Princeton professor Robert P. George is perhaps the most prominent philosopher working in the United States today. He is also, arguably, the most accomplished conservative scholar the country has produced in his generation. The director and founder of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, George is also the founder of the Witherspoon Institute, whose journal, Public Discourse, is a fountainhead of sound social and economic thought. George’s other affiliations, such as with the Heritage Foundation, and his solidly conservative positions on marriage, abortion, euthanasia, and other life issues, make him a lodestar of many political movements on the right. But “conservative” does not quite do George justice. His mastery of Western legal history and moral philosophy, his supple, electric intellect and ability to engage with a wide range of opposing arguments, and his respectful and cheerful demeanor, even when in the heat of the most strenuous debates, have earned him praise and even friendship from many unlikely quarters. Cornel West, another Princeton scholar who is decidedly not in George’s camp on any number of political issues, is a close friend, a testament to the high tone of George’s rhetoric and the broadness of his mind.

Above all else, George is an eminently American thinker. Although his scholarly roots are sunk deep in English soil, having attended Oxford University (under the direction of Australian legal philosopher John Finnis and Israeli legal philosopher Joseph Raz) and achieved a rare command of the thought of English jurists such as Henry de Bracton (ca. 1210-ca. 1268), Sir Edward Coke (ca. 1552-1634), and Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780) (with whom George shares a birthday), George’s instincts, the legal-philosophical lifeblood running through his many works, are richly American. The scenery in which his legal reasoning is set is very much Continental American, the tradition of James Madison, of course, as the namesake of one of George’s major projects, but also more generally of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the blessings of liberty, and the proposition that all men are created equal. Robert George’s body of work very much deserves to, and  undoubtedly will, take its place in the lists of the greatest legal and moral philosophical thought of the American school. He is a towering figure who represents the best, perhaps the peak in many ways, of the American experiment in ordered liberty.

But at the very height of his powers, as splendidly represented in a new Encounter book titled Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, George reveals not only the moral force of the American legal tradition, but also, in many ways, its limits, even its prefigured downfall.¹ In Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth readers encounter a man whose heart, mind, body, and soul strain with manly vigor to effect what is good and true in the American body politic. Yet, against what does George battle? We know what he is for: human dignity, racial equality, flourishing communities, healthy families, the better angels of our nature all in all. In that I am with him wholeheartedly. But I could not help but wonder, while reading this very important volume, whether George is not also at war with the very tradition that formed him. Is the American system not, in the end, the limits beyond which George’s richly moral vision cannot go? Robert George is a faithful Catholic, a man who lives and breathes the teachings of the Church. I wonder if we have not arrived at a point in our republic at which men who seek to do God’s will must ask themselves whether the American political tradition is not too narrow an epistemological horizon for the godly vision that calls us all to do what is right in the world. Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth can be read, I believe, as a monument to our legal historical moment in America, a point at which the shortcomings of the American political experiment are becoming fatally constraining, and beyond which something closer to the human heart than Madisonian legal philosophy must prevail. It is a testament to, and a portrait of, the moral power of America at her (and an American at his) best. But it is also a warning that what has sustained us has also hobbled us, blinded us even, and that we must now navigate new territory without much of the comforting old certainties to guide us.

Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth is divided into four parts and twenty three chapters. Some chapters are short, fewer than ten pages or so, while one chapter, which I will examine in detail below, is nearly seventy pages in length, plus generous endnotes. Despite this variety, the book hangs together marvelously as a whole. Part One, The Human Person: Ethical and Metaphysical Questions, sets the stage for the volume. Here, George (along with occasional co-authors Christopher Kaczor, Christopher O. Tollefsen, and Patrick Lee) explicates considerations of human dignity (chapters one and seven), the nature of the human person (chapters two, three, and six), and the natural law (chapters four and five). The last is of paramount importance to the present volume and to George’s work overall, so I will address it, too, in more detail throughout this review.

