Masters of Natural Law

Originally posted at Talk to Action.

One of the things I have stressed in my series on the Catholic Right is that we have got to understand natural law in order to understand the Catholic Right and increasingly allied conservative Evangelicals.  That being the case, I think any reasonable understanding of the wider Religious Right is incomplete without it.

The Summer 2008 issue of The Public Eye magazine has just published what I hope provides a useful primer: "How Roman Catholic Neocons Peddle Natural Law into Debates about Life and Death".

Here is an excerpt:

Neoconservatives are tiny in number, yet large in influence due to their prolific writing, thinking, and support from wealthy patrons that locate them close to the corridors of power. It is a small movement of intellectuals that emerged in earnest opposing political trends of the 1960s, without a mass base and with only the power of their ideas and connections to win influence. Their vigorous defense of the free market, capitalism, and a militarist foreign policy wins them powerful allies. Yet other currents run through their thought, including a defense of natural law and the championing of religion.

"Natural law," meaning the rules God set into motion in the world and also instilled in our own natures, has been a central, animating philosophical idea in Christian thought for a thousand years. However it has taken some important turns along the way, and there are now what we might call several branches of thought about the definition of natural law.

One of these, the Classic view, is embraced and promoted by the leading thinkers of Catholic neoconservatives in the United States and their political allies in conservative Protestant evangelicalism. Roman Catholicism as a whole employs natural law principles as a means to rationally explain and interpret the morality of Scripture. However, many in the Vatican have recently pressed to superimpose their particular interpretations on the greater secular society. This is driven by the belief that natural law principles are so universal that even non-Catholics are subject to their tenets.

And as I discuss throughout the piece, reactionary Catholics such as George Weigel, Richard John Neuhaus and Robert P. George also frame many of their ethical arguments within a revisionist frame of America's Founders being proto-orthodox Catholics -- although that was clearly was not the case.

As I say in the article:

Nevertheless, Catholic neoconservatives such as Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel and Michael Novak have seized on this erroneous view of natural law like a cudgel to further a revisionist narrative of American history that supports Religious Right notions of Christian nationalism. To this end, Thomas Jefferson and other of the founders are often portrayed as fervent evangelicals who cited thirteenth century interpretations of Aristotle's teachings; an inaccurate accounting that belies Jefferson's (among others) Arian Unitarianism (a belief in God as a single person as opposed to being three persons in one, a Trinity). "When they [the Founders] are not being denounced as infidels," historian Garry Wills bemusedly wrote, "men like Michael Novak dress them up as crypto-Evangelicals, crypto- Jews, or crypto-Catholics."

I will grant that this isn't exactly light reading.  But, as Fred Clarkson has repeatedly said, the more you know about your opponents the more effectively you can engage them. Hopefully, the article will be worth the wading and help us all better refute the arguments often made by Catholic Right neocons and their allies.

The Catholic Right: A Series, by Frank L. Cocozzelli

Correction: As fellow Talk to Action writer Jonathan Rowe pointed out, Thomas Jefferson was a Socinian, not an Arian Unitarian. Socinians believed Jesus was human, not divine at all (but perhaps on a divine mission). Arians believed Jesus was a divine being created by but subordinate to the Father like a super-angel, who would be second in power in the universe under God the Father.