Correspondence More on Stanley Hauerwas, with a response from Jeffrey Stout
NEFF, JOHN AND JUDITH ANN & KALLENBERG, BRAD & JOHNSON, KELLY & Stout, Jeffrey & Lysaught, M. Therese & Tilley, Terrence W.
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors At odds We thank you for the October 24 issue, which presents a fair debate concerning Catholic thinking on same-sex marriages. In the end we find ourselves at odds...
...One would not know that from reading Stout's "Not of This World" (October 10...
...Hauerwas refuses to talk about generic categories such as "tradition" or "justice...
...He spends almost every waking hour exchanging reasons with his fellow citizens and fellow Christians, and he is right to think of reason as essentially embodied in traditions...
...JEFFREY STOUT The editors reply: We are eager to provide space either for Stanley Hauerwas to respond to Jeffrey Stout's critique or for anyone else who would like to respond on Hauerwas's behalf...
...Yet I'm not convinced that his way of talking about the church avoids the kind of abstraction he criticizes in the work of others...
...My book defends a kind of perfectionism in ethics that I take to be quite close to Hauerwas's, both conceptually and historically...
...My book invites Hauerwas to rethink his depiction of our society's political dimension without relying uncritically on this contrast...
...The church, while very important to us, is but one of those sources...
...JOHN AND JUDITH ANN NEFF Knoxville, Tenn...
...Luckily, the book can now be purchased directly from the Princeton University Press Web site...
...I carefully avoid endorsing the charge these critics make against him...
...The core of what I call the new traditionalism is Maclntyre's overly simple contrast between premodern traditions of the virtues and a liberal modernity that is imagined to be "after virtue...
...Stout labels Hauerwas and Alasdair Madntyre "new traditionalists," which is as oversimplified as calling them "communitarians" (a charge they both deny...
...Here Stout ignores a crucial dimension of Hauerwas's work, one he should not have missed: specifically, that for Hauerwas theological convictions only make sense when they are embodied in actual Christian communities...
...Stout's presentation is incomplete in many ways...
...Yet appeals to justice in this society do precisely that...
...We hope that the editors will continue this important conversation with articles that are more balanced and accurate...
...Still, he does often echo Maclntyre's claim that modern democratic discourse, being "after virtue," can be nothing more than "civil war by other means...
...It is a friendship I value greatly, and I believe Hauerwas understands that my book's discussion of him, which is much longer than the article, is intended as an act of personal and civic friendship...
...Do I, in calling Hauerwas's ethics "perfectionist," imply that he fails to be realistic about the need to cope with human sinfulness...
...Now, it may be that he himself is being too charitable in reading me this way...
...As Stout well knows, Hauerwas has testified before Congress and lobbied the federal government on the question of war...
...They presuppose that one can talk about justice apart from a notion of goods...
...Democracy and Tradition, which is a defense of the legitimacy of religious voices in the public square, should be required reading, especially for those who think liberal democracy and Catholicism should be partners, not adversaries...
...I infer this from the blurb he offered for the back cover, which commends the book for its "charitable reading" of those with whom I disagree...
...Democracy and Tradition offers my answers to these questions, but it aims mainly to initiate a public conversation about them, one that will include theologians like Stanley Hauerwas as full-fledged, valued participants...
...There Hauerwas welcomes Stout's criticism, writing that he hopes Democracy and Tradition will "inaugurate the kind of discussion that is so desperately needed in America," and noting further that "Stout and I now seem to agree more than we disagree, which means our disagreements are all the more interesting...
...Finally, we would like to direct one final comment to Commonweal itself...
...The author replies: The very first sentence of Democracy and Tradition, the book from which my article was adapted, refers warmly to my friendship with Stanley Hauer-was, which goes back to the mid-1970s...
...As individual Catholics seeking a moral position, we are bound, in the final analysis, by prayer and by consciences informed by credible, competent sources...
...Let the dialogue continue...
...My book's main thesis is that modern democracy is itself best understood as a tradition-indeed, as a tradition we have good reason to embrace, despite its many flaws and dangers...
...Stout charges that Hauerwas "thinks of democratic questioning, conflict, and reason-giving not as valuable social practices...
...I do try to diagnose how his rhetoric creates an impression, shared by many of Hauerwas's followers as well as many of his critics, concerning what he is against...
...His refusal to do so is secondary to a more general refusal to abandon Christian reasoning...
...In the end, Stout does not argue why "Hauerwas is wrong about liberal democracy...
...In a society that is committed to ducking the question of substantive good, "justice" becomes merely a way to talk about protecting ourselves from each other's incursions...
...While it would certainly be nice to hear Hauerwas's thoughts on, say, tax resistance, Stout ignores Hauerwas's tireless and public advocacy in opposition to the Gulf War and the current war in Iraq, his work with selective conscientious objectors in the military, and so on...
...This has much to do with the awkward way in which what he borrows from John Howard Yoder fits together with what he borrows from Alasdair Maclntyre...
...We agree with Hauerwas that such a discussion is desperately needed, and published Stout's essay in the hopes of encouraging it...
...Nor does one emerge from Stout's essay with an accurate sense of Hauerwas's position...
...Another caricature is implied by Stout's demand that Hauerwas return to the "language of justice...
...He just talks about Hauerwas...
...Tradition, for Stout, becomes a generic theoretical category- something old, static, primitive, underdeveloped, and worse, "premodern" and "authoritarian...
...So I welcome instruction from those who have read him closely and who worry that I have misrepresented his writings...