Part Two, Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy, is the heart of the book. It is here that George (again with occasional co-authors, this time Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and John Finnis) dives into some of the most contentious cases and thorniest problems in American jurisprudence.² Obergefell v. Hodges (the 2015 case in which the Supreme Court found, improbably and with no small degree of acrobatic sophistry, a justification for homosexual “marriage” in the United States Constitution and Fourteenth Amendment), Dobbs v. Jackson (the 2022 case overturning Roe v. Wade), and the interplay of religion, virtue, liberalism, and the “American civic order” are on offer in Part Two. Anyone who is interested in any of the above topics, whether or not he or she agrees with George and his co-authors, should read at least this section of Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth to get a sampling of intellectual argument in its almost Platonic form. This is legal and moral reasoning of the highest order, and George, his co-authors, and Encounter are to be commended for giving it to the world.

Part Three, Culture and Education, and Part Four, Seekers of Truth and Bearers of Witness, comprise shorter vignettes about current topics in American civic life. In Part Three, George (writing alone from here on out) considers “campus illiberalism,” the relative moral merits and demerits of a market economy, and civic and religious approaches to religious pluralism. In Part Four, George pays homage to five men (only one of them American) who have embodied the kind of virtue and moral integrity that George has spent his own life trying to bring to bear on the public square in America. On display here as moral exemplars are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), whose 1978 Harvard address about the moral dimensions of the Cold War George saw in person as a student; Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the nineteenth-century German poet who wrote prophetically, and chillingly, about what would happen in his home country should Christianity ever loose its restraining hold on Germanic paganism; Joseph Raz (1939-2022), the Israeli legal philosopher who taught George at Oxford how to construct and advance moral arguments; Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020), the famed religious leader in the United Kingdom who, like the Dalai Lama and the pope, gained a moral power that went beyond his own national and religious milieu; and Ralph Stanley (19272016), the bluegrass legend who hailed, like George, from hardscrabble Appalachia. Parts Three and Four form a compelling whole, but also a faintly distressing one. While one wishes that American liberals would lend an ear to men of good sense such as those George holds up to be respected and emulated, one also senses that American liberals never will, and that, more to the point, they will never meet George on the plains of reason and deliberate in good faith over the deepest questions about life and liberty besetting our republic. Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth is at once the moral clarion call of one of America’s greatest living legal and political philosophers, and the swan song, as I read it, of the American experiment that he holds dear.

To understand this tragic interplay of moral clarity echoing in a flawed and even doomed system, one need only read chapter nine of Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, “Equal Protection for the Unborn Child: A Dobbs Brief,” which George wrote with his mentor John Finnis as an amicus curiae brief for the Dobbs court and which, in the present volume, the authors have “expand[ed] [. . .] fourfold with historical material and analysis” (129). It is a hallmark work in legal scholarship and moral reasoning and alone is worth the price of the book. There are two major elements at work in this chapter. The first is a moral one, grounded in the natural law reasoning that George learned from Finnis, and premised upon the humanity of the unborn and the necessity of protecting them from harm. The second element is legalhistorical. George and Finnis have combed through some eight centuries of Anglo-American legal precedent, parliamentary and congressional debate, and political philosophy to establish as fact what the Roe court, relying on bad-faith actors and also deploying no shortage of bad-faith reasoning of its own, was at great pains to deny: At the common law, children in the womb have almost always been seen as persons, and abortion has almost always been a crime.

As George and Finnis write at the opening of “Equal Protection and the Unborn Child”:

[. . .] The Fourteenth Amendment, sustaining and going beyond the Civil Rights Act of 1866, guaranteed equality in the fundamental rights of persons—including life and personal security—as these were expounded in Blackstone’s Commentaries and leading American treatises. The Commentaries’ exposition began with a discussion (citing jurists like Coke and Bracton) of unborn children’s rights as persons across many bodies of law. Based on these authorities and on landmark English cases, state high courts in the years before 1868 declared that the unborn human being throughout pregnancy ‘is a person’ and hence, under ‘civil and common law, . . . to all intents and purposes a child, as much as if born.’³

