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Philosophical Theology Political Theology Science and Religion

Book Review: Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

This is a book review I wrote of Francis Beckwith’s book Taking Rites Seriously:  Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith, for the journal Science & Christian Belief.

This book is a curious amalgam of philosophical theology, liberal political theory, and American Constitutional Law.  It succeeds reasonably well on the first count and less well on the third.  The space in the middle – liberal political theory – is the bridge that would connect the two but that ultimately betrays the author’s philosophical and theological presuppositions.

In many ways the value of this book to any reader likely will depend on his or her view of the importance of America’s culture wars.  Beckwith, who teaches at Baylor University, is well known as a scholarly participant in those culture wars.  At one time the President of the Evangelical Theological Society, in 2007 he returned in much-discussed fashion to the Roman Catholic Church of his youth.  The dedication of this book to Robert P. George, a leading proponent of the new natural law theory, reflects Beckwith’s orbit within a constellation of Catholic and Evangelical intellectuals who seek to advance philosophical arguments for traditional values in the public square, including opposition to abortion, rejection of same sex marriage, and strong views of religious liberty.  The arguments offered in this book ably present the kinds of views advanced by this school of conservative social thought, although they have been presented at length elsewhere.  If there were nothing else to the book it would not seem of much unique interest to readers of this journal.

In his discussion of philosophical theology, however, Beckwith presents some material of interest to the theology-and-science conversation.  First, Beckwith addresses an approach to public discourse he labels “Secular Rationalism” (SR), exemplified in the thought of legal theorists such as Brian Leiter, evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker, and various New Atheist public intellectuals.  As Beckwith defines it, SR is essentially a form of logical positivism, scientism, and/or narrow foundationalism.  Beckwith dismantles SR along the familiar lines that it is circular, self-defeating, and fundamentally undermined by its own need to presuppose some truths about reality without the kind of evidence it purports to require.  Some of the sources in Beckwith’s footnotes, such as Alvin Plantinga, David Bentley Hart, and N.T. Wright, have done the same work in far more winsome fashion; some of Beckwith’s sources, such as J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, are apologists of a certain narrow stripe whose work might be of more dubious value; and other important sources, including anyone from a critical realist perspective (say, John Polkinghorne or Alister McGrath), a process perspective (say, John Haught), or other strands of religious epistemology (say, Conor Cunningham’s take from Radical Orthodoxy) are absent entirely.  Nevertheless, Beckwith’s contribution to the literature showing the intellectual bankruptcy of “SR” is welcome, particularly in taking on the extension of “SR” to secularist fundamentalists in the legal academy such as Brian Leiter.

Of further direct interest to readers of this journal, Beckwith’s past defense of Intelligent Design (ID) theory and association with the Discovery Institute stand in stark contrast to his arguments against ID in this volume.  Beckwith now argues, from a Thomistic perspective, that ID undermines the orthodox Christian doctrine of creation because ID theory subverts creation’s causal integrity.  He shows that the Thomistic arguments for God’s existence do not imagine God as a huge, physical “finger” within creation, pushing things into motion and perhaps giving things a special poke here and there where “design” might be detected, but rather that God is the formal and final cause of the material and efficient causes within creation.  The overall beauty and order of creation in its material and efficient causes, viewed holistically, point towards formal and final causes outside of themselves.  If, as ID theory suggests, creation lacks an organic integrity, with “irreducibly complex” gaps that suggest a need for constant direct Divine intervention, this would undermine the classical Christian account of creation.  It is gratifying to see an erstwhile defender of ID theory recognize these problems.

Notwithstanding his theological and philosophical criticism of ID theory, Beckwith persists in arguing that the “ID case” in the United States, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, was wrongly decided.  He criticizes the federal trial judge in the case for adopting a legal test under which a “reasonable, objective observer” (ROO) must assess whether the challenged policy had an improper religious motivation under the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  There is something trenchant about Beckwith’s critique on this point, because, as he points out, notions of “reason” and “objectivity” require reference to metaphysical perfections that would seem ruled out of court by SR.  But this highlights the major structural problem with the book:  Beckwith wants to defend his socially conservative policies on the grounds of a kind of reason that would be accessible to anyone in society and amenable to adjudication within a Constitutional framework by the Supreme Court.  This simply does not work, because classical liberalism and the American Constitutional framework embed Enlightenment epistemology and values, not Christian epistemology and values.

A good example of this fundamental problem arises in Beckwith’s qualified approval of the result in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, upholding a business’ ability to exclude itself from a legal mandate to provide insurance coverage for certain contraceptives.  Like most “religious liberty” advocates, Beckwith skates over the question whether a corporation should have standing to assert “religious liberty” rights under the U.S. Constitution.  There is plenty of case law about Constitutional rights that are afforded (such as the right to freedom of speech) and not afforded (such as the right to vote) to corporations, so from the perspective of U.S. legal doctrine, the question of how the First Amendment’s religion clauses might apply to corporations is not by any means out of bounds.  From the perspective of philosophical theology, however, it is far from clear whether business corporations should have any personal “rights” at all, or what, if anything, a business corporation is — never mind whether Christian owners of a business corporation that employs non-Christians ought to have, or ought to exercise, a “right” to excuse themselves from a generally applicable social program if they otherwise choose to receive benefits the state provides to business corporations.  From a Christian theological and praxis perspective, the Hobby Lobby case is a mess.

Another example surfaces in Beckwith’s discussion of same sex marriage.  He offers the familiar refrain that the legalization of same sex marriage will invoke a parade of horribles for non-conforming religious institutions, which for the most part has not materialized, and he unconvincingly tries to distinguish the same sex marriage issue from the history of miscegenation laws and practices, which Bob Jones University fought in the Supreme Court only a generation ago.  He even suggests that same sex marriage was never really “banned” or “illegal,” unless sacramental Catholic marriage also was banned or illegal, because the state has never explicitly sanctioned all the religious elements of Catholic sacramental marriage.  It is difficult to tease out the overly-clever logic here, but it seems to be a variant on the argument that withholding a government benefit, such as a marital tax deduction, from one group (same sex couples) while providing it to another (opposite sex couples) is not a “prohibition.”  That may be true, but then one wonders what all the fuss has been about.  Let everyone have the public benefits, or take the public benefits away from everyone, and let private associations such as churches define the terms however they want.  Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.

The fuss, as Beckwith goes on to argue, is that “marriage” relates to deeper metaphysical concepts about the human person.  People care about the same sex marriage issue on both sides not because it is about an arcane tax benefit but because it has something to do with human dignity.  Either same sex marriage undermines human dignity because it denies something basic about human biology and difference, or disapproval of same sex marriage undermines human dignity because gay relationships are not intrinsically disordered, or at least the question is uncertain enough that dignity demands that each person have the liberty to decide the question without state coercion.  Beckwith and the new natural law thinkers with which he is associated think there are forms of rational argument apart from specifically religious claims that can establish their case decisively in the liberal institutions of modern legislatures and courts, if only the underbrush of scientism / SR can be cleared away.  Ultimately, however, clearing away that underbrush must involve a theological critique of modernity’s epistemological pretensions and metaphysical vacuity.  It seems that Beckwith and his compatriots do not wish to venture that critique, but believe instead that the modern liberal state can and should advance their goals.  The irony is that this move immediately surrenders the metaphysical and epistemological ground, ensuring not only that their culture war will be lost, but also that plenty of collateral damage will occur along the way.