Embrace the Discomfort
By some measures, political polarization in the United States is as pronounced today as it has been at any moment since the Civil War. As Rachel Kleinfeld recently observed, no wealthy, mature democracy has been as polarized, and for as long, as the United States. As a result of this polarization, people who disagree politically have stopped engaging with one another—or, at least, stopped engaging productively. Instead, they increasingly tend to congregate with the like-minded in ideologically homogeneous echo chambers, which only reinforces the polarization.
One insufficiently appreciated consequence of polarization is what we might call the “politicization of everything.” Virtually no area of human endeavor is safely outside the realm of political combat. As the Catholic historian Massimo Faggioli has observed, American political polarization—and the attendant politicization of everything—has had a negative impact on how American Catholics understand themselves and their faith community. In our two-party system, increasing political polarization has polarized the U.S. Church itself, putting more pressure on individual Catholics to “choose sides” at the expense of a shared religious identity that crosses party lines.
It has long been a truism that faithful Catholics are “politically homeless”—uncomfortably misaligned with the dominant political formations of the United States. By “faithful Catholics,” I just mean Catholics who try to take seriously the Catholic social and intellectual traditions and who grapple in a respectful way with the teachings of the Church. I include within this category those who disagree with one or more of those teachings as long as they remain productively engaged with the Catholic Church as an institution and with the Catholic tradition in a broad sense.
What does it actually mean for American Catholics to be politically homeless? On one level, it just means that the positions of the two major U.S. political parties do not align well with the Catholic worldview considered as a whole. But leaving the conversation at the level of policy misalignment understates the gap between the Catholic tradition and the American party system. This is because, as the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen has argued, the main currents of the two major political parties are arguably two branches of a single conceptual system, liberal individualism, which departs from the Catholic tradition in fundamental ways. As Deneen puts it, “the political debates of our time have pitted one variant of liberalism against another, which were given the labels ‘conservatism’ and ‘liberalism’ but which are better categorized as ‘classical liberalism’ and ‘progressive liberalism.’”
The Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor makes a similar point when describing what he calls the “modern social imaginary.” For Taylor, a “social imaginary” is “the way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” The social imaginary of modern America is an amalgam of assumptions, practices, and institutional forms (the scientific method, industrial production, individualism, secularism, etc.), many of which we associate with political liberalism.
Taylor traces the transition from a premodern to a liberal modern social imaginary back to the intellectual and social movements of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. This means that the Catholic tradition started more than seventeen hundred years before the arrival of modernism and liberalism. A great deal of the history of Catholicism in the period since the seventeenth century has been the story of the Church’s resistance to—and later, after the Second Vatican Council, partial accommodation with—that modern social imaginary.
Pope Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors captures the impulse of resistance. Among the errors he condemned were the following: (1) “That every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.” (2) “That the Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect.” (3) “That the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” (4) “That the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”
The Second Vatican Council marked a major shift in Catholic thinking and teaching on almost all these questions. It represented an overdue and essential reorientation of the Church, opening it to greater engagement with the modern world and with the global community. But while Vatican II reoriented the Church—away from hostility to modernity and towards engagement with it—engagement did not mean a wholesale embrace of modernity or a total break with earlier Catholic ways of thinking about the world and society. As Faggioli and others have argued, the Council itself and the post-conciliar Church were marked by both continuity and discontinuity. Unlike the pre-conciliar Church, they embraced democracy and religious freedom. But the Church’s discomfort with the dominant comprehensive ideologies of the twentieth century, Marxism and liberal individualism, has persisted. Here is how Pope Paul VI explained the Church’s position in a 1971 apostolic exhortation:
[The] Christian who wishes to live his faith in a political activity which he thinks of as service cannot without contradicting himself adhere to ideological systems which radically or substantially go against his faith and his concept of man. He cannot adhere to the Marxist ideology, to its atheistic materialism, to its dialectic of violence and to the way it absorbs individual freedom in the collectivity, at the same time denying all transcendence to man and his personal and collective history; nor can be adhere to the liberal ideology which believes it exalts individual freedom by withdrawing it from every limitation, by stimulating it through exclusive seeking of interest and power, and by considering social solidarities as more or less automatic consequences of individual initiatives, not as an aim and a major criterion of the value of the social organization.
