1 Introduction: Good Samaritans or Good Preachers
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”1
Jesus’s response is a recitation of the Great Commandment, whose meaning should have been all but self-evident to early followers of Jesus. The lawyer, however, follows his question with a second. As the account in the Gospel of Luke reads, “But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”2 This question is the crux of the Good Samaritan story.
We are left to wonder at the lawyer’s reported motive of self-justification. Did he ask the question in earnest, or was he playing the devil’s advocate? Was the lawyer a sophist seeking to appear smart by one-upping the Lord? Was he seeking to exculpate or excuse himself rhetorically from his own failures to live up to the Great Commandment? Was the lawyer engaged in a sort of hypocritical virtue signaling, perhaps obscuring his own ability to be more judicious than just, more righteous than right, or perhaps just a grumpy pragmantist in
With the parable of the Good Samaritan that Jesus offers in response, he takes the lawyer’s question seriously—offering not only an answer but also some marching orders.
“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”3
“Go and do likewise.” “Do this and you will live.” These are compelling commands. They do not seem to admit of ambiguity or afford permission to opt out. And yet the story of the Good Samaritan continues to raise questions of interpretation, as much now as when it was first uttered.
What we know of the parable is that the Good Samaritan is a Samaritan, perceived as an enemy and outsider by Jews, and yet in this instance traveling in their land. The victim was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, perhaps a Jewish priest returning home to Jericho from the temple, possibly with some collected funds to take to his community. Alternatively, he might have been a man of commerce, heading to Jericho to profit from its activities as an ancient trading center. We don’t really know much about him, but he was clearly a victim of a crime, seemingly harmed through no fault of his own. The priest and the Levite passed the man by, the subsequent speculation being that they might have perceived him as dead and feared defilement from handling the corpse. They weren’t so much bystanders to the crime, but they were witnesses
The point of this chapter in the present volume is to take up the question of where the story of the Good Samaritan figures into the study of law and religion—and particularly in the work of John Witte. After all, the concept of the Good Samaritan, as it has entered the law, is a concept that shows up very early in the first-year American law school curriculum, including the torts, contracts, and criminal law sources that Witte has taught to law students for decades, alongside courses on legal history, law and religion, and human rights. One learns particularly in the first-year torts class about “Good Samaritan laws,” intended to protect from legal liability those who render assistance.
For many students, the idea that someone who helps could be the subject of a lawsuit is something of a shock. But if one looks more comparatively and internationally, one learns that there are places in the world where there is no “duty to rescue.” There are also places, such as most of Europe and Latin America, where there is a “duty to rescue.” And then there are places, like the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and many parts of Canada—basically much of the Anglo-American legal world—where there are “Good Samaritan” laws. In these Anglo-American areas, people may welcome rescuers—but they may also try to sue them; hence the need for legal protection in the Good Samaritan laws. The standard comparison has been that the Anglo-American world is just more individualistic, libertarian, and adversarial in its legal system,4 even when it comes to Good Samaritans, in contrast to the more communitarian ethic that prevails in many European nations and their New World manifestations in French Catholic Quebec, New England states with Puritan legacies (Massachusetts and Vermont), Lutheran Midwestern states (Minnesota and Wisconsin), and the far-flung and often Spanish Catholic-influenced states of Washington, California, and Florida—all of which have retained the “duty to rescue” standard.5
In this context, it is not surprising that the story of the Good Samaritan made its way into several of John Witte’s early articles on law, religion, and human rights. There, Witte writes: “In desperate circumstances, it is sometimes better to be a Good Samaritan than a good preacher, to give food and comfort before sermons and catechisms.”8 But what does this really mean? In this chapter, I examine the Good Samaritan and related themes through the work of John Witte, drawing further inspiration from the great minds of two friends and teachers that Witte and I were blessed to share: the late Don S. Browning and Jean Bethke Elshtain. These reflections range from the ethics of bystanders to the kindness of strangers and the proper balance of charity and justice in the
2 “You Know, There Really Are No Bystanders”: Good Samaritan Ethics and the Great Commandment
