The question of the extent to which the law--promulgated by authorized state actors, typically legislatures (but increasingly administrative agencies)--should (and indeed can) influence a nation's "culture" is a hot topic today. Consider, for example, Cass Sunstein whose concept of "nudge" is now the Obama administration's perspective on the role of regulation. (Read the book or check the nudge blog here for much more detail.)
Within the Mainline Protestant and broadly Evangelical Christian traditions in America, two approaches to the use of the law to effect culture have long vied for attention. Large-scale use of the law to implement social change has found favor with the Left since at least the 1950s while the Right got on board in the 1970s with organizations like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.
More recently there has been a pullback from political action on what had been the Right wing of Evangelicalism. (The Mainline Christian Left has not so much retreated from its faith in the political process as waned in significance generally.) James Davison Hunter's book "To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World" (2010) is a good example of a theologically orthodox plea for near-abandonment of the political process in favor a Christian "faithful witness" to the truths and practices of Christian social teaching. No more "culture wars" for Hunter.
If one were a faithful reader of this blog, Hunter's stance might resonate with the "two kingdoms" approach about which I've posted here and here. I've also addressed the history of two-kingdoms theology in the Reformed Christian tradition in my published review of David VanDrunen's "Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms" (abstract here).
As one might expect, Hunter's book has proved controversial among Rightward-leaning Evangelicals. Now, however, his approach has drawn some substantively critical fire from a writer in the largest Christian group in America, the Roman Catholic Church. Patrick McKinley Brennan has recently published a response to Hunter in the Pepperdine Law Review (abstract here). Brennan critiques Hunter's position both from within and from without, although Brennan's arguments generally illustrate across-the-board differences in contemporary Catholic and conservative Protestant understandings of law, authority, and the purpose of government generally.
I'll leave Brennan's article to speak for itself except for one point: Hunter's under-appreciation of the "nudging" effect of law. Conservative Evangelicals are coming more and more to identify "law" as nothing more than the imposition of an external coercive power. (Check here for some related thoughts). Libertarians of a Randian sort. (And check here for an early post on the reception of Ayn Rand in India.) Such an approach lends itself to what I call "block-house" politics. "Block-house" politics distinguishes itself by a near-Manichaean if not apocalyptic form of discourse; it's all or nothing (and by "nothing" the conservative Evangelicals proponents of block-house politics mean little short of the abyss). Compared to such an approach, many can be forgiven for seeing in Hunter a breath of less Stygian air.
But from the perspective of a longer and more historically grounded tradition as well as from contemporary behavioral economics, law has a pedagogical function. Law teaches as well as coerces. Law instructs in addition to punishing. And it is in part to recall this pedagogical function of the law that Brennan critiques Hunter.
Citizens who live within the context of a distinctively religious point of view would do well to keep the incremental nature of "nudging" in mind. We need neither see every election as a life-and death struggle nor retreat into a bare witness to the truth.
Within the Mainline Protestant and broadly Evangelical Christian traditions in America, two approaches to the use of the law to effect culture have long vied for attention. Large-scale use of the law to implement social change has found favor with the Left since at least the 1950s while the Right got on board in the 1970s with organizations like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.
More recently there has been a pullback from political action on what had been the Right wing of Evangelicalism. (The Mainline Christian Left has not so much retreated from its faith in the political process as waned in significance generally.) James Davison Hunter's book "To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World" (2010) is a good example of a theologically orthodox plea for near-abandonment of the political process in favor a Christian "faithful witness" to the truths and practices of Christian social teaching. No more "culture wars" for Hunter.
If one were a faithful reader of this blog, Hunter's stance might resonate with the "two kingdoms" approach about which I've posted here and here. I've also addressed the history of two-kingdoms theology in the Reformed Christian tradition in my published review of David VanDrunen's "Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms" (abstract here).
As one might expect, Hunter's book has proved controversial among Rightward-leaning Evangelicals. Now, however, his approach has drawn some substantively critical fire from a writer in the largest Christian group in America, the Roman Catholic Church. Patrick McKinley Brennan has recently published a response to Hunter in the Pepperdine Law Review (abstract here). Brennan critiques Hunter's position both from within and from without, although Brennan's arguments generally illustrate across-the-board differences in contemporary Catholic and conservative Protestant understandings of law, authority, and the purpose of government generally.
I'll leave Brennan's article to speak for itself except for one point: Hunter's under-appreciation of the "nudging" effect of law. Conservative Evangelicals are coming more and more to identify "law" as nothing more than the imposition of an external coercive power. (Check here for some related thoughts). Libertarians of a Randian sort. (And check here for an early post on the reception of Ayn Rand in India.) Such an approach lends itself to what I call "block-house" politics. "Block-house" politics distinguishes itself by a near-Manichaean if not apocalyptic form of discourse; it's all or nothing (and by "nothing" the conservative Evangelicals proponents of block-house politics mean little short of the abyss). Compared to such an approach, many can be forgiven for seeing in Hunter a breath of less Stygian air.
But from the perspective of a longer and more historically grounded tradition as well as from contemporary behavioral economics, law has a pedagogical function. Law teaches as well as coerces. Law instructs in addition to punishing. And it is in part to recall this pedagogical function of the law that Brennan critiques Hunter.
Citizens who live within the context of a distinctively religious point of view would do well to keep the incremental nature of "nudging" in mind. We need neither see every election as a life-and death struggle nor retreat into a bare witness to the truth.
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