Gushee’s argument can be summed up as follows. First, John Locke’s political philosophy calls for an extremely limited role for the state with regard to moral and religious matters. Such a view does not allow government to use coercion to enforce convictions about the good life apart from what is necessary for basic protections for life, liberty, and property. Second, our own constitutional order established in 1791 with the passage of the Bill of Rights was fundamentally Lockean rather than Christian. Third, Christianity’s fading influence with regard to publicly enforced morality has been eclipsed by the Lockean conception, and so the Lockean view will, and should, govern our nation’s view on same-sex marriage. The Christian should, finally then, appeal to his faith with regard to sexual ethics privately but accede to the Lockean understanding when it comes to guidance for how to think about same-sex marriage as a matter of public policy.

Gushee is quite right to point out that a crucial part of Locke’s project was to protect religious belief and practice from the meddling of government. Apart from that, however, nearly every component of his argument is wrong or, at best, very misleading. First, he is mistaken in asserting that Locke’s conception of government ruled out what we call morals legislation. Throughout his many works Locke emphatically denied that adopting religious toleration meant tolerating what he referred to, sans euphemism, as adultery, debauchery, sodomy, and promiscuity. Professor Gushee reports that it is his reading of Locke’s Second Treatise that has revolutionized his approach to public policy, but Professor Gushee should also read Locke’s First Treatise, section 59, where he writes that adultery and sodomy violate the law of nature because they threaten the “security of the marriage bed,” which he links explicitly to procreation.

Not only does Locke condemn these activities morally, he insists on a role for government to prohibit them legally, and not because of any special revelation. In a particularly telling passage in Locke’s famous Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke responds to an objection that if government cannot enforce religious truth it will open the floodgates to all sorts of strange and immoral religious practices:

If some congregations should have a mind to sacrifice infants, or, as the primitive Christians were falsely accused, lustfully pollute themselves in promiscuous uncleanness, or practise any other such heinous enormities, is the magistrate obliged to tolerate them, because they are committed in a religious assembly? I answer, No. These things are not lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house; and therefore neither are they so in the worship of God, or in any religious meeting. [emphasis added]

It follows that if Locke believed the government could prosecute adultery, fornication, and sodomy, his approach to government would not mandate same-sex marriage.

Locke was neither an extreme libertarian nor a proponent of a Christian government. He could advocate religious liberty and insist on morals legislation because he believed that all citizens had access to moral truths through the natural law, and thus could be held accountable regardless of religious beliefs. One may or may not find natural law plausible, but it occupies a respected place within Western—and Christian—political thought and Locke was hardly out of the ordinary in his reliance on it. Indeed, it is hard to know how Gushee could avoid relying on something similar if he believes, as I’m sure he does, that non-Christians should abide by secular laws forbidding theft or sexual assault. One can, I note in passing, offer reasons as to the wrongness of theft, or even same-sex marriage, without relying on scripture.

Gushee has discovered a “Locke” that John Locke himself would not recognize. Founding-era Americans would not recognize Gushee’s Locke either. Gushee describes Locke’s views as emerging victorious over Christendom in 1791, though in fact Locke was much more influential in the events leading up to 1776 than he was in the constructive task of establishing a new constitution. Needless to say, Locke’s views, were they truly to sanction the sort of public license that Gushee claims, would never have enjoyed the acclaim they did amidst a founding generation that had rather robust views about public morality and the government’s role in protecting it.

Gushee’s argument fails to be persuasive in one final, though decisive, way. Let us grant for the sake of argument that Gushee is right about Locke’s political philosophy and that the founding generation understood, and adopted, Locke’s views as Gushee describes them. The government should not enforce our moral convictions, no matter how dearly we hold to them, but should restrict itself to minimal commitments to public order and personal liberty. Does this not undercut entirely the very case for same-sex civil marriage? Isn’t the argument for same-sex civil marriage itself presented as a matter of personal conviction about what justice requires?

