Not so many years ago The Christian Century, one of the leading Protestant journals in the United States, ran a series entitled, "How My Mind Has Changed." The purpose of the series was to give well-known religious thinkers an opportunity to take a second look at some of the positions they had adopted earlier in their professional careers. Would they still hold those views decades later? In a sense, I've been invited to do the same thing here—in the light of developments on the U.S. religious and political scenes. Although I continue to have a deep interest in the relationship between religion and politics, most of my formal writing, as opposed to weekly columns and public lectures, on the subject was published in the 1980s. I am revisiting that material here—especially 1987's Caesar's Coin: Religion and Politics in America, and my John Courtney Murray Lecture, published the following year.¹

I held then, as now, that discussions about the relationship between religion and politics—including the formulation of public policy through either executive or legislative action—often lack clarity and even accuracy because key terms are collapsed one into the other. Morality is equated with religion, religion with the church, and the church with the clergy. Thus, when people insist that morality and politics do not mix, they really mean that religion and politics do not mix. And when they complain that the church should not get involved in politics, they mean that the clergy should not be involved in politics—liberal clergy if the critics happen to be politically conservative, and conservative clergy if the critics happen to be politically liberal.

Unfortunately, morality and religion are often equated by people on both sides of the political spectrum. They assume that all morality is religiously based. Thus, many on the right insist that religion and politics do mix because public policy cannot be morally blind. And many on the left insist that morality and politics do not mix because public policy has to be religiously blind. I felt in 1987 that both sides were wrong, and I still do.

Public morality—a morality that affects the shaping of civil law and public policy—has to do with society's estimation of what is right and wrong, just and unjust, fair and unfair, in sum, of what is beneficial or harmful to the common good. Religion, on the other hand, has to do with a particular faith community's estimation of what God regards to be right and wrong, just and unjust, fair and unfair, beneficial or harmful to the common good. For those who are located at neither extreme, morality is rooted in reason, the imagination, and human experience generally—what the Catholic moral tradition refers to as the natural law. Religion, on the other hand, is rooted in what is taken to be divine revelation, that is, an experience of God, through whatever means—the Bible, worship, private prayer, mystical experience—that is perceived and accepted in faith as an experience of God. According to this schema, it is possible to reach moral conclusions about one's personal life or about public policy independently of any particular religion and of the revelation, in whatever form, on which a particular religion is presumably based. This also means that it is possible to be moral without being religious—an inference that many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in the United States would vehemently resist.²

The point here is not that morality and religion are completely and absolutely separate from one another. Morality can also be rooted in, and reinforced by, religious faith. Most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, mandate ways of living in relationship to God, the world, one's neighbors, and even oneself—as in the prohibition of suicide, with or without the help of a medical professional. Various religious traditions–and certainly the three just mentioned—are concerned with human dignity, justice, peace, and the common good. There is a large overlap, therefore, between public morality and the realm of religion.

The Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World pointed out that "the earthly and heavenly city penetrate each other."³ Accordingly, the church must have the freedom "to preach and to teach, and to pass moral judgment even on matters that belong to the political order, when human rights or the salvation of souls are at stake."⁴ Consequently, when religious communities and their pastoral leaders perceive a moral content to public policy issues—especially, although not exclusively, in medicine and bioethics—they will be drawn inescapably into specific public policy debates and, to that extent, into the political process itself.

How they are drawn in, and on what terms, will differ in accordance with the kind of religious community each is. Although Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Jews, and Muslims are deeply interested in many of the same issues, their approaches and processes of formulating their moral views differ considerably. The teaching of the Catholic Church at Vatican II is that the church always owes the public a careful accounting of how it came to its moral conclusions. In that process, it seeks no special status or privilege, and it should be accorded none.

However, it is not only religious communities that recognize the moral dimension of many public policy issues. A growing segment of secular society also recognizes that many major public policy issues cannot be resolved without first grappling with pertinent moral questions. One has only to consider the emerging public policy questions generated by extraordinary advances in medical science and technology—questions that concern life-extending health care and its financial cost in a situation of limited resources and competing needs, organ transplants, abortion, surrogate motherhood, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, genetic therapy, embryonic and fetal experimentation, and genomics. Again, one cannot limit these areas of moral overlap to medicine and bioethics. Similar questions abound in the economic, military, ecological, and artistic sectors as well.⁵ Some of the early political controversies in George W. Bush's presidency have also been moral controversies—stewardship of the environment, fairness in the distribution of tax cuts, the impact of increased military expenditures on available appropriations for education and prescription drugs for the elderly, federal funding for faith-based initiatives and human embryonic stem cell research, capital punishment, and the appointment of an attorney general whose publicly expressed views and votes as a U.S. senator are in some conflict with his sworn constitutional responsibility to uphold laws and executive orders that he had once opposed.

