Social Conservatism for the Common Good: A Protestant Engagement with Robert P. George. Edited by Andrew T. Walker, foreword by Ben Sasse. Crossway, 2023. 400pp. $18.99.

Few book genres are as promising, or as regularly disappointing, as that of the festschrift. Conceptually, it seems like an easy win: take an eminent scholar, nearing the end of a long career, and collect a dozen or so of his most eminent students, friends, and colleagues to offer a respectful engagement with his work. Such a book is sure to feature some scholarly heavy-hitters, covering a range of important topics, offering illuminating perspectives on the life’s work of the honored scholar. And yet, so often they fall flat. The essay topics are scattered and unfocused, with half the contributors taking the opportunity to expound their own pet projects. Out of respect for the honoree, critical engagement is often minimal, limiting the value of the conversation. And the secondhand summaries of a great scholar’s contributions often turn out to be less clear and less engaging than just reading the scholar in his own words.

Thankfully, Andrew Walker’s recently edited collection, Social Conservatism for the Common Good: A Protestant Engagement with Robert P. George avoids most of these pitfalls, offering instead a wonderful gateway to the extraordinary life, work, and Christian witness of perhaps the greatest Christian public intellectual of our time. This is partly, perhaps, because it isn’t exactly a festschrift, as the subtitle suggests. An ordinary festschrift for such an eminent Catholic moral philosopher, after all, would feature a star-studded cast of mostly Catholic contributors. What Walker offers us, though, is something much more interesting: an engagement with George’s new natural law theory and jurisprudence offered entirely from the ranks of evangelical Protestants. As such, the book offers a valuable barometer of just how far Protestants have come (and how far we still need to go) in engaging these critical fields of moral philosophy and philosophy of law.

For most of the latter twentieth century, Protestants certainly made their presence known in the American public square, but their sophomoric contributions tended to generate more heat than light. Skeptical of reason and schooled in apocalypticism, most failed to develop the philosophical or rhetorical toolkits to engage debates over abortion, marriage, and the purposes of government with any degree of sophistication, alienating their opponents more often than they persuaded them. Into this intellectual vacuum stepped conservative Catholics such as John Finnis and Robert George, taking clear intellectual leadership of social conservatism by the turn of the millennium, and providing nearly all the key arguments in the battle against same-sex marriage. 

However, the last quarter century, for all its political and cultural setbacks, has witnessed two very promising developments. The first is a thawing of relations between Catholics and evangelical Protestants, who are more likely to consider one another estranged brethren than heretics, and who regularly seek to learn from one another. The second is a rapid Protestant recovery of natural law discourse, a recognition that not only are such philosophical tools critical for cultural engagement, but they are a deep part of our own theological heritage, securing the continuity of creation and redemption. This book is a powerful testament to both trends. The mere fact that Walker was able to assemble a team of fourteen evangelical scholars to engage George’s work so perceptively (and that it would be easy to think of a half-dozen others who could have contributed equally well had space permitted) is proof that Protestant moral and political philosophy is in a state of rapid revival. And the warm appreciation that all fifteen contributors show to George himself and his work suggests a return to an earlier era, one when Protestant scholars regularly cited and drew upon Catholic philosophers and theologians, rather than hiding behind confessional walls.

To be sure, the book still shows that Protestants have some ways to go. Aside from articulating a general sense that George’s view of reason is a little too rosy and his reliance on Scripture a bit too minimal, few of the essays make much effort to tease out the substantive and methodological differences between Protestant and Catholic moral theology. Nor do most contributors show more than the barest grasp of the contours of the fierce debate between the “new natural law” and “old natural law” theories that is now well into its fourth decade. Among Catholic philosophers, this debate has reached a very high level of sophistication, shedding considerable light on questions of anthropology, philosophical method, and the nature of moral experience. Although some essays, such as Andrew Walker’s own, do offer some helpful orientations to this debate, one gets the sense that most of the contributors to this volume are not yet philosophically competent to engage it in any detail. 

One might also complain that the festschrift-y-ness of the volume does still tend to limit the scope of critical engagement. Most authors are exceedingly respectful toward George, offering only the gentlest pushback. Several key questions are left entirely unasked in these essays. Three in particular would’ve made for a much richer discussion. 

First, none of the contributors ask whether or not the framework of “rights,” which has been so central to George’s legal philosophy and public engagement, needs reconsidering in light of the anarchic and subjectivist tendencies of rights-language over the last century. Important challenges to this framework have come not only from George’s Catholic critics such as Patrick Deneen but from leading Protestant moral theologians like Oliver O’Donovan and Nigel Biggar. Ultimately, I think George’s uses of the natural rights concept mostly withstands such challenges, but it’s certainly a conversation worth having.

