Law and Morality in Public Discourse:

How Christians Can Rebuild Our Culture

by Charles J. Chaput

It’s in seeking Jesus Christ with all our hearts that culture is built and society is renewed. It’s in prayer, the sacraments, changing diapers, balancing budgets, preaching homilies, loving a spouse, forgiving and seeking forgiveness—all in the spirit of charity—that, brick by brick, we bring about the kingdom of God. Adapted from an address delivered August 6th at the Archdiocese of Toronto’s “Faith in the Public Square” symposium.

In the beginning, Genesis tells us, “the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Gen 1:2). Creation begins in chaos. On each day of creation, God brings new things into being and orders them according to a plan. God makes things for a purpose. He creates the world out of love. As Aquinas teaches, God orders the universe as a whole, and that order reflects his glory.

The world works better when it follows God’s design. We see this in our own moral lives. God gives us the law and the beatitudes because they lead us to joy. Jesus shows us the plan God writes into human nature so that, by his help, we can flourish. Too often we think of rules as things that keep us from being happy. But rules, understood as God’s order, are good for us because they show us how to live in a way that shares in his glory. They lead us to embody what God intended human beings to be and do. This is one of the things Scripture means when it says Jesus came “so that we would have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10).

If creation has a moral order, then how should we think about our human laws?

Since we’re made in the image of God, human beings can order their actions and communities just as God orders his creation. The German political philosopherEric Voegelin taught that the law is “the substance of order in all realms of being . . . The law is something that is essentially inherent in society,” but we give it practical force through the lawmaking process. Law binds us together. It reflects our society’s order, but it also secures that order. It shows who we are as a people, but it also forms us as a people. So if we want to thrive, we need to ensure that the laws we make—what we call “positive laws”—ground themselves in a right understanding of what it means to be human.

Some key points follow from this.

Law, Virtue, and Culture: Three Key Points to Win Hearts and Minds

First, the natural law should undergird our positive laws. Jacques Maritain, the French scholar of Aquinas who helped draft the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, noted that, although most people can agree on what universal human rights are, they can’t agree on the foundation of those rights. Maritain argued that only the natural law can adequately justify the rights of man. More than fifty years later, Benedict XVI said much the same thing in an address to the United Nations. Benedict stressed that

the rights recognized and expounded in the [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] apply to everyone by virtue of the common origin of the person, who remains the high-point of God’s creative design for the world and for history. They are based on the natural law inscribed on human hearts and present in different cultures and civilizations. Removing human rights from this context would mean restricting their range and yielding to a relativistic conception, according to which the meaning and interpretation of rights could vary, and their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks.

To put it another way, without the natural law, human rights have no teeth. In fact, so-called “human rights,” when they’re divorced from the natural law, become inhuman.

Second, our positive laws can teach us to live or not live in harmony with the natural law. They can lead us to freedom founded on truth—or they can lead us away from it. Borrowing from Augustine and Aquinas, Maritain argues that human life has two final ends, two purposes that govern the decisions we make. One is earthly. The other is heavenly. One focuses on peace and justice in this world. The other focuses on eternal life with God. Earthly laws should lead us toward our earthly end, which should also ready us for our heavenly end.

The ultimate goal of our laws is to make us morally good. Our laws should help us accord with the design God has written into human nature. Thus, Maritain writes, civil law “should always maintain a general orientation toward virtuous life, and make the common behavior tend, at each level, to the full accomplishment of moral law.”

We often hear the claim that we shouldn’t press for laws that impose our morality on others. But no one really believes that kind of argument, because it makes no sense. In practice, all law involves imposing certain moral claims on other people. Persons who support permissive abortion or same-sex unions, for example, are very comfortable in coercing the public through the courts and lawmaking process. As Christians we should be equally comfortable—and even more zealous—in defending the human person and advancing human dignity through legislative and judicial means.

That said, the American Jesuit thinker John Courtney Murray rightly warned that if we try to give everything that’s morally good the force of the law, people will sooner or later start to think that whatever is legal is also moral. In other words, laws can’t solve all our moral problems. Rather, Murray concludes, laws should seek “to establish and maintain only that minimum of actualized morality that is necessary for the healthy functioning of the social order.” Beyond this, a nation must look to other, non-legal institutions in civil society to maintain its moral standards.

That brings me to my third point. The law can’t teach effectively without the support of a surrounding moral culture, because law arises from that culture. As many thinkers, including St. John Paul II, have recognized, culture precedespolitics and law. Law embodies and advances a culture, especially its moral aspects. We Christians need to keep this in mind as we work for justice in our societies, despite the very negative climate of today’s culture wars. We should use political means as fruitfully as we can, without apologies. We should seek and employ political influence in our work on vital issues such as marriage and family, abortion, immigration, and euthanasia. And it’s right and just that we do so.

But, as Cardinal Avery Dulles once noted, culture wars can’t be won by tactical battles, even on crucial issues such as these. Policy statements by bishops and advocacy by lay men and women have important value. But their words, said the cardinal, “must be backed up by a coherent social and political philosophy.” In the long run, Dulles wrote, “if a consensus exists in favor of a healthy society, the implementation will almost take care of itself.”

Again, Dulles never suggested that we should abandon the political arena. Nor do I—quite the opposite. But we need to remember that the battle for hearts and minds runs deeper than winning a particular issue at the polling booths. Conversion is more important, and much more far-reaching, than any particular legislative debate.

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