Until recently, most Americans and their institutions assumed the principles of Christian and natural law anthropology, reflected in the Bible and our founding documents.
Each of us humans, because we are created and loved by God, possess equal dignity and worth. We are endowed by God with inalienable rights, intellect and will, and the freedom to use them in pursuit of happiness. But we are also fallen creatures. Our instincts deceive us into believing that accumulating wealth and power, and satisfying our desires, leads to happiness.
In the real world, we live best by employing faith and reason in seeking virtue. We are most likely to achieve happiness with self-discipline and hard work, respecting our neighbor, obeying the laws, and curbing our desires. Long human experience suggests that pursuing sexual love only within marriage benefits the spouses, their children, and the common good.
This understanding of the human person has now been rejected in large swaths of America. It’s being replaced by a “progressive” ideology that is reshaping our national understanding of what it means to be a human being, unconstrained by the shackles of tradition, with a “modern” view of love and happiness. Stunningly, this project is spreading – everywhere.
Almost overnight, the LGBTQI+ ideology has captured major American cultural and political institutions, including public education, universities, medicine, major corporations, and the Democratic party. Many Christians have also welcomed it, on the grounds that “love” trumps outdated Biblical injunctions about sex, marriage, and happiness.
The successes of this dangerous ideology have riven our always contentious people into two warring nations. Unfortunately, too many of us don’t realize the stakes in this battle, or think politics can win it. Though politics is important, it’s doubtful that anyone can avert this cultural disaster through political means alone. Nor can the courts reverse it.
And yet, despite its sudden dominance, the anti-faith, anti-reality ideology is so irrational, so arrogant in its disdain for common sense, that it depends heavily on political coercion. It requires blue-state laws, federal and state administrative decrees, attorneys general, “non-discrimination” rules, and laws that punish anyone standing in the way of the new moral dispensation of abortion on demand, same-sex marriage, and gender fluidity.
Because morally orthodox religious institutions stand in the way, they and their teachings are targeted, especially those of the Catholic Church.
While this deracinating American ideology couldn’t have been predicted by our Founders, they established a system of religious freedom to address a moment like this, in which the morally orthodox could act as a stabilizing force in a struggle over public morality, given its importance to the Republic.
When it came to religion, the Founders were true revolutionaries. Convinced that a religious and moral citizenry was necessary to the success of their radical political experiment, they sought a way to preserve religion and morality while avoiding the political coercion and moral corruptions they associated with a government-run Church.
Their solution was unprecedented in the history of mankind, and not replicated by any other nation since (which is why all other Western democracies are far ahead of ours on the path to moral dissipation). Our First Amendment guarantees the right of religious “free exercise” to every citizen and American religious community, in private and public life.
Free exercise is protected by forbidding the national government to establish any religion. It’s a natural, pre-political right, not a coercive government mandate.
This was a gamble, an experiment in ordered liberty that worked reasonably well for two centuries. While far from perfect, its grounding in Judeo-Christian principles helped frame a moral consensus on what human beings are, why we are here, and how we should live together.
Free exercise has strengthened our constitutional system of limited government by presupposing a divine authority greater than any government, by acknowledging human vulnerability to the corruptions of power, and by empowering intermediary social institutions, such as churches and families, that possess greater authority than government.
This helped orient our behavior toward virtues such as self-discipline, loyalty, generosity and forgiveness, as well as loving those who differ with or even despise us.
It helped us reject the terrifying lie that we are merely material beings who should live for ourselves, seeking personal gratification because that is all there is.
It generated a dynamic faith-based civil society – thousands of private religious institutions that provide loving care for the poor, the marginalized, immigrants, orphans, the aged, the sick, and the dying.
Free exercise has enabled the survival and even, in pockets, the renewal of traditional liberal education, which teaches students to employ reason in search of wisdom and truth, including the truth about God and man – our inestimable worth, as well as our fallenness.
Free exercise has protected the rights of parents who want their children liberated from the subjectivist lie of public education and elite universities that humans construct their own “truth.”
Free exercise has strengthened our health care system by defending the rights of doctors, nurses, and psychologists/counselors to act in accord with their Hippocratic oath and their religious and moral commitments.
In the second decade of the 21st century, the Founders’ experiment is at risk of failure. The triumph of the new moral despotism, however, cannot be completed without the silencing of those capable of resisting. That is why faithful Christians are in the crosshairs. Catholic teachings are well placed to lead resistance to the new dispensation.
St. John Paul II warned us about this danger, and reminded us of our responsibility: “The continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation. . .makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of your Republic.”
What, then, is the Catholic role in this crisis? Again, while politics is important, we are not a political party. We should, of course, support political candidates at the local, state, and national levels who defend the truths of our faith and our right to express them.
Despite the slurs and lies that occur so frequently in our politics, the Catholic way of fighting is not shrill condemnation or slander, but patient persistence in explaining and witnessing the truth. Our primary job is not to save the world, or even our nation, but to be faithful to Jesus Christ by being his disciples. The rest, Deo volente, will be added to us.
Some Catholics believe that America is already lost. They think fighting with “patient persistence” is naïve and likely fruitless. Some propose building small, inward-looking Christian communities to ensure that the faith survives. Others counsel a turn to integralism and a state-established Catholic Church. Still others reject the Founding as a tragic and irreversible mistake.
But Catholicism is not a religion of discouragement, even when things are profoundly dismaying, as they are today. Hope – trust in Christ – is a cardinal virtue, and fortitude is a gift of the Holy Spirit. We should never give in to passivity, or submissiveness to worldly authorities who would render unto Caesar what is God’s alone.
We must make more persuasive policy arguments on the disastrous, inhumane, unjust path being pursued by progressives. We have done well resisting abortion, but must never flag in explaining to a wavering society why every human life, from conception to natural death, is precious to God and deserves the same rights and legal protections as the rest of us.
We must witness with joy, and explain with patience and persistence, the natural wisdom and practical value of man-woman marriage. And we must reveal with compassion the cruel untruths of gender fluidity, never failing to love and support those who are suffering.
In sum, we must be Catholic and we must do Catholic. We are disciples of the Lord of all Creation. We are called to witness the truth by exercising our religion with faith, hope and love.
What in the world could be more important?
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