I'll Believe in Anything
A Critique of Post-Liberal Catholicism, in Two Parts
In the past decade, there has been a major shift on the religious right in America. This shift can be illustrated by looking at the ideological trajectory of R. R. “Rusty” Reno, editor of First Things magazine.
The first time I met Rusty was circa 2012. He was giving a talk at an event in DC. The gay marriage phase of the American culture war was in full swing, and the Windsor decision had just been passed down. Rusty was trying to find a path forward for the theocon movement, and his proposed answer was a retreat from culture war politics into a kind of religiously informed libertarianism. This meant ceding ground on cultural issues to the left, amplifying the separation between religious marriage and legal unions, and focusing instead on something like free markets and personal liberties.
By the time I was working for Rusty in 2016, his mindset had shifted away from libertarianism, but he still wasn’t sure what was next. I remember he used to wander into my office and ruminate about “What’s going on?” and what the big picture was. There was a shift toward ethno-nationalism. He became more antagonistic on issues related to race and immigration. In 2016 he published Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, which suggested that only a re-invigorated public Christianity could save America from the deleterious effects of secularism on government and culture. It wasn’t entirely a Christian Nationalist perspective, but he was getting there.
In 2019, Rusty published another book, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West. This was his attempt at a big picture assessment of the fate of western society in the wake of World War II. He tells a story about how the shock of two world wars made people squeamish about strong particular commitments (to a faith, a country, to particular and universal truth claims) and led the West down a path of self-emptying that more or less equates to Nietzsche’s story about the “last men”. He suggests that only a return to strong, exclusive, particular commitments (what he calls “the strong gods”) can save the west from its moribund liberalism.
Knowing Rusty personally and having a sense of his own intellectual development, the shift towards particularism and this lionization of the “strong gods” is interesting. If someone had handed me Strong Gods in 2012, when I first met him, I would have agreed with his thesis wholeheartedly. But, having walked the road he imagines and attempted to make the “strong gods” work, I don’t think the story he’s telling is very compelling. I wonder, in fact, to what extent it is even possible for someone like Rusty to believe in this story himself.
In what follows I’m going to tell the story of my own search for commitment and grounding during my foray into post-liberal Catholicism from 2009 to 2019. I’ve told this story before in various ways, but this time I’m going to focus on its more generic, intellectual aspects, because I think my experience searching for a particular set of commitments is illustrative of the problems with “strong gods” style post-liberal christianity at large.
In the second part of the essay, after I’ve told my own story, I’m going to map aspects of my own experience onto the problems faced by post-liberal Catholics more generally, with the aim of showing why the fantasy of a renewed commitment to integralism or christo-nationalism, or whatever post-liberal folks like Rusty are interested in these days, does not work as a viable path forward for religious conservatives.
In short, while I can understand why Rusty might think that “strong gods” type commitments would offer a way out of the confusion of a liberal, pluralistic society, ultimately no such “return” is possible without a massive amount of intellectual dishonesty. In my opinion, the fantasy of a renewed particularism grounding a post-liberal society is basically unachievable.
Part I: An Individual Experience
When I was 20 years old I had what philosophers call an “existential crisis”.
Such things aren’t uncommon for kids in their early 20s. Many of us, around that age, find ourselves profoundly disoriented by the conflict between new experiences and old beliefs, and feel the need to make drastic choices that provide fresh answers to big questions like “Who am I?” and “What is my place in the world?”
Over the previous few years I had read huge quantities of western philosophy, with special attention to the work of Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. More recently I’d been reading Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. These men represented, as far as I was concerned, the end of philosophy. I could not see a path beyond them. Their critiques and inversions, the way they dissolved the platonic unities and aspirations that had seemed to me previously to ground the philosophical search for truth, left me in a state of genuine perplexity.
This isn’t to say that I disliked their work. On the contrary, I found it brilliant and fascinating. But when considered as something other than an intellectual exercise, the dissolution of the western metaphysical tradition, the critique of logocentrism, the reduction of every truth and ideal to networks of power relations and shifting, historically contingent relationships between arbitrarily distinguished networks of signs… postmodernism left me with nowhere clear to stand.
I emphasize “me” in that last sentence because at some point or other philosophical inquiry stops being a matter of tinkering with arguments and ideas, and becomes something very personal. A philosophical system is meant to provide the vocabulary with which one situates oneself in the world at large. It’s supposed to answer big questions like “What was I made for?” and “How should I know what to believe?” and “What is the world, after all?” While I found the postmodern thinkers I’d read exhilarating (especially Foucault), they gave me no tools with which to answer those questions.
And I wanted answers. I wanted them because, despite my philosophical education and all my reading, my sense of personal identity was still deeply tied to the religion I was raised in. I needed to find a way to retain that commitment to my family and their religious beliefs. I believed very strongly that dissolving that sense of identity would leave me stranded, marooned in an ocean of competing possibilities, none of which were sufficiently evident to justify a new commitment, or prevent me from drifting off into an abyss of nihilistic despair.
