Catholic and American (and Quirky About It)

Now I’ve
gotten several emails, two from leading Catholic American thinkers, telling me,
in the words of one, that Patrick Deneen “hit me below the belt” in some essay
at The American
Conservative. I checked it out. I may have been hit below the belt,
but it didn’t hurt. But I guess I can’t leave it at that, for fear you’d have
the wrong idea about what I have or don’t have below the belt.

Patrick’s
“real divide” essay is an earnest effort at “branding,” one that preaches well
to the converted. All “real division” essays are meant to tell us who are
real friends and real enemies are. Straussian Harry Jaffa excels in writing
real division essays, ones that turned his fellow conservatives, such as
Justice Scalia, Irving Kristol, and even fellow Straussian Harvey Mansfield,
into his enemies. Real division essays that separate conservatives into
opposing teams, I admit, almost always have the merit of clarifying issues with
the teaching method of exaggerating differences. I’m not saying Patrick is
trying to turn anyone into his enemy, of course. We’ve been friends for a long
time, and I’m thinking through his real division for myself in
order to advance the “dialogue,” which can be contentious without being full of
real animosity.

Patrick
puts me on the team with worthies such as Michael Novak, Robert Royal, George
Weigel, Robert George, and Hadley Arkes. Friends they all are of mine. But
studies show that I never actually cite any of them with approval in my
writing. As much as I admire Robby and Hadley, for example, I have made a point
of criticizing their tendency to say that Aristotle, Kant, the Declaration of
Independence, Locke, and Thomas Aquinas are all on the same page when it comes
to describing what’s right by nature, what our duties are as rational
creatures. And Hadley’s interpretation of the Constitution, if actually
implemented, would produce an activist jurisprudence that I think is largely
unwarranted. Robby’s new or analytic natural law, in my view, isn’t really
natural law. I could go on.

What unites “our”
team is it’s both pro-Catholic and pro-American. It’s also united, I would
suppose, by Father Neuhaus’ confidence that now might be the Catholic
moment in American political thought. Patrick’s team, by contrast, thinks that
now is the anti-American moment in American Catholic thought. His article
should have been published in The Anti-American Conservative. I admit
there should be a journal by that name, because there is a position there
that’s worth thinking about. Anyone who’s read Tocqueville knows
that any middle-class democracy can be justly criticized for being merely
middle-class, for being deficient when it comes to intellectual, cultural, and
spiritual excellence. Almost all Catholic culture, for example, didn’t
originate in America. Still, we can’t forget that there has been plenty of
space for it to flourish here. It’s American Catholics’
fault, not America’s fault, if that flourishing has been on the decline. For a
long time (and even now here and there), American Catholic education, even for
working class kids in South Philly or South Boston, was a lot more than middle
class.

Patrick
actually pays me the ambiguous compliment of saying that I’m distinguished on
the pro-American team by my quirkiness. One reviewer of my book Postmodernism
Rightly Understood called
it quirky in the best sense. What Patrick seems to have meant is quirky in the
quirky sense. But when he actually describes the intellectual debts of the
pro-American team, it’s pretty much ME, that is, my singularly judicious mixture
of John Courtney Murray and Orestes Brownson. My four devoted readers can
attest to my effort to develop an indigenous American Thomism with the personal
resources of Murray, Brownson, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. My effort
may have failed, but I still think I’m on to something, something not even
quirky.

Murray and
Brownson, as I have emphasized, are just as critical as Patrick and the other
anti-Americans of the Lockean founding theory of our Founders. Murray and
Brownson, just like Patrick, say that theory—all by itself—is a kind of
political atheism that is destructive of all civilization. They also say,
however, that our Founders built not as theorists, but statesmen. And so they
compromised their theory with a kind of political realism, compromising, for
example, that transformed the draft of the First Amendment protecting “the
rights of conscience” to the final product protecting “the free exercise of
religion.” Religion, as Murray explains, is an organized body of thought and
action—an institutional church. So the First Amendment, contrary to the
theoretical anti-ecclesiasticism of the Lockean Madison, protects, due to
the legislative skill of Congressman Madison, freedom of the church.

So, as
Murray says, our Fathers providentially (our constitution is more deeply
providential than written, as Brownson explains) built better than they knew.
That means their political institutions, for which we Catholics have every
reason to be grateful, stand in need of a theory our political Fathers are incapable
of providing. The high task of citizenship for American Catholics, Murray
proclaimed, is to use their traditional, rational, personal, and
relational account of natural law to provide their country such a
self-understanding. Obviously American Catholics didn’t step up and do so in
any significant enough way. But America can’t be blamed for that
either.

Murray and
Browson are pro-American in the sense that that they wanted to be of service,
as Catholics, to their country. They wanted to make it an even better home for
their church, but they were the very opposite of uncritical of dominant forms
of American thought, both at the time of the Founding and in their own
time. ME TOO, I might add.

We’re not
“Americanists” if that means America in some sense the standard by which we
judge the truth of what we think and believe. We certainly don’t think America
is the “best regime.” Christians don’t think in terms of “regimes”; that term,
drawn in its classical form from Plato’s dialogue called politeia,
implies all sorts of false premises about the primacy of the political. All
political arrangements, devised as they are by sinners, have within them the
seeds of their own destruction. It’s the City of God, not the City of Man,
that’s sustainable over the infinitely long term. Still, Christians have
the duty not to be too alienated from their country, and to do what they can to
be of service to their fellow citizens by loyally encouraging what’s good
and could be better in the political place where they live. America, we
southerners know especially well, is the easiest place in the world to be both
at home and homeless, to enjoy the good things of the world without forgetting
that our true home is somewhere else.

