For Christian conservatives and especially for Catholics, the later Bush years were a heady time. At least since the 1980s, Father Richard John Neuhaus and the rest of the First Things circle had been speaking of a “Catholic moment,” and in the late 1990s Crisis magazine began planning for it. Thanks not least to Karl Rove’s enterprising effort to capture the Catholic vote, such a moment seemed to be at hand. What the “Catholic moment” was supposed to mean, though, was a rather strange thing; and with a decade’s distance, it looks like little more than wishful thinking. But for young Catholics interested in politics, particularly those within the world of campus organizations or D.C. think tanks, the facts seemed auspicious.

Even though conservatives still complained about “judicial activism” and Roe v. Wade, for Bush-era Catholic intellectuals, the tide seemed to be turning. They were confident that “pelvic orthodoxy,” combined with market-oriented but “compassionate” economic policy, would secure a Republican future. A faith in the “ordinary” citizen prompted hope for referenda on gay marriage; opinion polls seemed to suggest a larger public rethinking of abortion; and the Bush-era “faith-based initiatives” promised a model in which church, state, and private enterprise might cooperate harmoniously for the good of all. With sectarian squabbles muted, Catholics and Evangelicals would have the ideas and the votes to effect lasting political change. Catholics told themselves, and believed, that they were no longer a reactionary rearguard, but were on the cusp of triumph. A Catholic-inspired conservative politics appeared to have momentum and, more than that, it deserved to have momentum. These trends were not just happy turns of fate; they were signs that the political philosophy cobbled together by Catholics and conservatives was correct and illuminating and destined to win. The leaders of this movement may not have been the “Theocons” of Linker’s title, but they fancied themselves essential contributors to the intellectual project of holding together the American regime in a way that might preserve Catholics and the Church from the threats of secular liberalism. And it was no downside that in the process they might come to hold crucial positions of state.

These “Theocons” were devoted conservative fusionists. Even before the “Catholic moment” arrived, fusionism had been the name given to the conservative political movement attempting to combine social conservatism and free-market capitalism (though the term was initially one of criticism). In the eyes of Catholic fusionists, their views were simply the correct application of Catholic principles to contemporary problems: the Church was to stand on the side of political and economic liberty against communism, and on the side of social and moral order against the sexual revolution. The Catholic fusionists drank so deeply of this system that eventually they forgot what the first fusionists knew well: that a traditional approach to social questions sits uneasily alongside a capitalism in which “all that is solid melts into air.” But fusionism is a fitting name since the fundamental premise of the Catholic fusionist approach—rarely articulated, but always present—was that the principles of American conservatism and those of Catholic social teaching might be seamlessly and unproblematically combined.

The Catholic fusionists in fact took this position one step further. Not merely did they assert a possible symbiosis between the traditions of American liberty and the traditions of the Church, but they came to see the midcentury American political settlement as the very embodiment of Catholic social teaching. There was only one thing lacking, they thought, in the American social and political order—modern Americans had lost the Founders’ sense of the natural law principles that could hold the Republic together, principles that the Catholic tradition was ready to supply. Implausible and unnecessary as this might seem to those looking on at Catholic intellectual developments from the outside, it is hard to overstate the power that this image exerted on the “American Church” from the nineteenth century onward. Public doubt over whether Catholics could be good American citizens somehow combined, alongside the spectacular growth of the Catholic Church in this country, to produce an intense Catholic patriotism which equated chipper American liberalism with Catholic teaching itself.

You had to squint a lot to see orthodox Catholicism as the Bush-era GOP at prayer. More Gallagher:

But there were elements of that political tradition that this vision had to exclude. One could hardly grasp the American Church’s long-standing skepticism of free-market economics by reading the texts of Catholic fusionists. A vast number of books, homilies, and publications of bishops and popes demonstrates the Church’s deep interest in the “social question,” strong support for labor unions, and doubts (however awkwardly or ambiguously expressed) about the capitalist system. But when the fusionists did not simply ignore these, they tended to dismiss them as magisterial obiter dicta, quite without authority for the Catholic faithful. It is, of course, no surprise that the Catholic fusionists were eager to represent their views as rooted in perennial Catholic teachings. No Catholic likes imagining that he’s adulterating the faith with an alien or opposed school of thought. But this effort required more than a little finessing. For the most part, and despite the academic credentials that they often bore and bruited about, the proponents of this fusionism frequently betrayed rather shallow roots in the tradition they claimed to represent. In many cases, the role played by the Catholic side of the “marriage of convenience” was little more than a veneer: the Acton Institute might put a Christian gloss on Hayek, and First Things might cover typical neoconservatism with a sort of evangelical fig leaf, but the core ideas and proposals were self-subsistent, external to, and usually hostile to Catholicism itself. It was a tale of unrequited love: Catholic intellectuals eagerly offered their support to the traditions of American liberalism, but for the most part they were only preaching to their own choir, and one that was far from typical even within the Church itself.

