Treason and the Culture of Deceit

We live in a culture of deceit. Two events this winter have proved that point abundantly. On January 5th, Michael Wolff published Fire and Fury, a gossipy account of the Trump White House. Taken to task for the fact that many of his sources (from a former British Prime Minister, to major Trump allies, to a slew of journalists at the New York Times) explicitly denied quotes attributed to them, Wolff found himself on the back foot. He wouldn’t produce the recordings of their conversations which he (allegedly) possessed. No, the public doesn’t need hard evidence to support contested claims. Instead, Wolff proposed a novel method to prove what was true and what wasn’t: “If it rings true, it is true.” What does that mean, in essence, except for “It’s true if you want it to be true?” Different things will sound true or false to different people. In that case, my biases distinguish what’s true from what isn’t. On a closer investigation, they do more than that; my biases come to constitute the truth. 

On February 5th, President Trump spoke at a manufacturing plant in Ohio. Apparently prickled by insufficient applause at his State of the Union address, he said of the Democrats, “They were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, ‘Treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, why not. Can we call that treason? Why not?” Cue media firestorm number three hundred and seventy-nine, even though the President was probably joking. As with a lot of media meltdowns over things Trump says, there’s something here worth being upset about. Nationally elected figures shouldn’t call their political opponents traitors, even in jest. But, as a Holy Cross alumnus over at National Review has pointed out, the left lost the ability to complain about that a long time ago. 

When? Oh, seven years ago, that time Joe Biden said Republicans in Congress and the House “have acted like terrorists” by playing debt-ceiling politics. Or six years ago, when Senate majority leader Harry Reid started speculating that Republicans were deliberately tanking the U.S. economy in order to score political points against Barack Obama. Or three years ago, when Hillary Clinton compared pro-life Republican politicians to “terrorist groups.” Or even three months ago, when Andrew Cuomo accused Republicans who voted for tax reform of violating their oath. “It’s treasonous,” he said. “It’s modern-day Benedict Arnold.” 

All of this puts Trump in his context. For nearly a decade in mainstream politics, and substantially longer in media circles, we’ve been transforming our political opponents into terrorists, traitors, and totalitarian sympathizers. But does that have anything to do with Michael Wolff? Of course it does. Trump and Clinton, Joe Biden and Harry Reid are all enthralled to the Wolff standard for truth. It has nothing to do with whether the accusation can be proven, whether the facts can support it, or indeed whether a conversation actually happened. No, none of those things make a quotation or a story true or false. But they ring true, so Democrats are traitors and pro-lifers are terrorists and the Republicans want to destroy the United States of America. 

But why does it matter? This isn’t a new phenomenon. We can find this sort of casual relativism at the headwaters of Western culture, critiqued in the plays of Sophocles and the dialogues of Plato. While that’s true, there’s an important difference now. We can see it in the standard that Michael Wolff proposed. He didn’t say “It’s true because I said it’s true,” or “It’s true because I can persuade you that it is.” He said, “It’s true because it rings true,” which is to say, “It’s true because you want to believe it.” 

And sadly, whether it’s a treason accusation or an invented quote by Tony Blair, we all too often do believe it. The great and good turned out in hordes to cheer for Fire and Fury back in January. Hillary Clinton even stood on stage at the Golden Globes to read selections from it. Trump’s crowd cheered on those treason accusations with gusto, and we know the far-right wing agreed. A heap of students at this college would gladly lend their voices to the Clinton-Biden siren song of Republican traitors and pro-life terrorists. Our society makes biases primary, and tries to conform reality to it. Truth? What is Truth? 

This rot runs from the roots of the tree to its crown: on campuses, in the news media, in Washington. It has real consequences. For obvious reasons, when truth doesn’t exist, nobody believes anything the other side says, so we make things up and decide they’re true instead. Conservatives will be content to believe that the Democrats want to recreate the Soviet Union, and liberals will think that Republicans have a hankering for Germany circa 1936. There results an alchemy of outrage which transposes minor policy disputes into raging culture wars. And, because we don’t believe the other side will tell the truth, compromise becomes impossible. 

The issue of “fake news” reveals another facet of the problem. The term should diagnose a real problem—the kind of “journalism” produced by Infowars that intentionally misleads people to manipulate their voting preferences. But instead, it has become a synonym for “bad press,” or even just “honest reporting.” CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post are “fake news” in a lot of conservative circles. National Review and the Wall Street Journal earn the same title among my liberal friends. The assertion isn’t merely that they’re biased; it’s that any of those five news outlets will make up facts whole cloth in order to score political points. Of course, every media outlet has a slant. But if the NYT and WSJ are “fake news,” what are Breitbart and Buzzfeed? 

Pontificating about how the West is facing a cultural crisis has become a cottage industry of considerable scale. I’m not going to toss my hat in that particular ring. You need perspective to do that, and the perpetual screaming match of a New England campus doesn’t offer it. This hill isn’t high enough to see that far. But the limited view from here shows us a particularly vicious kind of tribalism—fractious groups of like-minded people glommed together against their political opponents. Factions in the Church. Identity groups on the progressive left. The seven kinds of conservative. The unmoving progressive/traditionalist battle line. These reveal a bloodless form of blood feud, in which common good and common decency are trampled to win the ideological campaign. A truthless society makes for a culture at war, and culture wars are tribal wars. 

