Catholicism and American Liberalism

Paul Harvey

An interesting factoid that I heard mentioned yesterday: If Judge Sotomayor is confirmed to the Supreme Court, she will be the 6th Catholic sitting on the bench. If Scalia and Alito represent one version of Catholic politics -- "natural law" and conservative politics -- Sotomayor could emerge as the bearer of the legacy of New Deal Catholicism.

We'll let the legal historians discuss the implications of Sotomayor's nomination, but a note here on its religious dimension. Religion and politics is most often discussed (in the popular realm) within the realm of Protestant evangelicalism, but scholars continue to excavate the deep history of Catholic thought and American politics. The Legal History blog calls attention to ongoing work in the realm of Catholicism and legal history, one that may set the current nomination in good perspective. Here are some notes on new pieces of interest, crossposted from Legal History Blog:
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Zachary R. Calo, Valparaiso University School of Law, has just posted a number of manuscripts on SSRN. Just posted is an article, 'The Indispensable Basis of Democracy': American Catholicism, the Church-State Debate, and the Soul of American Liberalism, 1900-1920. It appeared in the Virginia Law Review (2005). Here's the abstract:

Several recent works of scholarship explore how Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been shaped by broader political debates over the role of religion in public life. This literature focuses on the politics of anti-Catholicism, particularly during the early years of Establishment Clause jurisprudence in the1940s and 1950s. While not questioning the centrality of this period to the historical narrative, this Note argues that the political contest over church and state took shape in an earlier debate over the compatibility of Catholicism and the Constitution during the 1920s. The Church’s response to the anti-Catholicism of this period was of particular importance. Catholic apologists actively challenged the widespread argument that Catholicism could not be reconciled with a democratic liberal political order. In fact, Catholics not only defended the doctrinal compatibility of Catholic social thought and the constitutional separation of church and state. They argued that Catholicism was ideally suited to preserving the moral foundations of the free society. Far from imperiling American democracy, Catholicism was, in the words of the Church’s leading social theorist, "The Indispensable Basis of Democracy." Thus, rather than aiming to depoliticize the church-state fracas of the 1920s, American Catholics drove the issue ever more fully into the realm of politics and culture. In the process, Catholics developed a worldview that now stands at the heart of Establishment Clause politics.

Calo's newest paper is Catholic Social Thought, Political Liberalism, and the Idea of Human Rights.

As the dominant moral vocabulary of modernity, the language of human rights establishes significant points of contact between the religious and the secular. Yet, the human rights movement increasingly finds itself in a contested relationship with religious ideas and communities. Even as the idea of human rights draws on the inherited moral resources of religion, the movement, at least in many of its dominant institutional and intellectual expressions, has established itself as an autonomous moral discourse. In this respect, the human rights movement, as an expression of western liberalism, presents itself as a totalizing moral theory that challenges countervailing theological accounts of human rights. This paper considers the distinctive account of human rights which has emerged out of Catholic social thought’s engagement with political and economic questions. Particular attention is given to the process by which Catholic thinking about human rights has embraced the possibilities of political liberalism while also bounding liberalism within a particularistic theologically-informed account of the human person. The distinctiveness of the Catholic account of human rights raises questions about the role of Catholicism, and religious communities more generally, in shaping the law of human rights. To what extent can secular and religious approaches to human rights law find common cause and overlapping consensus? How does a Catholic account of human rights rooted in theological anthropology relate to a regnant secular tradition which rests on theological categories shorn of religious content (and which has become its own intellectual and moral tradition that is, in important respects, acounter-theology)? While a Christian theological jurisprudence must maintain a concern with the common good, the fractured moral consensus of late modernity usually demands that the goods identified be described with reference to the internal resources of the tradition. Catholicism, in this respect, might both advance and challenge the universalistic impulses of the human rights movement.

BUT WAIT: THERE'S MORE!

'True Economic Liberalism' and the Development of American Catholic Social Thought, 1920-1940, which appeared in the Journal of Catholic Social Thought (2008), and a chapter from Calo's book manuscript, The Circumscribed Radicalism of New Deal Catholicism: Catholic Liberalism in the 1930s.

Dispatches from a TBN Viewer

Randall Stephens

I'm putting in some quality time watching Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). Getting the low down on evangelical weight loss strategies, making more money with God's assistance, and finding out about the political details of the coming apocalypse. Dr. Carl Baugh's Creation in the 21st Century is one of my favorite programs. Tonight's episode was mostly about the moral and scientific implications of a global flood. Terrific graphics. And, better still, how many other science shows end with an altar call?