All of these matters require moral as well as political judgments made on the basis of answers to antecedent questions such as: What is right and wrong? What is just and unjust? What is fair and unfair? What does the common good demand? So long as the moral dimension of major public policy issues is recognized and addressed, religious bodies and religious leaders will be drawn inevitably into public policy debates. And so long as religious organizations and their leaders are engaged in such debates, objections will be raised by those who deny any distinction between morality and religion. The objectors' misconceptions are unwittingly fueled by representatives of religious communities who believe and assert that all morality is indeed religiously based, that we derive all moral principles from the Bible, the Qur'an, or from the official teachings of some body of religious leaders—or from some combination thereof.

But these religious figures fail to make a proper distinction not only between morality and religion, but also between moral principles and their application in the political, or public policy, order. To their credit, the U.S. Catholic bishops honored this distinction in their widely celebrated pastoral letter, "The Challenge of Peace," issued in 1983:

The key ideas in the preceding paragraph are: "prudential judgments . . . based on specific circumstances . . . which can change . . . or which can be interpreted differently by people of good will." In every instance where religious authorities presume to apply the moral principles of their tradition to a specific issue of public policy, those authorities must recognize and acknowledge that the judgments rendered are always prudential in nature. That is, they are an application of some higher moral principle and are not identical with the moral principle itself. In that regard, "people of good will" can reach a different interpretation of the particular application because "specific circumstances" are always involved, and those circumstances can, and usually do, "change." If any situation demands a second opinion, if indeed not a third and a fourth, it is one where individuals or groups presume to speak in the name of God or some equivalently transcendental authority regarding a complex matter of public policy that has a putatively moral dimension to it.

Most of the debate between Archbishop, later Cardinal, John J. O'Connor of New York and Governor Mario M. Cuomo of New York during the presidential campaign of 1984 was really over this point.⁷ The governor insisted, as he did in his widely reported speech at the University of Notre Dame on September 13 of that year, on making a distinction between moral principle and its political application with regard to the highly charged issue of abortion. He pointed out that "there is no inflexible moral principle which determines what our political conduct should be."⁸ A few weeks earlier, on August 24, Archbishop O'Connor had said that he considered it his duty to correct politicians if they offered erroneous views on Catholic teachings. Governor Cuomo replied later that same day that he had no quarrel with the archbishop on matters of doctrine. Their disagreement on the abortion issue, the governor pointed out, was over political tactics, not church teaching. The archbishop, however, had erased this distinction between moral principle and its practical application in the political order. For him, to disagree with a particular application of a moral principle was tantamount to dissenting from the moral principle itself. "I recognize the dilemma confronted by some Catholics in political life," Archbishop O'Connor would say later in the presidential campaign. "I cannot resolve that dilemma for them. As I see it, their disagreement, if they do disagree, is not simply with me; it is with the teaching of the Catholic Church."⁹

The late Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray delivered a profound understatement when he suggested that "the American mind has never been clear about the relation between morals and law."¹⁰ Either morality has been thought to be determinative of law and public policy generally, or law and public policy generally have been thought to be determinative of morality. The mentality that informs the first is that whatever is morally right should be enforced by law and embodied in public policy; the mentality that informs the second is that whatever is legal or embodied in public policy is by that fact morally good or at least morally acceptable. "From the foolish position that all sins ought to be made crimes," Murray argued, "it is only a step to the knavish position that since certain acts . . . are obviously not crimes, they are not even sins."¹¹

But there is a great difference between the moral law—as perceived through revelation and/or through the natural law, which is "written in [our] hearts" (Romans 2:15)—and the civil law. The former "governs the entire order of human conduct, personal and social; it extends even to motivations and interior acts." The latter "looks only to the public order of human society; it touches only external acts, and regards only values that are formally social."¹² The scope of civil law and public policy is limited, and its moral aspirations minimal. Therefore, to have made the moral argument for or against some practice, such as abortion, is not necessarily to have made the legal or public policy argument.

