Clarity about “Clarity”: Conservative Lucidity vs. the Common Good

Dr. Nicolete Burbach

Today’s post is from guest contributor Dr. Nicolete Burbach, a theologian whose research aims to help the Church navigate its difficult encounter with transness.

It is something of a cliché to say that Church teaching needs to be explained with “clarity”.

Used in this clichéd way, the word “clarity” is freighted with additional connotations. More conservative Catholics are almost always the ones who voice this claim. They do it in a way that suggests this clarity will make the Church’s teachings as they interpret them not simply understandable, but persuasive. 

Sometimes calling for “clarity” is also a way of demanding a walk-back when Church leaders say things with which they disagree; something conservatives correspondingly refer to as creating “confusion”, in a rhetorical strategy that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the events of Pope Francis’ papacy. In both cases, “clarity” means a restatement or deployment of Church teaching in ways that consolidate a conservative vision for the Church and society. Hence it is particularly common where this vision seems most at risk, such as around LGBT+ inclusion.

“Clarity” is a word that also crops up frequently in secular transphobic politics. In Great Britain, these calls tend to relate to the Equality Act 2010, a law that designates certain characteristics as “protected”. These characteristics, which include “sex”, “gender reassignment”, and “religion or belief”, are “protected” in the sense that discrimination on their basis is illegal, unless it is a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”.

Legal attacks on trans rights in a British context generally revolve around the way the Equality Act balances these protections, particularly in workplace disputes around trans women’s access to women’s spaces, or protection from harassment by ‘gender critical’ colleagues. Claimants argue that these protections discriminate unjustly against people with other characteristics. For example, they argue that employers discriminate against cisgender women on account of their sex by denying them “single sex” (here meaning trans-exclusive) spaces, or against ‘gender critical’ people by punishing them for their beliefs.

These become the basis for media commentary calling for “clarity” around the Act. These calls tend revolve around two claims: first, that the Act does not define ‘sex’ sufficiently clearly, which really means that it does not clearly exclude trans women from being treated as women; and second, that the Act does not tell us what constitutes a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”, which really means that it does not explicitly allow trans exclusion by default. As in the Catholic context, “clarity” here means conformity to a conservative vision for the world.

One reason why the word, “clarity” lends itself to this sort of rhetoric is because it connotes rigour, sharp distinctions, and a certain kind of intellectual mastery of the world. These concepts are brought together in an aesthetic that we might call “conservative lucidity”. This aesthetic associates strictness and powerful and uncompromising rigidity with the clear-eyed and resolute defence of known truth. 

Conservative lucidity sees itself not as closed-minded, but as intellectually rigorous; as refusing to relent in the face of a lax, woolly modern world. Conservative lucidity identifies established ways of thinking, acting, and organising society as not just correct, but clearly so. It then exalts anything that acknowledges not just a conservative worldview, but the obviousness of a conservative worldview. Conservative lucidity loves “clarity” because it sees this as synonymous with the truth of conservative beliefs, and demands “clarity” as a way of insisting upon them. 

Transphobic politics – whether in their Catholic or secular, explicitly conservative, or even notionally progressive or feminist forms – can all channel this aesthetic. Conservative lucidity opposes novelty to clear thinking and robust “common sense”. Conservative lucidity can be found wherever people decry the allegedly nonsensical nature of trans identity or the supposedly new-fangled ideologies that promote it.

Understanding this parallel is illuminating not least because doing so can help us to respond to “clarity” rhetoric in a secular context. The ever media-savvy Pope Francis has a method for responding to Catholic demands for “clarity”: don’t rise to it, don’t “clarify”, don’t backtrack. A particularly high-profile example of this strategy can be found in his response – or rather, non-response – to the now infamous dubia demanding “clarity” around his pastoral approach in Amoris Laetitia. This method provides a helpful model of response to “clarity” rhetoric more generally.

One strength of Francis’ response is that offering “clarification” simply concedes the idea that “clarity” in this ideologically-freighted sense ought to be present. Responding simply suggests that teachings and interpretations that push the boundaries of a conservative worldview ought to come under scrutiny, to be evaluated on conservative terms, or even are only to be voiced with an accompanying affirmation of the beliefs they might otherwise be taken to challenge. In refusing to “clarify” his teachings, Francis presents them in a way that suggests they stand on their own terms.

In doing so, Francis also shifts the focus of the discussion onto a better set of priorities. Calls for “clarity” demand that we focus on placating worried conservatives. However, the teachings that his detractors claim are “unclear” are the ones that try to make the Church inhabitable for the people whom it alienates, such as queer people, or divorced and remarried Catholics. Francis promotes these teachings because he is motivated by a vision of the common good, or “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (CCC 1906). 

Francis’ vision foregrounds the common nature of the common good. This provides the basis for an ethic of inclusion in which everyone has a place – “[e]ven people who can be considered dubious on account of their errors” (Evangelii Gaudium 236). This ethic in turn motivates his pastoral approach; and his refusal to “clarify” that approach is a refusal to turn his focus away from securing the common good in this way. This strategy is significant in a policymaking context because laws ought to be made “for the sake of the common good” (CCC 1951). In turning our attention to securing common good, Francis reminds us that this idea, not placating conservatives, should be the priority for policymakers. 

Indeed, calls for “clarity” specifically serve to obscure the rightful priority of securing the common good. For example, some critics of the Equality Act (much like critics of similar laws in other nations) claim that banning trans women from using single sex spaces is justified as a way of keeping cis women safe. In this context, calls for “clarity” are really calls to affirm the rightness of those bans. But more than this, they are calls to discount trans women’s stake in safety as part of the common good, or to hold it as of lesser value than cis women’s safety. In fact, trans women being allowed in these spaces has no negative effect on cis women’s safety, while having a significant positive effect for trans women. Because cis women’s safety is not actually at stake here, calls for clarity here are calls to hold trans women’s actual safety as of lesser significance than cis women’s sense of safety in the face of a mere feeling of threat.

To fall back on the language of the Equality Act, when viewed in light of the common good, banning trans women from women’s spaces is certainly not “proportionate”. Francis’ strategy of refusal to clarify thus not only frees us from having to justify trans rights before fundamentally unjust standards, but makes the problem with them abundantly clear – in the genuine sense of the word.

–Dr. Nicolete Burbach, London Jesuit Centre, April 11, 2025