A lecturer I heard back in September put it best. He argued that our public life has lost the images of the covenant. Although drawing on religious imagery, he was talking about the signal forms of social solidarity, like stable marriages, civil friendships, and personal loyalty. Is that our fundamental problem? I don’t know. But the religious imagery can tell us some -thing. “Covenant” is a biblical word, evoking God’s fidelity to his covenant with Israel. In Exodus, the Hebrew for covenant fidelity is emet. When ancient Jewish scholars translated the Bible into Greek, they rendered emet with a word that also stands for “truth.” Fabricated “truths” betray our social covenant. That’s the treason of the culture of deceit. 

"To Take the Risks of Love": an Interview with R. R. Reno

Dr. Reno is the editor of First Things, America’s largest journal of Religion and public life. He holds a Doctorate in Religious Ethics from Yale University, and was for 20 years a professor of Theology and Ethics at Creighton University.  This interview was conducted on September 21st, in connection with Dr. Reno’s lecture, “A Christian Interpretation of the Age of Trump.”  It has been edited for length.

Claude Hanley: What would be, in your estimation, the place of the university in American life now, and what should its task be?

R.R. Reno: Well, the purpose of the university is to provide a community of learning, it’s a place for the formation of a secular society that is committed to the life of the mind, and then obviously most students go on to professional work.  Most don’t become professors, but the educational experience serves as a leaven in society at large. I think especially on Josef Pieper’s wonderful short book Leisure, The Basis of Culture.  The American idea of the four-year liberal arts degree is of a time in your life when you’re not actually pursuing professional activities, but leaves you with something that’s closer to contemplative. Pieper argued that is actually necessary to have culture.

Now our view about the role of the university in the public square is shaped by the fact that after World War II, with the GI Bill, there was a big upsurge in college enrollments. And for the men that were coming back from World War II, the university became a kind of place where they looked at questions about what kind of society they were going to have. Consequently, we have this false view that the university is this kind of crucial place where the future of our society is debated and formed and shaped. I think that that’s distorted. It’s obviously true for some of our universities, but we overemphasize that because of the 50’s and 60’s, when we saw this sort of new, emerging middle class, different people from ethnic backgrounds being integrated into America’s leadership. Universities were the focal point for that process.  So universities would ideally be more nourishing, and less political than they are today.

CH: How do the humanities disciplines contribute to that mission?

RRR: Well, I’d put it more broadly, as the liberal arts. I mean, studying astrophysics doesn’t serve any practical purpose. It’s not clear studying evolutionary biology serves a practical purpose either.  Fossil records, all these sorts of things, contribute to our knowledge of the natural world, which we can perhaps use technically at some point.  Mathematicians also, they’re famous for coming up with things that have no relevance whatsoever, and then a hundred years later, people discover practical uses for their mathematical models. But it’s the wonder and joy of knowing that precedes their practical usefulness. And that’s a liberal education; it’s for its own sake, and not for some other end. That strikes me as what is so important about a liberal arts education.  We are made to know, and it is an intrinsic good to know truth.  Not every project can offer that; the liberal arts humanize us, and they make use more fully human.

CH: How does that humanization translate to society and to politics?

RRR: Whether it’s Shakespeare or astrophysics, you go out into the public square, if you’re liberally educated, and you’re less likely to be swept up in a thousand ideologies of the time. It gives you a kind of independence of mind.  I think it’s important, in any society, that you have people who have this independence of mind. John Henry Newman referred to education leads to an enlargement of mind.  You become more capacious…capable of grappling with a full range of experience. I don’t want to privilege the humanities in this regard.  I started out in physics as an undergraduate. My sister’s a physics professor at the University of Iowa. You have to specialize, you can’t know everything. It’s not like you’re swallowing all this food until your gut gets full and distended. It’s not just the amount of facts.  Instead, it’s developing a kind of mental plasticity, and flexibility, and a capacity that prompts you to think about things in such ways.

CH: It’s said that there is a lack of intellectual diversity, of that independence of thought in universities today. The same people are promoting the same kinds of ideas that are getting preeminence. Do you think that’s a valid criticism of the American university?

RRR: I don’t like to use this new term diversity here. We should have diversity of some things and we should have unity of other things. So, I think it’s not a cure-all. But there is a problem, it seems, where there isn’t independence of thought, there’s too much group think. And I don’t think it’s a matter of, as people often say, “Well, it’s because all the professors are liberals.” Now, I went to a small liberal arts college, not unlike Holy Cross.  The professors were ninety percent registered Democrats, they were certainly liberals.  But it didn’t feel like an environment that was closed or limited. To be capacious, to encourage adventure, to have the security as a faculty member to accept the fact that sometimes your students will go in a different direction -- These are qualities that I think that one hopes for in a faculty, but I see less of them today. It could be that the problem is not lack of diversity, but a kind of careerism on the part of faculty.  Or perhaps people want a cheap emotional payoff of feeling that their work has a great moral and political significance.  As a result, there’s a kind of works-righteousness around our salvation, at least our secular salvation by making sure that our  classes teach the right political lessons. I think we need to dig more deeply.  It’s not just a lack of diversity. That’s a symptom, not a cause.

CH: So, to continue this theme, one of the main challenges now is academic freedom and freedom of speech. I think of the events at Middlebury last year, and similar controversies.  What do you think at least some of the underlying issues are that cause this sort of tension?

