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In the twenty-third episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Helen M. Alvaré, the Robert A. Levy Chair in Law and Liberty and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law. Alvaré opens by discussing the impact of the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, how debates concerning abortion shifted to the states, and the impact of that shift on families and childhood well-being. One of the commitments Alvaré also discusses is how her pro-life commitments and her commitments as a feminist are inextricable from one another and thus even reinforce and strengthen one another. Alvaré then shares details concerning her formation as a steward of the law which includes study as an undergraduate at Villanova, law school at Cornell, and graduate work in theology at Catholic University of America. She also unpacks how her service to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops during the 1990s impacted how she exercises her commitments to serve as a legal scholar and public intellectual. Those lessons then also inform efforts such as her most recent book, Religious Freedom after the Sexual Revolution. Alvaré then concludes by discussing the virtues legal scholars need to strive to cultivate and how those virtues can be aligned in ways that serve the Church and its efforts to put families and children first.
- Helen M. Alvaré, Religious Freedom after the Sexual Revolution: A Catholic Guide (Catholic University of America Press, 2022)
- Helen M. Alvaré, Putting Children’s Interests First in US Family Law and Policy: With Power Comes Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
- Helen M. Alvaré (ed.), The Conscience of the Institution (St. Augustine Press, 2014)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Helen M. Alvaré, the Robert A. Levy Chair in Law and Liberty and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law. Thank you for joining us.
Helen Alvaré: Thank you so much for having me.
Todd Ream: On June 24th, 2022, the United States Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which in essence stated that the Constitution does not grant a right to abortion. To date, how do you assess the impact of that decision?
Helen Alvaré: The first thing I would say is how proud I am that the United States, as a world voice, found that we don’t have a right to kill the unborn in the Constitution. That’s just an amazing fact that we were willing to reconsider our wrong decision in that.
Second, is it really did create a heck of a backlash among advocates of legal abortion, and they were not properly stopped by politicians who, frankly, had in some sense been protected by the existence of a constitutional demand for abortion everywhere. They could say they were against it, but their hands were tied. Now when their hands are untied, they were not willing to step up. So we have not seen as much courage as we needed. Now, you know, we’ve got a bunch of states that protect the unborn rather strenuously, and a bunch of states, even surprising ones, sort of what we consider the Heartland, who are willing to allow unborn children to be killed up to the moment of birth.
So the struggle post Dobbs is philosophical, existential, cultural at every state level, and of course, there’s still federal work to do, but we have to appeal to people by saying, in a sense, how can we condone taking a situation where the woman who has been given by whatever you believe, God, nature, the role of protecting this child before birth is handed the right to kill her own child?
And not at any time, but only when the child is weak. If the child can fight back, then you can’t kill anymore. You can only kill your family and you can only kill them when they’re weak. And you can only kill the future. Can we grapple with this and agree that this is a terrible thing for a prosperous, powerful country to do? That’s the struggle now when everybody can do what they like.
Todd Ream: Thank you. To date then how do you also assess the impact of the this decision on the well-being of families and the well-being of children?
Helen Alvaré: So keeping children front and center has been a focus of my academic work and it became so out of logic because adults rights were so valorized and children thought of only after. And, of course, it also happens after you become a mother and you realize what’s going on here.
So I think, frankly, that what we’ve seen post-Dobbs, it’s a discussion about abortion, which one side takes to be a proxy for women’s rights. And the other side is talking about, I think, you know, rightfully, but not as complete as it should be about, how can you kill this defenseless human being? You know, this is wrong, but we have to think about what this means in toto for whether we’re afraid of having children, caring for children, whether we reject interdependency, whether we think that it’s a bad way to spend a life to take care of the next generation.
So, Dobbs, I mean, the country’s already got declining demographics, declining birth rate. There’s still the notion that being a woman who takes care of your children to the exclusion of money and authority outside the home, is not a great way to spend a life. That’s what has to be gone after if we’re really going to protect children.
