Rights and wrongs: an interview with Nicholas Wolterstorff

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THE CHRISTIAN philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff has pursued a broad range of interests, including political philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. He was recently professor of philosophical theology at Yale University and before that taught for many years at his alma mater, Calvin College. He has been president of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division) and of the Society of Christian Philosophers.

Wolterstorff's many books include John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, Religion in the Public Square (with Robert Audi) and Faith and Rationality (with Alvin Plantinga). His 1995 Gifford Lectures were published as Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. He is currently a visiting professor at the University of Virginia.

You have argued that Christians (along with other believers) have every right to make religious arguments in the public sphere--that they don't need to turn to some neutral, universally rational language before they engage in political debate. Can you explain?

I think it is appropriate in our liberal democracy for Christians, along with adherents of other religions, to make decisions about political issues on the basis of whatever considerations they find true and relevant. I also think it appropriate for them to cite those reasons in public discussions and debates about those political issues. Sometimes, though not always, these reasons will be distinctly religious reasons--Christian, Jewish, whatever. Of course, if you want to persuade your fellow citizens who don't accept your religious reasons to adopt some policy that you favor, you will have to try to find some reasons that they find compelling.

I don't agree, then, with the view of many political theorists that when making up our minds about political issues or debating them in public, we have to appeal to some body of principles that we all accept, or would all accept if we did things right. I don't believe that there is any such body of principles. It's not that we Americans disagree about everything. But we don't agree about enough things to settle our basic political issues by reference to a body of agreed-on principles.

In light of that stance, how would you evaluate the way that religious views and identities have entered into electoral politics in the United States in recent years?

There are better and worse ways of employing religious reasons in deciding and debating political issues. The way that religion has been bandied about in American politics over the past decade or two has often been lamentable. For one thing, the religion that politicians profess often seems to have little if anything to do with their political positions. Here's an example: it seems to me obvious that deep within Christianity and Judaism is the injunction to welcome the stranger; yet a good many of the recent crop of presidential candidates seem to have no difficulty at all fervently affirming their Christian piety while at the same time launching attacks on immigrants. They make no attempt--at least none that I have heard--to show how these two fit together. I find myself led to conclude that it was not for Christian reasons that they adopted the immigration policy that they espouse. Their professed Christian piety is a mere add-on to a deeply entrenched nativism.

I think the fundamental considerations that we ought to employ in debating political issues are justice and the common good: what do justice and the common good require? But I find, to my dismay, that when politicians do seem genuinely motivated by their religion, often their goal is not to secure justice and promote the common good but to secure power for their party. They try to use the levers of power for their own advantage. And in the process of doing so, they often heap abuse on those whose positions they disagree with, treating them with profound disrespect. That's wrong.

So I defend the right of Christians and other believers to use religious reasons in deciding and debating political issues. But there are right ways and wrong ways, good ways and bad ways, of employing those reasons. And we have seen a lot of wrong and bad ways in recent years.

For most of the 20th century Protestant theologians in the U.S. assumed that that there is a natural affinity between Christianity and democracy. That view has come under attack of late by neotraditionalists who are highly critical of the ethos of liberal democracy, which is--as they see it--focused on individual autonomy, individual rights and a thin, procedural view of justice. We take it that you aren't persuaded by that critique.

Very often in human history, the people living under a particular political jurisdiction have shared a common vision of God and the good, and they have seen their polity as the highest institutional expression of that shared vision. One effect of the Protestant Reformation was that within a century, in northwest Europe, this sort of unity was gone; political jurisdictions contained within their citizenry not one community united by a shared vision of God and the good but a number of distinct such communities. Religious strife raged across northwest Europe. It was in this situation that political thinkers and activists began to suggest that a new form of political organization had to be devised. Northwest Europe and its colonies began the risky experiment of granting to all citizens the right to free exercise of their religion. In the U.S. this risky experiment was taken even farther: there was not even to be any establishment of religion.