, we read: “He that buys a thing in order that he may sell it, entire and unchanged at a profit, is the trader who is cast out of God’s temple.”

Condemnations like those in the preceding paragraph strike the modern ear as rather odd. After all, reselling products is exactly what retail stores do all the time. To understand why the activities of the merchant are inherently problematic, we need to look back at medieval economic theory, beginning with the idea of the just price. All goods have an inherent price; the price of the good is, in essence, a property of the good, much like the color and shape are properties of the good.

Because each item has a just price, it is inherently unjust to sell an item for more than its true value. As Aquinas explains, “Therefore if either the price exceed the quantity of the thing’s worth, or, conversely, the thing exceed the price, there is no longer the equality of justice: and consequently, to sell a thing for more than its worth, or to buy it for less than its worth, is in itself unjust and unlawful.” It is thus not only unjust for a seller to demand more than the just price for a product, it is immoral for someone to pay less than the just price for a product. To demand more or pay less than the just price is a form of theft.

Merchants have long been considered dishonorable because their practice tended toward injustice of this sort. Plato notes, “all that relates to retail trade and merchandize, and keeping of taverns, is denounced and numbered among dishonorable things.” Similarly, Aristotle would ban any merchants from the state, since “such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue.” The early Church Fathers completely agreed: Ambrose, Tertullian, Leo the Great, and others roundly condemned the activities of merchants because their activities inherently tended toward cheating, lying, and enhancing greed.

By the time we get to the thirteenth century, the idea of the just price was well established. Aquinas follows Augustine in finding some exceptions to the blanket prohibition on selling a product for more than the price for which it was acquired. But any merchant whose motive is solely to enrich himself by his trading activity is acting in a thoroughly immoral and completely indefensible manner; this latter sort of trading is “justly deserving of blame, because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity.”

When we first meet the Merchant in The Canterbury Tales, we know immediately from the description of him into which category he falls.

A merchant was there, on a high-saddled horse:
He’d a forked beard, a many-coloured dress,
And on his head a Flanders beaver hat,
Boots with expensive clasps, and buckled neatly.
He gave out his opinions pompously,
Kept talking of the profits that he’d made,
How, at all costs, the sea should be policed
From Middleburg in Holland to Harwich.
At money-changing he was an expert;
He dealt in French gold florins on the quiet.
This worthy citizen could use his head:
No one could tell whether he was in debt,
So impressive and dignified his bearing
As he went about his loans and bargaining.
He was a really estimable man,
But the fact is I never learnt his name.

(This and following: David Wright translation)

A contemporary of Chaucer would immediately recognize that the Merchant is a villainous fellow. The forked beard makes us think of the forked tongue of a serpent, much like that in the Garden of Eden, which was “more crafty than any other best of the field” (Genesis 3:1, ESV) and inherently deceitful. His dress indicates great wealth, he talks of nothing but his profits, and his financial dealings are sometimes illicit. This particular merchant is thus constructed in a way to alert the reader that he does not meet any of Aquinas’s exemptions to the prohibition on trading; the Merchant is clearly profiting far beyond necessity, using the profits to buy luxurious goods for himself, and obviously trading with the sole intention of making such profits. Indeed, the Narrator concludes by noting with an air of sarcasm that while the Merchant was obviously an esteemed figure, the Narrator never even learned his name; never once on the pilgrimage does the Narrator stoop to a conversation with this despicable fellow. The Merchant is clearly the outcast.

The Merchant’s tale adds an element of comedy to the situation. The Merchant begins his tale by relating his marital problems; stating that he finds it too depressing to talk about his own life, he launches into a story of another’s problems in marriage (though it’s obvious this “other” person’s marital problems are actually the Merchant’s own).

The “Merchant’s Tale” is a story of “fraud and treachery and deceit, with lies and false oaths” to which the protagonist, January, is subjected by his wife May and her lover Damian. January is literally blind for much of the story, and his wife takes advantage of him. As the pilgrims’ host notes in the epilogue to the tale.

‘Now God have mercy on us!’ cried our host,
May the Lord keep me from a wife like that!
Just look what stratagems and subtleties
There are in women! Busier than bees
To diddle us poor fellows. On my oath,
They never miss a chance to twist the truth
That’s clear enough from this good merchant’s tale.’

This is not merely an accurate summary of the “Merchant’s Tale.” If you switch “a wife” and “women” to “merchants” in that passage, you would have a very good summary of the complaints about merchants’ activities in the fourteenth century. The “Merchant’s Tale” is thus an elaborate joke on the Merchant himself. The reader, knowing that merchants are full of deceit and will never pass up the opportunity to cheat another, are regaled with a tale told by the Merchant himself in which the Merchant is subjected to the very fraud he habitually practices on others.

Chaucer’s equating of the activity of merchants with adultery and infidelity is not unique to “The Merchant’s Tale.” It runs throughout The Canterbury Tales. If objects do indeed have a just price, then as the Roman Catholic Church once decreed, it is impossible for a merchant to attain salvation without first abandoning such an abhorrent occupation.

The Legacy of the Just Price

As economies developed, the idea that a commodity has an inherently just price faded away. It is, for example, difficult to determine a just price for a good with a very complicated production process. We now think of the value of a thing as being a price on which a buyer and seller agree. But, the legacy of this idea of a just price lingers in the popular imagination. It is an odd lingering notion, however. If asked, few people would be able to explain when a price is just. Yet, when the price is high, they do not hesitate to call it “unfair price gouging.”

But what about when the price is unusually low? Is it immoral to buy a good for a really low price? If there is a just price for a good, then charging more or paying less than that price is equally immoral. This lingering notion of a just price has an odd modern feature. When a seller profits from a high price, it is wrong, but when I profit by buying something at a low price, it is simply shrewd dealing?

Chaucer’s comparisons of the activities of merchants to adultery is a useful way of separating merchant activity itself from immoral activity. It is not the sexual act itself that makes adultery wrong, but rather the context of sex that can make it wrong (i.e., sex with someone other than one’s spouse). Similarly, the act of buying low and selling high is not inherently immoral, but cheating and deception are still quite wrong.

Are the wealthy in modern society as inherently morally suspect as the Merchant in Chaucer? Clearly not. Nonetheless, even though Chaucer is still instructive in many ways, insofar as the complaints about wealth are a vestige of the old complaints about merchants engaged in buying low and selling high, they are relying on an economic paradigm that is just no longer here.

Obviously, our discomfort with exorbitant profiteering has little to do with people who get wealthy by running retail sales outlets. Maybe there is some other source of wealth that undergirds the suspicions about the morality of wealth. We will discuss that in a future essay.

On Abolishing the Death Penalty: A Response to Daryl Charles

 . . . [Divine] Mercy is found even in the damnation of the condemned, for, while not completely loosening the punishment, It nonetheless lessens it short of what is entirely deserved. (Summa Theologiae Ia.21.4 ad 1).

I would like to address J. Daryl Charles’s argument published here at Public Discourse yesterday that the death penalty is a mandatory punishment for premeditated murder, necessary to achieve justice, and necessary to respect the image of God in the offender by holding him responsible for his acts. I cannot address everything that Charles argues in his essay. I will do only three things. First, I will argue that Charles has not and cannot successfully press the case that the use of the death penalty is mandatory in the exercise of punitive justice. Second, I will argue that it should be abolished in the United States, against the background of Thomas Aquinas’s argument (that Charles himself cites) that taking a criminal’s life is lawful in order to protect the common good. Third, I will conclude by reflecting on the implications of the image of God within us for justice and mercy.

The Early Church and Capital Punishment

On the first point, consider only the early Church figures that Charles cites. By and large, they do indeed recognize the legitimate authority of a political community to take the life of an offender. However, they also recognize something that Charles does not: it is within the state’s authority to refrain from this punishment and to instead extend mercy. (In this section, I summarize, paraphrase, and later quote the excellent article by Phillip M. Thompson, “Augustine and the Death Penalty,” in Augustinian Studies, January 2009, pp. 188–203.)

For example, Lactantius in one work forbids anyone in authority charged with the administration of justice from charging anyone for a capital crime, but in another acknowledges the state’s authority to put someone to death. Tertullian recognizes the authority of the state to impose death, and yet forbids any Christian from doing so. So also, the Christian author Athenagoras, whom Charles does not cite, forbids Christians from participating in it. This is not yet a point about mercy. However, it suggests a certain abhorrence on the part of the early Church for the death penalty as inconsistent with the life of a Christian. The secular or pagan state may be permitted to impose death as a punishment, but the authors suggest Christians ought to play no part in exercising that power.

Augustine, however, is particularly important when it comes to mercy. He recognizes the authority of the state to impose death as a penalty, particularly to protect the common good from a threat to its safety. And he does not forbid Christians from participating in it, as others had. But he also pleads for mercy on the part of governing authority. In one case pleading for mercy he writes, “[W]e do not in any way approve the faults which we wish to see corrected, nor do we wish wrong-doing to go unpunished because we take pleasure in it. … [However,] it is easy and simple to hate evil men because they are evil, but uncommon and dutiful to love them because they are men.” Even if one does not agree with Augustine that one should love the offender because he is a man, as it seems Christ commanded us to do, Augustine gives evidence in the Christian community of the recognition that not only justice is the task of the state, but also that mercy is within the authority of the state, as much within its authority as is the authority to execute the offender.

