The end of the Trumpian captivity of the American Church

 

The end of the Trumpian captivity of the American Church

The defeat of Donald Trump and the fight for the "religious soul" of America

By Massimo Faggioli | United States

The fact that United States was unable to know the name of its new president for several days after the polls closed was like a sort of corporal punishment for a country being forced to atone in a painful way.

Now we know that it will be up to Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Catholic, to begin the process of healing the moral and corporal wounds Donald J. Trump has inflicted on the country by the way he's handled the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing crisis of globalization.

Biden is the second Catholic, after John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961-1963), to be elected to the highest office in the land. And he's only the fourth Catholic – following John F. Kerry (2004), Kennedy and Alfred E. Smith (1928) – to be a major party's candidate for the White House.

The American presidency is not just political office. It is also an office with moral and religious aspects. And Joe Biden will assume that office at a time when political identities in his country have assumed theological and dogmatic intensity.

A realignment of the political relationship between Washington and the Vatican

US Catholicism is not detached from the global world. On the contrary, it is at the center of the convulsions in the body of the Church, one of the consequences of the crisis of globalization and world order.

In a Biden presidency one can expect a realignment of relations between United States, even if there are some important unknowns on certain international issues.

But this realignment will have to deal with a deeply divided Church on US soil, as well as a global Catholicism that is also divided.

One of the fruits of globalism has been an opposition to Pope Francis.

The Latin American Jesuit pope expresses his message on the most relevant issues at the public level (such as women, homosexuality, environment…) in ways and through channels different from those used by his predecessors. That message is received in contrasting ways in various parts of the world.

There has been unprecedented confrontation between the Trump administration and the current pontificate, beginning early on with the issue of immigration and on full view just last month when US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, publicly chastised the Holy See for its 2018 agreement with China (which has since been renewed).

It's not clear how much this open hostility impacted the results of the US presidential election, but it has had a very evident effect on the Church.

It has helped deepen the internal rift within American Catholicism, evidenced by a number of bishops and priests who continue to back Donald Trump till the bitter end – some via the new ecosystem of independent Catholic media and social media.

Trump's attempt to divide and conquer US Catholics

Over the past four years the White House (through officials like Steve Bannon and Pompeo) has directed a political attempt to divide the Church in two – for and against Pope Francis.

A handful of American bishops and a number of high-profile lay Catholics have given their blessing to this attempt. But the effort at division has failed.

Nonetheless, the ecclesial attempt remains, in a Church in the United States that is divided in two like never before. The "culture wars" have taken the form of intra-ecclesial theological wars and have exposed American Catholicism to the risk of a soft schism.

The Trump presidency and the 2020 elections have shown the extent to which the two Catholic ecclesial parties have identified with the platform of the opposing political parties.

While there is some of this among that group of Catholics that support Biden, it is much more obvious among the Catholic faction backing Trump. It has bended a proclaimed theological orthodoxy to a political orthodoxy, thus leaving very little room for argued dissent.

The moral failure of institutional Catholicism in the United States can be seen in the desperate attempts to stop the LGBTQ agenda and in the inability of the Church here to speak with a unified voice on the issue of racism.

The intellectual and moral paralysis of the US Catholic hierarchy

The hierarchical Church seemed to accept everything that came from the Trump administration without a blink, except on the issue of immigration – the American Catholic question par excellence.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), for example, refused to say anything about the Republican Party's blatant attempts this year to manipulate the electoral process and hinder minorities (many of them Catholics) from casting a ballot.

This was not just tactical aphasia. It was the latest sign of an intellectual and moral paralysis that has gripped the USCCB.

It was already evident during the Obama presidency, when the bishops' conference was unable to take any public position on the economic and social issues related to the great recession that began in 2008.

It's true that part of American Catholicism (though not a marginal part) supported Donald Trump, partly as ploy against the Democratic Party. But it was also a genuine anti-democratic turn that represents a departure from the last century of intellectual history in the Church in the United States.

