The large structures which are created by bureaucratic bodies play a significant role by their effect on individual lives, yet are not always traceable back to a distinct cause or person. Since it is not easy to identify the origin of these changes, the pope states that these structures can be called structures of sin only analogously. He adds that this does not remove the responsibility of transforming society with new structures: “However, to speak even analogically of social sins must not cause us to underestimate the responsibility of the individuals involved. It is meant to be an appeal to the consciences of all, so that each may shoulder his or her responsibility seriously and courageously in order to change those disastrous conditions and intolerable situations.”15 Both John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged the weight, force, and influence of certain unjust structures within society, but strongly asserted that the true origin of the evil lies in personal moral choice. Ratzinger wrote:
Being necessary in themselves, [structures] often tend to become fixed and fossilized as mechanisms relatively independent of the human will, thereby paralyzing or distorting social development and causing injustice. However, they always depend on the responsibility of man, who can alter them, and not upon an alleged determinism of history.16
The danger in theories that emphasize the role of structural or environmental factors in social evils is that they significantly lessen personal responsibility. This lessening can lead to the assumption of a kind of determinism, in which the environment is responsible for the acts of individuals.
John Paul II warned against speaking of structures in ways that ignore personal responsibility:
One must add at once that there is one meaning sometimes given to social sin that is not legitimate or acceptable even though it is very common in certain quarters today. This usage contrasts social sin and personal sin, not without ambiguity, in a way that leads more or less unconsciously to the watering down and almost the abolition of personal sin, with the recognition only of social guilt and responsibilities.17
In sum, there is a valid way to speak of “sinful structures.” But materialistic assumptions must not be smuggled into that term. There is no such thing as “on the wrong side of history.” All-determining fate is an illusion. Personal liberty is the one fundamental reality on which the whole ethic of Christianity depends. The primacy of personal responsibility is central to human action, and thus also to the struggle for social justice. Catholic social teaching is personalist. It emphasizes the primacy of the person over structures. Even when structures were spoken of as “sinful” by liberation theologians, these theologians did not have to think like Marxists. That is a responsibility they unnecessarily took upon themselves.
Conclusion
The conviction of Catholic social thought that individual liberty trumps the “dialectic” of materialism is one more reason to hold that social justice is not a program for the Leviathan state—more spending and more regulation—but the virtue of personal responsibility for the common good, via the large and small associations formed by free men. As Leo XIII was the first to diagnose, the best alternative to impersonal materialistic socialism is the free person and his or her free associations and self-governed communities. Between the Leviathan state and the creative human person, Leo stood with the free person—not the free person alone, but in associations of many sorts with many others. It is in that space between the state and the individual that social justice must flourish—or fail. Social justice is a practice learned and lived by free persons in their associations large and small. Its practices spring from the habits of individual citizens, working in unison with many other free persons, sometimes in international associations that circle the entire world (the Catholic Church, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders).
In the Christian vision, while all are called to practice social justice, some are likely to turn away. That is the prerogative of free persons. The theological definition of sin (deviatio a Deo) actually is an act that turns away from the Light, from the Good, from Justice, from the Person of our Lord. In this context, social justice is the virtue of free persons in their free associations, achieving the common good together, in a higher measure than the Leviathan state alone can reach. Free associations are more likely to act more respectfully of the dignity of human persons than the secular state. For one thing, free associations can preach the gospel, pray with those they wish to help, teach virtuous behavior that leads to social flourishing, and in other ways enter into moral and religious dimensions of human action forbidden to the secular state.
Social justice is not inherently hostile to the state. In fact, its organizations and energies are often focused on stimulating the state into action on behalf of the public good. But social justice does include within itself deeper reservoirs of devotion, love, wisdom, and nimbleness than the Leviathan (the huge, blind dinosaur) is permitted to exercise. It would be a fatal mistake, Leo XIII warned, for the human race to entrust all aspects of its flourishing to the collectivist government, as socialists were at that time demanding. That is why he called for Christians to summon up the strength to develop a new virtue, appropriate for the new world of the rerum novarum of his time. The state is neither equipped for achieving the full common good, nor fully trustworthy in its methods of envisioning it. The state is a guardian of certain important goods, but it has limited vision and limited purposes. It is neither flexible enough nor virtuous enough to be entrusted with the full treasure of human flourishing.
A more complete, more complex, and more penetrating understanding of sin, worthy of our greatest playwrights, novelists, and poets, is a very important part of achieving social justice. For we are all sinners. No use designing a republic for saints. There are not enough saints to fill a republic. (And saints are difficult to live with.) Republics must be built for sinners. That’s all there are.
That is why, as Charles Péguy wrote, “the sinner is at the very heart of Christianity.”
