Recharging the American Experiment (Excerpt)

November-December 1994

By James W. Skillen

WASHINGTON, D.C.—[The following is an edited excerpt from the author's new book, Recharging the American Experiment: Principled Pluralism for Genuine Civic Community, available from the Center for Public Justice.]

To emphasize the plural structure of society is, in part, to build on the principle of constitutionally limited government. The jurisdiction of such a government should be recognized as limited not merely by the procedural requirements of electoral representation, judicial review, and a constitutional amending process, but chiefly, and in the first place, by the responsibilities that people hold in other God-given relationships such as churches, families, schools, economic enterprises, and various corporate and voluntary organizations. The federal and state governments of the United States should, in fulfillment of their responsibilities, protect and advance the common civic good of American society.

All American citizens share a single commonwealth and are subject to the same laws that bind them together in that political community. This is the civic unum [from the phrase e pluribus unum"--out of many, one"]. However, the single civic community is not omnicompetent over the lives of its citizens as if they constituted a simple, undifferentiated mass called "the people." To the contrary, a just unum of citizens under government can flourish only where justice is done to other social and individual responsibilities—the pluribus—held by those same people. Each must be given its proper due.

This means, for example, that all moral discourse about public life should be differentiated discourse. By "differentiated" moral discourse I mean conversation and argument that distinguish among the spheres of moral obligation in which people hold different kinds of responsibility. Every undifferentiated appeal to justice, goodness, fairness, equality, freedom, or correct behavior actually causes confusion in a differentiated society. Every moral appeal that fails to address the persons or institutions responsible for particular kinds of behavior will only obfuscate and frustrate the fulfillment of moral responsibility.

In the political realm, for example, undifferentiated moral appeals have degenerated into sloganeering contests for majority control to compel actions and responses from people without regard to their multiple responsibilities. The tyranny of the majority, which Tocqueville feared, shows many signs of life in countless generalized arguments that are proffered as moral admonitions to people in general—to society at large.

Differentiated public-moral discourse, by contrast, requires the legal and political recognition of both structural and confessional pluralism. "Structural" pluralism refers to diverse social institutions and different types of human responsibility. "Confessional" pluralism refers to the fact that people live by different faiths, with different ultimate commitments that guide their lives in all social spheres. Public law is morally legitimate, in other words, not merely by virtue of majority votes and constitutionally legitimate procedures, but only when it does justice to the confessional and institutional diversity of society. Laws are not just if they discriminate against the religious commitments and viewpoints of some citizens by granting special privilege to one above others. Laws cannot be just that contradict or disrupt legitimate responsibilities that people exercise in nongovernmental institutions. Just public laws will be those that give proportionately fair treatment to all religious worldviews expressed in public as well as in private realms of human responsibility.

This argument for structural and confessional pluralism is not itself an expression of moral relativism. It is part of a larger civic-moral argument for a definite kind of just political order. In every arena of life moral principles are binding for human behavior and judgment. Truth and error, right and wrong, good and evil, ought to be distinguished in each arena, and people ought to seek the truth and do what is right. In the case of the civic arena, the principle of justice obligates government to give proper due to each citizen and to the multiple responsibilities of a complex society as part of its legally integrating responsibility for the commonwealth. Thus, my argument is for a just republic and for the truth of structural and confessional pluralism as an integral part of justice in a republic in God's creation.

If I were offering an argument for sound education, or for a loving family, or for stewardly business practices, I would have to make the case for the particular kind of obligations that hold for those realms of life. My aim here, however, is limited to the quest for clarity about what is right and wrong in the arena of law and politics. And my argument, put in the form of a question, is this: Is it not true that a rightly ordered political community is one in which government and courts exercise an authority of limited, public-legal competence comporting with the norm of public justice for a differentiated society? Public Justice, in this respect, calls government to the positive, integrating task of nurturing a healthy commonwealth—a task that simultaneously prohibits it from exercising an undifferentiated, omnicompetent authority that would, in effect allow it to displace or supersede parental, ecclesiastical, educational, and other independent responsibilities by means of a political/legal authoritarianism. Or to say it in another way, the moral good that government ought to accomplish is to bind citizens together under law in a civic community of justice that assures every citizen of equal and fair protection. And to be just, that equality must express itself both in proportionately fair treatment of citizens' diverse religious ways of life as well as in the recognition of their personal and institutional competencies beyond the civic/legal sphere.