Barron's Objective Morality is Barren
Bishop Barron's objective morality is a meaningless, lifeless husk.
On May 23rd Bishop Barron gave a lecture titled The Breakdown of the Tocquevillian Equilibrium. He name checks a dozen or so thinkers and philosophers throughout the piece in a way that is sometimes illuminating but more often obfuscating1.
The main points he is trying to make about American democracy are these2: for much of its two and a half century long history, America has had uniting foundational principles of religion and liberal democracy. That in his view - religion, liberal democracy, equality, and small government are all inextricably linked. That religion provides the “objective truth” which can only be found in God. And finally, as the title suggests, this unity of religious view with liberal democracy is falling apart with the decline of institutional religion in the west and leading to a “dictatorship of relativism” where there is no objective ground for morality.
I’ll leave out any discussion of Barron’s characterization of Hobbes, Locke, Tocqueville, et al mentioned throughout the lecture3. I feel far too inadequate to address each and untangle what they actually said from how their ideas are characterized. Suffice it to say that I have little faith in the Most Reverend’s intellect to grapple with them in any intelligent way4.
What I am interested in is Barron’s core argument which comes in the last two sections on The Dictatorship of Relativism and Reclaiming the Objectively Valuable. This is the core of how the “very smart” bishop thinks. Those who are irreligious or disagree with the good bishop on any sort of value or policy must be simple relativists with no belief in an objective good. Bishop Barron meanwhile is standing up for the straight and narrow of objective morality.
Bishop Barron positions himself in this valiant way as an “oh so brilliant and brave hero standing athwart the dangers of modernity” when he characterizes relativists in this way
"Absent this normativity, the freedom of the individual comes to generate value. Instead of imitating and appropriating for oneself the objective goods of the natural and moral orders, the sovereign self creates a personal good and cultivates a personal truth.”
But for the blind Bishop who can’t think past the edges of his skull, he is describing a logic that is fully consistent with the existence of objective morality.
It is good to think of separating in the mind questions of “what is or could be?” and “what ought to be?”. The first can often be answered with observation, science, and analytic understanding while the second is the domain of ethics, morality, and religion. Relativism describes many schools of thought. In the metaphysical realm of answering the questions of “what is,” we find relativism to be a great framework for how time and space changes when approaching speeds close to the speed of light5. In the realm of questions answering, “what ought to be,” relativism's ideas include the obvious insight that people acting in the world can and should take their particular context into account when taking actions and making plans on how to live a good life.
But Bishop Barron is talking about a more extreme version of relativism that is more akin to nihilism and answers the question “what ought to be?” with the denial of an answer. But a free individual that “creates a personal good” is not denying the existence of an answer to that question that is a description of seeking objective capital T Truth. Any Catholic who seeks help from a spiritual director is engaging in this project where "the sovereign self creates a personal good and cultivates a personal truth.”
Bishop Barron goes on to say that this subjectivation of value, this relativism, causes a breakdown of people with no natural affinity to each other. He submits as his proof that arguments about moral and intellectual matters have largely disappeared from twitter. I find this point a particularly hilarious self-own. If you haven’t seen people complaining about moral wrong on twitter or social media then you haven’t been listening, reading, or truly understanding the real, felt, material and spiritual harm people in the world are facing in the day-to-day trenches of everyday life. If you, as a very visible and powerful Bishop, think all critical responses on your timeline are just petty insults, then I submit that you are falling into your default mode. As David Foster Wallace put it, your default mode is your
“deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.”6
Bishop Barron is concerned that
“one of the principal preoccupations of young people today (are) safe spaces.”
Maybe he should consider that one of the reasons young people might be longing for safe spaces is the vast harm done by sexual abuse over the decades Bishop Barron is takling about7. And maybe Bishop Barron lecturing that young people are morally bankrupt for desiring safe spaces will sound hollow and even insulting coming from someone in charge of an organization that placed someone who perpetrated abuse in a place of power8. Perhaps it rings hypocritical that Fr. Grunow still works at WOF, when he seemed much more interested in protecting the institution of Word on Fire than the staff or people who were abused.
Bishop Barron thinks
“it is not at all surprising, moreover, that many studies have indicated how young people in our country increasingly are suspicious of freedom of speech and are increasingly open to more powerful government regulation.”
But I submit that maybe Bishop Barron is confusing his personal “objective” beliefs about morality with what is actually truly the best structure of society. Maybe young people think more and more that conservative people that harm other people don’t have an automatic right to be published in the New York Times and certainly don’t have a right to publish their screeds without being yelled at by other people online who are materially hurt by powerful people.
And maybe young people think that it would be truly, objectively good for society to have more regulation in some domains that Bishop Barron thinks are bad regulations. Maybe this comes from a view of trying to increase human flourishing and believing that other people’s freedom to navigate institutions without fear would be good. This is different from Barron’s claim that if people disagree with him on specific regulations, then that means we are descending into a nightmare of man against man resulting in lives’ that are nasty, brutish, and short.
For an example of such short-sighted policy, Bishop Barron helped write and signed a letter on potential ramifications of the Respect for Marriage Act. He worried “Faith-based housing providers could be forced to treat same-sex couples as married for the purposes of housing,” that “faith based social service agencies serving immigrants could be forced to treat same-sex couples as married” and that “religious organizations could be forced to treat employees' same-sex civil marriages as valid for the purposes of providing spousal benefits.”9
That is, Bishop Barron thinks it is deeply, horribly immoral that two people in a same sex couple might be able to get access to housing, welfare benefits, or medical insurance.
