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A Catholic Vote Must Be a Moral Vote
There was a time not too long ago in our nation’s history when Catholic doctrine positively influenced the outcome of ballot votes by effectively contributing to meeting the perennial need to keep civil law in harmony with moral law. One might consider, for example, the political success of the Catholic campaign in Massachusetts in the 1940s against the proposal to end the legal prohibition of artificial birth control. The civil laws against contraception had been written by Protestants in the previous century, but the general Protestant teaching on that moral issue had changed. In the 1940s, supporters of Planned Parenthood and others were invoking the rationale of civil liberty and pushing for an end to all state restrictions on birth control. The push came mostly through the Republican Party, and Catholic Democrats united in resisting it as immoral.
In 1948 the Archdiocese of Boston conducted a public campaign against the liberalization of birth-control laws and adopted the slogan “Birth Control is STILL against God’s Law!” The slogan appeared publicly on billboards and in radio spots. Catholic priests used the slogan in their homilies. The argument against contraception was made on the basis of natural moral law, not merely religious conviction. Natural law was understood as following from that which is suitable or unsuitable to human nature considered in its totality. A sermon outline distributed to Catholic priests in Massachusetts for their Sunday homily on October 1 explained that “the prohibition of birth control is not a law peculiar to the Church any more than are the laws against murder, theft, perjury, or treason. The Catholic Church does not initiate these laws. They are rooted in our very natures and are written by God in the very heart of every man, woman, and child.”1 The Catholic campaign at the time was successful, and the liberal amendments were defeated. Civil law was kept in harmony with natural law. Of course, the moral victory was only temporary. In our nation in the twentieth century, traditional morality won a few battles but lost the war.
The liberalization and secularization of the United States of America in the twentieth century came about through the modern ideologies promoted in its colleges and universities especially in the 1960s. New and progressive theories of moral truth and justice were introduced into the curriculum. The sexual revolution was underway, and many of the new theories systematically rationalized sexual license, which soon had disastrous consequences in Church and State alike. Commitment to the natural law, which had been fundamental to the founding of our nation, was categorically abandoned and then disdainfully opposed, along with most of the other basic ideals and values of Western Culture.2 Faith and reason, as well as religion and science, were routinely placed in false opposition to one another and no longer considered to be compatible vehicles of objective truth.
Like Europe itself, the United States of America was intentionally founded as a political synthesis of Christian faith and human reason. The original idea was that Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, respectively representing divine revelation, philosophical wisdom, and the rule of law, could be effectively harmonized into a unified political system that with the help of grace would sustain the common good and universal human rights. The synthesis between Jerusalem and Athens began in Judaism even before Christ assumed a human nature and founded his Church, but it was comprehensively advanced by early Christian philosophers and theologians such as St Augustine. It formed the Classical and Judeo-Christian heritage of Europe until it was replaced by modern secular ideologies such as fascism, communism, and liberalism.3 Such ideologies are inherently anti-Jewish and anti-Christian and typically terminate in genocides, as they clearly did in the twentieth century.
In the old world of Europe, the common good was understood not as the maximization of overall pleasure but as the set of social conditions that cultivate and sustain traditional human virtues and morals. Human rights were understood not as the freedom to have or do whatever one desires but as the freedom to pursue that which is perfective of human nature. The existence of God and the providence of God, as well as the basic precepts of moral law, were considered to be knowable by reason alone. If such truths were not evident to someone, a proper education could always make them apparent on the basis of foundational truths which are self-evident to anyone who is able to reason. That was the task of the various philosophers who defined the moral and political philosophy of the West.
Civil law is based in natural human knowledge of the common human good, and God is our ultimate Good. Secularism is the incoherent proposal that the common human good can be defined and pursued rationally apart from God. Human reason itself is opposed to secularism and tells us that God exists and that without God there is no ultimate or lasting happiness. The State is ordered to God by the content of reason, and the Church is ordered to God by the content of faith. The United States of America is “One Nation under God”—not under any particular revealed religious doctrine about God, but under God as naturally known as the author of natural moral law. Without God, there is no real basis for a unified and just society.
“In God We Trust” is therefore an article of reason as well as an article of faith. A nation must have a civil cult of reason and natural law, just as a religion must have clerical cult of faith and revealed law. God is the metaphysical foundation of both natural goodness and supernatural goodness. Civil law is ordered to the natural common good, and religious law is ordered to the supernatural common good. Those who deny the existence and goodness of God fall into a contradiction, because God alone is necessary and sufficient for human happiness. God is also the metaphysical foundation of both scientific truth and religious truth.
Every citizen of every nation in every time and place has the inalienable moral right and duty to acknowledge God and to trust in God. Moral rights and duties are grounded in human reason and human nature, not in any religious confession of faith, and certainly not in any national consensus or will of the majority. The majority can always fall into serious error and stand in need of being called back to reason. Any nation or religion that contradicts our perennial human knowledge of God and moral law is opposed to the common good. The common commitment to natural moral law in Europe and America is what brought about the abolition of the immoral practice of slavery.