Gushee’s Locke may have been decisive back when the argument from gay rights activists was based on privacy and letting people do what they would like in their bedrooms. Yet ever since the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, gay-rights arguments have generally shifted from pleas to be left alone to demands that same-sex relationships be recognized and enforced as the moral and legal equivalent of heterosexual marriages. If the state cannot uphold a controversial traditional view of marriage because it lacks the moral warrant to do so, how can it then in turn uphold a controversial progressive view of marriage? Gushee’s argument, taken to its logical conclusion, seems to lead not to an acceptance of same-sex marriage but to the abolition of a public recognition of marriage altogether. Neither the real John Locke, nor a hyper-libertarian reconstruction of him, can help Professor Gushee cordon off his personal convictions from the public square.

Micah Watson is William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Affairs at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and Director of the Center for Politics & Religion at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.


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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The interest from the regulatory agencies of the local and state governments, however, raises some very interesting questions. State officials expressed frustration with the pornography industry’s citation of privacy concerns in rejecting the state’s inquiries about which actors in particular had acquired HIV. The state’s interest was in preventing a health epidemic, and the industry’s reluctance seemed to them obstructionist.

This may seem obvious enough to the common observer. Yet there is a sense in which one might question the rationale for state officials to intervene, given that the industry in question involves the behavior of consenting adults presumably cognizant of the health risks of their profession. Why cannot free citizens, acting by their own lights and under no compulsion, choose to engage in medically risky behavior in order to earn a living? By what right can the public officials of the county of Los Angeles and the state of California seek to restrict this flourishing business, even if it is a curious type of business that combines transactions of a commercial and sexual nature?

What sets off this particular industry from others is the risk of passing on this particular condition and creating a public health epidemic. In this sense, pornographic actors are viewed similarly to nurses and other health workers, whose exposure to contagion is understood to justify governmental oversight. Thus officials from the State of California, relying on the traditionally understood police powers to protect public health, safety, and morals, considered themselves to be rightfully exercising their mandate on behalf of the public.

Even so, what might strike one as odd in the phrase “public health, safety, and morals” is its concluding word. Including “morals” among the reasons for which the state might regulate the behavior of its citizens and their businesses seems today rather quaint. Yet it was not long ago that state officials believed themselves competent not only to judge what was detrimental to the physical health of its citizens but also what corrupted their moral health and well-being. Like the ravages of a physical disease, ordinary citizens and their officials could point to good reasons to think that pornography not only damaged the producers, “actors,” and consumers, but also those with whom they shared their communities.

The authority constituted by the consent of the citizens—the state—was understood to be justified in principle to assist people in protecting themselves and their neighbors from destructive behavior. But what were the reasons or beliefs that informed previous generations’ understanding of human nature and law such that morals legislation was seen as an integral part of the role of government?

The case for morals legislation rests on a conception of the human being as a rational, relational, and moral creature. Hadley Arkes is fond of paraphrasing Samuel Johnson in saying that we are geometricians by accident, but moralists by nature. Like other creatures, we live socially, depending on one another and living communally. But unlike other creatures, human beings use reason to order their lives and interact with one another. Further still, this use of reason is not merely a function of calculation, like that of lab mice learning how to navigate a maze to satisfy their appetites. Such calculation is useful and necessary, even for humans, but human beings go further in our interactions: considering what appetites are appropriate, if these appetites ought to be satisfied and to what extent, and how we should relate to other reasoning beings in going about pursuing a life well lived. In other words, human beings are moral creatures who cooperate to pursue the good life, lived well together.

This truth about human nature is properly described as a basic or self-evident truth, as seen in Thomas Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of practical reason: good is to be done and evil is to be avoided. “Self-evident,” in this sense, does not mean obvious to all, as many contemporary college students initially think when first confronted with the idea. A self-evident or basic principle is one that does not depend on a more fundamental principle for its validity. When it comes to apprehending a basic truth one either “sees” it, or one does not. If a young student does not understand the transitive principle in mathematics—that if A=B and B=C, then A=C—there is no more fundamental truth that will lead our student to take a further step and understand the principle. The same is true for the notion that human beings are moral creatures who are to pursue good and avoid evil.

