Many thoughts have been running through my mind since listening to Governor Mario Cuomo’s brilliant talk on religion and politics at Notre Dame. But first a little background.
When the Roman emperors were feeding Christians to the lions, there was little church-state controversy. After Constantine’s conversion in 312, the church-state issue took on a new life, and there followed fourteen centuries of various state churches. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution happily flew in the face of that situation, even though those who had immigrated to America to escape persecution by various state churches in Europe had already established their own state churches in ten of the thirteen colonies when Madison penned that amendment.
Because of the First Amendment, religion became a matter of personal conviction in America and gave us in the intervening years the strongest and most diverse group of religious citizens on earth … and the most free. While we are locked together in argument — as at present — that is better than being locked together in violence, as in Lebanon or Northern Ireland or Iraq- Iran. The greatest civic virtues in America are tolerance and civility. Despite the recent election-year clamor, no religion really wants to become established by the state in America. Likewise, no religion really wants to impose its religious tenets on others in America. These allegations only cloud the discussion.
What then of religion and politics? Unlike church-state questions which are institutional, religion and politics are personal. If politicians are religious — and most are in one way or another, like most Americans — it is inconceivable that their religiously founded moral convictions will not enter into their political lives. Moral convictions touch many public concerns in America: the nuclear threat, human rights, problems of poverty, housing, education, the Third World, drugs, environment, and abortion, too.
Let me try an analogy. I grew up and was educated during the thirties and forties and learned to despise prejudice of all kinds, especially our treatment of blacks in America. Certainly this basic moral conviction was of religious origin, but it was also philosophical, experiential, and shared by many non-religious people throughout the nation.
We were, at that time, under a law of the land with which I was in thorough moral disagreement: Plessy v. Ferguson, which condoned separate but equal treatment for blacks. Many worked against that law in every way possible, but within the law and within the democratic and pluralistic structure of our country. Plessy v. Ferguson was finally, after 58 years, repealed by the Supreme Court in 1954, but there was still much yet to be done. Executive action by President Johnson and legislative action by the Congress in 1964, 1965, and 1968 changed the face of America. Apartheid, once the law of the land, was dead, and a new American consensus, both religious and non-religious in origin, welcomed its demise. Neither the consensus nor the change just happened; both were made to happen.
Was there anything un-American about that procedure? Was I wrong to spend fifteen years on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, trying to build a consensus opposing what I and others, both for religious and non-religious reasons, believed a horrible injustice? Now, is it un-American to be convinced that the frivolous taking of life is unjust? Is it un-American for people so convinced to articulate what they believe to be an existing consensus, or to develop a new one, in order to restrict legal abortions?
Let us consider two basic points.
First, the widespread uneasiness about 1,500,000 abortions a year on demand, overwhelmingly for the convenience of the mother, is not an exclusively Catholic malaise. Since Roe v. Wade, abortions have increased from thousands to millions, and 70 percent of Americans polled (Gallup, Harris, National Opinion Research Center), Americans with various religions or none, affirm that they share this malaise.
Second, if given a choice between the present law of abortion-on-demand, up to and including viability, or a more restrictive law, such as limitation of abortion to cases of rape, incest, and serious threat to the mother’s life, the majority of Americans polled consistently have supported the more limited option. Why? I keep remembering a message in Chinese on a cemetery wall in Hong Kong, a message from the dead: “What you are. I once was; what I am, you soon enough will be.” At the other end of the spectrum of life, a human fetus, granted speech might well say to us: “What I am, you once were; what you are, I soon enough will be — if you let me.” One need not be a professional philosopher or theologian to see the point of this argument.
If it was patriotic, just and noble to work for the repeal of Plessy v. Ferguson and apartheid, why should it now seem un-American to work for fewer legally sanctioned abortions when there is already a moral consensus in our country that finds our present legal permissiveness on abortion excessive and intolerable?
In fairness, it must be said, as Governor Cuomo and others committed to politics, the art of the possible. have pointed out, there is a not a consensus in America for the absolute prohibition of abortion. But there is and was a moral consensus, one ignored by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, for a stricter abortion law. A remarkably well-kept secret is that a minority is currently imposing its belief on a demonstrable majority. It is difficult to explain how a moral America, so brilliantly successful in confronting racial injustice in the sixties, has the most permissive abortion law of any Western country, recognizing virtually no protection for unborn human beings as a biologist will describe the fetus or the Holy Innocents, as we call those butchered long ago by Herod in Bethlehem. In West Germany, the highest federal court, mindful of the holocaust, struck down abortion-on -demand as violating right-to-life provisions of the country’s constitution. The only countries that agree with our laws are mainly the Communist countries, especially Russia and China.
