This neglect of the interests of children is endemic in our culture. Consider the way we talk, not only about marriage, but also about things like artificial reproductive technologies or surrogacy.21
What Is to Be Done?
What is to be done? Feser argues that the “duty of remedying such injustices rests, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, primarily with individuals, families, and private associations.”22 That principle also recognizes, as part of natural law, the state’s duty to deal with those injustices that cannot effectively be remedied in this way. But when the state confirms in law “what was already the practice, trend, and effect of an alternative culture that had its immediate origin in the 1950s and ’60s,” then the task falls all the more heavily on the associations of civil society.23
As Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George reflected after two important Supreme Court decisions concerning the definition of marriage:
If you believe, as we do, in the importance to children and to society of the marriage-based family, then of course you were hoping for different results in yesterday’s marriage cases. But you probably also put your trust in the institutions of civil society—in that vast arena between man and state which is the real stage for human development. And in that case, you never expected a court of law to do our work for us, to rescue a marriage culture that has been wounded for decades by cohabitation, out-of-wedlock child-bearing, and misguided policies like no-fault divorce.24
Whatever one’s opinion about the Supreme Court’s decisions concerning marriage, or the scope for any legal measures to address the collapse of marriage, the task remains for social work what it was. In line with its historic emphasis since the Charity Organization Societies and the Settlement House movement, its task of empowerment is still to combat social injustice by strengthening families and communities. The challenge is to work out how to help rebuild a culture of marriage in civil society, especially in the poorer half of the population where the disintegration has been most complete and devastating in its effects.
Attempts to promote and strengthen marriage come in various forms. At the policy level, there are attempts to remove disincentives like the marriage tax penalty, and otherwise to incentivize marriage and make it easier for people to meet their moral obligations—of spouses to each other, to their children, and to society.
In 2004, a group of social scientists produced a list of policy proposals under the head, “Can Government Strengthen Marriage?”25 They proposed a shift of emphasis from preventing teen pregnancy to preventing unwed pregnancy, since the data revealed no benefits to delaying nonmarital birth into the twenties, but considerable benefits to getting married before having children. They recommended support for marriage preparation education to reduce violence, conflict, and unnecessary divorce; lengthening the waiting period for no-fault divorce; removing perverse incentives to cohabit rather than marry; and evaluating and strengthening the pro-marriage aspects of the 1996 welfare reform (among other things). All these measures can be understood as promoting an ecology that fosters the virtues required for and developed by marriage.
Such efforts flew in the face of the sexual revolution and its increasing adoption as law and official government policy. As Alvaré argues, recent court rulings promoting a culture of “sexualityism” can only be understood as the government’s systematic embrace of and commitment to sex without consequences.26 Government, not least through its imposition of an HHS mandate that requires employers to enable access to contraceptive—even abortifacient—drugs, as well as to sterilization, is promoting the destruction of marriage by normalizing and promoting the delinking of sex from marriage and from both the bearing of children and their rearing by the two parents who made them.
Little wonder then, that supporters of marriage and marriage-based families put little faith in government and its capacity for interest in promoting a culture of marriage. I will leave aside further discussion of the kind of social policy measures that have been my bread and butter as a policy analyst. Instead, I will look at some approaches within civil society to promote and sustain the kind of culture that makes the vision of marriage described by Pakaluk attainable by those who want it. I will also look at what is involved in promoting the virtue of social justice in social workers themselves, as well as in the families and communities they work with.
Building an Alternative: Reculer pour Mieux Sauter
In the famous ending of his After Virtue, Alisdair MacIntyre recalls the example of Saint Benedict as he considers a way forward in our own dark ages: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.”27 In our own dire times, “the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for quite some time.”28 “Benedict’s greatness,” MacIntyre explains, “lay in making possible a quite new kind of institution, that of the monastery of prayer, learning, and labor, in which and around which communities could not only survive, but flourish, in a period of social and cultural darkness.”29
Our own times are very different from Benedict’s, and a Benedict for our times would, as MacIntyre writes, doubtless be very different. Combined with MacIntyre’s call for construction of local forms of community, the monastic example suggests the need—alongside local or parish-level initiatives to support marriage in a hostile environment—for distinctly Christian communities centered on faith and family.
MacIntyre’s call to construct local forms of community, combined with the need in our time to rebuild an authentic culture of marriage and Benedict’s example of a strong community of faith and learning, brings into focus the promise of a small, seriously Catholic Christian university and community like Ave Maria in Southwest Florida. To what extent is a modern day analog of sorts to the strategy of Saint Benedict possible? Can it build not only a center of learning, culture, and faith in contrast to the received wisdom of the contemporary Zeitgeist, but also specifically a culture of marriage closer to Pakaluk’s vision? Can it serve both as a beacon to attract or guide others, keeping things alive that would otherwise be lost, and also as a training ground to prepare people to go out into the world and, in the current phrase, “evangelize the culture”?
