The Communion Question

I’ll assume you are an educated person who’s already read Josh Marshall’s post about … what to call it? Bush’s Al-Sadrist gambit: locked in a death-struggle with the forces of democratic reconstruction in your country? See if you can get zealous souls to lay down suppressing fire from the holy places. If you succeed, fine. If the holy places end up getting shelled when the targets lose patience, you cry religious persecution (even if it was pure self-defense) and make hay out of that. It’s win-win.

Let’s consider this issue of Bush’s attempt to “nudge the American bishops toward greater ‘activism’.” To wit: denying communion to Catholic political candidates who take church-disapproved stances on gay marriage, abortion and stem cell research.

I gather there are legal issues. Old render unto Caesar thing. Threats to tax-exempt status. I don’t understand this stuff so let’s move on.

A spot of devil’s advocacy: whyever would you even so much as think it was OK for the Catholic Church to start dictating to Catholic politicians how they can and cannot govern the country?

Let’s try to make it vivid. I’m old, so I remember way back in the 80’s when Karen Finley was a shocking performance artist. She declared that the reason she hated the Catholic church – or had left it, or didn’t like it, or resented it, or whatever it was – was because ‘she could never be Pope.’ Because she was a woman, one inferred. And this slight to her dignity was intolerable. On the other hand (one was tempted to point out) she was also chocolate-covered and had a yam stuck up her … Anyway, it didn’t look as though she was exactly grooming herself for papal ascendancy, or particularly wanted the job, or was in any way temperamentally suited for it.

Of course, you might say this confuses cause and effect. And you would certainly be right. But never mind how Ms. Finley’s mind works. From an orthodox Catholic point of view, the response to such a woman may well be: look, we aren’t exactly a ‘come as you’ are outfit. Or, rather we ARE, but we aren’t a ‘feel free to stay as you are outfit.’ We have rules. If that isn’t for you – well, don’t let the cathedral door hit your yam-filled … anyway … on your way out to join the Unitarians. This isn’t the middle-ages so we won’t burn you in the town square as a heretic witch, but you don’t get to haggle, let alone dictate doxastic terms to the hierarchy. That’s not how it goes.

I take it lots of Catholics feel this way and get impatient with demands for women priests, etc., on this account. Catholic Church: love it or leave it. Anyway, it’s this brittle-hard thought that seems most plausibly applicable against the abortion-tolerating likes of John Kerry. If he can’t follow a few simple rules of the club, he’s out of the club.

What is wrong with this line of devil’s advocacy? (Pardon me if the solution is perfectly obvious to you, but I haven’t seen anyone state it in pedantic fullness with reference to this recent debate.) One could point out that it seems suspicious to burrow into the Bible, then look Republicans and Democratics up and down, then find only the Democrats coming up short.

If you are happy with this answer as to why this whole communion-denying thing is wrong, you can stop right here. On the other hand, if you are morbidly determined to delve deeper, as I am, then the problem is that the church is on the verge of telling John Kerry not just what he is permitted to believe, but what he is permitted to permit others to believe, or at least which of their beliefs he is permitted to permit them to act upon. And many of those legislatively dictated to by the church in this way, by Catholic politician proxy, will not themselves be Catholics.

This threatens to make religious intolerance into religious duty for Catholic politicians.

But can’t the church demand not just that Kerry believe whatever it says, but do its bidding absolutely and unquestioningly? Well, yes. At this point I could ask whether we have learned nothing from the Thirty Years War. Have we all forgotten those pictures of what it was like at Magdeburg? Oh, but I see the Wikipedia hasn’t gotten to that battle yet. OK, you’re forgiven. But it wasn’t just the Protestants taking lumps. Couple kidney shots to Mother Church and, mirabile dictu!, religiously tolerant political liberalism is born – not from principle, but in practice – from a divine mother of exhausted Catholicism, no longer willing to die just to kill Protestants, and a noble father of Protestantism, no longer willing to die just to kill Catholics. As the saintly Mill writes:

But when the heat of the conflict was over, without giving a complete victory to any party, and each church or sect was reduced to limit its hopes to retaining possession of the ground it already occupied; minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becoming majorities, were under the necessity of pleading to those whom they could not convert, for permission to differ. It is accordingly on this battle-field, almost solely, that the rights of the individual against society have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claim of society to exercise authority over dissentients openly controverted. The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.