However, the importance of mercy amid justice is no sectarian Christian virtue. The responsibility of governing authority to show mercy is a fact recognized by Seneca, no Christian, in his letter to Nero, De Clementia, where he argues that mercy in a ruler is essential to governing. As a stoic, however, his argument for mercy is significantly different from Augustine’s, focusing not on loving the offender as a fellow human being, but on the need to rein in both leaders’ and society’s passions of cruelty and savagery, passions that often accompany the just desire to punish. He goes on to argue that the power of the emperor to extend mercy is even greater and more manifest than is his power to condemn, “for anyone can take a life, but few can give it.” That power in a ruler is in fact godlike, according to Seneca. Aquinas agrees when he writes that among all of God’s attributes, it is in mercy that God’s omnipotence is most clearly shown. (“Unde et misereri ponitur proprium Deo, et in hoc maxime dicitur eius omnipotentia manifestari” ST IIaIIae 30.4.)

Just as one would be hard pressed to find a culture with a governing authority, biblical or otherwise, that had not at some point asserted and exercised the right to put capital offenders to death for heinous crimes, one would be equally hard pressed to find one that did not claim the authority to exercise mercy and punish short of death. Good government in the administration of criminal punishment will establish a range of possible punishments for a crime, acknowledging the need for both mercy and equity in judging which punishment is best in the circumstances. Again, this is a point recognized by the pagan Seneca, who argued that mercy does not come after the judgment of just punishment, to limit justice as it were, but enters into the determination of what justice is in a particular case.

Aquinas on Capital Punishment

Aquinas argues that this governing authority to establish the character of punishment and its application to cases is rooted in the natural law. But in the end, positive human law determines the actual force and scope of punishment. Any such “determination” of the actual punishment appropriate for a crime has only the force of human law, not the force of the natural law itself (ST IaIIae 95.2). We decide how crimes will be punished as a matter of human positive law, not by deriving them from natural law. This determination is part of our dignity as images of God: we participate in divine providence by being provident over ourselves. We use our reason both to recognize the natural law within us and to establish human law over diverse political communities and common goods (ST IaIIae 91).

In addition, like Seneca before him, Aquinas recognizes that it is also the task of judicial authority to exercise equity (epikeia) when determining punishment under human law. The judicial authority does this by taking into account circumstances not anticipated by the legislature when it crafted the law. In other words, judicial authority sets aside “the letter of the law,” lest one sin against the common good by application of the “letter of the law” (ST IIaIIae 120.1).

If we acknowledge Aquinas as an authority on these matters, as Charles seems to do in citing him, these points make it clear that it is well within the governing authority of a community to refrain from the use of the death penalty to punish crime. Political leaders can even refrain from legislating that capital punishment will be among the range of punishment for serious crimes, including premeditated murder. This decision ultimately requires reflection about how to preserve and promote the common good of a particular community in a particular place and time.

A Case for Abolition

Now I would like to argue that the death penalty should be abolished, at least in the United States and many other nations as well. Of course, Aquinas’s argument about the lawfulness of a community’s taking the life of an offender is often cited by proponents of the death penalty in the way Charles cites it—as if permissibility requires the exercise of the death penalty in certain cases, that is, makes it “mandatory.” However, Aquinas’s argument is merely that it is lawful to take the life of an offender to protect the common good from threat. He does not come anywhere close to arguing that it is required or mandatory for certain crimes.

It is very important to notice about Aquinas’s argument that it is not based on principles of restitution, that is, not based on the need to redress the harm done to the one who has been wronged. Nothing can be done to redress the wrong done to the one who has been killed. Nothing can undo that, no recompense given, no restitution made. This is a point that Charles himself recognizes in the case of murder. In addition, though it might sound harsh, it is not the task of governing authority to criminally punish offenders in order to assuage the anguish of the family and friends of the murdered. Those left behind or affected by a murder may derive a certain amount of psychological catharsis in seeing the responsible parties punished, but it is probably not lasting. What’s more, in terms of restitution, nothing can undo what they have lost. That is in part the horror of the crimes done—that nothing can be done to restore to the one abused or to family and friends what has been taken from them. At best, punishment can be merely symbolic with respect to restitution in these cases.

Criminal law punishes not on behalf of the individuals who have been harmed by a crime, but on behalf of society’s common good, which has been harmed by a crime. It punishes to restore the order and peace of society that has been disturbed by the crime, and to further protect it from threat. But even here in the case of capital crimes, society cannot have restored to it what the crime has taken; society cannot have restored to it the human being killed. No punishment will return the order of tranquility and innocence lost to a society by the abuse of children, or to women and men by various forms of violence. However, a certain amount of peace and tranquility can be restored in protecting society from further threat of such things.

Close attention to Aquinas’s argument suggests that a malefactor loses, in a way proportionate to the gravity of the crime, the protections afforded by society to the innocent and thus becomes subject to the punishment of the law. This is its retributive aspect, that formally the gravity of the punishment is directed to the will of the offender in a way proportionate to the gravity of the crime willed by the offender. But, as we’ve seen above, the idea of “proportion” here is not a conclusion drawn from the natural law, but a “determination” of human law in light of the common good that punishment serves to protect. The offender becomes subject to the loss of property or the loss of freedom of movement, for example. Also, in some cases he becomes subject to the loss of life.

What Aquinas does not argue, however, is that having become subject to punishment, even possibly the loss of life, a criminal’s loss of life is required or mandatory. It is not the so-called lex talionis—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life—that allows for the lawfulness of killing another human being. The lawfulness of ending an offender’s life is based on the need to protect society from the threat by the one who has lost the protection of society. So, one cannot claim that according to Aquinas the killing of a human being is lawful in order to pursue retribution or restitution for the wrong done. It is lawful to protect from harm, which is forward-looking, not backward-looking.

Thus, Aquinas’s argument is not that killing an offender is always lawful, much less that it is mandatory. It is lawful upon a condition, namely, that it is necessary to protect the common good from a threat. Absent that condition, Aquinas does not argue or even suggest that killing a malefactor, including one who has committed murder, is lawful. Indeed, in his discussion of clementia as mercy extended to those who are subject to punishment (ST IIaIIae 157.3 ad 1), he suggests that the desire to harm through punishment should be avoided and mitigated, even when someone deserves punishment. He also says that it is better when the one doing the punishing decides the wrongdoer has had enough, rather than pursue the full extent of punishment possible.

One can ask under what conditions governing powers should exercise mercy. The exercise of mercy ought also to take into account the common good. Aquinas’s argument that it is lawful to take the life of a malefactor to protect society from threat also suggests that mercy is legitimately exercised when no threat to the common good is posed by the offender. This would be the case when, for example, the offender can be rendered harmless to the common good by means other than killing. This point concerning the death penalty is made explicitly by Pope St. John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

In the thirteenth century when Aquinas made his argument, it might not have been possible in general to render a murderous malefactor harmless short of killing him. However, it is now possible in the United States and many other modern nations to protect the common good from the threat of those who have committed murder and other heinous crimes. That being the case, we have no reason to think that it is lawful for those nations to kill human beings who in other times and places might pose a threat to the common good. Given the imperative to act with mercy as much as with justice, the death penalty ought thus to be abolished in the United States and other such countries.

Mercy and Justice

To conclude, Charles makes much of the idea that the image of God in human beings is not taken seriously if we do not hold offenders responsible for their crimes, particularly those who have killed with premeditation. I agree with that proposition. What Charles and other defenders of the death penalty do not take seriously enough is the thought that being made to the image and likeness of God is not a static fact of human nature, but a responsibility. Nothing can erase from the nature of a human being the image created within him or her by God, no sin or crime however heinous. We acknowledge that fact when we hold our fellow human beings and ourselves responsible for our actions. However, being made to the image of God is a vocation, that is, a call to being godlike in all that we do. So, those of us who seek justice in the punishment of others must ask ourselves what our godlike responsibility is in the circumstances in which we live.

God is not simply a God of justice, but also a God of mercy. Mercy and justice are not set against one another. As Aquinas argues, they are manifest in every act of God’s (ST Ia 21.4). Even so, divine justice is founded upon divine mercy. Even the pagan Seneca recognized that mercy is as godlike as justice. In addition, mercy is not a poor second cousin to justice. Again, Aquinas argues that among human virtues, mercy is the greatest of all virtues, greater even than justice (ST IIaIIae 30.4). Mercy does not come in after justice to limit it. Mercy informs justice. Indeed, if we take Aquinas seriously, justice strives after mercy as its goal. “It is clear that mercy does not take away justice, but is in a certain way, the plenitude of it” (Ia 21.3 ad 2). Justice must always then be informed by mercy. After all, with the responsibility to live up to the image of God within us, it is worth pondering the fact that not even the damned in Hell are punished by God as much as justice alone might allow that they deserve. How much more, then, should punishment be loosened for those among us who have not yet been damned?

