Justice Scalia was not silent about his faith
By Mike Haynes
You would think neither supporters nor detractors of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would be surprised at his views on religion and government.
You would think neither supporters nor detractors of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would be surprised at his views on religion and government.
The devout
Catholic talked about both in September 2013 at the massive Stone Chapel on the
grounds of the Lanier Theological Library in Houston. The chapel, a replica of
a 1,500-year-old church that once stood in Cappadocia, modern-day Turkey, has
physical mass that was appropriate for the presence of a Supreme Court justice
who had such influence on American society and whose
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| Stone Chapel at Lanier Theological Library (Photo by Kathy Haynes) |
Mark
Lanier, the Lubbock native and Houston attorney who built the library and
chapel, hosts several speakers a year, mostly Christian scholars. In 2013, he lured
Scalia to Texas to address the question, “Is Capitalism or Socialism More
Conducive to Christian Virtue?”
I wasn’t
there, but it feels like I was because my wife and I toured the chapel last
summer, and video of the 48-minute lecture is available at http://www.laniertheologicallibrary.org/videos.
Anyone
slightly familiar with the justice knows his answer to the capitalism/socialism
question, but some might be surprised at nuances of his reasoning.
“The first thing I wish to say about
it is that I do not believe it is terribly relevant,” Scalia said. “I do not
believe a Christian should choose his form of government on the basis of which
would be most conducive to his faith any more than he ought to choose his
toothpaste on that basis.”
Those who
think Scalia would have favored a theocracy would be wrong. “A Christian should
not support a government that suppresses the faith or one that sanctions the
taking of innocent human life,” he said. “But the test of good government … is
assuredly not whether it helps you save your soul. Government is not meant for
saving souls, but for protecting life and property and assuring the conditions
for physical prosperity. Its responsibility is the here, not the hereafter.”
Scalia
pointed out Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 22:21: “Render therefore to Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (RSV)
But he said
socialism is not as conducive to Christianity as capitalism. “The churches of
Europe are empty,” he said. “The most religious country in the West by all
standards – belief in God, church membership, church attendance – is that
bastion of capitalism least diluted by socialism, the United States.”
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| Justice Antonin Scalia portrait at Lanier Theological Library in Houston (Photo by Mike Haynes) |
“Christ
said, after all, that you should give YOUR goods to the poor, not that you
should force someone else to give his.”
Scalia said
Jesus didn’t preach eliminating hunger, misery or misfortune, but “the need for
each individual to love and help the hungry, the miserable and the unfortunate.”
The judge believed that when government handles charity, “it deprives individuals
of an opportunity for sanctification and deprives the body of Christ of an
occasion for the interchange of love among its members.”
He said the
negative consequences extend to those receiving aid. “The governmentalization
of charity affects not just the donor, but the recipient. What was once asked
as a favor is now demanded as an entitlement,” he said, which “has produced
donors without love and recipients without gratitude.”
He
contrasted 19th century charity, which included efforts for “moral
uplift,” to modern social workers who legally can’t address a person’s virtue.
He lamented the “coldly commercial terminology” in which people in need are
called “clients.”
Scalia said
for capitalism to work, traditional Christian virtues are essential. Because
people have more freedom under capitalism, they have more opportunity to do
evil. “Without widespread practice of such Christian virtues as honesty,
self-denial and charity toward others, a capitalist system will be
intolerable,” he said.
“The burden
of my remarks is not that a government of the right is more Christlike, only
that there is no reason to believe that a government of the left is. I do not
think Jesus Christ cares very much what sort of economic or political system we
live under.”
Asked what
is the greatest miscarriage of constitutional justice he has seen, Scalia said
it’s the recent use of the First Amendment clause, “Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion.”
“It’s the
clause that’s always invoked whenever people want to tear down a cross that’s
been put up on public land or remove a crèche that’s in the city square or take
down the Ten Commandments,” he said.
Unless
something hurts a person, he said, that person has no standing to complain to
the
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| Justice Antonin Scalia signed the guest book Sept. 6, 2013, at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston. |
He
certainly exercised his religious rights, including singing in Catholic choirs.
A lover of opera, he preferred the formal and traditional. After singing Mozart
at Rockefeller Chapel in Chicago, he often would attend another service.
“I would go
down the street to Mass and hear some clown strum a guitar and sing, ‘God is
love, kumbaya.’”
This
Supreme Court justice surely was not the touchy-feely type. But from his speech
in Houston, it’s obvious he had a sense of humor and a hearty faith.