If the ethics of the Good Samaritan is about knowing and responding compassionately to the circumstances of one’s neighbor, it is first necessary to see the neighbor and to see them as falling within the circle of one’s concern. Interestingly, toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, at exactly the time that the internet and social media were connecting people within and around the world’s nations more than in any previous era, when surveillance systems and technologies were increasingly allowing us to witness crimes, genocides, and the most mundane lives and circumstances of others in ways that only Foucault with his panopticon could imagine,9 there was an inexplicable epidemic of horrendous lapses by modern-day Levites and Pharisees among us. The sick slumped and died before cameras in hospitals, the elderly and babies were left unattended in streets, and we were just beginning to see that police body, cruiser, and street cameras would be the silent sentinels to law enforcement abuses and surveillance of the public—at least until they were released to the public’s horror.10 We would soon see, often through others’ smartphone cameras, atrocities against citizens that would launch civil wars and citizen protests in places like Syria, Hong Kong, Iran, and even U.S. streets following incidents of police brutality.11 Satellites, our “eyes in the sky,” would
There has been a lot to see in recent years, but our ethics have not always risen to the occasion. How to think about the ethics of bystanders in a Samaritan sense was the focus of some work that I did under the leadership and direction of a mutual friend I shared with John Witte, the late and great Don Browning. Specifically, in a seminar that convened over several years on the “Moral and Spiritual Formation of Children,” led by Elizabeth Marquardt, another scholar inspired by Witte’s work on marriage, family, and children in law,14 I produced a paper titled, “‘There but for the Grace’: The Ethics of Bystanders to Divorce.”15 The paper departed from my own memories as a child of being part of the “divorce culture” generation as no-fault divorce took hold in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.16 While my parents never divorced, the parents of many friends did—and in ways that seemed threatening even to those of us whose parents stayed together.
In writing about bystanders to divorce, a key question was whether I had any basis (or maybe “standing”) in legal terms to be bothered by the sad circumstances of the families of others. Was it any of my business? What reason could I have for being affected by other people’s family troubles and dissolutions? Wouldn’t my being sad about it make it even worse for childhood friends who had to shuttle between parents and divide their holidays? Was I a stakeholder of sorts—or merely a bystander—to the tragedies of others? Perhaps I should keep my discomfort and anxiety about my own familial stability to myself, be grateful for my blessings, and keep a silent, stiff upper lip.
The concept of the bystander and the appropriate response to the travails of others also became connected in my mind to the Good Samaritan. Surely,
But the pernicious origins of the bystander effect did not stop me from delving into all manner of social contagion, social network, and cultural trauma theories to understand the ethics of bystanders. It seemed that there were many theories concerning social forces by which the bystander could be deterred from action. So it was like a pinprick in my burgeoning bystander ethics balloon when Witte’s and my mentor, Don Browning, turned to me after the presentation and said, “You know, from a Christian perspective, there really are no bystanders.” What? Really? Not after I spent twenty minutes and many pages propounding them. I felt deflated, but also defiant. I bristled. I was getting my inner Cain on. What Browning seemed to imply was that the Christian religion assumes a very high level of responsibility for others—that we ultimately cannot and probably never should try to erect a bystander barrier to others. “Am I my brother’s (or sister’s) keeper?” The story of the Good Samaritan seems to say, definitively: Yes.
We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us forget ourselves and all that is ours.
Conversely, we are God’s: let us therefore live for Him and die for Him. We are God’s: let His wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God’s: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward Him as our only lawful goal.19
“We are not our own.” It’s a powerful statement—and one that has many implications for human agency toward our neighbors in this world. It counsels a “relativization,” as we say in ethics, of the self in relation to others. It is a strong basis for what theologian H. R. Niebuhr called “the responsible self.”20
Calvin’s observation, in turn, is redolent of the Great Commandment as expressed in John 13:34: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”21 If we are to strive for God and to love God, then clearly we must love one another. In such a theology, there clearly can be no bystanders. Even to posit that there could be bystanders—that is, people who are not in fact standing by or with their fellow humans but standing separate and apart from and unaffected by their suffering—is to separate oneself from others and thus from God. In short, as Jesus admonishes the priest and the Levite in the parable—it is sin. In that context, the Good Samaritan is not an exceptional individual—a bystander who happened to become an upstander. The Good Samaritan is no mere exemplar of an occasional grace. The Good Samaritan is who Christians are called to be. The exception is to be the rule.