To this combination of university and community, we may add the path-breaking work of Mary Eberstadt on the profound impact of the pill as the technological base of the sexual revolution and on the relation between faith and family—Adam and Eve after the Pill (2012), and How the West Really Lost God (2013).30 Eberstadt confirms the strong link between religious observance and high fertility rates, but she emphasizes the ways in which large families foster religious observance and not simply the other way around. Children drive their parents to church, as she puts it. She notes how Christianity in particular, with its Holy Family, its God the Father who loves, guides, and protects, with a Son who addresses God the Father as Abba (Daddy), and so forth, is near to unintelligible in communities where fathers who love and protect their families are rare. Christianity and the family, she argues and shows empirically, rise and fall together.
Ave Maria is a community of large families and strong faith, each reinforcing the other. A faithful Christian community and locus of Catholic learning and culture, it attracts many who live in isolation from these things but are drawn to them. It is home both to Pakaluk, chair of the university’s philosophy department, and to Novak and me. The marriage Pakaluk describes could be that of his own daughters. The reference to Shakespeare recalls students’ involvement in the plays, As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, that a class on Shakespeare in Performance presented in recent years, playing, as Michael Novak put it, “characters their own age, with the distinctively tender and fragile feelings, high excitements and crushing blows of that gloriously vulnerable time of life.”31 In the exhilaration of the performances, one could sense the identification over the centuries of a sh
ared culture of marriage, a shared understanding of the sincere gift of self it involves—the gift of the couple to each other and to the children that may result from their comprehensive union, a union at once emotional, bodily, and a matter of will. Play and audience share an understanding of marriage as the institution through which each generation sacrifices itself for the next.
Patiently Explain: In Hostile Territory
Serious Catholics and other Christians, social workers not least, live and work amidst hostile liberal-secular media, academia, and legal, political, and professional elites. In this aggressively secular world, sexual expressionism, the ideology of the sexual revolution, is absolute dogma and state religion, dissent from which will not be tolerated. For this cultural elite, the Catholic Church’s organized structure and presence in the public square are the main obstacle to their vision of the future, which they seek unrelentingly to impose everywhere, all talk of respecting other cultures notwithstanding.
Most families in Ave Maria chose to live in the Florida swampland, far from a major city or other centers of learning, because they had experience of a beige, accommodationist Catholicism in their former parishes and saw the erosion of faith and family around them. Ave Maria attracts many others too, even though they do not live there, as a beacon reflecting and keeping alive the light of faith amidst the powerful forces that seek to extinguish it as a public presence in their world. It does not substitute for other strategies for building a strong culture of marriage, faith, and family. But it helps. It is an example of the virtue of social justice practiced by members of a community, joining together in many groups and projects to further the common good, not least creating and fostering a culture of marriage that corresponds to the nature and destiny of the human person as imago Dei.
While Ave Maria as a community tends to attract intense hostility from comment box writers whenever it is mentioned, most faithful Christians who remain within the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition in matters of life, death, sex, and marriage face hostility without such solid community support, as individuals or congregations, as employees, parents, or small entrepreneurs trying to make their way and retain their integrity, often condemned, in Justice Scalia’s words describing the effect of the Supreme Court’s DOMA decision, as hostes humani generis—enemies of the human race.32
Navigating this hostile terrain is a different challenge that has elicited many initiatives, mostly lay-led, at the parish or cross-parish level. The Stand With Children movement in California, with its Faith and Action Circles, offers one outstanding example of a grassroots effort.33 In Norway, the government is rethinking its attitude toward divorce and encouraging “date nights” for couples to sustain marriages and reduce divorce rates.34 For several reasons—a different view of the role of government and the present government’s commitment to the sexual revolution among them—such a strategy is highly improbable in the United States. That is true, at least, for government, but not necessarily within parishes or other intermediary groups of civil society.
The people involved in these grassroots activities exercised the virtue of social justice by joining together for the common good, the good of marriage and marriage-based families. They did so in face of overwhelmingly powerful forces tending toward their dissolution. These forces include both political and cultural movements and the pressures of the sexual revolution on individual families. Among the effects are the normalizing and increased incidence of divorce, including the devastating impact of no-fault or unilateral divorce, pornography, sex before and outside of marriage presented as the norm by media and “enlightened opinion,” cohabitation, and children raised without one or either of their parents. Unfortunately, social work has done much harm in promoting and normalizing some of these developments.
Social workers, indeed, have had little to do with the developments I have described that promote a positive culture of marriage. Despite our literature and tradition of empowerment-based practice, we have tended to think of social justice not as a virtue at all, not as rights derived from God or moral obligations or duties, but as claims on the state in the name of equality. Social justice becomes a series of demands on government aimed at a desired state of affairs, with no connection to personal character. This is at best a very partial understanding of social justice.
