Freedom and Virtue: An Interview with Stephanie Slade
An interview with Stephanie Slade, a prominent Catholic libertarian, about classical liberalism and the intersection of freedom and virtue
In this special interview, Kairos interviews Stephanie Slade, a prominent Catholic libertarian journalist, about classical liberalism and the intersection of freedom and virtue. Slade is a senior editor at Reason, the magazine of “free minds and free markets,” and a fellow in liberal studies at the Acton Institute. Her writing has appeared in America, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, the Online Library of Liberty, and elsewhere. She covers the intersection of religion and politics, and she has authored notable essays on Catholic libertarianism, pro-life libertarianism, and fusionism.
KAIROS: What attracted you to classical liberalism and libertarianism initially, and how have you seen the movement evolve since joining? What has it been like as a young religious person in the liberty movement?
STEPHANIE SLADE: My experience has been that people commonly think being a religious libertarian must be hard, but in practice I was accepted as a church-going pro-lifer from my very first day working at Reason, despite the fact that most of our editors have been atheists and none of my colleagues (especially back then) shared my religious beliefs. I’ve come to think of classical liberalism as essentially the idea that the goal of politics is to help us figure out how to live peacefully with each other, even when we don’t all have the same values. That means carving out space and protecting freedom for people to pursue happiness and flourishing in different ways.
The illiberal perspective is that my side has all the right answers, and the purpose of politics is to amass power and use the power to get everyone in society to live the way I think they should. Obviously the liberal approach is far better for you if you’re someone with countercultural views (which, let’s face it, many Christian views are in this day and age). And libertarians, in my experience, are more committed than anyone else to that classical liberal project of making sure that the rights of minorities and dissenters are protected. In fact, they often respect you more for being willing to express a perspective that’s heterodox in some way.
KAIROS: At Reason, you focus on the intersection of religion and politics — what some call “political theology.” Where do you see the role of political theology in the ongoing discourse over the crisis of liberalism and anti-liberal alternatives such as postliberalism?
SLADE: The most important Christian teaching for me is the equal dignity or moral equality of every human person. We are all beloved by God and created in His image, and that has some implications for how we can and should interact with each other. In the personal realm, it means we have an obligation to treat people with the respect befitting someone of that kind of infinite worth. And in the political realm, it means that nobody has a right to subordinate or rule over anyone else, to coercively impose their understanding of virtue on others.
This general idea that we all deserve to have equal rights under the law — not to achieve equal outcomes, mind you, but to possess equal rights — is quite deeply embedded in the American DNA, and that is one of the reasons that I think anti-liberal views feel so foreign and so threatening to many of us.
Yes, postliberalism has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years, but when you shine a light on what the postliberals actually believe and are actually calling for, most Americans naturally recoil from that. Of course, the more secular our culture becomes, or the more shallow our theological understanding becomes, the more we risk losing sight of the incredibly important truth of every human person’s dignity, and the more susceptible we are to tyranny.
KAIROS: Commenting on fusionism, you’ve written in Reason that “A life well-lived consists in using one’s freedom to do what’s right. The clear recognition that these are separate spheres, with separate roles to play for the common good, is the genius of the fusionist project.”
How do you see the dynamic between religious faith, particularly its emphasis on virtue, and classical liberalism? Is the dynamism of economic freedom fundamentally at odds with the “permanent things” such as faith, as some postliberals have argued, seeing “liberty and virtue as fatally at odds”? How does a notion of ordered liberty rather than limitless freedom — something we studied in an Acton Emerging Leaders seminar this summer, which you seem to affirm — fit into this?
SLADE: As a fusionist, I believe that liberty and virtue are mutually reinforcing. It’s not automatic. You can definitely be free without being virtuous. Freedom is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, for virtue. But you’re not likely to maintain a free society very long if the culture is unvirtuous. If there isn’t trust, if people aren’t generally honest, if nobody is willing to work hard or to help others in need, you’re inevitably going to end up with people expecting government to solve their problems. And more government means less freedom. So it’s important to find ways to promote a virtuous culture that don’t involve government coercion.
Now, the question that the postliberals ask is, don’t free markets undermine virtue? It’s true that free markets mean we have more opportunities to pursue wealth instead of other things, or to spend our time just consuming material goods instead of pursuing virtue and the higher things in life. But free markets also mean more opportunities to pursue the higher things — to exercise our creativity, to seek knowledge, to seek beauty, to connect with others, to build new institutions to address various problems. Free markets mean more opportunities across the board (and more material well-being, which is no small thing). What we do with those opportunities will depend on the moral character we bring to the table.