But let’s go back a step. Why is a Catholic politician’s opposition to abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, the equivalent of religious bigotry or intolerance? Why isn’t it a case of: society has to arrive at collective judgments about certain ethically-fraught issues, and Catholics get to put in their two cents right alongside everyone else’s. Lots of people oppose these things on religious or (just barely possibly) other moral grounds. If some of these people get elected, which wouldn’t be terribly surprising, are they supposed to not vote their consciences? Must they fabricate some ersatz ethical persona to be their liberal public face? Are they supposed to check religion at the door? (And isn’t it a tad early to start worrying about full-blown religious war?)

Let’s subdivide the question. There are concerns about principle. Higher order commitments to tolerating religious difference, freedom of conscience, so forth. What are you committed to when you do a crazy thing like swear an oath to uphold the Constitution? And there are concerns about slippery slopes. If you open fire from the holy sites, exactly what sorts of harms do you invite – to your targets, to yourself, to the holy sites?

Many sources of ticklishness hereabouts. The distinction between freedom of conscience and freedom of action. Presumably the bishops do not propose to criminalize pro-choice beliefs, beliefs in the permissibility of stem-cell research, the desirability of gay marriage. They merely mean to force Catholic politicians to work to criminalize acting on these beliefs. And they want to kick those who do not out of the church. Is this incoherent or inconsistent with the structure of political liberalism? Not obviously, I think.

The question is also ticklish for the way it draws attention not just to what you believe but your reasons why. From a politically liberal point of view – and I don’t mean liberalism in the Democratic party sense – it is hardly reasonable for me to expect you to accept my belief that P on the grounds that Q, if Q is a thing my religion hands down from on high, and you don’t accept my religion. Turning the point around: if I can’t demand that you believe my religion, then I can’t demand that you acknowledge my religious reasons, then I can’t demand that you believe what I believe exclusively on the basis of my religious reasons.

But how are we to sort out actual reasons for believing things about abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage? The human heart is a complicated place. People often aren’t exactly sure why they have the moral convicitions they do, after all. We don’t ordinarily forbid people to vote their conscience even if they aren’t able to produce a satisfactory, self-critical anatomy of their conscience.

This issue is considerably simplified, however, by the circumstances of the present case: if the bishops proposing to deny candidates their wine and wafers aren’t absolutely sure that their reasons for doing so are purely religious, then they do not have sufficient grounds to deny wine and wafers. (If the issue is even in part that the bishops are Republicans at heart, that wouldn’t be a sufficiently Catholic reason for withholding communion from Democrats, I take it.) But if the reasons here are purely religious, then surely that is a sufficient reason for the church not imposing beliefs based exclusively on these reasons on other citizens who do not accept the religion, hence do not accept the reasons.

But does it follow – here we are back at this point again – that religious politicians shouldn’t vote their consciences, if they can’t cook up non-religious reasons for what their religious consciences tell them? Can’t they make the weight of their opinion felt in a democratic vote even, especially if they are elected officials? Must their opinions count for less, because these pious folk are liberally obliged to bite their tongues?

This is a delicate point to explain. Put it this way. The machine of religious Catholicism and the machine of political liberalism frankly do not interlock in totally, manifestly satisfactory fashion. Matthew Yglesias makes the point in characteristically cut-to-the-chase style:

What’s the deal with non-Catholic leaders holding these respectful meetings with the Pope. I mean, as I see it, there are roughly two possibilities on the table here. Maybe the Pope really is the head of the One True Church outside of which no salvation is possible. If you believe that, then clearly you ought to treat the man with a great deal of respect. But then again, if you believe that, then you really ought to join his church. If you don’t believe that – because you’re an atheist, Protestant, Jew, what have you – then the Pope is kind of just an eccentric old man surrounded by strangely deluded toadies.

Anything for votes, I guess. But really, to sit around and listen to the Pope critiquing your foreign policy is just absurd, and it doesn’t get any less absurd just because your foreign policy is terrible.

