The Rawls Report
Twins From Birth: Christian and Secular Natural Law
by Alec Rawls
Contributing Editor

Natural law refers to what we have grounds to assert about right and wrong. Scripture can be a source of understanding about right and wrong. So can moral reason (the requirements of thinking straight, applied to matters of value). How do these different founts of natural law compare?

In the case of Christianity, followers are called upon to be "of the truth," which must mean first of all being honest about reason and evidence and what one has grounds to assert, just as secular reason calls for. If Christianity as a whole abides by this principle, then Christian natural law should be very similar to natural law as moral reason can discern it. Is it? Is the Bible consistent with secular natural law? What about Christian practice?

Liberty and truth

The central nexus of secular natural law is the synergy between liberty and truth. On one hand, liberty is the great engine of truth, creating a kind of society-wide scientific process of progress where everyone's ideas about where value lies and how to pursue it get tested against reality. Competition between and dissemination of people's ideas advance the discovery of truth on all fronts, scientific, practical, moral and political. At the same time, the most important truth that liberty discovers is that liberty works. Economic liberty (capitalism) works. Gun rights work. School choice works. In general, empowering moral agency works.

Modern Christian practice, especially conservative Christian practice, is quite consistent with this core of secular natural law. Conservative Christians are for economic liberty, limited government, low taxes, gun rights, and school choice. In the land of liberty, it is conservatives who are the liberty-lovers.

Secular moral reason is concerned with more than whether liberty works. There is also the importance of liberty per se. To substitute one person's moral agency for another's is a kind of murder. Christianity also includes this dimension. Liberty is to be respected because we are all made in God's image.

This belief that we are all created in God's image was historically the main impetus for all Western liberty, but especially in the United States, which was founded by what we would today call "fundamentalist" Christians. Not only had their ancestors come to America in search of religious liberty, but because the founders gave their subservience to God, they were unwilling to be subservient to a secular power, like the federal government, any further than was absolutely necessary.

The Bible itself is quite strong on principles of liberty, especially economic liberty. The parable of the laborers in the vineyard, for instance, rejects the principles of compensation by merit and/or equal treatment in favor of the principle of contract. If you receive what you agreed to, you were not cheated (Matthew 20).

Secular reason also embraces liberty of contract. Not that merit doesn't matter. Rather, the best way to achieve reward for merit is to leave people free to seek out the cooperative arrangements that suit them best.

Slavery

The glaring violation of liberty in the Bible is its toleration of slavery, and even of the killing of slaves. "When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be punished; for the slave is his money" (Exodus, 21:20).

This is not quite as liberty-loving as could be, given that slavery is the annihilation of liberty, but there is another side to Christianity on the slavery question, too. Christianity, with its belief that all men are created in God's image, was the driving force behind the abolition of slavery throughout the Christian world. (Unfortunately, slavery still has a substantial presence in the Muslim world, while the capacity of Islam to reform itself is still in question.)

Even the Mosiac law about the killing of slaves has a silver lining in terms of liberty. Looking past the tolerance for slavery, this law actually asserts a basic liberal principle: that government (the law) should stay out of those areas where people have private incentive to behave responsibly. A slave owner has incentive not to take bad risks with the health of a slave because "the slave is his money." Thus punishment for injuries inflicted when disciplining a slave are only called for in the extreme case where the killing of a slave is likely to have been intentional.

This is an extreme example of the fundamental principle of limited government. Government should only intervene where necessary. What can be left to liberty should be left to liberty. Thus in an odd way, what the Mosiac law on the killing of slaves actually demonstrates is how committed the Bible is to principles of liberty. Once joined with modern Christianity's rejection of slavery, Biblical principles of limited government square perfectly with the conclusions of moral reason.

Abortion

The one place where modern Christian practice seems to be out of sync with natural law as discerned by secular moral reason is the abortion question. When the weights on both sides of this decision are accounted, it is pretty clear that the balance of considerations can point either way, making this exactly the kind of question that is best left up to individual responsibility.

Analytically, the abortion question is highly ambiguous. Very often there is life on both sides of the equation. Bearing a child now will often mean forgoing the plans one may have had for creating a family in the future. It could also cause the parents to fall short of fulfilling parental obligations to the children they already have. In general government is less well equipped to make these life vs. life decisions than parents are.

