A broader, better, and authentically Catholic vision of politics

During the time of the early Church, it was commonplace for Caesar to be addressed as “Lord.” And this was more than a simple honorific title acknowledging that Caesar was the supreme political authority in the land. It also had pagan religious connotations since the Roman Empire as a whole was viewed by most people at that time as a dynamic union of the realm of the gods and the realm of the earthly city. The Empire was viewed as a sacred entity since it was expressive in microcosmic form of the macrocosmic world of the gods and the assorted “principalities and powers” that ruled the world as their subaltern agents. Thus, the affirmation “Caesar is Lord” was a statement of deep religious and political significance that affirmed, through an almost sacramental embodiment of the sacred realm in Caesar, the primacy of the Empire over all things.

Therefore, when Christians in the apostolic age made the public affirmation that “Christ is Lord” they were engaging in an act which was much more than an expression of a private devotional piety. They were also making a dangerous theo-political statement insofar as the doxological affirmation, “Christ is Lord,” was also an act of political defiance which indirectly denied that “Caesar is Lord.” In so doing, those early Christians were developing the first outlines of a theological politics that rejected the reduction of the Kingdom of God to any specific political form in a worldly register.

How easy and tempting such a reduction would have been for them! How easy it would have been for the early Church to affirm Christ as their “god” all the while affirming as well the existence of the Imperial gods. They could have placed Christ in the pantheon of Roman gods and then morphed into yet one more of the many mystery religions of that era. They would have retained their own unique religious devotion to Christ while avoiding the persecutions of the empire. This was surely a temptation, as some of the early heresies make clear (such as Marcionism, in which the attempt was made to expunge the Judaic elements of Christianity entirely) but it was a temptation that was resisted with a martyr’s fervor.

By resisting they created a form of Christian living wherein the pursuit of the holiness with which Christ had gifted them was seen as a process of Kingdom building that had political consequences, in spite of the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that they made no direct political claims. Indeed, in the end, the small band of resisters conquered the very empire that had attempted to snuff them out.

Citizens and Strangers

I recall all of this in order to frame what I think is of paramount significance in the timely and very important new book from Kenneth Craycraft on the relationship between Catholic social teaching and the political challenges facing Catholics in the United States. The title says it best and first: We are to be loyal citizens of our nation but with an awareness that we are also strangers within it since we are a pilgrim people whose final home is not of this world. Therefore, our citizenship in any particular nation cannot be adopted as a stance of absolute devotion to any particular political regime. We can be citizens but only as sojourners whose presence will always be that of a negotiated strangeness or, put another way, of an alienation from anything that threatens to raise the penultimate goods of the political realm above the ultimate claims upon our citizenship from the Gospel.

But beyond these theological claims, the text goes further than merely to caution against the elevation of politics to a false ultimacy. There is a decidedly post-liberal tonality throughout the text and Craycraft is highly critical of the current American cultural and political landscape. For example, he lays down the gauntlet in his very first sentence:

Catholics in the United States today are liberal Protestants before anything else. To form our moral lives as Catholics is a constant battle to overcome the liberal Protestantism that we began to consume with our mother’s milk.

Craycraft, like many others, views modern American culture as the product of the confluence of Protestantism and the values of the Enlightenment. Therefore, there is baked into our national psyche an inherent hyper-individualism that is anything but metaphysically neutral. He sees this as the essence of “liberalism” in all of its various permutations and claims that both the Democratic and Republican parties are its exponents in only slightly differing ways. Both parties are animated by the deeply flawed moral anthropology of this liberalism. And this anthropology is characterized by Craycraft as containing at least two elements:

(1) radical personal autonomy and (2) an absolute commitment to individualism, characterized by the language of ‘individual rights’ as the basic moral foundation.

He views both of these principles as “corrosive of Catholic faith and witness” since the individualism in question is atomistic, if not monistic, and views the individual in isolation from, and in opposition to, all other individuals. This means that “the human person is not naturally social, and thus there are no natural social institutions.” This in turn means that all social institutions are ultimately merely “conventional–formed by the agreement of autonomous individuals in voluntary associations.

Living in the downstream culture

Herein resides in my view the true force and significance of this text and the aspect of the book most likely to generate backlash. Catholic apologists for the American settlement focus too much on the era of the founding, its principles, and its grounding in a fairly benign reading of Locke, and focus far too little on the actual downstream political and cultural entity that we actually got. Now is not the time to rehearse all of the shopworn debates about the founding and its compatibility or non-compatibility with Catholicism—and Craycraft, to his credit, spends only a little time on that question. Because, regardless of what the founders may or may not have intended, the fact remains that the downstream culture we got is more Hobbesian than Lockean.

We see this in the exponential increase in the power of the national security State and the alliance of that State with all manner of intelligence gathering agencies. And this is in addition to the collusion between this State and modern forms of corporate surveillance capitalism. We also see an increasing dogmatism from that State on all manner of issues which gives the lie to the notion that our government is non-theological. For example, we now live in a country where the government can take your eight-year-old child away from you if you insist on “misgendering” them. Therefore, in the religious domain, we are far closer to the Hobbesian Leviathan than we are to Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration”.

