A few hours after a vice president addressed the March for Life for the first time in history, President Trump signed an executive order on immigration which bars Syrian refugees and institutes a 90-day suspension of entry for seven countries where a majority of the population are Muslim. The executive order was immediately criticized, soberly and seriously by conservatives, and with unreserved outrage by progressives.
Many Americans responded to both the plight of the unborn and the refugee in similar fashion. Almost everyone believed, wittingly or not, that Christian teaching should determine American law and policy on both of these issues concerning the dignity of the human person, and the family. That is, both sides appealed to the justice owed to the human person, and both sides appealed to mercy, and to charity, those especially Christian ideas that resonate through the ages. That justice and mercy should kiss, the psalmist cried.
As the French political philosopher Pierre Manent has observed, “Even in our secularized present the Church is the spiritual domain at the center of the West.” There is still a sense, however muted, however distorted, however darkened by the iniquity of sin, that the American people still have a conscience that retains a memory of being Christian.
Yet the country is fragmented. We are not a happy nation. The threats from without are really downstream indicators of a domestic strife which can feel like civil war by political proxy.
Former President Barack Obama’s use of executive power served the perceived needs of a socially-progressive elite situated comfortably in large coastal cities which are also hubs of global cosmopolitanism. President Trump is using executive power to serve the perceived needs of those who have experienced the disadvantages of being a globalist superpower, who have lost jobs to the global project, and want to recover borders precisely because they feel the country is dissipating.
Without a doubt, both sides feel uncertain about our common life. Both sides can feel that something is shaky in the American project. Both sides can feel that we are skating on thin ice.
On the bright side, it is good to have a hyper-vigilant citizenry on the Left that doesn’t fawn over every act of the executive branch. I call that progress!
But the dark side is real too. If every Trump policy maneuver — and he does seem to think of every policy change as a maneuver, as a temporary stance in a long set of negotiations, already evident in the way the White House walked back the restrictions on green card holders — is treated as though it is some kind of coup within a banana republic, not only will the Left be exhausted and lose all credibility by Ash Wednesday, we’ll also find the ice we are skating on getting much thinner indeed. We have to think about the shape of our common life. Do we have one?
If the nation is no longer a project in its own right, if it isn’t carrying forward a vision which is rooted in any account of the genuinely common good, distinctive qualities peculiar to Americans, then we will face exhaustion, dissipation, and there will be nothing great about that.
At the origins of the Christian West, in the fourth book of the City of God, St. Augustine wrote, “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?” For Augustine, justice wasn’t simply fairness, and it certainly wasn’t about “balancing rights,” it was about a harmony between our laws and the highest Good. To ask about our common life slipping away is to also ask about what makes America not just great but good? What makes us worthy of admiration?
The executive power needs limits. All human power needs limits. It is within limits that all greatness is achieved. But greatness isn’t our best category, lest we become a very great band of robbers.
We have to think in terms of goodness above greatness. This is the category which we speak of when we talk about the virtue of justice which is owed to unborn persons. If we decide to be merciful and charitable as a nation, that is, the way that the one true God is merciful and charitable, then that too can also guide our policy on refugees. But we should know who we have been, who we are as a nation, and where we are going. If it is simply justice which demands that we recognize the rights of the unborn person, isn’t it Christian charity alone, which the Left often scorns, that justifies an admirable policy on refugees?
Americans know how to negotiate on policy, but if we feel ourselves in constant negotiation without common purpose, constantly tossed about, if we find ourselves unmoored from the rule of law, from the common good of the human person, and the human family, then we ourselves will become refugees in our own country, we ourselves will be in danger of the same logic of self-destruction that Roe v. Wade enshrined at the heart of our republic 44 years ago this month.
C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate professor of Theology at The Catholic University of America, located in Washington, D.C. If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
