Sometimes our worship practice is criticized as being too passive, all sitting and listening and not enough action. But we need to recover a sense of how some of the most important work we do is sitting and listening to Scripture, taking time to sit and listen to a sermon, to be fed. In simply withdrawing from what the world considers its important business, in taking time to do nothing but worship in a world at war, in celebrating an order of worship in a world of chaos, Christians are making a most political statement. In takes courage to take time to worship God in a world where we are constantly told that it is up to us to do right, or right won’t be done.
Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, The Truth About God, page 62
As Christians, we must never lose sight of the fact that what we do on Sundays is just as important as that which we do Monday through Saturday. I think the criticism Hauerwas and Willimon describe here is real, and that too many churches who are social justice-minded have internalized that criticism. Worship is not an intrusion into, or distraction from, the work of justice and mercy we are called to. It is, in fact, the very act that does that calling to us! How can we know the kind of world God wishes for us if we do not take time to pray, to praise, to read Scripture, and most of all, to be in community with one another?
Ultimately, this is why I ended up back in the church a little over a decade ago, after rejecting religion quite decisively during my time during and just after college. I never lost my passion for the work of justice in the world, but I found I had no moral foundation undergirding it that also infused that justice with compassion, with hope, or with a dose of perspective. I needed worship, even if I wouldn’t have termed it that way at the time, or for a long time even after I began the faith journey to where I am today. My moral and ethical commitments are not in spite of my desire to worship, nor are they driving my religious feeling. No, those commitments are borne out of the act of worshipping week in and week out. That is why the church is so important, and will never go away: people need more than policy papers and disenchanted justice.
I first began writing this essay series way back in July of 2022, with the goal of unpacking a new vision of what a politics for the church can look like, in the wake of the destruction wrought by the Christian left and Christian right. We come, finally, to the final essay, in which, following Stanley Hauerwas one more time in his essay “The Politics of Charity”, we examine three ways the church can shape itself as a social ethic for a more just and charitable world.
As we noted at the end of the previous essay, a more just world is also a world where that justice is paired with virtues like friendship, loyalty, truthfulness, and fairness, all of it leavened by a strong commitment to Aquinas’ greatest virtue: charity, which is the love of God and love of humanity. That all sounds good, but none of this is easy. What does it actually mean for Christians to practice a charity that is less concerned with being effective and quantifiable and just, and more concerned with just embodying that love in the world, consequences (and bottom lines) be damned? There is no coherent vision or complete political program presented by Hauerwas to answer this question, nor should there be; the nature of the charitable mindset he is commending to us precludes those kinds of totalizing systems, ideologies and answers. Instead, we are told that the church, in answer to the questions of justice and charity presented by the world, has the duty to be a paradigmatic community. In other words, when presented with examples and instances of the world’s brokenness, the Church’s answer is to act in the way that the Church should- as guided by the example of Christ as encountered in God’s revelation – in order for the world to see what it means to be a person. This is the crux of that earlier exhortation we explored, that “the first task of the church is not to make the world more just but to make the world the world.”
However, we aren’t left to our own devices completely at the end. Instead, Hauerwas presents three questions the Church should be asking itself about who it is. These three questions aren’t the only ones churches should be asking themselves. But they are a good starting point.