Todd Ream: Thank you. From 1990 to 2000, you served as the Communications Director for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Secretariat for Pro-life Activities. Would you please describe the details of your role to begin during those years?
Helen Alvaré: Wow. It was huge. I started off doing abortion. I ended up being sort of the face of the U.S. Church in the media and before Congress and at universities.
But what I was commissioned to do at a time when being pro-life was considered to be as sort of dull-witted and unintellectual as it has again, you know, been caricatured as today. And I was told, hey, Helen, you’re an Ivy League lawyer with big firm background and you’re a young woman. I was 29 when I started. You need to make it acceptable for thinking, intelligent people, women in particular, to be pro-life. Like that was the job.
The details were to marry faith and reason. Because I was on the political and university scene, I began with reason and then showed how faith supported it. As, as Pope Benedict always said, you know, faith illuminates reason and reason disciplines the expression of faith.
And my job was to go everywhere. So before I had children, I was on the road over a hundred days a year at every forum that would have me and every television show and every radio program and every newspaper editorial board and the Democratic and Republican platform committees and every congressional hearing on the subject to witness with reason supported by faith that it was against human rights to destroy an unborn human life and to, and, and to encourage women to make a decision of misery for themselves.
Todd Ream: What lessons did you learn during those years that then have impacted you and your sense of calling as a scholar, but also as a public intellectual?
Helen Alvaré: I was so glad you asked that question because it really caused me some, some fun thinking.
I’d say several, you know, here I am, worked in DC. I’m right outside DC at the moment for 37 years. First, never put party politics ahead of other things. Don’t put them ahead of reason and principle. Don’t put them ahead of your faith. Stay principled at all times.
Number two, a communications point, two communications points. One, communications is not a lesser art. You know, here I am now a scholar for 25 years. And I was like, eh, I was a big firm lawyer. I want to be a scholar. I’m communicating, it’s not intellectual enough. It turns out that getting the expression of true things and important things correct is absolutely as much of a service as you can imagine. And it is worth your time.
Another communications point, which is don’t lead with what you know. I know this, I know this, I know that. Lead with what you really need your listeners to believe, and start with that statement and then support it. And I guess a final thing is, do a lot of listening. Do not be one of those talking heads that’s diving in. Wait, say less, but make it really good. Practice it in advance.
I actually had a technique where I would know exactly the points I needed. But when I was asked a question or when I dive bombed in after finally the other person had talked and talked and talked and talked in the interview, I got sick of them. I would look up like I was thinking of something original. Like this is spontaneous where really I knew exactly what I needed people to hear. So all of those have influenced even my academic writing, which should be clear and helpful.
And, of course, as a public intellectual, which seems like a fancy word, I’m like, really, do I deserve that? But, you know, I’m a scholar who goes on media. You know, when I’m talking on NPR, or PBS, or to a fine newspaper or magazine, those same principles apply as they do in my scholarship.
Todd Ream: Thank you. On a number of occasions, you’ve referred to yourself as a pro-life feminist. Would you please unpack what you mean by feminist and then the relationship those commitments as a feminist share with your pro-life commitments?
Helen Alvaré: Right. So, as you know, feminism has many strands. My take is a couple.
One, there are venues and situations where women still are not treated as full equals. I think we are regarded sometimes as intellectually weaker or as letting our emotions rule our thoughts. I think sometimes the fact that not only we give birth to children, but we have a strong interest in spending a lot of time with them is held against us.
At the same time, I’m not a person who sees discrimination everywhere. I’m on a faculty where men outnumber women, and I’m treated by my colleagues according to my person. And I am rewarded according to my successes, and I am questioned and, and, you know, asked to improve according to my failures. I don’t see it everywhere, but in the places where I do see it, I want to say something.
With regard to the abortion issue, I do think that the call for abortion is an anti-feminist discriminatory message. That somehow women’s ability to get pregnant and have children and our desire to rear them is a disadvantage. Well, that means that our being, that how we were created is fundamentally flawed.