Pope Francis has echoed this rejection of comprehensive ideologies, calling them “poison” and urging people to engage instead with what he simply calls “reality.”
Perhaps it should not be surprising that a 2,000-year-old moral and intellectual tradition finds itself out of sync with prevailing secular progressive and conservative positions on various issues. Against the conservative side of the American political divide, the Catholic tradition utterly rejects laissez-faire economics in favor a preferential option for the poor; condemns the death penalty and is critical of the carceral state; celebrates racial equality and diversity and rejects ethno-nationalism; calls on states to welcome migrants; and enjoins us all—but particularly those of us in more affluent countries—to take urgent action against climate change. Until recently, it never would have occurred to me that support for constitutional democracy also belongs on this list of Catholic disagreements with American conservatism. But a new generation of conservative thinkers has called democratic self-governance into question. So it may be worth pointing out that, since the Second Vatican Council, Catholic social thought has strenuously endorsed democratic forms of governance over the alternatives.
At the same time, the Catholic tradition rejects many beliefs that prevail among secular progressives in the United States. It condemns abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia as immoral; does not view recreational drug use as a matter of personal preference or moral indifference; insists on constraining sexual behavior within norms of chastity and self-mastery; affirms the validity and value of hierarchy and authority within social structures and organizations; affirms the legitimacy—within moral limits—of private ownership and market relations; and regards the family as the most basic unit of society.
In general, the Church is wary of any political philosophy, “liberal” or “conservative,” that emphasizes individualism and individual freedom over the kinds of organic, socially embedded relationships that Catholic moral anthropology understands as essential to human flourishing.
Despite its differences from both of the two main currents in American politics, the Catholic tradition encourages us to involve ourselves in the political process in order to advance the cause of human dignity. So Catholics are left to make common cause with movements and parties with which they aren’t always in perfect agreement. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, we are left with what Pope Paul VI called a “legitimate diversity” of political options. I say “perhaps,” because the scope of our legitimate choices is itself a matter of controversy among faithful Catholics.
One way that some Catholics have responded to the misalignment between the Catholic tradition and the prevailing political formations in our society is to elevate their political identities or loyalties above their confessional ones. I will call this the “Cafeteria Catholic” approach because it simply sets to the side the elements of the Catholic tradition that deviate from one’s preferred political identity. The proponent of this view will point to the areas of overlap between their party and certain Catholic teachings, but they will not deeply engage with the areas of divergence. Nor will they try very hard to shift their party’s platform in the direction of Catholic social teaching. In short, the Catholic part of their belief system does no actual work—it just follows along like a caboose attached to the train of partisan identity. The areas of partial overlap between party and Church may make people feel better about their partisan identity. It may even imbue their political advocacy with a sense of righteousness and religious fervor. But this is not a very attractive way of dealing with Catholic political homelessness, and so I won’t say much more about it.
A second way to grapple with the imperfect fit between Catholic teachings and the political party system is similar to the first in that it does not put equal emphasis on every part of Catholic teaching. But it is different from the cafeteria approach in that it seeks a principled basis for elevating certain Catholic commitments over others. Those who favor this second approach use these “super-commitments,” or non-negotiables, to justify the choice of one party over the other. I will call this the “intrinsic evil” approach, since that is the concept invoked by many proponents of this strategy to describe the offending policies of the party they do not choose.
The argument goes as follows: It is true that neither party perfectly reflects the totality of Catholic social teaching, but not all Catholic teachings are created equal. Some teachings represent categorical prohibitions about actions or policies that are gravely wrong at all times and in all places, while others merely reflect contingent prudential judgments about actions that might sometimes be permissible. Catholic teachings on, say, economic justice, may begin with bedrock commitments to human dignity, but they depend on a chain of reasoning relying on the tools of economics and behavioral science to yield somewhat qualified and tentative conclusions about the precise shape and nature of appropriate state intervention into the economy. In contrast, Catholic teachings regarding instrinsic evils, such as abortion, begin with the same bedrock questions of human dignity, but proceed through inexorable steps to reach the conclusion that legal accommodation of intrinsic evils is contrary to justice. When choosing how to vote, faithful Catholics must, before all else, avoid providing political support for policies or actions that promote or facilitate intrinsic evils.