RRR: Our society is very divided. Grownups don’t tell young people what life is for, and they’ve rebelled.   Everything is open, you choose your own values, et cetera et cetera.  I think it’s quite natural that students want to find some consensus and stability. The radical schools that want to shut down who they perceive to be bad people, I think are misguided.  But that may not be an altogether unhealthy desire, that they need right and wrong. So, I think we’re seeing these perverse dysfunctions in education because we the grownups have created that need.  It’s being filled by some sort of ideological, imposed consensus, rather than a real, genuine consensus.

CH: And this critique reaches back to the same idea, that we’ve lost the ability to pursue the human good?

RRR: Right. If we’re concerned about academic freedom and free speech (and we should be concerned about these things), we need to be clear about what the education at the institution is for, and why shouting people down harms the proper end of education. We’re a community of inquiry.  In a community of inquiry, if people can’t speak, in that sense there’s an imposed consensus, and there’s not a lot of inquiry any more. I’ve talked with young people, and they’ve told me that they find more and more, that it’s just wise not to say what’s on their minds. It’s too dangerous. Well, how can you make progress in the pursuit of truth if you can’t articulate what you think the truth is, and hear what others have to say in response? The problem with shutting down speakers is that it impedes us in achieving the end of education, which is to refine our ideas and make them more in accord with the truth. So I don’t think that academic freedom is an end in itself, it needs to be the means to the end -- having a healthy medium of inquiry. I don’t think that Holy Cross should invite a creationist to give lectures. It just doesn’t help advance the pursuit of truth.  You and I can come up with examples where “no, that’s not going to help.” The problem again is that then the sort of ideological frame of mind comes into play.  It’s a crazy view that the political opinions of half the country are taboo. How could any reasonable person think that? It’s irrational.

CH:  So we have to balance academic freedom with a duty to truth.  What duty to truth does a Catholic university in particular have, and how should it be balanced against academic freedom?

RRR: I think that a Catholic university has an absolute duty to teach what the Catholic Church teaches. A Catholic university that does not teach that which the Church teaches is not betraying its Catholic identity; it’s betraying its identity as a University. The purpose of a university is to encourage people to pursue the truth, and also to transmit the truth. And we believe, as Catholics, that what the Church teaches truths that are indispensable, not just for our salvation but also for our fuller understanding of the human condition. There’s a question of priorities. It’s not the job of the Catholic university to represent all possible views of what it means to be human; It is absolutely the responsibility to propose to students, and to the world, that the Church teaches what it means to be human. That entails defining priorities: hiring priorities, what kind of courses to acquire, etc. It’s not a violation of academic freedom to say that Catholic theology is required, but a Jewish Studies professor’s course is not required. It’s not a violation of academic freedom; that’s the institution establishing its priorities.   Nor is it a violation of academic freedom for the university not to invite speakers who hold positions contrary to what the Church teaches. Now there could be student groups or others who want to invite those people.  Then the university has to make a judgement about whether it harms the mission of the university, which is to transmit and encourage students to pursue the truth. In many cases, Catholic universities have confidence in their own students. If it is doing what it should be, which is to ensure Catholic teaching is clearly taught, it can tolerate dissent quite easily.

CH: How does that concern influence the other disciplines, outside of philosophy and theology?

RRR: It applies across the board. For instance, one problem we have is that in the sciences, there’s often a materialistic metaphysics that’s operating very close to the surface: that our brains are our minds, and we’re just neurons firing. A university should guard against teaching this. It’s scientism, it’s not science. The same goes for economics.  Economics is a powerful and important discipline that teaches us to think in a critical way about markets.  It models the human behavior in terms of maximizing authority, where that’s understood as maximizing one’s material interest. That’s fine for modelling, but it easily can lead to a generalization that humans are nothing more than utility maximizing achievements. That’s not true for the human person either. So in many different disciplines, there needs to be reflection on how we as an institution can present our view of the human person. Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech dealt with that.

CH: Are there any particular reforms you think should be made, or is it more a change in attitude toward the project of the University?

RRR: I think Catholic universities really need to get a grip on the hiring of faculty. We’ve spent too many decades now trying to imitate secular higher education. We need to return to the wisdom of our own tradition, and recognize that the metaphysical poverty of our time is quite acute, and we need to focus on hiring people, not the people who all agree, that’s absurd, you’re never going to find that [laughs], that’s the whole idea. You can’t even find Thomists who agree. It’s not a question of agreement, it’s a question of whether or not there are faculty members who believe that there’s truth, and that truth transcends a particular discipline. In Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech, he looked back with nostalgia on his years at Regensburg, when faculty members often would gather together and try to talk about the big questions, transcending the specialized knowledge that they had in philosophy or theology or science or literature or history. One has to grope towards these larger theories together, and we have to hire professors who are committed to try to do that together. That’s what it means to be liberal, not having a collection of specialists.  And I think because the Catholic Church opposes a compromise of truth about the human person, both as to our manifold destiny in God, as well as to our natural duties and responsibilities, and because it presents a comprehensive vision of the human person, we in particular have an inheritance that allows us to recognize the poverty of our present age. We should address that poverty by building institutions that pursue a larger vision.

FR: But that would entail first recognizing our inheritance.

