Ross Douthat pens a solid challenge to Damon Linker at a debate hosted by TNR and pretty much covers all the bases you could want.  He hits Linker for the inconsistency of tone, by turns scholarly and alarmist, the book’s overreaching thesis (secular America is DOOMED!) and the nationalist (dare we call it nativist?) refrains about an “alien ideology” corrupting the national tradition.   

As one inclined to view at least certain kinds of theocracy in a good light, and perhaps as one of the “heirs” to “the old throne-and-altar European right” (personally, I prefer symphoneia as a concept to Thron und Altar, but we reactionaries have to be broad-minded about our differences) that does not care much for the Christianity-fortified liberalism of Neuhaus et al., I thought I might offer a few remarks to supplement what was generally a very satisfying and thorough thrashing of Mr. Linker. 

Worthy of mention is that a friend of Eunomia, Prof. Arben Fox, also receives favourable mention in Ross’ treatment for his remarks on Theocons.  It is in connection with Fox’s reading of the critique in Theocons, which I think offers the best explanation of what Linker is trying to accomplish in his attack on the theocons, that Ross takes the easiest route to polemical victory and makes a charge that doesn’t hold up quite as well as the rest of his contribution.  Ross searches through the Catholic polemicist’s bag of tricks and comes out with the attack that never gets old: Linker is indulging old-fashioned anti-Catholic tropes about the impossibility of good Catholics being good Americans.  He says:

But, for the most part, I suspect that you believe that the attempt to link the American Founding to the Catholic natural-law tradition–which is at the heart of the “theoconservative project,” insofar as there is one–marks a greater departure from America’s supposed secular ideal than did the God-soaked politics of, say, Bryan or King. (This is how your friend Russell Arben Fox interprets your argument, at least, in an exegesis of your thesis that’s somewhat more interesting than the thesis itself.)

If this is what you mean, I wish you had been gutsy enough to take your argument to its logical conclusion and to say outright what you repeatedly imply–namely that orthodox Catholicism is essentially incompatible with the American liberal order, and that Neuhaus (like John Courtney Murray before him) is wrong to tell his co-believers that there’s no great tension between Rome and the United States. You spend a great deal of time talking about the “authoritarian” political inclinations of Neuhaus and company and how they threaten liberalism, but your evidence is nearly always that they believe in accepting the Catholic magisterium’s religious authority on matters of faith and morals–with the implication being that, if you let the magisterium tell you what to think about birth control or the Virgin Birth, you aren’t fit for the responsibilities of democratic self-governance.

This argument–that American Catholics need to choose between the Pope and the republic–has a long pedigree in our political life, and it’s far from an absurd interpretation of the relationship, or lack thereof, between liberalism and Catholicism: It is held, for instance, by Neuhaus’s critics on the Catholic right, who accuse him of choosing the republic over Rome. So I put it to you–is this your opinion on the matter? Is the dissenting, the-Pope-can’t-tell-me-what-to-think Catholicism of Garry Wills the only form of Catholicism that’s acceptable in the American context? You accuse Neuhaus of hinting that Jews and atheists can’t be good citizens; do you think that Neuhaus, given what he believes, can be a good citizen himself?

Or put another way: As someone who believes in what the Roman Catholic Church believes and teaches–and as someone who thinks that our laws should be just and that the ultimate source of this justice is God–can I be a good American? Is there a place for me at the table of your idealized secular state?

I said that this doesn’t hold up as well because this may be the one part of the anti-theocon attack that has some purchase.  As I have talked about before, referring to my adventures in anti-Straussian argument, the problem with the theocon claim about equating the “law of nature” with Catholic natural law tradition (and thus creating the supposed historical basis for applying Catholic theology as the leaven of American political life) is the same problem the Straussians have in pulling off a similar maneuver of stuffing Aristotle, Aquinas and Locke in a nicely-wrapped box called Natural Law: it is manifestly ahistorical and rests of the slenderest of conceptual reeds (i.e., that Catholic natural law teaching and Lockean law of nature are sufficiently similar to be roughly identical).  As everyone’s favourite champion of the gentry shows us, there is on the one hand no need to indulge elaborate natural law theories to defend the constitutional inheritance of Englishmen and on the other, by extension, no need to concoct a rather preposterous alliance of Bossuet and Locke when neither one is needed to support and defend the genius of the mixed constitution.  This does not need to scandalise faithful, patriotic Catholics (Orthodox in America will not find, and do not seek, the Byzantine origins of “the Founding,” because it is not necessary for them to find such origins), because it was largely in the twilight of the Republic (i.e, post-1861) that our political language began to be saturated so heavily with the application of Biblically-derived rhetoric that took us far from the forensic and deliberative rhetoric of the republican period.  (For those who have been paying attention, yes, this is Bradford’s critique of Lincoln, and, yes, this is a paleo critique.)  In other words, it perfectly normal for Americans to be both Christian and yet not engage in the sort of conflation of religious and political ideas that theoconservatism seems to assume was the normal and natural way of things in this country.

