Conscience versus duty
TIMOTHY M. KAINE was elected Democratic governor of Virginia last week because, apparently, some Americans think a radical dichotomy between private and public morality is a good thing. ''My faith teaches life is sacred," Kaine, a Roman Catholic, told voters. ''That's why I personally oppose the death penalty. But I take my oath of office seriously." One hears the beat of silence. ''And I'll enforce the death penalty."
Kaine's statement was a sharp affirmation of distinct ethical spheres -- a person's ultimate obligation to conscience, and that same person's equal, if sometimes opposite, duty to impose a sanction that conscience abhors. The New York Times reported that ''focus groups and Internet surveys showed that voters respected Mr. Kaine's position, even if they did not agree with it." They respected Kaine's readiness to execute the condemned, even though he thinks it wrong to do so.
American voters are familiar with this kind of ethical reasoning, if it can be called that. For more than three decades, on another subject, politicians of various stripes have routinely pronounced themselves ''personally opposed" to abortion, but ready to protect legal access to it. The usual rationale for this position is that, in our system with its separation of church and state, it would be wrong for a politician to impose a ''private" religious conviction on a public that does not share it.
This refusal seems to be a personalizing of the nonimposition clause of the Constitution (''make no law respecting an establishment of religion"), with the officeholder acting to uphold the freedom of conscience of each citizen, even if at the expense of the officeholder's own conscience. This dichotomy not only defines the nation, but must define the inner life of every one hoping to serve the nation as a leader.
There are clear benefits to this approach. It is, for one thing, an antidote to the poison of state-imposed religion, in reaction to which the founders of the United States sought and found an ingenious constitutional solution. The importance of this ''wall of separation" tradition is newly evident as some proselytizing Christians in the US Air Force, for example, implicitly put the power of rank and office at the service of conversion. Alarms should sound when certain kinds of beliefs are deemed necessary for the ''unit cohesion" on which the military depends. President Bush's selection of a candidate for the US Supreme Court based mostly on her ''faith commitment" was another instance of a troubling embrace of a religious test for an office that must be kept resolutely apart from religion. Similarly, the plethora of ''faith-based" initiatives coming from Washington rightly raises hackles. The public sphere must be protected from religious preference of every kind.
But another result of this dualism has been a deadly impoverishment of both private and public moral thinking, from the start. As I learned from Wendell Berry, the church-state divide let the first generation of Americans, like Thomas Jefferson, abhor the institution of slavery in private (''Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.") while doing nothing to oppose it in public -- a refusal to impose a ''private" morality on a slave-owning public. An objection that was ''merely" ethical carried no weight when it came to law or policy -- or to the meaning of ''all men are created equal." Was it only incidental that it served Jefferson's own political purpose to keep his ''private" objection private?
Contemporary politicians who declare themselves ''personally opposed" to abortion, but ready to enable it, may be sincere at some level, but at a deeper level their opposition rings hollow. Judging not by what they say, but by what they do, one must disbelieve them. Perhaps their real ''private" secret is the conclusion that, in some circumstances (following the principle of the lesser evil, for example), abortion is the right thing to do, and that the government, therefore, must protect it as an option. Convoluted public-private rhetoric about the death penalty can be similar.
In American politics, it is easier to fudge such moral questions in the blurred borderland of ''separation" than it is to mount a direct challenge to an ecclesiastical establishment or powerful interest group. As litmus tests, abortion and the death penalty can seem to sit in opposite dishes, but the moral conundrums raised by each are similar. In both cases, and in others, what we need are politicians who reach moral conclusions in the privacy of conscience (whether religiously or not), and then dare to claim, explain, and defend their private positions in public.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
