The all powerful totalitarian state in George Orwell’s novel 1984 uses the comforting, familial image of “Big Brother” to mask the ugly reality of its absolute control. Big Brother uses many tools (such as constant surveillance) to keep and exercise his power, but the most effective is language. By tightly controlling the language, Big Brother can control the way his subjects think. Just as the image of Big Brother himself is a fiction, words and phrases serve, not to convey meaning, but to hide real meanings in favor of whatever content the state chooses to give them.
Newspeak
This language that is intentionally designed to deceive rather than inform is called Newspeak. A character in the novel named Syme, a lexicologist, explains that, as Newspeak develops . . .
Where were you on February 25th, 2004? Well, we might not remember the exact date, but most of us (except the youngsters) will remember the event. On this date seventeen years ago Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was released. That year Ash Wednesday fell on the 25th of February, and Gibson intentionally timed the release of his film, a cinematic depiction of the last 24 hours of the human life of Jesus, to coincide with the beginning of Lent.
It’s hard to overstate the impact the film made at the time. It remained the largest grossing non – English Language film of all time (all the dialogue was in Aramaic and Latin) until 2017, when it was overtaken by something called Wolf Warrior 2 (your guess is as good as mine). It sparked quite a bit of controversy, as well as some substantial discussion, about antisemitism and violence in films, and about the meaning of the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The film was also credited with bringing many Christians back to a closer embrace of their faith, and with bringing some non-Christians to conversion.
In 2014 critic Mark Steyn marked the tenth anniversary of the release of The Passion of the Christ with an update of his original review from 2004, which he has apparently continued to update since. Reading Steyn’s resurrected review helped me pull together various stray thoughts in my mind, which resulted in a blog post I called “Steyn, Spong, Kempton, And The Passion of the Christ”. I suppose if Steyn could republish his piece ten years later, I can repost mine after seven (it is Throwback Thursday, after all). More to the point, the issues raised are still as relevant, if not more so, as they were seven years ago. My (only slightly updated) post is below:
Sometimes there is a certain event that perfectly crystallizes important social trends: such was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. We may forget ten years later [now 17] the magnitude of the film’s impact. Last week Mark Steyn marked its ten year anniversary with an updated review [here]. While I disagree with some of his points (more on this below), Steyn does a good job of capturing the movie’s social and spiritual significance, while at the same time recognizing some of its artistic weaknesses. His most incisive observation is that the controversy sparked by the movie was “not between Christians and Jews, but between believing Christians and the broader post-Christian culture, a term that covers a large swathe of the media to your average Anglican vicar.” There’s a lot packed in to that brief quote, including a recognition of the sad reality that a very large part of that “post-Christian culture” is made up of people who claim to be (and very often think that they are) “believing Christians”. Among protestants the two groups break down to some degree along denominational lines, although even the most “progressive” churches have some members who adhere to a more traditional Christian belief and practice; in the Catholic Church we’re all thrown in together, which tends to keep things lively.
Jim Caveziel as Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane; Satan (Rosalinda Celentano) in the background.
One of those devout, traditional Christians in a denomination that was much less so was the late left-wing journalist and commentator Murray Kempton, who was an Episcopalian. I remember reading one of his columns at least a decade before The Passion came out in which he was comparing Catholic Cardinal O’Connor, then Archbishop of New York, to Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, New Jersey. As I recall, Kempton had less than kind words for co-religionist Spong, who had made himself a darling of the cultural elite by publicly doubting the Resurrection and by dismissing orthodox Christian morality. At the same time, the columnist lavished high praise on the Catholic Cardinal, with whom he doubtless disagreed on many points, but whose determination to teach without apology the faith as received from the Apostles was undeniable. I don’t recall the Kempton’s exact words from a distance of more than twenty years, but I have retained a very clear recollection of his assertion that a man who could not affirm the most essential Christian doctrine had no business being a bishop. To Murray Kempton, it was a matter of integrity: be what you are!