To this a skeptic might ask: Does this idea of self-evidence not leave the defender of a normative human nature without resources for putting forth his case? Not in the least. For certain expectations follow if this basic truth about human beings holds true. Though one cannot argue deductively to the first principle of practical reason, one can argue dialectically to find ample evidence of its existence. For instance, we might expect that if human beings were endowed with a moral nature they could not help but appeal to moral norms. If human beings everywhere and at all times have spoken not only with “is” but also with “ought” in their syntax, then that would be a powerful clue as to the sort of creatures they are. And, of course, humans do speak in the language of “ought” as well as “is.”

Why would we propose interference with the architect of genocide in a foreign country, or intervene with an indigenous tribe’s practice of female infanticide? We oppose such practices because we have good reason to know such actions are grievously wrong and thus we are obligated to act where we can. Describing genocide, racial discrimination, and infanticide as morally wrong is a fundamentally different claim than describing them as things which we happen to dislike. To echo Arkes’ formulation in First Things, we understand those acts to be wrong in principle and thus not admitting to degrees of intensity nor of particularity of location or history. If genocide is morally wrong, then a little bit of genocide is not a little bit better; if racial discrimination is wrong in the United States in the 1980s, then it is also wrong in Slovenia in the 2010s. Moreover, we find ourselves repeatedly returning to the discourse of rational moral explanation when challenged by others about our moral judgments. Rational moral creatures offer, demand, and deserve to be offered reasons regarding moral conduct.

There is one more truth about human nature that is as sure as the reality of a moral law. This truth has two sides to it. The first is that human beings are to some extent free creatures, and this freedom has moral implications. Unlike the law of gravity, human beings can break the moral law, and they do. To borrow an example from C.S. Lewis, we blame the man who tries to trip us and does not succeed. We don’t blame the man who accidentally trips us, even though the second may actually harm us and the first has not. Moral approbation requires moral freedom, and we can condemn immoral actions only because we believe, implicitly or explicitly, that human beings have this freedom.

The other side of this truth is that as surely as there is a moral law built in to human nature, there is also a resistance and rebellion against that law and the norms that flow from it. It is crucial to keep alongside our conception of human nature as relational, rational, and moral the competing human dynamic that results in damaged and hurtful relationships, irrationality, and immorality. Only with these truths about human nature in mind can we consider the proper role of law and government engaged in morals legislation.


Micah Watson is William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Affairs at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and Director of the Center for Politics & Religion at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. This article is adapted from an essay in a forthcoming volume honoring the work of Hadley Arkes edited by Robert P. George, Francis J. Beckwith, and Susan J. McWilliams.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

It is of course true that some laws will be better conceived than others, and many may fail entirely to achieve their purpose. But that they have a purpose, and that the purpose includes at least an implicit moral element, is incontrovertible. One need only ask of any law or action of government, “What is the law for?” The answer at some point will include a conception of what is good for the community in which the law holds. The inversion of the question makes the point even more clearly. What would provide a rationale for a law or governmental action apart from a moral purpose?

The “good” here in question is not merely the product of passing fads or idiosyncratic preferences. When something is wrong, it is not wrong merely because it offends someone’s personal taste. The governing authority’s power to pass and enforce laws takes account of the beastly side of human nature while holding that some wrongs are so fundamental that they demand a robust and coercive response. If there are truly deeds that are gravely morally wrong, then it follows that there must be an authority established to command that such deeds be avoided and to punish the transgressors who commit them.

As Hadley Arkes has argued, if it is wrong to torture other human beings, then we do not content ourselves with mere tax incentives to encourage citizens to stop. We know that the wrong of torture requires that this choice be removed altogether from the domain of what is acceptable. You can enjoy the symphony, a NASCAR race, or the latest offering at the movies, but the logic of morals and law removes the option of torturing your neighbor for your weekend’s entertainment—even if your neighbor annoys you.