So, at the end of all my philosophical journeying, I returned to Heidegger and Kierkegaard. These two seemed to have answers to my problem, and throughout that year I kept turning their work over in my mind, specifically Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous epistolary novel Repetition and Division II of Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Newman
Both of these texts deal in different ways with the problem of cultivating a sense of groundedness or meaning after confronting the chaotic arbitrariness of one’s situation in life. For Kierkegaard, the problem is presented semi-comically through the story of a man who goes on special trip to Berlin, and then attempts to re-live his trip several years later (disastrously). He then raises a question: How is it possible to repeat a past choice or an experience? How can one recover and reinforce the meaningfulness of a belief, an event, an ideal, when every subsequent iteration of that thing is, due to the inherent flux of life, different from what came before? How do we find a stable commitment to build our lives around?
In Heidegger the idea appears somewhat differently. Heidegger introduces the concept of Geworfenheit or “thrownness”, which is the experience we have as being always-already situated in an unchosen set of circumstances—a mood, an identity, a historical context, a set of relationships, etc. Our thrownness is something we take for granted without noticing or questioning it, until, at some point, we start to see with anxiety the vast array of alternative possibilities, and the finitude of our own existence. This anxiety leads us to confront both the basically arbitrary character of our ongoing historical situation in life (as unchosen and unjustifiable) as well as the inevitability and specificity of our own death. Within the horizon of this confrontation with the contingency and finitude of my existence, I experience a radical absence of orientation. This is, in essence, what an existential crisis is.
Both philosophers offer more or less the same answer to the problem of existential anxiety. The solution is basically this: in the face of the arbitrariness and groundlessness of existence, it falls to each of us as individuals, once we have confronted our own thrownness, to make a choice.
The path forward Heidegger offers, which is more or less analogous to what Kierkegaard proposes, is to choose a hero or a tradition, some ideal, some set of meanings and customs, and throw ourselves into those with the awareness that, even though we cannot escape our thrownness, we can be resolute in our choice. This set of particular commitments is no longer blindly received the way our naive prejudices and context were. Instead, we intentionally cultivate behaviors and meanings, knowing that each successive repetition, each re-commitment or re-enforcement of those behaviors and meanings, adds to and enriches them, so that they become a kind of historically real tradition in which we live. In this way it is possible to authentically repeat meaningful experiences even though they are always different, and to cultivate meaning in the face of a thrown situation which is fundamentally arbitrary.
As I tried to figure out what was next for me and how to frame a worldview that made sense of it all, I started to go to Catholic Sunday mass. And it occurred to me that Catholic liturgy was exactly the sort of repeatable, meaning-laden activity that Heidegger and Kierkegaard were describing. It was something that was slightly different every time, but was enriched perpetually by those slight variations in meaning, affect, receptivity, context, etc. A connection started to grow in my mind—between the repeatability of an authentically resolute way of living (in Heidegger) and the repeatability of a religious tradition.
The summer before I turned 21, a friend introduced me to John Henry Newman, and this more or less sealed the deal for me. I wanted to find a way to intellectually justify staying Christian. I recognized the importance of repeatability and traditions of meaning. I also believed that one’s sense of meaning, on an ontological scale, had to be received and could not simply be made up. In other words, the hero or tradition one chose needed to be found rather than created, because the authority of a tradition (and therefore the basis of its repeatability) collapses if it is solely grounded in one’s own inventiveness or creativity.
Newman provided a narrative that explained away the numerous evident discontinuities in Christian theology and practice, from the apostolic era to the present. In his book An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, he draws an analogy between the Gospel as taught by Christ and an acorn. The acorn contains, in principle, the full pattern of an oak tree, and there is nothing present in the nature of the oak tree which was not present (even if only by potentiality) in the un-sprouted acorn. In the same way, the tradition of Christianity is a tradition of developing the ramifications of the gospel, spelling them out, defining the limits of belief, and drawing inferences from previously accepted beliefs to their necessary corollaries and conclusions. This is how it is possible to have apparently new doctrines surfacing centuries after Christ. As Newman puts it, there is nothing that an orthodox Christian believes today which, would not be accepted by St. Paul, if we could have proposed it to him in the first century (with all the necessary explanations and distinctions).
For Newman, after his own encounters with the theology of the early church and his own personal struggles with orthodoxy and denominational differences, it seemed clear that the version of Christianity which represented the oak tree fully grown, i.e. the version which was fully in continuity with Church established by Christ and the Apostles in the first century, was Roman Catholicism. I bought into this reasoning, found the narrative compelling, and so I made my choice and I became Catholic.
Tradition, Authority, Thomism
Once one has made the leap into a specific faith, a tradition, a set of repeatable meanings and behaviors, things get a lot easier. The sense of existential disorientation recedes and suddenly the world seems much more approachable, almost like a problem that can and will be solved. In the wake of my decision to become Catholic a number of discoveries followed, helping to increase my sense of intellectual groundedness. It was all very gratifying.
One of the first things I discovered was that, as Newman described, there was indeed a long and rich intellectual tradition within Catholicism, and one could dig through it to find all sorts of opinions and doctrines, to resolve tensions and answer questions. There was no end of material to draw on when trying to figure things out, and this sense of the vastness of the tradition provided me with a secondhand confidence in my beliefs: if so many people before me had thought so long and so deeply about all this stuff, then any question or difficulty that arises must have an answer somewhere. Every intellectual difficulty must have been solved. A solution is out there; you just have to look for it.