KAIROS: You’ve commended the central insight of fusionism in its promotion of something akin to subsidiarity, “that the common good is best achieved when the state stays focused on protecting rights and liberties, leaving individuals and voluntary associations to do the rest.”
Where do you see the future of fusionism, and is there an imperative to restore and rebuild the institutions of civil society to attain this ideal vision? We’re thinking particularly of Robert Nisbet’s work in The Quest for Community, where he notes the decline in smaller personal associations such as family, neighborhood, and church, which have “become functionally irrelevant to our state and economy and meaningless to the moral aspirations of individuals.”
SLADE: Yeah, the huge challenge here is that you can’t have a healthy culture or a good society without robust social institutions — but ever-growing and ever-more-aggressive government crowds out those institutions. Churches and charities and neighborhood groups and guilds and mutual-aid societies are all less necessary today than they were 100 years ago because these massive, well-financed, bureaucratized government programs exist, and we all pay taxes to support them anyway, so why wouldn’t we just get out of the way and let the “experts” take care of things?
We no longer view ourselves as being on the frontlines of helping our neighbors and solving social problems. Our sense of personal agency has been eroded. This is why, again, it’s a mistake to think of liberty and virtue as severable. The classical liberal fight to shrink the size and scope of government is directly tied to the desire for a healthy, moral society. If you don’t figure out how to roll back the government’s intrusions into our lives — its one-size-fits-all “solutions” that frequently actually make our problems worse — it’s very hard for non-state institutions to flourish the way we need them to.
KAIROS: How have American conservatives failed to prevent the growth of statism? And how can a rearticulated, revamped fusionism realize a world that prevents the crowding out of civil society and is truly and sustainably able to resist the government’s unjust interference in the lives of religious communities?
SLADE: Theory is one thing and practical politics is, unfortunately, another. Even a president like Ronald Reagan who read Hayek and Bastiat, and whose rhetoric reflected the fact that he understood the principles of fusionism — even he allowed himself to be talked into tax hikes and trade protectionism and so on. I saw an interview recently where George W. Bush said that he deeply regrets the bank bailouts during the Great Recession. Why? Because taking taxpayer dollars and giving them to big wealthy institutions feels unfair to people. Rightly so. And a lot of the populist backlash we’ve seen in the years since then was a reaction to that injustice, and to the sense that the system is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful over regular Americans. But in the moment, he didn’t want to be the president that allowed the whole economy to collapse, so he gave in.
Human nature being what it is, it’s always easy to believe that we’re in desperate times that call for desperate measures. Let’s break the rules, just this once. Studying history teaches us why that rarely works out as intended. It almost never ends up being “just this once,” and now suddenly the rules are a dead letter. So part of my effort to revive fusionism is rearticulating the principles. But part of it is also getting people to look back at history and gain some perspective and see what can be learned.
KAIROS: How can fusionists simultaneously promote virtue in society (such as through education), while also advocating for limited centralization of power? We’re considering this especially in the context of competition with factions who are more open to using state power.
SLADE: Sometimes you’ll hear postliberals say that conservatives have no choice but to embrace “muscular” state power and wield it against our enemies. After all, the radical left has no qualms about using state power against us, so if we refuse to respond in kind, it amounts to unilateral surrender. That’s a seductive argument. It’s also false and frankly rather evil.
Look at the persecution that the early Christians underwent. Our opponents had all the power and were willing to use it in unthinkably brutal ways in an attempt to kill this religion in the cradle. If those aren’t “desperate times,” what are? Yet the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. Our power doesn’t come from becoming like our enemies or even defeating our enemies. Our power comes from loving our enemies and thereby showing the world that there is another way.
KAIROS: As a young person in the liberty movement today, which issues do you think are of the highest stakes for young, liberty-minded individuals who also care deeply about religion?
SLADE: I have a “let a million flowers bloom” philosophy. We all need to care about both liberty and virtue, because you can’t have a good society without both of those things. But it’s OK for some people to focus on rebuilding our crumbling social institutions, while other people focus on the battle to roll back intrusive government in the political sphere.
Some people are going to be writers and thinkers and idea generators, while others are going to be activists or evangelists, and plenty more are going to be just good and holy mothers and fathers, good and holy doctors and teachers, good and holy business owners, good and holy bus drivers, good and holy whatever the case may be. Some people have religious vocations, and their job is to minister to the souls of the faithful, and I tend to think it’s best if they stay far away from partisan politics.
God made us all unique, so the real question is, what are your talents and passions? And how can you use them to make your corner of the world a freer and more virtuous place?
(Photo: Reason Magazine)