Murray Kempton and Cardinal O’Connor are no longer with us, but John Shelby Spong, it seems, lives on. The now-retired Episcopal bishop was a major focus in an article published in the Washington Post on Holy Saturday [2014] which assures us that “The Gospel Story Of Jesus’ Resurrection Is A Source Of Deep Rifts In The Christian Religion”. You may wonder exactly what “Christian Religion” they’re talking about. After all, belief in the Resurrection is, and always has been, the absolute minimum requirement for being a Christian. St. Paul says that if Christ didn’t rise from the dead we are the most pitiful of men (1 Cor. 15:19) – and he had never even met Bishop Spong. The Resurrection has always marked the rift between “The Christian Religion” and everyone else: on one side you’re a Christian, on the other you’re not. In any case, Easter has become an annual occasion for the secular press to celebrate self-proclaimed Christians who deny the divinity of Christ, or the latest hyped-up claim that such-and-such archaeological discovery “proves” that Jesus had brothers, children, wives, etc. Why should they care? Because the Church and believing Christians are all that stand between them and the “progressive” program of re-making the world in the image of whatever passing notion appeals to them at the time.
Mel Gibson’s Satan: he, she, it – who knows?
Which brings me back to Steyn’s review of The Passion of the Christ. One of his criticisms with which I disagree is his take on Gibson’s Satan. Steyn dismisses him (Her? It?) as “a cross between Nosferatu and Jessica Lange in All That Jazz”. I don’t actually disagree with that description, but where Steyn sees it as a misstep, I found the creepy androgyny of Gibson’s Evil One (played in the film by actress Rosalinda Celentano) to be a particularly astute touch, especially for a 21st century audience. Non Serviam! “I will not serve!” is the essence of Satan; Lucifer’s refusal to be what God made him to be lies at the heart of his fall. His refusal here to be either male or female is a brilliant counterpoint to the creation story in Genesis: “Male and female he created them (Genesis 5:2)”. It also, of course, aptly reflects the refusal by so many in our world today to accept this basic truth about human nature, not just in our sexual relationships but even in our very bodies. Which, in turn, brings us back to Integrity, which is, after all, about much more than telling the truth: it is about being a fully integrated whole, about truly being who you are.
This is where Steyn, Spong, Kempton and The Passion of the Christ all come together. While The Passion was a big hit among the believing crowd, there are nevertheless any number of reasons why a devout Christian might not like the film. Its effect, however, has been to cast a bright light on the growing divide between enduring Christian belief and the Spirit of an Age that more and more is succumbing to what Cardinal Ratzinger, just before he became Pope Benedict XVI, called “the dictatorship of relativism”, an age in which integrity has been conquered by ideology. The late, great Richard John Neuhaus used to say that “When orthodoxy becomes optional, sooner or later it will be proscribed.” In the decade [now seventeen years] since the release of The Passion of the Christ, the wisdom of those words has become ever clearer. St. Ignatius of Loyola describes two armies facing each other, Christ’s and Satan’s; there’s no middle ground. Eventually, we all have to be who we truly are, and choose our Master, our Commander: which one will it be, Christ or Satan?
“It seems a good time to take a break from all the culture war stuff.” So I said in the introduction to my last post. The Lord knows we could all use a break, and yet the hits keep on coming, don’t they? Well, as that witty old atheist Leon Trotsky might have said, “You may not be interested in the Culture War, but the Culture War is interested in you”. The forces pushing culture war don’t seem to feel the need for a break at all, and they’re coming right at us.
But the Culture War, you might recall, is only one front in the larger war. In some earlier posts (here and here) I used the image of a pyramid to illustrate the different levels upon which our society is built, with politics the top (and least important), with culture underlying politics, and religion as the bottom level, the basis for the whole structure. I’ve touched previously on the political and cultural fronts of the war (which is, at root, a spiritual conflict); today we’re going to look at the religious front.