Capital Crimes and Capital Punishment

Today’s essay by Daryl Charles makes the case for capital punishment for those guilty of premeditated murder. Tomorrow’s essay will be a reply by John O’Callaghan, who argues for the abolition of the death penalty.

Our culture is morally confused about many things. Conservative Christians tend to focus on concerns about hot button issues like abortion, sexuality, relativism, and education. But one phenomenon that is overlooked but no less urgent is murder. A mere listing of mass killings occurring in the United States in recent years boggles the mind. The year 2022 alone, by all counts, surely must be record-setting. As I write (early October of 2022), one reads that a fifteen-year-old in Raleigh, North Carolina goes on a shooting spree, killing five (including his brother and an off-duty police officer) as he walks through a neighborhood; that five people have been shot in a northern South Carolina home; that in Bristol, Connecticut, two police officers are fatally shot and a third wounded in responding to a domestic violence call (which is said to have been a ploy to lure the officers); and that a thirty-two-year-old is charged with two counts of murder and six of attempted murder following a stabbing melee on the Las Vegas Strip. In the same week we read that four bodies have been found in the Oklahoma River. And this just in: a Florida jury recommends a life sentence without parole instead of the death penalty for the man who murdered seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

These randomly selected tragedies, of course, only identify the tip of the iceberg. Most of our cities are currently reeling from the sheer frequency of killings that have descended on our streets, our neighborhoods, our families, and even our schools. In the four months of June, July, August, and September of 2022, there were respectively 73, 100, 71, and 70 mass shootings, with the total numbers of injured or dead being 297, 439, 262, and 272 respectively. Tucked away in these numbers are the horrendous tragedies and suffering that have visited communities such as Orlando, Uvalde, and Buffalo.  According to the Marshall Project, more mass shootings (i.e., of four or more victims) have occurred in the last five years than in any other half decade since 1966.

The barbarism behind increasing murder rates suggests that debates over capital punishment should intensify. But this has not been the case. In fact, what is striking is the relative absence of discussion and debate of the death penalty. On the rare occasions when the death penalty is discussed today, it is almost always viewed unfavorably. The abolitionist argument takes any number of forms: the mental health of the murderer; the possibility of prematurely ending a criminal’s rehabilitation; debates over deterrence; the misconstruction of retribution as revenge (i.e., retributivism); fallibility of the criminal justice system; and modern notions of “civility.” Religiously motivated abolitionists sometimes point to the annulment of the Mosaic code, assumed ethical discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments; and Christ’s teaching on forgiveness.

We have grown intolerant of meting out punishment that is perceived as “cruel” or “barbaric.” Strangely, however, our abhorrence of penal “barbarity” is displayed against the backdrop of increasingly barbaric criminal acts themselves. Indeed, until very recently, capital punishment was almost universally affirmed biblically, morally, and legally.

Christian History and Capital Punishment

Even though abolitionist arguments have been dominant in recent decades, it is worth recalling that for most of history, a variety of civilizations have used the death penalty and grounded it in serious moral reflection. Capital punishment was practiced in the earliest recorded history. Its prescription appears in the mid-eighteenth-century-BC Code of Hammurabi, in sixteenth-century-BC Assyrian codes, in fifteenth-century-BC Hittite codes, in the thirteenth-century Mosaic Code, as well as in ancient Greek and Roman law.

Among the church fathers, one finds varying perspectives on the death penalty, although there is a general recognition of the state’s responsibility to implement capital justice. Tertullian (late second century) and Lactantius (late third century) affirmed that in the case of murder divine law consistently required a life for a life. Both Augustine (late fourth and early fifth century) and Theodosius II (mid-fifth century) acknowledged the state’s role in mediating capital sanctions. In addition, various councils from the seventh century (the Eleventh Council of Toledo) to the thirteenth (the Fourth Lateran Council) followed the lead of Leo the Great (fifth century) in forbidding clerics from engagement in matters of capital justice, even as they understood the state’s legitimate role in facilitating such matters.

In the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas insisted that the community had both the right and the duty to “cut away” an individual in order “to safeguard the common good.” The common good, he reasoned, is “better than the good of the individual,” notably because “certain pestilent fellows” who serve as “a hindrance to the common good, that is, to the concord of human society.” Such persons, he concluded, therefore “are to be withdrawn by death from the society of men.”

Late medieval and Reformation-era theologians also affirmed the state’s duty before God to impose capital sanctions upon murderers. Even the so-called “left wing” of the Protestant reform movement—from which much modern religious opposition to capital punishment is thought to derive—recognized the death penalty. The Schleitheim Confession of 1527, an exemplary document adopted by the Swiss Brethren (the progenitors of earliest Anabaptism), reads: “The sword is an ordinance of God. … Princes and Rulers are ordained for the punishment of evildoers and putting them to death.” This Anabaptist declaration concurs with the 1580 Lutheran Formula of Concord, which prescribes for “wild and intractable men” a commensurate “external punishment.” In summary, the patristic, medieval, and late medieval periods generally mirror the church’s tacit acknowledgment of capital punishment in cases of murder.

There has been much debate about the place of capital punishment in Catholic social thought, but the pre-2018 version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church articulates the most sound position on the topic:

Preserving the common good of society requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm. For this reason the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty. (no. 2266, emphasis added)

The Church’s teaching on the death penalty historically finds expression in Thomas Aquinas’s question “Is it legitimate to kill sinners?” (S.T. II-II, Q. 64.2). His response is predicated on “the common good,” with an analogy. If the well-being of the whole physical body requires the amputation of a limb, the treatment is to be commended. “Therefore if any man is dangerous to the community and is subverting it by some sin, the treatment to be commended is his execution in order to preserve the common good, for a little leaven sours the whole lump.” What is forbidden, Aquinas argues later, is to take the life of an innocent person (Q. 64.6).

Theological Arguments

It is no surprise that for most of Christian history, the death penalty was widely embraced. To understand the theological basis for capital punishment, we must first look to the nature of law. Fundamental to the biblical story is the depiction of the Creator as Lawgiver. Law, as the reader of the biblical narrative discovers, is of no human origin, nor does it issue out of pragmatic or popular consent. Its authority issues not out of cultural or intellectual enlightenment but from the universal created order. Whether individual cultures and regimes recognize this reality is, of course, another matter. Yet the effects of moral law are as the law of gravity: its disregard always and everywhere results in the rotting of social culture.

In a remarkable—though little remembered—series of homilies in 1976 (eventually published under the title Sign of Contradiction), Karol Wojtyła, at the time Archbishop of Cracow, delivered a sustained reflection on the question of man’s purification from sin in the present life. Guilt incurred by sin, he observed, constitutes a debt in the present order that must be paid. Punitive dealings, thus, provide necessary atonement and restore the balance of justice and moral order that has been disturbed. In theological terms, they prepare the human being for a destiny in eternity.

In Sign of Contradiction, we find the necessary response to religious abolitionists who ground their bias against capital punishment in a particular (mis)reading of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and a purported “forgiveness” ethic. Pitting a misinterpreted Jesus against Paul, they ignore ethical continuity in the broader sweep of biblical revelation and prefer, based on the flaws of human government, to dismiss its divinely instituted commission to punish evil and reward good.

This defect in religious thinking—“the cross is not a sword”—demonstrates conspicuous disregard for what is recorded in the text of Genesis 9, where God makes his covenant with Noah after the flood, the implications of which are stated in universal terms. It is precisely because the human being is fashioned in the image of God that one who purposely sheds the blood of another must die. Genesis 9:5–6 is to be understood foremost as an institution that protects life, in accordance with the Decalogue’s pronouncement “Thou shalt not murder.” The rationale for this morale imperative is none other than the safeguarding of human life. Retribution discourages invasions on the sanctity of the human creature. (Here let us pause for a moment: any society that advances an “inversion ethic” of killing human beings in utero while refusing to take the life of a convicted murderer should strike us as barbaric.) The Genesis narrative suggests that premeditated murder is an assault on human life and is comparable, as it were, to an assault on the very being of God. The fact that justice demands punishment befitting the crime—i.e., just retribution—reveals the essential difference in character between revenge and retribution.

Having been created in the imago Dei, human life is a sacred trust. The implication is clear: murder—i.e., the deliberate extermination of a life by another human being—is tantamount to killing God in effigy. Moreover, as confirmed in Mosaic legislation, premeditated murder is the one crime for which there exists no restitution. As C. S. Lewis noted in his wonderfully prescient essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” to be punished however severely because we in fact deserve it is to be treated as a human being created in the very image of God.

Justice, Charity, and Restitution

When a murder occurs in our community, we are obliged, regardless of our comfort level, to clear our throat as it were and make a public, communal declaration. The deliberate extermination of another human being is an absolute evil and therefore absolutely intolerable. Period. This was the argument advanced by David Gelernter in a 1998 Commentary essay. Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale who was letter-bombed in June of 1993, almost lost his life. The essence of Gelernter’s argument was that we execute murderers in order to make a communal statement: deliberate murder embodies evil so terrible that it defiles the community, and as a result the community needs catharsis that occurs through criminal justice properly construed. Gelernter correctly noted that in the face of murder, contemporary society, however, is more prone to shrug it off than to exact just retribution and affirm binding moral standards.

