Benedict’s Critique of Secularized Hope

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic. (Then-Cardinal Ratzinger in "Truth and Tolerance").

(Yes, faithful blog-reader, this quote was also mentioned last month: it bears repetition and meditation!)

A pervasive theme in the thought of Ratzinger-Benedict is his critique of secularized forms of hope, the displacement of trust in God to secular substitutes. This is an important meditation for Advent, season of (capital H) Hope and for our current political climate. (See fine article by Tracey Rowland in Communio, Summer 2008.)

In the USA, secularized hope has taken various shapes:
- Technidolatry: Expectation that science and technology will deliver us from evil. Consider the fascination with embryonic stem cell research. Even as breakthroughs continue with adult stem cells and we can reprogram the same to be as flexible as the embryonic, the hype continues about the infinite promise of destroying embryos. (Today’s Times tells us that there are at least 400,000 embryos in storage from “in vitro” attempts. No one knows what to do with these tiny human creatures, frozen in technological limbo.)
- Overconfidence in the miracle of free elections and free markets is the core of the Neo-conservative creed that propelled us into the mission to bring liberation to Iraq. Blind belief in the beneficence of unregulated, free markets continues to be a pillar of the conservative movement in the USA.

The strongest expression of such illusory, secularized messianism is the Obama phenomena. The euphoria and high expectations surrounding his inauguration defy belief. At times he seems himself to believe the hype as he refers to himself and his cohort as the “Joshua generation.”

Sadly, the entire script brings to mind the 1960 presidency of John F. Kennedy: the glamour, intelligence, confidence, glamour, youthful and athletic energy, Ivy League collaborators, high expectations, glamour, liberal exuberance after eight years under a Republican, historic import, and the glamour. The word glamour indicates appeal, excitement and attractiveness; but the original root implies a deformity of sight so that we see something that is not; i.e. an illusion.

For this Catholic blogster, the memory of JFK evokes a “tragic sense of history.” This “tragic sense” is a realization that an original curse hangs over us, especially in our pretensions to grandeur, and that within time and history the tragic (death, evil, sin, guilt) is invulnerable to human efforts and designs. The Kennedy legacy is sad and tragic on the scale of a Shakespearean drama: the untimely deaths, dark cynicism of Paterfamilias Joseph, unhappy marriages, betrayal of Catholic values, abusive and addictive behavioral patterns, embrace of sexual liberalism and the compensatory political moralism. And yet, the Liberal Creed pays homage to the Kennedy name and family as a fount of unlimited righteousness.

Obama is clearly the heir of this heritage. His installment by the Ted and the family ensured his victory in the primary. He embodies the same liberal ethos and is himself the fruit of developments within the liberal movement after the death of JFK: particularly in his embrace of abortion, feminism, and gay rights.

His cabinet “team of rivals” evokes thoughts of Lincoln but there are problems with this. Lincoln was on the right side of the decisive moral issue of his time; Obama is enthusiastically on the wrong side of the decisive moral issue of our time; in this he is clearly the Anti-Lincoln. Beyond that, Lincoln had a tragic sense of history and a deep sense of humility before the Almighty Lord. Obama demonstrates neither. His campaign and the movement attending it reflect a Pollyannaish expectation of immediate and drastic improvement on all fronts: economic, diplomatic and domestic.

The Liberal Creed, freshly embodied in our President-elect, dismisses the doctrine of original sin; it locates evil in the greedy, ignorant policies of Republicans; it places its hopes in diplomacy, intelligence, progressive economics, tolerance, sexual freedoms, inclusiveness, and an elusive idol called “change.”

Glamour, as illusion, continues its reign: from Kennedy to Clinton to Obama. It is a sad and tragic legacy of denial, over-confidence, sexual license, and the arrogance of intelligence, education and privilege.