From the earliest centuries at common law, (1) elective abortion at any stage was to ‘no lawful purpose’ and functioned as an inchoate felony for not just one but two felony-murder purposes, and (2) elective abortion was an indictable offense at least when the woman was ‘quick with child’—a phrase with shifting meanings [. . .] ⁴ (And contrary to Roe’s potted history, the sources show that the common law’s concern was to protect the child’s life, not simply to outlaw procedures dangerous to the mother.)⁵ By 1860, the ‘quick-with-child’ prerequisite for indictments had been abandoned in a majority of states, because science had shown that a distinct human being begins at conception. Such obsolete limits to the common law’s criminal-law protection of the unborn had been swept away in a cascade of statutes, in almost three-quarters of the states, leading up to the Amendment’s ratification. [. . .]

The only counterarguments by any Justice—and by the sole, widely discredited legal-historical writer cited in Roe—rest on groundless extrapolations and plain historical falsehoods subsequently exposed in scholarship that has never been answered, to which this brief adds some new evidence. (130-131)

There follows a virtual barrage of legal historical fact establishing that the Roe court indulged in outright mendacity (although not all of it of its own design) when it held, one hundred and seven years after the United States Congress had declared that all persons were clothed equally in fundamental rights, that unborn children, consistently understood as members of the human family at common law, were not persons and therefore had no rights. The source of much of this mischief, apart from the liars on the Roe court, was Cyril Means, Jr. (1918-1992), an obscure law professor whom George and Finnis rightly show to have been the manufacturer and disseminator of much falsehood across two essays, published in 1968 and 1971 respectively (156). George and Finnis make it crystal clear: The Roe court, supported by Means’ (and others’) lies, badly misunderstood, and often apparently intentionally mistook, the meanings of “quick” and “quickening” in common law cases (144-151) in order to arrive at the “utterly untenable” denial that “‘any person’ included unborn children” (155).⁶

George and Finnis accomplish in this chapter intellectually what the Supreme Court, relying on their brief and the amicus briefs of others, eventually did in the life of the law, namely overturning Roe v. Wade.⁷ For this they are all, scholars and justices alike, to be commended. And yet, this moment of triumph tastes also of despair, a despair that also casts a pall over the life work of the great legal and moral philosopher Robert George. For Dobbs, the slayer of Roe with the help of George, Finnis, Joseph Dellapenna, and other honest scholars, did not really undo the work of its nemesis. Dobbs did not declare human babies to be what they obviously are: persons. Roe made abortion legal in America, in willful defiance of eight centuries of legal precedent, the commandments of God, and the natural law shared by all human beings. Dobbs answered this outrage by remanding the abortion question to the several states, many of which, by popular referendum, have gone beyond Roe in embracing and even promoting the practice of in utero murder. All of this is completely democratic, fastidiously in keeping with the procedural niceties of American law. Those who hope that a moral revival will lead the United States to repent of its sins and return to the righteousness once taught it by preachers of the Gospel must contend with the sobering fact that Americans have become a highly legalistic, and at the same time lawless, people. James Madison would surely have been aghast at what transpired between Roe and Dobbs, sickened by the moral depths to which his countrymen had sunk, but he would also have had to admit that the post-Dobbs rush by many states to enshrine abortion as law was federalism in action. And if there is anything in the writings of Madison, or any other great American political theorist, that might suffice to turn a fallen people back to the straight and narrow of the higher law, then I do not know where to find it.

To put the matter more bluntly, the fallout from Dobbs, coupled with the fact that over nearly fifty years Americans killed some sixty-five million children in the name of freedom, democracy, and the liberal American order, takes a considerable amount of shine off the American experiment in ordered liberty. This is no reflection on Robert George, of course, or on his work. No one alive today has done more to breathe moral sanity into the republic than he. But what is one to make of a defense of American ideals in our day when those ideals have been found, time and again by courts throughout the land, to be consistent with, even inevitably resulting in, the practice of virtually unrestricted abortion? This is to say nothing of pronouncements on homosexual “marriage,” against the immorality and societal detriment of which George has been at least as adamantly opposed as he has been to the taking of innocent human life in the womb. God is asked often to bless America, but I wonder what part of it is left to receive the blessing.