Second, very few of the essays take note of the “elephant in the room”: if George’s work as a public intellectual is so powerful and persuasive, both in terms of its philosophical rigor and rhetorical winsomeness, why does it seem to have failed so spectacularly over the last three decades? Of course, to ask this question is not to suggest that George himself, or any of his comrades, need take the blame for this failure. Perhaps we simply needed more Christians with their courage and cogency, and Obergefell might have turned out differently. Still, it seems likely that we are facing cultural deformities deeper than failures of public reason or wise jurisprudence, deformities that no amount of sophisticated new natural law arguments will be able to repair. I’d have liked to see at least a couple of the essays grappling more fully with the limitations of George’s form of public intellectual witness, and what other forms of witness might complement it.

Third, it is worth asking more insistently just how much George’s commitment to classical liberalism is consistent with the earlier Christian moral and political tradition upon which he draws. To be sure, George’s liberalism is a very modest form, rejecting Rawlsian neutrality and the absurd notion that you can keep morality out of law. Micah Watson’s essay, with its fine exposition of George’s 1993 Making Men Moral, may surprise some New Right Christians who have been led to think of George as some kind of socially conservative libertarian. He is clearly no such thing. That said, there are still some fault lines here. He and his allies like to cite Thomas Aquinas’s observation that human law cannot punish every vice or promote every virtue, but there is a subtle difference between Aquinas and most modern advocates of free speech and religious freedom. Aquinas recognizes that in any society there will be barriers to the pursuit of public virtue and one will have to compromise with the realities on the ground—indeed, he (in)famously gives the example of prostitution as an evil one may have to tolerate. But he does not say that there are certain classes of evil, like blasphemy, which should always be tolerated; much less does he indulge in Millian raptures about the ways that a space for free debate and inquiry will always advance the cause of truth, as George and his allies sometimes seem to. Don’t get me wrong; old-fashioned liberalism may indeed be an advance on Thomistic communitarianism, an advance for which Protestantism can take some credit, but there is at least a difference there that deserves some hashing out. 

All three of these concerns, I should add, are areas in which George has been taken to task (indeed, to the woodshed in some cases) by his “post-liberal” Catholic critics such as Patrick Deneen, and parallel debates are taking place now within Protestant ranks. That said, those skeptical of George’s form of winsome, reasoned public engagement based on rational common ground, might be surprised by some of what they find in Social Conservatism for the Common Good.

For one thing, critics would complain that folks like George, comfortably ensconced at elite institutions, simply don’t understand how hostile the culture is becoming—don’t understand just how much we live in what Aaron Renn has called “Negative World.” Of course, this is silly—if anyone understands what Negative World is like, it’s going to be Christians like George who have spent their careers at the heart of highly secular progressive institutions. And sure enough, in a striking passage from a 2014 speech that Walker quotes in his introduction, George declared, “To be a witness to the gospel today is to make oneself a marked man or woman. It is to expose oneself to scorn and reproach” (7). George’s style of public engagement, far from being designed for a neutral world in which Christianity is treated indulgently, is intended precisely for a world in which Christians find themselves subjected to a withering barrage of political, intellectual, and cultural opposition, and must learn how to fight smart and yes, winsomely.

Fighting smart means knowing whom not to fight, or when to cultivate friendship even in the midst of important battles. Perhaps the most powerful essay in the book, then, is Paul Miller’s “Partners in Truth Seeking,” dedicated to describing and understanding the remarkable two-decade-long friendship between Robert George and Cornel West. From all we read in the media about the depth of political polarization, friendships just aren’t supposed to be able to cross such ideological boundaries anymore. And yet George and West’s friendship is no mere charade for the cameras, or a matter of polite academic respect for a worthy adversary; it is a deep spiritual and intellectual bond on which both men have come to rely for mutual support and sharpening. “True friendship,” writes Miller, “is a spiritual discipline, an antidote to what ails our democracy and our universities, and an answer to the plight of loneliness that many people experience in contemporary culture. George and West did not become friends for these purposes, but their friendship shows a path forward for our spiritual, cultural, and political good” (280).

Not only in this friendship, but in his towering intellectual achievements, his unflappable optimism, his perseverance amidst adversity and defeat, and his unshakeable commitment to the ideal of persuasion in a culture that has increasingly despaired of it, Robert George shows a path forward for our spiritual, cultural, and political good. Social Conservatism for the Common Good offers a compelling introduction to that path, and I hope it will inspire many Protestant readers to take up and read George’s work, and learn from his example of cultural leadership.

Bradford Littlejohn is the founder and former president of the Davenant Institute, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is recognized as a leading scholar of the English theologian Richard Hooker and has published and lectured extensively in the fields of Reformation history, Christian ethics, and political theology. He lives in Landrum, SC, with his wife, Rachel, and four children.