Let’s start with one of the more famous non-doctrinal statements of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, going back to long before he became pope, or even a bishop: that the Church of the future would be a “smaller, purer Church”. While there’s no record of him ever saying it in exactly those words, that does fairly accurately sum up a number of statements Joseph Ratzinger made over the years. The earliest and perhaps most famous instance was in a Christmas Day address on German radio in 1969, when the future Pope Benedict XVI was simply Fr. Ratzinger, a theology professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much.“
The Crisis of Today and the Church of Tomorrow
We’d be mistaken if we thought that Fr. Ratzinger was advocating a smaller, purer Church, or suggesting we’d be better off if we jettisoned members who don’t live up to a certain standard of purity. Nor was his address a “prophecy” in the Biblical sense, although the past half century has shown it to be prophetic in the more colloquial sense, in that it accurately foretold what was to come (this was the sense I meant in a previous piece several years ago called “Fr. Ratzinger’s Prophecy”). In reality, all Fr. Ratzinger was doing was looking at social trends, the “signs of the times” (see Matthew 16:3). He saw a society in which Christian belief was becoming less important with, as a consequence, progressively less social advantage to membership. As the advantage diminished and eventually disappeared, the less committed members would move out, and on to something else:
From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision . . .
Most of us would probably agree, half a century later, that Fr. Ratzinger was on to something. As for the Church becoming purer, he says:
The Church will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed.
Signs of the Decline
Hard going, indeed: I suspect we’re still only beginning to see how hard it’s going to be. But let’s go back to the first part here, the “smaller Church”. Social science data gives us a more tangible idea of what the decline in Christianity looks like. The Pew Research Center has been measuring religious practice and attitudes for the past several decades. The decline in Christian belief and practice is very real, as a report published by the Pew Center a little over a year ago shows (In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace ). There’s not space to go into all the details here, but you can get the main idea from two of its numerous graphs.
The first graph shows that in the twelve years from 2007-2019 the number of Americans who identify as Christian has declined from 77% or 78%, depending on the which survey you look at, to 71% in 2014 and 65% in 2019. At the same time, the so-called “Nones”, Americans who have no religious affiliation increased from 16% or 17% to 23% in 2014 and 26% in 2019:
The second graph is even more sobering, because it strongly suggests the decline will only get worse. We see every succeeding generation less Christian and more disconnected. The Millennial Generation comprising those Americans born between 1981-1996 is the first in American history in which less than half identify as Christian:
Now, it’s likely that many of those Millennials will “find religion” as they get older. That’s not unusual. In order even to catch up with the not-terribly-religious Generation X, however, they would need to go through a Great Awakening greater than anything this country has ever seen. We can also be sure that some who now consider themselves Christian will fall away later in life. Given all that, it’s not unreasonable to project that, a generation or two down the road, Christians will be in the minority in the United States.
Those Who Lap Like Dogs
So, how are we to square this sobering prognosis with Christ’s promise that the Gates of Hell would not prevail against His Church (Matthew 16:18)? Well, first of all, Christ’s Church is not the same as our local churches. Large stretches of the Middle East and North Africa that used to be solidly Christian are now peopled overwhelmingly by Muslims; we have no guarantee that the Church in the United States will survive. We also have no guarantee that individual souls will be saved; even victorious armies suffer casualties, sometimes heavy ones.