RRR: Right.  Catholic universities have a natural excellence of the life of the mind. Most of what goes on at Catholic universities functions in the area of the natural virtues -- intellectual integrity, intellectual honesty and intellectual zeal. This is encouraged and elevated by the supernatural virtue of faith, but these are natural virtues. It’s possible that we can draw upon educational models and experiences at secular universities. It’s not that we only have to hire people with degrees from Catholic universities, etc., etc. But it does require a kind of recognition that higher education in the United States is not in good shape. We see this from this dysfunctional campus environments. And because it’s not in good shape, consequently we should not just be imitating what other, elite, universities are doing.  We should be returning to our sources and asking ourselves, “What is it that the Catholic tradition proposes as a vision of the Truth?”

FR: In conclusion, what piece of advice would you give undergraduates about how to take their four years of undergraduate education?

RRR: Don’t worry about what comes next. Bill Deresiewicz, who wrote a book called Excellent Sheep about today’s college students, said that there are two religions that dominate higher education today. One is a religion of political correctness, and the other is a religion of success. Both of those religions actually feed on each other, because political correctness is a way of baptizing a person to success. So I would say that success is a far more powerful god than political correctness. So beware of that idol. Study the things you love.  One of the great poverties of our age is that it really is a loveless age. People don’t feel that they even have permission to take the risks of love. If you love physics, study physics. If you love theology, study theology. Don’t worry about what you’re going to do for a living right now.  In the United States, we have society set up for people to do well. We don’t have a society set up for people to cultivate the life of the mind. Cultivate it now, and it will carry you through many of life’s difficulties and setbacks, which are inevitable even if you are successful.

No "Right to Healthcare"

Our current healthcare system is, to put it bluntly, unsustainable. The cost of treatment inflates yearly to exorbitant new levels, and the system as a whole is laden with inefficiencies. Those who lack adequate health insurance rarely receive preventative or proactive care and often times preventable illnesses become costly emergency-room cases. In an effort to address this crisis, the American left has united behind a common rallying cry: “Healthcare is a fundamental human right!” 

The aim of such rhetoric is admirable. Confronted with the stomach churning reality of the large number of Americans who die each year because they could not afford decent medical treatment in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, those who make such proclamations are responding to a very real injustice. Nonetheless, this maxim is a caustic one. In claiming that access to healthcare is a fundamental human right they both distort the concept of human rights and imply a perverse set of assumptions about what it means to live in a society. 

Fundamental human rights exist in order to preserve the dignity of the individual. Rights such as the right to free speech and the right to practice one’s religion ensure that individuals within a society are free to act according to their conscience and beliefs, so long as they do not impede others from doing so. The establishment of basic rights preserves the dignity of the individual by protecting him from unjust coercion from his fellow citizens and the government itself. Under this schema of human rights, the claim that the right to healthcare should be included quickly breaks down. Medical treatment, or the resources used to procure it, inevitably come from another human being. The assertion that one has a right to healthcare thus implies that one has a right to the property or resources of another human being, and ultimately, that one has a right to coerce another to serve his own ends. At this point, a “right” no longer serves to protect the dignity and integrity of the individual within a society; it involves an overreach into the integrity of another. 

At this point the argument in favor of the government providing a basic healthcare safety net to its citizens appears to collapse. And indeed, under the terms of the prevailing mode of moral discourse in our society it does. But that is because the discourse is shaped by an unnatural, pernicious notion: that as a society our obligations to our fellow human beings extend only as far as the bare portion we owe to them as an absolute right. Such a conception of what it means to live in a society is one-dimensional and cold. It ignores the cooperative aspects of human nature that compelled us to sacrifice our natural total freedom in order to enter into a society in the first place. It labors under the delusion that the height of human political good in a society is a sort of cage match- a contest of all against all monitored by an indifferent referee whose only purpose is to cut things short when certain lines are crossed. 

When the obligations we have to each other by virtue of our common human nature are cast only in legalistic, bare bones terms -- of force and rights, of what I can and cannot be made to do, of what I owe and am owed -- we lose the freedom required to regard others as human beings deserving of our compassion. We transform them, instead, into entries in an accountant’s ledger, against which we must balance the books. Those who advocate for a government that operates on such terms advocate for an unnatural government, a government that exists not to support a society but a pack of individuals in constant competition. Even our founding fathers recognized this when they allowed the federal government to collect taxes for the “general welfare.”

I object to the argument that healthcare is a basic human right, not because I disagree with the need for government sponsored healthcare, but on two other grounds. Firstly, that it dilutes the precious concept of what exactly a human right is and our reasons for protecting them. Secondly, because it operates under and thus affirms the assumption that our debts to one another extend no further than political rights; that our society can do no better than hostile and reluctant concessions. I believe more of human nature.

On the Malice of the NRA

In the wake of shooting in San Bernardino, California in December 2015, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement strongly condemning gun violence in the United States. It called on Catholics to urge their congressmen to enact legislation such as universal background checks, limitations on high capacity magazines, and improved access to mental health care. 

That did not happen, despite almost overwhelming public support for universal background checks (86% according to Gallup in 2015). To this day, federal firearm legislation remains stagnant. If this makes anything at all painfully evident, it is that Congress would prefer to take money from the NRA than ensure domestic tranquility. 

