<\/p>\n

A year or so ago I got together with some college friends. Good guys\u2014careers, families, some churchgoers, others not, all involved in their communities. For the most part bourgeois in the best sense. But a few were perplexed. They wanted to know why I had become a social conservative.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t able to give a very good answer. But I\u2019ve continued to think about it. Yes, I\u2019ve come to see the moral urgency of protecting the unborn and defending traditional marriage, as well as restoring the virtues of civility and self-discipline. But there\u2019s something more, and it concerns a basic biblical principle.<\/p>\n

In the Gospel of Matthew we find Jesus warning us about how our lives will be judged. His words are pointed. We are to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner. For what we do to the poor and the destitute\u2014\u201cthe least of these my brethren,\u201d says Jesus\u2014we do to the Lord himself.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sobering warning, and I fear that I\u2019m typical. For the most part I think about myself: my needs, my interests, my desires. And when I break out of my cocoon of self-interest, it\u2019s usually because I\u2019m thinking about my family or my friends, which is still a kind of self-interest. The poor? Sure, I feel a sense of responsibility, but they\u2019re remote and more hypothetical than real: objects of a thin, distant moral concern that tends to be overwhelmed by the immediate demands of my life. As I said, I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m typical.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the modern Catholic tradition of social ethics has consistently insisted that the needs of the poor must take priority. In Octogesima Adveniens<\/em> (1971), an encyclical marking the eightieth anniversary of Leo XIII\u2019s seminal treatment of modern social issues, Rerum Novarum<\/em>, Paul VI evoked the fundamental importance of a transformative spirit of self-sacrificial love. \u201cIn teaching us charity,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe Gospel instructs us in the preferential respect due to the poor and the special situation they have in society: the most fortunate should renounce some of their rights so as to place their goods generously at the service of others.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cPreferential respect\u201d became the handier slogan \u201cpreferential option,\u201d a formulation that first emerged from liberation theologies in South America but has percolated into a great deal of Catholic pronouncement on social ethics in recent decades. It captures a fundamental Christian imperative. When we think about politics and culture, our first question should be: \u201cWhat are the needs of the poor?\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, there is certainly material want in America. People who have lost their jobs can\u2019t pay rent. Unmarried young women who have courageously refused to abort their children struggle to make ends meet. Illegal immigrants are exploited; the homeless need shelter; the hungry, food. <\/p>\n

Some say the best way to meet these needs involves adopting tax policies designed to stimulate economic growth, along with redoubled efforts of private charity. Others emphasize public programs and increased government intervention. It\u2019s an argument worth having, of course, and to a great degree our contemporary political debates turn on these issues. But we shouldn\u2019t lose sight of the fact that there is a unifying consensus: The moral character of a nation is measured to a large degree by its concern for the poor.<\/p>\n

On this point I agree with many friends on the left who argue that America doesn\u2019t have a proper concern for the poor. Our failure, however, is not merely economic. In fact, it\u2019s not even mostly economic. A visit to the poorest neighborhoods of New York City or the most impoverished towns of rural Iowa immediately reveals poverty more profound and more pervasive than simple material want. Drugs, crime, sexual exploitation, the collapse of marriage\u2014the sheer brutality and ugliness of the lives of many of the poor in America is shocking. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church <\/em>reminds us, poverty is not only material; it is also moral, cultural, and religious (CCC 2444), and just these sorts of poverty are painfully evident today. Increasing the minimum wage or the earned-income tax credit won\u2019t help alleviate this impoverishment.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t restore a culture of marriage, for example, by spending more money on it. A recent report on marriage in America from the National Marriage Project under the leadership of W. Bradford Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America<\/em>, paints a grim picture. The lower you are on the social scale, the more likely you are to be divorced, to cohabit while unmarried, to have more sexual partners, and to commit adultery. One of the most arresting statistics concerns children born out of wedlock. In the late 2000s, among women fifteen to forty-four years old who have dropped out of high school, more than half of those who give birth do so while unmarried. And this is true not only of those at the bottom. Among high-school graduates and women with technical training\u2014in other words, the struggling middle class\u2014nearly half of the women who give birth are unmarried.<\/p>\n

A friend of mine who works as a nurse\u2019s aide recently observed that his coworkers careen from personal crisis to personal crisis. As he told me, \u201cOnly yesterday I had to hear the complaints of one woman who was fighting with both her husband and<\/em> her boyfriend.\u201d It\u2019s this atmosphere of personal disintegration and not the drudgery of the job\u2014which is by no means negligible for a nurse\u2019s aide\u2014that he finds demoralizing.<\/p>\n

Teachers can tell similar tales. The wife of another friend told me that her middle-school students in a small town in Iowa were perplexed by Hawthorne\u2019s novel The Scarlet Letter<\/em>: \u201cWhat\u2019s the big deal about Hester and Reverend Dimmesdale gettin\u2019 it on?\u201d It was a sentiment that she wearily told me was of a piece with the meth labs, malt liquor, teen pregnancies, and a general atmosphere of social collapse.<\/p>\n