Is making common cause with all those against totally permissive abortion a Catholic position? The bishops’ support of the Hatch Amendment was a move in this direction. But generally, the pro-life movement has been for an absolute prohibition of abortion. If such a total solution is not possible in our pluralistic society, and, in fact, was voted down by national referendum in Catholic Italy, will Catholics cooperate with other Americans of good will and ethical conviction to work for a more restrictive abortion law? One might hope so. This would not compromise our belief in the sanctity of all human life. We should continue to hold ourselves to a higher standard than we can persuade society-at-large to write into law. If Catholics would help articulate this consensus, favoring a more restrictive abortion law short of an absolute ban, Catholic politicians would no longer be able (or feel compelled) to say, “I’m against abortion, but …” Catholic and other politicians could even relive the civil rights revolution in an ultimate context of life and death.
the ant�7cehF���nts. By all accounts, it was a typically internal Dutch affair, difficult to understand for its European and Atlantic allies.
In France, massive popular resistance against govern-mental plans to bring private schools under state control created an acute political crisis. It is a very old and typically French problem, but this time it may well affect political stability. Mitterand’s efforts to make France’s system even more presidential were thwarted by the opposition in the Senate. The newly installed government now is a minority socialist one (representing less than 25% of the voters), for which the support of the Communist party (no longer in the government) is less than assured. Communists are known to pay lip-service to a government, while at the same time fostering social and political unrest by other means.
The prolonged coal-miners’ strike in Britain is a very British affair in its resistance against industrial modernization. No other European country needs modernization more than Britain, if it is to play a constructive role in Western Europe. Yet no other country is so hampered in doing so by the old-fashioned and backward looking trade union arrangement. The strike also has clear political overtones and may well turn out to undermine political stability.
A few remarks now on the German Democratic Republic, which over the last few years may well have become the principal problem from the point of view of Atlantic cohesion and European cooperation. The talk of the day this summer has been the coming visit of the East German Party leader Erich Honecker to Bonn. By the time you read my letter, it may have taken place or it may have been cancelled by Mr. Honecker. Whatever happens, it should be obvious that Mr. Honecker is not in a position to significantly diverge from his Soviet masters in his policy towards the German Federal Republic. He may gamble on disagreement inside the Kremlin, as have previous East European leaders. As in the case of Poland and Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the outcome would be quite predictable. It is more likely that Honecker and the Kremlin see the need for continued West German financial and economic support, and judge that to play up presumed differences among themselves helps to further alienate the West Germans from the United States and Western Europe. The longing for reunification is strong in the Federal Republic, and many Germans have concluded that accommodation with the East is more promising than cohesion with the West.
The return of “the myth of the nation-state” in Western Europe has not been helpful for the effort to regain a sense of purpose and an awareness of a common destiny. Still, cooperation among the European and Western democracies has survived the French dreams of national grandeur, the British “across-the-channel” syndrome. Dutch tendencies to withdraw from responsibility, and Mr. Papandreou in Greece. If, however, the myth is restored to prominence in Germany, Europe and the West will be in great trouble. Since its creation in 1949, the German Federal Republic maintained a careful balance in pursuing its three principal foreign policy objectives: close allied cooperation, especially with the United States; West European unification; and bearable relations with the East, and with East Germany in particular. The first assured German security and re-assured the Western allies that the German problem would be solved only in the framework of an eventual European settlement. The second protected West Ger-man democracy and re-assured its European partners about the republic’s reliability as a democratic partner. The third assured the federal government of enough popular support for its Western oriented policies in a situation in which reunification would remain a far-away possibility.
In a situation of strained German-American relations and stagnating European unification, the East German overtures may well induce the Federal Republic to give more emphasis to restoring the identity of Germany as a nation, than to upholding the cohesion of the Western democracies. If so, freedom, democracy and the rule of law are bound to be the first casualties in Germany itself and in Western Europe at large.