Blaming Bob Jones

Among the nastier and more patently manipulative aspects of the presidential primary season was the accusation by the McCain campaign that George W. Bush is anti-Catholic because he spoke at Bob Jones University and did not take the occasion to challenge the view among some hard-core fundamentalists that the papacy is the Antichrist. Immediately, a horde of reporters and television crews (a horde meaning more than a dozen) were at the door or on the phone wanting to know what I made of Bush’s alleged anti-Catholicism. They were generally disappointed to learn that I made nothing of it at all, and that because the charge against Bush was entirely bogus. A writer from the New Republic asked if I agreed with an article he was doing which claimed that the Bob Jones incident would break up the convergence between Catholics and evangelical Protestants represented by “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” He was obviously surprised and disappointed by my saying it would likely have quite the opposite effect. The animus against Catholics in this culture has very little to do with Bob Jones University and everything to do with the liberal-left elites who also make no secret of their disdain for evangelicals. It is hardly the strongest bond between them, but evangelicals and Catholics are also drawn together by recognizing who holds them both in contempt.

The partisan manipulation of the anti-Catholic issue is incisively addressed by Peter Steinfels of the New York Times. He notes along the way that the Democratic leaders who try to pin the anti-Catholic label on Republicans are the same people who have slammed their party’s door against Catholics who dissent from, to cite the most obvious instance, its pro-abortion orthodoxy. Then there is the larger question about the source of anti-Catholicism in America. Steinfels writes: “Yes, anti-Catholic animus rooted in the theological polemics of the sixteenth-century Reformation still exists in the United States. But the anti-Catholic animus rooted in the political polemics of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the cultural polemics of nineteenth-century American nativism has long since taken over all the traditional themes. The Church is an authoritarian monolith; its doctrines are hopelessly premodern; its rites are colorful but mindless; its sexual standards are unnatural, repressive, and hypocritical; its congregations are anti-Semitic and racist; its priests are harsh and predatory; its grip on the minds of believers is numbing. These themes still ring in some fundamentalist pulpits. But they are far more apt to be interjected into the more adult sitcoms and late-night comedy, and to be reflected in films, editorials, art, fiction, and memoirs considered enlightened and liberating.”

At a social event in Washington, Steinfels reports, a woman with an impressive reputation for supporting liberal and humanitarian causes was singing the praises of her daughter-in-law. “She’s a Catholic, you know,” and then quickly added, “but she’s a thinking Catholic.” Steinfels asks us to imagine that woman saying of someone, “She’s an African American, you know, but she’s an educated African American.” A thinking Catholic, of course, is a Catholic who disagrees with the Church’s teaching on regnant cultural and moral orthodoxies. In this view, as one has too many occasions to note, the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic.

Steinfels concludes: “Anti-Catholic animus is not keeping Catholics out of board rooms or country clubs, however, although it may complicate the careers of those in academic life,journalism, or some professional fields who don’t make sure they are seen as ‘thinking’ Catholics. Anti-Catholicism would be a worthy subject for study and debate, freed, one hopes, from the manipulative politics of victimhood. But the place to begin is not Bob Jones University.” One place to begin is with the anti-Catholic, and anti-evangelical, prejudices entrenched among those who, in a moment of partisan contortion, expressed such touching concern about the alleged anti-Catholicism in the current presidential race.