We now turn to Paul Adams, without whose determination this book would not exist. After reading every essay I had ever written on social justice, Professor Adams insisted that they be rewritten as a book, everything thought through anew and written in proper order. He made a plan showing how this could be done. What fascinated him, he said, was how uncannily the theory of social justice I developed coincided so neatly with the “best practices” that had evolved in his own field of social work.
So now that we have seen the theory, it is time to consider the practice.
[PART TWO]
In Practice
Paul Adams
INTRODUCTION: Getting beyond Dichotomies
When I first encountered Michael Novak’s work on social justice, I was immediately struck by two of its main characteristics. First, his mind seems always to proceed by the method of both/and. That is my own favorite method, too, as the reader is about to see in the next five chapters. That shared characteristic may be what most fueled our collaboration.
Second, I saw immediately how the concept of social justice as a virtue, internalized by individuals, brilliantly articulates a key, if often overlooked, insight in my own field of specialization, the theory and the practice of social work.
It is not enough, social workers have learned through long experience during this past century, to do things for people. One must also help them to internalize certain basic social habits and skills—that is, virtues—of their own, so that they become the chief agents of their own destiny. There is no real success in rendering them totally dependent—on social workers or anybody else. Such dependency is no cure for what ails them; it is the condition from which they suffer.
Thus, the profession of social work identifies social justice as a core value, central to its ethics and identity. Social work aims to translate social justice into practice at every level, among individuals, families, and communities. It even tries to think through and to promote reform in economic, social, and cultural structures. But too often thinking in our field falls
into dichotomies. We see conscience pitted against social justice, individualism against collectivism, charity against justice, informal associations against state-run programs.
Often our terms are conceived of as mutually exclusive—we have to choose either A or B. For instance, either respect the rights of conscience or promote social justice. Conscience, the protection of which was once a foundational value, has today been reduced to mere personal preference, always to be trumped by the claims of “social justice.” But conscience is itself a matter of social justice: irreducibly social in nature, a key bulwark of civil society against the Leviathan. Conscience always makes claims about what is actually true about a given situation—it is either just or unjust, and (at least in large part) an evil or a good. Conscience always involves judgment about the right course of action to take in these particular circumstances. Thus conscience, rightly understood and rightly formed, cannot stand in opposition to social justice.
Another false dichotomy, individualism versus collectivism, often lies disguised in debates about conscience. But as Catholic social teaching has consistently emphasized, these are twin evils. Individualism—whether the expressive individualism of the sexual revolution or the economic individualism of nineteenth-century “liberals” or contemporary libertarians—offers no alternative to statist collectivism, but actually depends on and foments it. Consider the state of contemporary marriage, an unprecedented collapse that has done immense harm to the poorest and most vulnerable.1 Here the proper response to the dichotomy of individualism versus collectivism is also both/and: The “moral ecology” of the civic order must support the personal commitment of one person to another.
Subsidiarity and solidarity are another fraught pair, often seen as opposite poles between which some correct midpoint must be identified. Subsidiarity—the principle that higher bodies should not interfere with or substitute for lower ones when those are capable of fulfilling their functions—is sometimes understood as an expression of individualism and laissez-faire. Solidarity—the principle of love and our responsibility for one another—then becomes the collectivist pole, the duty of the state as agent of collective responsibility. But both subsidiarity and solidarity—both/and—are needed at every level: in the family, in the community, and in state and supranational bodies.
Last, but most important, we must resist the opposition between charity and justice—“justice, not charity,” as one theorist puts it. The last two chapters of this section take up the question of how we understand both charity in its double sense (works of mercy and caritas) and social justice. Justice needs caritas and charity needs justice—both/and.
In the field of social work, the term “social justice” is probably used more often than in any other field. As Novak notes more generally, in this field, too, the term is hardly ever defined. But once we do define it as a virtue (a strength, a skill) internalized by individuals—and also a skill properly described as social—we gain a very useful and practical tool indeed. We cast quite brilliant light on what, without ever having defined it, we have actually been trying to do for some time. In this respect, Novak’s contribution in Part One above is actually quite a boon to our own field of social work. That is what drew me into this collaboration.
[CHAPTER 16]
Conscience and Social Justice
No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.