The intrinsic evils now in question, according to these thinkers, are abortion and the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Faithful Catholic voters cannot provide their support to a party that affirms those practices. If another party opposes those positions, then Catholic voters are duty-bound to support that party even if it takes positions that are at odds with the Catholic tradition on issues of lesser importance, or about which reasonable Catholics might disagree. When the U.S. Catholic bishops say, as they do in their document Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, that not all issues are of equal importance and call abortion the most important issue for Catholics to consider in their voting decisions, they seem to be flirting with this argument—though, importantly, they have not explicitly claimed that it is morally impermissible for Catholics to vote for a party or candidate that supports abortion rights.
There are several problems with the most aggressive versions of this line of reasoning. I will focus here on just two.
The first is that, in its focus on abortion in particular, the intrinsic-evil approach fails to acknowledge that issues of life (and intrinsic evil) lie on both sides of the political divide. This seems to be what Pope Francis was getting at when he recently remarked that Catholic voters in the United States should choose the lesser evil in the upcoming presidential election. Both candidates, he said, take positions that qualify as “anti-life” from the Catholic perspective. While many people on the secular left were outraged by the pope’s remarks, what was most noteworthy about them was his putting Donald Trump’s views on migration in the same category as Kamala Harris’s views on abortion. In so doing, the pope implicitly cast doubt on the effort to elevate abortion above every other political issue.
The second problem with the intrinsic-evil approach is that it seems to ignore the many steps involved in getting from a moral judgment to a law or policy. It has been a bedrock position in Catholic legal thinking since Thomas Aquinas that a certain degree of prudential judgment is always involved when determining whether the law should prohibit some vice or mandate some virtue. Here is what Aquinas says in the Summa Theologica:
human laws do not forbid all vices…but only the more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained.
What counts as a “grievous vice”? How do we determine whether the majority is capable of abstaining from it? How do we know whether “human society could not be maintained” if the vice in question were not legally prohibited? Answering any of these questions seems to involve significant elements of prudential judgment.
In the mid-1960s, Richard Cardinal Cushing of Massachusetts asked the Jesuit John Courtney Murray to provide him with guidance on the question of whether the Catholic Church should oppose a proposed state law that would legalize contraception. Applying Aquinas’s framework, Murray argued that for prudential reasons the Church should not oppose the law, notwithstanding the Catholic teaching that contraception is always immoral. Murray’s analysis echoed Aquinas’s approach:
[T]he scope of law is…limited to the protection and maintenance of relatively minimal standards of public morality. A minimum of public morality is a social necessity. On the other hand, the force of law is coercive (disciplina cogens metu poenae), and men can normally be coerced into the observance of only minimal standards.
Murray brings Aquinas’s theory into the modern context of a pluralist, democratic society characterized by profound disagreement around many moral questions:
The people whose good is at stake have a right of judgment concerning the measure of public virtue that is to be enforced on them, and concerning the manner of public evils that are to be repressed.... [T]here must be a reasonable correspondence between the moral standards generally recognized by the conscience of the community and the legal statutes concerning public morality. Otherwise laws will be unenforceable and ineffective and they will be resented as undue restrictions on civil or personal freedom.
Where does abortion fall within this traditional Catholic approach to the relationship between law and morality in the context of a religiously pluralistic society characterized by profound disagreement on the underlying moral question? What about the legal recognition of same-sex unions in a society where the clear majority approve of them? Applying Murray’s logic, it seems to me that reasonable people who take seriously the Church’s teachings on any of these topics might yet disagree about how to apply this traditional Thomistic framework to those issues.