The first question is a reminder to be aware: that “the economic life of the church is…not irrelevant to how the church acts as a social ethic in the societies in which she exists.” The Church lives in a world largely defined by the economic realities of modern capitalism; everything has been given a economic value, all utility is understood in terms of dollars and cents, and we are all always evaluating decisions not in terms of virtues and values but via cost-benefit analyses, because that is the way we have been shaped by the world. Mammon is the almighty of the world, but the Church knows that Mammon’s power ends, and God’s doesn’t. Christ showed us that three days after the Cross. Thus, the Church must commit itself to evaluating value and worth in a different way, and must demand of its people that their economic lives mirror their Christian values. “This not only involves how Christians learn to use their possessions,” writes Hauerwas, “but also what kinds of economic life professions the community thinks it appropriate for Christian to participate in.” This is a key factor in being a paradigmatic community for the world to see. How we use our dollars matters, but just as important is how we acquire those dollars, because the instrumentalization required of monetary exchange doesn’t only operate in consumption; it also plays a key role in value-creation via the work we choose to do. This tells us, then, that contrary to much of the ethos of the modern church, there are definite professions and vocations that are out-of-bounds for Christians, and those are not just related to sexual expression. Should a Christian be a soldier? Should a Christian be a police officer? Should a Christian be a politician? These are all questions the Church has long contemplated. But what about these: should a Christian be a banker? Should a Christian be a venture capitalist? Should a Christian be working on fossil fuels? These are questions the Church must address with its members, and it should not be afraid to take a stand and say what is and isn’t off limits for someone who claims to be committed to being a part of this paradigmatic community representing Christ in the world.
The second question Hauerwas suggests concerns ecclesiology: “the question of how the church governs herself is crucial to what kind of social ethic she is.” This question of church governance is necessarily tied up in a question of politics. What is the politics that governs the church? How will the church make decisions and arrive at consensus together? This is a vitally important question that must be answered; to not answer what governing ethic the church engages is still to answer the question, because at the point that the answer is not thoughtfully considered, the worst habits of human organization rear their heads. “The crucial question,” Hauerwas askes, “is whether we are a determinative enough community that our politics can provide a basis for authority rather than a politics of fear?”
Finally, the third question is about care for strangers, because “how Christians care for the stranger is an essential mark of what it means to be the church.” This third question swings us back around to that question of effectiveness that we started this series with. What does stranger care mean for a church that isn’t bound by questions of statistics and sociology? What does it mean to care for our neighbors, to be a Good Samaritan, as an institution that understands itself as the hands and feet of Christ in the world?
Historically, Hauerwas reminds us, this has been practiced simply as caring for those who need it. “[I]t was no accident that Christians have been among the first to set up hospitals.” Simply providing a place to heal is a good start. This approach certainly comes with its fair share of critics who are still on the effectiveness and policy tracks; he notes that a common critique of this practice has been that these are merely practices of charity, “not dealing with the systematic forms of poverty and ill health”, but as we’ve been discussing here over the course of eight essays, for the church, there is no such thing as “merely” charity. Charity is our calling, because “the first object of the Christian social ethic is the kind and form of care it provides for those who have no other means to defend themselves.”
I want to end this first series of essays by focusing on that phrase “Christian social ethic.” That is what we’ve been thinking about throughout these essays: what is the Christian social ethic? This essay series has ranged far and wide, probably too much so at times to claim any real sense of coherence, but this is really the question at the heart of things in Hauerwas’ original essay, and in the reflection I have tried to do. What first grabbed me so strongly when I read “The Politics of Charity” three summers ago was Hauerwas’ biting critique of effectiveness as anything the church should ever be concerned about. I wanted that to be the central theme of this series, but again, I fear that at times I have strayed too far from that original animating impulse.
But, again, I want to use the idea of a social ethic to draw together the threads of this series and bring it to a close. Hauerwas brings his essay to close with this statement: “the church does not have a social ethic, but rather is a social ethic.” This statement is close to one I use often, which is that the church is not a social service organization. The church is the church, and when we say that, we say what it is for the world and for the hurting. It is the church. That means it is a people shaped not by social sciences or policy white papers or political platforms, but by the example and words of Christ as revealed on the Cross and in Scripture. It is “an institution that has learned to embody the form of truth that is charity revealed in the person and the work of Christ.” There is no thought given to effectiveness; as we saw in the story of the Good Samaritan, in fact, the social ethic that is the church often works counter to what the world would define as effective in the face of difficult situations. “Love God.” “Love your neighbor.” “Love your enemy.” These are the things commended to us. Love is not quantifiable, it is not measurable, it certainly doesn’t always make sense. The world would tell us that loving God is a fool’s errand, that loving your neighbor is dangerous, that loving your enemy is nonsensical. And maybe they are right about that. Let’s do it anyway.
