The Common Good is Plural: What Then Should We Require of Government? (A Brief Reflection)

This article was originally published in the Journal of Christian Legal Thought, Volume 14, Issue 1 (2024). It is republished here with permission from the original publisher.

Christians from many different theological streams share a conviction that our faith ought to have something to say about social-political issues. At the same time, Christians rightly perceive that our influence in the broader culture is waning. Fewer people call themselves Christians in America than ever before, while expressive individualism and its associated harms are culturally ascendant. Common good constitutionalism is one prescription for this diagnosis, a call to abandon positivism and viewpoint neutrality and boldly enact “the good.” Yet in this case, the prescription might be worse than the disease. How then should we as Christians more surely promote and secure justice and goodness for the citizens of this country? This vital question is at the root of common good constitutionalism, but it also motivates the push of progressivism, populism, and more. Each of these movements is post-liberal, or non-liberal, frustrated and impatient with the ways liberalism has failed to protect and promote crucial values. Without a doubt, although liberalism is indeed flawed, it has indispensable strengths which should be preserved,¹ albeit within the better framework of principled pluralism.

Don’t Let Caesar Pretend to be God

Activists and scholars who call for radical change—for the development and practice of some kind of post-liberal or pre-liberal way of organizing our social and political lives—are right to raise the alarm. A sober look at our society surely must drive us to pray for deep and extensive change or a sweeping revival that can make our society substantially better—less unjust, racist, self-indulgent, polarized, heedless, lonely, consumerist, and fragmented. And surely, we must acknowledge that these troubling and even terrible realities developed within and were facilitated by the ideas and arrangements of Enlightenment liberalism. The principles and practices of liberalism may have been an advance when they won the day, yet they neither curbed nor cured, but rather accelerated a rampant, self-centered individualism, with its detachment from others and the denial of accountability outside of oneself. It seems that manifold freedoms—rather than liberating individuals, groups, and societies to achieve their best—gave free reign to much that is harmful and corrosive.²

But the solution to the fragmentation and self-centeredness of our society is not to make government and the courts more powerful (or less limited) so that they will be able to form everyone toward the common good. Such formation would inevitably involve not merely nudging, but also compelling everyone to follow the government-specified notion of the common good.

When there is no broad desire in society to follow God’s ways, but instead everyone is hellbent on doing what is right in their own eyes— just our contemporary situation—then making government’s coercive power stronger and extending its reach further would counter the very goals of greater goodness and justice that the critics rightly seek. Empowering government to impose on everyone the current majority’s damaging norms and misunderstandings would not foster the spread of beliefs and practices that conform more closely to God’s ways that yield shalom. Instead, such empowerment would further hamper those who do want to follow God’s narrow way, making life more dangerous for people who desire to follow the Galilean rather than the crowd.

Against the mirage that a strongly formative government can turn a society to love of neighbor and constructive communal action, we should soberly recall the tragic historical record of strongly directive governments. Note, for instance, from the long list of these horrific examples: Stalin’s Soviet empire, Mao’s China, Hitler’s Third Reich. Millions were slain for not conforming to the regimes’ respective standards of belief, thought, conduct, or identity. Civil society organizations were compelled to reconstitute themselves as parrots of the state’s ideology and directives or were closed. Churches were forced underground, shuttered, or had to become worship sites for the regime’s religion. And there is a painful history, too, of Christian governments coercing in the name of “right” theology and righteous living: Roman Catholic states against Protestants; Calvinists and Lutherans against Catholics and each other; Anabaptists besieged by other Christians.

Yet we should set against those lamentable Christian episodes a key historic Christian political calling and achievement: to limit rather than swell the span and intrusiveness of government. The belief that a political community should be a polis, a totality conforming its members under the civic religion, is persistent, says Francis Oakley, but was decisively rejected by Jesus, setting Christianity on a different course, in principle.³ Jesus said to render to Caesar (only) what is due to him, which cannot be all things,⁴ for it is only to God that we may look for ultimate guidance and to know how much authority should be allotted to governments, families, schools, and churches.⁵