So the interesting thing about being a pro-life feminist is you are, by definition, a person who comes with a message of care and human rights because the message is caring, interdependency, vulnerability and all of that is part of the picture of a woman’s life.
The other side, to be against pro-life feminism, is to say that all women should abide by a childless male worker model. And that is just inherently discriminatory.
Todd Ream: So in your estimation how you’ve sort of framed and thought about this that being pro-life and being a feminist in in many ways are theologically, philosophically, and in turn, politically inextricable from one another?
Helen Alvaré: Inextricable. That’s exactly the word I’ve always used. Yes.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. I want to ask you a couple details about your education and formation as a public intellectual and scholar. You earned a bachelor’s in economics from Villanova, Juris Doctorate from Cornell and a Master’s in Theology from Catholic University of America. You also committed two and a half years, and I assume all of your free time to a doctorate in systematic theology. But to begin, at what point did you discern your calling as a steward of the law?
Helen Alvaré: Two moments.
I have a now late disabled sister and when I would see her mistreated or misunderstood by the sort of the government agencies that she had to deal with, I thought, wow, America really is land of the lawyers and I want to know enough to be able to navigate this system.
I used to say to my late husband, how do people even function in the States without a law degree? Also, I had this fabulous theology professor at Villanova and she asked each of us to, you know, just as a project, but then it became more for me, to commit ourselves to some social justice work. You know, even if we did it over a weekend.
Well, I ended up thinking I’m going to spend a summer. So I spent a summer with a group of religious fathers, a religious order of men who lived and worked in West Virginia and had volunteers, men and women from all over the United States to work in the poorest parts of West Virginia. So I committed a summer to that.
And I spent a lot of time working with prisoners and their wives or girlfriends and their children. And again I thought, and the guy who I mostly dealt with was a social worker out of a maximum security prison. And again I thought, you need to be a lawyer to do some stuff here for the good of the kind I want to do. And also I was always a talker and thinker and, you know, the classic, you’ve got an argumentative kid and somebody says you should be a lawyer.
My husband used to say, have to say to me sometimes, I’m your husband, I’m not opposing counsel, could you just like rejigger the conversation? So it’s part, it’s apparently it’s part of me as well as, you know, systemically.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. With your expertise, and forgive me I’m probably going to miss a couple of them here, but I’m going to at least note: economics, politics, theology, the law, how do you discern the parameters of your vocation? In essence, to what do you say to and to what do you say no to?
Helen Alvaré: That has been so hard. I started on what I know now that God would consider the wrong foot, scholarly wise, which is, to say what will get me published in good journals and get me tenure.
And it was a struggle because having had a background in pro-life, you know, law reviews are written by students. Students are more, more woke than not. And so I was blackballed from a lot of good journals. I got a call from one student, quietly, on a journal going, listen, your piece is terrific. It’s the calibers, everything. But, you know, you worked in pro-life. Nobody here is going to publish it.
I’ve had another, and this was at a Catholic university, it was at Loyola in Chicago, where they agreed to publish something and then the student said, oh, no, we never agreed. I sent them back the three contract provisions. And then they said, well, the religious freedom here, you know, is anti, anti-LGBTQ. And I said, no, it’s not. It’s just religious freedom argument. They bad-mouthed me to every student in the school. They tried to renege on the promise.
So, you know, the, “I’m gonna get published in, you know, where I want and, and what I want.” I was so frustrated. One day I had three journals, a Catholic university, a public university, and another public university say, I’m sorry, we can’t publish it after all. And I had like a total breakdown. I cried and went shopping.
And I had a friend step in at a very crucial moment and she said, “Helen, stop trying to please the world. Stop trying to do the traditional. Where are you needed? You are a woman with these expertises. And there are these questions that nobody will touch that you’re interested in. Go after those questions, write about them, get them published anywhere.
You can put them up on SSRN, right? Social Science Research Network dot com, which is free to everybody. Once it’s in a journal, you got 4,000 Facebook friends, you have umpteen LinkedIn friends, whatever. You can make an impact by doing what’s needed, not worrying about your own career.” It was instrumental in flipping me. And ever since then, I’ve written what no one else will write in my fields.