If Americans are a legalistic but lawless people, then it would seem the remedy for their condition is to be found, not in the American political and legal paradigm as received going into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, but in something higher than the common law—if not the Gospel, then the natural law. But even here one finds that George, a natural lawyer without peer in America, does not go as far as he might, and that is due, I suspect, to the very nature of the American system. In Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, George argues, for example, against “transsexualism and transgenderism,” stating that “sex is constituted by our basic biological organization with respect to reproductive functioning; it is an inherent part of what and who we are. Changing sexes is a metaphysical impossibility because it is a biological impossibility” (304). Elsewhere, George, writing with Patrick Lee, says that “human beings are fundamentally different in kind from other animals, not just genetically but in having a rational nature (that is, a nature characterized by basic natural capacities for conceptual thought, deliberation, and free choice)” (14). And about marriage, George (here with Sherif Girgis) finds that:

. . . male and female are not just any two sexes, as black and white are just two races. They are necessarily interdefined: You cannot fully explain either without reference to the other and a social good. What defines them—at a deeper level of explanation than anatomy or genes—is their biological organization (and, thus, their basic physical potency) for reproducing together. And reproduction, its social value, and its link to opposite-sex composition are not mere constructs. So a relation to an important public end appears on the face of this classification, without resting on any stereotypes. (118)

This is all true, as far as it goes. One could hardly object to any of it without spiraling into unlogic—precisely what George’s opponents often do when attempting to argue that women can become men or men women, that humans are just animals (or, worse, mere clumps of cells), or that marriage is simply a contract between two (or more) consenting adults, and so has nothing to do with what George and Girgis rightly point out to be the “social value” and the “social good” of these things.

Indeed, as George and some of his co-authors argue in Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, the “common good” is a bedrock element of shared human existence, an end toward which political arrangements must be organized (see, e.g., 44-55). George, and his teacher John Finnis, rightly see the natural law—“in no sense a human creation”—as the criterion of “the justifying moral-critical point of law and legal systems, namely, to serve the common good” (49, 55). But here we come to a wrinkle in the legal philosophical fabric. As any student of American political history will tell you, the United States was founded on rather generic notions of divinity, with such natural law as is translated into American political tracts and laws almost entirely disarticulated from the study of the natural law in the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition. George cites both Aristotle (384-322 BC) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) approvingly many times in Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth (e.g., 202, 243-444). But as Aquinas “Christianized” Aristotle, bringing philosophical truth into the light of divine revelation, so, too, does the natural law need to prompt us to raise our eyes to the God who wrote it in our hearts. Remaining at the level of the common good is not enough, especially when a people, such as Americans have become, are mired in hateful inhumanity toward the weakest among them. I think George and Finnis would agree in principle. The problem is that the American system is not designed to work at that altitude. It is a secular machine, and, while it works well when the people who use it are reasonably well catechized, it falls to pieces when Americans are morally rotten.

Now, to be sure, the natural law is not religious law.⁸ I do not argue here for an American theocracy. George quotes Finnis to argue (rightly, I believe), as George puts it, that:

there’s really no single and unitary common good within the reach of politics, for each community has its own common good, even if all are ultimately facets of the common good that embraces all others. Seeing the distinction between the particular and higher common goods is vitally important for politics. As legal philosopher John Finnis explains in a penetrating analysis,

“Taking common good in its widest extension, it is for the common good of the members of a political community that they find the truth about divine creation and redemption, live in accordance with that truth, and so enter and remain forever in the altogether fulfilling fellowship of the divine family extending from this world into eternity. But the state is responsible only for temporal common good, and correspondingly the coercive jurisdiction of state government and law has as its defining objective not the widest common good which might include salvation itself, but what the [Second Vatican] Council calls a (or the) ‘basic component of the common good’, namely public order.⁹” (243)

