In the Coalition, but not of the Coalition

It is difficult to talk about Catholic involvement in political life without falling into clichés: “Catholics are politically homeless,” for instance. But sayings turn into clichés because they are often true. We should not be surprised that we are politically homeless, because the Bible itself tells us that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come,” since “our citizenship is in heaven.”

But the hope of Christians for the future Kingdom of God has never led them to abandon their concern for the right ordering of the earthly city. Quite the opposite. Christians do not enter the Kingdom of God by leaving this world. Rather, according to the logic of the Incarnation, God brings about His Kingdom by entering into this world to heal and elevate it. Christian hope is neither an escapism that flees from the world nor a utopianism that expects a transformation of the world according to its own potentialities. The new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven from God, and it does so, at least initially, through the life of grace and communion lived among the members of his Church and through their evangelical efforts to welcome all the nations into their fellowship. Christians stand at a crossroads: They already proleptically participate in the Kingdom of Heaven, but they are also members of their earthly political community, and they are called to order the latter according to what they know of the former.

This goes right back to the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” When Jesus gave the Great Commission, He told his disciples to teach “all nations,” and this means not just making individual converts from among all nations but converting whole societies to the Gospel, fulfilling the prophetic hope that one day all will stream toward the living God and live together in justice and peace.

If the situation of the nascent Church prevented Her from realizing this goal, it certainly was not outside of Her aspiration. We get glimpses of this aspiration in various early Christian writings. The Letter to Diognetus says that although Christians dwell in the world as sojourners living outside their heavenly homeland, nevertheless they are the soul of the world, living among but not like their fellow citizens, preserving the very communities that look on them with disdain. People get this point wrong by borrowing from the political theology of the radical Reformation. Trying to re­create the outlook of the early Church, they make the mistake of confusing its concrete historical situation, cells of the elect within each society, with its universal aspiration, to convert whole nations and to order their societies in accordance with the teachings of the Gospel.

It is no surprise, then, that as soon as the Church was in a favorable position to influence society, She began to do so. Roman law was reformed as the empire Christianized, and what we now call “social justice” was a theme in the preaching of every Church Father. The Fathers held that the moral teachings of the Church were not just a sectarian code of ethics for Christian believers; they were true and good and conducive to the right ordering of society. The Church has consistently made this claim up to our own day. Because the Church is convinced that Her moral teachings—whether they derive from the natural law or from divine Revelation—are simply true, and because She is convinced that it is Her mission to lead all to salvation, She claims the right to proclaim these truths and to advocate for their implementation in society. Thus, the Church’s attempts to shape the social order according to Her moral teachings are an integral part of Her evangelizing mission. In every age and in every culture, the proclamation of the Gospel has brought about a change in society through the work of the members of the Church.

What is different in our own time is the way in which this change comes about. For most of the history of the Church, the imposition of Christian principles came through the mediation of the state in a society whose rulers and subjects were mostly Catholics. Starting with the liberal revolutions of 1848, this situation began to change. States became more secular, often aggressively so, and subjects became citizens. How was the Church to reformulate Her traditional mission in this new environment?

Pope Leo XIII began to consider this question in earnest. Having lost the Papal States, Leo sought to reshape the exercise of the papacy to better suit his situation. With the assistance of technological advances, he transformed the papacy into a teaching office that informed the consciences of Catholics, who would work to enact Catholic principles in society, and he took a pragmatic approach toward dealing with modern states. In an address that he delivered on March 1, 1892, Leo said that it was his mission not to restore “the crude civilization” or the “flawed institutions” of the Middle Ages, but to restore “that robust faith, deeply engrained in the conscience of the people” that healed their societies. Pope Leo focused on the nature of the state, the family, and civil society; the origin of political authority; and the right relationship between labor and capital. He admitted the validity of democratic government, but he was ambivalent about the form of the state. Consequently, he left unaddressed the problem of the participation of citizens in politics.