The conservative New York Times columnist David French, for example, says he accepts traditional Christian views on same-sex relationships. And yet he believes that, as a matter of individual freedom, same-sex couples should be able to avail themselves of the legal protections provided by civil marriage. Although French is not Catholic, his analysis resembles Murray’s. Using similar logic, Mario Cuomo gave a speech at Notre Dame in 1984, arguing, on the basis of religious freedom and the Thomistic distinction between morality and law, that while he was morally opposed to abortion, he did not believe the law should prohibit it in most cases.
Even if one disagrees with Cuomo about abortion, one can still recognize that the process of moving from first principles about the wrongness of abortion to ultimate conclusions about how the law should treat it involves a chain of prudential reasoning that includes contestable assertions and conclusions: first, about the character of the society in question; second, about the practicality of law enforcement in this context; and third, about how women who have unwanted pregnancies and do not accept the Church’s teaching would likely respond to a law prohibiting them from getting an abortion. The conclusion that the law as it relates to abortion should be deployed at a particular time or place—or should take a particular form—starts to look more like the very kind of prudential judgment that the intrinsic-evil theorists were trying to avoid. If reasonable Catholics might disagree about the ultimate conclusions, then the intrinsic-evil analysis designed to simplify the voting question begins to break down.
My own dissatisfaction with both the cafeteria approach and the intrinsic-evil approach leads me toward a third approach: embracing our political homelessness. If we give the full breadth of Catholic teaching its due, and diligently apply our conscience to the question of political participation, we will find ourselves in frequent disagreement with people on both ends of the political spectrum. The fact of that disagreement does not mean that we can’t make a bottom-line judgment about which party or which candidate to support in any given election, or even that we can’t associates ourselves with one of the two major political parties in a more extended way. Indeed, our affirmation of the importance of participating in the political process may require us to make these kinds of tough choices. But the unavoidable fact of conflict between the Catholic tradition and the major parties in the United States does suggest that our political participation will be—and ought to be—uncomfortable and somewhat tentative, no matter where we end up. When Pope Francis says that American Catholics should approach their political decisions as a choice between “lesser evils,” this is just another way of saying that American Catholics should consider themselves politically homeless.
This is an uncomfortable position. Our decision to cast our lot with one party or another will frequently require us to disagree with the positions taken by those on our own political side. That is always difficult, but it’s particularly so in a society as polarized as ours. And our political participation is uncomfortable for another reason, which goes back to the Catholic opposition to ideology. Both major parties in the United States are composed of a coalition of pragmatists and ideologues, but the animal spirits of the parties usually derive from the ideologues. Catholics’ principled opposition to ideology and our commitment to engaging with the world as we find it puts us on a collision course with idealogues of any stripe. This will create discomfort no matter which party we choose. But that discomfort can be a good thing—good for us and for the parties, and good for democracy.
For parties, the presence of Catholics in their midst contributes to a healthy diversity of thought. As our society has become more polarized, the major parties have become more homogeneous in their views. When homogeneous groups deliberate, they tend to reach more extreme conclusions than heterogenous groups do. They become more ideological. The social science of deliberative groups suggests that this does not bode well for the quality of ideas emerging from either side of the political spectrum.
By bringing our own distinctive social imaginary to both political parties, faithful Catholics can help inject diversity and independence of thought into party thinking on both sides of the aisle and thereby counteract the worst impulses of each party’s ideologues. This will in turn be good for our democracy as a whole. By engaging with both parties—but tentatively, and from the standpoint of political homelessness—Catholics can help to reduce the polarization that now threatens the health of our political system.
Finally, this process of depolarization will be most effective if, following the late Cardinal Bernardin, we also look for the common ground that binds us together as Catholics. We may ultimately reach different conclusions about which political party deserves our qualified support, but we all still share theological, liturgical, and even esthetic practices and beliefs that exist in a vast conceptual space outside of politics. By accepting our political homelessness and giving voice to our Catholic convictions even when they diverge from the secular orthodoxies of our chosen political teams, we can begin to decenter our political identities and to recenter our shared faith tradition. This would be a healthy development, both for each of us individually and for an increasingly polarized U.S. Church. American Catholics should not consider themselves above partisan identities, or too pure for the tradeoffs of democratic politics, but neither should they allow their politics to subsume the rest of their identities, or to alienate them from their fellow Catholics.
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