And so, it happened again. On October 1, 2017, a gunman fired into a large crowd of people attending a music festival and killed 58 of them, wounding over 500 others. He is reported to have fired about one-thousand rounds, and used a modification known as a “bump stock” to allow his semi-automatic rifle to fire at a rate nearly equal to that of an automatic. Why, as a society, are we allowing individuals to buy high-capacity magazines and modifications to essentially create military grade hardware? You don’t need a machine-gun with state of the art optics and a 100-round drum magazine to kill a small deer. 

The United States stands alone amongst highly developed countries when it comes to the savage frequency of mass shootings. Two researchers, Jacyln Schildkraut and H. Jaymi Elsass, cataloged data from mass shootings in eleven countries (Australia, Canada, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States) from 2000 to 2014. The US had more shooting deaths and incidents than the other ten countries combined. The common counter to this statistic would be the that, with the exception of China, the US is much more populated than the rest of the countries surveyed. However, when adjusted for population, only Switzerland, Norway, and Finland outrank the United States. 

Writers at PolitiFact note that data here is slightly skewed, as all three of these countries have very small populations coupled with only one or two mass casualty events. The US, nonetheless, appears to have a higher than ordinary number amount of shooting incidents than other countries of a similar level of development. This is a problem. A problem that lawmakers have continually failed to address. Neither Newtown, nor Aurora, nor Orlando, nor Las Vegas, nor Sutherland Springs have resulted in any substantial, long-term gun control legislation. 

Nor are mass shootings the only manifestation of America’s gun problem. As of September, The Washington Post reports that forty-three people were shot by toddlers in 2017. Meaning, on average, an American is shot by a toddler every week. It is absolutely ridiculous that children are being put in positions where they could cause serious harm to themselves or others, and US lawmakers refuse to do anything out of fear of the NRA. How many massacres, how many cases of children accidentally shooting each other, how many school shootings, before congress realizes that there is a gun problem in this country? How many more dead before something is actually done to address this problem?

Immediate legislative action is needed to prevent further deaths. I am not naïve. I do not think that stricter gun control will completely stop mass shootings, or gun related deaths. However, if even one life is saved, then we’re on the right track. 

But where to start? Universal Federal background checks might be a good place to begin. They would impede and, hopefully, prevent those with a history of crime or mental illness from purchasing a firearm, but would not prevent law-abiding citizens from purchasing firearms. Prohibiting high capacity magazines, and modifications that alter the rate of fire of semiautomatic weapons should be next. Then, of course, in response to these rather modest measures, a cacophonous chorus screams out “the 2nd Amendment!” Mind you, I do not wish to scorn the US Constitution, but it’s a bit odd that some in this country are using a document meant to shield US citizens in a bid to harm them. Do we imagine even for a moment that background checks could be unconstitutional? Or that any regulation whatsoever on magazine sizes is beyond the constitutional remit of federal power? I’m no legal scholar, and it may very well be against the law to enact the measures which I have proposed. But constitutionality is not the point of this piece; moral obligation is. The Constitution does not establish moral obligation; it establishes legality or illegality. If the 2nd Amendment does, indeed, guarantee unrestricted access to firearms, and any common-sense gun legislation would be unconstitutional, then the Constitution ought to be amended. For I consider laws which protect the lives of the citizenry to be the mark of a good state. If our founding document makes it impossible to prevent some of the 34,000 firearm fatalities this country sees each year, it is our duty and responsibility to modify them. Anything else is beyond immoral.

The Second's Opinion

Throughout the fall, the sight of mass shootings and similar gun based atrocities occurred so frequently that some American citizens and their politicians called for limitations as to prevent such horrors from happening again. In the months that followed the deadliest mass shooting in American history in Las Vegas in early October, victims of gun violence have been found at a Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and a California elementary school. Almost immediately after such acts, Democratic politicians called for a vigorous expansion of gun laws while politicians on the right refuse to act because they, like the base, believe that they possess an inherent right to carry firearms.

Using the Second Amendment as the explicit reminder of Americans’ intrinsic right to use firearms, these advocates challenge any legislation that their gun control opponents propose. Noting that the first gun control laws proposed by the American Founders in the early republic mandated that most household be armed, believers in the Second Amendment argue that its purpose is to allow for the defense of the pubic liberties, in case the government acts tyrannically and violates these fundamental rights. Granted that America in 2017 is not acting tyrannical, the Second Amendment is not mooted by the cultural bond it has with politically active hunters and firearm aficionados. Although these enthusiasts engage in lawful activities and vote accordingly, they are often vilified by gun control advocates for “assisting” in mass shootings. Look no further than the statement of the disgraced Harvey Weinstein, who proposed pursuing actions that would eliminate the NRA’s influence from the political process after the Las Vegas shooting. 

Despite the outcry condemning Weinstein’s statement, a significant portion of the country still cannot fathom the close bond that their fellow citizens have towards guns and continue to remain isolated from people who “cling to their guns.” Second Amendment skeptics, like like Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), have called for the banning of AR-15, a specific type of semiautomatic assault rifle. A Democratic colleague of the Senator Murphy, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), proposed a bill banning AR-15s in the U.S. Senate days after the deadly shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas. 

