Some Notes on Resistance

The Catholic Thing

By Francis X. Maier
By the time this column is read, the 2024 election will be decided. Or nearly so. And since what I say will affect no one's vote, and I don't know the outcome as I write, I can be candid. Simply put: My wife, our youngest son (who lives with us), and I all voted on Tuesday against the Democratic Party ticket at every level. The Republican candidate for president was an eccentric, blustering narcissist. But his opponent, her political party, her running mate, her celebrity supporters, and the corrupt national media that consistently covered for her inadequacies were worse.
Her party branded scores of millions of ordinary citizens as "garbage" and "fascist." This, while cynically calling for national unity. And the Democratic candidate's addiction to abortion was both defining and repugnant.
We all have a duty to follow our conscience. Many good people no doubt found a way to vote differently from my own family. That's for God to judge. But the right to kill a developing human child in the womb is now, quite clearly, a core value of America's "progressive" elite. The party of Al Smith and the once-Catholic working class is now the party of abortion clinics; the party that turns the chopping up of an unborn human being into a private real estate issue.
Some quiet reading of Genesis 19 might be in order
As Christians, we can't avoid political engagement. It's a duty of our citizenship. More importantly, we have a Gospel obligation to be a leaven for good in society. Politics involves the acquisition and use of power, and power always has a moral dimension. And law always embodies someone's idea of right and wrong.
So we can never excuse ourselves from working for what's virtuous and true in the public square. But politics is never the central concern of a Christian life. It's always a cocktail of imperfections and compromises. And - as thinkers from Jean-Marie Lustiger to Leszek Kolakowski have argued - it can easily become a seductive form of idolatry. Which is exactly the direction of our current culture.
In his 1986 essay "The Idolatry of Politics" (collected here), Kolakowski noted that America's founding ideals - that all men are created equal; that all have inalienable rights endowed by a Creator - today "appear either patently false or meaningless and superstitious to most of the great men who keep shaping our imagination."
Too many of the men and women who lead us don't really believe what they claim to believe. And they subvert words like "democracy" to mean something quite different from a traditional popular understanding.
Modern American life still has a residue of Biblical faith. Many millions of Americans are religious believers. But our nation's heart, and the spirit of its leadership class, are increasingly technocratic and materialist. In effect, we live in the most materialist culture in history; a culture of practical atheism where God is not repudiated, but instead rendered irrelevant by other appetites and concerns.
Absent God, nature (including the human body) becomes dead matter waiting to be manipulated, and human life lacks transcendent purpose. Politics fills the void of meaning left by the exit of the divine. And technology offers the tools to achieve a more perfectly rational, man-made ordering of society.
The result is a kind of soft totalitarianism. Modern society - so the reasoning goes - is too complex to bear populist confusion and bickering. Leadership must therefore fall to an enlightened expert class that will consult the masses but ultimately knows what's best for everyone else - whether they agree or not.
I've simplified our current political reality here, but not unfairly. Christopher Lasch, among others, argued much the same more than thirty years ago. My point is simply this: Too many Catholics and other Christians think we're living in one nation with a familiar set of rules, when we're really living in quite another.
The go-to Catholic posture in this country, espec...