3 “One Deals with What One Is Dealt”: Charity, Justice, and the Good Samaritan State
Becoming a Good Samaritan bystander is not easy for striving Christian individuals—and it may be even harder for aspiring Christian states. At the collective level of the state, the Good Samaritan story implicates another key discussion in Christian ethics—namely, the debate over the relationship between charity and justice. In considering this debate in light of the Good Samaritan story, I am guided by memory of a remark from another mutual acquaintance whom John and I shared: Jean Bethke Elshtain. Elshtain and I once exchanged
Upon hearing this, my initial reaction was much the same as that of another fellow student to whom I recounted the story: “That’s so Jean!” It was no doubt dripping with abundant truth and human experience, even though it sounded a little harsh. But wait, subsequent reflection counseled, “What does this mean?” “One deals with what one is dealt.” It is a statement at once hopeful and fatalistic. Life deals us many things. Not all are within our control. But some things are. They may even be, at least partially, our fault. They may even be the result of sin. There is hope in our capacity to deal. But what happens when that capacity falls short? Must we individually pull ourselves up by our own tattered bootstraps? Will a Good Samaritan step in to assist and offer the kindness of a stranger? Or is there some collective responsibility—maybe even a responsibility of a Christian or Good Samaritan state that those around a person in distress should share?
This question of the relationship of charity and justice in the Good Samaritan state is a good question to ask of the work of John Witte, particularly his studies of the development of “poor-relief” laws (Armenordnungen) in Europe under the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, these laws to do with poor relief and proper allocation of resources from the community chest in the “Church Ordinance” laws, dating back to 1522, are some of the earliest effects of the reformers on law.23 The sort of charity expressed in these poor-relief laws was one of the real achievements of Reformation law in an early modern European world in which many were still condemned to lives that were, in the immortal words of Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”24 It is interesting that the “solitary” and “poor” parts often get lopped off this phrase in popular parlance. Is it an attempt in subsequent capitalist societies to evade the communal responsibility to care for those who are less well off? What responsibility does a Good Samaritan-informed Christian state have to ameliorate and assist those whose lives would otherwise be “nasty, brutish, and short”?
“Our nature is corrupted by original sin,” Melanchthon wrote, echoing Luther’ s doctrine of total depravity. “Thus the law of nature is greatly obscured.” This, too, was a decided departure from conventional teaching. Medieval writers recognized that all individuals have an innate or natural knowledge of good and evil, which they sometimes called “synderesis.” Through proper discipline, a person could come to understand and apply this knowledge and so do good and avoid evil. A person must use reason to apprehend the natural law. He must use conscience to apply it in concrete circumstances. Thus, for example, through the exercise of reason a person apprehends and understands the principle of love of neighbor; through the exercise of conscience he connects this principle with the practice of aiding the poor and helpless or of keeping his promises.”26
As Witte observes of Melanchthon’s reconstruction of natural law for Protestant understandings, “For many medieval writers, reason was a cognitive or intellectual faculty, conscience a practical or applicative skill. Melanchthon, like Luther, would have none of this fine casuistry. God planted a perfect natural knowledge of the nature of good and evil in our minds. But our sin keeps us from apprehending or applying it without distortion.”27
[I]n a Christian commonwealth, charity must be prized and churlishness scorned. “Even though men are of private estate, they are not excused
from helping others,” Eisermann argued. This is the plain instruction not only of nature but especially of Scripture. We must “exhort delightfully in hospitality, rendering to none evil for evil, for we are commanded to feed [even] our enemies if they are hungry, to give them drink if they are thirsty, and thereby heap burning coals on their head and thus provoke them to do likewise.” In giving charity, “man is a veritable god to his fellow man.”28
Though saints and sinners alike deserve charity, a person of modest means must be discriminating in dispensing it. One’s own family and dependents deserve closest care. Beyond that, only the worthy poor should be served—orphans, widows, the aged, the sick. The unworthy poor—the lazy beggar, the itinerant mendicant, the loitering vagabond—must work for their alms or be banished if they refuse. Eisermann’s insights were part of a whole industry of new Evangelical reflections on poverty and charity.30