Justice has classically been defined as rendering to each person what is due. Desert, then, is foundational to ethics; it is a part of the human moral intuition. Parents know this, children know it, and indeed people from Kansas to Canada to Kenya to Kazakhstan know it as well. Retributive justice, then, is a social good, for it corrects social imbalances and perversions. Herein we find the wedding of justice and charity. When through social attitudes and the rule of law we affirm retributive justice, we are addressing several levels of “imbalance” and disturbance: we are attentive to (1) the victimized party who has been wronged, (2) society at large, which has been offended and is watching, and (3) future offenders who might be tempted to do evil. This trifold application of justice, as Augustine and Aquinas understood it, was in fact an application of charity. And as an extreme example, both saw going to war as an act that can express the wedding of charity and justice properly construed: it is charitable to prevent the criminal (whether domestically or in war) from doing evil, and it is charitable toward society, which needs protecting.

Punishment for a crime and restitution for the victim are interrelated concepts. In the case of premeditated murder, compensation is not available. Hence, as much of human history attests and as the biblical witness affirms, it is the one crime that carries a mandatory death sentence. To suggest or argue that the ultimate human crime should not be met with the ultimate punishment being meted out by civil authorities, at least in a relatively free society, is not some “higher” ethic as some might contend; nor is it “Christian” by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it is a moral travesty because it fails to comprehend the nature and meaning of the imago Dei.

Civilized societies do not tolerate the murder of innocent human beings; uncivilized regimes do.

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Augustine Isn’t the Political Pessimist You Think He Is

In the past twenty years, the rhetoric of hope in American politics has fallen out of favor. The first decade of this century featured John Edwards’s convention speech declaring that “hope is on the way” and Barack Obama’s “hope and change” campaign. Many expected that we were helping the arc of history bend a little faster towards justice.

But in retrospect, it seems like hope never arrived. Instead we got American carnage, Democracy dying in darkness, and critical theories about structural racism. We have a rhetoric of gloom if not despair. We went from the optimism of The West Wing shaping our political imaginary to the cynicism of House of Cards. With this prevailing mood, Michael Lamb’s A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought is an important intervention not only in Augustine studies, but also in our politics of stagnation and hopelessness. I will address the former first and then consider how it might offer hope and guidance for us in the realm of political life.

Augustine the Pessimist?

Lamb lays out the standard interpretation of Augustine: he is an otherworldly pessimist. Nothing in this life gets better, and nothing in this life is worth loving. Our hope is in the next life; this life is only good for getting us there. For Lamb, this is how Augustinian realists interpret the great saint’s thought. The earthly city is thoroughly wicked, and we better get used to facing that. Whereas the realists have no hope for virtuous political life, the Augustinian communitarians think that virtuous political life can take place within the pilgrim city, which is the Church. Only the Church is capable of midwifing political improvements, according to the communitarians, so it’s best to join these pilgrim communities heading for the exits. Meanwhile, most liberal theorists think Augustine offers nothing constructive for our political life. For the liberals, we can have a sunnier political life if we stop treating politics like a doomed endeavor as Augustine does.

These different interpretations of Augustine often depend on highly selective readings of his work. But a growing number of Augustine scholars (such as Lamb, but also Eric Gregory, Veronica Ogle, Joshua Nunziato, and Robert Dodaro) are questioning this selectivity. The selective readings offer a false vision of both Augustine and the relationship between the pilgrim and earthly cities. Looking beyond some of the standard texts of the Augustinian corpus, Lamb turns our attention to sermons, letters, and catechetical pieces to flesh out an Augustine beyond the doom and gloom.

Lamb points to an Augustine who is hopeful. This Augustinian hope is connected to love. For Lamb, Augustine develops an order of loves in which our love of God does not negate love of other people and other things, but rather conditions and shapes these loves. Likewise, hoping in God for our entrance into the heavenly city does not mean we cannot hope in God for our earthly city. With both hope and love, we need to get things in the right order so we can act rightly. The Augustinian vision that Lamb presents means that when we love or hope for something else more, we do not cease loving or hoping for the lesser thing; rather, by loving and hoping in God first, we are able to situate our hopes and loves the right way.

Hopeful Rhetoric

Along these lines, Lamb brilliantly shows how Augustine uses rhetoric to move his listeners toward the right order of hope so that they can act rightly in the world. Augustine’s commitment to rhetoric—to finding the available means of persuasion and applying them—only makes sense because he thinks that persuasion can bring about change. Augustine’s attempts at persuasion indicate his hopefulness: you can’t write and speak as much as Augustine did without hoping for at least marginal improvement.

Lamb ably directs his readers to see Augustinian rhetoric as a form of spiritual exercise meant to develop the listener’s ability to hope in the right way, for the right things, and in the right God. Hoping rightly, we can work in and for the pilgrim city and for earthly cities. Augustine’s descriptions of life’s evils and turmoil should awaken us to life’s uncertainties, our lack of self-sufficiency, and our need for mercy. But for Lamb, these descriptions can’t be separated from Augustine’s depictions of the beauty of this life, which are meant to remind us that goodness and peace are deeper and more real than evil and strife. Both Augustine’s dark and bright renderings of this world guide us to hope in the good that we only partially perceive and can only partially attain. We can partially attain, and so should work to attain, the good of this life.

Emphasizing Augustine’s rhetoric allows Lamb to show the Augustinian navigation between presumption (which expects too much from or for ourselves) and despair (which expects nothing from or for ourselves). For Augustine, hope is the middle way between these errors in part because it is less self-referential than either. We do not get much certainty in this life (contra both the presumptuous and the despairing). But we can hope that the good we partially perceive can be partially realized here and now, and it will be fully known in the next life. Our deepest hope lies in God, but our lesser hopes can also be in ourselves and in others. Just as we love our neighbor as we love ourselves, so too we hope in our neighbor as we hope in ourselves. For Lamb, in hoping in God, we can have the moderate and reasonable hope in others that does not make them idols. When we make idols out of politicians or political causes, they will inevitably fail us. But when our hope in them in mediated by a greater hope in God, we can do the work our communities need from us.

However, I worry that Lamb is too quick to steer us away from the otherworldly. The focus and direction of this life is the heavenly city. The only real commonwealth in this world is the pilgrim city. Lamb is right that wayfarers can and should care for the way. Hikers en route to the summit should improve the trail for themselves and others, clear and clean the campsites on the way, and help those they meet. They do so, never forgetting the summit they aim for. Likewise, Lamb shows that Augustinians should work for earthly peace and worldly justice. And yet, he occasionally downplays the otherworldly as our proper home when he is trying to restore Augustine’s this-worldly concerns. Along these lines, his critique of Augustinian communitarians for excessive preoccupation with the church as an alternative community seems to forget just how much time Augustine spent on ecclesial matters. Yes, he intervened in political life, but most of his time was spent on building up the pilgrim city. Augustinian communitarians might reject the political too much, but Augustine certainly prioritized the ecclesial more that Lamb indicates.

Nevertheless, Lamb’s work provides an important intervention in political thought today. He helps us navigate between the extremes of presumption and despair. Lamb’s depiction of Augustine’s political agency is important because it illustrates what hope in action looks like: in his political endeavors, Augustine was not presumptuous and did not aim for a total transformation of this life—but neither did he despair of making life better. Lamb discusses Augustine’s political efforts, which generally took the form of intervening with political leaders on behalf of the poor and imprisoned or admonishing his congregation to a more equitable distribution of goods. Augustine counseled one political leader not to abandon political life for the monastery. He presided over a bishop’s court tasked with doling out justice in a world of rampant corruption and strife. Lamb corrects the supposedly apolitical and otherworldly view of Augustine, showing that he was actively engaged in the political sphere to make this life a little better. The supposed pessimist hoped enough in this life to improve it, especially for the sake of the smallest and most forgotten among us.

A Hope That Works

This is why Lamb’s book is well suited for our times. The soaring rhetoric of political hope offered by Obama, Edwards, and Jed Bartlet leads to disappointment. Promising too much, presumption inevitably ends in despair. Despair, in turn, leads to a cynicism that leads to endless political posturing with little actual political action. Politics in this earthly city is rarely transformative, but it can be reformative. We can and should make life more just, equitable, and loving. We can “improve public life in ways that were meaningful for many who were vulnerable to its worst effects,” as Lamb puts it. We can, in this life of weal and woe, make things a little less hard, a little more merciful, a little more peaceful as Augustine did.

In this, Augustine—and Lamb’s thoughtful scholarship on him—provide us with a model for hope in our times and guidance for how to live that hope. This will include the hard work of political engagement to make our republic a safer place for the weak and neglected. It entails compromise between people who hold different first principles in order to lessen social and political evils. Lamb suggests that living an earthly politics of hope includes “working on behalf of the poor, advocating for societies’ most vulnerable, preserving the rule of law, diagnosing the lust of domination, talking with neighbors, building coalitions with local leaders, and participating in activities that unite citizens around common hopes.” Sometimes this will mean voting, more often it will mean joining the group that helps clean up the local park or helping at your parish’s food drive.