Todd Ream: That’s great. Mentors who inspired you. You referred earlier to a theology faculty member at Villanova perhaps whose name you may want to mention here, but others came alongside.
Helen Alvaré: Yeah. So, yeah, Suzanne Tobin, who taught me at Villanova, really made a difference in my life. The guy who told me to get out of an accounting major and into economics, because my brain was more analytical his last name was, oh, it was Nick Rongione, also at Villanova.
And then frankly, my siblings, who are these holy, hardworking, marvelous parents and fabulous business people. It’s funny. We’re Cuban, which is associated with owning your own businesses. And I didn’t, but they all did, and they were just so good and so hardworking and such beautiful family lives all put together their whole life continuing to this day.
Pope Benedict, you know, I’ve read him almost every day for decades and then I’ve served on some Vatican commissions for him. I continue to serve at the Holy See but Benedict was the most formative. The woman who told me to stop trying to please law students and start serving the world of ideas, Jane Aldophe. She worked at the Vatican Secretary of State and then taught in several American law schools.
And then Mary Ann Glendon very much. She’s a law professor at Harvard who actually— what’s her specialties? Property, family, law, and religion. What are my specialties? She gave me all the encouragement I needed when I got started. She was a guide to me throughout on how to navigate this world. I mean, I was at a Catholic university, now I’m at a public university. She started off at a Catholic university. She went to Harvard.
In terms of my role in the Church, my role in the, in the world of scholars my my and as a mother, she’s a mother of three. I’m a mother of three. I remember asking her advice when I had a kid and she gave some fabulous advice. One of them was never miss a graduation. I was like, why would I do that? It’s like just telling you it happened to me once. Not good. And I had an opportunity once to represent the White House at John Paul II’s funeral and my daughter had a big important thing at school that weekend and I said no. And that was Mary Ann Glendon in the back of my head.
So and now, of course, my own children, who you know, two of them are doctorates in econ and theology, and one of them an artist, and they’re all adults, and they say things that really resonate with me and change the way I live.
Todd Ream: That’s wonderful, how our children who we raise and shape and form and create opportunities for can eventually circle back and make those contributions to us. That’s beautiful.
In your present role as a faculty member and administrator at George Mason what work do you find most fulfilling?
Helen Alvaré: Well, my kids would tell you, you know, what do I talk about at dinner was a good day. It’s definitely reaching a student in a deeper way, who they really have caused to think about a point in the law often that overlaps with a life’s lesson.
I have a lot of religious students of all religions, right? Jewish, Muslim, every kind of Protestant denomination, Catholic, Baptist you know, have conversations about the intersection of their, their legal career and, and their faith. I have people talk to me about meshing law and family obligations because I’ve now done that.
And then I have people talk to me about sort of a, you know, like property law even is a, it’s got social justice connotations. It has efficiency connotations. How do we navigate those? So definitely, you know, I think a lot of people would tell you at the beginning of their scholarly careers that office hours and time with students is like, ah, I’m gritting my nails. I have to prep to teach. I have to write. And then I think it becomes some of your greatest joy as time goes on and you see, you know, what your contribution is.
And then every once in a while, I guess the final thing is if I write something and it really is of service. And it makes a difference. It’s a point that somebody uses. It’s a judge looking at it. Justice Alito cited the brief I co-wrote in the Dobbs case. And it was me and two other women, and we got 240 women, JD, PhD, MD just to prove pro-life women aren’t stupid. And we all signed on, and, and he cited it. It’s just extremely rewarding when an idea of yours matters at all.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to ask you now about some of those ideas that have found their form and expression in books. So in addition to a considerable number of articles in academic journals and popular periodicals, you’re the author and editor of six books.
And if I may, I’d like to start by asking you to talk about Putting Children’s Interest First in American Family Law and Public Policy. It’s published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. What led you to write that book?