By 2012, it was clear that this project had failed utterly. Gallagher says 2015’s Obergefell decision was the icing on the cake. In fact, recognition of the failure of the movement was the cause of the 2014 Dulles Symposium, and its attempt to lay the groundwork for charting a new course. The centerpiece of that event was Prof. Michael Hanby’s powerful essay, concerning the end of “The Civic Project Of American Christianity.”

Hanby’s contention is that contrary to the views of Catholic neoconservatives (Neuhaus, Weigel, Novak, and others), the metaphysical claims of traditional Christianity can no longer be reconciled with the liberal order undergirding American politics. Given the developments of late liberalism, the contradictions have become unsustainable. He writes:

The civic project has taken as gospel ­[Jesuit Father John Courtney] Murray’s conviction that the founders “built better than they knew.” But this presupposes the very thing in question: that the state and its institutions are merely juridical and that they neither enforce nor are informed by the ontological and anthropological judgments inherent in their creation. That exactly the opposite has more or less come to pass suggests rather that the founders built worse than they intended, that the founding was in some sense ill-fated. This does not make liberty any less of an ideal or its obvious blessings any less real. It simply suggests a tragic flaw in the American understanding and articulation of it. Nor need this diminish our affection for our country, though it is an endlessly fascinating question, what American patriotism really means today. One can love his country despite its philosophy, provided there is more to the country than its philosophy. Yet it is surely a sign of the impoverishment of common culture and the common good—and an index of the degree to which liberal order has succeeded in establishing itself as both—that we are virtually required to equate love of country with devotion to the animating philosophy of the regime rather than to, say, the tales of our youth, the lay of the land and the bend in the road, and “peace and quiet and good tilled earth.”

This creates a great temptation for protagonists on all sides of the civic project—right, left, and in between—to conflate their Christian obligation to pursue the common good with the task of upholding liberal order, effectively eliminating any daylight between the civic and Christian projects. For example, virtually absent from our lament over the threats to religious freedom in the juridical sense is any mention of that deeper freedom opened up by the transcendent horizon of Christ’s resurrection, though this was a frequent theme of Pope Benedict’s papacy. If we cannot see beyond the juridical meaning of religious freedom to the freedom that the truth itself gives, how then can we expect to exercise this more fundamental freedom when our juridical freedom is denied? Too often we are content to accept the absolutism of liberal order, which consists in its capacity to establish itself as the ultimate horizon, to remake everything within that horizon in its own image, and to establish itself as the highest good and the condition of possibility for the pursuit of all other goods—including religious freedom.

I really hope you will read all of Hanby’s essay. It’s remarkable, and quite challenging. He makes it crystal clear that Catholic neoconservatism no longer works because American culture rejects Catholic (and traditionally Christian) anthropology. Metaphysics is inevitably a guide to politics, and in our case, what the masses believe a human being to be is not what the Christian tradition teaches. In his own piece, Gallagher notes that Ryan T. Anderson’s, Sherif Girgis’s, and Robert George’s thin, tightly argued natural law defense of marriage had no effect on the debate when it appeared in 2012. I read the book at the time, and thought it truly excellent. But I also knew it would be ignored, because being a post-Christian nation means that we reject the metaphysical claims of Christianity.

Back to Gallagher’s essay. He points out that despite the failures of conservative Catholics to advance in the public square, or even to defend successfully the shrinking space given to orthodox Christians in it, the intellectual-industrial complex continues to manufacture arguments:

Unfortunately, the complete reversal from their influential position during the late Bush years does not appear to have dealt much of a blow to the network of broadly “conservative” Catholic think tanks, conferences, and periodicals. Nor does it seem to have done much to dry up the donor monies that keep this network on life support. But in the alliance of conservatives and Catholics, the Catholics no longer hold the reins. The thought leaders have apparently still been thinking, and are certainly still writing, but as the conservative political world came under the influence of the Tea Party, and eventually of the Trump movement, these Catholic energies and activities became ever more extraneous to it. Apart from occasional, marginal, and largely unserious spectacles like Paul Ryan’s invocation of Thomas Aquinas in defense of his fiscal proposals, the dream of a “Catholic moment,” in which the faith might be a major political influence, has quite evaporated. And yet all through Obama’s presidency, these wheels continued to turn—the Catholic network of donors, pundits, and minor political philosophers had become almost self-sustaining, and carried on.