Of course, some choices will fall within the discretion of a polity’s citizens. Not every decision has profound moral consequences. But even drawing the line between morally innocent choices and morally culpable choices demonstrates our moral understanding. Abraham Lincoln made this clear in his debates with Stephen Douglas when he noted that Douglas’ professed ambivalence about whether states voted for or against slavery showed that he did not think slavery belonged in that category of actions that are truly morally wrong. If you don’t care which way a state votes on slavery, then you clearly don’t view it as a horrendous moral evil. Rather, you treat it like a state lottery: it is fine if the people want it and vote for it, and it is fine if they don’t.

The logic of morals, then, means that there can be no right to do a wrong. Built into the notion of wrong is the corresponding truth that an authority is right to punish perpetrators of the wrong. The idea that government can act as a neutral arbitrator between competing notions of the good life is ultimately incoherent because the idea itself promotes an underlying conception that this arrangement will lead to the best state of affairs.

It is a historical irony that the most famous attempt to sever the connection between law and morality illustrates the enduring link between the two. This attempt was made by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1897 address at the graduation of Boston University Law School, “The Path of the Law.”

Holmes argued that high-minded moral concepts only detract from a clear understanding of what law is and what it should do. Holmes proposed to completely eviscerate moral considerations from our understanding of law. “For my own part,” he said, “I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law.” To understand law, Holmes declared, we must adopt the point of view of a “bad man” trying to avoid getting in trouble rather than start off with idealistic concepts of moral improvement and the good life.

Unfortunately for Holmes’ argument, his denial of the link between law and morality can only be made by invoking the language of morals and law. To understand the law, he suggests, is to look at the law as the bad man does. But this raises a question: How, might we ask, are we to truly understand what it means to be a “bad man” and what it means to be a “good one”? Is it not telling that Holmes’s very attempt to expurgate morality from the law itself depends on making a moral distinction? If Holmes is using the terms “good” and “bad” merely as descriptive statements about how some men see themselves (the bad men looking to keep out of trouble, and the good men thinking that they are beholden to some external morality), then he is doing more than attempting to separate morality and law; he seems to be denying morality altogether. Yet he explicitly denied any moral skepticism in his address.

But if Holmes is using the normative words as truly normative, then he cannot help but back himself into the logic of morals by requiring us to make a judgment about good and bad men. That is, he requires us not merely to make moral judgments distinguishing between “goodness” and “badness” (and thus better and worse, right and wrong) but also to associate “badness” with those who do not see a link between morals and law. Whatever his intentions might have been, Holmes winds up illustrating the link between the logic of morals and the logic of law.

To legislate, then, is to legislate morality. One can no more avoid legislating morality than one can speak without syntax. One cannot sever morality from the law. Even partisans of the most spartan libertarian conception of the state would themselves employ state power to enforce their vision of the common good. Given this understanding, the term “morals legislation” is, strictly speaking, redundant. The real question is not whether the political community will legislate morality; the question is which vision of morality will be enforced and by what sort of government.


Micah Watson is William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Affairs at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and Director of the Center for Politics & Religion at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. This article is adapted from an essay on morals legislation in a forthcoming volume honoring the work of Hadley Arkes edited by Robert P. George, Francis J. Beckwith, and Susan J. McWilliams.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

We might articulate the perfectionist principle in this way: “religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools, and the means of education, shall forever be encouraged.”

Such was the position of the United States Congress as expressed three years before the Constitutional Convention in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The exact nature of the encouragement is not as important as the principle underlying it: republics depend on a virtuous citizenry and thus it is in the interest of the government to promote virtue. It is necessary, then, for government and law to partner with the institutions of religion, morality, and knowledge toward the perfectionist end of “making men moral.”

While the carrying out of this task is difficult and calls for principled and prudent leadership, the principle itself is much more controversial than it used to be. Objections arise from the libertarian right and the liberal left. Libertarian-minded conservatives, or conservative-minded libertarians, understandably blanch at the prospect of government engaging in what they consider soulcraft. If government is at best a necessary evil, how can one trust it to inculcate the good?

Many liberals, in contrast, purport to reject a perfectionist role for government in the name of individual autonomy. In reality most do not object to government promoting an idea of the good as such. Rather, they worry about the content of what passes for good when traditionalists argue for a government role—they seem to have no problem when the government advances a liberal conception of the good life. Nevertheless, many liberals speak as though the role of government is to enable individuals to pursue their own understandings of the good life and this approach is in tension with the principle espoused by the 1787 Congress.