The United States of America preserved the old Judeo-Christian synthesis longer than Europe did, but it is now being abandoned here as well. Most of our citizens have embraced secularism and no longer think of themselves as living in a Christian nation. Many of the young people who were very effectively educated in our colleges and universities from the 1960s to the present are now protesting and destroying all our nation’s connections to Christian Europe. The old world of Europe was a cultural system of traditional values, a living synthesis of revelation and reason, which was enshrined in our own nation’s founding.
Many people now see that old European system of Christian values as something evil, as something that must be opposed and dismantled for the cause of civil liberty and a new secular system of values, but there is nothing new about such political movements. Those who take part in them forget or ignore that Western culture has already been there and done that, with terrible and miserable results. The secularisms that took over Europe in the twentieth century and rejected God and the transcendent dignity of the individual human person now threaten to take over America in the twenty-first century.
Thus our nation is at a crossroads this year. We have to decide our future. Shall we retain our original commitment to natural law and the existence of God, which was present in our nation’s founding, or shall we embrace the brave new world of secularism and liberalism, which completely divorces the will of the people from both God and human nature? 2020 may well go down in history as the year when the United States of America as a whole decidedly abandoned its old European values and traditional morality altogether. The choice is ours to make, and one of the primary places that we make it is in the voting booth. We therefore ought to review the basic principles of forming our consciences and voting in accord with the natural law.
No one is ever morally permitted to intend any act that is intrinsically evil. To vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s liberal stance on an intrinsically immoral kind of act is to intend an evil act. To do so knowingly and deliberately is to commit mortal sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly indicates many different kinds of acts which must be morally opposed as intrinsically disordered and therefore evil. Unlike Protestant doctrine, Catholic doctrine has never changed on any such intrinsically evil acts. The Catholic Church has always insisted that all such acts, even if made legal by civil law, are still against God’s law.
What about those who find that no matter how they vote they will be supporting political candidates who contradict God’s law, as most do nowadays in one way or another? In order to vote for a candidate who takes a liberal stance on any intrinsically evil kind of act, it is morally necessary to be opposed to that stance and to have a serious and truly proportionate reason to vote for the person anyway, according to the principle of double effect, which is often used in traditional natural-law ethics. The candidate might have a positive stance on other important moral issues or be likely to do less overall moral harm than his or her opponent would do if elected, but whenever we vote for any candidate who is clearly supporting immoral policies, our specific reason for doing so must always be serious and proportionate. And we must then accept the responsibility to voice our opposition to such immoral policies publicly and emphatically.
For example, we would be morally permitted to vote for a pro-abortion candidate only if two conditions were met: we were prepared to do something positive to make our objection to abortion apparent, and we could honestly estimate that the candidate upon election would do sufficient good to offset the great evil of supporting abortion. Hopefully, we are always willing to protest publicly against legalized abortion. However, given that the act of abortion is a form of murder that violates the universal and inalienable human right to life, and is in fact routinely killing millions of innocent citizens, there is no proportionate reason for anyone to vote for any pro-abortion candidate. The second condition therefore cannot be met in the current situation, and no vote that materially cooperates in the evil of abortion can be justified. No pro-abortion candidate upon election is going to save millions of human lives, but making abortion illegal again, as it morally ought to be in every nation, would do just that.
Finding a proportionate reason to vote for a pro-abortion candidate specifically for the Presidency or Senate of our nation is even more difficult given the constitutionally defined role of these elected offices in nominating and confirming the Justices of the Supreme Court. These factors have often been emphasized by members of the pro-life movement, who typically offer a reliable moral guide to voting. Such factors must be weighed carefully as we now prepare to participate in the upcoming November elections, and the platforms of each political party must be evaluated with a concern to avoid supporting activities which cannot be justified. Human life must always be defended from intrinsically evil acts against it, and voting for a pro-abortion candidate in any political party is therefore morally unacceptable.
Abortion is intrinsically evil and therefore must never be directly intended in any act. Knowingly and deliberately voting for pro-abortion candidates specifically because they are pro-abortion is formal cooperation in evil and is always a mortal sin, but doing so for some another reason is material cooperation in evil and is usually but not always a mortal sin. Many Christians nowadays suppose that such material cooperation is hardly ever a mortal sin, but the reasoning that informs such a conclusion is unsound. Since abortion is a form of murder, voting for pro-abortion candidates even not specifically because they are pro-abortion but for some other reason is still participating in the act of murder. Such cooperation is justified only if it is unavoidable. Certainly it cannot be morally justified by the present conditions that obtain in our own nation. If the present conditions in the real world, not merely in improbable speculation and subjective imagination, were such that voting for pro-abortion candidates would somehow actually save more human lives than it would cost, then knowingly and deliberately doing so specifically in order to save a proportionate number of human lives would not be morally wrong. It would be a justified material cooperation that is justifiable only under the strictest conditions, and those conditions would be met. We would be reluctantly and unavoidably participating in murder in order to save more human lives than would be killed.