At the same time, a trend is only a trend as long as it keeps going in the same direction. Consider the story of Gideon, in the Book of Judges. Gideon was bringing out his army to face the Midianites when he heard the voice of God:
The Lord said to Gideon, “The people with you are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, ‘My own hand has delivered me.’ Now therefore proclaim in the ears of the people, saying, ‘Whoever is fearful and trembling, let him return home.’” And Gideon tested them; twenty-two thousand returned, and ten thousand remained. (Judges 7:2-3)
That, however, wasn’t enough:
And the Lord said to Gideon, “The people are still too many; take them down to the water and I will test them for you there; and he of whom I say to you, ‘This man shall go with you,’ shall go with you; and any of whom I say to you, ‘This man shall not go with you,’ shall not go.” So he brought the people down to the water; and the Lord said to Gideon, “Every one that laps the water with his tongue, as a dog laps, you shall set by himself; likewise every one that kneels down to drink.” And the number of those that lapped, putting their hands to their mouths, was three hundred men; but all the rest of the people knelt down to drink water. And the Lord said to Gideon, “With the three hundred men that lapped I will deliver you, and give the Midianites into your hand . . .(Judges 7:4-7)
“Gideon Overcoming the Midianites” by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1625-1630)
And of course The Lord did deliver Midian into the hands of Gideon, but not as we might expect. While Gideon and his three hundred blew trumpets, broke jars, waved torches, and shouted, among the Midianites “the Lord set every man’s sword against his fellow and against all the army; and the army fled as far as Beth-shittah toward Zererah” (Judges 7:22). It couldn’t have been clearer to Gideon and his followers that they didn’t defeat Midian through their own prowess: they themselves were rescued from Midian by the God in Whom they trusted.
Hope in The Lord
The story of Gideon should give us hope. It is clear we have just about come to that place Fr. Ratzinger foresaw when membership in the Church would no longer confer social advantages; it may even be that we are entering an era when being a Christian is an actual detriment (there are some places, such as academia, where it already is). The fearful and trembling are on their way home, and soon, perhaps, we’ll be down to the three hundred who lap like dogs. What happens then? Let’s go back to Fr. Ratzinger:
But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.
This is where the story of Christ’s Church diverges from the story of Gideon. Gideon and his army chased down the confused and frightened Midianites with the sword; the reduced and purified Church will, instead, offer them a beacon of hope. The remaining Christians will truly need to be the salt that gives savor to a godless world, and the light to “shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16). Ratzinger accordingly predicts:
It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.
There is reason for Hope amid the gloom. Christ’s Church may need to suffer as Jesus himself did on the Cross, but there’s no Resurrection without the Crucifixion. As St. Peter reminds us:
In this you rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold which though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:6-7)
Last week I promised (or threatened) to discuss the issue of the relationship between faith and politics more fully (see last week’s post “Religion, Culture, & Politics” ). Something that really helped lead me to think about this subject more deeply (and, I hope, more clearly) a few years back was a comment a priest once left on one of my earlier blogs. The post was one of my screeds (not unlike the one I reposted the other day) in which I was going on about building a Catholic culture, or more likely the failure of Catholics, and the Church, to build a Catholic culture. Father’s comment was: “The Church doesn’t exist to build a Catholic culture. The Church exists to save souls.”
I had to admit he was right, and that I had been writing as if a Christian, Catholic culture was an end in itself, when in fact it is a product of Christianity and its ultimate purpose is to help leads souls to Christ. Catholic culture is not an end in itself. That’s doubly true for politics. I’ve tried to avoid that trap since. And yet, I still write about culture and politics – in fact, I’m doing it right now. How can we discuss politics and culture issues from an explicitly Catholic perspective without subordinating the ends of religion to those two lesser categories?
The Pyramid is Back
I actually started this discussion last week, (even before that, really, in my inaugural post on this blog). Last week I used a pyramid-shaped diagram to illustrate Pope St. John Paul II’s idea of how human society was structured, a concept which informed his successful effort to free his native Poland from communist tyranny. The Marxists claimed that economics was the dominant factor and therefore the “base” of the societal pyramid, while culture and politics both reflected and protected the economic system (and religion, the “opiate of the people”, was just another tool in service to that system). John Paul saw religion as the real basis of society, the foundation upon which culture was built; politics and economics grew from there. Events, of course, vindicated the Pope’s view.