Helen Alvaré: So the idea came to me in the year 2000, but I had to wait till my youngest was 17 till I had the time. That’s the first thing. And a colleague who didn’t teach family law at Catholic U, his name was William Wagner. He said to me, whatever happened, how did the family law take care of, you know, trying to channel people to give children birth in marriage versus outside after the law of illegitimacy went away? The law of illegitimacy punished children born outside of marriage by denying them all sorts of government benefits before the late 1960s, 70s.
The problem is, you should never have punished them for being born outside of marriage. You should never have punished the children. But you did need to try to say to adults, please don’t do this. You know, the single greatest consensus between the left and the right, even though the left doesn’t write about it as much anymore, is that the best, safest place for children is in the stable relationship, marriage of their parents, the people who gave them birth.
And so I asked, how could we restore a sense of responsibility among adults to give birth to children within a relationship of long-term commitment? And it led me to write that book, to do an analysis of how American law had abandoned it, and in fact, had gone in the other direction.
I mean, at certain points during the Obama administration, the HHS, the Health and Human Services website was linking to organizations that said, you want to have a baby? It doesn’t matter if you’re married, as long as you’ve got enough money and you can pay the rent, do what makes you happy. Like, it had gone that crazy.
We had Supreme Court opinions, like the Lawrence opinion, or the Obergefell opinion on same-sex marriage, saying, listen, states can’t really prioritize or encourage children’s being born into situations where they would be stably united with their mother and father. It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant.
And I, it’s a shocking turn in American law, but we can’t punish them, and we can’t, you know, punish the adults, it doesn’t, that’s not who we are as a country. How do we encourage them? And that’s what that book was about.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. What questions then would you encourage laypersons in the Church to ask themselves when assessing public policy regardless of what level, state, federal, local, when it comes to childhood well-being. What’s, what are some of the questions that people should be, you know, who are in the pew, should be asking themselves?
Helen Alvaré: Right. Well, the first thing is to become familiar with the realization that childhood matters drastically. That people are shaped in ways that they will be talking about into their 80s, if they live that long. It is the school of love. And if it’s not loving, it’s the school of something else that will impact them. So the first thing is, do not underestimate your debt to the next generation.
Second is to themselves and to their children. When thinking about a sexual relationship should also involve thinking about children. You know, I, I, the, the Catholic Church is teaching on contraception, which I originally thought was stupid as you can imagine, right? It was kind of like, it was just stupid. Now I realize when you take even the thought of sex is related to procreation out of it, you eradicate it, first with contraception, then with abortion if that fails, you take out of that relationship between the man and the woman, tomorrow. You say, tomorrow’s not part of what you’re doing now, this is just for the moment.
And it leads to differences in dating. I don’t have to date people I need tomorrow. It leads in differences in sexual behavior. I don’t have to worry if we conceive someone. I can get rid of it or I can raise it without the influence and, and presence of this other person. It changes everything.
The irony is, the thought was that contraception would make sex and marriage more harmonious and more, more wonderful because you wouldn’t have to worry. And I don’t think anybody would say that relations between men and women are much better since the sexual revolution. Dating is better and courtship is more beautiful. Marriage is longer lasting and happier.
Taking tomorrow, which means taking even the idea of children outside of sex, does not improve people’s relationships. And Catholics who, you know, set aside our teaching on contraception, others who say it’s kind of a stupid anti-woman physicalist sort of teaching, are forgetting what it’s really getting at, which is people respect the other person’s procreative potential and think of a partner in relationship to the long run, because children matter so much.
And frankly, the circumstances into which children are conceived are the circumstances they’re going to be raised in. People who have a child and then get married later, sometimes it works, but the rate of dissolution is very hard, and most of them don’t get married.
Todd Ream: Yeah, yeah, thank you.
For clergy, then, are there any questions that you would encourage them ask in addition to what you’ve already said laypersons perhaps?
