I keep believing that Charles Featherstone is and is going to be an important voice in American Christianity. Here’s one reason why.

The other day, I blogged about Baltimore, and my fear of the mob. I said, in part:

I was thinking today why stories of rioting and civil unrest unnerve me like nothing else. It has to do with fear — terror, actually — of anarchy. I have a very deep need for order (not that you’d know it by seeing the interior of my car), and I am always thinking about the sources of order, and disorder. For better or for worse, this drives my thinking; it’s why I seem so alarmist to many. You might say that I worry unduly over things that aren’t that big a deal, or you might say that I see things that are not apparent to others.

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Anyway, order for me is not an aesthetic concern, but a moral one. A mob is the enemy of the things I value most. One of the most traumatic events of my life had to do with a mob of bullies who held me down and abused me while the two adults in charge did nothing to stop them — not because they could not, but because they would not. Once violence starts, I find it hard to fault authority for stopping it by any means necessary.

The anarchy I worry about is not the anarchy of poor black people in West Baltimore, or anywhere else. The anarchy I worry about is the anarchy within the hearts and communities of people like me — people who outwardly live lives of prosperity and normality, but who, in their hearts, believe that they and their appetites are the only authority they should follow. This is why I am so perpetually alarmed about our culture: it is fundamentally anarchic, because there is buried within our culture no source of order outside the Self.

In his personal response to me, which is now up on his blog, Charles said the following:

[T]his is where you and I differ the most. I did not see the bullying I suffered through as a lack of good order — I experienced as the order itself. This is why I’m not terrified of chaos, but rather, by order. And I think there’s a similar experience at work in many African American communities, especially poor ones. Because they experience a very violent and capricious order. One they may respond badly to, but it’s hard to respond wellto that kind of violence. When the people who keep order see you as something to be dealt with, an object to be handled violently if need be, then it’s hard to respect order, and hard to make the kinds of choices that will lead to something resembling success. Because everything is so contingent, even random, and your property, your safety, your value as a human being, is not figured into any calculus of what matters when order is kept. Character is good, grit and persistence are valuable in and of themselves. I will always preach those things to people who face even horrific odds because it’s easier to change who you are than it is to change the world. But it is not wrong to say that the world is, in fact, ordered against some people. And some whole communities. It doesn’t respect their lives, their liberty, their well-being, or their property. These can all be taken at a whim, and THAT is called good order.

I am deeply sympathetic with conservative appeals to order. I truly believe conservatives have a better understanding of the human condition than do progressives and liberals. I believe an orderly world is one in which people can truly thrive. But I also know that every order has a cost, and every order is enforced with violence, and my concern will always be with who pays the cost for a particular social order. With who is on the wrong side of that violence. And why.

I think Charles and I are closer on this than it may initially appear. Order is not the same thing as justice. There are unjust orders; Charles has been the victim of them, and it appears that Freddie Gray was too. An unjust order is another form of chaos. The truth is, we can never achieve a fully just order in this world; we can only approximate it. Justice is the harmonization of what is legal and what is right and what is actual. “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” is a call for justice, both ideal and actual. Order itself is not justice — in fact, it might be its opposite — but justice can only emerge from a condition of order.

This is why conservatives like me — and like the black conservative Thomas Sowell — see the disorder on the streets of West Baltimore as having deep roots in the chaos within the social order of West Baltimore. This is not to deny that a culture of corruption within the Baltimore Police department exists, and is a serious problem. It’s only to say that in seeking to impose justice on the police, we must not make them be the scapegoats for all that is wrong with the people in the culture that they police. Here’s Tom Sowell:

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.

As Sowell points out, it’s not a black thing exclusively; Theodore Dalrymple, the UK physician who spent his career working among the British underclass, has long recorded the same behavior among whites.

As a reader of Dante, I note that the Divine Comedy is in large part a meditation on justice. In Dante, justice is inseparable from charity, that is agape, a self-sacrificial love, the highest form of love. In Dante, the will of God is justice, and no human form of justice that deviates from the will of God can be called just. We humans, Dante knows, cannot see perfectly, so things that seem unjust to us may in fact be just, and vice versa. Justice is the right ordering of the world, which, to Dante, does not mean an equal distribution of goods, but a harmonious society in which each person fulfills his natural end, in love.

The law without love is unjust. Love without the law is incoherent. The model of justice as an expression of love, and of harmony, is worth considering. It is also worth considering Dante’s teaching about injustice (disorder) in the world as an emergent property of injustice — that is, disorder — in our hearts.

I think it’s also worth pondering a model of justice that is not strictly legal, but rather medical. What if the body politic is sick, and in need of healing. Would justice be the medicine that heals it? What would the administration of justice be like in that case, in which its application is meant for the sake of healing the whole?

Let’s say that you have two brothers who inherit their father’s estate. One brother lives a life of sobriety and charity; the other is a drunkard who abuses his wife and neglects his children. One form of justice would say that the property must be divided equally between the two sons. In fact, we can’t think of any other distribution that would be fair. Both sons are the heirs of the father. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we know that the wastrel son will spend down his father’s inheritance, and not use it for the betterment of his family. Would it be more just, then, for a court to put the bad man’s portion of his father’s estate into a trust for his children? Would it promote justice to in some way withhold the drunkard’s access to the fortune pending his recovery from alcoholism? How can it be ultimately just for the estate the dead father has worked so hard to build up to pass into the hands of a ne’er-do-well son who will waste it, and who will leave nothing for the grandchildren of the dead man?

Of course the courts can’t normally get involved in that level of managing broken families. But I’m not talking about justice as what the courts mete out. I’m talking about justice in an ultimate sense. The courts might define justice as the equal distribution of the father’s estate to the brothers, and that might be the best we can do. But it would not really be just, it seems to me.

We have to live by whatever the courts say the law is, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same thing as justice. Similarly with West Baltimore and places like it. Justice is a condition of the heart, individual and collective. As Dante teaches, when individuals and societies start to see justice not in terms of the realization of ordered agape, but in terms of I, me, mine, we are very far from achieving true justice. This is true no matter our color, our class, our status.

Just throwing it out there. I’m thinking through these things too, like you. Anyway, somebody give Charles Featherstone another book deal, this time to talk about justice and suffering and poverty. I need to hear his voice. We need to hear his voice.