It is the duty of the magistrate to restore the decayed, gather the dispersed, recover the lost, reform the disordered, punish the evil, enlarge the common good, relieve the poor, defend the orphan and the widow, promote virtue, administer justice, keep the law, demonstrate that he is the father of the country, hold the people’s commitment to him as if they were his own children, embrace godliness faithfully and with his whole heart, perform all that is profitable or necessary among the people, according to his duty, no less than if God Himself were present.31
The Lutheran reformers rejected traditional teachings of both the spiritual idealization of poverty and the spiritual efficaciousness of charity. All persons were called to work the work of God in the world, they argued. They were not to be idle or to impoverish themselves voluntarily. Voluntary poverty was a form of social parasitism to be punished, not a symbol of spiritual sacrifice to be rewarded. Only the worthy local poor deserved charity, and only if they could not be helped by their immediate family members, the family being the “first school of charity.” Charity, in turn, was not a form of spiritual self-enhancement. It was a vocation of the priesthood of believers. Charity brought no immediate spiritual reward to the giver. Instead, it brought spiritual opportunity to the receiver. The Evangelical doctrine of justification by faith alone undercut the spiritual efficacy of charity for the giver. Salvation came through faith in Christ, not through charity to one’s neighbor. But the Evangelical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers enhanced the spiritual efficacy of charity for the receiver. Those who were already saved by faith became members of the priesthood of all believers. They were called to love and serve their neighbors charitably in imitation of Christ. Those who received the charity of their neighbors would see in this personal sacrificial act the good works brought by faith, and so be moved to have faith themselves.32
They translated their belief in the spiritual efficacy of the direct personal relationship between giver and receiver into a new emphasis on local charity for the local poor, without dense administrative bureaucracies.… The “redemptive charity” that the reformers had in mind came more in the direct personal encounter between the faithful giver and the grateful
receiver, not so much in the conventional notion that the receiver should experience and receive charity within a Church institution.33
In later centuries, these Reformed Protestant concepts of charity would undergo some modification in the context of modern administrative states, while also sticking to core beliefs, including concepts of the “worthy” or “deserving” poor. In Witte’s writing on the public theology of the nineteenth-century neo-Calvinist theologian and journalist Abraham Kuyper, who served as prime minister of the Netherlands in the early years of the twentieth century, one sees the worthy and unworthy poor distinction still in play. Witte writes, “Like Calvin, Kuyper commended work and condemned idleness, championing the Protestant teaching that God calls all persons to a ‘vocation’ that best suits their natural abilities and gifts. But ‘if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.’”34 At the same time, Witte further observes of Kuyper’s theology of poor relief, “All Christians were to serve the poor, needy, orphans, and sojourners in their midst, for ‘as much as you do it to the least of these you do it to me,’ Jesus had said (Matt. 25:45). And the church itself was to maintain the diaconate to collect and distribute alms to the ‘deserving poor’—those who, despite their best efforts, still needed help.”35
Yet, the gusts and gales of Dutch industrialization were posing profound new socioeconomic changes and challenges to the Netherlands and much of the West. Now that employers had access to newfound steam power, electricity, and machinery, many enterprises no longer needed as much manual labor, or were growing too large to heed local labor concerns. With open trade, population growth, and foreign workers intensifying competition, Dutch workers were finding it harder to get and keep their jobs. The old systems of guilds that had long guarded local craftsmen’s interests were giving way to more laissez-faire business practices that left many workers with lower wages, longer working hours, and harder working conditions. Many workers were forced to sign easily
terminable contracts, and later lost their jobs or began to slide into poverty. The Industrial Revolution, Kuyper wrote, stripped workers of a “sense of security” in life. In response, workers in Kuyper’s day were picketing and striking, boycotting goods, sabotaging factories, and joining trade unions that endorsed violence. Kuyper labeled the new challenges of industrialization, labor, unemployment, and poverty as “the social question” that needed the urgent attention of all spheres of life, including notably the state.36
In the context of such broad and sweeping social transformation, reliance on individual or institutional charity for sustenance was likely to lead to disasters. Charitable endeavors by individuals and organizations might make a dent in social welfare, but they could not provide for it entirely. This is where the Samaritan ethic needed an accompanying social ethic.