—Thomas Jefferson to New London Methodists, 1809
AS THE GULF HAS GROWN IN RECENT DECADES BETWEEN traditional Judeo-Christian orthodoxy and the secular state in matters of life, death, sex, and marriage, the question of conscience protections and exemptions in law has become pressing.1 Livelihoods, careers, charitable organizations and activities, and whole communities have been put at risk in the interest of imposing measures that require many Christians and others to violate their consciences. Such coercion by the state is sometimes justified in the name of social justice.2
Unfortunately, there is as much confusion about the concept of conscience as there is about the concept of social justice. Conscience is, no less than social justice, inherently relational, rooted in community, and directed beyond the self. It is moral belief applied to conduct, conveys a claim to truth, implies accountability, restrains power, and is inseparable from personal integrity.3 Like social justice, it is key to a healthy republic and civil society, to expanding and protecting the rich associational life that occupies the social space between individual and state. Some identify with social justice, while others emphasize conscience, as if the two were in opposition. Both perspectives frame issues in terms of the rights of individuals and the role of the state, neglecting the intermediary groups and institutions of civil society. One sees the world in individualistic terms, the other collectivist, but both in relation to the state and each as opposed to the other. So it appears as if individualism stresses conscience at the expense of social justice, and collectivism does the reverse. On the contrary, rightly understood, conscience, and social justice illuminate and reinforce each other, and both are necessary to a democratic pluralist society.
The Threat to Liberty of Conscience
“Have progressives abandoned the liberty of conscience?” asks legal scholar Robert K. Vischer.4 Noting that the American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit to block George W. Bush’s conscience protection regulations from being implemented, and that other progressive groups that “trumpet their commitment to defending an individual’s moral integrity against government incursions were curiously silent about President Obama’s rollback” of those protections in 2011, Vischer observes:
We’ve come a long way from the times when ringing defenses of conscience were provided by progressive heroes such as Jefferson, Thoreau, and Gandhi. The former Democratic governor of Wisconsin justified his veto of a conscience bill for health care providers on the ground that “you’re moving into very dangerous precedent where doctors make moral decisions on what medical care they provide.”5
Among those progressive associations that have switched in recent years from defending conscience rights and protections to casually dismissing them, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) stands in the forefront.6 Indeed, no other profession gives shorter shrift to conscience or has so little regard for the conscience rights and protections of its own members. The threats to conscience and religious freedom confronting Christian social workers and health professionals have become ever more pressing in the United States, Canada, and Europe in recent years. A flood of writing about the subject covers everything from individual legal cases involving students, employees, and businesses across the United States to the HHS mandate and the hundred-plus lawsuits challenging it.
Here I will limit myself to developments most directly linked to social work and related practice (such as counseling) and to the threat posed to conscience by the very way in which the social-work literature frames its discussion of conscience exemptions and conscientious objection. My primary but not exclusive focus will be on threats to liberty of conscience of individual practitioners rather than, as in the case of the HHS mandate, their employers. I want to suggest that the usual way of framing conscience issues in current debates, as matters of individual rights enforced or limited by the state, is inadequate, and I mean to propose a more complex but far from new way to think about the options and ethical obligations of professionals in contested areas, where expanding state coercion of conscience conflicts most sharply with moral conviction or religious faith.
Threats
Christians, Jews, and others in social work and related fields who adhere to the Judeo-Christian tradition in matters of life, death, sex, and marriage face threats to conscience at every level. As Robert George argues,7 the secular-liberal orthodoxy in these areas aims not to foster tolerance of religious orthodoxy or pluralism, but to build a monopoly in the public square.
In 2009, Julea Ward was di
smissed from her counseling program at Eastern Michigan University after she sought to refer rather than treat a potential client who was seeking counseling about a homosexual relationship. The university’s insistence that Ward needed “remediation” to help her abandon her beliefs about homosexual behavior and act against her conscience led to her dismissal from the program and resulted in a series of university and judicial hearings and appeals. In January 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Sixth Circuit8 ruled in Ward’s favor, and in June 2012, the Michigan House passed Bill 5040, known as the Julea Ward Freedom of Conscience Act, prohibiting religious discrimination against college students studying counseling, social work, or psychology.
In its review of ten social-work education programs, the National Association of Scholars found many examples of the coercion of student consciences,9 legitimated by a constrictive and unwarranted reading of the NASW Code of Ethics. The cases involved requiring students to advocate and lobby for positions to which they were opposed in principle and as a matter of conscience. Again and again, we find students coerced into a morally degrading performance that requires public avowal of beliefs contrary to their own convictions, conscience, and faith.
The issue of coercing the conscience of professionals in the health and helping professions has come to the fore in recent years as a result of the promulgation of new rights in matters of life and death, sex, marriage, and family. Behaviors that were illegal or socially stigmatized for millennia have been declared legal and have become rights, expanding the options for those who wish to engage in these behaviors. But what is optional behavior for clients or patients rapidly becomes mandatory for professionals who must endorse or otherwise cooperate in the newly permitted behavior. An argument for tolerating certain behaviors has become a case for intolerance—of those who refuse to be personally or professionally complicit in them.10
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