We work because we hope: the more reasons to hope, the  more reasons to work. Lamb gives us reasons to work by showing how Augustine hopes. Presumption and despair do not make the world a better place. They just leave us with TV shows and empty convention speeches.

A hope that works, that is aware of hardship but still sees this life’s goodness in the light of the God who is the Good, can make life a little better for the denizens of our various earthly cities. That hope might just be the leaven for healing and point to goods higher than any this world can offer.

Christian Revival Draws Thousands to Kentucky Town

The Scandal of Virtuous Reading

Is reading well a virtue? In her 2022 book, The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints (Brazos Press), literary scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson surveys a broad sweep of twentieth-century novels to explore whether literature can effect moral excellence in its readers. Wilson not only affirms the connection between a well-read mind and a well-formed character, but also goes one step further: a well-ordered love of literature can help us see reality better and receive the graces from God we need to become saints. As Lauren F. Winner’s foreword puts it, “Wilson thinks reading novels is actually efficacious. … [I]n Wilson’s hands, novels become a kind of sacramental.”

In unveiling what philosopher Josef Pieper calls “the core of all reality, the domain of the eternal archetypes,” good literature, like all good art, helps us to better see the real. The act of reading, done well, becomes a spiritual practice. Indeed, according to Wilson, not only is reading well a virtue, but literature itself becomes ordered to sainthood.

The Matter and Form of Reading Well

Wilson breaks up her book into thematic chapters centered around one or more texts. Though she delves deeply into the content of the novels she has selected, her core arguments treat the form of reading well, framing the act of reading itself, the way we approach the content of a great book, as an action that can become a spiritual and theological activity.

Each of her thematic chapters includes devotional materials, study questions tailored for small group discussion, and suggestions for further reading. Like Aristotle, Wilson believes that one cannot flourish or grow in moral excellence outside a community. As she astutely observes, virtue is not formed in isolation; we will only fail if we “try to become holy without other people,” as “saints are never saints by themselves any more than a person can practice virtue on an island;” rather, “we are all called to be saints together.”

There are two necessary components for reading to become a seedbed of virtue: excellence in content or matter (what is being read) and excellence in form (how one reads). Great attention has been paid to the former in recent years. There have been numerous debates about the literary canon and the qualities shared by great works of literature. Joshua Hren’s 2022 Contemplative Realism, a book and manifesto, is a striking intervention in this debate: he traces an intellectual through-line in works of literature stretching back to the classical world. He suggests that the common thread in these works is that they seek to reveal and inspire wonder for truths, and that they prompt us to consider more carefully what the real is in both its beauty and brokenness.

In her 2022 essay in The Point, “Art Is for Seeing Evil,” Agnes Callard advances another argument about what exactly constitutes literary form. There, she suggests that “narrative fiction broadly conceived” is for seeing evil. The best stories, according to Callard, provide readers with a training ground where they can grapple with the evils facing humanity that the modern world has so carefully attempted to bracket off from everyday existence.

Despite their differences, Hren and Callard concur on foundational points on which Wilson’s book builds. First, great literature represents and discloses reality in a deeper way than our daily experience of reality often affords; second, the narrative “matter” of a great book shapes how its readers see the world, enabling them to see more fully what is true. A great book reveals something new to us, something real, that our naked eyes couldn’t have noticed on their own.

Wilson goes beyond these debates about great literature’s matter: she also looks at the form of reading well. For Wilson, reading well is an act with philosophical and, critically, spiritual implications. Wilson, like René Girard, emphasizes the mimetic aspect of human character and imagination that are being formed (whether we like it or not) by the content of our surrounding culture, which we often unconsciously imitate. Wilson asserts that if we carelessly accept what we imbibe from our culture, we can quickly buy into ideologies that are fundamentally inhuman, the “vicious philosophy” of much modern entertainment which prizes “autonomous evaluations of value” and creates “an idolatrous imagination.”

But these dangers don’t mean that we should try to suppress our tendency to imitate. Rather, Wilson suggests that we shift from passive, uncritical acceptance of cultural mores to active formation in virtue. To do this, we need literary exemplars that do not elide the messiness of everyday reality, that depict the struggles afflicting everyone who strives for sanctity: they are neither saccharine accounts of cheap piety nor dry philosophical and moral theories.

Wilson also champions literary models of sainthood because they illustrate how a particular sinner’s journey to sainthood is a microcosm of salvation history. The “literary saints” that authors like Sigrid Undset, Georges Bernanos, Ernest J. Gaines, and Julia Alvarez offer are “ways of imagining God already at work in our hearts, present in the world, transforming and sanctifying his creation all the time,” modeled in our everyday lives. For Wilson, reading well allows good literature to transform us—through the reshaping of imaginations—into saints.

An Elusive Virtue?

Though she addresses at length the stories and the content of the books she highlights, Wilson seems to assume that readers don’t necessarily need intermediaries or guides to these texts for them to be efficacious. Wilson sees her task as exegesis, not eisegesis: she is simply explaining what is there, the reality of the texts as they are. Wilson would not claim that one would need to read The Scandal of Holiness in order to see the penetrating insights on marriage and sacrifice in Kristin Lavransdatter or to incorporate those insights into one’s own moral life—though Scandal might make doing so easier. Like Hren and Callard, Wilson sees great art as containing in and of itself that which is necessary for becoming a better person. Apprehension of beauty leads to the incarnation of the good. You cannot truly see something beautiful without its changing the way you live your life.

I desperately want this to be the case. Indeed, the Christian intellectual tradition’s brightest minds today seem sympathetic to this view, including Michael Hanby and James Matthew Wilson, the latter of whom recently remarked that “reality is always hitting you in the face,” that no predisposition can fully separate a person from the truth. But some of the finest works of art, including many of the books Wilson highlights, seem vulnerable to misunderstanding. Our imaginations are malformed and idolatrous. Probably all of Scandal’s prospective readers, me included, have had our imaginations formed by entertainment that encourages us to obsess over “our autonomous selves,” something Wilson rightly decries. Contemporary readers can even misinterpret a story as clearly concerned with redemption as Kristin Lavransdatter. Contemporary readers can misread a story as clearly concerned with redemption as Kristin Lavransdatter as “a long book about God’s disinterest in humanity in general.” How then can we assume that a novel that requires  a more careful reading, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (recommended but not treated by Wilson), will bear spiritual fruit for an untrained reader?

Another way to put this question is: how can one cultivate the virtue of reading well by reading great books if one does not, on a certain level, know how to read well already? Likewise, though I agree with Dana Gioia’s sentiment that “you can’t force young people into literature,” that “they need to be led by pleasure and wonder,” is it necessarily true that deepening one’s literary knowledge or refining one’s literary palate through reading truly great books leads to the alteration of one’s life for the better? Why couldn’t this lead to snobbery or to a new reader becoming what Alexander Pope called a “bookful blockhead”?

These questions remain on the table. Though Wilson is quite right to say that reading groups can be communities that build up their members in virtue, groups of readers who do not know how to see a text in right relation to reality cannot be relied upon to teach each other well simply because they approach a text communally. Perhaps literary guidebooks like Scandal can start to provide the hermeneutic equivalent to corrective lenses for such aspiring readers. As Wilson stresses, however, models work best when they are living and incarnate in front of you. Wilson’s book demonstrates the great need for teachers who can exemplify virtuous reading in their local communities—but where these teachers will come from, God only knows.

The task of developing reading well as a virtue now faces the future of the Christian intellectual tradition. Though Josef Pieper—whose writings on art, contemplation, and leisure are quoted by Wilson—once famously claimed that “man’s ability to see is in decline,” Wilson’s book offers a glimmer of hope that by reading well, we can see truly again.

Gay Marriage, Civil Rights, and Christian Virtue: An Interview with David French

In today’s interview, David French joins Public Discourse editor-in-chief R. J. Snell to discuss French’s new position as a New York Times columnist, gay marriage, and how Christians should engage in politics. 

R. J. Snell: Thanks so much for being with us for this interview and congratulations on your new position with the New York Times. Are there issues or topics you hope to explore there that would be different than at the Dispatch or elsewhere?

David French: As far as I know, I’m going to be writing about the exact same themes and issues and topics that I’ve written about at the Dispatch and the Atlantic. In fact, that’s why the Times wanted me, so I could continue to write about those themes. So I’m going to write about religion, I’m going to write a lot about law, culture. My military experience will come into play in my writing as it has at the Dispatch and the Atlantic.

If you’ve seen my work over the last many years, law, culture, religion are all three big themes that I have addressed quite a bit. We are in an era at the Supreme Court where we have this conservative majority and we’re likely to have this conservative majority for the foreseeable future. It’s important to have folks who understand conservative jurisprudence writing in mainstream publications. Conservative jurisprudence is the air I breathe. I understand what’s going on at the Supreme Court, and I understand the various nuances of conservative jurisprudence. So that’s going to be an important part of what I write about and what I address.

It’s also really important to step outside of the news cycle often and take a look at the larger cultural and religious trends that are shaping American life. And Dean Baquet said right after Trump was elected, a lot of the media doesn’t “get religion.” You can’t understand America without understanding America’s religious landscape. So I’m going to be writing quite a bit about that as well.

