CT Institute Essay: Why Can’t We Work Together?

A noted Catholic lawyer urges Catholics and evangelicals to become partners in the battle against rampant secularism.

I come of Protestant and Catholic parentage. My first ancestor on this continent was Edward Ball, Puritan, whom the records show lived in Connecticut in 1642. My other immigrant ancestor was William Foley, arriving here in 1871 from County Limerick, Ireland. From childhood on, I have been able to appreciate much that is good in both traditions, as well as the sufferings that have marked each. Over the years, I have witnessed much prejudice and fear on both sides, but from an unusual vantage point—not only as one of mixed parentage, but also as legal counsel in cases involving religious freedom.

Last October, the Catholic lay journal Crisis published my article “Catholics and Evangelicals—We’d Better Hang Together.” In that article, I urged Catholics to be more appreciative of and cooperative with their evangelical brethren. In this article, I write to a largely evangelical audience, offering observations based on my experience in relating to evangelicals in court.

Who Should Hang Together?

Following my article in Crisis, two leading evangelical lawyers wrote me heartfelt positive reactions, but one of them brought me up short on a critical point—namely, that there does not exist one body of people, holding identical beliefs, whom one can pinpoint as “The Evangelicals.” There is, rather, a broad spectrum of believers who are comfortable with being labeled “evangelicals”—even though all of them may not be comfortable with certain other evangelicals being labeled evangelicals.

I had been trying to say that certain Catholics and certain evangelicals should be hanging together. Excluded, for example, would be those Catholics whose sentiments are clustered in such progressivist publications as National Catholic Reporter, or who—like Father Richard McBrien of Notre Dame—attack John Paul II as a reactionary and whose ideological compass needles invariably point to political causes of the Left. Under that tent are the Edward Kennedys, the Mario Cuomos, various gay-rights folk, socialists, and do-your-own-thing doctrinaires. They are not the Catholics with whom I plead that evangelicals should hang together.

But neither do I urge Catholics to hang together with evangelicals who are “moderates” on abortion, who support the secularizing of education and eschew the Protestant religious school, whose interest in religious liberty does not go beyond political sanctuary, who decry interventions by religious leaders in the political order, especially on “single issues” (unless the “single issue” is sexism, the environment, or federally mandated child-care regulation).

The group I have urged to hang together is, alas, a discrete minority. But it is nonetheless numerous, and it nonetheless stoutly bears a Christian witness. It is our society’s common-sense core and its principal human resource for resisting the militant secularism that Francis Schaeffer predicted would dominate our “post-Christian” world. The media orchestrations that accompany the trends in our courts and legislatures are of strong significance in a growingly illiterate, sensation-prone populace. We may laugh at the cocksure doom-saying of some electronic preachers, but the warnings of Orwell, Ellul, Yeats, John Paul II, Richard Neuhaus, and many another thoughtful observer in the past six decades, may not be dismissed.

If these Catholics and these evangelicals were to draw up a document called “What We Stand For” (meaning not the things we endure, like tax burdens and media biases, but the things we affirm), it would consist, as Thomas Howard has said, “in the ancient creeds of the Church”—the one triune God, the divinity of Christ who is our personal Savior, the Virgin Birth, the Holy Spirit, the inerrancy of Holy Scripture, the existence of Satan, man as created by God in his image and likeness, man’s salvation through Christ.

From these common beliefs, many Catholics and many evangelicals derive clear positions on issues of law and public policy: affirming the sanctity of human life, and hence militantly rejecting policies favoring abortion and euthanasia; stressing the duty of religious witness-bearing in the political forum; protecting churches and ministries from arbitrary governmental intrusion; calling for parental freedom of choice in schooling and child care; resisting the secularization of our society; militating against the breakdown of morality, especially in the areas of sex, law observance, and the conduct of business and government affairs; protecting and encouraging family life.

I refer to those who hold the above theological and policy positions as “the orthodox”: “orthodox” evangelicals (OEs) and “orthodox” Catholics (OCs). That, I believe, is how they perceive themselves.