This is not wrong. It is principled, prudent, and wise. And yet, it appears also to me to be the limit of the American experiment and one of the unintentional drivers of the moral disorder, even moral collapse, that we find in America today. As George writes elsewhere in Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, agreeing with his other Oxford mentor, the late Joseph Raz, “the common good of political society is fundamentally an instrumental good [that] entails moral limits on justified governmental power” (202).¹⁰ George frames this instrumentalism in terms of subsidiarity, which is a Catholic idea (as George rightly notes) laid out in Quadrigesimo Anno by Pope Pius XI (18571939) in 1931 but stretching much farther back into Church and Western theology and philosophy (203). But subsidiarity works only if the subsidiary parts are not fatally corrupted. George notes the famous dictum of John Adams (1735-1826) that “our Constitution is made for a moral and religious people [and] is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” (213).¹¹ Hear, hear. But what happens when Adams’s foreboding comes to pass? It is here, I think, that we run headlong into the limits of George’s vision of the natural law, as well as the dead end of the American experiment.

In chapter twelve of Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, George and coauthor Ryan T. Anderson counsel against throwing out “the baby [with] the bathwater,” that is, against abandoning what George and Anderson see as positive aspects of the liberal tradition. Making a strong claim against the “supposed neutrality or (to use John Rawls’s [(1921-2002)] term) ‘antiperfectionism’ of contemporary progressive liberalism,” which they see as “appeal to moral neutrality [. . .] [often] function[ing] in practice as smoke screens to disguise the smuggling in of a certain controversial conception of the good—one that progressives hold and just about everyone else rejects,” George and Anderson note, rightly, that “representative government, separation of powers, constitutionalism, limited government, and respect for the autonomy and integrity of institutions of civil society (beginning with the marriage-based family), jury trial, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other basic civil liberties all pre-date John Locke [(1632-1704)] [and] are more than defensible (and are indeed better defended) without invoking Lockean philosophical ideals” (232).¹² This is all very true, and well said. But even if we grant all this, we are still right back where we started. The American Constitution is for a moral people, which many Americans are no longer. The American founders, it might be said, did throw out the baby with the bathwater—the Christ Child, the source of the good and the very Good Himself.

But a God so singular, so personal, cannot be the God of America, for America is, as a political and legal system, committed to pluralism on many registers. And so, what George and many other conservatives and others of good will have done is to invent a kind of religious version of Americanism, a religion that does not exist in practice but which must exist if America is to function as a system. In Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, George cites social thinker Robert Bellah’s (1927-2013) critique of the “expressive individualism” of “liberal secularism” that has become an “orthodoxy [. . .] among Western cultural elites” (306). Yes, this critique has certainly been borne out in spades by what has happened in America since Bellah’s passing. But George’s reference to Bellah called to my mind Bellah’s work on “civic religions” and made me wonder whether George did not perhaps feel the need for one to make up the difference between the instrumental common good he advocates, and beyond which the American system cannot see, and the human need for metaphysical good, above all eternal life, that Christianity fulfills. “Onward, Judaeo-Christian soldiers,” George writes at the end of chapter sixteen, “Christianity and Paganism: Then and Now” (291). But “Judaeo-Christianity” is not a religion, but rather an attempt to bring morality to bear on the “public square” (George is very much in line with the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) on this score) (245). No one worships at houses of “Judaeo-Christianity” on the Sabbath, there being no such places to begin with. Appeals to “Judaeo-Christianity” are tacit admissions that there is something very important that is missing from our shared American lives, something that America, by design, simply cannot and will not supply. And so American natural lawyers, in so far as they are fully both, will be left flailing if the religion that is meant to bolster both the natural law and America is ever lost, and the American people with it.