RJS: Some have disputed what they understand as a tension or contradiction in your commitments. Particularly your commitments to both civil libertarianism and religious freedom. How would you articulate your position and the tensions or lack of tensions?

DF: Well, I think religious freedom is an aspect of civil libertarianism. So religious liberty, free speech, all of that, those were encompassed in the First Amendment. And so I would say more people frame the distinction as a tension between my commitment to civil libertarianism, including religious freedom for all people, including people who have dramatically different religious beliefs from me, and my Christian orthodoxy. That’s where people see a lot of the tension. I don’t see that tension at all, really.

I think of two of the great founding documents in American history. Of course the most famous of the founding documents is the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that we’re endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and then goes on to talk about how governments are tasked with defending that liberty. And then the lesser known, but very important document is John Adams’s letter to the Massachusetts Militia, where John Adams uttered the famous statement that our constitution was made for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.

The entire letter is fascinating because what he’s basically saying is that our constitution is not strong enough, the government is not strong enough to dictate public morality. Rather than dictating public morality, it depends on public morality. So he talks about how certain vices are so terrible that left unrestrained, they would cut through the cords of our constitution like a whale goes through a net.

So I think of these two documents as framing an American social compact. It is one of the primary responsibilities, not the exclusive responsibility, of government to protect the liberty of its citizens. It is the responsibility of citizens to exercise that liberty towards virtuous purposes. That’s your social compact. When I’m interacting with the relationship between the state and individuals, I’m going to defend the liberty of individuals. When I’m interacting with individuals, I’m going to urge, especially when talking with fellow Christian believers, Christian virtues, I’m going to urge various civic virtues, defend civic associations, defend those institutions that are advancing civic virtues. So I don’t see those things really in tension at all. In fact, I think that the defense of liberty, in many ways, is necessary to holistically pursue virtue in the private sphere.

RJS: For some, that answer makes sense, but others think things have changed. They might have been friendly to that argument some years ago, but when they look at the contemporary United States, they see decadence and decline, even the absence of public morality, which that compact depends upon. What had been obvious no longer seems obvious. What would need to happen in our society for you to rethink your commitment? Is there a breaking point where you would think, “that’s not working out; I need to reconsider”?

DF: Yeah. The difficulty is that if you look at some of the worst moments in American history, it’s when the government has violated that social compact, when it has said for certain communities of Americans, you have fewer rights. Or when it has put its thumb on the religious scales in some decisive way.

For example, you don’t have to go far back in American history to find the Blaine Amendments, these anti-Catholic state constitutional amendments that were designed to protect public schools, which were deemed and viewed at that time as essentially Protestant schools free from Catholic influence. Here was a world, in many ways, that a lot of the more “New Right” folks want, which is the ability of the government to put its thumb on the religious scales. We had that. It didn’t work very well.

We’ve had many times in American history when the government had the power to reward friends and punish enemies. Again, this is what much of the New Right wants, and it didn’t work. It was inherently unstable. It was unjust.

What I see in modern America is something maybe a little bit different than what other folks see. I think the nation vis-à-vis its laws is far more just than it has been at virtually any point in its previous history. Racial discrimination is outlawed de jure. You have an extension of the First Amendment to all American communities. You have greater religious freedoms in a concrete way than we’ve ever enjoyed in the history of the United States. Is this government treating its people justly? We’re far from perfect. We have a lot of problems, but we’re better than we’ve been.

When it comes to public morality, the other side of that social compact that asks us to exercise our liberty for virtuous purposes, things are a lot more mixed. Now, in some ways, we’re better. We should never minimize the advances we’ve made in really eradicating the kinds of brutal personal racism that used to mark American life. There’s a news broadcast from the 1970s in New York where there’s a black family that’s moving into a local community. And the amount of unbelievable, overt racism directed at that family blows our minds here in 2022, and that’s not that long ago. 1970s is my lifetime.

We often take a look at things from the standpoint of sexual morality. We think the changes in sexual mores have fully defined the increasing decadence of the American public. But we are complicated creatures. There are many ways in which we’ve gotten better, and there some ways in which we have gotten worse. We tend to completely overlook the ways in which we’ve gotten better and then say, “Well, this is just not working out. We have to make big changes.”

But in fact, even when it comes to sexuality, I think that we are actually in the middle of a number of really important and meaningful conversations about sex and sexuality, and there are actually some positive signs. Many negative signs for sure, but also some positive signs. I don’t know if you saw Christine Emba’s recent book about how the consent-only culture has harmed women. There’s been a rising groundswell from both religious and secular sources rethinking the way in which we have constructed a sexual morality that is entirely experiential as opposed to a relational. Disconnecting sex from love and relationship has not worked for millions upon millions of people. A free society isn’t immune to negative social movements, but it is able to react to and reform negative social movements in a way that more authoritarian countries often are not.

I’m not going to say that from a moral standpoint, we citizens have upheld our end of the bargain. In many ways, we have not, and that has caused a lot of suffering. But it is also the case that a free society is able to reform itself in ways that totalitarian societies obviously do not and cannot.

RJS: How would you respond to those who suggest that the inner logic of liberty and the anthropology of liberalism have a directionality toward the destruction of the family, fragmentation, and soft tyranny? Sure, it’s not as bad as hard tyranny, but we’re moving to soft tyranny as an inevitable logic.

DF: I’ve always been confused by the phrase soft tyranny. Is it tyranny if it’s soft? I don’t know exactly what that means. When I see the phrase soft tyranny used, this often means there are powerful people who don’t like me. It’s not that they can actually control me. It’s not that they actually are shutting down my church. They’re not destroying my family or my relationships, but I’m a dissenter. I’m on the outside looking in, and there are people who don’t like me. That term, soft tyranny, needs a lot more definition before I’m going to start to question liberal democracy.

RJS: I take them to mean it’s not the state itself, but cultural forces, business forces, those sorts of things.

DF: Yeah. Again, unimpressed by that concept. But some of this, I think, is also due to what your conception is of what it means to live as a Christian in this world. I never for a moment have understood the scriptures to say that there is a system of government that is going to make it easy for me to live as a Christian. In fact, I’ve been guaranteed the opposite.

So if my standard is, well, I find it difficult to live as a Christian in this culture, therefore we need massive governmental reforms and greater governmental authority to make it easier for me to live as a Christian in this culture, number one, the track record for that historically is really bad. Number two, in many ways, what you’re asking for is trying to construct what is biblically, in many ways, an impossible system. I’m not so sure it’s possible to make the systems and the engines of culture hospitable to the gospel message by force of law.

And number three, we have seen time and time again that it is difficult to live authentic Christian lives even in many of America’s Christian institutions. If you look at some of the most powerful Christian institutions in America, part of Christendom, for lack of a better term, some of them have been deeply and profoundly corrupt. The most prominent apologetics ministry in the United States was run by an abuser of women. You have perhaps the largest Christian camp housing one of the worst superpredators in American life for a decade plus, and then covering it up. You could go down the line. And time and time again, I hear Christians say, “We need more Christians in power.” And I’m thinking, “Do we, though?”

Think of January 6th. If you had told young me that there will come a time when the chief of staff is an outspoken evangelical, one of the president’s personal lawyers, outspoken evangelical, the House and Senate Republicans are staffed with outspoken evangelicals, the young naive me would have said: “Justice must be rolling down from the heavens.” Instead, what was rolling down from the National Mall was a mob listening to praise music as they stormed the U.S. Capitol building.

I do think you can use the engines of government in ways that are deeply and darkly oppressive to Christianity, but I’m much more skeptical when it comes to arguments that I hear from folks on the New Right about building some sort of Christian nationalism that will preserve what is good in our society and squelch what is bad. I’ve yet to see a government exercise that kind of authority in a just manner.

RJS: Let’s talk about same-sex marriage. You’ve written that you’ve changed your mind on this, and more than once. Is this a fair summary of your position from the Atlantic and Dispatch essays of late 2022?

First, equality and fairness before the law under the conditions of pluralism guides your thinking. Second, there’s an unfairness and inapplicability of using Christian or religious understandings of marriage as normative for civil marriage. Third, civil law is already out of step with the Christian conceptions anyway—think no-fault divorce—and the harms to the biblical understanding of marriage were done by religious hypocrites. And, fourth, you don’t see under the current conditions any grave threat to religious freedom. Is that the arc? What would you add or change in my summary?

DF: I think that’s pretty fair. The way I characterized it in a piece I wrote is that it’s a flip-flop-flip. It’s one position then another, then back to the original. Again, remember, my default position is a more civil libertarian position. So when the initial Massachusetts Supreme Court decision was handed down in the early 2000s, I was not alarmed by it. I’m a traditional, small “o” orthodox Christian, and I have a biblical view of marriage, which I call covenant marriage. And no-fault divorce is utterly alien to that scriptural conception. It is as separate as night and day from the scriptural conception.

So when civil marriage was being changed to include same-sex couples, in my view, that was not the same thing as walking into my church and saying, “Okay. Marriage has changed.” Those were two different things.