Preferential option for the poor. A Christian who hopes to follow the teachings of Jesus needs to reckon with a singular fact about American poverty: Its deepest and most debilitating deficits are moral, not financial; the most serious deprivations are cultural, not economic. Many people living at the bottom of American society have cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and some of the other goodies of consumer culture. But their lives are a mess.<\/p>\n

And why? It\u2019s a complicated question that I can\u2019t convincingly answer here. But I want to end with a suggestion, if not an argument.<\/p>\n

On the question of social justice, Pope John Paul II once wrote, \u201cThe needs of the poor take priority over the desires of the rich.\u201d For most of my life (I was born in 1959), the rich and well-educated in America have desired nothing more than the personal freedoms of bohemian liberation. The rich, we must be clear, include the secure and successful academic and professional upper middle classes. I am not talking only about people who live in penthouses, but about people like us and those we know.<\/p>\n

This bohemian liberation has involved the sexual revolution, of course, with the consequent weakening of the constraining and disciplining norms of a healthy culture of marriage. But the ways in which the rich have embraced their freedoms hasn\u2019t involved only sex and marriage. It also includes the verbal antinomianism typified by George Carlin\u2019s campaigns to normalize obscenity, suburban librarians insisting on the right to view pornography, tech billionaires who dress like dockworkers, a feminism that mocks the social mores that make women ladies and men gentleman, and many other attacks on older notions of bourgeois respectability.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a typical story. A few months ago, a Northwestern University psychology professor invited a sex entrepreneur to speak to his class, and the visit concluded with a sexual performance that, as one newspaper discreetly reported, involved \u201ca woman, a man, and an electric-powered device.\u201d <\/p>\n

The powers that be squirm a bit when lifestyle revolutionaries frighten the horses and bring bad publicity. Northwestern\u2019s president, Morton Schapiro, put out an anodyne statement: \u201cMany members of the Northwestern community are disturbed by what took place on our campus. So am I.\u201d But elite sentiment remains indulgent, if not positively solicitous. The rhetoric of liberation (\u201cSexual minorities need to be accepted!\u201d) throws up a smoke screen, and there\u2019s lots of earnest talk about academic freedom. Meanwhile, the rich get their freedoms, which have very little to do with justice and everything to do with marrying wealth and status to the delicious benefits of a diminished conscience. And all this takes place in an environment furnished with the safety nets of therapists, detox clinics, watchful friends, and economic security.<\/p>\n

The social reality of contemporary America is painfully clear. By and large, the rich and powerful don\u2019t desire more wealth nearly as much as they desire moral relaxation and the self-complimenting image of themselves as nonconformists living a life of enlightenment and freedom in advance of dull Middle America. Meanwhile, on the South Side of Chicago\u2014and in hardscrabble small towns and decaying tract housing of old suburbs\u2014the rest of America suffers the loss of social capital.<\/p>\n

I must admit that I often feel frustrated by my liberal friends who worry so much about income inequality and not at all about moral inequality. Their answer is to give reparations. Are we to palliate with cash\u2014can<\/em> we palliate with cash\u2014the disorder wrought by Gucci bohemians?<\/p>\n

No. Progressives talk about \u201csocial responsibility.\u201d It is an apt term, but it surely means husbanding social capital just as much as\u2014indeed, more than\u2014providing financial resources. In our society a preferential option for the poor must rebuild the social capital squandered by rich baby boomers, and that means social conservatism. The bohemian fantasy works against this clear imperative, because it promises us that we can attend to the poor without paying any attention to our own manner of living. Appeals to aid the less fortunate, however urgent, make few demands on our day-to-day lives. We are called to awareness, perhaps, or activism, but not to anything that would cut against the liberations of recent decades and limit our own desires. <\/p>\n

Want to help the poor? By all means pay your taxes and give to agencies that provide social services. By all means volunteer in a soup kitchen or help build houses for those who can\u2019t afford them. But you can do much more for the poor by getting married and remaining faithful to your spouse. Have the courage to use old-fashioned words such as chaste<\/em> and honorable<\/em>. Put on a tie. Turn off the trashy reality TV shows. Sit down to dinner every night with your family. Stop using expletives as exclamation marks. Go to church or synagogue. <\/p>\n

In this and other ways, we can help restore the constraining forms of moral and social discipline that don\u2019t bend to fit the desires of the powerful\u2014forms that offer the poor the best, the most effective and most lasting, way out of poverty. That\u2019s the truest preferential option\u2014and truest form of respect\u2014for the poor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: First Things Catholic writer R.R. Reno explains why he became a social conservative. Catholic social teaching has always stressed a “preferential option for the poor” which certainly conforms to Orthodox moral teaching particularly in reference to Matthew 25. Where it gets hazy however is when we discuss how policy should be crafted that meets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[11,5,1520,1662],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10049"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10049"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10052,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10049\/revisions\/10052"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}