The honest answer to the question of how these two machines – Catholicism and liberalism – get functionally interlocked is that there’s a thick bit of compressible rubber, if you will, that pads the points of contact where you would expect friction and grinding. The rubber is composed, I suppose, of legs – legs made rubbery through exhaustion from bloody religious war, as per the Mill passage. Quite a stock of this rubber built up in the 17th Century. I think we are still working through that stock, and it’s absolutely crucial to a functioning liberal democratic state that it not run out.

So anyway, it’s a bit embarrassing to say you are doing what you are doing because you don’t have the stomach to fight to the death with an old guy in a funny hat. So you sort of make like you have deep respect for him, and have this higher-order commitment to tolerance and all; and, after a couple centuries of putting on this little act, it sinks in. You actually do really respect him and you really do have this higher-order commitment to tolerance; even if it’s not exactly clear what else about your beliefs has been adjusted in the meantime to allow for this, in all logical strictness.

So anyway, what’s a poor Catholic politician to do?

How do you decently serve two masters: commitment to democratic liberalism; obedience to the church? It seems to me the way this vague dissonance works itself out, in healthy practice – rubber compressing and expanding – is that you reserve the right to assert your religious values, even over your fellow citizens, if you really, really believe it, and it’s really, really important. On the other hand, you commit to letting other people, non-church members, not only believe some things that the church forbids, but actually act on such beliefs. If it’s not so important. For example, even though absolutely everyone absolutely ought to come to mass on Sunday, it isn’t illegal for them not to, nor should it be.

The three issues that are presently on the table – abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage – offer an instructive array of contrasts along this important/not-so-important axis. I understand that some people really do sincerely believe that abortion is murder. I have a hard time quite believing that they really do believe that. I sort of suspect what’s really going on in their heads is a cranky loathing of a culture of sexual permissiveness is wandering from it’s proper station and hallucinating that it is a sincere belief that abortion is murder. That said, I do not have any great difficulty believing that people deeply and sincerely oppose abortion as a very grave ethical affront to the dignity and respect of the human person. Or something like that. I can see that they sincerely believe it’s not a private choice. And I can see that they think the number of abortions performed makes this a serious issue – too serious for them to sit on their hands. So their religious faith in the grave sinfulness of this practice obliges them to go forth and impose their more enlightened values on the heathen to the best of their ability. I really wish they wouldn’t, but I can see why they might feel obliged. And I do see that liberalism has this escape clause, although we all hope it doesn’t get much use. If a thing is intolerable, don’t tolerate it – even if this threatens to shred the fabric of liberalism.

Now, stem cell research. I fail to see how anyone could fail to see that the proof that stem-cell research constitutes ethically intolerable meddling with the human person … is subject to long and uncertain interpretation. (And if someone wants to cut the proof short by means of Leon Kass’s wisdom of repugnance, then they must submit to an equal and oposite recital of how repugnant I find Kass’ wisdom – ergo, on Kassian grounds, I am instructed to reject it out of hand.) Even if there is some case to be made that stem-cell research is an affront to the dignity of the human person, it ought to be clear how reasonable people can see it otherwise. And it sure isn’t murder. So stem cell research seems like almost a model candidate for liberal toleration. The church can forbid Catholic scientists from engaging in stem cell research. But Catholics should generally be tolerant of other people having other beliefs on the subject, so Catholic politicians should seriously consider voting to allow other people to do something they themselves regard as absolutely impermissible, and which they might get denied communion for engaging in themselves.

What about gay marriage? Not so conceptually complex as stem cell research. It’s easy to understand what entities are involved without taking advanced biology. Unlike the abortion case, it’s pretty hard to see that allowing this practice will do any damage except to the souls of those immediately involved. (Yes, it will have incidental effects on others. But everything effects everything, after all. That’s not a good reason to deny people some sort of private sphere, even if its surface is somewhat fictionally-conceived.) The politically liberal part of the church-meets-state deal generally mandates allowing people who do not belong to your religion to do things to their own souls which you regard as moderately harmful, so long as they aren’t harming other people.

Whatever complaint the Catholic church has against gay marriage cuts equally hard against Protestantism, if it comes to that. Catholics are committed to the view that Protestantism is distinctly non-optimal for your soul. Actually, the case against Protestantism, from a Catholic point of view, is possibly stronger than that against gay marriage. Because (despite what you may have heard) there are no gay activists going door to door. But there are Protestant missionaries spreading the word. From a Catholic point of view, this must be regarded as spiritually regretable. Yet it is tolerated.