Then you began to see what a lot of people presciently warned about, that some people who will attempt to isolate and render as second-class citizens individuals who believe in traditional Christian marriage, or what are called covenant marriage in my writing. This is something I encountered time and time again in my religious liberty work. “Oh, you don’t have the new view of marriage? Well, you can’t operate in this college. You can’t have a student group in this college,” or, “We’re going to threaten your accreditation if you’re a Christian university.”

RJS: Soft tyranny, as it were!

DF: Well, it’s pretty hard when you’re using the operations of the government to kick someone off campus, or take away their tax-exempt status. That’s government action. That’s not somebody making me feel bad. I can handle that.

That’s when you began to see this concern emerging that said, “Look. If same-sex marriage becomes law, then the institutions and ideas of covenant marriage are going to be rendered second-class.” And I said no to that arrangement, absolutely not. If supporting same-sex marriage means treating those people like me who uphold covenant marriage and belong to institutions that uphold covenant marriage and want to foster it around the culture, if that means that people like me have to become second-class citizens, no deal. So then along comes Obergefell, and when Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, he seemed cognizant of this issue. He very clearly wrote that there are people of goodwill on both sides of this issue and the law should respect and protect both. I remember reading it and thinking, “Nice words. We’ll see.”

Since then, in the seven, now coming on eight years since Obergefell, there has not been a single significant religious liberty loss at the Supreme Court. Religious liberty has continued to advance. And many of the wins were by supermajority, seven to two, nine to zero. This was really surprising for folks who thought that Obergefell was the beginning of the end of religious liberty.

When the Respect for Marriage Act came up, it tried to (imperfectly) respect religious liberty. If I was writing the bill, it would be different, but it imperfectly said, “We think that same-sex marriage and religious liberty can coexist in the United States of America, and we’re going to codify that coexistence.” I thought that was absolutely an acceptable compromise.

RJS: After the Atlantic piece, you did two Dispatch essays to explain your views in more detail. In one of those, you have a throwaway line—it’s not the core of your argument, but I’m interested in it—where you state that there are both secular and religious arguments against abortion. Are there not secular arguments against same sex marriage? What is the role of reason in how we understand covenantal marriage and civil marriage? Are there secular arguments against same-sex civil marriage? Don’t covenantal understandings of marriage translate to reason?

DF: Let’s say I’m talking to someone who does not share my faith commitments. I have lots of arguments about the value of lifelong marriage and not viewing marriage primarily as an engine for adult happiness.

RJS: Are these mainly sociological arguments, or arguments that can be made about the nature of marriage itself?

DF: I’m not so sure about the nature of marriage itself, but definitely when it comes to arguments based in what we understand about human flourishing. And interestingly, what we see is that there are an awful lot of people who don’t question no-fault divorce at all and would resist a legal regime that repeals no-fault divorce. Yet they don’t live like that in their own marriages: they stick through it, through thick and thin.

One of the hallmarks of the upper-middle-class America is pretty darn stable families. People do not cycle through relationships. They do not cycle through marriages. That stability is the hallmark of upper-middle-class America, even if social conservatism as an ideology is not. There are all kinds of arguments about family stability, the inadvisability of divorce, the destructiveness of divorce, the challenges of loneliness. You can make these arguments to people who don’t share my preexisting faith commitments about marriage.

RJS: Those are sociological arguments, or arguments about human flourishing. As you know, some of our colleagues at Witherspoon wrote the What Is Marriage? book, in which they ask, using secular reason, about the nature of marriage itself. They claim that if you don’t accept the conjugal view of marriage you lose any principled and rational basis for why marriage needs to be permanent or exclusive. If you don’t provide arguments about the nature of marriage itself, what’s your limiting principle to disallow throuples or five-year marriages with options to renew? Such arrangements might have negative effects, but do you have a principled reason against them?

DF: Well, so five-year marriages with an option to renew would actually be more binding than the current no-fault marriage. It’s mind-blowing to realize literally a refrigerator warranty is more binding than a marriage under the law. That is no exaggeration. So when people have talked to me about the sanctity of marriage prior to same-sex marriage, it’s been an eye-rolling thing for me because I think either they don’t know what no-fault divorce is, or they think that has sanctity? What? No-fault divorce is the codification of a sub-contractual view of marriage.

It’s hard for me to see the argument that there’s something fundamentally sacred about that civil arrangement. I see why government has an interest in delegating the sanctity of a relationship to the citizens. I see why there are defensible governmental reasons for the no-fault divorce construct of marriage, especially given long histories of extraordinary problems with domestic abuse in intimate relationships, and the difficulty people had traditionally in extricating themselves from physically abusive situations in years past. But it is difficult for me to see the moral interest in that construct. So that’s why I’m not persuaded that that particular construct was worth excluding same-sex couples from. That’s where folks lose me.

And this is magnified by the idea that, if you have a same-sex couple and they’re raising children, you’re going to come in and change the law, and suddenly, they’re not married, which has all kinds of down-line ramifications for everything—from financial arrangements, to healthcare relationships, to child custody. My goodness.

While at the same time preserving this sort of no-fault situation that heterosexual couples have, it’s hard for me to see the justice in that because that’s where the reliance interests come into play. You have a million-plus people in this country who have built their relationships around these legal arrangements, and then to yank it all away strikes me as profoundly unjust, even cruel.

RJS: You claim there’s something quite different between a covenantal marriage (I would call this a sacramental marriage) and a civil marriage. The circles don’t overlap, is how I remember you putting it. But on one understanding, and this would be my own, the logic of revelation or grace can’t contradict the logic of nature. Even more, the logic of revelation or grace presupposes the logic of nature. Grace presupposes nature, grace perfects nature, and grace elevates nature. If in the domain of the civil or the natural, we’re creating something out of step with the logic of revelation and grace, we’ve got something deeply wrong with our understanding of the natural; we have something that can’t be true, that doesn’t follow the logic of either nature or grace, or we have double truth. God’s general and specific revelation would contradict one another, and that just cannot be possible. How do you think about that?

DF: What do you mean creating?

RJS: Well, we create laws, positive law. I take civil law to be a construction of the state. But I also take a just civil law to be one in keeping with the logic of grace, and open to it because grace presupposes nature. (That’s Aquinas’s phrasing.) Do you agree? What should we do if the civil law contradicts the logic of covenantal marriage? How do you understand the relationship of nature and grace? I think you’re going in a different direction than I would.

DF: Yeah. I don’t quite see it that way. I don’t think the civil law is creating anything. It’s recognizing relationships in a pretty precise legal way. So the civil law cannot create or destroy my marriage. My marriage—

RJS: Your covenantal marriage?

DF: That’s the only marriage that I know. The civil law cannot create my marriage, nor can it destroy my marriage. It can recognize it and provide particular sets of benefits surrounding it, or it cannot recognize it, but it doesn’t create it, nor does it destroy it. We can’t think of the state as providing that level of meaning. That’s where I dispute some of this, because I don’t see my marriage as a creation of the state at all. I see it as a union of one man and one woman before God himself. I’m glad that the state recognizes it and provides certain kinds of short benefits that allow me to make, by default, some kinds of medical decisions, and by default possess child custody. But it does not create my marriage. It cannot destroy my marriage.

The question when it comes to the state is not what is the state creating. The question is what kind of relationships is the state recognizing and providing certain kinds of default protections for. It’s a much lower order of engagement. That’s why from the beginning of the debate, I’ve been much more torn about this than many of my Christian friends have been. I look at the role of the state as not an entity that creates. It recognizes and provides particular kinds of benefits to relationships. It’s a much lower order engagement.

Perhaps some of this is influenced by, for example, my longtime free speech advocacy. If the state is protecting my speech, it is not in any way endorsing that speech. Or if the state is protecting my religious liberty, it is not in any way endorsing that religion. It is not imbuing that religion with truth or meaning or purpose. It’s just protecting it from oppression and restriction. I think of the role of the state in a different way.

You can really dig deep into this, but one of the ways where I really depart from some of my Christian nationalist friends is they put a lot more meaning around what the state can potentially do to provide some sacred purpose or meaning to a nation.

RJS: One might respond to what you just said this way: okay, fine. So the real marriage is neither going to be created nor destroyed by the state, but the state can recognize the relationship. But that’s precisely why the state should recognize some sort of civil union, but not same-sex marriage, because the state can’t create marriage. Marriage is created by the covenantal logic, and that covenantal logic is going to be permanent, exclusive, involving spouses of different sexes, and so on. Why grant same-sex marriage under civil law? That sounds like creating something, and something false. Certainly, there are opponents to that position, who want same-sex marriage recognized as marriage just because marriage has a sacral quality to them. They didn’t want the recognition of civil unions. They wanted marriage.

DF: Right. Yeah. They absolutely wanted their relationships to have the same legal recognition as the recognition granted to opposite-sex couples. If the state recognized civil unions, but not marriage, even if the set of benefits were identical provided to civil unions as to marriage, that they would still view these as second-class arrangements. There was a validating aspect of expanding the definition of civil marriage. There’s no question about that.