The Soul of the World
Today I intend to focus on politics, the top of the pyramid, but we need to be clear about what we mean by “politics”. There’s partisan politics, which is one of the lower species of politics; I’m not talking about that today. I’m more interested in politics as defined by the late, great, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus: “How we order our life here together”. How are we to do that? One of the classic descriptions of the role of the Christian citizen comes from the second century, in the work known as The Letter to Diognetus. The anonymous author of the letter tells Christians they are to “dwell in the world, yet are not of the world”. That separation from the world, however, gives us a certain responsibility to it. He tells us:
. . . as the soul is in the body, so are Christians in the world . . . The soul is imprisoned in the body, yet preserves that very body; and Christians are confined in the world as in a prison, and yet they are the preservers of the world.
The Powers of the World bow down to the Christ Child: “The Adoration of the Magi”, Jan Boeckhorst, 1652
Being “preservers of the world” can mean a number of things. For instance, there are many questions that don’t carry much moral import but are important for maintaining an orderly and prosperous society. Should we allocate tax money for a new playground, or a new parking lot for the town hall? These decisions are important in a limited, temporary sort of way. We need to take them seriously because we have a responsibility to be good citizens and good stewards, but we can, in good conscience, make these decisions based largely on our interests and preferences.
We also have a responsibility, a deeper responsibility, to questions of justice. Our Lord tells us:
. . . for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ . . . ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ (Matthew 25:35-36; 40)
On the One Hand, On the Other
“Ruth in the Field of Boaz”, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1828
This statement comes up in the Gospel of Matthew in the context of what we need to do in this world in order to be happy with God in the next. Some questions, then, while they may have a political aspect to them, are really moral questions of justice that don’t simply involve the ephemera of pure politics but go right down through the pyramid, with implications that stretch into eternity.
Some issues are not very straightforward because there are serious moral arguments on both sides. Take illegal immigration, for instance. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us, on the one hand:
The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.CCC 2241
The other hand immediately follows:
Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens. CCC 2241.
Notice the Church doesn’t tell us how to implement these moral directives: that’s the job of political authorities and, in a republic, the citizens. A responsible, Christian approach to the issue of immigration would involve serious and prayerful discussion of how to craft policies that both recognize the human needs of would-be immigrants and respect the common good of the citizens of our own country. This issue, unfortunately, has become a weapon in the power struggle of partisan politics, and so for the time being seems beyond the reach of reasoned resolution.
The Non-Negotiables
The moral dimensions of other issues are much less nuanced, especially issues relating to marriage, the definition of the family, and, preeminently, abortion. It’s hard to find a clearer case than abortion for illustrating how an issue that may look like a political issue at first glance is really much deeper: the crack that we see at the top, in the political step of the pyramid, is just the surface evidence of a flaw that goes all the way down through the cultural level and into the religious level.
That is not to say that a political response isn’t necessary. Remember we’re called on to do justice, especially for “The least of these my brethren.” There is a real need for political action, to protect innocent human beings targeted for destruction in their mother’s womb, and to rescue the adults implicated in obtaining, performing, or promoting abortion, who are in danger of something far worse than the death of the body.
March For Life 2020, author’s photo
Which brings us to the second reason for political action. You may recall the image from my previous post of the crumbling step pyramid, where the falling debris from the eroding upper levels damages the lower levels on the way down. Legal abortion corrupts the character of the people involved, who become accustomed to the casual slaughter of unborn human babies. It also corrupts political institutions: one of our major political parties has been completely ensnared by it, with large parts of the other party compromised as well. Legalized abortion was imposed undemocratically by a corrupt ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, a decision one of the dissenting justices called “an exercise in raw judicial power”. Such exercises have become more common since, imposing novelties such as same-sex marriage. Also, because the continued exercise of raw judicial power is needed to keep abortion legal, the process of confirming Supreme Court justices has been corrupted. Formerly sedate and almost pro-forma proceedings, confirmation hearings have become ferocious campaigns to destroy any nominee who might possibly rule against Roe vs. Wade.