The second principle is a bit more complex. If the perfectionist principle holds that the government should play a role in encouraging citizens to be good, the reason principle holds that we can identify that good through careful deliberation and the exercise of universally available human reason. As with the perfectionist principle, this position is also expressed in a seminal document of the American founding. In the first essay of the Federalist Papers, which were notably devoid of religious language, Alexander Hamilton wrote:

It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.

It is important to note what this principle does and does not exclude. It rejects the notion that politics is a mere hurly-burly power struggle in which the tribe, race, class, or church with the most strength determines success. In emphasizing the role of reflection and choice as such, it also rejects the idea that divine revelation is the only source for knowledge of justice and virtue. At the same time, however, philosophers like George see no necessary conflict between the reason and perfectionist principles and a role for divine revelation.

These two principles, then, were among the main themes discussed at the conference. The speakers at the conference offered papers that addressed how and in what ways these principles are worked out in public policy, analytic philosophy, and cultural apologetics. While many conferences have a specific theme, the broader mandate of this gathering produced an eclectic set of presentations (audio available here). Consider some of the presentations:

Intellectual historian Paul Kerry opened the conference with an overview of George’s intellectual project. Political scientist James Stoner suggested that George adopt a version of John Rawls’s abandoned Aristotelian principle—basically the notion that human beings enjoy the use of their higher faculties in community—to augment his natural law theory. Jean Bethke Elshtain, drawing from her recent book Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, argued that an untethered pursuit of individual autonomy has led to not only an impoverished civil society, but to some of the worst excesses of the last century. Theologian Russell Moore spoke about the prospects of evangelicals and Catholics continuing to work together for the common good. Gregory Thornbury, dean of the School of Christian Studies at Union, drew on the work of Carl F.H. Henry to cast a warning about the efficacy of human reason and an overly sanguine reliance on natural law.

Philosopher Christopher Tollefsen argued that a natural law approach best grounds the common conviction that disabled individuals are fully valued members of the political community and can participate in human flourishing. Jewish philosopher and theologian David Novak considered how it is that he and George can differ to some degree on their underlying theoretical positions while agreeing on practical moral truths. Political philosopher Hadley Arkes, stepping in for the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, reminded the audience of the necessity of engaging in moral discourse, weaving together the various strands of moral and logical argument, and working to realize Fr. Neuhaus’s conviction that “we can still turn this thing around.”

These addresses, disparate as they were, all touched in one way or another on the two key principles. The perfectionist principle, whatever its standing in the wider academic world, was not terribly controversial among this group of scholars. The same could not be said, however, about the reason principle. Understanding this relationship between reason and revelation with regard to pursuing the public good was perhaps the central theme underlying the varying papers presented at the conference.

This relationship was the topic of Professor George’s chapel address on the final day of the conference. Speaking explicitly as a Christian to a Christian audience, George expounded on the role that faith plays in the life of the believer. George told the students in the audience that unlike their secular counterparts, the Christian knows that God has a plan for his life and religion provides an overarching purpose. Moreover, the Christian understands himself to participate, even on a small scale, with God’s cosmic plan for the universe.

At the same time, however, reason is available to the human being as such. While divine revelation is surely needed to communicate theological truths such as the Trinity and the Communion of Saints, with regard to moral truths the content of revelation reinforces and illumines what we can work out using our reason. Our reason is flawed, to be sure, and so when our reason is not up for the task revelation can play a supplementary role. Nevertheless, unaided human reason is sufficient to understand morality and make principled and prudential judgments about the common good and the public square.

Despite common ground on hot-button issues and many shared theoretical commitments, this understanding of reason and revelation is one side of a fissure between otherwise like-minded thinkers and communities. For many evangelicals, the notion that divine revelation acts as a failsafe for when our reason is not up to the task seems to elevate man’s thinking over God’s acting to reveal himself. Such was the argument of Gregory Thornbury’s address invoking Carl Henry and Karl Barth, who both famously rejected natural law.