Civil law and public policy generally enforce "only what is minimally acceptable, and in this sense socially necessary," Murray continued. "Beyond this, society must look to other institutions for the elevation and maintenance of its moral standards—that is, to the church, the home, the school, and the whole network of voluntary associations that concern themselves with public morality in one or other aspect."¹³

Murray's view is entirely consistent with the Catholic tradition generally and with that of Thomas Aquinas in particular. Although concerned with leading the citizenry to virtue, civil law and public policy can do so only gradually. "Therefore it does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect people the burdens of those who are already virtuous, namely, that they should abstain from all evil," Aquinas wrote. "Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils."¹⁴

Laws and public policies must be enforceable to be effective, but they cannot be enforceable unless there is a consensus within society to support their enforcement. Otherwise, the laws and policies will be ignored or flouted and respect for law generally will be diminished. Murray proposed four principles to address this problem. First, each religious group within society retains the right to demand moral conformity from its own members. No law or public policy can impede that. Second, no religious group has the right to expect government to impose or prohibit some act of behavior when there is insufficient support for such action within society. Third, any religious group has the right to work toward a change in moral standards within a pluralist society, through the use of methods of persuasion and pacific argument. And fourth, no religious group has the right to impose its own religious or moral views on others by using force, coercion, or violence. It would indeed be "incongruous," Murray noted, if certain religious groups should pursue their spiritual and moral ends by methods of power rather than of persuasion.¹⁶

These principles were not "made in heaven" he insisted. "They are made on earth, by the practical reason of man . . . Their supposition is the jurisprudential proposition that what is commonly imposed by law on all our citizens must be supported by general public opinion, by a reasonable consensus of the whole community."16 Indeed, exclusive appeals to the Bible or to the teaching of the Church are the weakest forms of public argument in a religiously pluralist society. And they are becoming increasingly ineffective even when directed toward members of one's own religious community, as survey after survey has shown the widening gap in the Catholic Church between the official teachings of the pope and the bishops on matters of sexual ethics and the views and practices of the laity and so-called lower clergy. If a moral argument is to be compelling, it has to persuade those who do not share the same view of divine revelation or the same religious tradition. As noted above in the reference to Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, there has to be a careful accounting of how the moral arguments were derived and how the moral conclusions have been drawn from them.

The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago made this very point in a major address at Georgetown University on October 25, 1984. He argued that, in order for a moral principle to be incorporated into civil law or public policy, the burden is always on the moving party, to use a legal term, to make the case that the matter is one of public, rather than of private, morality. Such claims are rarely, if ever, self-evident. "Obviously," Bernardin noted, "in a religiously pluralist society, getting consensus on what constitutes a public moral question is never easy."¹⁷ But it has to be done. The moving party—in this instance, a religious group—has to make "a rationally persuasive case" if it expects the authority of the state and its civil laws and public policies to be invoked on a given issue. What is required more than anything else is reasonableness. When religious groups enter the so-called public square, they cannot expect, much less demand, immediate attention and deference. They should assume only the right to participate in public policy debates, not to dictate their outcomes. Their impact on the outcomes will be as strong as their arguments and as positive as the political and financial realities will allow.

In the final analysis, however, the most effective way for any religious group to influence public policy is through the force of its own example, whether in the fields of economics or health care. Do we want to change laws and public policies regarding the rights of workers, for example? Then let it begin with church institutions themselves. "While the Church is bound to give witness to justice," the Third World Synod of Bishops declared in 1971, "it recognizes that anyone who ventures to speak to people about justice must be just in their eyes."¹⁸ Pope Paul VI made the same point three years later: "Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses."¹⁹ And the U.S. Catholic bishops applied the same principle of practicing what you preach to the role of the Church in the U.S. economy. "All the moral principles that govern the just operation of any economic endeavor apply to the church and its agencies and institutions; indeed the church should be exemplary."²⁰

In other words, religious groups and institutions are held to a higher standard of behavior in the public forum than comparable groups and institutions because of the claims religious groups and institutions make about themselves, their relationship with God, and their mission in the world.

NOTES
1. Richard P. McBrien, Caesar's Coin: Religion and Politics in America (New York: Macmillan, 1987); "Religion and Politics in America: The 1988 Campaign," America 158/21 (May 28, 1988), 551–58. I am, in a sense, plundering material from Caesar's Coin and the John Courtney Murray lecture for two reasons. First, they were the product of substantial research that need not be redone here. Second, neither my thinking nor the pertinent religious and political circumstances have significantly changed in the meantime.