Of course, the likes of Stanley Kurtz are out there trying to drum up statistics from Scandinavia about how traditional marriage is wrecked by gay marriage. But it is hardly acceptable for bishops to start denying their flock communion on the basis of highly debatable Scandinavian sociology. Yet it is acceptable, though perhaps unfortunate, for politicians to make decisions about legislation on the basis of debatable Scandinavian sociology.

So it seems to me that a Catholic politician could take any number of stances on these issues, consistent with strong commitment to his/her church and strong commitment to liberal democratic tolerance, freedom of conscience, and so forth.

You could be staunchly pro-life on the grounds that this is a serous enough issue that you simply have to push your private faith in the public sphere.

You could be staunchly pro-choice on the grounds that, although you as a Catholic are strictly forbidden, you ought to respect the non-Catholic beliefs of others who sincerely regard abortion as permissible. The Kerry position, I take it.

You could be staunchly anti-stem cell research on the grounds that you just plain find it repugnant. (Not an intellectually admirable ground, but there is no law against legislators being Kassians.)

You could be staunchly pro-stem cell research on the grounds that, even though your church forbids you to engage in it, you can see that it is a complicated issue about which other people reasonably think and feel differently; so you have no business meddling in their private business.

You could be staunchly anti-gay marriage because you read the National Review more than is good for your poor head. And because you find the thought of gay sex icky. (See above about how legislators are not legally obliged to be mature and enlightened souls, like us liberals.)

You could be staunchly pro-gay marriage because, even though your church severely forbids you to get one for yourself, lots of gay people aren’t Catholics and what they do in their bedrooms, and the sorts of mutual contracts they make, are really none of your business to interfere with, legislatively. (Voting in favor of gay marriage could be, for a Catholic politician, exactly like a strict teetotaller voting to lift prohibition on the grounds that he knows his neighbor wants to drink beer, and he doesn’t think he has a right to stop his neighbor from making that bad decision in the privacy of his own home.)

In short, it ought to be left to the private consciences of Catholic politicians to decide how they want to vote, and they are hardly forbidden from finding some way to express their religious faith in politics. (The church tells them what they personally have to believe and do; but they have to decide whether and to what extent they should force that stuff on their non-Catholic fellow citizens.) Josh Marshall links to a Catholic News article – now, oddly, the link has turned non-functional – in which one priest or bishop or official (can’t remember) makes an impassioned plea on behalf of private conscience along these lines, i.e. against the whole ‘denying communion’ idea.

But now the hard-line Catholic smirks: so you want all our politicians to turn Protestant, after all? Letting their consciences, rather than the church, be their guide?

Well, no. That’s not the right way to read it, although this is a natural enough misunderstanding. Think of it this way. When you have a thing like the Catholic church interlocking with a thing like modern liberal democracy, there is no avoiding the need for religious persons, and especially religious politicians, deciding when to tolerate and when to say that something has become so intolerable that one must act, possibly illiberally, on the basis of faith. The spongy rubber of living and letting live will mostly stay pretty spongy, but at a few points it may indeed be so cruelly compressed that it becomes hard and the machines start grinding away at each other. But there are excellent reasons for the Catholic church to delegate decisions about determining when this has happened – when push has come to shove – to politicians. Partially it’s just more seemly if the politicians make the decisions. Then, even if they are imposing their religion on fellow citizens who are not their coreligionists, they can at least pretend they were only acting on the basis of debatable Scandinavian sociology, or some other acceptably secular motive.

But mostly the reason to let the politicians decide, rather than the church hierarchy, is that – as aforementioned – the Catholic hierarchy is inherently hard and rigid. If you tell a hard, rigid thing to take over the job of a bit of spongy rubber, this amounts to abolishing the spongy rubber, because the hard and rigid thing just can’t substitute. As it stands, Catholic politicians are doing to touchy work of accommodating an illiberal structure to a liberal political environment. If this is taken out of their hands, either the hierarchy needs to liberalize or … there is going to me a lot more painful grinding of gears: top-down deliveries of dogma vs. liberal freedom of conscience.