Helen Alvaré: No you know, I think they, they both need to think about it, right? And clergy need to do a better job of explaining that their teaching about contraception, or about marital births, or you know, against divorce, or against adultery, or against same-sex unions, is all of a piece. It’s saying, sure, adults matter a lot, but, you know, in Christianity, being the man or woman for others is really a thing.
And, you know, Jesus love is radical. It’s attentive to the body. The body is sacred. It’s radically other focused. Why should anyone be surprised that the same religion, that has martyrs, and saints, and celibates for Christ, also has these teachings on sexual relations, and our teachings on social justice? They’re all one.
It’s about a radicality of love for the other that recognizes that we’re both body and soul. And this is an image of God. It’s in acting like Christ, so that He’s not a 2,000 year old memory. He’s actually alive today because we bring Him alive to others.
Todd Ream: Thank you, beautifully said. I’d like to go back now, three more years to 2014 and ask you about a project that led to the publication by St. Augustine Press of the Conscience of the Institution. Just to begin, what compelled you to lead that project?
Helen Alvaré: That’s a great story. Did you ever hear of a scholar named Yuval Levin? He’s at Ethics and Public Policy Center here in D.C. So religious freedom was in some cases good, some cases not so good, not as good as it is now at the constitutional level at the Supreme Court. And you may remember that in 2011, the Obama administration passed a regulation in connection with its health care reform law that said even religious institutions have to dispense contraception, including the kind that’s really abortifacient because it destroys the embryo. That was in 2011, 2012.
The Little Sisters of the Poor and others filed their lawsuits. So the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, which is a think tank at Princeton called me and said, can you lead a religious freedom project? You know, there’s lots percolating on it and we need you and the other scholars that are on this team, Yuval Levin, Jerry Bradley, Robbie George, great people, we need you to sort of think what are the most pressing problems in this arena.
And Yuval Levin, what a thinker. He said the government’s going after the institutions. He said, they, we used to say to ourselves, oh, they wouldn’t want our religious institutions, our Lutheran hospitals, our Christian crisis pregnancy centers, our Catholic schools. Oh, they wouldn’t want this vast network of schools and healthcare and social services to go under.
And we began to see, no, they’d like to sweep us off the field. This sounds drastic, but it’s true. If they got what they wanted, no religious institution could operate because they would all have to perform abortions, insure same-sex couples, perform trans surgeries you know, call little girls little boys in schools, etc. They would all not exist. And they don’t want us anymore. They want intermediate religious institutions to go and they want to have the first, last, and only word.
And so we had this conversation and we thought everybody was like, yeah, we have to deal explicitly with institutional religious freedom, not just, frankly, what had been the American model, which is very individualistic. Nothing wrong with individuals religious freedom, but the model, because we’re such an individualistic country, had been, even in the realm of free speech or freedom, to talk only about the individual.
So we took up, all the essays in the book are why institutions have religious freedom, and frankly, that culminated, I mean, in that book, such a modest little undertaking, a bunch of essays, but every one of them you can find echoed in all the briefs, in the Hobby Lobby case, the Zubik case, the Hosanna Tabor case, the Our Lady of Guadalupe case, the Carson versus Makin, the Lutheran preschool case. All of those cases that came after that project, arguments from that book are in it.
And usually, often, in addition to many other people, by the same scholars who were, who were doing amicus briefs in those cases and, and continuing to write further articles, I’ve continued to write about my most recent book was all for the institutions. Individuals can draw inspiration from it, but institutions in the United States, group efforts versus me, the individual, needed extra intellectual arguments on their behalf.
Todd Ream: Before I ask you about that most recent book, then, I want to ask you in what ways, if any, are these conversations now different today, or you frame them differently than perhaps you did in 2014, 11s years ago?
Helen Alvaré: So it’s actually leads to why I wrote the most recent book. What I saw as, you know, a daily consumer of religious freedom arguments was that we might, increasingly, we started to win the battle. Even with Justices Kagan, et cetera, and Breyer, who has left the court, we began to win some religious freedom arguments.
