In a fascinating must-read, Patrick Deneen considers the real division to be not between “left” and “right” but between those who hold that there is “no fundamental contradiction between liberal democracy and Catholicism” and a radical school that “rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible”:
Because of these positions, the “radical” position—while similarly committed to the pro-life, pro-marriage teachings of the Church—is deeply critical of contemporary arrangements of market capitalism, is deeply suspicious of America’s imperial
ambitions, and wary of the basic premises of liberal government. It is comfortable with neither party, and holds that the basic political division in America merely represents two iterations of liberalism—the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere (liberalism) or the economic realm (“conservatism”—better designated as market liberalism).
Because America was founded as a liberal nation, “radical” Catholicism tends to view America as a deeply flawed project, and fears that the anthropological falsehood at the heart of the American founding is leading inexorably to civilizational catastrophe. It wavers between a defensive posture, encouraging the creation of small moral communities that exist apart from society—what Rod Dreher, following Alasdair MacIntyre, has dubbed “the Benedict Option”—and, occasionally, a more proactive posture that hopes for the conversion of the nation to a fundamentally different and truer philosophy and theology.
I find myself torn between both camps – but the dismaying long-term consequences of America’s individualistic materialism, in which the pursuit of happiness has become merely the pursuit of money, and in which the planet is apparently dispensable, have pushed me more to the radical camp. I always believed that the easy conflation of Catholicism and America from John Courtney Murray on is too facile. I don’t believe America’s Founders were closet natural law theorists. I don’t believe that the core framework of the American project is Catholic in any meaningful sense of the word.
But I wouldn’t go as far as attempting to change the political order – because liberalism (broadly construed) has emerged triumphant for very good reasons as the least worst way to manage such a fractured, diverse and querulous place like America.
And liberalism allows for a kind of personal freedom that, once given, can never be taken away, and that, to my mind, has created far more than it has destroyed. I’d simply posit Catholicism as a necessary thorn in America’s side, a corrective counter-culture, an aspect of civil society that could actually help balance the more utilitarian and individualistic forces that dominate liberal polities, and can make us all more miserable and less fulfilled as human beings. Catholicism therefore greets American capitalism not with socialism, or with any rival socio-political order, but with the simple Gospel insistence that money does not lead to happiness and in fact is one of the greatest impediments to it. This Catholicism would aggressively promote the necessity of a much more radical personal charity and commitment to the poor; it would care for the sick and the homeless, the needy and those in prison; it would advance arguments in defense of the natural world against the demands of money; and it would create space for art and beauty that have no commercial ends. It can be in America, but not entirely of it. And for these reasons, it would never have the total coherence that Deneen wants from it. It could be co-opted neither by liberalism nor by liberalism’s enemies.
It would remain in constant tension and without any settlement between religion and politics. But it would demand of us that we understand both more completely, and don’t mistake the familiar for the good. This is enough for the purposes of existing in a political order, and making sense of it. And if we can simply accept this essential tension in this fallen world, we can perhaps more adequately divert our attention to the world beyond this one.
The Dish 