...Continued on page 29) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) In short, I defend the legitimacy of religious voices in the public square against those who wish to exclude them...
...In other words, instead of talking about empty abstractions, Hauerwas talks about the church...
...And even if my motives are charitable, or at least friendly, it does not follow that my reading of Hauerwas is either complete or wholly accurate...
...Judging by the lengthy, constructive, wonderfully generous response to Democracy and Tradition that will appear as the postscript to his new book, this is a conversation he welcomes...
...However, Stout fails to mention Hauerwas's untiring emphasis on human sinfulness and-most crucially-the subsequent centrality of the practices of forgiveness and reconciliation...
...The question is whether this claim adequately accounts for the practices of reason-exchange in which Hauerwas himself actively participates...
...incarnation...
...His article in the current issue of the Journal of Religious Ethics strikes a similarly positive note...
...Part 2 of the book, which offers criticism of liberals as well as traditionalists who exaggerate the contrast between tradition and modernity, is followed by part 3, which aims to preserve and perfect what I find valuable on both sides of the debate...
...One might be able to make such an argument, but Stout has not provided one here...
...Readers are now in a position to examine the whole thing and judge for themselves...
...Curiously, especially in light of where the essay ends up, Stout fails to include the centrality of the military in his list of practices and institutions that he thinks comprise our common life...
...terrence w. tilley M. THERESE LYSAUGHT BRAD KALLENBERG KELLY JOHNSON Dayton, Ohio The writers are members of the department of religious studies at the University of Dayton...
...Not only does such a position presume a naive misunderstanding of authority and obedience as contrary to argument and reason-giving (think, for example, of the relationship between the practice of law and constitutions, authority to which citizens of democracies are called to be obedient), but it also ignores the shape of Hauerwas's life and character...
...What perfectionism means in this context is belief in the importance of what Hauerwas calls sanctification as a virtue-oriented discipline of rectifying what requires rectification in one's own character...
...This is an astonishing claim...
...While we appreciate the journal's decision to engage its readers in important ongoing arguments about the relationship between Christian (Continued on page 4) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 2) commitments and secular, liberal democracy, we were surprised to find such a lengthy argument against one particular person without a response...
...I am interested in what Hauerwas might say about democratic practices if he resisted the temptation of conflating them with liberalism, defined pejoratively as an essentially antitradition-al project...
...Stout never says directly, but the reader is left with the sense that it is a bad thing to be...
...This is a glaring omission, given how Hauerwas posits gospel-based practices of forgiveness and reconciliation as the alternative to a Niebuhri-an "realism" for which the realities of sinfulness lead to the "tragic but necessary" use of violence...
...He does mention the church briefly-but only to subsume it into a larger category of "our common life" (the family, the university, etc...
...Just as there is no such thing as "tradition" apart from a specific tradition, one cannot talk about justice as an abstract category...
...Defending Hauerwas Jeffrey Stout and Stanley Hauerwas have long been friends and conversation partners...
...In the end we find ourselves at odds with your editorial policy ["State of the Unions," September 27,2002] and with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's statement on this issue...
...Do I believe that traditions are essentially "old, static, primitive, underdeveloped, and worse, 'premodern' and 'authoritarian...
...In alerting readers to the implications of Hauerwas's rhetorical and philosophical vilification of liberal democracy, Stout's essay was neither unbalanced nor inaccurate...
...Yet Stout doesn't talk about Jesus or the church...
...Does the historical evidence support the conclusion that democratic culture is essentially "after virtue" or antitraditional...
...Indeed, the book spends a lot of time criticizing liberal secularists for blocking such a conversation, and advising them of the importance of reading authors like Maclntyre and Hauerwas...
...He does not carefully outline Hauerwas's objections to the idolization of democracy-which is a more accurate description of Hauerwas's position than Stout's-nor does Stout offer any reasoned argument why Christians should support democracy as an end in itself, especially in its current convoluted U.S...
...It will be a lively dialogue indeed...
...Do I accuse Hauerwas of antira-tionalism...
...Hardly...
...What is a "new traditionalist...
...As Stout points out, Hauerwas has already written a lengthy rejoinder, which will appear in his next book, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Brazos...
...Also like Hauerwas, I worry about the dangers of idolizing democracy or, even worse, idolizing the nation-state...
...For example, he labels Hauerwas's ethic as "perfectionist," implying that it is, in the words of the article's title, unrealistic or "not of this world...
...In the same vein, Stout's comments about Hauerwas's pacificism are little more than an ad hominem attack...
...Like Hauerwas, I hold that this discipline benefits from meditation on exemplary lives, from reading novels, and from the good company of truthful friends...
...Tradition, as Stout renders it, is antirationalist...
...My friendship with him requires that I speak the truth, as I see it, about how the more extreme of his rhetorical devices have tended to obscure whatever democratic commitments he actually has, causing his critics to charge him repeatedly with a sectarianism he explicitly rejects...
...As a people, we will probably be ultimately influenced by whether same-sex marriage is hurtful to those in the marriages and their children, and whether such unions harm us in any other way...
...I am proposing a new model of public discussion-beyond both liberal secularism and the new traditionalism-a model that aims to learn much from each...
...And if not, how shall we think of it and relate ourselves to it...
...Furthermore, I am reluctant to accept his rhetoric as the last word on democratic culture...
...That sets the bar much too low for Christian accounts of the common good...
...Perhaps the brief excerpt printed in Commonweal leaves a misleading impression of what I am up to...
Vol. 130 • November 2003 • No. 20