But the upshot in many people’s mind was that we won the right to do wrong. We won religious freedom rights to be mean to, you know, women and gay people. And it occurred to me that we also needed, in every case, to pair with our religious freedom arguments, First Amendment, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, technical, fill the mandate of those requirements to win a religious freedom case, we needed to say, and if we win it, the thing that we’re doing at our institutions is of tremendous benefit to society.
It’s good for us to tell young people, don’t cohabit. It’s good for us to tell young people and patients and clients, abortion will be harmful to you and the child. This is a social benefit. And if we didn’t make the common good argument every time we were winning a religious freedom right, we were winning battles, but losing the war.
Todd Ream: A comparable argument, I believe, that Bradford Wilcox made in most recent book, Get Married, then also.
Helen Alvaré: I couldn’t survive as, you know, my economics background led me to, and, and my teaching at Scalia Law at George Mason, because it’s a very empirical law school, I couldn’t survive without sociologists like Brad Wilcox and Mark Regnerus who write really important empirical research or host it on their blogs and bring forth all these other scientists because I want to make the faith and reason argument. And family law relies a ton on sociologists. So I bring them into the legal debate.
Todd Ream: I want to note for our listeners, the title of that book is Religious Freedom after the Sexual Revolution, and it was published by Catholic University of America Press in 2022. I want to ask you as a way of sort of teasing out, you know, the details of what you’re talking about, that for teachers and administrators, say, at a parish school, what questions would you encourage them to be asking themselves when making compelling arguments for this kind of thinking?
Because part of what’s at the root of your book is that we haven’t made these arguments well enough. They haven’t been compelling or inviting enough, and we’re leaving a lot, say, off the table when we’re doing so.
Helen Alvaré: Okay, I’ll try to be brief. There’s so much here.
First is, you can’t make the argument if you’re not walking the talk, and they need to make hiring and curriculum or service decisions and all operations, employment services with their religious mission in mind. And as a lawyer, I would tell them, have that all documented, admission statements, contracts you know, annual retreats for employees and faculty, for students, for parents. Everybody needs to be on board. We know lots of institutions are religious in name only. And that’s problematic as, legally, but it’s more problematic spiritually, right? So first, have your mission in real order.
Second, communicate this to everybody, not just once at the beginning, but throughout. And nurture what it means through retreats and conversations and course reviews and conversations with parents and students. Nurture what it means to be an institution that performs a service or provides education and is religious.
And they all need to understand that this doesn’t make you unintellectual or anti-academic freedom, but they actually need to understand that it’s only when you understand who you are as created by God that you’re really free. If you’re fighting human nature, you’re fighting reality. You’re not really free, and you’re not really intellectual, and you’re not really reasonable, okay? People need to buy into that.
And then, frankly, people have to do some studying. Like I said, communications is not a lesser or non-intellectual art. It’s huge. I wrote my book so that there are, there’s a piece on each of the most difficult issues confronting religious freedom and, and school’s sense of comfort right now, right? Non-marital sex, cohabitation, contraception, abortion, same-sex relations, transgender.
I wrote the faith part, I did how the empirics complements and supports the faith, how they support one another, and then I closed it with a brief summary that would have both of those arguments in it and be where you would to a court of law or even to your own audiences, your employees, your parents, your students, your clients, say, this is who we are.
I know it’s hard. So I read, you know, all the empirical stuff, the theological stuff, sociological, the historical, the philosophical, and put it together so that you can say, no, our argument is good. It’s true. It’s for the common good. It works with empirics. It works with our faith.
Todd Ream: And it’s good for us in a number of ways as a society, but also as Church too.
Before we close our conversation, I want to ask you a couple of details about your understanding of the academic vocation and in particular, what qualities or characteristics do you believe are most fundamental to it and then are most fundamental to service as a public intellectual?
Helen Alvaré: I think they’re very overlapping with just a few extra things on the public intellectual side. So, you know, I do think, first of all, it has to be a vocation. You know, you got to go through discernment with God and the people who love you, that it’s really where you belong.