Against both socialists who sought to dismantle property rights and market structures and capitalists who downplayed market problems and impoverished workers, Kuyper outlined new roles for church and state in confronting “the social question.” In “normal” situations, Kuyper wrote, the church was to assume responsibility for assisting the poor with their spiritual and material needs.… Thus the church was not only to share the Gospel, but also to implement a diaconate funding system wherein alms were collected from all and discretely donated to those in need. Miserly charity was insulting, and ad hoc philanthropy was inadequate to meet the biblical commands to love and care for our neighbors.38
4 “No Fault of Their Own”: Charitable Choices and Challenges
A United States Department of the Treasury fact sheet reads: “The American Rescue Plan will change the course of the pandemic and deliver immediate and direct relief to families and workers impacted by the COVID-19 crisis through no fault of their own.”39 Through no fault of their own. It’s a phrase one hears frequently in connection with government spending—especially after collective disasters such as natural disasters and dreadful pandemics. It’s also a phrase one hears from “fiscally conservative” politicians to defend social spending that is necessary, whatever their ideological proclivities against “welfare” and “socialism” and toward downsizing government. Politicians often have a soft spot for social spending when the recipients are victimized by forces “through no fault of their own.” The challenge tends to come when the recipients are seen as complicit in their circumstances.
In U.S. politics, the relationship between government spending and charitable giving, particularly by religious organizations, has an interesting recent history. When I began my studies with John Witte in the 1990s, the 1992 election of a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, was followed by a Republican revolution in the midterm elections, in which Congress, led by the Speaker of the House, then the Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich,40 enacted numerous reforms on fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility (welfare), tax credits for children and marriage, and job creation and wage enhancement. It was a conservative program in American political terms, and it would likely have met with strong approval from Protestant Reformation forebears. There was even talk of “devolution of powers” from the federal government to the states that seems inspired by Kuyperian and Dooyeweerdian sphere sovereignty.
Further changes to the system of charity and social welfare came just a few years later with the “charitable choice” provisions under President Clinton,
“Compassionate conservatism” became the term for the continuation of this charitable-choice impulse under the administration of President George W. Bush.43 But circumstances changed, in many respects, with the Great Recession of 2008. This was a global economic recession that touched lives the world over, but in the United States, it gave rise to the Tea Party movement, which began as a fiscally conservative movement concerned to lower taxes and reduce the federal debt, but which became a volatile movement of libertarian, conservative, and populist forces, all of which ultimately wanted much less government in people’s lives. Their fiscal concerns might have meshed with some of the Protestant reformers’ concerns for efficient management of the community chest and national resources, but without the moral underpinnings of concern for neighbor love and social welfare. These new conservative movements were all about liberty—but not always about love. And by the time of President Donald Trump, they were calling for “deconstruction of the administrative state” in a way that would presumably have shocked the Obrigkeit of old.
Throughout most of these recent programs— the “Contract With America,” “charitable choice,” and “compassionate conservatism”—there has been some preservation of distinction between those who are worthy or unworthy of social welfare assistance. The Personal Work and Responsibility Act of 1996
As the twenty-first century moved on, the rise of the internet and the effects of global economic recessions in 2001 and 2008 led to social and technological revolutions in work and at home. Entire industries were being displaced or upended in the new millennium. Scientists began to issue increasingly urgent calls for global attention to climate change. Political polarization and rising authoritarianism abroad weakened societies and their safety nets. The COVID-19 pandemic was a great leveler in some respects, since it prompted the shutdown of entire societies, but it also underscored social, political, and economic problems and dramatic inequalities in health and well-being, even in advanced nations. The effects of these large phenomena may be no one’s fault in particular, but they are surely what we are being dealt, and the key question is who, between the private charitable and public governmental sectors, will lead in addressing them.
5 Being Good Samaritans and Charitable Bystanders in Today’s Sociopolitical Sphere
In an introduction to a recent volume on Abraham Kuyper’s social and political thought, titled On Charity & Justice, John Witte recites at one point a little Calvinist catechism that strikes this reader for thinking of how to be a Good Samaritan and a charitable bystander in today’s world. I divide it in half here in order to make specific reflections. It is a nice blend of the theological and political, the individual and the collective and what we are called to do in order to “Go and do likewise.”
