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The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002) 361-373



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Dispelling the "We" Fallacy from the Body of Christ:
The Task of Catholics in a Time of War

Michael J. Baxter


Within hours after the attacks of September 11, academics were busy doing what academics do: talking about words. For example, the word war, which President Bush used to describe the attack. What exactly does that word mean? So too with the word terrorism. And the word cowardice. And extremist, tragedy, religion, freedom, and civilization. In those days and in the months since, the words which have commended my attention are we, our, and us. Why did they do that to us? How did they breach our security systems? What should we do in response? In these sentences, what is the subject? Who is the "we"? The answer is that it is "we Americans."

This identity of we Americans I accept with serious reservations, especially in a time of war. My reservations about using the word we (and related first-person pronouns) in conjunction with the word American are due to the fact that this usage bespeaks a kind of collective purpose, a shared project, a community that is, I would argue, a fiction. The argument here is complex, but it can be summarized briefly as follows: genuine political community is not possible in the United States owing to the absence of a shared [End Page 361] understanding of the good life—an understanding that must be rooted in a substantive account of the purpose of life, and, ultimately, of the Author of life: God. But the United States is a political order formed on the exigencies of moral and religious pluralism, in which such a common understanding is not available. Indeed, politics in the United States is designed to translate moral and religious convictions into interests, which are set over against other interests, which are then adjudicated so as to achieve whatever relative forms of justice and peace are attainable given these differences. The aim is not true justice and peace grounded in the good. The aim is rather a relative justice and a tolerable peace, which is the best that can be achieved amid the various parties in a religiously and morally pluralistic society.

This social setting and political vision produces a certain kind of moral relativism, the kind which says that it is wrong for parents to destroy their unborn offspring if the parents believe that it is wrong, but not wrong if they believe that it is not wrong; the rightness or wrongness of abortion depends on the belief system of each individual, his or her preferences, his or her choice. This kind of moral relativism also bestows on people the so-called right to die, a right, it can be argued, that with time will be expanded to include not just the terminally ill, but also the very seriously ill, and the mentally ill, the burdensomely ill, the old and decrepit, the unwanted. A trenchant criticism of how this kind of moral relativism is promoted in a liberal democratic culture has been delivered by Pope John Paul II. In recent encyclicals, in particular Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae, he argues that democracy as a form of government is not a good in and of itself, that its goodness depends on the virtues of its citizens, and that when those are lacking, it can promote or protect heinous evils. 1 Advancing this line of reasoning, he refers to the tyranny that can arise in the name of the will of the majority, a tyranny that preys on the weak and disabled, the poor and the innocent; and to the extent that the state protects or promotes this tyranny it can be regarded as, to use John Paul II's phrase, a "tyrant state." 2 It is no secret that these remarks were aimed at the United States of America.

The pope's warning about liberal democratic political orders in general and the "tyrant state" in particular should...

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