The metaphysics and anthropology that undergirds our culture today are at odds with the central principles of Catholic social teaching, making the situation we face today not all that dissimilar from that of the first Christians in Rome. They had to grapple with an Imperial political machine that embodied a rival theology and a broader culture in the throes of a decadent collective of concupiscence. And this is true today, even if America does not claim for itself, as Rome did, any explicit claims to absolute authority in a sacral order. Laced throughout Craycraft’s analysis is the undermining of this narrative of America’s “modest” claims for itself, and it is an analysis very similar to that given by post-liberal authors such as William Cavanaugh, Patrick Deneen, David C. Schindler, and Michael Hanby. Therefore, if you find those authors prescient and insightful you will find this text equally powerful.

Craycraft is clearly not, therefore, a neo-conservative Catholic intent on reconciling the faith with the broad contours of modern America. His mood is less optimistic and what he offers is far less ambitious than what we saw from some in the days of Ronald Reagan and the heyday of the American neo-con movement. At best, says Craycraft, what we can hope for is John Courtney Murray’s affirmation that Catholics can participate in good conscience in the American electoral process—so long as we do not take the foundational principles of our politics as “articles of faith” but instead treat them as mere pragmatic “articles of peace”.

Post-liberalism and Catholic social principles

I am surprised a bit by his willingness to approach Murray as helpful in this context since most post-liberal Catholic thinkers find in Murray an overly robust affirmation of the very political principles that Craycraft spends so much space warning against. But, looked at another way, one could say (as Craycraft does) that for the Catholic, “Murray’s suggestion that we take the moral principles as articles of peace is helpful for understanding that we may live (uneasily) on the moral foundations of the United States, but we can never really embrace them with unbridled enthusiasm.”

But these are concepts that can be reached without having recourse to Murray’s problematic constructions, which points, perhaps, to the fact that in appealing to Murray’s iconic status Craycraft is seeking to distance himself a bit from some of the other more “scorched earth” post-liberal Catholic critiques of liberalism. Indeed, that it is a caution against turning post-liberal theory into yet another attempt at reducing the Gospel to a particular political regimen.

To that end, Craycraft spends the middle sections of the book outlining the basic principles of Catholic social teaching as the only true alternative to all of the false metaphysical and anthropological assumptions animating modern culture. This is an extremely important section of the book since it points to an overall positive proposal rather than just a negative critique. Thus, to the question “how is a Catholic to approach our politics as a responsible citizen?” Craycraft provides us with an answer. He outlines what he calls the “four central pillars” of Catholic social doctrine. They are:

1. The inherent dignity of the human person
2. The solidarity of all humankind
3. The subsidiary nature of social structures
4. The common good

Space precludes me from going into each of these pillars to give them extensive analysis. Suffice it to say that his exposition of each shows that Catholic natural law reasoning is not something separated from the realm of grace, which flows from the Christological center. The Catholic not only can, but must, allow his moral vision to be informed by the light that Christ brings. And this is true because the very claim that reason is only truly itself when divorced from faith and existing in some alleged realm of pure Archimedean objectivity is a part of the erroneous epistemological apparatus of secular modernity. It is also, in our era of “woke cancel culture”, demonstrably not even the view of reason adopted by most seculars today.

Dogma and politics

Dogmas abound apparently. So, the question is: who has the better ones? We do. And that is because our dogmas complete reason and elevate it beyond itself, and yet in so doing make it even more reasonable. By contrast, post-critical forms of secular reason are self-cannibalizing and ultimately, therefore, dehumanizing. Craycraft gets this, and his analysis of the four pillars of Catholic social teaching make a compelling case for the Catholic Faith as the deepest, and only true, humanism, precisely because it does not shy away from explicitly theological categories in the name of some putative “neutral public language”. As such, Craycraft’s analysis shows us that Catholic social doctrine has a broad explanatory power as a heuristic synthesis of the full range of the human reality, which in turn gives it an enormously attractive appeal to those victims of our current cultural barbarism—people who are seeking an institution that has the nerve to defend sanity when all others have gone insane.

Finally, it should be noted that for Craycraft, as with all other genuinely Catholic political theorists, the category of “politics” is actually much broader than just “voting” and the electoral political process. The broader vision views the realm of the political as embodying the full range of our social relations and thus the full range of our social institutions. Therefore, a deep cultivation of the Catholic values inherent within various Catholic institutions–and other related institutions–is a form of political action separate from voting. Indeed, as Craycraft notes, a situation may arise, and probably often does, where voting is just not the most viable form of political action given the severe deficiencies of both parties and the candidates they put forward.

Thus, for Craycraft, the more important political category is the development of what he calls “civic friendship”. And he holds that our current electoral politics often act against a proper civic friendship. Therefore, “it may be that casting a vote is a violation of the obligations of citizenship, not its necessary corollary.”

All that said, many millions of Catholics do indeed vote. And, in this presidential election year, a text like this one is most needed and most welcome. Be that as it may, whether we vote or we do not vote, the biggest takeaway from this text for me is Craycraft’s Augustinian reading of the words of Jesus regarding rendering unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and unto God what belongs to God. And that reading is bracing as it reminds us, at the end of the day: what does not belong to God?

Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in Divided America
By Kenneth Craycraft
Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, 2024
Paperback, 208 pages

Catholic World Report