The Spreading Corruption
The corruption spreads from the political sphere to the other layers. Corrupt political players enlist cultural forces in the media and the arts to support the abortion regime. Language is corrupted, where ordinary words like “choice” are used to disguise ugly realities. Even people who are not directly involved in abortion (although huge numbers are involved) become accustomed to the taking of inconvenient life; eventually it becomes thinkable to hasten the end of those near the end of life, or even, as is the case in some European countries, to facilitate the suicide of young, healthy people who have given up hope. We see that people and institutions compromised by the evil of abortion are willing to countenance all sorts of further evils.
The religious base of society is not immune from the spreading corruption. I’m sorry to say that many clerics, not only many priests and religious but even many bishops, for the sake of pet political causes of a much lower order, support parties and candidates that promote abortion. Some even promote abortion itself, such as the nun who publicly declares that “God is pro-choice”. This situation is a classic example of the scandal in the classical meaning of the word: the bad example of public Catholics, especially those who are public representatives of the Church, sends the message that the Church doesn’t really believe her own teaching, and so even more people are led into sin.
Which brings us back to the beginning of the cycle because, as we might recall, the religious institutions form the base upon which the cultural and political institutions arise. A strong religious basis would not have produced a culture which permitted the imposition of something as diabolical as legal abortion. We might also note that, since even widespread contraception can’t prevent lots of irresponsible sex from producing lots of unintended babies, abortion is a necessary adjunct of the the culture of sexual license that has grown stronger in our society as the influence of Christian teaching has grown weaker. It’s probably not necessary to point out that, sadly, the institutional Church itself has not been immune from sexual scandal.
Spes Nostra in Domino
That’s why I said previously that the role of politics is mostly defensive: it can help protect vulnerable people from direct harm, and shield more fundamental layers of society from further damage. Those are essential tasks, but politics can’t fix the damage that already exists at the cultural or the religious levels. The psalmist tells us:
“The Archangel Michael”, Poulakis Theodoros 1650-1699
Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help. When his breath departs he returns to his earth; on that very day his plans perish. Happy is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God. (Psalm 146:3-5)
The real battle, as St. Paul reminds us, is at a much deeper level:
For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)
Let’s fight the political battles that come our way, but remember that we can depend upon the powers of this world to save us no more than Jesus could rely on Pilate to save him from Calvary. Our true Hope is in The Lord.
How important should politics be to a serious Christian? What is the importance of culture? I hit a bit of a hot button last week in my introductory post on this blog when I wrote:
I promise to try not to get too caught up in the specifics of politics. Politics is like the horse in Psalm 33: “The war horse is vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save” (Psalm 33:17).
“The war horse is vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save” (Psalm 33:17).
One commenter took me to task for downplaying the importance of politics, pointing out (correctly) that, in its beginning, Naziism presented a primarily political problem; if German Christians both Catholic and Protestant had understood that their faith obliged them to oppose Hitler and the Nazis in the political sphere, enormous evils might have been averted. She’s right – and yes, Christians should have worked to stop Naziism at the political level before it metastasized into the full-blown horror of the Third Reich.
I agree that we should be involved in politics – and as I pointed out to the commenter above, I started this blog in the first place at least in part as a political act, a rejection of the Twitters & Googles and all their works and empty promises, and in particular their giant thumbs on the scales of our political discourse. We need to understand politics in its proper place, however, as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. I’d like to explore that idea in a little more detail here.