The reconciliation between Catholicism and constitutional democracy in the 20th century is part of American history.

Beginning with the US exile of Jacques Maritain and Luigi Sturzo during World War II, Catholic thinkers in the United States laid the foundations of a modern theology of religious freedom, culminating with contribution of Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

Catholics and the neo-conservative movement

However, in the mid-1980s there was the emergence of the neo-conservative movement in the United States, in which Catholics have played a central role. They include people and publications like the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and First Things magazine.

From the early 2000s, and then in a crescendo after the election of Benedict XVI in 2005, the neo-conservative and theo-conservative movements have been mutating into a single neo-integralist and neo-traditionalist movement.

Its creed was the rejection of Vatican II as a way to reject theological and political modernity.

At a time when the WASP establishment was collapsing, conservative America called for a Catholicism that was no longer just conservative or post-liberal, but openly anti-liberal.

The model is no longer John Paul II or Joseph Ratzinger. It is now Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister and self-avowed champion of "illiberal democracy".

The USCCB's constitutional agnosticism has stifled the bishops' ability to confront Donald Trump's open threats to the democratic system. US Catholics had rightfully expected their bishops to say something.

Instead, it was women religious – the nuns – who spoke out!

A Catholic Church trying to protect its own freedom, while disregarding the rights of others, will end up losing its own freedom – after having lost that minimum of respect and self-respect necessary to act in the public square.

A president that threatens the foundations of the political and civil community is also a threat to the freedom of religion and of the Church.

The moral authority, cultural prestige and cohesion of American Catholicism have been severely damaged in the eyes of a country that is becoming more secular.

Especially when the ongoing sex abuse crisis continues to be identified as a uniquely Catholic scandal – unfair as it that may be, given that abuse is a problem that affects all institutions dealing with the youth and the vulnerable.

Vatican II Catholicism in America in a no man's land

If the United States is a sick giant, the American churches are sick too. And it's not just a problem on the conservative side of the spectrum.

The intellectual life of Vatican II Catholicism in the United States currently finds itself in something like a no man's land. Religious progressivism, defined by social questions, is articulated today in an often anti-institutional and post-ecclesial language.

This has left a void that is being filled by Catholic "militantism", which is neo-integralist and anti-modern, both in politics and in the intellectual debate. And this will continue even after Trump is gone.

The result of the US elections is also an indicator of the state of the Catholic Church in America and the pontificate of Francis.

Officials close to the Trump White House – like Pompeo, Bannon and Newt Gingrich, whose third wife is currently the US ambassador to the Holy See – have tried to find sympathetic forces in the Vatican, Italy, and Europe to create a bridgehead of a neo-nationalist Catholicism allied with the European right-wingers.

They have failed.

A fight for the "religious soul" of American democracy

But the existential crisis of Catholicism in the United States has not been resolved. American democracy is in peril when there is an involution in its religious soul, of which the Catholic Church plays a particular and unique role.

Thanks to Joe Biden, the Democratic Party spoke more often and convincingly in 2020 with a language intelligible to religious voters. But there is a long way to go before it can seize from the Republicans the self-proclaimed banner of "God's party".

Right-leaning intellectual and political Catholicism in the United States today ranges from neo-conservatism that claims to be inspired (though very selectively) by John Paul II and Benedict XVI to a neo-fundamentalism that has taken Carl Schmitt (d. 1985), the Nazi-era political theorist, as its muse.

Left-leaning political Catholicism in America must deal with other issues. Biden is a John XXIII Catholic, but it would be fatal to think his election to the presidency is a long-term substitute for a Vatican II Catholicism that, at least in the US context, has been weakened on many levels.

The American Church's relationship to politics today is reminiscent of the French Church between the 19^thand 20^thcenturies.

But the new Catholic militants in the United States seem to be embracing Charles Maurras' reactionary nationalism much more than Jacques Maritain's reconciliation between Catholicism and democracy.

Follow me on Twitter @MassimoFaggioli