This is not to say that Americans wanted to be “secular” exactly, since a small cottage industry of authors has successfully shown that early republican Americans were actually often enough quite thoroughly religious churchgoers and, yes, they brought their religious scruples to bear on matters of public interest as Christians had done since time immemorial.  But they didn’t confuse having established churches or public religion with claiming that the mixed constitution was exactly ordained by God, by and large didn’t go on about God-given “rights” (with some notable and unfortunate exceptions) and did not tacitly or explicitly claim some quasi-privileged status for Christians as better citizens (Fr. Neuhaus, meet Katherine Harris).  There wasn’t just a real tension between Rome and the United States (i.e., between Catholicism and America), but between the Kingdom and the Republic.  It was ever an unhappy New England tendency to collapse the two and identify the fortunes of the Republic with the earthly glory of the Kingdom–thus such blasphemies as Battle Hymn of the Republic, or John Brown’s Body, a song only a jihadi or Bostonian could love, or the Christification of Lincoln upon his death.  It has been to the unending confusion of the American mind (and, more recently, American foreign policy) that we take seriously Winthrop’s Zionification of the nation as “a city on a hill,” as if America were the New Israel, which is properly a role reserved solely for the Church.  Fr. Meyendorff once noted that the chief problem with the Byzantine idea of symphoneia was that it denied the fundamental opposition between the Kingdom and the world; in the end, even though the emperor was crowned by God, the Roman Empire could never fully be in harmony with the Church, but must always remain part of this world.  So, too, with American order. 

To deny the implausible claim that America was born from the substantive marriage of Christianity and Enlightenment liberalism (the marriage, if it ever did take place somewhere, was surely annulled for failure to consummate) is not to deny that full-throated, serious, orthodox Christians can and should be politically active and “good citizens,” but to reject the presumption that unless one can concoct an elaborate theory of ideological compatibility between philosophy inspired by the Faith and liberal political philosophy that militates against basic truths of the Faith Christians are somehow necessarily opposed to or alienated from the political regime of their home country.  (What never seems to trouble theocons and their friends is the rather unpleasant implications this sort of ideological compatibility model has for Catholics in countries with a much more explicitly anticlerical, anti-Christian Enlightenment political tradition or countries that have only limited experience with Christianity of a century or two.) 

In trying to concoct such a theory, it is actually Neuhaus et al. who accept the assumptions behind the anti-Catholic trope by creating an entire philosophical apparatus designed to create nothing so much as a reverse image of the anti-Catholic charge.  The thinking seems to be: “Not only are we not aliens and enemies of the American way of life, but we are the best Americans!  Not only is there not irremediable hostility between Rome and Washington, as you say–there is virtually no tension between them at all!”  This tends to do violence to the very real tensions that will inevitably exist between the Gospel and any particular political philosophy, and forces the theocon to fudge on questions pertaining to the Faith.  This seems to happen most often when the government goes to war or supports a line of policy in foreign affairs that seems patently unjust.  In the eyes of the secular Mr. Linker, theocons arguably ought to be at their most “reasonable” and accommodating with the liberal political order when they are at their most enthusiastic for the government-backed bombing of other countries, which ought to make him reconsider whether he wants to have Christians who are a little too friendly with Caesar in this perfectly secular way.  It is only when they fervently and rather ineffectively rail against the evils of the “culture of death” at home that they might frighten Linker with some of their rhetoric, but even here they have framed their objections in terms of resisting judicial usurpation of representative government, which is still not exactly the call to arms of a theocrat. 

The habits of mind necessary to construct this flimsy bridge between Christianity and American liberal political theory also tend to encourage wild swings between accommodation to the demands of the liberal political order (and, in practical terms, the government) at expense of the Gospel when the two do inevitably conflict and the zeal of the religious revolutionary who, having invested the liberal and democratic political order with the dignity of divine justice, is outraged at the aforementioned judicial usurpation of liberal representative government.  This tends to make the theocon curiously passive and accommodating to official policy when confronted by the injustices of government inflicted on other nations (because the saints must go marching on, I suppose) and almost equally intense and uncompromising when confronted by legal interpretations or policies that foster or even enshrine profoundly evil and immoral things such as abortion.  Their motto might be: “Revolution on behalf of the unborn, but not one tear of compassion and not one word of outrage for the victims of aggressive war.”  Perhaps that is a touch exaggerated, but only a touch.    

It is interesting that there are Catholics and other Christians who feel, for reasons of patriotism and full assimilation to what they consider the values of their country, the need to engage in this sleight-of-hand, but I fear that the reason why they feel this need is part of the problem with their attempt to identify an important part of their religious intellectual tradition with the political and philosophical traditions of Anglo-America, and this is the need for all citizens in good standing to agree ideologically about the nature of the “project.”  This is tied in deeply to terribly mistaken ideas about the nature of American identity, which makes being American a question of accepting propositions of political liberalism rather than any other sort of belonging or historically-constituted identity.  If this is indeed an “ideological nation,” it becomes imperative to show that you are on board with the reigning ideology; this is imperative not only to show that you belong here, but also so that you can wield influence and power.  But this is easier to do than for others, and this is a particularly unwise kind of game for conservative Christians to play, since we will never be able to identify with Enlightenment liberalism or its latter-day heirs as thoroughly or credibly as others.  By playing this game, and claiming to win it, First Things encourages exactly this sort of “ideological nation” thinking and exposes conservative Christians to further exclusion from the national narrative once it can be shown (and it is not hard to show) that Christianity (and philosophical conservatism) and Enlightenment liberalism are as compatible as water and oil. 

In its way, theoconservatism is the final expression of Catholic Americanisation, or is an example of Catholic Americanisation gone too far, and represents a latter-day form of the immigrant’s strategy to prove his belonging to the nation by talking about how much he loves freedom and democracy and insisting that he’s not like his reactionary peasant ancestors from Europe (and here, as always, I mean reactionary peasant as a compliment).  This is all well and good in one sense, but when it creates a model of accommodating the Faith to the (false) claims of liberalism about human nature and society or encourages mistaken compromises of moral principle with the liberal regime out of a misguided sense of American loyalty it does no one any good.  If Linker’s book might show some small part of the problems with this theocon model, it will not have been a complete waste.  Since it is unfortunately caught up with the much bigger progressive hobby-horse of fighting a supposedly incipient theocracy that does not exist, it will probably accomplish nothing.