While the proposals of these Democratic Senators and other gun control advocates are well intentioned, they are severely misguided because the man who brought the shooting to an end in Texas used an AR-15. If there had been legislation banning the legal acquirement of an AR-15 that man, Stephen Willeford, could not have acted and the shooting could have lasted longer with even deadlier implications. Unlike the densely populated communities with police stations nearby where most gun control advocates reside, the communities reliant on their firearms for self-defense live significant distances away from law enforcement officials. Furthermore, Secret Service officers were able to prevent further injuries to Congressional leaders or House Majority Whip Steve Scalise because they were able to respond rapidly to the shooter at the Congressional Baseball practice. The presence of a deterrent firearm is the best precaution against mass shooting because it allows the rapid response that saves lives.

In the aftermath of the Las Vegas and Sutherland Spring shootings, gun control proponents frequently asserted that firearm laws needed be strengthened because it would then prevent future atrocities from ever occurring again. Such proposals are absurd; they fail to take into account the fact that the people who intend to break the law by murdering people will have no qualms about violating laws in order to obtain guns illegally. 

But what of background checks? They are a current requirement for people purchasing guns. However, due an error in the processing stage, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System failed to recognize that the shooter in Sutherland Spring was courtmartialed for domestic abuse because the Air Force failed to submit the records. The extension of background checks usually gains support across the partisan lines so policy proposals aimed at eliminating the inefficiencies between the agencies so that authentic checks could occur would most likely gain bipartisan support. Until recently, Congress has discussed bipartisan support for the elimination of bump stocks.

While Democrats and gun control advocates have been hesitant to respect the wishes of gun owners, they should listen to their voters because their options are going to be a matter of major political significance in eleven months. In a public opinion poll taken after the Sutherland Springs Shooting, Gallup found that only 36% of those surveyed would support legislation banning AR-15. With Democratic Senators representing deep-red states with a heritage of hunting, it would be politically imperative for Senators Tester, McCaskill, Heitkamp, Donnelly, and Manchin to oppose any regulation infringing upon the rights of gun owners. If they refuse, it is safe to assume that a politically coherent class of gun owners would be motivated by the NRA to select a Republican who shares their values. Hopefully these Senators will listen to their constituents, the American people, and the not the more radical members of their own party.

Is Catholicism a Faith of Compromise?

On October 4, the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J. Center hosted Dr. Julie Hanlon Rubio, professor of Christian Ethics at Saint Louis University, for her lecture entitled “Dare We Hope for Common Ground?” – an hour-long talk aimed at finding a solution to ease the contentious political tensions among Catholics in 2017 America. Rubio acknowledged the intense disunity among those she labels as “orthodox” and “progressive” Catholics – especially since the 2016 election cycle and pertaining to controversial social topics like abortion, same-sex marriage, and transgenderism – and suggested that although it is difficult to compromise on such issues, coming together on “middle” or less controversial matters can eventually pave the way for compromise on the more divisive ones. Rubio’s thesis stems from her suggestion that Catholics need not seek to “recreate the Kingdom of Heaven on earth” or demand that traditional Catholic social teachings ought to be reflected in public policy, but that the political sphere ought to exist independently from the teachings of Christ; thus, Rubio contends, in order to maximize diplomatic efficiency and promote harmony and respect among all Americans, it is both acceptable and encouraged for Catholics to set aside key Church doctrine as it relates to public policy. 

Rubio’s argument is certainly compelling to a certain extent: as she suggests, when two opposing parties come together to find common ground on a mutually agreeable issue, progress can in fact be made on a larger scale. However, these kinds of interactions have their own time and place. Rubio’s suggestion that Catholics and other people of faith must abandon certain truths and dogmas while engaging in political discourse in order to alleviate tension among political sectors ultimately promotes leniency and discourages belief in an absolute or objective truth. If Catholic doctrine asserts that the unborn must always be protected, that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman, and that gender is not malleable, et cetera, is it truly reasonable to expect Catholics to surrender these infallible truths for the good of the “middle ground,” and thereby favor the secular over the divine merely for the sake of political compromise? The unchanging truths of the Church are not relative to time, culture, or political tensions, and although conflict and disagreement as they pertain to these issues are inevitable on a societal scale, devotion to Christ’s message should not take a backseat to efforts to reach a partisan consensus. 

Freedom of conscience is absolute and ought not be held hostage by the need to compromise. When it comes to life and death, moral truth or moral falsehood, we have a duty never to compromise. 

Take 2016 Democrat vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, for instance. Kaine has consistently and unabashedly cited his Catholic faith as what led him to pursue a career in public service. Throughout the 2016 primary election cycle, Kaine touted his Jesuit education and time as a missionary in Honduras as being definitive experiences for him and his career: “My faith is central to everything I do,” he has said repeatedly. Despite his self-proclaimed devout Catholic faith, Kaine has adopted a position on abortion that is not only highly controversial among Catholic voters and directly contrary to Church doctrine, but it is also logically inconsistent and brings to light the very flaws and inextricable tension of Rubio’s argument. "I have a traditional Catholic personal position [on abortion], but I am very strongly supportive that women should make these decisions and government shouldn't intrude […] I'm a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade and women being able to make these decisions. In government, we have enough things to worry about. We don't need to make people's reproductive decisions for them," he said in an interview with CNN last fall. In other words, Kaine has insisted that he is personally pro-life, but publicly pro-choice. Here, he seems to be practicing political compromise and supporting a “middle” position similar to that outlined in Rubio’s lecture. His statement prompts an important question: Why does Kaine oppose abortion in his “private” life? If Kaine truly upholds the “traditional Catholic position” on abortion, as he contends he does, he would believe that all human life is inherently sacred, and all human beings have an intrinsic right to live – regardless of whether or not that human being has been born or other extraneous circumstances. One who advocates for the “traditional Catholic position” on abortion must also acknowledge that abortion is morally equivalent to murder. Murder is reprehensible. Period. If one truly believes that abortion is morally equivalent to murder, how can Rubio expect Catholics (and pro-lifers of all stripes) to compromise on the subject? 