There are two common misperceptions of the orthodox: First is pinning the label “conservative” on OCs and OEs (unless that term is given the meaning that Russell Kirk attaches to it, with its emphasis on belief in a transcendent order). Some members of Congress, “conservative” in defending interests of business, would not agree with a single one of the seven policy positions above.

It is also a mistake to view the OEs and OCs as “negative” in outlook and lacking in constructive programs to build a better society. The orthodox believe that a good society is built from the bottom up (that is, in family-endorsed values and in voluntary social endeavors), not from the top down. As sociologist Brigitte Berger recently remarked, Sweden—a planned society constructed upon the belief that government money and government-controlled social organizations must inevitably result in a strong, prosperous, and happy society—has proved to be a disaster. An overtaxed, profoundly dependent, listless populace now witnesses the economic collapse of the government provider.

Far from being negative, OEs and OCs are constructive and affirmative. Nothing could be a better affirmation of the possibility of a good and peaceful society than resisting the forces of disintegration so evidently succeeding in our country. I do not think that my perspective as a lawyer exaggerates the dangers that confront society. Instead, it is from observing the trends in our courts and legislatures that the most realistic picture of where we are heading emerges.

The OEs and OCs are wary of religious leaders who, at the very time their congregations are declining in fervor and spiritual certainty, volubly opine on the Strategic Defense Initiative and other matters on which they have no professional competence. The unwelcome image of Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House comes to mind—that lady, so energetic and zealous for Borrioboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger while her own household was in chaos.

Fears Of “Cobelligerency”

Anyone who advocates the cooperation of OCs and OEs inevitably must address the fears some have of “cobelligerency.” Carl F. H. Henry, whom I have long revered, discussed some of those fears on these pages last November. Those fears centered on Christians who “concern themselves only or mainly with their own interests as one of the numerous faith communities,” who “exhaust their energies in what they oppose, or in promoting single-issue special interests.” He pleaded that they instead focus on the fact that American society is today religiously plural, that there exists no moral and religious consensus. He speaks favorably, then, of the Williamsburg Charter, which is predicated on those facts. He appears to ask Christians to abandon their single-issue, sectarian political causes—especially when they seek to embrace theonomism or place “ecclesiastical controls” upon others. They should instead embrace a “public philosophy,” one aimed at promoting “the common good of society.” Henry sees that “public philosophy” as “not located in sectarian religious tradition but in universal revelation and public reason, without disavowing the crucial importance of special revelation.”

I suppose that what I have said so favorably about the public policy positions of the OEs and the OCs could be taken as running counter to Henry’s views. In important ways it does; but in important ways it does not. If Henry’s concern over the promotion of the sectaries’ “self-interest” refers to religious fakirs who overload the mails and airwaves with their emergency pleas for money, he is dead right. But when “sectarian” evangelicals and Catholics join arm-in-arm in the March for Life each January 22, whose “self interest” is being promoted? That of millions of our unborn. It is the common good we seek.

That brings me again to “single-issue” activity. No progress for the common good has ever been made except on a single-issue-by-single-issue basis. Often the single issue has had to be advanced by a single group that cares so intensely that it is willing to fight alone for a good thing. The Aid to Education of the Handicapped Act of 1970 began as the single-issue cause of a single group. In 1986, the Pennsylvania General Assembly enacted a statute to protect basic freedoms of all religious schools. This had been an OE-OC effort, pursued against heavy opposition.

OEs and OCs, we must note, typically have financial resources ranging from meager to zero to support their public-policy witness. They depend principally upon the dedication and sacrifice of their members. The prolife movement and the Christian-school movement are conspicuous examples. Not infrequently must OEs-OCs, in pursuit of the common good, contend against such heavily financed organizations as Planned Parenthood and the National Education Association and their networking allies. Almost always the power of the media is directed to denigrate OE-OC causes (as witness the disparate treatment given the April 28 “Rally for Life” and NOW’s proabortion rally last August).