I only have
time for three objections to Patrick’s anti-American Catholic team as he
describes it. First, it is repulsively lacking in gratitude. We Catholics
criticize Lockeans for not being grateful for what they’ve been given by nature
and God. Well, we Catholics don’t want to be justly criticized for not being
grateful for what we’ve been given by America. Not only has our church
flourished in freedom in America—in some respects in unprecedented freedom, but
we can’t forget what Chesterton says about America being a home for a homeless,
including Catholics who had to flee from grinding poverty and oppression.
Patrick’s great teacher, Carey McWilliams, was just as harsh as he is in
criticizing America’s techno-indifference to virtue or genuinely dignified
egalitarianism, but he also never failed to mention that he was grateful for
American freedom, as well as for his country’s resolute defense of
that freedom (in winning, as the French Catholic thinker Pierre Manent
admits, the Cold War against repressively atheistic global communism fairly close
to single-handed) throughout the world.

American
freedom—American liberalism—has to be distinguished from the civil-religious
statism of the Continental liberalism that originated with the French
Revolution. It’s the latter that’s hostile to the Catholic Church as an
institution as a matter of principle. If time permitted, I would go
on to explain that the Locke’s hostility to civil theology—and so
his separation of church from state—are his debts to Christianity. They,
as Brownson explains, depend upon each person’s openness to a
transpolitical God who knows him or her as essentially more than either a
political or a material being. Locke, Patrick is right to say, is weak, from a
Catholic view, on the relational dimension (the Trinitarian dimension) of being a
person, but that doesn’t mean his anthropology is wholly opposed to the key
Christian personal insight. Locke is closer to the truth than those (even
MacIntyre) who point to the omnicompetent Greek polis as the model human
community.

The Lockean
personal insight into the equal freedom of us all from political domination, as
Chesterton explains, can only be properly accounted for the Christian thought
that there’s a center of significance to the universe that gives each of us
unique and irreplaceable significance. That’s why our Declaration is grounded,
with dogmatic lucidity, in the self-evidence of the proposition that all
men are created equal. From the perspective of this egalitarian dogma about
personal significance, American history is a narrative, in some ways, of
decline, but in others of progress. The practical indifference of the Epicurean
Mr. Jefferson to enslavement of particular persons and the “white moderate”
described by Martin Luther King Jr. to segregation were overcome by the
irreducible Christian devotion of American citizens. Our pro-American team, as
Robby George and Walker Percy have written, doesn’t forget to affirm
the good—including the personal, relational love—that has been our Civil Rights
movement, which includes, properly understood, our resistance to both racism
and communism. (An issue that I’ll pass over for now is that the anti-American
team often writes as if American Protestants weren’t really Christians who
practice the virtue of charity, of loving one another out of love of God.)

Second, if
Patrick is right, and the core of America is nothing more than Lockean
individualism working itself out by emptying us out over time, then
he has to agree, as a matter of Constitutional law, with the opinions of
the Court in Roe and Lawrence.
As a Catholic he can object, but he can’t deny that the Court has
grabbed on to the nerve of our Lockean Constitution in its doctrine of
freedom as autonomy unfolding generation by generation.

For the
pro-American team, that judicial interpretation of the Constitution
according to theory extrinsic to its actual text, Justice Scalia and Hadley
have shown in different but equally compelling ways, is an unconstitutional
abuse of power. That’s because, for one thing, abortion and marriage are issues
to be resolved by the people acting through legislatures, and Catholic
Americans, as citizens, are perfectly free to convince their fellow citizens of
the truth of their view of who we are as free and relational beings.

There is
much more room for the Catholic view under our Constitution than Patrick
supposes through his one-dimensional theorizing of American
constitutionalism. (Here, I should mention in passing, how incredibly distant
Patrick’s view of our constitutionalism is from that of American
traditionalist conservatives such as Russell Kirk, who claim
our constitutionalism owes little to nothing to Locke. Those
conservatives, I thought, was for whom The
American Conservative was founded.) Catholic citizens
have every reason—including the truth of the matter—to argue that our
Constitution is much more democratic that our Court now says it is, just as
they have every reason to argue that our Framers never meant “liberty” to be
used as a wrecking ball deployed against our indispensable relational “intermediary”
institutions—beginning with the family and the church. It’s Continental
liberalism that’s all about nothing standing between the isolated individual
and the state.

Third,
Patrick reasonably says that members of his team can’t be comfortable with
either Democrats or Republicans. Who can? But there’s no denying that one party
is much more open to influence and correction, not to mention much
less hostile to the institutional church. Of course it’s true that
evangelization and conversion are much more fundamental than political
partisanship. Brownson says that America gives the church all it should
ask for from government: The freedom to evangelize. There
are unprecedented threats to that freedom today, I admit, even if they too
are easy to exaggerate. Those threats are strong enough
that political disengagement is a luxury we can’t afford. Even
those who want to drop out, so to speak, and follow the rule of St. Benedict
need the space to do so, as do our less “radical” but highly admirable home
schoolers. There’s something—but not everything, of course—to the Tea Party
insight that it’s genuinely American to use libertarian (or liberal in the
old-fashioned sense) means to pursue non-libertarian (or social or
relational) ends.

There’s a
lot more, and I’m grateful for Patrick for hitting me and us all where it might
well should have hurt. And there’s much I readily agree with in Patrick’s
article, including his observation that the conservative narrative of
“Founders good, progressives bad” was always somewhat misleading and has
certainly become outmoded.