By prioritizing political compromise, we as Catholics give up our ability to express our freedom of conscience and ability to believe in something absolutely. While Rubio claims that personal and political spheres must exist independently of one another, it is in dividing the personal and the political that we forfeit our beliefs, the doctrine of the Church, and our call to do God’s will. In a political and social era as polarizing, divisive, and perhaps even uncertain as our own, we must ask ourselves: should our faith be one of compromise or one of dutiful resilience? Should our faith be one of cultural and political relativism or one of passionate faith and a robust belief in God and His message to us? The Church survives and prospers not because of diplomatic compromise but because of the timeless teachings of God and the authentic passion of Her followers. Where compromise prospers, authenticity of faith perishes. As Rubio stated in her lecture, debate is a positive, healthy way to sustain differences of opinion and belief. But rather than giving in to compromise for the sake of compromise, we as Catholics have a duty to spread God’s message and the infallible truths of the Church. The Church both as an institution and as a worldwide community ultimately relies upon our lack of compromise. It is more important now than ever to hold firmly to this truth.

Let the Dogma Live Loudly in Us!

Last week, the social left’s disdain for people of faith rediscovered one of its most eloquent witnesses.  Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic law Professor at Notre Dame and nominee to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, faced sharp questioning over her religious beliefs at her confirmation hearing.  Senator Dick Durbin (D., Illinois) demanded to know whether she considered herself “an orthodox Catholic.” Senator Diane Feinstein (D., California) went further.  Implying that Barrett’s religious faith would prevent her from serving effectively, Feinstein declared, “The dogma lives loudly in you.  And that’s a concern.”  The two senators make an effective example of a process now well underway in this country -- the gradual exclusion of social conservatives and people of faith from the public square.  In pursuit of this goal, the rhetoric of “hatred” and “bigotry” has been one of the social left’s most effective tools.
 
In his essay, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, the philosopher Josef Pieper argues that language has two purposes: to express the truth, and to communicate it to someone. The two are fundamentally linked: if a speaker does not tell the truth, he fails to communicate at all.  There is precisely nothing to communicate.  If the content is knowingly false, it is nothing, devoid of meaning. Deceit transforms communication into obfuscation.  But words, even false words, have consequences.  Through a lie, we hoodwink the other person to act in a certain way, to keep silent, or to think as we would have them think.  Lies makes others the unwitting implements of our will. Divorced from truth, language becomes purely a tool of power.  In support of a political agenda -- and it almost always is -this sort of speech is a profound threat to any shared intellectual, religious, or political life.  It is in precisely these terms that we must understand the accusations “hatred” and “-phobia” so favored by the social left.
 
An example will illustrate the point.  We have all heard the term “homophobia” employed in any discussion of sexual morality, most likely lobbed at an observant Catholic or Evangelical Protestant.  Frequently, it accompanies an array of other lovely, communicative, dialogue-friendly terms: “hateful bigot,” “judgmental Pharisee,” “ignorance,” et cetera.  There are different terms for different topics: “Anti-choicer” for the pro-life crowd, “Islamophobe” for anyone who votes Republican, and so on.  Pick a cultural norm, imagine what you’d call a person who transgressed it, and the point is clear.
 
These examples all share a few common properties.  In each case, the accuser pretends to know the heart or mind of the person who holds the offensive view.  I know, for instance, that the “homophobe” actively detests gay people, and would very much like to see them chemically castrated -- even if I only met him five minutes ago, and he has done nothing but make an innocuous moral statement.  He is, by definition, a stranger to me -- and yet, I know him well enough to comment on his motivations and emotions, and to lecture him about the true reason he believes what he believes.  In short, all of these terms are used not in response to the expression of an actual emotion, but in response to a (usually “conservative”) moral or political belief. There is no ground for the accusation to be true or not; it relies instead on an assumption, often self-serving, about a person’s interior life.  Ultimately, the claim these terms make is either unverifiable or manifestly false -but that hardly matters. The accusation is not, however, an inconsequential one.  “Homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “sexist” and all the rest do not express an idea in terms which allow for discussion and response.  Instead, they act as rhetorical bludgeons, meant to intimidate, discredit, and ultimately silence the other side.  When we call people "homophobes,” whatever they say is immediately discredited.

Their ideas are rooted in an irrational hatred of other people.  Hatred is bad.  Therefore, the ideas are bad.  We can ignore them.  Hatredlanguage imposes a remarkable skew on any discussion -- one person is forced to defend both an idea and his own character, while the other has merely to make accusations.  In this fashion, any argument about a major social or moral issue may be short-circuited before it even begins -- not by superior argument, but by superior sophistry.
 
Branding a social or ethical position “hatred” or “-phobia” discredits the idea before it can be rationally evaluated.  The most terrifying consequences of such a strategy then become clear.  The accusation of bigotry does not rest with the individual; instead, it contaminates the entire system of belief from which the offender speaks.  Hence, a Roman Catholic’s opposition to abortion makes the entire religion “sexist” and “anti-choice.”  And as a result, any Roman Catholic is discredited in the public eye before his or her arguments can even be heard.  No matter whether people of faith argue on biological, philosophical, or constitutional grounds, the political claims will be readily dismissed as “theological,” and the people will be written off as “bigots.”
 