If the church is going to start telling politicians not just what they have to believe, in order to stay members in good standing, but what they have to go out and make other people – non-church members – believe and do, there must be limits, or the liberal bargain breaks down. The church can’t just impose every last doctrinal detail of official Catholic faith on everyone in the United States. Even President Bush wouldn’t like it if the church got so solidly behind him that it tried to force him to go to Catholic mass on Sunday. But what will be the principle of self-restraint on the basis of which this church will advocate forcing some of its doctrines, not others, on non-Catholics? The church is not well-engineered to self-restrain in this liberal way. Conceivably a very few absolutely life-and-death issues could be singled out for attention, with the caveat that absolutely all the rest are to be allowed to slide. If the bishops came out and said they are going to force politicians to toe the line on abortion because abortion is according to the Pope himself a sort of ethical holocaust in progress … well, I would feel sorry for John Kerry on that day. But, on the other hand, no one says you can’t stand up for your religious beliefs – or be made by your church to stand up – if they tell you there’s some sort of ethical holocaust going on. [UPDATE: It occurs to me that you couldn’t plausible exclude staunch, papal opposition to the death-penalty from the category of ‘life and death issues’. So there is probably no way to muster plausible spiritual consistency here without frustrating the partisan spirit of the proposal.]

But once you start just throwing everything in the pot – stem-cell research, gay marriage, which are not life-and-death by any stretch of the imagination – then it looks like the church itself has just gone and made Republican hot-button issues into holy dogma, i.e. they’ve just joined the Republican Party. (Bye, bye, tax-exemptions.) This notion that the church ought to be on call when the GOP’s immediate tactical needs are proclaimed, ex cathedra – call this the Rovian heresy – is well expressed in a bit Josh Marshall quotes:

Karl Maurer, vice president of Catholic Citizens of Illinois, a conservative grass-roots group, said he would add sodomy and gay marriage to that list. Some liberal grass-roots groups have said they believe the church’s teachings against war and the death penalty are worthy of equal treatment.

“Once you open this door, what’s going to come rolling through it?” asked Deal W. Hudson, editor of the magazine Crisis and a key Catholic ally of the Bush administration. “Pretty soon, no one would be taking Communion.”

Hudson said he believes the denial of Communion should begin, and end, with Kerry. Even better, he said, would be if priests would read letters from the pulpit denouncing the senator from Massachusetts “whenever and wherever he campaigns as a Catholic.”

Alternatively, the church could be consistent and just demand that Catholic politicians demand the whole farm. But that gets us back to forcing everyone to go to mass on Sunday, which is clearly absurd.

Well, I’ve rattled on, haven’t I? One last thing. To what degree is this really a slippery slope, down which we are really likely to slip if the Catholic church really starts getting heavily into politics by withholding communion from politicians – or even from voters? If pro-choice, pro-stem-cell reserach, pro-gay marriage forces start taking heavy incoming fire from the church, are they going to fire back, and what form will that fire take?

Obviously we are in no serious danger of fighting in the streets, let alone religious war. But it does seem reasonable to point out to any Catholics who support these denials of communion that a predictable result will be probably permanent discomfort at the joints where the church touches the legal order of the liberal democratic state. The church is not a liberal institution, nor does it wish to become one. Nor does it wish to exile itself from modern society. Nor does it wish to overthrow the Western tradition of liberal democracy, these last couple centuries, and advocate a sharp turn to absolute theocracy. This means the church has no resort but to cultivate what will probably be somewhat cognitively dissonant padding – semi-Catholic absolutist/semi-liberal – between itself and the liberal state. At present this cushion resides largely in the inevitably somewhat conflicted minds of Catholic politicians and voters. If the church forbids its presence there, by denying communion to those who do not resolve the muddle consistently in favor of Catholic dogma – where will it go? I suspect most Catholics don’t really want for some people to start thinking Catholics are unfit for public office in virtue of their faith, which makes them unable to honestly swear to uphold the Constitution. Even less do most Catholics want for many people to think this because it becomes sort of true, even though it didn’t used to be true at all, back in good ol’ JFK’s day.

Or maybe Karl Rove has done the numbers and figured out it’s going to be OK. It’s all good.