I want to pause the reader for a second here to observe my personal feelings on this. I think moral deliberation and philosophy is interesting. I enjoy thinking about policy, laws, and systems of governance. How they fit together and benefit or harm people is often an area of dispassionate fascination and even joy to me. So I want the reader to sense the change in tone on that last paragraph is to one of rage.
I cannot stress enough how truly horrid and frustrating I find this belief from the Bishop in my country that may have one of the largest followings in America, the ear of thousands on a weekly basis and likely command of millions of dollars in the Diocese of Winona-Rochester. I think Bishop Barron is deeply, catastrophically, morally wrong on this point and it induces table flipping righteous anger in me. I am not speaking from a framework of moral relativism when I say this, I think our society and institutions that serve the least should not force those they serve to prove their moral worth and sexual purity before being given basic human dignities like food and shelter. And a powerful man that consistently uses his power and influence on politics to lobby for more regulation10 of morality of the most vulnerable of society in Christ’s name makes me sick to my stomach. Christ came to call sinners, and asked to stay with them before conversion, not as a condition of conversion.
Bishop Barron goes on to say that the solution to the declining cultural consensus of the 1960s is a refocus on the objectively valuable as opposed to subjectively satisfying, and the moral example of heroes such as Maximilian Kolbe arrests us and converts us into evangelists. The funny thing is, I agree with this in both the abstract as well as the specific. Virtuous authentic living that cares about others, especially the least powerful can serve as an example that can bring people to religion. However, I don’t think that the conservative movement where Barron gave this speech or Bishop Barron himself is correct on many of the specifics of what is objectively good.
Furthermore, the Bible is not a set of strict laws; rather it is an unfolding narrative that actually contains within it the reality of shifting perspectives. Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is also a Sermon on the Plain. The story of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles parallel each other and conflict with each other. The main focus of Christian worship is not on law but on a God who became human in all our pain, suffering, and messiness except sin. His life was one that called sinners to repentance but began with listening and going out to the margins.
You can call this a synodal process, or listening, or inclusiveness, or be as pretentious as me and call it deontological existentialism, or whatever else you want. But whatever it is, it does not start by dictating from on high, the objective morality of God. Instead, the church walks with us broken humans in our sin and brokenness, a church as a field hospital as Pope Francis imagines it. The opposite of this is the danger of a strict moral certainty that Barron personifies.
In ironic conclusion, I think Bishop Barron is in danger of the exact atomization that he claims to be preaching against. If he cannot see his enemies, those who disagree and criticize him, as possibly being capable of a love he is not capable of11, how can he expect to find Christ in those around him. Because in the parable of the good Samaritan Jesus tells us that our neighbor isn’t the priest that knows Jewish law or Levite that keeps ritual and tradition but instead the Samaritan who acted justly and whom many despised for their wrong beliefs.
And it turns out the world of "objective value” is not as interesting as the one we live in at all. Flat lists of rules, regulations, and certainties are often lifeless and boring. Our broken world, with broken humans, stupid Bishops, and vast inequality is worth being in at its messiest, most painful, and weakest12. And I don’t claim that this is easy, it’s hard and I’m bad at it. Young people in the most powerful regions of the earth are likely leaving the church for many different reasons. But among them is that it is very hard to swallow the idea that we alone have the objectively valuable when the flaws in the institutional church are numerous, clear, and often horrifying. I submit to Bishop Barron that many of the gays, the trans, the social justice warriors, and the struggling to believe that he is so quick to dismiss and soldier against are all building the Kingdom of God. Come and see.
And by obfuscating, I mean I can’t make heads or tails what the hell he is talking about. But maybe it sounds smart! And if I liked Barron, I might feel good about listening to someone so smart that makes my brain work to be able to understand him. Isn’t that so great? That this intelligent man has gifted us with his intelligence.
At least I’m pretty sure. But Bishop Barron is “so smart” so who knows, maybe I’m just a stupid pleb who hasn’t read every one of The Great Classics.
I’ll let others address what Bishop Barron gets wrong about philosophers Woke, Beige, and Plato: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised on Word on Fire | by Sam Rocha | Medium
Not that I’m any better. But at least I’m not insufferable.
Those pesky physicists with their theories of general relativity and special relativity that *checks notes* have done a good job of describing new observed physical phenomena.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/290479013 This is water: some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion about living a compassionate life.
Just the latest report: Report on Catholic Clergy Child Sex Abuse in Illinois (illinoisattorneygeneral.gov)
Barron is positioning himself as “anti-regulation” and it is true that the RMA to some degree might “regulate” those serving the poor by saying they can’t actively discriminate. But the impact is deregulatory at the person-to-person level. It’s similar to the question is a state telling a local government they can’t put overly strict zoning regulation “regulation” or “deregulation.”
Thank you to Sam Rocha for the understanding of love of enemies, and apologies if I botched it
Genesis 32: 24-29
> I submit to Bishop Barron that many of the gays, the trans, the social justice warriors, and the struggling to believe that he is so quick to dismiss and soldier against are all building the Kingdom of God. Come and see.
Amazing line.
This is brilliant, witty, and timely! I appreciate the author's voice and fierce advocacy.