Let’s start in my wild and crazy undergraduate days, when I thought it would be interesting to take a course called “Theory of Communism”. Much of it turned out to be not-so-interesting, particularly some of the assigned reading, which contained what must have been the most tedious prose I ever had the misfortune to read (who knew world revolution could be so dull?).
figure 1
I did take away a few things, though. One thing that stuck with me was a diagram the professor put on the board one day. It looked like a pyramid made of three steps (figure 1). On the bottom and largest step he wrote “economics”, on the middle step “culture”, and he labeled the smallest step, the one on the top, “politics”. The pyramid was a graphic illustration of the Marxist concept of how society is structured: the economy forms the basis for society, and the foundation (and source) of the culture, the second step, that rests on top of it; the political system is founded on top of the other two.
While it is itself a product of the economic system, the culture helps to preserve that system, and the political system serves to protect the two lower layers from which it procedes. Given this concept, we can see why the Marxists believe that simply changing the economic system will lead to a new kind of society, and even a New Man . . . a change, granted, achieved with a helpful nudge here and there from the propaganda power of a properly revolutionized culture and state power taken into the hands of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
figure 2
This pyramid came back to my mind a couple decades later when I read George Weigel’s biography of Pope St. John Paul II. John Paul knew that the Marxist understanding of human society was all wrong. The economic system is a product of the culture, not the other way around, and culture’s true foundation is religion. If John Paul II had felt inclined to use a pyramid diagram as my college propfessor did, it would look something like figure 2. At any rate, he believed that, if he reconnected the Polish people with their religious heritage, they would embrace their true culture. Then, a more authentic, human politics would become possible, and the Communist police state would wither away. Events proved that he was right, and the Marxists were wrong.
Figure 3
Now let’s take it a step further, because the second pyramid is not quite complete. Religion has one thing in common with politics: it’s not an end in itself. The word religion is believed to derive from the Latin religare, which means to bind back, i.e., to reconnect. And to whom or what does it bind us back? To God, of course. God is the ultimate foundation of everything. The Marxists aren’t wrong that the upper layers of society are a product of the lower layers, and that they serve to preserve and protect the layers that lie below. They are wrong about which layers are dependent upon which, and being atheists they deny the existence of the most important layer of all. If St. John Paul was right, and it appears that he was, our conclusion should be that the end of a healthy politics is to protect a healthy culture, which in turn provides fertile ground for sound religious institutions, which then serve to bind us back us to Our Lord. Notice that politics does not bring us salvation: it merely helps create conditions conducive to those institutions that can lead us in the direction of our true Savior.
So what does all that have to do with us here and now? Let’s go back to the second pyramid, which contains the three layers within our control. For two thousand years, our culture and politics have rested on the foundation of religion, most tangibly present in the Catholic Church (and in varying degrees in other Christian communities as well). While the upper levels are dependent on the lower, they can protect those layers beneath . . . or actually harm them. It’s undeniable that religion has been crumbling, and as it does, culture and politics and economics follow suit. But remember, the influences go both ways: weakened cultural and political institutions fail to do their job of protecting the the base, and religion is further damaged. I sometimes picture an actual step pyramid in my mind, with pieces of the upper levels falling off and smashing parts of the lower levels as they collapse on top of it.
So, yes, politics is important, but its role is mostly defensive: it can protect the cultural and religious institutions that it rests upon, or if it is neglected or abused it can damage or even destroy them. Politics itself can help order our material existence in the short term, and protect life and property, but it can’t create human happiness. Attempts to use politics to achieve utopia have always resulted in bloody failure. Marxism in practice, for example, has always tried to use political power to force the changes that it seeks in the cultural and economic spheres, with incalculable loss in human life and societal destruction.
For us, even if we win the political battles we see in front of us (and I agree that they need to be fought), the victory will only be temporary if the culture is eroding beneath us, and our religious foundation is collapsing under that. While I don’t agree with Rod Dreher that the culture war is already lost, we are losing it, and losing badly. We must fight the political battles for justice in the short term (as in, for instance, the fight to protect innocent life), but the long term battle will be won or lost at a more foundational level.
There’s more that could be said on this topic, but this post is already running too long. We’ll come back to it next week – I welcome your thoughts in the meanwhile.