As things stand in the real world, however, with millions of unborn babies being denied their inalienable right to life and routinely murdered, voting for pro-abortion candidates when it is avoidable is gravely evil by virtue of the consequences of the act, which perpetuates a social injustice that is exceptionally evil. The matter of an immoral act can be grave by virtue of its consequences as well as its object and motive. The act of voting is good in itself, and we may have the best of intentions, but if a vote materially and effectively participates in the killing of millions of innocent citizens, then knowingly and deliberately placing such a vote when it can be avoided is gravely wrong. Remote material cooperation in the intrinsically evil act of abortion is morally wrong because there is no objective reason which even comes close to justifying such cooperation. A person who clearly understands the moral facts of the matter and clearly has the option to avoid voting for a pro-abortion candidate but then deliberately does so anyway is participating in murder and committing a mortal sin. Of course, most people do not clearly understand the moral facts of the matter, and in their confusion they are excused because they know not what they do, but people of faith who have a moral sensitivity which is informed by grace and cultivated by sound catechesis generally recognize that there is something seriously wrong with voting for a pro-abortion candidate. The guilt that they would feel from such an act is appropriate.
There are many people who claim that such reasoning is naïve and outdated. Many also regard it as reducing a complicated moral question down to single-issue voting. But all moral reasoning involves the question of discerning what can and cannot be justified, and whether our conscience will be violated by a particular course of action here and now in the real world. The question of whether to vote for a pro-abortion candidate is not really very complicated for those who accept traditional natural-law reasoning, as members of the Catholic Church do. When we apply the principle of double effect to the question of voting for pro-abortion candidates, we find that the condition of proportionality is not met, and thus we know that we ought not to do it. And when we listen to those who are attempting to offer some moral justification for voting for a pro-abortion candidate, we find that they are not even using traditional natural-law reasoning, which forces us to conclude that they are under the influence of some modern secular ideology.
There are also many people who find themselves in general agreement with this line of reasoning and its unavoidable conclusion but then maintain that whenever there is no pro-life Democrat available it would be better not to vote for anyone, or would be better to vote for a pro-life member of a third party, than to vote for a pro-life Republican. Many Catholics feel this way, and Catholic Democrats have often found it necessary to condemn and resist the platform of the Republican Party. But times have changed, and it should now be painfully obvious to Catholics that the pro-abortion stance of the platform of the Democratic Party is morally reprehensible. The platform of the Democratic Party contains other policies which are likewise objectionable, but its greatest evil by far is that it rationalizes and promotes the murder of millions of innocent children.
Furthermore, while it is certainly morally permissible to vote for a third-party candidate or not to vote at all, taking either of those options sets aside the opportunity which is now before us—the opportunity for which American Catholics have been praying for decades — to make abortion illegal in our nation once again through the constitutionally defined role of the Supreme Court, and thus to bring our civil law back into greater harmony with God’s law. Whether we like it or not, that opportunity is presenting itself largely through the Republican Party. To set aside such an extraordinary opportunity and thus fail to bring about the political correction of the most terrible social injustice that has plagued our nation and its laws since 1973 would be to ignore the action of divine providence and to fail to do that which is now in our power to do for our weakest and most vulnerable citizens—the unborn. We might not get another chance. For this reason, not voting for pro-life candidates who have a good chance to win is imprudent.
Doing what is morally right is not always easy or pleasant, and nowadays it usually involves facing the outrage and violence of those who have committed themselves to advancing modern secular ideologies, but one thing is very clear: a Catholic vote must be a pro-life vote. Especially for the upcoming November elections, all people of good will who adhere to natural law need to understand that no one is morally permitted to vote for pro-abortion candidates. Catholic clergy and all Christian pastors should be clearly and explicitly informing the lay faithful that voting for pro-abortion candidates cannot be morally justified. Anyone who thinks that it can is making a mistake. And given that our vote can help correct the massive social injustice of legalized murder in our nation, our most prudent course of action is to support all pro-life candidates, even though we disagree with them on other issues. We might have good reasons not to like particular pro-life candidates, and their opinions and attitudes might not be completely consistent on social issues other than abortion, but as a matter of principle we should still give them our vote. The imperative in such cases is clear, urgent, and grounded in the dignity of the human person: for the sake of the babies, vote pro-life!
Sarah—see Jan 2020 or a photo
Deacon Tracy Jamison was raised in a Christian family as the son of a Scotch-Irish evangelical minister in the Campbellite tradition. As an undergraduate he majored in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Cincinnati Christian University, where his parents had been educated. At this institution he met Joyce, who was completing a degree in Church Music, and after graduation they entered the covenant of Christian marriage in 1988. Through the study of philosophy and the writings of the Early Church Fathers, Tracy was received into the full communion of the Catholic Church in 1992. Under the influence of the theological writings of St. John Paul II he began to study the works of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross and entered formation as a Secular Carmelite of the Teresian Reform. In 1999 he completed the doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, and in 2002 he made his definitive profession as a Secular Carmelite. In 2010 he was ordained as a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Currently he is an associate professor of philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary of the West.
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