World War II changed papal thinking. In his radio address for Christmas in 1944, Pope Pius XII suggested that the experience of the war was prompting discussion of an overhaul of the social order, including a new insistence on democratic forms of government. Had there been popular accountability instead of dictatorial overreach, then maybe there would have been no war. Pius reiterates Leo’s teaching that the Church is not opposed to democracy, as long as it recognizes the divine origin of political authority and its consequent limitations, and as long as it is ordered to securing the common good of its citizens. But Pius also goes a step beyond Leo’s ambivalence. He points out that the individual person should not be a passive object of the social order but “its subject, its foundation and its end.” Pius even admits that given the realities of the modern state, “the democratic form of government appears to many as a postulate of nature imposed by reason itself.”

Pius begins the discussion of citizens’ participation in politics. The enemy of democracy is mass politics. The masses are a mere aggregate of individuals who happen to live in the same place. They are not a true political community because they do not pursue a common good. Rather, each person pursues his own individual self-interest as he understands it, or worse, as his dysregulated passions dictate. Lacking the solidarity that comes from the pursuit of a common good, the masses are especially subject to bitter factionalism, exploitation by demagogues, and manipulation by state bureaucracies. The opposite of mass politics is ordered liberty. Where there is ordered liberty, there are true citizens and a true political community, because its members recognize and respect each other as bearers of rights and duties who are equal before the law, with some shared notion of the good at which society aims, despite their differences in political views, culture, social class, and so forth. Because they mutually recognize each other as members of a community and pursue a common good together, they can engage in the project of ordering their lives together. The citizen in a true democracy does not contend for his own selfish interest but seeks to advocate what he thinks are the best means to achieve the common good of the community, as this good is presented in the natural law and in the Gospel.

In Gaudium et spes, the Second Vatican Council echoes Pius XII’s call for more participatory forms of government. The Church supports a wide variety of political systems, provided that they are compatible with the transcendent dignity of the human person and provided that they order the life of society toward the common good. In Apostolicam actuositatem, the council’s decree on the laity, it officially assigns the role of participation in political life to lay Catholics. The council also refers to the problems of secularism and pluralism in society. Prior social teaching tended to assume that it was addressing societies where the majority of the citizens were Catholic, or at least subscribed to a morality that was directionally aligned with that of the Church. The Second Vatican Council began to grapple with the problem that this was no longer the case in most places. Most Catholics live in societies with an irreducible plurality of worldviews. The council mostly limited its consideration of the problem to a more careful delineation of the role that the Church would seek to play relative to society, and its view of the problem was mostly irenic.

What has become more pronounced in the decades since the council is the fact that there are more aggressive forms of secularism in society. Not only do many citizens in many countries not admit the validity of religiously informed opinions in public discourse; they also hold that Catholic moral claims are positively harmful to society. Often they believe that democracy in a pluralistic society requires participants to espouse a form of moral relativism, at least when it comes to deciding political questions, so that each person can pursue his own private conception of the good. But this approach falls into the mass politics criticized by Pius XII. Ironically enough, this moral relativism is often taken to mean that moral convictions that purport to come from the natural law or from revelation are inadmissible. Pope Benedict XVI called this contradiction the “dictatorship of relativism.”

Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has made some headway towards defining the parameters of Catholic participation in a secular and pluralistic democracy. Documents such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s “Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life” (2002) and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” (2015) describe the moral boundaries that govern Catholic thinking on public policy. Moreover, the Church has ably refuted the notion that democracy presupposes moral relativism, arguing instead that democracy actually presupposes a common acknowledgement of the truths of the natural law if society is not to fall into a cacophony of rival factions, each trying to impose its will-to-power on the others. The Church has also rejected a laicist conception of a secular society that excludes religiously informed arguments from the public square, insisting instead that the very notion of democracy entails that all citizens may bring their views about how society ought to be ordered into the public square, and therefore that Catholics may rightly advocate for public policies based on both the natural law and the Gospel.

The devil is in the details, however. Just how are Catholics supposed to carry out their participation in public life? This is an area that remains relatively underdeveloped in Catholic social thought. But the question is urgent: Democratic politics necessarily involves making common cause with others in order to advance one’s own agenda, so aggressive secularism and extreme pluralism will force Catholics to face difficult questions about how to make common cause with ideological opponents who do not share their commitment to the natural law and revelation, and it will expose them to the danger of surrendering their own convictions and conforming to the outlook of their coalitional partners. How can we be in the coalition but not of the coalition?