The Professional Challenge
Possibilities for practicing and promoting the virtue of social justice in oneself and one’s clients vary for social workers according to employment and funding constraints. There is no straightforward answer to the question of what is to be done—the “practice implications.” Here I want to discuss some of the challenges social workers face in trying to orient their own practice to the social justice of which I speak. What principles might guide us in meeting our own moral obligation to the common good and helping those we work with to meet theirs?
In Aristotle and Aquinas, justice is the virtue that orders all the virtues to the common good. Habitually giving others their due requires, in Benestad’s words, “the laborious effort to prepare one’s soul for action through the cultivation of the virtues and the acquisition of knowledge. . . . Some works of justice require very sophisticated knowledge and very great effort to control pride, anger, and fear as well as love of pleasure, money, honor, and power.”35 In the language of the virtues, we recognize the dual emphasis in social-work education on acquiring knowledge and on the qualities of character, like those of self-effacement, prudence, courage, and self-mastery, needed for the “professional use of self” in practice.
Marriage and its breakdown present particular challenges to social work. Marriage requires virtues on the part of the couple, their families, and the community. It requires a culture of marriage to support the gift of self that is comprehensive, permanent, and faithful. This gift and the culture that supports it assure any children that result from the spouses’ union the emotional, financial, and legal support and the kin of the two parents who made them. Marriage doesn’t just happen, and the cultural, political, and economic structures needed to support it, or even understand it, are in disarray.
These conditions for healthy marriage barely exist for most of the people social workers work with, or even, in many cases, for the workers themselves. I have found Master of Social Work (MSW) students incredulous at research that shows that cohabitation is not equivalent to marriage, that women are safer from intimate-partner violence in marriage than in other kinds of relationships, that children do better when they are raised by their own married mother and father, and so on. Part of the reason for their surprise, no doubt, is the ideological miseducation that students of marriage and family routinely receive as undergraduates. Part is that many of the MSW students sitting in the classroom themselves live with partners and/or children outside of marriage and marriage-based families. Their discernment of reality is blurred by cognitive dissonance, denial, or defensiveness.
Decades of promoting, normalizing, and celebrating alternatives to marriage have done immense damage to professional helpers as well as to those they aim to help. The task of social-work education today—in helping students acquire the knowledge, the virtues, and the habits of the heart they need to be effective—is formidable.
Three Principles
I conclude with three principles to guide a way forward.
1. We have to face the reality of marriage’s disappearance as a socially available, attainable choice among much of the population. We need to acknowledge at a deep level the effects of that destruction in widening inequality, perpetuating poverty, and damaging mothers’ and fathers’ ability to meet their moral obligations to each other and their children. We need a sense of the sin through which we have corrupted marriage as an ideal and the social injustice perpetrated in particular against the poor and children.
2. We need a sense of the joy of marriage as understood in Christian tradition, as described by Pakaluk (and Shakespeare and the Song of Songs), as rooted in a chaste longing in the human heart. Ma
rriage offers an opportunity for the sincere gift of self through which humans find fulfillment.
3. As Christians, we understand that God’s mercy and forgiveness are greater than our sin, including social sin. As social workers or Christians or concerned citizens, we have to find ways to offer hope to and support for initiatives in civil society through which people exercise the virtue of social justice, joining with others to rebuild a culture of marriage.
[CHAPTER 18]
Practicing Social Justice
WE HAVE DISCUSSED HOW THE VIRTUE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE involves skills, knowledge, and habits required to join with others for the common good. Social justice is the virtue particularly required for and developed by participation in civil society. It concerns how people exercise their initiative and creativity in the associations and groups that fill the space between individual and state. Brandon Vogt has shown how saints, practitioners of heroic virtue, have worked to make common life better on predominantly national and local levels, generally doing so in the space between the lone individual and the Leviathan state. He draws lessons from these saints about how ordinary Christians today who are neither professionals nor agents of the state may practice social justice in their own lives.1
But what of the efforts of those who seek to help others as their primary occupation? Can professional helpers like social workers exercise and promote the virtue of social justice in the course of their practice? The question seems absurd since social workers regard social justice as a core value and combating social injustice as a professional obligation. We have used examples of social justice in practice in nonprofessional, nonstate cooperative efforts like bridge building or barn raising. We had in mind, too, activities such as organizing young adults who were born to sperm donors and whose voices and needs were neglected in prior discussions of artificial reproductive technology. Or those who campaign against gendercide, the selective abortion and infanticide of baby girls. Or workers who organize and press for a just wage that enables them to live decently and support their families.
Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is Page 29