Way back when I started this series of essays, I set up a dichotomy, in the very first paragraph:
“Contrasted against the work of social justice, charity is often viewed as simple good deeds that fail to acknowledge or ameliorate the structural issues underlying the need being met. For instance, soup kitchens do admirable charitable work, but are ultimately insufficient, as they don’t do the hard political work of discovering why people are hungry, and then wielding the power to solve hunger.”
Justice, and charity. Often, especially in more liberal or progressive spaces, they are set up as antagonists, with one often taking away from the other in some sort of zero sum game. Against that dichotomy, following the lead of Stanley Hauerwas in his essay “The Politics of Charity”, I proceeded to make an extended defense of charity as a positive and necessary virtue for Christians, and in fact as the most Christian of virtues, despite its often countercultural or ineffective practices, at least compared to the work of justice.
But, it would be wrong to make this about booting justice in favor of charity, just as it is wrong for many progressive churches to effectively do the reverse. As Hauerwas reminds us at this late point in the essay, “there can be no charity without justice.” This point is key to understanding Hauerwas’ broader point in his essay, and in drawing together the task we have undertaken here over the course of the last seven essays. So, in today’s essay, I want to work through Hauerwas’ argument about the paired virtues of charity and justice, and then move on to a broader summation of the work we’ve done so far. This will allow us to turn, in the final essay, to a vision of what the Church is supposed to, since we’ve done a lot of work to establish what it is not.
In order to understand how charity and justice go hand in hand, it is important to figure out what justice is, and what it is not. If you’ve ever taken a basic college course in philosophy, you know this is not an easy or light task. For thousands of years, people have been trying to define, understand, and enact justice, in one form or another. It is a murky concept, with contextually contingent features sitting alongside universal, eternal truths.
So, let’s start with what Hauerwas tells us justice is not. He begins by writing, “justice is not simply what is possible or necessary for societal order.” More, justice “obviously involves more than the recent interpretations of justice that almost totally associate justice with patterns of distribution of basic values (freedom) and material goods.” In these statements, Hauerwas is taking clear aim at the conception of justice that undergirds much of the social contract theorizing that justifies societal arrangements in liberal societies. Throughout his corpus of works, Hauerwas is continuously critical of the most prominent 20th century social contract theorists, John Rawls. In order to understand Hauerwas’ critique of common understandings of justice, and the vision he places in contrast, one must understand Rawls.
John Rawls
Rawls wrote a seminal book titled A Theory of Justice, a book that has shaped political theory in the post-Cold War years unlike almost any other. For Rawls, justice is essentially fairness, balanced against liberty. In a liberal society with a democratic political order, that which is fair to free and equal people is considered to be just, and structures of power, control, and decision making must be established in order to ensure fairness and liberty. But how does such a society determine what is fair, and what is not? To answer this question, Rawls came up with two, interrelated concepts that would guide decision-making in a just society: original position, and the veil of ignorance. The original position is the idea that any member of a society should, when making decisions about the good of that society, should do so as if they were free of bonds or obligations or relationships to other people or groups. In other words, the original position dictates that the needs of society as a whole should not be influenced by or made subordinate to the needs of civil groups, identity, family, religion, or any other contingent factor. But how to do this? How would any person conceivably separate themselves from any bias or partisan favor when making judgments? This is where the veil of ignorance comes into play. Rawls instructed that every person, in order to act from original position, should imagine what answer they would provide to any question if they were to be found in the lowest and most disfavored societal position. The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment, wherein each person imagines they are making choices from behind a veil which obscures where they might find themselves placed in any society. From behind the veil of ignorance, no one knows whether they might be rich or poor, black or white or brown, male or female, Christian or Jew or Muslim, or any other identifier. Thus, any choices made should be ones that would favor the maximum amount of fairness and the maximum amount of liberty. This fairness and liberty, arrived at from the original position and behind the veil of ignorance, is justice, in Rawls’ influential determination.