Notably, when Constantine became the Christian ruler of the Roman Empire, he dictated that worship of the empire’s gods be replaced not by obligatory worship of the Christian God but by an unprecedented and real, if imperfect, religious freedom.⁶ True that within a few decades a successor Christian emperor, Theodosius, elevated Christianity and banned paganism. But his action wrought not a totalistic Christian state but a perennial battle between church and government authorities, between popes and emperors, church and state. And the early Christian reflection on the virtue of religious freedom—of limiting government in matters of deep conviction—was ready for (slow and uneven) adoption when the Reformation fractured the Catholic Christian western world and new rules had to be crafted for managing the relations of governments and multiple (co-existing) religious communities.⁷

In our era, between the Fall and the Second Coming, we should not be surprised that societies are marked by sin and riven by divergent fundamental belief systems. At the least, only some desire to follow God, while many are determined to obey other gods. This reality should make Christians always deeply suspicious of political authoritarianism, of plans to use government to bring about uniformity, however much righteousness is claimed as the goal. Our faith teaches us that the heart is deceitful above all things and that even men (and women) after God’s own heart fail to avoid the temptation to abuse power to satisfy their own ends.

We ought, instead, to work for limits on government, broad religious freedom, and for strong protections for conscience, associations, and speech. We—you and I—need the freedom to believe, profess, and live as we—individually and in community with others—are convinced God requires us to live. We need a government that protects that freedom, not one that more strongly than ever will compel everyone to follow whatever beliefs the ruler or the majority of the people favor. Borrowing an idea from Jonathan Chaplin, the Reformed Christian political theorist, what our times call for is neither the construction of a more totalitarian state nor a return to the classical, liberal, minimal state that praises, protects, and promotes almost any behavior and thought any person has. But, instead, they call for the development of a Christianly corrected liberalism.⁸

We Need Liberalism, but a Liberalism Corrected into Principled Pluralism

Classical liberalism, with its dedication to limits on government instead of a commitment to a totalizing state, is the place to start. Put not our trust in princes or even the most well-intentioned majority of the day. We need a weaker, not stronger, government, or rather a government that is less extensive and less intensive, strong but more narrowly cabined. But we need more than that. We need stronger—more faith-full, more formative—social groupings: stronger marriages and families; congregations that shape their members against the immense pull of the culture; distinctive, faith-based schools and think tanks; bold Christian Legal Society student chapters; courageous, faith-shaped businesses; and Christian adoption agencies and rescue missions that do not simply mimic professional best practices. And for that, government policy should become not more classically liberal but more principled pluralist.

Liberalism limits government to liberate individuals. But to flourish, even just to exist, individuals need social connections and social entities. Although this is not well-articulated in American political thinking,⁹ our lives depend not only on our individual capabilities and health, good government policies, and a healthy economy, but also on a vast and diverse group of civil society institutions. And for these institutions to do well what only they can do (i.e., a family is not a business or a recovery group), they need appropriate authority and power. They need the ability to define their particular purposes and decide what specifically to do, the freedom to decide who will become an employee and who not, and so on. Moreover, often these different varieties of social organizations have been created to operate in line with some particular faith: not just a private school but a Lutheran or Jewish school; not just an adoption agency rather than a talent agency but a Catholic adoption agency.

The theory and practice of liberalism, while not wholly insensitive to civil society, tends strongly to pit individual rights and secularism against the prerogatives of civil society organizations, insisting (unless pushed back) that a faith-based organization (except maybe churches) should hire without regard to sexual conduct and identity and generally ought to serve everyone without taking any account of the particular teachings of its religion. But, of course, a Muslim prison ministry cannot serve Muslim prisoners excellently if the religion has to be washed out, and an evangelical pre-K school cannot serve low-income families well if the state requires absolute secularism as the condition of participating in its universal pre-K program. The result of such mandated secularism will be the vast retreat of religiously motivated organizations from participation in our shared common life, which will only lead to more unmet needs and more social fragmentation. Civil society institutions that are not free to be religiously or ideologically distinctive cannot be strong, formative influences on those who work there or are served by them. Formation is an inherently value-laden enterprise. Liberalism’s preferential treatment of individuals over institutions contributes thus to the self-centeredness that we witness all around.