Second, you do really have to love your students. Sometimes I say, I think to myself when I interact with my students that they would actually be embarrassed to know how much I love them. Like I see their vulnerability. I see their youth. I see their striving. I see them, you know, eating a Mars bar for dinner and a Coke before they go to an evening class. And I know they’re married and I know they have children and I know they’re trying to support their family, right. So that’s really important.
You really want a true intellectual curiosity because otherwise you’re not going to be able to do the drop and give me 50 kind of hard work of researching and writing and preparing for class. So discipline, discipline is amazing. You’re going to need it to not be distracted by shiny objects, in the news, in, oh, who’s publishing what? Maybe I should be in that field. That’s what’s getting more attention.
You need to understand the questions that you are being called to answer. And as a Christian, those are going to be the things that need you as a scholar, but also as a Christian. There’s a great essay I would recommend people read by the French philosopher, Etienne Gilson, called “Intelligence in the Service of Christ,” which puts together a lot of this, you know, work ethic.
But also you have to know when to put it down because let’s face it, how many people are really going to read anything that most of us have written? This conditions both the service part of it, but it also conditions the put it down when there’s, you know, a certain time requirement. You have people in your life who have to come first. You have commitments to your, your religion, your, your church, your, your, your spiritual reflection every day. You’re important, you’re not that important.
And as a public intellectual, I think you have to have the additional qualities of courage. And, you know, you gotta deal with your spouse on this. Because if you’re someone who’s gonna go out and, you know, throw a few flames, you know, you’ve also gotta keep a job, support your kids, so you gotta have the cooperation of your spouse and family on this. And your point is not to hurt people, but you may be throwing a few flames from time to time, right? And get in trouble.
And then you also have to be devoted to some communications arts. You have to learn those. I remember sitting against someone who was my intellectual opponent in a congressional hearing, and she wasn’t accustomed to this public work and she had like her 30 page paper was just going to through it and do her five minutes and I thought I am so winning this because I had turned my 30 page paper into the five minutes of the top communications points I needed to make. And that’s the work of a public intellectual.
And she meandered, never got to her main points and sounded flustered when they told her she had 30 seconds left and I was like, I win for preparation here. So courage, knowing how far to go, knowing your family is on board, not letting it take up so much time as a public intellectual that you’re not spending your time being a clear thinker, because that can be a habit too.
If I really wanted to be in the news, you know, every week, I could. Everybody’s looking for comments on the issues that I work on and not everybody’s willing to go and, you know, have tomatoes thrown at them in public, but I am. But I still do drastically less of it than I could, because other things have to come first.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close our conversation, then, you’ve echoed couple of these, but against what, what vices do those individuals committed to the academic vocation and perhaps also to service as a public intellectual, that we need to guard against?
Helen Alvaré: Yeah. A lack of humility, a sense of self-importance. I heard a secretary once at like seven o’clock on a Friday night, grumbling because a professor had forced her to stay to send his article to like a hundred people by hand and packets. And her grumbling was, I don’t think that many people are reading you. I’ve checked. And she was saying to herself; he was gone. And I don’t see why, you know, you’re so important that I have to— and I was like, wow, what a come to Jesus moment for all of us. Humility, focus, discipline, but don’t think, again, your ideas are more important than the people in your lives. It’s not a question of balance. It really is prioritizing.
But the other thing is, you know, being a dilettante is it’s easy to be, you know, to have an opinion on everything and not to have a deep knowledge. Stay in your lane. Be the smartest person in the room on the subjects that you are.
And this particularly is important for a Christian scholar whose religion will be held against them in many venues. You have to show that you are not a bad thinker, that somehow there’s this caricature of Christians as against academic freedom and against intellectual rigor. These are not true. To serve your faith, you have to be really, really good at your scholarship.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you. Our guest has been Helen M. Alvaré, the Robert A. Levy Chair in Law and Liberty and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. Thank you for sharing your insights and wisdom with us.
Helen Alvaré: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