Also, there was almost no constituency on the right for creating civil unions that were identical to marriage, but not called marriage. I remember the days. If you were for civil unions, you were seen as a hopeless compromiser. This was compromise that nobody wanted at the time.

It’s also the case that there’s a wide divergence of religious belief regarding marriage in the United States of America. An awful lot of same-sex couples say, “David, you’re wrong. I have a covenant marriage just like you do.” And they belong to religious traditions or to churches that would endorse that wholly entirely and completely, and that my definition of covenant marriage is fundamentally wrong. And that brings into play the question that we haven’t really addressed, which is pluralism. How do we live together across this really big difference? Again, that’s why my default position comes down to respecting each other’s liberties and respecting each other’s desires to live our lives according to our deepest values.

RJS: Final question, and thanks again for doing the interview with us. Clearly, there’s a lot of contestation in the conservative world right now about what it means to be a conservative, what we should do, who we should vote for, and so on. What do you want to tell conservatives about how they should think and act and proceed going forward?

DF: On the voting question, which is one of the more basic questions, I have a two-pronged test that I apply, and you have to pass them both. It’s not one or the other. It’s an “and,” not an “or.”

First, you have to possess personal character commensurate with the office you seek. So the higher the office, the higher demand for character there should be. So there should be character commensurate with the office that you seek. Second, a person should broadly support my political policy positions, my political values. There’s no perfect person, and there’s no perfect policy alignment. But broadly speaking, high character and policy alignment. If you’re missing either one, I’m not going to vote for you.

I wrote about this in my last Sunday newsletter. In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention wrote a resolution on moral character in public officials. It was extremely brief, but eloquent and powerful. And one of the most eloquent passages of it says that the tolerance of serious wrongs by leaders sears the conscience of a culture, spawns unrestrained lawlessness, and surely will result in God’s judgment. There was a lot of mocking of that sentiment by a lot of the mainstream culture in 1998 when it was drafted, because that was Bill Clinton they were aiming at. We had peace and prosperity and all those Christian prudes. I remember even reading op-eds about how we need to have more European views about mistresses.

Is there a statement that’s been more thoroughly vindicated than that? What happens when we tolerate serious wrongs by leaders? It does sear our conscience. How many times are we now seeing people just rationalizing the grossest conduct? It does spawn lawlessness. The scandals that are metastasizing through the American body politic are ripping at the seams of our social fabric. God’s judgment is not necessarily hurricanes or tsunamis or fire from the sky. It can be something as simple as giving us over to our own desires and watching us reap the consequences of our own behavior. A part of God’s constant mercy and grace is consistently saving us from ourselves. God’s judgment will not always save us from ourselves, and many times we reap what we’ve sown. Right now, we’re in a reaping phase of having sown an awful lot of lawlessness and corruption.

This really short-term thinking that says, “I don’t like either one, but one’s clearly a lesser evil,” is exactly what’s landing us in the position that we are in with a collapse of trust in institutions, a collapse in trust in politics, a collapse in competence. If your primary qualification is you’re not the other guy, where’s the emphasis on competence even as a baseline? Somebody has to start taking the long view.

Neither party can win an election without their Bible-believing base. The two most church-going segments of American society, in addition to Mormons, are white evangelicals and black Democrats. Black Protestants are overwhelmingly Democrat. If both these movements exercised a veto authority over low-character politicians, American life would change.

That’s what I would urge for people of faith. Use the power that you actually have. Stop sitting around moaning and groaning that you’re persecuted and you don’t have any power. Come on. White evangelicals are the most powerful faction of one of the two most powerful political parties in the most powerful country in the history of the world. You are not powerless. You are not persecuted. Use the immense power that you have to begin to change the character of our institutions in a positive direction. No more fear-based voting. No more compromises with lesser evils. Use your power to reinforce virtue in this country, or you’re not upholding your end of the social compact. Period.

Why Do Mass Expulsions Still Happen?

Guest post by Meghan Garrity

January 30, 2023 marks 100 years since the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece.

This population exchange was not the first such agreement, but it was the first compulsory exchange. Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion and Muslim Greek nationals did not have the option to remain. Further, Greek and Muslim refugees who had fled the Ottoman Empire and Greece, respectively, were not allowed to return to their homes. Only small populations in Istanbul and Western Thrace were exempted from the treaty.

The population exchange between Greece and Turkey is an example of the broader phenomenon of mass expulsion—a government policy to systematically remove an ethnic group without individual legal review and with no recognition of the right to return. Far from an isolated incident, the Lausanne Convention was one of 19 population “transfers” or “exchanges” throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. These expulsions occurred with the stroke of a pen, but mass expulsions also occur at the point of a sword. Governments use violence to force out “undesirable” groups by destroying their homes, appropriating their assets and income, and in some cases, killing members of the group to encourage others to flee.

Although mass expulsion is rare, it is recurring. Between 1900–2020, governments expelled over 30 million citizens and non-citizens in 139 different episodes around the world.

Far from a historical phenomenon, over the last 50 years governments have continued to implement expulsion policies at an average rate of 1.56 per year. In just the last two decades (from 2000–2020) there were 24 expulsion events, including Eritreans from Ethiopia (1998–99); Rohingya from Myanmar (2012–13; 2016–18); and Afghans from Pakistan (2016).

What explains this recurrence? In the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly after World War I, minority groups were seen as dangerous Trojan horses that sowed instability and brought insecurity. The “Great Powers” and international institutions like the League of Nations, promoted expulsion as a necessary policy to “unmix” antagonistic populations. It was believed that only by reuniting groups with their co-ethnics and establishing homogenous nation-states—however fanciful that idea was in practice—could international peace and security be achieved.

Therefore, in post-conflict environments mass expulsion was often considered a viable policy, typically disguised in the more benign-sounding language of population “transfer” or “exchange.” The 1923 Lausanne Convention was part of one such post-conflict peace agreement that ended the war between Greece and Turkey and redrew the borders of the soon-to-be Turkish Republic.

Notable figures such as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Herbert Hoover openly promoted and lobbied for mass expulsion. In 1942, in the midst of World War II, Czechoslovakia President-in-exile Edvard Beneš wrote in Foreign Affairs, “It will be necessary after this war to carry out a transfer of populations on a very much larger scale than after the last war. This must be done in as humane a manner as possible, internationally organized and internationally financed.” After the war, the Allied Powers carried out Beneš’ wish. The 1945 Potsdam Agreement authorized the “orderly and humane” expulsion of between nine and 12 million ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

But international norms and law slowly began to shift. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights included the right of nationals to return to their country of origin. The next year the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibited “individual or mass forcible transfers.” Protection for refugees soon followed with the 1951 Refugee Convention explicitly stating, “No contracting state shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee.” Subsequent regional human rights treaties bolstered legal frameworks against the expulsion of both nationals and non-nationals, including the European Convention on Human Rights, Protocol 4 (1963), American Convention on Human Rights (1969), African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981), and more recently the Arab Charter on Human Rights (2004). In 1998 the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court included “deportation or forcible transfer of populations” as Crimes Against Humanity.

Yet despite these legal advancements, mass expulsion persists. Although laws against expulsion are in place, there is minimal, if any, regional or international enforcement. In the face of myriad atrocities and human rights abuses, cases of mass expulsion are not prioritized. The limited international justice resources are dedicated to accountability for more heinous atrocities like genocide. Unfortunately, multiple rounds of mass expulsion may eventually escalate to more serious violence as in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar: expelled in 1978, 1991–92, 2012–13, and 2016–18. Only this latest episode has been referred to the International Court of Justice amidst accusations of genocide.

Governments also hesitate to call out others for implementing expulsion policies because they too have expelled. In 1983 Nigeria expelled over two million West African migrants without any serious criticism from its regional neighbors. Affected countries like Ghana, Niger, and Chad had previously expelled populations from their territories, and thus refrained from condemning Nigeria.

Furthermore, while mass expulsion has continued over time, the nature of the person targeted has changed. In the first half of the twentieth century, mass expulsions almost exclusively targeted citizens. Since 1950, only 12 incidents of citizen-only expulsions have occurred, which at first glance seems to indicate the customary international law against expelling citizens has diffused around the world. But, on the contrary, expelling states have simply modified their strategy by removing citizens simultaneously with non-citizens—foreign nationals, resident aliens, and/or refugees. When non-citizens are the main target of expulsion, these decisions are often considered “immigration policies” under the sovereign jurisdiction of the state. However, international law also guarantees the protection of non-nationals from mass expulsion and requires certain rules to be followed, including non-discrimination and individual legal review. The en masse removal of groups based on identity characteristics is illegal.

Mass expulsion, in whatever form it takes, has gross humanitarian consequences for those affected. In the chaos families are separated, homes and livelihoods are left behind, and in some cases, lives are lost. Importantly, research shows these policies do not bring the positive outcomes their advocates proclaim, and expelling states often suffer economically and politically in their aftermath.

The anniversary of the 1923 Lausanne Convention is a moment to reflect on the tragedy of the Greek-Turkish “population exchange.” More policy attention is needed to prevent and punish mass expulsion.

Meghan Garrity is a postdoctoral fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

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