The necessary corrective to our current fragmentation is neither the further growth of state power nor a retreat to a liberal state that maximizes individualism. Instead, we need a public policy and practice of principled pluralism. This principled pluralism must be understood not only as promoting the vital virtue of accepting and co-laboring with those whose beliefs we do not share,¹⁰ but more fully as a government commitment to respect and uphold the roles and authority of the manifold nongovernmental institutions, while also honoring and protecting the freedom of organizations to manifest their own respective animating systems of belief and conduct.¹¹ That is, the government’s reach should be curtailed not only so that individuals may pursue their distinct dreams and religions, but also so that various social institutions can play their varied roles in accordance with their respective religious tenets. Moreover, for individuals to flourish, the government must uphold the freedom of those institutions to be true to their missions and not allow individuals to demand that an institution must conform instead to their own, different, beliefs and practices.¹² In societies with multiple systems of values, only a principled-pluralist policy enables people to find and partner with institutions that deeply embody their respective values—institutions whose formative power they can accept rather than fight.

Dare To Be a Daniel or a Rahab!

Our society does not need even greater political absolutism. We need more principled pluralism so that the beauty and truth of God’s ways can be displayed amidst the many other competing worldviews and value systems. This will require Christians with more biblical insight and more biblical courage. We need more Christian people, churches, nonprofits, and businesses that shine like stars in the sky (Phil. 2:15), witnessing in word and in deed to the truth of the Christian account of life, persons, relationships, organizations, sin, salvation, and redemption. Accepting the reality of our pluralist society in the now and not yet does not mean that we are joining the shallow directive of our times to “celebrate diversity.” We ought to be glad that our government protects diversity of conviction and that constitutionally, and to a great extent in practice, we have “the right to be wrong.”¹³ Not because wrong is good, but because the government is not authorized to define the ultimate right. Instead, people and organizations bear their own responsibility to seek the truth and to live by it. When our compatriots push what is not good, then, rather than celebrating diversity, we may need to confront them and strongly advocate for something better. Respect for others, a true love of neighbor, requires not acquiescing to whatever they advocate but confronting what is bad with what is good. That will be possible precisely because the government has preserved our freedom to do so, in both word and deed.

Rather than joining the clamor from the right and the left for a bigger government that will steer people and organizations to follow what one side or the other is convinced is true, Christians ought to get serious about utilizing the many freedoms we have to better discover, learn, and be shaped by and practice God’s good will for personal and community life. In Romans 12:2, the apostle Paul tells believers not to be conformed to the world, but instead become faithful to God’s ways and intentions by having our minds and our worldviews transformed. Isn’t it evident that, despite our extensive freedom as Americans to follow biblical ways, we have let our churches and other Christian organizations become shallow and barely formative? We Christians do not have much to offer our society to help it get beyond its many weaknesses and injustices because we are more conformed to the culture—whether that be the culture of the right or the left—than to the Word.¹⁴ But we cannot blame liberalism for our failure to be agents of intellectual and cultural formation.

Our society, as deeply shaped by liberalism and as individualistic as it is, nevertheless has afforded Christians extensive institutional and individual freedom. We enjoy broad religious freedom in this country: extensive constitutional, statutory, and regulatory protections for our individual and institutional exercise of religion, even when these conflict with laws and social expectations. But as Dr. Jacqueline Rivers stresses in a lesson drawn from the hard experience of Black Christians in the United States, real religious freedom is not what is written in court decisions, the Constitution or legal codes, but rather is what believers actually do—it is forthrightly acting in obedience to God without first checking to see if the government gives permission.¹⁵ As Christians, we can and must use these gifts of extensive individual and institutional freedoms to create, support, and be guided by churches and Christian organizations that will conform us to godly wisdom rather than the thin ways of our society. We should not twist Christian organizations into platforms to show ourselves off.¹⁶ Rather, we should join such institutions and embolden them to be the Jesus-honoring hands and feet of the Christian community. And those organizations, rather than bending to anti-Christian cultural trends or “preemptively capitulating” at the threat of some government penalty for not following society’s mores,¹⁷ should ground themselves more firmly in biblical soil and work harder and more creatively to embody biblical views and standards in their operations, staff training and interactions, and services.¹⁸

Conclusion

For American society to become better, more just, we do not need stronger government. We need stronger churches and other Christian organizations that can more effectively, more faithfully, shape us into God-honoring ways. And we need to more actively and more courageously shine that brighter light into our society—into the legal profession, public policymaking, corporate decision-making, the entertainment industry, the media, K-12 and higher education, and more. This is a battle, a battle of spirits, not of weapons of compulsion and cancellation. There is no single—common—societal good that Americans, even American Christians, can agree on. Demanding a stronger, farther, and deeper-reaching government entails accepting the strong likelihood of the suppression of Christian truth as other conceptions are enforced on all. We should work instead for greater legal protection of the ability of private organizations to be distinctive and formative—for more institutional coherence and impact and less ability for objecting individuals to weaken the distinctive beliefs and practices of educational, worship, cultural, and service institutions. Then those organizations, their staff, and those they influence, can more strongly make a distinctive—Christian—contribution to our common good.

