That politics and nature are so intimately conjoined is perfectly consonant with the character of God’s dominion as expressed in the Decalogue. In this regard, it is clearly correct to speak of the Decalogue as God’s ‘natural law, insofar as the Ten Commandments reveal what our lives should look like as people created for friendship with God. But the expression ‘natural law’ does not entail a knowledge which could be had anterior to or separable from an understanding of the politics of God’s law. Because politics and nature are indissolubly joined, because grace and nature cohere, it would be a mistake to assume that a correct understanding of one could be had without the other. As both Aquinas and Luther argue, the last nine commandments in the Decalogue depend upon, and in that sense are an elaboration of, the first. This means that our understanding of the natural cannot be separated from the political any more than the theological can be separated from the ethical/ecclesial.
Stanley Hauerwas, “The Truth About God: The Decalogue as Condition for Truthful Speech” in Sanctify Them In The Truth, page 45
Author: Justin DaMetz
Father of Julian and Evelyn, Husband of Tabitha, Christian theologian, writer, 5th grade teacher, book addict, displaced Middle-Earth resident
a new moral majority
An aside in a recent Scott Alexander comments post caught my eye. The “this” he refers to in the first sentence is conflict theory:
The most famous example of doing this well was the Reagan coalition, where powerful business interests got to stay rich and powerful, and Moral Majority Christians got to have prayer in school or whatever. But the modern Democratic coalition works too – powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better.
I had never thought about it in this way before, but as I become more critical of the identarian/”woke” wing of the left, this seems to ring true to me. Just as I strongly believe all of the culture war material on the right (Satanic panic, LGBT issues, euthanasia, stem cells, and above all else, abortion) has long been a convenient giveaway by economic elites in order to get everyday conservative voters to support an economic agenda that largely benefits the wealthy, I believe the same dynamic is increasingly at work on the left. These woke issues suck up a lot of time and energy and attention among progressive activists, and while they may in some ways be important, they also distract from economic issues that would be mire widely attractive to working class voters and harmful to elite interests. This kind of cultural distraction is very useful to those in power. The left would do well to re-embrace a class-focused progressivism, instead of allowing itself to fall into the trap of becoming a moral majority of the left.
Oh, we remember all right
This is possibly the most pathetic thing I’ve ever read:
Sad.
Over here in reality, the Biden administration has done some great work rolling out vaccine distribution in amazingly short period of time, despite having to start almost from scratch amongst the wreckage left behind by the last administration.
Justin DaMetz 