David Novak also addressed this issue, noting that philosophy done well attempts to discern the reasons God himself has for the morality he has revealed. At the same time, the vast majority of us will come to our moral beliefs through a religious framework and then exercise our reason to try and understand moral truth. As such, the reasonableness of morality is prior to the historical revelation of the moral truths (God knew the reason why murder was wrong before he revealed it), whereas psychologically many of us come to know these moral truths through the revelatory teachings of our respective religious communities (we are taught “thou shall not kill”) and then reflect on the foundational truth that human life is a basic good.

Philosopher Justin Barnard also raised questions about the sufficiency of natural law in his response to Christopher Tollefsen’s paper on how we are to understand human flourishing of severely disabled persons. Barnard agreed with Tollefsen that natural law provides a much better account of our moral intuitions than the liberal cosmopolitanism of Martha Nussbaum, but wondered if natural law leaves out the most important part of the human story. While agreeing that natural law can work from the basic good of human life to the conclusion that severely disabled persons are indeed persons worthy of our care and respect, Barnard argued that there are other salient truths—that such persons are created in God’s image and have an eternal destiny—that are only available through divine revelation.

One might wonder about how such theologically involved conversations fit into George’s larger project given his defense of reason and its availability to all persons irrespective of religious faith. There are (at least) three reasons why we should engage with this ongoing discussion regarding reason and revelation.

First, religion is a public good and a matter for public deliberation. The freedom to practice one’s religion, change religions, or reject religion altogether, is a freedom intrinsic to both the common good and the American political tradition. Indeed, George concluded Making Men Moral with a perfectionist argument that situates the good of religion not in individual autonomy but as a basic good; the basic good of considering the ultimate transcendent reality in the universe and ordering one’s life accordingly. Moreover, one need not be a believer in the traditional sense to recognize the value of religion both to individuals and to the larger society.

Second, as a practical matter anyone who has an interest in America’s public life must take into account the pervasive and overwhelming religiosity of her citizens. This discussion about reason and revelation encompasses Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Latter-Day Saints, Evangelical and Mainline Protestants, and other believers of various stripes. These groups compose some of the intermediary institutions that Tocqueville thought were so crucial to the health of a democracy. One cannot get a handle on the religio-political landscape of America without some understanding of what matters to the various players. This means adopting what legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart referred to as “the internal point of view.” It means, in other words, delving into the seemingly non-public discourse for the sake of better understanding, and influencing, public discourse.

Third and finally, it’s important to discuss the limits of reason and revelation if for no other reason than understanding what truly counts as public knowledge. Some critics of natural law claim not so much that natural law is false, but that some truths of divine revelation are also accessible to human beings as such. James Stoner made the case that a fundamental cause of the naked public square and the decline of the modern university has been the relegation of theology from a discipline that claimed objective knowledge to “merely an elaboration of belief.” Whether the critics of natural law, or Stoner in a somewhat different claim, are correct is not the point. The point is simply that it is only by engaging in such discussions that one can speak meaningfully about the distinction between public and private reasons.

With this particular topic, and with the several others addressed at the conference, the participants contributed to a very high level of discourse. If George’s Making Men Moral made the theoretical case for influencing the culture’s mores, the discussions at Union University centered on how best to go about making that case given the countervailing currents in law and culture. These discussions, available online, continue the work and legacy of Fr. Neuhaus, Professor George, and their fellow travelers while offering a model of how Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, and others of good will can, without compromise, engage the culture for the sake of good and for the sake of the common good.

Micah Watson is Director of the Center for Politics & Religion and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

This has not always been the case. Before the Supreme Court thrust the issue onto the national stage more than thirty-six years ago, pro-choice philosophers like Judith-Jarvis Thompson and pro-life philosophers like Germain Grisez were contributing to a debate that became more politically contentious even as the underlying scientific and philosophical issues were becoming clearer.

Consider the basic pro-life argument as it has developed over the last thirty years. Though there are many versions and several sophisticated philosophers who have made the case in more formal terms, the argument rests on three simple fundamental beliefs. The first is normative, the second medical or scientific, and the third is political.