I was browsing around the TBN website when I came across a Christian documentary on Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Called Warriors of Honor, the film speaks "plainly about the Christian faith of Jackson and Lee," says pastor, author, and homeschooling kingpin Steve Wilkins. "It is a beautiful and accurate account of two great Southern leaders and of a war that forever changed our country." (See the Southern Poverty Law Center for more on Wilkins.) The site for the film proclaims: "Both [Lee and Jackson] were masterful generals, brilliant strategists and, above all, faithful Christians. The faith of these 'Warriors of Honor' governed their lives on and off the battlefield, and their legacies continue even today. 'God's will ought to be our aim, and I am contented that His designs should be accomplished and not my own.' - General Robert E. Lee."

Amazing. Brings back memories of those neo-confederate catechisms that Tony Horwitz described in Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. I think I'll need to order Warriors of Honor for my history course on the America South since 1865. Adds to what Paul posted below concerning the Arlington Confederate Monument.

Forging the White Republic in Kentucky

Paul Harvey

Congratulations to our blog contributing editor Luke Harlow, who has completed his dissertation "From Border State to Solid South: Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830-1880" (Luke will also be decamping from Rice University to take a position as an assistant professor at Oakland University this fall, formerly home to our own Matt Sutton -- congratulations on that too, Luke).

Luke sent me PDFs of the diss., which I just had the pleasure of reading. This is one of those works that makes you wonder why it had not been done before, because the topic is so obvious, and so important, and yet Luke's work follows a story in a state that everyone in the Civil War era, from Lincoln on down, understood to be absolutely crucial, but tends to get neglected in the religious history of the period. The key players in Luke's dissertation are those he calls the antislavery conservatives -- the Presbyterian leader Robert Breckinridge and the Baptist organizer James M. Pendleton chief among them. They saw slavery as a scourge primarily for its effects on the ordinary white man -- a border state/Mid-South kind of free soilism that also informed Andrew Johnson. And the kinds of white supremacy that we associate with Johnson also deeply informed this view as well. After the Emancipation Proclamation and into the REconstruction era, Harlow shows, white Kentuckians, including the formerly antislavery conservatives, "embraced a decidedly pro-Confederate stance. . . Kentucky's postbellum white population, led by clergy and laity who rejected civil rights for African Americans, came to a broad embrace of Confederate ideas and paved the way for the emergence of a dominant white Democratic political bloc."

In short, white Kentuckians fought fiercely over the existence of slavery, over Unionism versus secession, and over the political allegiances of their churches (especially among the Presbyterians). But they bonded over postbellum white supremacy, to a degree that is sobering to read no matter how many times one has been over some of this material.

3 cheers for Luke's dissertation and new job, and I look forward to seeing this in published form in the future.

Arlington Confederate Monument

Paul Harvey

Think the religion of the Confederacy has died? Think again.

Dear President Obama: Please Don't Honor the Arlington Confederate Monument.

Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin disagrees, hoping instead that Obama will put his skills at dialogue with those he disagrees with to good use here, as he did recently at Notre Dame. Caitlin Hopkins makes another worthy suggestion:

I would be perfectly happy to see Obama's staff "forget" to order the wreath for this particular bit of Lost Cause nostalgia, but that's not really his style. It seems much more likely that President Obama could be persuaded to add an extra stop on that Memorial Day wreath-laying tour — I suggest a trip to the African American Civil War Memorial before the Arlington excursion.

The future of the Republic probably doesn't stand or fall on whether some low-level administration staffer does or does not participate in this anachronistic, historically ill-informed little ceremony. My take: it's time to let this outdated tribute to Confederate mythology and religion die, let the Lost Causers rage though they will.

Religion and Foreign Policy: Crusading Modern Style

by Matt Sutton

GQ has an excellent article (“And He Shall be Judged”) in this month’s issue about the use of biblical passages on the cover sheets of war-time classified intelligence documents created by top military brass and delivered to George W. Bush by Donald Rumsfeld. The article begins:

on the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.” This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine.

GQ has also created an amazing slide show of such documents, available here.

As outrageous as this is, it is not new. I have just begun reading William Inboden's Religion and Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment (priced in typical Cambridge University Press fashion at $80), which looks like a great book that is very much relevant to our understanding of the intersections of religion and foreign policy today.

Here is the jacket blurb:

The Cold War was in many ways a religious war. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and other American leaders believed that human rights and freedoms were endowed by God, that God had called the United States to defend liberty in the world, and that Soviet communism was especially evil because of its atheism and its enmity to religion. Along with security and economic concerns, these religious convictions also helped determine both how the United States defined the enemy and how it fought the conflict. Meanwhile, American Protestant churches failed to seize the moment. Internal differences over theology and politics, and resistance to cooperation with Catholics and Jews, hindered Protestant leaders domestically and internationally. Frustrated by these internecine disputes, Truman and Eisenhower attempted instead to construct a new civil religion. This public theology was used to mobilize domestic support for Cold War measures, to determine the strategic boundaries of containment, to appeal to people of all religious faiths around the world to unite against communism, and to undermine the authority of communist governments within their own countries.