Instead of assuming that natural human life was lawlessly “brutish, nasty, and short,” they emphasized the natural restraints of God’s law written
on all hearts and God’s common grace, which “shines on all that’s fair.” Instead of seeing natural rights as pathways to a self-interested pursuit of life, liberty, and property of the sovereign individual, they saw rights as opportunities to discharge divine duties set out in the Decalogue and other moral laws.44
In this way, the tradition cautions against “naturalization” of plights of poverty, otherness, and victimization and recommends postures of abundance, solidarity, and agency. The Good Samaritan gave of his time and treasure in a way that the self-interested sovereignty of the priest and Levite, keen to preserve their purity and distance, did not. Where the priest and Levite saw inconvenience and possibly even contagion in the plight of the man by the road, the Good Samaritan saw the opportunity to discharge divine love toward a stranger.
Instead of seeing constitutions as social and government contracts between individuals designed to protect individual rights, they treated constitutions as divinely modeled covenants between rulers, people and God, designed to protect human and associational rights, to break up and bracket political power, and to encourage and celebrate godly values.45
We see ongoing discussion today over who should take responsibility for the vulnerable among us. Some argue for a robust public sphere, by which we come together collectively as a society to create governments and social structures that will meet people’s needs and assure the general welfare. Others argue that this sort of assurance only comes about when we have a strong private sphere, where people have “skin in the game” by having ownership of property that they can then use to benefit others through charitable acts and arrangements. Others propose public-private partnerships as a hybrid to get the job done. What all of these arrangements depend on are systems of law and rule of law to provide for and protect these arrangements.
Instead of seeing free speech, free exercise, or free assembly as individual rights limited only by the rights of others and the boundaries of treason, Calvinists saw them as constitutional expressions of the biblical teaching that all persons are called by Christ to be prophets, priests, and sovereigns in the world, with duties to speak, serve, and rule with others in the creation and protection of a godly public.46
Much as there was problematic “rights talk” when Mary Ann Glendon wrote about it in 1991—the very year that I became John Witte’s student—there is arguably problematic “liberty talk” today. Some of our freedoms of speech, exercise of religion, and association have become cudgels in the hands of authoritarian and antidemocratic forces today. There are new calls for free speech that seem to depend on the silencing of others. Some castigate new social media, which, even though they carry certain risks of hate speech and incitement of insurrection in some contexts, have been used in others as tools for uncovering human rights violations, exercising important associational freedoms to organize, and coming together in revolutions to topple bad regimes and empower new democratic movements to support good ones. In the current context, these constitutional freedoms can indeed produce prophets—the original “See Something, Say Something” folks. And when people’s skills of seeing something and saying something are cultivated. They are likely to do something, even something risky, like coming to the aid of a stranger as a Good Samaritan.
Luke 10:25–28; all biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version, unless noted otherwise.
Luke 10:29.
Luke 10:31–38.
The status of the United States as a libertarian outlier was first brought home to me in reading a well-known book by a frequent Witte associate, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, who for decades taught comparative law and other topics at Harvard Law School, Witte’s legal alma mater. See Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991). Indeed, it was almost certainly Witte who recommended the book to me.
I mention religion because it is worth thinking about whether these states’ orientations—particularly those that recognize a “duty to rescue”—coincide with religious principles. However, it is beyond the scope of this essay to conduct a full inquiry. As a native of Louisiana, I do find it interesting that Louisiana, which retains the Civil Code, has cast off the French and Spanish commitment to a duty to rescue. There is probably a story there.
A key book in the “Responsibility to Protect” debates was written by another Harvard professor, now diplomat, Samantha Power. See Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
See Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: An Endangered Connection (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018); and Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
John Witte, Jr., “Law, Religion, and Human Rights,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 28, no. 1 (1996): 11. See also John Witte, Jr., introduction to Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives, ed. John Witte, Jr. and Johan D. van der Vyver (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), XVII–XXXV.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Book, 1995), chap. 3.
For examples of some troubling headlines from the times—and at a time when Witte and I were contemplating a project on humanitarianism, no less—see the following: Peter Applebome, “The Day the Traffic Did Not Stop in Hartford,” The New York Times, Jun. 8, 2008; Anemona Hartocollis, “Video of a Dying Mental Patient Being Ignored Spurs Changes at Brooklyn Hospital, The New York Times, Jul. 2, 2008; and Keith B. Richburg, “An Injured Toddler Is Ignored and Chinese Ask Why,” The Washington Post, Oct. 19, 2011. On police cameras, see, for example, Frej Klem Thomsen, “The Ethics of Police Body-Worn Cameras,” Moral Philosophy and Politics, Jun. 20, 2020.