Rawls’ conception of justice is any appealing one, and has much to recommend it. It has been a popular political philosophy ever since A Theory of Justice came out. But, it is also a fatally flawed framework, as Hauerwas has pointed out in his writings. I am going to quote Hauerwas at length, from his essay “The Church and Liberal Democracy” in one of his earliest books, A Community of Character:
[T]he ‘original position’ is a stark metaphor for the ahistorical approach of liberal theory, as the self is alienated in its history and simply left with its individual preferences and prejudices. The ‘justice’ that results from the bargaining game is but the guarantee that my liberty to consume will be fairly limited within the overall distributive shares. To be sure, some concern for the ‘most disadvantaged’ is built into the system, but not in a manner that qualifies my appropriate concern for my self-interest. Missing entirely from Rawls’ position is any suggestion that a theory of justice is as much a category for individuals as for societies. The question is not only how should the shares of any society be distributed equitable, but what bounds should individuals set for themselves if they are to be just. In an effort to rid liberalism of a social system built on envy, Rawls has to resort to the extraordinary device of making all desires equal before the bar of justice. As a result he represents the ultimate liberal irony: individualism, in an effort to secure societal cooperation and justice, must deny individual differences.
There are two key critiques of Rawls’ theory of justice that I want to draw out here, because they are relevant to our larger project in these essays. The first has to do with moral relativism, the second with alienation. As Hauerwas says so well in this passage, Rawls’ justice depends on leveling the playing field of what is and is not considered good, in both an aesthetic and a metaphysical sense. What this means is, a society operating in the just way Rawls describes is not a society capable of saying what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, as long as that behavior is arrived at in a way that maximizes fairness and liberty. But, this very obviously goes against the entire project of Christianity, and other religions. All moral systems make firm declarations of what the good is, and what it isn’t. Not all choices are equal; some are more desirable than others, even if they may be just as fair or free as all others. Moral systems like Christianity take it as their duty to make judgments on what is good, true or beautiful, but this stabs at the heart of Rawls’ theory. In Rawls’ conceptual world, to make a statement on whether we should do something or not is to tread upon the right of others to do as they please. Thus, any question of moral good inevitably becomes beside the point, and an “anything goes” ethos reigns.
Related to this lack of moral good is the question of alienation raised by Hauerwas, which I think is the most important of these two critiques. In order to imagine oneself in the place of the original position and the veil of ignorance, one must necessarily shed all ties that one may have to any community or tradition they are a part of. But, even the most honest and removed of actors cannot fully extricate themselves from the context in which their character was shaped. The veil of ignorance can only ever be a thought exercise, and human beings can only ever approximate its effects in the best of situations. But, even given the limited way in which any person can separate themselves from their own context, the larger question arises of whether we actually even want people to do that. What does it mean to remove all ties of belonging and being from our decision making and judgment? Is that really a desirable way for a human to ever operate?
For Christians, the question is even more important. Should Christians ever actually enter situations where we would want to completely remove and set aside the new life we take on at baptism? Doesn’t doing so undermine our identification as disciples of Christ? Wouldn’t the presence of Christian principles in a person sharpen their decision making, not make it more dangerous? None of these questions are asking if Christians should in fact impose their views on the world – our earlier forays into the anti-Christian nature of coercion forbids that. But, Christians in all spheres do and should bring the way of being that Christianity demands into all of our contexts, not as a form of power to exercise over others and society, but as a way of seeing the world that cannot be set aside, due to its all-encompassing and paradigm-shifting nature.