That is not to say, of course, that legitimate examples of racism, homophobia, hatred and all the rest do not exist.  The violence in Charlottesville and the attack on the Pulse nightclub attest to that.  Instead, the problem is that the semantic range of the term “hateful bigot” is progressively expanding.  We may truly describe the staff of the Daily Stormer as hateful bigots: as a matter of principle, they support ethnic cleansing.  To describe
Christians in the same terms because they dissent from cultural orthodoxy on sex, abortion, and other issues does not express any sort of truth. It merely advances a particular social agenda -- the attempt to expel people of faith from the public square.  Feinstein merely attests to the success this movement has enjoyed.

Senator Feinstein does not imagine a world without dogma; she imagines a world without any dogma but hers.   Whoever of us relies on accusations of hatred to win debates -whoever abuses language to silence people of faith -- builds up toward that same world. For all Americans, religious or not, this is troubling. The work of theologian and cultural critic R.R. Reno is insightful.  Faith, he argues, is one of the few elements of human life explicitly directed towards higher things, beyond the control of the state and the world.  It gives us the courage to resist expansion of both the state and the market, and to scorn the demands of a government that thinks itself all powerful. It motivates us also to defy injustice, to raise up the poor and promote solidarity.  In American society, people of faith are perhaps the best defence that freedom and solidarity possess.  Reno writes, “What’s inscribed on our hearts strengthens our spines.”  We live loudly in the world because the dogma lives in us.

Confederate Monuments Dishonor Our Heritage

The United States, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, is at a major political crossroads. The polarization within our ideological landscape has reached a nearly unsustainable level, and communication between Left and Right has all but ceased to exist. Whether it be the soft socialism of Bernie Sanders or right wing populism, political possibilities once thought unpalatable in the United States now present themselves as forces sufficient to motivate large portions of the electorate. Although destabilizing, political turmoil such as the one we find ourselves in now distances us from the status quo and allows us to more objectively examine the political world in which we live. It can push us to question our beliefs and values more deeply and accelerate social change like nothing else. One of the key questions that have been explored is the place Confederate monuments in public life. An honest examination of this issue leaves one inescapable conclusion; that they must be removed from public places of celebration and reverence.
 
Key to one’s take on the issue is one’s interpretation of the events of the Civil War. Apologists frequently claim that slavery was a minor issue, tangential to the conflict between the Union and Confederacy. The Sons of the Confederacy, an organization of men descended from Confederate veterans, claims that “The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.” Before any productive conversation on the issue can take place, this grave misconception and historical inaccuracy must be succinctly and thoroughly dispelled. The Confederate States rebelled against the Federal government to preserve their ability to maintain slavery. As Ty Seidule, a professor of history at West Point points out, “slavery was, by a large margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War”, adding that “the secession documents of every Southern state made clear, crystal clear that they were leaving the Union in order to protect their ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery.” Even a casual survey of first hand documents of the time reveals a patent and unobscured motivation on the part of Southern states to fight for the preservation of slavery.
 
To display Confederates monuments in prominent, public positions of honor is thus at odds with our values as both patriots and people of good conscience. In honoring the Confederate military, we honor an institution that sought to tear apart the political order of our country and caused a staggering loss of human life, all in the service of a deeply unethical practice. In memorializing “the Cause”, a term used by the Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that played the largest role in the establishment of such monuments, we pay honor to a depraved and horrendous worldview; one based in the inhumane subjugation of our fellow Americans. This is not merely a theoretical critique of Confederate memorials, or an assignment of intentionality, motive, or symbolic significance without evidence. An examination of the history of such memorials reveals a clear pattern to their construction. A modern study of the establishment of such monuments by the Southern Poverty Law Center reveals “huge spikes in construction twice during the 20th century: in the early 1900s, and then again in the 1950s and 60s.” The study also notes that these trends came as a reaction to attempts at establishing robust civil rights for black Americans. Jane Dailey, a professor of history at the University of Chicago concludes that “the monuments were not necessarily erecting a monument to the past”, but in fact were established with an eye toward “a white supremacist future.” It is thus clear that monuments to the Confederacy were not erected as a simply acknowledgement of history; they were built to perpetuate the legacy of one of the darkest moments in our country’s history and in furtherance of a twisted ideology. This trend indeed continues to this very day, as evidenced by the white nationalist protesters who gathered in Charlottesville in defense of
one such memorial.
 
Many claim that the removal of Confederate monuments constitutes an “erasing of history.” The memorials to the Confederacy that sit in the parks and public squares of our nation are not archaeological objects, placed long ago in abandoned cities by long dead cultures and people. They do not need to be preserved as though they were windows to a lost world, because they are very much living objects that speak for our own living world. Lt. Stephen Dill Lee, in a speech to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, claimed that his organization was charged with the “guardianship of history.” The notion that history needs to be guarded is a valuable one; we must learn from our history and shape our worldview from accurate historical accounts. In allowing Confederate memorials to remain in places of honor, we allow our history to fall into the hands of treacherous guardians; of those who wish to distort it and expunge from it the lessons that we all must heed.