See, for example, “Arab Spring: The First Smartphone Revolution,” The Economic Times, Nov. 30, 2020; Matt J. Duffy, “Smartphones in the Arab Spring,” International Press Institute Report (2011): 53–56; Jacob Granger, “Voice for the Voiceless: Smartphones Are the Weapon of Choice to Tell Stories from the Syrian Civil War,” Journalism.co.uk, Jun. 6, 2019; and “What You Should Know about the Smartphone Revolution in Iran,” Article 19, Jun. 9, 2016.
Jen Chung, “MTA Updates Famous ‘See Something, Say Something’ Campaign with Real NYers Who Saw Something, Said Something,” Gothamist, Mar. 21, 2016.
The phrase is said to be based on Jeremiah 5:21: “Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear.”
See Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (New York: Random House, 2005).
M. Christian Green, “‘There but for the Grace’: The Ethics of Bystanders to Divorce,” Propositions (New York: Center for Public Conversation, 2012).
See Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, The Divorce Culture: Rethinking Our Commitments to Marriage and Family (New York: Vintage, 1998).
See A. M. Rosenthal, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (New York: Skyhorse, 2016).
The Witness, film, dir. James D. Solomon, exec. prod. William Genovese (2015).
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960 [1559]), 3.7.1.
H. R. Niehbuhr, The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
John 13:34, New Revised Standard Edition.
See, for example, Jean Bethke Elshtain’s wonderful remarks, titled “Does Luther Make Sense?” at Reformation Day at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology on November 11, 2009, available in audio recording at https://archive.org/details/podcast_reformation-day-2009_does-luther-make-sense_1000091636127.
John Witte, Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 184.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) I, XIII, 9.
1 Corinthians 13:13, King James Version.
Law and Protestantism, 124–25.
Ibid., 125.
Ibid., 149.
Ibid., 149.
Ibid., 150.
Ibid., 151–52.
Ibid., 193–94.
Ibid., 194.
John Witte, Jr. and Eric Wang, “Abraham Kuyper and Reformed Public Theology,” International Journal of Reformed Public Theology 6, no. 2 (2020): 10–11 (citing 2 Thessalonians 3:10); pagination is to SSRN copy found at: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3959072.
Witte and Wang, “Abraham Kuyper and Reformed Public Theology,” 11.
Ibid., 11.
On sphere sovereignty, see, for example, Abraham Kuyper, Our Program: A Christian Political Manifesto (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015); Abraham Kuyper, Charity & Justice (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2022); Herman Dooyeweerd, The Struggle for a Christian Politics, ed. D. F. M. Strauss (New York: Paideia, 2012), also in The Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd, Series B, Vol. 17 (New York: Paideia Press). See also Jonathan Chaplin, Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022).
Witte and Wang, “Abraham Kuyper and Reformed Public Theology,” 12.
United States Department of the Treasury, “Fact Sheet: The American Rescue Plan Will Deliver Immediate Economic Relief to Families,” Mar. 18, 2021 (emphasis added).
See Newt Gingrich et al., Contract With America (New York: Times Books, 1994).
For discussion of the charitable-choice provisions, see Carl Esbeck, “Charitable Choice and the Critics,” N.Y.U. Annual Survey of American Law 57, no. 1 (2000): 17–33; and Stanley Carlson-Thies, “Charitable Choice: Bringing Religion Back into American Welfare,” Journal of Policy History 13, no. 1 (2001): 109–32.
See Carl Esbeck, “Charity for the Autonomous Self” (review essay), Journal of Law and Religion 32, no. 1 (2017): 185–96.
Marvin Olasky, Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America (New York: Free Press, 2000).
John Witte, Jr., “Abraham Kuyper: Always Reforming,” in Abraham Kuyper on Charity & Justice, ed. Matthew J. Tuininga (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2022), XXXIII–LXVII, reprinted with updates as “Abraham Kuyper on Family, Freedom, and Fortune,” in John Witte, Jr., Faith, Freedom, and Family: New Essays on Law and Religion, ed. Norman Doe and Gary S. Hauk (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 199–214, at 205.
Ibid., 205.
Ibid.