Gallagher says younger Catholics who hold to theological orthodoxy are now looking to pre-modern, anti-liberal sources of political thought within the Catholic tradition, e.g., integralism. And why not?:

On its own terms, a Catholicism more critical of the mainstream of American thought would have little to recommend it to outsiders. Neither Republicans nor Democrats nor libertarians have any real appetite for neoscholastic treatises on political order; there is no base of donors or network of think tanks eager to promote the careers of young “integralist” scholars or assure them of an audience for their writings. But in the wake of the practical failure of the Catholic fusionists, of the closure of the “Catholic moment,” of the arrival in many places of a secular right-wing politics not beholden to Christian sources, now is the time for Catholics to avail themselves of all the sources needed to understand the current crisis—and even, if the possibility emerges, to make a positive contribution to rebuilding from political liberalism’s steady decline.

Read the whole thing.  It’s quite good, and it’s quite important. As much as I disagree with the integralists, they have the virtue of at least understanding that Catholic fusionism is done for. Don’t get me wrong: the late Richard John Neuhaus was, in my estimation, a good man, and an important man. He and the school of thought he led did their very best to square a circle. But we now know that it couldn’t have been done, at least not under the conditions in which they made the attempt.

I don’t believe in integralism, and not only because I’m not a Catholic. While it is true that as an Orthodox Christian, I would find a polity governed by the moral principles of the Roman Catholic Church to be more in keeping with the common good than what we have now, I see no way to accomplish that in the real world without handing over to men like Theodore McCarrick and Donald Wuerl the power of the state. If you really do believe that the world was better off with the State deferential to the will of Catholic bishops, ask yourself how well that worked out for sex abuse victims in pre-2002 Boston.

In a piece he has out today, the Catholic traditionalist Michael Brendan Dougherty speaks to my own more basic concern about the feasibility of integralism:

I would gently suggest that the integralist critics of liberalism may be focusing too much on the theory of liberalism and not enough on the condition of their Church.

We can look at liberalism not just as an ideology of individual rights superintended over by a powerful central authority. It is also as a practical negotiation made among “those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community” within what used to be called Christendom. The Catholic Church in America may have lost the vigor and “fecundity” that Leo XIII observed in it over a century ago. And insofar as it has, it has lost some of its practical bargaining power.

See how the Reverend John I. Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame University, took several contradictory positions on the contraception mandate. His school became a plaintiff, arguing against it, as an infringement of religious liberty, in the highest courts in America. But, faced with dissension among professors, he reversed himself.

This level of dissension on matters of moral doctrine is everywhere in Catholic institutions, not just in universities but on the boards of Catholic health-care and charitable organizations and in diocesan secondary and primary schools. Such dissension characterizes the whole Church in America, a country where the second-largest reported religious affiliation is “ex-Catholic.”

More:

And here then is another modest suggestion. The more urgent need for the Church’s liberty in the United States may not demand an attempt to transcend 500 years of a mistaken political philosophy. Instead it may be a matter of looking at a decades-long problem of disaffection and apostasy. The Church also suffers from a massive scandal of immorality and criminality among its prelates. These crimes, so long unaddressed by higher authorities in the Church, manifestly call into question not just the Church’s commitment to its doctrines but its fitness to lead so many civic institutions and to control so many resources. Are America’s Catholic bishops conducting themselves “as worthy members of the community?” And if not, can we expect their religious liberty to remain sacrosanct?

If the Church recovered its vigor and its authority internally, then the neighbors with whom it lives peaceably, and among whom we do so many good works, would be less inclined to test our commitments, or our patience. The social Kingship of Christ may proceed to impose duties upon all nations, but it begins with the words: Physician, heal thyself.

To put a finer point on it: nobody wants to listen to advice of the Catholic Church on how to govern a civil polity when it cannot even govern itself.  

Integralism is a dead end, theoretically and practically, but then again, so is Catholic fusionism. To bring this full circle, Dougherty’s piece also serves as a response to Prof. Traffas’s High Weigelism. The American churches — Catholic and otherwise — have demonstrably become far more accommodated to the world of liberal modernity than its people want to believe. If we are going to have anything distinctly Christian to offer to the post-Christian world, it will only come after we have recovered our faith and traditions. It’s not only the Catholic Church in America that needs to heal itself before trying to bring the life-saving prescriptions of the Great Physician to a hurting world.

This is the main point of The Benedict Option. We Christians are not simply to run away from a world gone bad, but run towards something very good: a more profound engagement with Scripture, Tradition, and Christian community. Because lay people are not called to the monastic state, we naturally live in the world. If we are going to be salt and light for that world, as we are called to be, then we have to devote ourselves to defending what is distinctly Christian within our own communities, and cultivating authentically Christian lives. Most of us Christians are failing to do that, which is why we are losing our own children to the faith in such large numbers.

Aside from voting defensively in state and national elections, the only serious Christian politics that make sense to me under these conditions are the localist politics of a Vaclav Benda or a Patrick Deneen. As Deneen says in his great book Why Liberalism Failed, we are entering a time of localist political experimentation, in which the faithful have to rediscover and rebuild political community at the local level. And here’s another quote from The Benedict Option: