The second of the Elijah Page posts I linked to below includes some thoughts on politics and values. In that post from last August I wrote:
Politics is, to a significant degree, about values. Politics exists because there is disagreement over what our values should be. The law, no matter what it does, even if it is silent, endorses some values over others. The law is one very important way in which we express who we are and who we want to be as a people. These are values questions. Political talk is values talk. There is no way to avoid it. So let's stop the silly talk about who is imposing values on whom.
In democracies, very rarely do political actors actually impose values. They often propose policies that are founded on certain values and they hold those values up for public approval or disapproval. Often conservative Christians are accused of seeking to impose their values when really they are simply proposing their values in legislative terms for the endorsement (or not) by the public. See the latest abortion law in Missouri, for example. Advocates on the political left do the same thing, for example when they say that justice demands that we take money from some people in the form of taxation and give that money to others in the form of social welfare spending.
Now a group of Catholic Democrats are calling on the Catholic bishops to be more active in denouncing the war in Iraq and working to end that war.
The legislators, all Democrats, wrote to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops asking for a meeting to discuss how Congress “and the clergy can work together to mobilize public action to end the war,” according to a statement released Tuesday.
“As Catholic members of Congress we stand in unison with the Catholic Church in opposition to the war in Iraq,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said in a statement. “Yet to attain the ideal of peace, we must not only speak the words, we must take action.”
Let's look at the wording. These liberal Democrats are calling on Catholic clergy to work to change public opinion. Further, they say, simply speaking against injusitce is not enough; action must be taken. One assumes this means legislative action. The Catholic Democrats are asking the bishops to use their moral weight to fight injustice through lobbying for legislation. If the bishops were being asked by other parties to work against the injustice of abortion instead of the war in Iraq, one would expect an outcry about the bishops seeking to impose their values on the public. Predictably, we'd read blog posts and opinion columns about "theocracy" and "separation of church and state" as the Catholic bishops were denounced for trying to write their own religious values into law. "It's all right for them to be opposed to abortion," we'd hear, "but why must they seek to impose their values on everybody?"
One see liberal Christians increasingly discussing their policy preferences in terms of their religious faith. This is a welcome addition to the public rhetoric. Let's have people of various political and religious perspectives express their policy preferences in both terms of secular reasoning and demands of faith. The American people can then work through the competing claims as diligent citizens ought. Then let's drop the silly rhetoric about "imposing values" and "theocracy."
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