Americans in their moral blindness no longer have the capacity to see the goodness of the full truth. And so, perhaps, natural lawyers in America are wont to break things down into terms that secularized Americans can more readily understand. This is not a bad tactic, not by any means. But it strikes me as a losing one, ultimately, if Americans are unable to have their sight restored to take in what is above and beyond their immediate surroundings. To take one example, marriage is not just an “institution,” as George writes, but more properly a sacrament (122-125). There is all the difference in the world between whether one sees marriage as primarily one or the other. If marriage is just an institution, then it is right for George, and for the state, to debate its contours and particulars, to debate who gets to be part of the institution and who doesn’t. George, as a Catholic, certainly does not believe that marriage is just an institution. But to cede the ground, from sacrament to institution, and to argue on the terms of the latter, is to give away the entire game in the opening move. The notion that the state should be involved in marriage at all is an idea rooted in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Code.¹³ The American experiment, while a common law phenomenon, ended up in essentially the same place as the Napoleonic Code on marriage, as religious pluralism in America meant that the state would have to be the arbiter of religious practices impinging on public order.¹⁴ Of course it is possible for state law to respect marriage and even uphold it as a virtuous calling, a sacrament even. But over time it seems inevitable that democratic paradigms, coupled with moral decay, will eventually lead the state to turn its back on marriage as a sacrament, and then to turn against marriage as anything other than another secular institution to be regulated, precisely as has happened in America.¹⁵ In this case, someone in George’s position, who has grounded the natural law in the common good for the sake of advancing debate in the religiously pluralist public square (however much the natural law and the common good are stipulated to be metaphysical in origin and telos), will be up the republican creek without a paddle.

Turning to John Finnis for help rowing may not be enough to get us back to a godly America, either. In 1979, Finnis wrote:

In 1953 Leo Strauss prefaced his study of natural law with the warning that ‘the issue of natural right presents itself today as a matter of party allegiance. Looking around us, we see two hostile camps, heavily fortified and guarded. One is occupied by the liberals of various descriptions, the other by the Catholic and non-Catholic disciples of Thomas Aquinas.’ Things have changed during the last 25 years, and the debate need no longer be regarded as so polarized. Still, the issues tackled in this book go to the root of every human effort, commitment, and allegiance, and at the same time are overlaid with a long and continuing history of fierce partisanship. So it may be as well to point out that in this book nothing is asserted or defended by appeal to the authority of any person or body. I do quite frequently refer to Thomas Aquinas, because on any view he occupies a uniquely strategic place in the history of natural law theorizing. Likewise, I refer occasionally to the Roman Catholic Church’s pronouncements on natural law, because that body is perhaps unique in the modern world in claiming to be an authoritative exponent of natural law. But, while there is place for appeal to, and deference to, authority, that place is not in philosophical argument about the merits of theories or the right response to practical problems, and so is not in this book. My arguments, then, stand or fall by their own reasonableness or otherwise.¹⁶

This is in many ways a commendable position to adopt. And, to be sure, Aquinas also understood, as would any reasonable person of good will, that marriage is a human good, an institution with obvious benefits for families and societies.¹⁷ But what Aquinas taught, more fully speaking, is that “matrimony is instituted both as an office of nature and as a sacrament of the Church.”¹⁸ And so the question re-presents itself. Can marriage be a sacrament in America such that the American system will recognize it as such, and only as such? If not, then the debate about homosexual “marriage” will, I fear, go on and on forever, because godless Americans simply cannot understand why sodomy cannot be contractual if we are all equal before the law.