The second thing I discovered was the tradition of “magisterial teaching”, which is to say the set of documents issued by authoritative bodies within the church (the popes, ecumenical councils, major synods, etc.) which laid out core definitions, creeds, and declarations on matters related to faith and morals. The availability of this tradition of (ostensibly, more or less) infallible teaching documents meant that there was a backstop against interpretive waffling, and that the ambiguities inherent in the text of the bible and the contents of written and unwritten tradition were circumscribed by a living authority responsible for deciding what was and was not part of the orthodox faith.
Finally, about a year after my decision to convert, I discovered the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Thomism has a unique place in the Catholic intellectual tradition. More than any other intellectual school, the philosophical and theological views of Thomas Aquinas and his followers represent a complete system including an intricate moral theory, a sophisticated metaphysics, and a thorough reconciliation of all the core doctrines and tensions within orthodox Catholicism. While Thomism is not in a strict sense the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, it has occupied something close to this role time and again, and to some extent the metaphysical theories of St. Thomas are baked in to Catholic dogma around things like the sacraments, grace, and sin.
This is to say that, by discovering Thomism and becoming invested in it, I had found the intellectual theory that grounded my chosen, repeatable tradition. And so, the deeper I got into this theory, the more I immersed myself in the intellectual system implied by it all, the more that existential choice or leap of faith by which I had landed here faded from consciousness. It ceased to be important. The tradition itself became the grounding of my conviction, and I stopped asking why, in an existential sense, I believed it all in the first place.
Bracketing Doubts
I’d like to highlight two important moments during this process that illustrate the attitude with which I chose to immerse myself in the tradition. The first was when I was 22. It was the summer before I started my graduate program in theology, and as preparation I decided to read the first volume of Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, which was written as a ground-up defense of Catholic theology that could be read by muslims (or other non-Christians) and convince them to believe, if not the supernatural portions of the faith, at least the praeambula fidei, those articles of Christian belief demonstrable through rational argument alone.
As mentioned earlier, I had dedicated a lot of time in my teenage years to reading the work of Immanuel Kant, especially his Critique of Pure Reason, which is largely devoted to demolishing the sort of metaphysical arguments Thomas makes in the Summa Contra Gentiles. Kant makes a fairly strong case against the possibility of ever performing such demonstrations, and suggests that all such arguments are based on subtly illegitimate extensions or misappropriations of empirical concepts to an alien, non-empirical domain.
When I read Aquinas, I thought about this. It occurred to me that a Kantian critical assessment of Thomas’s reasoning would find it all riddled with fallacies and equivocations. But I shelved that thought, and I took on authority the notion that Thomas was a great and enlightened thinker, and that I should therefore trust implicitly the correctness of his arguments even if in particular cases they did not seem clear or valid to me.
This choice—to allow an appeal to authority to stand as a placeholder for the validity of arguments I did not find convincing—became fairly commonplace. And it is an important choice to take note of, because it allowed me to operate within a sort of free floating intellectual framework with the pretense that it was all rationally demonstrable, despite never having actually encountered substantially compelling demonstrations.
But, amusingly, one of the articles of faith for Catholics is that the praeambula (beliefs like the existence of God) are demonstrable through mere reason, without appeals to faith. And so, by faith, one ends up believing in the validity of arguments, even though one cannot personally grasp how exactly they work out.
Forming an Intellectual Silo
The second experience I’d like to highlight came in the second year of my graduate studies. I was working on my master’s thesis, which was a comparison between Michel Foucault and Thomas Aquinas on the nature of intelligibility (what it means to know or understand things). Part of my thesis involved giving a thomistic defense of the possibility of knowledge, which I framed as a defense of the possibility of making determinate references to things in reality.
According to Thomas the “essence” of anything we know is somehow abstracted by the intellect and imprinted upon the soul, so that the soul “becomes” the thing known. I was really perturbed working through this theory, because I could not shake the postmodern sense that these “essences” were all basically arbitrary inventions of the mind. I remember going to a priest for confession and telling him that I was losing faith in the intelligibility of things, that I wasn’t really sure that any of these concepts were real, and it wasn’t all just an arbitrary jumble of socially conditioned behaviors.
The priest was very kind to me and told me to keep following my ideas through to the end. I did, and I came up with a half-hearted argument that went something like this: even if you can’t prove that knowledge of the Thomistic variety is real, in order to play the sort of philosophical game I want to play (and Thomists want to play), it’s necessary to presuppose that it is real. So anyone, like a Foucault or a Derrida, who objects to such ideas about the possibility and nature of knowledge, is free to do so, but by their rejection they exclude themselves from playing the game we’re playing. We cannot, in effect, meaningfully talk to each other across the divide.
While this may seem like an extremely abstruse and technical topic, it has major implications. It amounts to giving up on the idea that people outside my chosen intellectual tradition can agree about or even find intelligible the claims and arguments made within that tradition. It’s a gesture that effectively silos participants in the philosophical/theological game I was playing. But I was OK with being siloed, as long as it allowed me to feel like I had intellectually satisfied the need for an “argument” in defense of my “first principles”. This is to say, I was able to keep believing that all of this stuff was rationally demonstrable, at the cost of creating barriers that would prevent me from engaging with anyone who had fundamental disagreements with my epistemic and metaphysical commitments.