The normative premise is that human life is a fundamental good and all human beings have a right to life. Some philosophers hold that this is a right not to be intentionally killed, though the killing of a human being may be accepted if it is the foreseen but unintended consequence of another justified action. Other philosophers do not completely rule out intending to kill a human being, but would take culpability and desert into account. Regardless, pro-lifers generally agree that unborn human beings have a right to life that cannot be violated.

The scientific belief that ties into the normative premise is the simple medical fact that embryos and fetuses are human beings. There is no longer, strictly speaking, any debate about “when life begins.” That question has been answered not by religious authority but by the disciplines of human biology and embryology. A human life begins at the moment of conception when a distinct and complete, though immature, human being forms from the joining of her parents’ gametes.

What follows from the conjoining of the scientific and normative beliefs is disarmingly simple: all human beings have a right to life; unborn human beings are human beings; thus unborn human beings have a right to life. When you add the basic political belief that the purpose of governments and laws is to protect fundamental human rights, you arrive at the basic pro-life position.

The scientific component of the argument has become very clear over the last few years. No longer do we hear as much about “clumps of tissue” and the “products of conception” and other euphemistic attempts to obfuscate what is at stake in the abortion debate. Thanks to the remarkable advances in medical imaging technology, this scientific truth seems to be making inroads in the general public. When describing the realties portrayed in the ultrasounds pictures that now adorn millions of kitchen refrigerators, we refer to those creatures pictured by their names. They are not masses of tissue with the potential to be human; they are human beings, our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and grandchildren.

This clarifying advance in the scientific realm has also affected the normative debate. The argument is no longer about what sort of entity is killed during an abortion, but whether each human being, as a human being, has a right to life. Unlike the scientific consensus about when a human life begins, here the debate remains contentious, though the central dividing line is once again surprisingly simple.

Either one believes that all human beings as such have a right to life, or one believes that amongst the category of human beings some have a fundamental right to life and others do not. Hence the debate has shifted from determining when human life begins to when human personhood begins. This clarification of the debate is welcome and edifying, as Ryan Anderson illustrates with his account of just this sort of discussion at a recent event at Princeton.

Pro-choice philosophers differ amongst themselves about what qualities of a human being warrant the designation of human person, and when in the life cycle those qualities are salient enough to declare personhood. One such quality is the ability to feel pain, another is self-awareness, and yet a third is viability, or the capacity of the fetus to live outside the womb. Other pro-choice philosophers, however, take a different tack. They acknowledge a right to life for all human beings, but find other rights held by the mother to outweigh the right to life of the unborn human being. A mother, the argument might run, has a right to her own bodily integrity, or perhaps a right to make plans for the future autonomously. According to this line of thinking, such rights outweigh the real but secondary right to life of the fetus. Thus pro-lifers will refer to a fundamental right to life to distinguish their position from pro-choice advocates who acknowledge a right to life but believe it can be defeated.

Pro-life theorists often differ about political strategies and prudential tactical choices. They also differ amongst themselves as to the grounding of the normative claim that human life is a good. Some pro-lifers emphasize the religious underpinnings of the sacredness of life and the Judeo-Christian concept of imago dei; others do not necessarily hold such beliefs but start from the self-evident good of human life and leave theological considerations out of the public discussion. It is fair to say that pro-lifers generally agree on both the value of all human beings regardless of age and state of development and on the goal of seeing this value protected in law and cherished by the culture. They often disagree, however, on the argumentative and political means to achieve that end.

Nevertheless, the philosophical debate about the normative dimensions of the abortion issue still comes down to the aforementioned watershed difference: either human beings as such have a right to life, or some human beings have a right to life and are thus persons, and some are not and are thus expendable.

While pro-life philosophers must continue their work by applying principles to emerging bioethical questions, the argumentative clarity achieved by their work in the abortion debate has implications for pro-lifers who seek to continue to influence both the law and the culture. Perhaps the most important implication is also the most obvious. If the philosophical debate about abortion is over, the political debate remains.

