Righting the Wrongs of Josh Hawley

I’ve been thinking about this NY Times piece on Josh Hawley (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/opinion/josh-hawley-religion-democracy.html?smtyp=cur&smid=fb-nytimes) ever since it was called to my attention last week.  I’ve mulled it over and round and again and again, and it tells me very little more about Hawley than I already knew.

But it does tell me a good deal about were religion is in America today: namely, poised between two pretty terrible fates.

On the one hand, there is the caricaturish fate of religion in the hands of those who want to anoint public leaders as Messiahs.  Some who see this happening (generally of the left) fear (or feared) that this will all come too true: that we’d end up living in a veritable handmaid’s tale of biblically-inspired tyranny.  Yet to any person with much religiosity in them, it was evident that this was never a likely fate.  The Christianity being preached by those in public office was hardly deep enough for that.  Religion was in danger of becoming empty of content.

On the other hand, there is the opposite fate, when all meaningful moral content is seen as religious.  That indeed is what happens in Stewart’s piece on Hawley.  While taking sure aim at Hawley for brushing everything with religious strokes, she also indicates—via her attack on Hawley’s attack on Pelagius and Kennedy—that any judgement of another’s freedom to choose their way of life, or define their own concept of existence, is detrimental to a “modern, liberal, pluralistic societ[y].”

Now I admit, as a Catholic, a modern minority that has at various times and places enjoyed hegemony and persecution, I do enjoy many things about living in said modern, liberal, pluralistic society.  However, if Stewart is right that such societies are endangered every time we judge one another’s freedom to choose a way of life, or define another’s concept of existence, then they are not ultimately sustainable.  Fundamentally, every society involves certain basic rules: don’t infringe on other’s life and property, for example.  And if I choose a way of life that involves murder, robbery, and pillage, then my modern, liberal, pluralistic society has ever right (and indeed a duty) to clap me in irons (or at any rate, flexicuffs).

There are going to be some moral absolutes in any society, however liberal and pluralistic.  The trick is to getting everyone in society to agree on what those are.  And a lot of it can be trickier than we’re willing to acknowledge.  If my neighbor lights up on his porch every day, so that my kids are exposed to the smoke when the wind blows over our fence, do I have a claim against him?  Does it matter if it’s pot or tobacco?  We can all agree that people have a right to wear whatever they want in their house—but what about their front yard?  Are laws against “indecent exposure” legitimate in a modern, liberal, pluralistic society?  What about public drunkenness?  What about dressing in drag, then?  What about wearing a swimsuit to the grocery store?  What about going armed to the grocery store?  What about stalking?  What about verbal harassment?  What if I want to put a ten-foot-tall Jesus, or Santa, or Buddha, or Thomas Jefferson in my front yard?  Or toll church bells every hour on the hour, or have a Muslim-style call to prayer that can be heard down the block?  And who gets to define all of these things?

The simple libertarian answer to these questions usually goes something like, “owners of businesses get to make their own business rules, and everyone else gets to move if they don’t like the neighborhood.”  But as anyone who’s bought or sold a property knows, moving is much easier said than done; and for many people it may not be economically feasible to live in a neighborhood that manages to avoid, say, litter and tramps.  So we have laws about littering, and we build homeless shelters; and suddenly we’re living in a modern, liberal, pluralistic welfare state.

The point is simply this: the whole question of how I choose to live is not, never has been, and never will be simply based on my own ability to choose my own way of life and define my own concept of existence.  Simply by living I rub elbows with my neighbors; and indeed, the more pluralistic my society, the more questions are going to arise as to how much of a right I have to live my life the way I want to, because the more different my neighbors and I are—the more pluralistic my neighborhood is—the more likely it is that we will rub each other the wrong way.

(Disclaimer: In actuality, I have nice neighbors.  We all happen to be fairly quiet.  But it could easily have been otherwise.  A few blocks down the street, for instance …)

So Stewart’s shade on Hawley—whatever its justification in his specific case—is actually rather dangerous.  It suggests that the easy solution to the problems of the republic is for everyone to live and let live.  Maybe, if life is kept tamped down to a few very basic details.  But as soon as you think about the things we crazy human beings actually want to do, it becomes apparent that the problem is not that we all might be too religious.  It’s that we might not be religious enough to love our neighbors, and treat them well, despite the fact that we all have different definitions of existence and different modes of life.

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