In both of these cases, the pretense of intellectual rigor was sustained by a choice not to deal with doubts or criticisms I knew existed from outside. That is to say: I allowed myself to foster confidence in the correctness and coherence of my belief system, my chosen tradition, at the expense of disassociating from serious engagement with people who rejected that tradition.
Competing Traditions, Deviant Authorities
As time went on, my familiarity with the actual history of Catholicism deepened, as did my understanding of the ins and outs of Thomism and the magisterial tradition. This introduced a few new problems.
First, it became clear to me that there were a variety of alternative traditions active in the Catholic Church, and that in fact the dominant theological viewpoint within American Catholicism wasn’t in any real sense a “traditional” catholicism and had nothing to do with Thomism, but was a sort of patchwork of social justice projects, therapeutic spirituality, pious customs, and issue-specific moral commitments. Realizing this was scandalous, but I was armed with Newman’s theory of Development and I believed that the “true faith” was the one in continuity with the apostolic tradition, which I thought ought to be easily discernible from the history of magisterial teaching and church traditions.
But the deeper I dug into that history, the more remote the “true faith” seemed to become from the Catholicism being practiced around me. Catholicism throughout the medieval and early modern periods had a brutal and grim outlook on subjects like sin and salvation, was intensely legalistic, and celebrated a degree of pious austerity and mortification most people today would find clinically deranged. I wrestled with that. I wasn’t sure how to make sense of the reality that most catholics were probably damned, based on the version of traditional Catholicism I found in my reading, not to mention virtually all non-Catholics. It was a troubling mystery, but one I assumed (vaguely) had been solved, somehow.
The second difficulty arose as Pope Francis settled into his role in the Vatican and began shaking things up. It had already been clear to me under Pope Benedict XVI that the Church was in a period of lax deviation from good praxis, and that orthodoxy wasn’t being enforced from the top as much as it should have been. With Pope Francis, this sense of lax enforcement grew into a sense of actual and intentional deviation from the “true faith” as I understood it. Small changes kept happening, things that were scandalous and confusing and threatened the role of the Papacy as anchor of magisterial authority. I had a slow-motion crisis of faith that lasted several years, as I struggled to reconcile the evident heterodoxy of the Pope with his role in church doctrine as the final arbiter of orthodoxy and supreme judge of the Church on earth.
Bad Arguments, Missing Arguments
The third difficulty arose quietly around 2015, and it’s something I’ve written about at length elsewhere. As a personal project, I wanted to construct a commentary on St. Thomas’s Summa Theologiae that would fully flesh out his arguments in a way that was intelligible and compelling to a modern secular audience. In other words, I wanted to overcome at least in part the siloing that I’d settled for previously. I trusted in the authority of St. Thomas as a great thinker and believed that, however unclear or apparently fallacious an argument might be, it must be possible to interpret it in a way that was sound and led to insight about the matter at hand.
In the process of writing my commentary, I got stuck on Aquinas’s “Five Ways” of proving the existence of God. Specifically the fourth way, which does the most substantial work in getting us the kind of God generally described by western monotheisms influenced by Plato (including Christianity), i.e., a God that represents the maximum of all good qualities, and is Goodness itself. I spent weeks looking at commentaries, trying various approaches, hoping to make the argument work. In the end I couldn’t find a way to construe it that wasn’t plainly fallacious, so I set aside the project and turned to other things instead.
This difficulty proving the “naturally knowable” preambles that ought (according to the Church’s own dogma) to have been evident to everyone was somewhat troubling. But it went along with a different difficulty that was much less obscure. In the summer of 2015 the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, establishing a national constitutional right for same sex couples to marry, and ending a years-long battle in the public square over the morality of homosexuality and the extent to which it should be publicly tolerated.
The moral universe I had lived in my whole life, both as a child in an evangelical household and later as a conservative catholic, regarded homosexuality with profound horror. It was represented to me as intrinsically connected to child abuse, deeply perverted, monstrous.
As someone who (privately) “struggled with same-sex attraction” (to use the lingo popular among conservative Catholics), one of the things I hoped for from my conversion to Catholicism was that I would somehow become heterosexual. That never happened. But what I did get from my chosen tradition was an array of authoritative magisterial teachings condemning homosexuality, describing it as intrinsically disordered, a form of affective immaturity, and something that precluded one from participating in active ministry in the Church.
This was, paradoxically, gratifying to me when I converted. I was pleased to find that the authorities within the Church had not adjusted to the shifting, liberal morals of the prevailing culture. This lent credibility to Catholicism and made the papacy seem more legitimate to me, because it offered “hard teachings” (as opposed to the surrounding liberal culture, which sought to accommodate everyone and everything). As the years passed, I enjoyed “hard teachings”—things that entailed major discomfort, scandal, suffering, inconvenience, etc. for believers—more and more, because they seemed instances of contradiction that showed Catholicism to be “not of this world” and somehow divine in origin. Catholicism required us to make sacrifices for the Truth, to be martyrs in our own small ways. As Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”
But, aside from a magical orientation change and an authoritative condemnation of gayness, the thing I hoped for from Catholicism with respect to homosexuality was some sort of cogent set of arguments or reasoning about why it was wrong. After all, much like the praeambula fidei regarding the existence of God, Catholicism officially taught that its teachings on sexual ethics were part of the “natural law”, written on our hearts. It was, allegedly, naturally evident to everyone that gay sex was gravely evil. So I went searching for arguments that would make that case.
The arguments, in short, did not exist. The most popular argument was and remains something called the “perverted faculty” argument, which is so patently fallacious I won’t bother giving an account of it here. It depends on just-so reasoning that requires one to suspend all critical thought or imagination and makes use of on an arbitrary enumeration of “faculties” assigned to various human organs.
The other popular argument, which was made publicly during the buildup to the Obergefell decision, was devised by Robert P. George of Princeton University. It depended on the (biologically bizarre) notion that a copulating heterosexual couple somehow becomes a single organism during intercourse, and that homosexual couples are engaged in a deviant imitation of a “one-flesh union” when they have sex. This was meant to justify drawing a hard distinction between heterosexual marriage and same-sex unions.
What disturbed me in all this was not exactly that the arguments didn’t exist, but that Catholicism was very clear about the self-evidence of these “natural law” moral claims, and yet when they were proposed to non-Christians (and even many Christians), fewer and fewer people seemed to find them convincing at all. Much like my struggle over the deviation of current Catholic praxis and doctrine from the “true faith” of traditional Catholicism, this evident unintelligibility of the “natural law” to ordinary people seemed to indicate a disturbingly widespread corruption of the conscience of the general public. It seemed impossible to imagine the sort of great conversion wished for by the Church and envisioned in the Gospels. How could all of mankind become Catholic if nobody found even the basic, non-supernatural stuff plausible?
Loss of Faith
After about a decade of immersion, close study, and grappling with all the tensions I’ve mentioned already, I was pretty burned out. It had become increasingly clear to me that the authorities in the Church were not interested in promoting the “true faith” I had been educated into. I increasingly suspected that most bishops didn’t actually believe at all, or believed something very different from “orthodox”, by-the-book Catholicism.
More disturbingly, I kept discovering evidence that the Catholic tradition was not as continuous or consistent as it claimed to be, and found a number of ruptures that were very difficult to justify but had been broadly forgotten or papered over after the fact. And the deeper I got into Thomism, the less convinced I was that it all actually held together. In practice, Thomists had a bizarre fixation on the philosophy of Aristotle, and existed in an intellectual silo of their own making, almost completely devoid of contact with the broader philosophical landscape.
I still believed that somehow solutions to my problems were out there, but they didn’t seem to be forthcoming, and I felt increasingly alienated by the practice of my faith on a day to day basis.
Finally, in 2019 I admitted to myself that it was time to make a choice. Secularism was just more plausible to me at that point. The number of absurd excuses I’d made for the Catholic Church in order to try and make my commitment stick and get it to all hold together seemed unjustifiable. I quit going to mass and quit believing, and settled into a cheerfully agnostic pragmatism. One big difference this change in belief made for my life was that I stopped being so alienated from non-Catholics. I no longer needed to mentally shield myself from the opinions or evidence of non-believers. I didn’t need to construct narratives about why people with alternative lifestyles or histories were morally bankrupt or secretly miserable. And I didn’t need to keep pretending I wasn’t gay.
Strangely, that loss of meaning I’d been so afraid of when I was 20 never happened. I found that I still had plenty of intellectual resources to draw on to tell my own story about who I was, what it was all for, and so on. And, now that I wasn’t beholden to a monolithic commitment to a received tradition, I could be a lot more flexible about it all, open to learning, and better at adapting.
Part II: The Story of Post-Liberal Catholicism
So far I have been telling my own story, the story of my arrival at a crisis of belief, the commitment to a particular religious tradition, my subsequent grappling with that tradition, and eventual departure.
But, in a funny way, my story is paradigmatic for a certain kind of post-liberal experience of Christianity at large. So in this next part, I would like to retell the story, in very broad strokes, on a different scale, and illustrate how the problems I was grappling with personally between 2009 and 2019 are in fact problems that have plagued a certain kind of educated Christian since the 19th century.
Christianity Loses its Voice
Intellectual developments in the 19th century went hand in hand with an overall transformation of Christianity. The advent of higher criticism in biblical scholarship, the work of Charles Darwin on natural history, and the shift toward theologies grounded in philosophical idealism more or less detached Christian doctrine from its traditional grip on reality, and ended the unambiguous metaphysical universalism it had inherited from Plato.
Christianity lost its ability to speak authoritatively about science, nature, and history—both natural history and even the events narrated in the bible. The consensus around the authorship and authenticity of various portions of the bible dissolved as theologians grappled with textual discontinuities, redactions, and evident contradictions. This did significant damage to the Christian belief in scripture’s divine origins and inerrancy, undercutting the authority of the Bible as a whole. The social gospel became ascendant. Dogmatic belief became comparatively unimportant, and it was increasingly accepted (due to the decline of metaphysics) that traditional metaphysical questions about God, grace, predestination, and the rest were of dubious philosophical legitimacy and broadly unanswerable.
There were exceptions to these trends among some protestant denominations (and Catholicism), but western society at large rapidly secularized, and Christianity broadly liberalized into a tolerant, non-dogmatic form of socially conscious spirituality, open to alternative viewpoints, less secure in its own intellectual commitments. The holdout forms of Christianity, especially Catholicism, maintained their previous intellectual stances largely by refusing all engagement with the new scholarship and ideas. This created tensions which erupted, for example, in the Catholic Modernist movement, as scholars deviated from the prescribed orthodoxy by trying to come to terms with the intellectual developments in society at large.
Through the course of the 20th century, it became clear that the refusal to engage with the new scholarship and new philosophies was merely a way of delaying the inevitable. The modernists were put down under Pius X in the early 1900s, but re-emerged again and, by the 1960s had become the dominant intellectual force within Roman Catholicism, eventually displacing the traditionalists and bringing about a full-scale rapprochement with modern biblical scholarship and philosophy, effectively demolishing the reactionary Catholic intellectual tradition from within.
As secularization and the increasing occurrence of multi-ethnic, multi-cultural societies made people more sharply aware of the arbitrariness of their core beliefs, a new variety of philosophical reflection emerged that was interested in exploring what exactly one should do once one has confronted the groundlessness of one’s moral formation and presuppositions about the world. Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus (to give three major examples) each had their own take on this problem and each in his own way insisted that the solution was a sort of self-assertion, the radical freedom of the individual to choose a meaning to live by.
For educated Christians, once the metaphysical pretext for belief, the apparent self-evidence of God’s existence, and the intrinsic authority of Scripture had been dissolved by Kant, Darwin and the rest, believing became more of a radical choice. It was no longer something one could necessarily reduce to “the obvious”, and wasn’t something that could be argued to from mere reason. One had to choose, and the choice involved not only the choice to believe, but also the selection of a particular tradition, an authority, a set of practices and a community to participate in. And the more educated one was, the more exposure one had to alternative traditions, authorities, etc., the more arbitrary that choice would tend to feel.
Private Faith
Within the context of a broadly liberal society, and with the understanding that one’s choice of belief is radically personal, something that cannot be argued to or demonstrated publicly, religious belief functions unobtrusively. Religion is a private matter. It may emerge into public view on rare occasions, but never as something prescriptive for non-believers. There is an understanding that the basis of religious belief is personal, and that in a free society no one should be compelled to abide in public by the dictates of someone else’s private beliefs, especially not when those private beliefs are motivated by an unjustifiable radical choice to have faith.
But in Christianity specifically there is a tension between this liberal privateness of chosen belief and the inherently public ambitions of the religious community. Jesus says to “make disciples of all nations”. God functions as public lawgiver, the Lord of All. Platonism and the Platonic God are, to some extent, indelibly etched into Christianity and the Christian tradition.
And so, even within religious communities constituted by the radical choice to foster and maintain a private belief in an unjustified and unjustifiable faith, and to commit to a particular tradition, we find an almost automatic aspiration to shift backwards, from private religion into a public faith, a faith that re-claims the metaphysical and totalizing aspirations of pre-modern, pre-liberal Christianity.
Liberals and Anti-Liberals
Broadly speaking, educated Christians tend to relate to their faith in either of two ways.
On one hand they can take the liberal attitude which sees Christianity as primarily a moral teaching, which offers spirituality (prayer, a sense of connection to God, communal worship) to those who desire it, but without the eschatological dogmas or emphasis on sin and judgment so central to non-liberal Christianity. For such people, because religion is about the love we have for our neighbor, and because God is abundantly merciful and loving, grace and kindness are the main dictates, and tolerance is the general attitude toward non-believers. Liberal christianity tends to come with a large dose of epistemic humility and openness to the idea that God discloses himself to people in many, sometimes apparently contradictory, ways.
On the other hand, for those who approach Christianity with an eye toward intellectual coherence and authority, it matters that their beliefs and practices cohere with an overall worldview. Such Christians want to have answers to theological questions, and they want the right answers. They want to know the Truth about God, the truth about what’s right and wrong. They see religion as a bulwark of orthodoxy and orthopraxis against a world corrupted by sin and the devil. They take seriously the doctrines of the New Testament and their particular religious tradition, and they attempt (more or less) to reconcile these things with their knowledge of the world at large. On a metaphysical level, even if their ideas are not spelled out in a particular philosophical system, such Christians have a strong commitment to a unitary conception of Truth. Truth is singular, universal, eternal, and we are all accountable to it.
For the latter group, which I’ll call “anti-liberal”, the totalizing impulse of their beliefs and the certainty with which they approach their particular religious convictions tend to make them obtrusive in a pluralistic society. The more one takes one’s religious commitments as universally normative and absolutely true, and the more dogmatic one’s chosen tradition is, the more necessary it will seem to adherents of that tradition that they impose their norms and beliefs on people outside their community. After all, Jesus died for all of humanity, and without faith in him no one will be saved.
For Americans, this is to a large extent an ever-present experience we share. Many of our Christian friends and neighbors tend to feel the need to proselytize, and they tend to try to push their beliefs into the public square, including schools and government.
Phantom Arguments
From here forward I’m going to focus specifically on anti-liberal Catholicism, since that’s where my experience is most extensive, though what I’m going to say is no doubt applicable in part to other anti-liberal forms of Christianity.
Catholicism in its official doctrine offers a variety of claims not just about “faith and morals”, but also about the specific manner in which some things are known (e.g. by reason alone vs. through divine revelation). I call these “epistemic meta-doctrines”, because they’re doctrines about the epistemic status of other doctrines. Some such claims are baked into Catholic dogmatic theology (e.g. Vatican I’s teaching on the demonstrability of the existence of God), while others are so constant within the catholic theological tradition that their removal is almost unimaginable (e.g. the idea of natural law as found in St. Paul or St. Thomas).
Because Catholicism has such elaborate meta-doctrines describing the epistemic status of its own beliefs, Catholics tend not only to believe these things (e.g. the claim that sodomy is sinful) but also to hold (by faith) beliefs about the evidence for these beliefs (e.g. “sodomy is sinful and this is naturally evident”).
However, in many cases the arguments that would establish the asserted epistemic status don’t exist. There are no compelling versions of them available to be made. This creates a bizarre double-consciousness, where the anti-liberal catholic will see people who disagree with a given doctrine as arguing in bad faith against something they “really” know to be true “deep down”, while at the same time that same person cannot offer any real justification for the belief in question. This confusion creates a general impression that non-believers are somehow dishonest or misrepresenting their own convictions out of a perverse desire to sin.
On a still larger scale, one of the things anti-liberal Catholics tend to believe is that the Catholic Church is self-evidently the “true” church, and that anyone with the capacity to do a little investigation will readily come to this conclusion (because it has never erred, and is the only orthodox church, and has infallible popes, etc.). They tend to miss the obvious circularity of this reasoning, in part because the Church has taught that there is strong rational evidence that the Roman Catholic Church is the true church, and so once one is convinced of the truth of the Gospel, according to Catholicism it ought to follow rationally that one should become Catholic.
In combination, these epistemic meta-doctrines obscure for anti-liberal catholics the fundamentally arbitrary and personal nature of their choice of religious tradition. The deeper one gets into the doctrinal weeds of conservative Catholicism, the more catholic doctrine tends to shape one to believe that it is rationally compelling, even when it isn’t. And this creates a disconnect between the way one actually holds ones own beliefs and how one expects those beliefs to be received by people outside the fold.
Fake Traditions
In addition to these epistemic meta-doctrines, the Catholic Church also has doctrines about its own history. For example, it is important to Catholicism that Peter was the first Pope and that he held primacy among the other apostles as vicar of Christ. This conviction has a substantial impact on the way Catholics write and describe the history of the Church.
Overall, the Church has a strong commitment to the claim that its tradition is consistent and that catholic doctrine has “developed” but not “evolved”, i.e. there have not been innovations or reversals, only the emergence of implied doctrines and the formalization of unwritten but ancient traditions. Anti-liberal Catholics use these doctrines about history as a lens through which they interpret historical evidence, even to the extent of dismissing historians as having an “anti-catholic bias” when they report things that are contrary to the Church’s official teaching or imply something uncomfortable.
One interesting consequence of this ideologically driven hermeneutic of Church History is that it leads Catholics to implicitly reconstruct a tradition that agrees with current doctrine. The tradition they accept within the historical evidence cannot be one that would falsify their current beliefs, so they construe the evidence in such a way that they will only ever find a church that agreed with them.
Because of this impulse to retcon current doctrine backwards into history, one of the things one finds among various anti-liberal Catholic sects is that they each tend to have their own, somewhat different, invented version of the “true tradition” and “traditional orthodoxy”. The more contact one has with this phenomenon, and the deeper one gets into the history of the Church, the more obvious it becomes that each person’s commitment to a “tradition” is simply a commitment to the correctness of their own ideas, laundered (through a selective reading of history) to give it the appearance of being something “received”. And while these ideas may have been received, in most cases their origin is much more contemporary, contingent, and novel than the believer would let on.
The Missing Caesar-Pope
Another peculiarity of the relationship between anti-liberal Catholics and Catholicism at large is their relationship to authority. Since 1958 all of the reigning popes have been liberals, and most (with the exception, perhaps, of Benedict XVI) have been emphatically liberal. However, the anti-liberal picture of Catholicism depends heavily on a hierarchical understanding of magisterial authority and the pre-eminence of the Pope as the guarantor of orthodoxy and supreme ruler of the Church. In recent years there has been a re-emergence of Catholic Integralism, a political theology which sees the state as responsible for submitting to the Church in spiritual matters, implying that regimes ought to be quasi-theocratic and promote catholic religion and morals across the entire population.
Integralism was, in some form or other, the dominant position within Catholicism until the 20th century. Integralist viewpoints have been endorsed in official church documents by many popes over the centuries, and religious liberty (its opposite) has been repeatedly condemned (until it was declared to be a human right of divine origin at the Second Vatican Council).
So again, the anti-liberal Catholic must cope with a difficult tension. Their faith is built around a certain view of authority, based on the magisterial tradition, and yet the current possessor of that authority (now, Pope Leo XIV) emphatically rejects their vision of it. The response, in my experience, of anti-liberals has been to either play pretend and give tendentious readings to all the things the popes say, or to ignore the pope completely, or to settle for some degree of principled and uncomfortable dissent. Regardless of which option one chooses, the tension remains.
Ideally, the anti-liberal Catholic would like to see a return to the days of Pius IX, with blanket condemnations and anathemas issued left and right, dogmatic definitions, elaborate regalia, and the pretense of holding both secular and spiritual authority over the whole world. But this kind of pope hasn’t been around for the better part of a century, and doesn’t seem to be coming back.
Anti-Liberal Catholicism and the Public Square
Anti-liberal Catholics hope to return to dominance in the public square. They would like to overcome the agnostic, tolerant pluralism of their liberal peers and instead return to the strong, universalistic commitments of pre-modern Christianity. They want to preach the Truth, and they want to live in a society in which the Truth is generally acknowledged, sought, and agreed on, where basic moral convictions are shared by everyone.
Within the intellectual silo of post-liberal Catholicism, there is a sort of three-pronged hope for the conversion of society. Post-liberal Catholics believe that the intellectual arguments of neo-Thomism and other anti-liberal forms of philosophical reflection will convince the secular public to accept their chosen tradition, not merely as one option among many, but as the correct option. They believe that the historical evidence in support of their chosen tradition is compelling enough to propel those with faith to accept their version of orthodoxy as the True faith. And they hope for a future in which they can point to the authority of the papal magisterium as offering strong evidence of the global, institutional backing of their religious commitments by a figure with ostensibly divine and infallible authority.
The problem faced by such Catholics is that all three of these hopes are, as I’ve shown, illusory. The intellectual edifice backing up post-liberal Catholicism survives only through its total disengagement with outside critical voices and recent developments in the intellectual life of the broader world. The conceptions of tradition held by various catholic traditionalists are mostly fictive and incapable of coping with the evidence of actual history, much less the incoherence of the menagerie of disagreeing traditions currently live within Catholicism itself. And finally, the magisterial authority they long to see exercised in service of a coercive reassertion of Catholic orthodoxy will not come, because the institutional church has internalized liberalism both in its official doctrines and in its ecclesiastical culture. Pope Pius XIII is not going to arrive and excommunicate all the heretics or declare a new Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
But these problems, as I’ve suggested, aren’t unique to post-liberal Catholicism. Any version of anti- or post-liberal Christianity must likewise confront the fact that its aspirations to a renewed universalism are rendered impossible by its own refusal to engage on honest terms with the social and intellectual currents that gave rise to liberalism in the first place. Post-liberal christians deal in an intellectual currency that is not valid outside the confines of their own walled garden. This means that any attempt to reassert a general commitment to the “strong gods”, to a particular tradition with universal aspirations to Truth, cannot function short of coercing people to accept these commitments by seizing the power of the state. Unfortunately, the post-liberals seem to have decided that this is the best path forward, as we are currently witnessing in places like Texas and Florida, as well as in the intellectually coercive behavior of the Trump administration at large.
As I conclude, I’d like to go back to Rusty Reno and consider once more his call for a “return to the strong gods”. As I said at the start, I sympathize with Rusty’s impulse here, though not the numerous bigotries (racial and sexual) and fictive sociological theories motivating his analysis, nor the grim caricature he paints of our allegedly moribund liberal society. I sympathize with the sense he has as a beleaguered believer wishing for a way to feel grounded in some powerful, unchosen authority accepted by all of his peers and neighbors. I once felt that need as well. It is a pleasant fantasy to cling to.
But it is ultimately just a fantasy. Even for those who make the leap of faith into a specific religious tradition and offer themselves at the altar of the “strong gods”, the gesture of renewed commitment is always made possible by a counter-gesture of intellectual abnegation, a refusal to engage with the broader world or allow oneself to entertain doubts about one’s beliefs. Such people cannot see that their “strong gods” are just externalized projections of their own need for a freudian authority figure to fear and worship, projections of their own personal fantasies about law, order, meaning, and tradition. Such forms of religiosity are not durable, cannot long survive contact with an irrevocably pluralistic and multi-cultural global civilization, much less form the basis of a renewed, shared culture.
It would be better, rather than fantasizing about the return to the strong gods or attempting to coerce people into sharing beliefs you cannot rationally defend, to settle for the liberal forms of christianity that prioritize kindness, are open to learning about the world, and see tradition as an unfolding story of the possibility of increasing human compassion, understanding, and love.
Though I am no longer a Christian, Reno’s chosen metaphor sets up a powerful set of contrasting images. On one hand there is the image of Christ crucified, who preached compassion for the foreigner, generosity to the poor, and abstention from aspirations to secular power. On the other hand there is a pile of old idols, chthonic deities with promises of domination, particularity, and strength.
If Christianity has a path forward in the 21st century, it cannot be by aspiring to become a neo-pagan cult in service of some grubby images we pretend are “strong”. It must accept the withering away of its bankrupt, universalistic pretensions, humble itself, and become once more a voice for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.