Liberal Catholicisms: Three Types

Rod Dreher, in a recent blog, predicts the demise of liberal Christianity. He has a good point about the internal contradictions and instability of liberal Christianity in the face of an aggressive secularism. But he underestimates the resiliency and durability of religious liberalism in our culture and he fails to distinguish its types. In the Catholic world that I know, there have been three distinct liberalisms. First, there was the wholesome Catholic liberalism of 1945-65 in which we were raised: vigorous in defense of the working man, of the poor, and of civil rights for blacks;  patriotic and yet internationalist and unflinchingly anti-communist. Most of all, it was absolutely, if inarticulately, pro-family and pro-life.  That liberalism died around 1970 and was survived by two descendants which we will call militant and modest liberalism. The first is more cultural and moral, the second primarily political. The first comes out of the sexual revolution, the second attempts to perpetuate the earlier wholesome version by ignoring The Culture War. The first issues from a philosophy of the Sovereign Self as autonomous and free to assert its own choice and values; the second draws, at least indirectly, from a concern for the common good. The militant is fanatically committed to an ethos of sterile, which is to say contraceptive, sex and all its correlates: abortion as backup, homosexual marriage, easy divorce, recreational pornography, cohabitation and sexual license. The modest liberal is often personally traditional, sometimes admirably so, but retreats from defending that way of life in the public square and therefore defers to, even collaborates with, the militant. The later is viciously condemnatory of the Catholic Church as misogynist, homophobic, regressive, authoritarian, and repressive. The modest is more patient, deferential and respectful of the Church. Abstaining from The Culture War he sides with neither tradition nor liberation. He inherits from the earlier generations a quietness, a shyness and a reticence about sexuality that was admirable in a different time. To handle the moral dissonance, he practices avoidance and denial: professes to be pro-life but votes unfailingly pro-choice and despises the pro-life movement as moralistic and arrogant and in league with "The Right." Largely uncertain about contraception, legal abortion homosexuality, he relegates it to the private sphere and thus sides, in practice, with the militant. Tentative and uncertain on Catholic truth and practice, he apes the militant in a rigid, dogmatic allegiance to leftist positions on taxes, guns, immigrants, the death penalty, and the entire litany. And so the two live, more or less happily together, in the Democratic Party. The modest liberal in effect enables the cultural agenda of the militant as it looks away in denial. In the hard game of politics, then, the modest liberal sides with its militant sibling against traditional Christian values. Considered in itself, modest Catholic liberalism is a continuation of an honorable tradition that vigorously advocates for the poor and marginalized and for the common good as it assumes a quietness and reticence about matters of sex and marriage. But in the post-1960s context it has become complicit with an agenda that deconstructs family, gender, chastity and spousal fidelity. Let us consider the Jesuit order which is often viewed, somewhat unfairly, as heretical. The reality, in my view, is more complex. My (more than anecdotal but less than rigorously statistical) experience is that no more than 20% of Jesuits are militantly liberal in an articulate and forceful rejection of the Church's teaching. Perhaps 10% are similarly articulate and forceful in their defense of our traditions. These last, however, are largely marginalized since the remaining 70% are modest liberals: leaning left politically but culturally uncertain, indifferent or removed. As a result, the leading Jesuit institutions (America magazine, Georgetown, Boston College, etc.) are overwhelming controlled by the critical mass of militants like Thomas Reese and James Martin. Pope Francis is complex and contradictory but certainly in his all-important appointments of bishops and cardinals he is a modest liberal who has made his peace pact with the militants and has no taste for the Culture War. He and his appointees are concerned about the environment, open borders for refugees, and a redistribution of wealth. They prefer not to engage with the pandemic of sexual license, pornography, infidelity, lustful objectification of women and the decomposition of family, spousality, paternity and maternity. Theirs is a soft materialism that trusts that the family structure will be restored by higher minimum wage and capital gains tax. The militant version is flat-out a contradiction of the Catholic way of life. The modest is an attempt to split the difference. It is a thin religion, blending seamlessly into the mainstream as it condemns war and champions the earth and avoids abortion. "Catholic Lite"...it is feeble in its resistance to elite, hegemonic culture and cannot protect its young from the allure of a careerist, materialist and sexually liberated lifestyle. In time, it will largely (as Dreher predicts) drift into secular liberalism. Mainstream Protestant churches are a stop-over as the militant becomes increasingly secular. The Catholic Church will continue, in the foreseeable future, to fill up with modest liberals, a la the lieutenants of Pope Francis, since the religious instinct itself as well as the noble liberal instincts (inclusion, care for the needy, yearning for peace, care of nature, etc) are both irrepressible. We can only hope that this modest liberalism will find in its heart the fortitude, the certainty, the magnanimity and the sense of purpose to defend family, fidelity, fecundity and chastity against its wicked twin.