{"id":3271,"date":"2017-10-12T23:51:57","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T23:51:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/?p=3271"},"modified":"2017-10-12T23:51:57","modified_gmt":"2017-10-12T23:51:57","slug":"book-review-francis-beckwith-taking-rites-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2017\/10\/12\/book-review-francis-beckwith-taking-rites-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This is a book review I wrote of Francis Beckwith’s book Taking Rites Seriously:\u00a0 Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith<\/a>, for the journal Science & Christian Belief<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This book is a curious amalgam of philosophical theology, liberal political theory, and American Constitutional Law.\u00a0 It succeeds reasonably well on the first count and less well on the third.\u00a0 The space in the middle \u2013 liberal political theory \u2013 is the bridge that would connect the two but that ultimately betrays the author\u2019s philosophical and theological presuppositions.<\/p>\n

In many ways the value of this book to any reader likely will depend on his or her view of the importance of America\u2019s culture wars.\u00a0 Beckwith, who teaches at Baylor University, is well known as a scholarly participant in those culture wars. \u00a0At 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.\u00a0 The dedication of this book to Robert P. George, a leading proponent of the new natural law theory, reflects Beckwith\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If there were nothing else to the book it would not seem of much unique interest to readers of this journal.<\/p>\n

In his discussion of philosophical theology, however, Beckwith presents some material of interest to the theology-and-science conversation.\u00a0 First, Beckwith addresses an approach to public discourse he labels \u201cSecular Rationalism\u201d (SR), exemplified in the thought of legal theorists such as Brian Leiter, evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker, and various New Atheist public intellectuals.\u00a0 As Beckwith defines it, SR is essentially a form of logical positivism, scientism, and\/or narrow foundationalism.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Some of the sources in Beckwith\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s take from Radical Orthodoxy) are absent entirely.\u00a0 Nevertheless, Beckwith\u2019s contribution to the literature showing the intellectual bankruptcy of \u201cSR\u201d is welcome, particularly in taking on the extension of \u201cSR\u201d to secularist fundamentalists in the legal academy such as Brian Leiter.<\/p>\n

Of further direct interest to readers of this journal, Beckwith\u2019s past defense of Intelligent Design (ID) theory and association with the Discovery Institute stand in stark contrast to his arguments against<\/em> ID in this volume.\u00a0 Beckwith now argues, from a Thomistic perspective, that ID undermines the orthodox Christian doctrine of creation because ID theory subverts creation\u2019s causal integrity.\u00a0 He shows that the Thomistic arguments for God\u2019s existence do not imagine God as a huge, physical \u201cfinger\u201d within creation, pushing things into motion and perhaps giving things a special poke here and there where \u201cdesign\u201d might be detected, but rather that God is the formal and final cause of the material and efficient causes within creation.\u00a0 The overall beauty and order of creation in its material and efficient causes, viewed holistically, point towards formal and final causes outside of themselves.\u00a0 If, as ID theory suggests, creation lacks an organic integrity, with \u201cirreducibly complex\u201d gaps that suggest a need for constant direct Divine intervention, this would undermine the classical Christian account of creation.\u00a0 It is gratifying to see an erstwhile defender of ID theory recognize these problems.<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding his theological and philosophical criticism of ID theory, Beckwith persists in arguing that the \u201cID case\u201d in the United States, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District<\/em>, was wrongly decided.\u00a0 He criticizes the federal trial judge in the case for adopting a legal test under which a \u201creasonable, objective observer\u201d (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.\u00a0 There is something trenchant about Beckwith\u2019s critique on this point, because, as he points out, notions of \u201creason\u201d and \u201cobjectivity\u201d require reference to metaphysical perfections that would seem ruled out of court by SR.\u00a0 But this highlights the major structural problem with the book:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This simply does not work, because classical liberalism and the American Constitutional framework embed Enlightenment epistemology and values, not Christian epistemology and values.<\/p>\n

A good example of this fundamental problem arises in Beckwith\u2019s qualified approval of the result in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores<\/em>, upholding a business\u2019 ability to exclude itself from a legal mandate to provide insurance coverage for certain contraceptives.\u00a0 Like most \u201creligious liberty\u201d advocates, Beckwith skates over the question whether a corporation<\/em> should have standing to assert \u201creligious liberty\u201d rights under the U.S. Constitution.\u00a0 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\u2019s religion clauses might apply to corporations is not by any means out of bounds.\u00a0 From the perspective of philosophical theology, however, it is far from clear whether business corporations should have any personal \u201crights\u201d at all, or what, if anything, a business corporation is<\/em> — never mind whether Christian owners of a business corporation that employs non-Christians ought to have, or ought to exercise, a \u201cright\u201d to excuse themselves from a generally applicable social program if they otherwise choose to receive benefits the state provides to business corporations.\u00a0 From a Christian theological and praxis perspective, the Hobby Lobby <\/em>case is a mess.<\/p>\n

Another example surfaces in Beckwith\u2019s discussion of same sex marriage.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He even suggests that same sex marriage was never really \u201cbanned\u201d or \u201cillegal,\u201d unless sacramental Catholic marriage also was banned or illegal, because the state has never explicitly sanctioned all the religious elements of Catholic sacramental marriage.\u00a0 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 \u201cprohibition.\u201d\u00a0 That may be true, but then one wonders what all the fuss has been about.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Give to Caesar what is Caesar\u2019s, and to God what is God\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The fuss, as Beckwith goes on to argue, is that \u201cmarriage\u201d relates to deeper metaphysical concepts about the human person.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Ultimately, however, clearing away that underbrush must involve a theological <\/em>critique of modernity\u2019s epistemological pretensions and metaphysical vacuity.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a book review I wrote of Francis Beckwith’s book Taking Rites Seriously:\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It succeeds reasonably well on the first count and less well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[85,75,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophical-theology","category-political-theology","category-science-and-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-QL","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3273,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3271\/revisions\/3273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}