A tempting suggestion is to try to remain aloof from partisanship by remaining independent, or not voting, or participating in a third party. This is certainly a valid option, and a prophetic critique of our mainstream political discourse may be a useful or even a necessary stance. But one might wonder whether the efficacy of remaining aloof is too limited. At any rate, the majority of Catholic voters will probably continue to align themselves with one of the two major parties in our political system.

Unlike political parties in other countries, the two major American political parties are coalitional and not ideological. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are each big tents that contain a variety of ideological factions who think it expedient to make common cause with each other. Many Catholics do not feel entirely at home in either political party for the same reason that many other Americans do not feel entirely at home in either political party: The very act of joining a coalition involves making compromises. The question is how to compromise without becoming compromised.

This is a risk for Catholics who align with either party, of course, and the challenges of being a Catholic Democrat have been much discussed. But Catholics who align themselves with the Republican Party on account of their social conservatism have the more pressing challenge right now. The Trumpian remake of the Republican Party has rendered obsolete old debates about how Catholics can participate in the fusion of social conservatism, classical free-market economics, and hawkish foreign policy that was championed by Ronald Reagan. The Trumpian coalition is dominated by social libertines with a live-and-let-live attitude that rejects all moralizing, whether from traditional social conservatives or from progressives and their “woke” agenda of transgenderism and D.E.I. The Trump era has also ushered in an unprecedented crassness in political discourse and an indifference regarding the moral character of politicians—which social conservatives used to take seriously. Traditional social conservatism is not just about the content of political discourse but also its mode.

The current iteration of the Republican coalition is both hospitable and inhospitable for Catholics. Many Catholics appreciate its opposition to wokeism, and the new live-and-let-live attitude of the Barstool conservatives at least serves as a bulwark against progressive attempts to prevent Catholics from living their values. The populist wing of the coalition, despite the excesses of its rhetoric on immigration, does have a pro–working class and pro–family agenda that can be harmonized with Catholic social teaching. And the restraint that some members of the coalition want to show regarding foreign wars is not all that different from the position of Pope Francis.

Nevertheless, there are some problems. Traditional social conservatism is basically dead. People who think of themselves as social conservatives often do not see this because they have been tricked into mistaking reflexive opposition with social conservatism. Not everyone on the contemporary right shares the Catholic vision of the nature of the human person and the good society, after all. Traditional social conservatives also risk being tricked by something analogous to the “woke-washing” that occurs on the left. This is where the forces of capital attempt to subvert progressive positions on labor and the economy by appealing to woke identity politics. (There is an ad for the 1619 Project, for example, that reads, “Sponsored by Shell.”) On the right, forces inimical to social conservatism tempt social conservatives to abandon their traditional convictions by riling them up. Finally, social conservatives run the risk of excusing the character of their leaders and abetting the coarsening of political discourse. If we give in to these tendencies, we will become like the world, rather than becoming the light of the world.

How do we counteract these problems? The most important step is to put our theological beliefs above our political beliefs. The most important beliefs of Catholics are about the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the life of grace, and our hope of eternal life. Politically active Catholics are tempted to mix their own political beliefs with their theological beliefs as if they were all equally a part of being a good Catholic. But political ideology is not a matter of orthodoxy. Treating it as such turns politics into an idol and robs us of any distinctive witness in the public square, because when we do so we let our politics shape our theology, rather than letting our theology inform our politics.

By refusing to doctrinalize our politics, we open ourselves up to communion with fellow Catholics. Catholic social teaching does not supply policies; it supplies a framework according to which Catholics debate policies. The example of charitable and good-faith debate among Catholics according to shared principles is itself a contribution of the Church to public life—exhibiting and restoring the proper mode of political discourse.

Supplying this example would go a long way towards recovering the teaching of Pius XII on democracy. Our politics is a perfect example of mass politics: dysregulated libertine individualism manipulated by resentment and demagoguery. For socially conservative Catholics, it is tempting to embrace this mass politics and sell out their deeper principles, which are just the principles that Pius says found a healthy democracy: the ordered liberty of citizens who possess a shared vision of the common good and respectfully recognize each other as fellow bearers of rights and duties who debate how to enact that good in society. If Catholics can bear witness to this in our country, we will be bearing witness to something higher and more noble: our hope for our home in Heaven, the Kingdom of God and its righteousness.