The Problematic Context of Our Debates

Michael Sean Winters highlights something crucial

Michael Sean Winters recently called attention to a moral theology debate. He reported on an interview with Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia where the prelate described what drove his reform of the John Paul II Institute. Paglia rejected an abstract “armchair theology” to focus on one that attended to history and personal experiences. Winters then noted Bishop Robert Barron’s response to the interview on X, accusing Paglia of a “trendy postmodernism” that neglected moral foundations and principles.

This debate between principles and context hardly seems new. You can see it after Vatican II in those who debated proportionalism and natural law. You can see it in the 90s when John Paul II argued for exceptionless norms in Veritatis Splendor. You can see it in Cathleen Kaveny’s reflection on the 2018 CTEWC meeting where she said the gathering declared that “[s]ocial and cultural analyses have now become the focus of attention” and individual actions are “evaluated by the degree to which they participate in or resist structures of sin or oppression.”

Partly, I think this debate continues because it is just the nature of doing moral theology. Principles need to be applied to actions, and as different theologians work in ethics, they come to focus on either context for the application or theory to grasp principles.

But I also think there is more to the persistence of this debate. I think the binary nature of our public discourse has seeped into the guild and shaped the context within which we carry out our theology.

While a bifurcated public discourse is not new in the United States, its prominence has been accelerating since the end of the Cold War. Instead of a common, external enemy, political parties started to turn on each other. The FCC’s 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine removed the legal requirement that broadcasters present opposing views on air. Cable news expanded, often by stoking conflict. Newt Gingrich advocated a confrontational style, getting his party to prioritize Republican loyalty and Democratic opposition over the common good. The internet and then social media accelerated all of this by rewarding the most extreme voices. The Iraq War and the bailout following the 2008 financial crisis deepened distrust of government along partisan lines. Donald Trump’s political style of treating every disagreement as a battle between loyal allies and enemies intensifies this binary.

This structure of our public discourse has come to shape how we carry out debate in moral theology. The first move is to position an essay, locating which side it is on before giving it a hearing or considering its argument. The question is not “is it true or false?” or “is the argument strong or weak?” The question is “where does this belong?” Once positioned, it can be dismissed as partisan. There is no need for genuine engagement. Just use the standard tropes of criticism directed at the caricature of the opposing side.

While we Catholic ethicists are often aware of this initial dynamic, able to recognize it in ourselves and others and work to avoid it, the fact that we must acknowledge its reality and guard against it implicitly accepts that we are operating within a binary context. We make moves in our work to avoid it because we know we are operating in this kind of system.

This reality is even more obvious when one tries to respond to a positional critique. When one says “I am not that” or “that isn’t my position” or any other attempt to reject a categorization, one has already conceded that the structure of the debate is a binary. One’s job has become to defend one’s true location, fighting against a false positionality for a true positionality. It is arguing about the context within which debates occur. It is a battle over territory, a zero-sum game, and as one must continually defend one’s territory, the ideas become more markers of location than openings for discussion.

At this point, genuine discourse is almost impossible. The more one defends oneself, the more one is operating within the binary architecture. The more one operates in the binary architecture, the more the discourse is about defending one’s location.

I think this underlying architecture is why sixty years have not moved the debate about norms and context forward so much as hardened it into camps that now hardly talked to each other. We are operating on a field that assumes conflict as primordial, that life is a winner take all proposition, and that every maneuver is really about protecting one’s position.

This problem is not the need for better theology but for a better context. We believe in the Trinity, where each person is fully what they are precisely in relation to the others. This Trinity is also the source of creation, meaning that conflict and hostility are not the fundamental reality. Love is. And love is non-competitive. It expands as it is shared, strengthening everyone. It is freeing, liberating, calling us to care for what is good and for ourselves and others.

I am not sure how to instantiate a context for debate built on this belief. It requires both individuals and institutions to generate and sustain it. I can make two small suggestions that I think would further us along this path though.

First, we should be wary of projecting political or cultural positions upon theological positions. For too long, we’ve been using terms like “liberal” and “conservative” in theology. These terms import a binary architecture that makes genuine dialogue and collaboration all but impossible. These labels presume a view of the world in tension with Christian beliefs, so they skew our theology at its foundational level.

Second, we should avoid approaching our theology as attacks, as if its primary purpose is to defeat abstract “armchair” theologians or “trendy postmodern” ones or any other position. Such a telos for theology should be a warning that the work, whatever else its merits, is operating in a binary context. I think this is more challenging than we might think because much of our theology can be mistaken for attacks. This post can come across as a critique of bishops. The work of identifying and resisting sinful structures can be mistaken for mere deconstruction. But the difference from an attacking approach is that the telos is about the constructive work, like finding a problem that has hindered our debates or working toward a more just and merciful world or discerning those actions that can guide us toward greater love of God and neighbor.

These suggestions do not undo the binary context within which we operate. But identifying the problematic binary afflicting our field and trying to operate differently is the beginning of building a new context, one that presumes a world where God loves each of us, calls us to love one another, and so moves us to do work that cooperates with God.