We Hold These Truths by John Courtney Murray

First published: 1960

Edition(s) used:We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, foreword by Walter Burghardt and critical introduction by Peter Lawler. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Critical analysis; essays

Core issue(s): Communism; freedom and free will; justice; morality; reason; social action

Overview

A key architect of Vatican II’s declaration on freedom of worship, Dignitatis Humanae, John Courtney Murray is probably the most important Catholic theologian yet to hail from the United States. We Hold These Truths, however, is a work of Christian political philosophy, not a theological treatise. Addressed to all thinking Americans, smartly written, and first published the same year that the United States elected its first Roman Catholic president, the book garnered national attention and has since established itself as a twentieth century classic.

We Hold These Truths is a selection of essays woven together around a central question: “What are the truths that we as Americans hold?” That is, what is the basic agreement beneath America’s pluralism that holds American society together and gives the government its basic sense of direction? What are the truths on which the nation was successfully founded, what is the consensus on which it stands today, and how will this “American Proposition” need to develop if it is to endure the weight of contemporary American civilization?

Murray’s book is divided into three parts. The essays in the first part introduce the basic features of the American proposition. Murray contends that the founding fathers forged a successful Constitution because they were astute lawyers and policymakers, well formed in traditional English jurisprudence. Unlike the French revolutionaries, they did not govern in the spirit of doctrinaire rationalism; instead, they built the public consensus on the shared heritage of constitutionalism and common law. This tradition was especially unifying because it was based on key truths about human society, on a sense of natural laws that were both broadly discernible and imminently practical. It taught, to pick a characteristic example, that political legislation cannot create a virtuous or educated society “from the top down,” and therefore that the common good hinges on society’s ability to sustain virtuous citizens with a full spectrum of free and flourishing nongovernmental institutions (families, schools, charities, churches, and so on). With the nation united by such a philosophy of “a free people under limited government,” religious and cultural pluralism did not render political union impossible. Even the federal amendment resolving to “make no law respecting the establishment of any religion” became acceptable to all groups (including Roman Catholics), it being nothing more than the obviously prudent application of traditional principles of limited government.

Murray argues that the “public philosophy” grounding the American consensus has become particularly weak during the twentieth century. Increasingly, coherent political philosophy and social ethics have been neglected, as has the (chiefly Christian) intellectual tradition that originally gave meaning to the American ideal of freedom. Universities in particular have failed to disseminate the kind of reflection on experience that could reinvigorate principled consensus, focusing instead on the material and social sciences and on activist ideologies. This silent neglect of philosophy and history, together with many outward changes as the decades rushed by, has washed away almost all intelligent agreement about what America stands for and, therefore, almost all footing for healthy cultural debate.

In the second part, “Four Unfinished Arguments,” Murray sets aside his general contention about public philosophy to demonstrate the concrete value of natural law; that is, of the humanistic and philosophical idea that human nature is something real that can be discovered by observation and analysis and that has laws that need to be obeyed. This concrete value he demonstrates by giving incisive arguments that illustrate how a knowledge of history, informed by a strong sense of human nature and its laws, can cut through the cacophony of public opinion on four contemporary topics: the justice of government funding for religious schools, the legitimacy of censorship, the relationship between Christian ideas and healthy citizenship, and the prospects for political freedom in a postmodern and post-Christian world.

In the third part, “The Uses of Doctrine,” Murray moves from domestic policy to foreign policy and further justifies his insistence on America’s need for a rational consensus about its own principles and objectives. Focusing on the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, Murray illustrates, in significant depth, how the United States’ international relations have been ultimately rudderless and reactionary, with the result that maximum armament, combined with a no-first-strike pledge, falsely passes for a foreign policy that is ethically and strategically coherent.

Murray then turns to the general question of moral thought in contemporary culture and finds the American mind confined between simplistic biblical fundamentalism at one extreme and hazy philosophical relativism at the other. This circumscribes the entire spectrum within a helter-skelter individualism; direct application of private standards of altruism to global politics is manifestly naïve, so the current lack of concern for the unique moral norms that regulate human nature in its collective aspects (such as society and state) ends up abandoning national policy to be guided by material self-interest alone.

Murray concludes with an essay specifically on the philosophical tradition of natural law, illustrating it alongside the other potential sources of guiding principles for the future of the United States. He insists that it is experiential without becoming ideological (without exalting one dimension of the human person, such as its individuality, to the exclusion of others) and pragmatic without being amoral (without being so focused on the “how” of science and technique that it is deaf to the “why” of justice and charity), and therefore that the classical tradition of natural law offers the “last best hope” for American cultural leaders wishing to offer the nation a healthy sense of direction.

Christian Themes

Written from the particular perspective of Catholic and, more particularly, Thomistic and Jesuit (Suarezian) philosophy, We Hold These Truths offers one of America’s foremost attempts to think through the encounter between the United States and Christianity. This relationship is more nuanced than American Protestantism has sometimes realized, and the questions of how politics should be influenced by faith (and Church) have emerged as increasingly vexing with the loss of national consensus. Murray’s use of the Catholic tradition to suggest that there is such a thing as a strong and thoughtful humanism that is nevertheless not necessarily Christian is pertinent to the situation of a pluralistic democracy, and it suggests possibilities far exceeding common Protestant and secular evaluations of Catholic thought.

The leading theological criticism of Murray has been that he underestimates the need for specifically Christian symbols in American public life. The seriousness of this criticism being granted, it remains significant that in the midst of proposing a “secularized” Christian humanism as America’s proper public philosophy, Murray clearly maintains that constitutional liberalism will prove unsustainable if it is hostile or indifferent to the Christian religion. Though American democracy is justifiable in terms of the natural law alone, its emergence from the heritage of Christian political philosophy is not happenstance. Murray elaborates two key reasons: First, Christian spirituality, with its simultaneous focus on heaven and earth, promotes a helpful mind-set that avoids both withdrawn indifferentism and monomaniacal ideologism. Second, insistence that God’s Church is an institution with a right to exist and a calling to invoke transcendent authority has historically formed an unparalleled bulwark against state tyranny.

A further important theme of Murray’s book is his Christian and philosophical response to the American ideal of freedom. By arguing that political freedom is precious precisely because it is ordered toward genuine responsibility, he issues profound challenges both to Americans whose notion of freedom is hollow and to various reactionaries who are tempted to view political freedom as a merely specious value.

Sources for Further Study

D’Elia, Donald J., and Stephen M. Krason, eds. “We Hold These Truths” and More: Further Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition—The Thought of Father John Courtney Murray, S.J. and Its Relevance Today. Steubenville, Ohio: Franciscan University Press, 1993. A late twentieth century re-examination of Murray’s viewpoints and their relevance for modern times.

Ferguson, Thomas P. Catholic and American: The Political Theology of John Courtney Murray. Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed & Ward, 1993. An examination of Murray’s thoughts about Catholicism and its connection to politics.

Hooper, J. Leon, and Todd David Whitmore, eds. John Courtney Murray and the Growth of Tradition. Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed & Ward, 1996. Essays by twelve Murray scholars look at his thought and beliefs and examine them for solutions to modern problems.

Weigel, George. Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1989. An extension of Murray’s project, showing how it can be used to restore rationality and civility to general debates between conservatives and liberals, as well as to several particular topics.