This assessment opens up a broader vista of consideration about the natural law and the American experiment. While Americans—and the West more generally—still had a strong religious background, the American experiment could keep coasting, as it were, on the fumes of Christendom. Morality could continue, under those conditions, to hold up the American Constitution and legal system by supplying the substantive content of the positive law, which, by definition, restrains itself from commenting on metaphysical matters. But here we are in the year of grace 2025, when many Americans have long since abandoned any moral pretense when it comes to marriage (divorce and sodomy are rampant, and have been for decades), abortion (the massacre of the unborn continues three years after Dobbs), education (LGBT ideology has infected even American kindergartens and preschools), euthanasia (increasingly gaining acceptance in the United States), and a host of other life issues. It is true that the Supreme Court has provided relief in some cases, acting as a brake on the moral degeneration of our country. But as Dobbs shows, and as the metaphysically content-less, albeit metaphysically reliant, American paradigm more generally attests, there are limits to what the law can do. For the common good to be common, there must be more than what George, and Finnis, would institute as social goods, beneficial institutions. To be sure, “new natural law” theorists like George and Finnis (and their predecessors Germain Grisez (1929-2018) and Joseph Boyle (1942-2016)) do not at all rule out higher order, even metaphysical truths; it is simply that their starting point is with human and societal goods (39-41, 53, 57, 60-61).¹⁹ Fair enough, but human and societal goods presuppose humans in society who know how not to behave like barbarians. I doubt very seriously whether many Americans today have any inkling how to do this. As I was writing this review, the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin struck down that state’s ban on abortions dating from 1849. The move was purely political, in at least two ways. First, some 60 percent of Wisconsin voters have now declared themselves in favor of broad access to abortion, so the Supreme Court justices simply acknowledged what voters, albeit in their lobotomized consciences, profess to believe. Second, a conservative justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is up for election in 2026, and a former Planned Parenthood policy director is mounting a challenge. Killing babies is big business, and so, killing babies wins elections. Any laws that get in the way can be overturned by fiat. Blackstone? Bracton? The Fourteenth Amendment? Those who break God’s laws are unlikely to follow man’s. That’s the reality we face.²⁰

So we are at the end of the line for America, I fear. Or, at the beginning of a long slog back to the fear of God that once buoyed the American system, long ago. The Spring 2025 issue of the Human Life Review put it best. In the introduction to a symposium titled “What’s God Got to Do with It?” the editors write:

Pursuing legislative and judicial pro-life victories, while important and even necessary, seems clearly insufficient to transform America into a nation where the unborn are valued and protected by society. It seems that only a long-term campaign to convert minds and hearts not only to personally value human life from conception to natural death, but to acknowledge the objective value of the unborn’s life according to something like the ‘laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’, will suffice. In other words, for most people a conversion to belief in an objective morality that applies to everyone and therefore does not derive from political institutions or authorities but from a transcending authority—let’s say it, from God—is necessary for the pro-life cause to succeed nationally.²¹

As Notre Dame professor Gerard V. Bradley points out in the Symposium, “The Dobbs decision did not recognize the unborn as ‘persons’ with a right to life.”²² George and his co-authors in Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth argue, strenuously and backed by the fulness of the common law and much of the American legal tradition that flows from it, that the unborn are persons. There is no doubt, at law or in the Magisterium, that this is so. And yet, the reality is that Americans have learned to live with abortion as a necessary adjunct to freedom and democracy.²³ Babies are not persons because the American system, the instrument of a corrupted people, insists that it must be otherwise. It is true, as Monica Snyder notes in the Symposium, that atheists and other secularists can, and do, become prolifers.²⁴ But this seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

It could very well be that I am wrong. Perhaps there is something substantive in the American political system that will lead to the undoing of a great wrong, the repentance and reconciliation needed to bring morality back to bear on the life of American laws. But I fear that Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth will represent both the pinnacle of conservative thought in America, as well as its obituary. Having reduced the natural law to what is socially beneficial, in practice if not in theological and philosophical commitment, leaves even the best and most morally upright American philosophers and legal thinkers, of whom Robert George is the most excellent and eminent, unable to mount a comeback when public morality takes a turn for the worse. We are all of us, in the American way, captive morally to politics, insofar as we buy into the American paradigm of pluralism of belief.²⁵ George writes (along very Finnisian lines) that among the “constructive aspects of human fulfilment” are “knowledge, aesthetic experience, work and play (as skillful performances), friendship, marriage, integrity, and religion (understood as the quest for harmony with the ultimate source or sources of meaning and value)” (59). But this surely will not satisfy the human soul, which craves communion, and not abstract principles. George is against the establishment of religion in the United States (235). So am I. So I confess that I do not know how to make America confessional again. I wish I did. The natural law according to George and Finnis does not tell me. There are no sermons in Judaeo-Christianity to guide me, there being no such religion in the first place. And so I fear that, like the great and good Robert George, I will also go on seeking truth and speaking truth, all while watching America slip further under the waves.