What is needed now are pro-life thinkers and activists who have the intellectual chops to navigate the arguments and insights of the philosophers, the communication skills to translate them for both the pro-life rank-and-file and the persuadable middle, and the charisma and savvy to inspire and guide the pro-life movement. What we need, in other words, is more people like Scott Klusendorf and more books like his recently published The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (Crossway Books).

Klusendorf is president of the Life Training Institute and travels the country arguing for the pro-life cause. His book can perhaps best be described as a sort of bridge between the robust philosophical arguments of people such as Gerard Bradley, Francis Beckwith, and Robert P. George, and concerned citizens who care about abortion but are not going to trouble themselves with the distinctions between essential and accidental qualities of persons and mind-body metaphysical dualism. Klusendorf has a gift for explaining arguments without dumbing them down. It is not too much of a stretch to say that he has a bit of C.S. Lewis’s knack for taking what can be a complex-sounding issue and presenting in terms that regular people can understand. And, like Lewis, he often does this through helpful analogy and fictional, though entirely realistic, dialogue.

As the subtitle suggests, Klusendorf’s book is primarily written for Christians. Yet this should not be taken to suggest that the book is only written for religious believers. Many of Klusendorf’s arguments in the first three parts of the book apply to the pro-life movement as such and it is only in the fourth and last section that he devotes four chapters to the specifically Christian call to engage the culture for the sake of the unborn. His book is an invaluable resource that will reward the pro-life Christian and non-Christian alike, both for its substantive and winsome arguments about abortion and for its blueprint for influencing the culture with those arguments.

The short-term challenges for the pro-life community are as important as they are daunting given President Obama’s positive commitment to abortion and a compliant Congress. On the political front pro-lifers must continue to pursue prudent and commonsensical policies that restrict abortion at the state level. Parental notification, waiting periods, informed consent, and bans on particularly gruesome forms of abortion are worth defending and implementing. To borrow a sports analogy, hitting for singles and doubles has proven to be a more effective strategy than swinging for the home run that would be the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

At the federal level pro-lifers will be playing defense, given changed political realities. But even this shift can prepare for future success. It is telling that President Obama has had to back off his pledge to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, the pro-choice dream legislation that would codify Roe and transform abortion from a negative right that the government cannot fully obstruct to a positive right for which the government must provide the means. The pro-life movement must bring pressure to bear on these matters, expending political capital whether on high-profile legislation like FOCA or on more subtle attempts to achieve the substance of FOCA through executive orders and “add-on” language buried in more mundane legislation.

On the cultural level, pro-lifers must not shrink back from engaging the debate in a respectful and winsome manner in all venues and at all levels. Princeton professor Robert George sets an outstanding example in his discussion with Pepperdine University’s Doug Kmiec about abortion and the Obama administration. Of course not every conversation will achieve such a level of erudition, but the “everyday” conversations that will take place over the next few years will go a long way in determining whether ours will be a culture that values and protects life or a culture that continues to narrow the boundaries of what it means to be fully human.

Circumspection is prudent when confronted with claims that “now” is the crucial moment for a political movement’s success. Yet there are signs that the pro-life cause is making headway. Recent polling data is encouraging, if not definitive, and the changed language of the political discourse surrounding abortion is telling. For decades there have been tens of thousands of dedicated pro-lifers making a difference in schools, churches, and crisis pregnancy centers. Meanwhile pro-life academics have made the intellectual case for the unborn, often at personal and professional cost, and politicians and lawyers have fought for modest but successful protections in law and policy. Perhaps we are seeing some promising signs that these labors are bearing fruit in the attitudes of citizens throughout the culture.

In other words, this is not the time to shrink back from engaging the debate, whether in the Ivy League classroom, the factory lunchroom, or at the family reunion. Pro-life thinkers would do well to consider how to inspire and equip the average citizen who knows there is something terribly wrong with abortion, but isn’t sure how to think about the issue or address it with friends and family. Scott Klusendorf’s book is an excellent place to start.

Micah Watson is Director of the Center for Politics & Religion and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.