This is a great article and a great looking book that together provide a troubling commentary on the state of American foreign policy in recent decades. Not as troubling though as my own memories of my years growing up as a "Crusader." Of course we did kick the asses of the L.A. Baptist Knights in basketball, so maybe God does favor the Crusader mascot!

The Democratic Virtues of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Commencement 2009
by Kathleen Sprows Cummings

What a pleasure to walk across the quad this morning without having to keep my eyes downcast. The “abortion plane,” the one towing a banner with a graphic picture of a 10-week aborted fetus, is gone now, after having circled Notre Dame’s campus for weeks on end.

Participating in yesterday’s commencement—I was seated with the faculty about 100 feet from the stage—was both exhilarating and exhausting. The nervous tension before and during the event was unbelievable. There was a Secret Service agent disguised in academic garb (the earpiece was a dead giveaway) seated in the row in front of me, and U.S. Marshalls posted throughout the arena never stopped scanning the crowd for threats. Worst of all were the hecklers at the beginning of the President’s speech, whose comments and subsequent removal were far more disturbing in person than they appeared to be on television.

We had all heard that Randall Terry’s group had obtained tickets, but we didn’t know how many of them there would be, or whether there would be disruptions throughout the speech, or how exactly the crowd would respond. It was a relief after the first five minutes passed, when we could all really start to listen to the President’s marvelous speech (the New York Times reports on it here). And when that was over, we could go about the business that brought us all there in the first place, honoring and celebrating Notre Dame’s class of 2009.

There is no question that the last six weeks have been the most painful in my life as a faithful Catholic. Two weeks ago my daughter’s second grade class held their First Communion retreat on campus, and the joy of participating in that event was overshadowed by worries that the abortion plane would disrupt our nature walk, or that I wouldn’t be able to avoid the demonstrators and their placards as I drove my group back to school. How, after all, does one explain dismembered fetuses, or baby dolls covered in blood, to a group of eight year olds?

But if the Obama controversy has saddened me as a person of faith, it has heartened me as a teacher and scholar of American Catholicism. The folks in administration and development will almost certainly grimace if they read this, but on balance this episode made my professional life, at least, a whole lot LESS complicated. I always search for opportunities to engage past and present in the classroom, and so I was delighted when, early in the semester, Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services was announced the day before we were scheduled to discuss the election of 1928.

But if I was pleased with the thoughtful discussion about Catholics in American public life that Sebelius’ nomination generated, I was astounded by the level of intellectual engagement that characterized our discussions of the Obama controversy. As a prelude to those discussions, we read and analyzed a host of primary documents, ranging from Monsignor John Tracy Ellis’ 1955 critique of Catholic intellectual life to the 1968 Land-O-Lakes Statement of Catholic Higher Education, from Mario Cuomo’s 1984 speech at Notre Dame to the USCCB’s statement on Faithful Citizenship. We debated what the controversy revealed about faith and public life, dissent, episcopal authority, Catholic education, and electoral politics in the post-Vatican II American church. My students came to these discussions from a variety of ideological viewpoints, yet our conversations were invariably characterized by respect and by a sincere desire to understand what developments over the last half-century have brought us to this moment in American Catholicism.

On my way home from work each day, I couldn’t help but marvel at the contrast between our provocative discussions and the daily circus staged by protestors at Notre Dame’s Main Gate. I have never felt more privileged to be a faculty member at the University of Notre Dame than I have been this semester, and I was even prouder during yesterday’s ceremony. Between the legacy of Father Ted Hesburgh, evoked so elegantly by President Obama, and the leadership and courage of Father John Jenkins, displayed so prominently in his own remarkable speech, I was repeatedly moved to tears. I plan to use both speeches as a springboard to discussion in my classes next year, and there is much more that can and will be said about them. Today, though, I am just grateful it is a quiet and happy day at Notre Dame, with nothing but blue skies overhead.

Catholic Culture, the Rooted, and the Universal

Paul Harvey

John Fea's recent blog entry "Catholic Culture" points to a nice piece on this particular type of rootedness, and its decline amid the forces of a more rootless modernity.

It made me wonder how the author would respond to Obama's Notre Dame appearance and speech (a full transcript of the speech is here, by the way). Here is the response, worth reading in full, but a brief excerpt here:

In my view, the singular focus upon abortion as THE issue over which conservative Catholics will brook no divergence and around which we are called to rally reveals, to my mind, not evidence of robust Catholic culture as much as its absence.

What he means by that is a little hard to summarize here, so I encourage clicking on the link above for the rest.

Obama's speech deftly played on the tension between communal rootedness and universal values. It's worth reading in full, too. I'm hoping our contributing editor Kathy Cummings will weigh in on the Notre Dame appearance (hint hint . . . . )

Update: Kathy says she can take a hint, and says it was a wonderful day to be present at Notre Dame -- so a post reflecting on this further is forthcoming!