Stanley Hauerwas on "Rights"

Here's something to think about. Hauerwas is a well-known and respected theologian, published frequently in First Things.

...Indeed I want to argue that America is the only country that has the misfortune of being founded on a philosophical mistake--namely, the notion of inalienable rights. We Christians do not believe that we have inalienable rights. That is the false presumption of Enlightenment individualism, and it opposes everything that Christians believe about what it means to be a creature. Notice that the issue is inalienable rights. Rights make a certain sense as correlative to duties and goods, but they are not inalienable. For example, when the lords protested against the king in the Magna Charta, they did so in the name of their duties to their underlings. Duties, not rights, were primary. The rights were simply ways of remembering what the duties were.

Christians, to be more specific, do not believe that we have a right to do with our bodies whatever we want. We do not believe that we have a right to our bodies because when we are baptized we become members of one another; then we can tell one another what it is that we should, and should not, do with our bodies. I had a colleague at the University of Notre Dame who taught Judaica. He was Jewish and always said that any religion that does not tell you what to do with your genitals and pots and pans cannot be interesting. That is exactly true. In the church we tell you what you can and cannot do with your genitals. They are not your own. They are not private. That means that you cannot commit adultery. If you do, you are no longer a member of "us."

Under the veil of American privatization, we are encouraging people to believe in the same way that Andrew Carnegie believed. He thought that he had a right to his steel mills. In the same sense, people think that they have a right to their bodies The body is then a piece of property in a capitalist sense. Unfortunately, that is antithetical to the way we Christians think that we have to share as members of the same body of Christ.

So, you cannot separate these issues. If you think that you can be very concerned about abortion and not concerned about the privatization of American life generally, you are making a mistake. So the problem is: how, as Christians, should we think about abortion without the rights rhetoric that we have been given--right to my body, right to life, pro-choice, pro-life, and so on? In this respect, we Christians must try to make the abortion issue our issue.

This is particularly clear when listening to Walter Williams' facile (and erroneous) Explanation of All Living in terms of Economics. It's a simple-minded (and wrong-headed) approach, which taken to its logical conclusion, would tell us that raising children is utterly devoid of value.

It also has an impact on the "right to privacy" debate. Not only is that phrase NOT found in the Constitution (and thus had to be put there, emanating-wise, by a creative group of Supremes in Griswold)--it is irreconcilable with a Christian notion of society, as Hauerwas shows above.

More curious: one wonders why the "right to privacy" was NOT present. Was this a case of the Homeric Nod by the authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights?

HT: Dreher