The willingness of others to adopt an unwanted child changes this calculus considerably, leaving the life of the unborn child in possible conflict only with the liberty interests of the would-be mother for the duration of her pregnancy. There is no longer life on both sides of the equation and it becomes more tenable to hold that the state's interest in the life of a fetus dominates the other life and liberty interests at stake.

But adoption is not always available, and if the government tries to subsidize adoption, that too puts life back onto the other side of the equation. The taxation needed to subsidize adoption takes from people's ability to raise families. The only internally consistent grounds for any extreme opposition to parental choice on abortion is a religious conviction that abortion is murder.

Here, then, is a place where secular reason and Christianity can part company, and have. Secular reason does not recognize religious convictions as reasons so it rejects any blanket opposition to abortion. In contrast, modern conservative Christians often embrace a religious conviction that abortion is murder and on that grounds embrace blanket opposition to abortion.

This rift, however, may not be as grave as it looks at first sight, because the one thing that conservative Christians will always be sympathetic to is their Bible, and the Bible is quite explicit that the life of an unborn baby is not to be regarded the same as the life of a born person.

Mosaic law on the unborn

"When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows [to the woman], the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman's husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." [Exodus 21:22.]

Permanent injury to a woman is punished harm for harm, but causing the death of a child in the womb only incurs a fine, set by the father. In taking this position, the Bible is again expressing the fundamental principle of limited government: that where possible, decisions should be left to those who have private incentive to account the value at stake, not handed over to government to decide. It is parents, not government, who are in a position to weigh the life of the unborn.

Thus the Bible accords fully with secular moral reason at this point. It is the more modern Christian sympathies, the same ones that ended slavery, that in this instance create a conflict with secular natural law. The answer to this conflict is simple. Fundamentalists just need to be a little more fundamentalist. Heed your Bible.

Personally, I wouldn't want to go quite that far. I would want to upgrade the Mosaic law's penalty for assaulting a woman and causing a miscarriage. In this case, where a child is wanted, all conflict between the life of the unborn and parental life and liberty interests disappears. The decision has been made to nurture this life and hence there is no reason to withhold the same protections that are afforded for a born life.

If in attacking a woman an assailant kills the woman's unborn child instead, then unless the attack was in self-defense the killing should be charged as either murder or manslaughter, depending on intent, and punished accordingly. In the United States we now have such laws. Right here in California, Scott Peterson, charged with killing his pregnant wife, faces the death penalty because this crime is considered a multiple murder.

The Bible offers no such articulation. It simply asserts that the lives of the unborn are not to be weighed on a par with the lives of the born. Those who embrace the Bible would seem to commit themselves to erring, if err they must, on the side that the Bible errs on, undervaluing the life of the unborn. Certainly, they should get right what the Bible gets right: those decisions that people have private incentive to manage prudently for themselves should be left to liberty.

A secular Bible

Trust in truth (the first principle of both Christianity and of secular moral reason) leads to trust in liberty. There are only two places where Christianity has been in major conflict with secular moral reason on this principle. One, slavery, was corrected by modern Christian practice. The other, abortion, stands to be corrected by the Bible. In sum, there is almost no conflict between Christian natural law and natural law as discerned by secular moral reason.

Thousands of years ago Judaism and then Christianity got natural law right. The Jewish and Christian scriptures are also the foundation of Islam, and are accepted by Islam as the word of God, suggesting there is hope for Islam too, despite the sorry condition of modern Islamic practice. The other problem child is secular society, where illiberalisms of every stripe run rampant.

Everything conservative Christians get right--gun rights, school choice, limited government, economic liberty--is gotten wrong by the majority of secular society: the Democrat-left. The hope for secular society is that it can be moved by what ought to be its own bible: secular moral reason. If this happens, Christian and secular natural law will again become, as they were at the nation's founding, the friends in practice that they are in principle.

Alec Rawls is a Contributing Editor of The Stanford Review. He is currently writing a book on republicanism. Contact alec@rawls.org or visit www.rawls.org.

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:27:19 MST.