NOTES

1. Robert P. George, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment (New York, NY: Encounter, 2025).

2. George, Sherif, and Anderson are the coauthors of the 2012 volume What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (New York, NY: Encounter Books).

3. Citing Hall v. Hancock, 32 Mass. (15 Pick.) (1834), 255, 257-58

4. Emphases in quotes here and elsewhere reproduced from the originals.

5. Citing, inter alia, Act for the Punishment of Crimes (1846, s. 103 Supp., enacted March 1, 1849) and State v. Murphy, 27 N.J.L. 112 (1858).

6. George and Finnis cite in this chapter also the 2006 book, recently reissued in an expanded edition, by Joseph W. Dellapenna, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2023). At 1,283 pages and crowded with footnotes, Dellapenna’s book is the definitive source on the legal history of abortion at the common law.

7. See also Joseph W. Dellapenna, “Brief of Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioners, Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al., v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al.,” July 29, 2021.

8. See Heinrich A. Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought: A Treatise in Political Philosophy (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2016), 332, citing Francisco Suárez, De legibus (1612), III, chapter two, nos. 9 ff., and Felice Cavagnis, Institutiones juris publici ecclesiastici (1906), I, i.

9. Citing John Finnis, “Religion and State,” in John Finnis, Religion and Public Reasons: Collected Essays: Volume V (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 94-95.

10. Citing Robert P. George, “The Concept of Public Morality,” American Journal of Jurisprudence, vol. 45, no. 1 (January 2000), 17-31.

11. Citing John Adams, Message to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts (1798).

12. “Constitutionalism” is not explicated here, so it is not exactly clear to what George and Anderson are referring. There is a complex history to this term not, perhaps, fully represented by the mention in the quote paragraph. See Martin Loughlin, Against Constitutionalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).

13. See Kenneth Stow, “Equality under Law, the Confessional State, and Emancipation: The Example of the Papal State,” Jewish History, vol. 25, nos. 3 & 4 (2011), 320-325.

14. Cf. Joseph Raz: “The Rule of Law, as I will understand it, is a specific virtue or ideal the law should conform to. There is no agreement about what it is: This lack of agreement is common to important institutions and principles, like freedom of speech. The lack of agreement is often a source of strength—people unite in supporting such institutions and principles in spite of diverse views about their nature. [. . .] [Rule of Law] principles are not about the content of the law, but about its mode of generation and application: they require that legal decisions and rules be anchored in stable legal doctrines, made for publicly available reasons, applied faithfully observing due process etc.” “The Law’s Own Virtue, King’s College London Dickson Poon School of Law, Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Paper No. 2019-17; Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 14-609 (2018),” 1-2. See also, more generally, Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law, Second Edition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).

15. On marriage as a social institution, see, e.g., Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986), 161-162, 309.

16. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Second Edition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press) 2011, vi, citing Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 7.

17. See Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, op. cit., 446-447.

18. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplement to the Third Part, Q. 49, Art. 2, Respondeo. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/5049.htm

19. See, e.g., Melissa Moschella, “Sexual Ethics, Human Nature, and New Natural Law Theory,” Public Discourse, September 23, 2019 https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/09/55959/

20. Todd Richmond, “Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority strikes down 176-year-old abortion ban,” AP News, July 3, 2025 https://apnews.com/article/wisconsin-abortion-ban-184901658358639a63db7df92aeec34c612d

21. “Symposium: What’s God Got to Do with It?” Human Life Review, vol. LI, no. 2 (Spring, 2025), 27.

22. “Symposium: What’s God Got to Do with It?” op. cit., 28.

23. Professor Helen M. Alvaré’s sentiments in the Symposium are mine, too, almost exactly. “Symposium: What’s God Got to Do with It?” op. cit., 42-43.

24. “Symposium: What’s God Got to Do with It?” op. cit., 37-39.

25. See David Mills’ insightful “Political Capture” section in “Symposium: What’s God Got to Do with It?” op. cit., 56-57.

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Original Bio:

Jason Morgan is an associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.