Stanley Carlson-Thies is the Founder and Senior Director of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance (IRFA), a program of the Center for Public Justice.

Endnotes

1. Michael W. McConnell, Old Liberalism, New Liberalism, and People of Faith, in Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought 5-24 (Michael W. McConnell et al. eds., 2001).
2. Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018).
3. See Francis Oakley, The Emergence of Western Political Thought in the Latin Middle Ages (3 Vols) (2010-2015) (especially volume 1); see also Peter J. Leithart, Antiquity: Constantine and Constitutionalism, in Christianity and Constitutionalism 75-90, 83-90 (Nicholas Aroney & Ian Leigh eds., 2022).
4. Luis E. Lugo, Caesar’s Coin and the Politics of the Kingdom: A Pluralist Perspective, in Caesar’s Coin Revisited: Christians and the Limits of Government 1-22 (Michael Cromartie ed., 1996).
5. As Jonathan Chaplin comments: Christian thought has typically asserted that God authorizes many institutions, each with their own proper and limited sphere of authority. . . . The authority of each must in the first instance be deferred to by other institutions, including by the political community. . . . No single human institutions can arrogate to itself comprehensive authority over society or suppose that it is the sole fount of authority from which all other kinds derive. Jonathan Chaplin, Faith in Democracy: Framing a Politics of Deep Diversity 16-17 (2021).
6. See Peter J. Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (2010); Leithart, supra note 3.
7. Robert Louis Wilken, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (2019); Timothy Samuel Shah, The Roots of Religious Freedom in Early Christian Thought, in Christianity and Freedom, vol. 1 Historical Perspectives 33-61 (Timothy Samuel Shaw & Allen D. Hertzke eds., 2016).
8. Jonathan Chaplin, Rejecting Neutrality, Respecting Diversity: From “Liberal Pluralism” to “Christian Pluralism,” 35(2) Christian Scholar’s Rev. 143-75 (Winter 2006); Chaplin, supra note 5; see also Nicholas Wolterstorff, Fidelity in Politics: Hallmarks of Christian Political Activity in the Tradition of Reformed Protestantism, 52(3) Christian Scholar’s Rev. 9-20 (Spring 2023).
9. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (1991) (see chapter 5).
10. Kenneth Townsend, The Necessity of Hope in Legal Education: Character Development in Pluralist Contexts, 13(2) J. of Christian Legal Thought 7-13 (2023).
11. See James W. Skillen, Recharging the American Experiment: Principled Pluralism for Genuine Civic Community (1994) (chapter six offers a more comprehensive notion of principled pluralism); see also Chaplin, supra note 8;
12. Stephen V. Monsma, Pluralism and Freedom: Faith-Based Organizations in a Democratic Society (2012); Christianity and Civil Society: Catholic and Neo-Calvinist Perspectives (Jeanne Heffernan Schindler ed., 2008). Steven V. Monsma & Stanley Carlson-Thies, Free to Serve: Protecting the Religious Freedom of FaithBased Organizations (2015).
13. Kevin Seamus Hasson, The Right to be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America (2005).
14. Tim Keller calls for the development of specific teachings, a “counter-catechesis,” that can shape church-goers into conformity with Christian understandings rather than our culture’s views. See Timothy Keller, The Decline and Renewal of the American Church (Extended Version), Gospel in Life (2022), https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/ decline-and-renewal-of-the-american-church-extended/.
15. Jacqueline C. Rivers, The Paradox of the Black Church and Religious Freedom, 15 U. St. Thomas L.J. 676 (2019).
16. See Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (2020) (offers an insightful description and critique of the contemporary trend to use organizations as platforms for individual display).
17. I owe the concept of “preemptive capitulation” to Luis Lugo.
18. See Monsma & Carlson-Thies, supra note 12, ch. 10; cf. Peter Greer & Chris Horst, Mission Drift: The Unspoken Crisis Facing Leaders, Charities, and Churches (2014).
19. Stanley Carlson-Thies, The Common Good Requires Robust Institutional Religious Freedom, 15 U. St. Thomas L.J. 529 (2019).