So what does all of this have to do with our broader purpose in these essays? It is this: justice, in the words of Hauerwas, “must also involve a view of the good that will necessarily form how any distributive criteria work.” Justice must involve more than just fairness and maximal liberty; in its best form, justice is so much more than optimizing distributive decisions and material concerns. Justice necessarily incorporates a conception of the Good, a notion that has become superfluous in a liberal society. There can be no definite understanding of what the Good is for society, because pluralism means every single individual gets to define it for themselves. But, if justice is to mean more than ensuring I get mine and you get yours, it must include a vision of what it means to be good, and not just narrowly for myself, but for society as a whole. This is why Hauerwas’ critique of Rawls is so important: the pursuit of justice demands a vision for the world, and that vision is shaped by our attachments, our communities, our traditions. When our conception of justice is broadened in this way, then the idea that charity and justice must be in opposition to one another begins to fade away. Instead, we begin to see that they are interdependent, that justice requires the virtue of charity, and charity presupposes a holistic vision of a just world.
Here’s the problem many churches have run into about charity: it has been misunderstood and wrongly defined. We’ve tainted the word charity as about giving people free stuff or undeserved ends, and not about what it is, in the original sense of the Latin caritas: the love of our fellow human being. It is the greatest of the virtues, according to Aquinas, that which unites us to one another, and thus, unites us to God. When we are able to understand charity in this way, we begin to see justice as its complement, as the other side of the coin. You cannot have one without the other. “There can be no charity without justice,” writes Hauerwas, “for justice involves those basic obligations we owe others and ourselves that charity presupposes.” Charity requires of us love, and justice prescribes what that love looks like in public.
We’re drawing in on a concrete vision of how the church can practice both charity and justice in the world. The next and final essay of this series will do that, but before we can get there, we need to flesh out this interplay between charity and justice. As we’ve seen so far in this essay, modern liberal notions of justice have narrowed the scope of what we understand justice to be. As per Rawls, justice becomes fairness and liberty, balancing against one another. The forms justice takes, then, are all centered around questions of distribution: who gets what, and how much do they get, and who do they get it from? Like so much of the world under capitalism, the once rich concept of justice becomes about numbers, dollars and cents we owe to one another.
But, when we recognize that justice depends on charity – on love for one another, regardless of the economic or distributive worth of that love, regardless of just how effective that love is in the world in a policy or economic sense – we begin to understand that justice is so much more than fair and free distribution. A truly good society is one in which “fellowship, friendship, loyalty, and truthfulness are equally important marks” as justice in the making of decisions. And we know this to be true, because we can look around at a culture that has been steeped in the language of justice, often to the detriment of all other considerations. Are friendship, fellowship, loyalty, and truth something we see much in the public sphere anymore? The question answers itself. The institutions and ideals that shape us as a people are intensely focused on a shallow, market-based understanding of justice- and concepts like truth get left behind. Justice can be quantified and measured. Fellowship? Loyalty? Not so much.
Forming a society that integrates all these things – charity and justice, and also friendship, loyalty, trust, fellowship, fairness, and liberty – is no easy task, obviously. And it is not something that can be implemented from the top down. Instead, it requires the forming of people, and those people must be formed by the communities and traditions from which they hail. The Church, in particular, has historically been a community of people who have a vision of the world to share and embody. Too often this gets twisted in a political program or an ideology; that danger must be acknowledged and warned against. But it should not scare Christians off from having a clear and coherent answer to the question of “what does it mean to be a good and just society?” The Church can and should posit an answer to this question, not as a policy platform or an ideology, but as a way of life modeled on that of Christ and embodied in the everyday lives of people for two thousand years. Instead of trying to put together a political platform for others to endorse, the church should “pioneer those institutions and practices that wider society has not learned as forms of justice” – those values and virtues we just named as companions to justice. “The church, therefore, must act as a paradigmatic community in the hope of providing some indication of what the world can be but is not.” The question of the things that the church in particular can do to embody this vision is where we turn in our next, and final, essay.
Justin DaMetz 