I could not agree more, however, with Henry in his plea that the OE-OC cobelligerents embrace a public philosophy aimed at promoting the common good. Our differences lie, first, in the fact, I think, that by and large, OE-OC cobelligerents do have such a philosophy, and second, in the fact that that public philosophy is located not merely in “universal revelation and public reason, without disavowing the crucial importance of special relevation,” but is based solely upon commonly held teachings of Christianity. I do not understand Henry to mean that Christians should act in the public forum only upon those issues on which a majority of religious (and nonreligious) advocates agree—for example, to campaign to save the whales and baby seals, but not to save unborn human beings. Nor do I understand his brief reference to “race discrimination and ecological pollution” to imply that anything to which those labels may be attached are issues on which we can and should all stand together. On some forms of affirmative action, or with respect to pleas for population control to help the ecology, wide differences necessarily exist.

As a participant in the drafting of the Williamsburg Charter, I find no inconsistency with the charter in the fact that OEs-OCs pursue their public-policy positions. Most of those whom I encounter are keenly aware that we are indeed a religiously plural society and know that to persuade one does not villify. OEs’ and OCs’ cobelligerency does not mean, by and large, that each tries to be as belligerent as the other! They agree with the charter’s warning to religious advocates against “a misplaced absoluteness that idolizes politics, ‘Satanizes’ their enemies and politicizes their own faith.” But the charter states:

Freedom of conscience and the right to influence public policy on the basis of religiously informed ideas are inseverably connected. In short, a key to democratic renewal is the fullest participation in the most open possible debate.

Finally, Henry stresses “the importance of public evangelical identification with the body of humanity, no less than with the body of Christ.” To the OEs and OCs, it is identification with the body of Christ that enables them to serve the body of humanity.

Overcoming Negative Perceptions

Reading the jeremiads that OCs and OEs publish concerning the state of our society, it is remarkable that they do not make greater efforts to enhance their effectiveness by concerted endeavors. The reason lies mainly in a history of mutually negative perceptions. Evangelicals carry with them knowledge (sometimes family knowledge) of Catholic pre-Vatican II teachings respecting religious liberty, and mindsets of some Catholics respecting Protestants personally. Catholics naturally carry with them remembrances of traditional Protestant hostility toward them, still quite vibrant when that rather un-Catholic Catholic, John F. Kennedy, was running for President.

Were I to counsel OCs, I would begin by taking them for a visit to an ACSI (Association of Christian Schools International) school. There they would find a vitally God-centered environment, the promotion of virtue, teachers who sacrificially pursue what, in Catholic parlance, are “religious vocations,” a pervasive spirituality, and children (of all races) being well started on the Christian pilgrimage.

As they became familiar with the community of believers in which this school was centered, they would experience the joy of finding people ever so much like their brother and sister OCs—people of prayer and of unshakable belief in Christ. They would realize, too, that OCs need not go it alone in resisting materialism and hedonism in our society, but that here are cultivators of the soil of society, at the root level, as contrasted with the statist-minded, who would cover society’s fertile earth with lifeless pavement. Moral courage, too, that most unfashionable virtue, the visitors would find—a love of freedom, with a despising of license.

I regret the occasional example I see of Catholic defensiveness toward evangelicals. Where evangelicals compete aggressively to convert Hispanic Catholics, Catholics should charitably correct any misrepresentations of their faith; but where conversions do occur, they should ask themselves why, twice over, and learn from the answers.

Were I to counsel OEs, I would have them visit my parish in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I have been surprised when fundamentalist clients of mine, on hearing I am Catholic, ask me: “But do you really accept Christ as your personal Savior?” The name of my parish, indeed, is Sacred Heart of Jesus—a reverent phrase loaded with the tenderest meaning. We OCs, as Protestants know, believe that we receive the actual body and blood of Jesus when we receive Communion. That fact testifies to our literal adherence to the Bible, as also does Catholic teaching on contraception. Were an OE to come to my parish, he would find a spiritual at-homeness with us. Our families—white and black, Slovak, Polish, Irish, Hispanic, Slovenian, Italian—express the moral and spiritual strengths of traditional Catholic family life. Catholics are comforted by the rootedness of their church in history—“great and respected,” in the words of Macaulay, “before the Saxon had set foot in Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca.”

Are there not Catholics today—indeed in the political limelight—who defy Christian moral teachings, even giving scandal by their personal lives? Certainly. But “let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Too many stones have been thrown in the past, and the time is at hand to publicize, instead, one another’s virtues—indeed, to celebrate them.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.