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If Catholics Want To Play Politics, They Should Learn The Chicago Way

If Catholics Want To Play Politics, They Should Learn The Chicago Way

Last updated on: February 2, 2015 at 10:27 am by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

If Catholics Want To Play Politics, They Should Learn The Chicago Way 2015-02-02T10:27:30+01:00 Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

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Austin Ruse has a piece lambasting those Catholics who would see Catholics disassociate themselves from the Republican Party over the use of torture. He goes over the history of those Catholics who supported and played a role in the Bush Administration and paints a positive picture of those years.

As a supporter of the Republican Party, I share a number of his impulses. I agree that it’s ridiculous to think we should weigh abortion and, say, the minimum wage in the balance the same way, even if the minimum wage were good policy (maybe we can try “But Hitler got the unemployment rate way down!” as an excuse for the Reichskonkordat). I agree that a “pox on both their houses” attitude can be a bit of performative Phariseeism against those who would actually go into the political arena and actually work for change. Sometimes a studied neutrality can be a witness that Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world; sometimes it can be a form of cowardice.

All of that is true.

But here’s the thing: the reason why I don’t support an explicit (or even implicit) alliance between the Church and the Republican Party has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with basic political wisdom, and it is this: if you go all-in with a party, and if the party knows you have nowhere else to go, the party is going to treat you like dirt. The rule of politics is power. Parties’ interest is in courting swing constituencies, at the expense of their base.

George W. Bush was an Evangelical Christian. I believe his faith was sincere, as was his desire to help. And yet Evangelicals got screwed by the Bush Administration. The famous “faith-based initiatives” thing never went anywhere; never got funded, never got the proper attention. I don’t think this was malice on Bush’s part, I think it’s just the nature of things: when you are sitting on the Oval Office, there are about 100 different urgent-important priorities that beg for your attention, and you have to choose, and you will be naturally led to choose what is more in your immediate interest. When Bush had to spend political capital on Medicare Part D or immigration reform, he did; when he had to spend political capital on faith-based initiatives, he did not. Evangelicals just don’t have leverage.

More broadly, while politics are important, especially in a culture of death, evangelism remains the Church’s main mission, and it is obvious how a coeval association with a political party can be destructive to that mission. Most sociological observers of American religion today would agree that while American Evangelicalism is robust, it has still hit a “ceiling”, and that this is in large part due to the perception of its association with the conservative movement (and also its anti-intellectualism). Once a denomination becomes “[Movement] At Prayer” people wonder why they should get up on Sunday morning when they could just as easily vote and donate to the right causes and sleep in. And nonbelievers can smell when you preach Jesus or when you preach an ideology. This is a big element of what killed Mainline Protestantism in the US. It would be sad if the Church had evaded Charybdis only to land on Scylla.

A big part of the question is: what lesson do you draw from the Bush years?

The main critique of the Catholic “theocons” (a derogatory term but one that I’m going to use here for the sake of clarity) from the Catholic Left is that they were either evil geniuses, or craven idolaters putting their ideology over their faith, or both. And I get the impulse to defend them from those accusations, which I don’t think do justice to the people involved. I have enormous sympathy for the project.

But my reading of those years is, in many ways, even more merciless: they weren’t evil geniuses; they just got played.

In this regard, it is astonishing that Ruse’s entire manifold story does not include a single time the word “Iraq.” You got played. Catholic theocons threw their credibility behind the War in Iraq and in exchange got…what? Nothing. (It was Evangelicals who saved us from the Harriet Myers fiasco, that thing would have played out the same way without us.)

Ruse recalls examples of briefings for the First Things crew, and so on, as example of how those collaborations can work just fine. No, man, let me tell you: you got played.

I have eyes and ears, so I’ve learned long ago not to be surprised by Catholics who are evil. Original sin and all that. There but for the grace of God go I. But the one thing I cannot, will not tolerate is Catholics who act stupid. We are the smartest religion in the world. Holiness is hard. Intelligence is not, or at least it should not be for us.

You can talk about prudence all you want, but the simple fact of the matter is that Bush decided to go into Iraq, the Pope said that was a bad idea, anyone outside the neocon bubble could see it was a bad idea, and the Catholic theocons went all in. Regardless of the purity of their intentions or the abstract merits of their logic at the time, the simple fact of the matter is that they destroyed their own credibility in the process, in the most awful way possible. Again, regardless of intentions and abstract merits, it irreparably tainted in the public eye any claims to (a) faithfulness; (b) courage; (c) judgement.

And by the way, you can brush off criticisms of torture all you want, but yeah, an unjust war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians, and whose consequences are still reverberating chaos in the Middle East (ask Middle East Christians about the Iraq war one of these days. What do you think caused ISIS?), yeah, that’s kind of a big deal, morally.

For entire generations of people whose political consciousness began after the ’80s, their only memories of conservative governance are associated with bogus wars and economic crisis. What do you think is the impact on Supreme Court nominations? So, you know, on behalf of those of us who were just spectators in those years and are now thinking about carrying on the baton, thanks.

I don’t have the special secret answer to how Christians should relate to, and act within, politics. We are all well aware of how each form of engagement presents its own moral dangers.

But if you are going to go into politics, if you are going to get your hands dirty, then fercryinoutloud, at least, be smart about it.

The actual neocons were smart about it. Maybe it’s that Trotskyite legacy. It’s very well documented how they basically engineered a silent coup in the Bush Administration after 9/11. They were masters of bureaucratic cloak-and-dagger and completely played reasonable folks like Colin Powell, like a fiddle. They were ready. They were there when Bush put together his staff during his first campaign. The bottomline is this: PNAC succeeded; First Things failed. Fr. Neuhaus is one of my all-time heroes, but that’s just the truth.

But hey, y’all got press briefings in the Bush years! Gimme a break.

I think it’s just impossible to imagine how different America today would be if there hadn’t been the Iraq War and the sex abuse crisis. As noted above, American Evangelicalism has hit a ceiling; Mainline Protestantism is committing seppuku. Without Iraq, American political life would be incalculably different. If the Catholic Church still had credibility, it would be the only remaining “center” for American religious life and culture, it would be America’s soul. Think about it, in this anti-Catholic Protestant country. We have such a talent for scoring own goals, it’s amazing.

The reason why Obama felt he could take on the Catholic bishops is because he knew that whatever the bishops say, it doesn’t have an impact on how actual Catholics vote. And the reason for that goes much deeper than politics. It has to do with the Filth, it has to do with catechetical chaos, it has to do with the liturgy, it has to do with the culture–we all have our theories. But before we entertain fantasies about the Catholic Church becoming the new Religious Right or whatever, we need to clean up our own house, because right now it’s laughable.

It’s not the intentions, or even the methods per se, of the Catholic theocons I have a problem with. It’s their results.

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