The enervating experience of the current election cycle points to deeper malaise.
The 2020 U.S. presidential election already may have burned more moral and psychological energy than any presidential election in any of our lifetimes—already, and it’s not over yet. For me, it seems to have been the most contentious and emotionally draining of the eleven presidential elections in which I have been eligible to vote. While such things are not measurable in any reliable way, this campaign probably exposed the sharpest and deepest chasm between partisan loyalists of any election since the American Civil War. This is not a good thing.
The outsized importance of presidential politics, and the uncompromising postures that it engenders from both sides, is a sign that politics is the new American religion, with two competing sects worshiping at the altars of a pair of rival gods.
At least two aspects of American public life seem to contribute to this pathology. And, sadly, American Catholics are by and large complicit in it. First, in a violation of the principle of subsidiarity, political life has supplanted civic life as the primary way that Americans think about public expressions of citizenship. And, second, the intractability of the two-party system in the United States creates a zero-sum political climate, in which there are no incentives for reasoned negotiation and political compromise—indeed, where such efforts are punishable by excommunication.
The subsidiary role of politics is to create and sustain the formal structures that permit these mediating structures to flourish. When political life becomes the primary—or even sole—way that people identify their public moral responsibility, this principle is turned on its head.
Made in the image of the triune God, humans are naturally social creatures. “It is not good for man to be alone,” God says. The flourishing of human being depends on being in society. We are created in and for natural human communities, built upon conversation and mutual social cooperation. As such, the Christian tradition has long held that we have reciprocal responsibilities to contribute to common good, loving our neighbors as ourselves as the penultimate end of the moral life. These responsibilities are manifested in a positive duty to participate in civic life, both for the benefit of our own moral flourishing and as an expression of solidarity with others. Obligations of civic friendship are at the heart of our social natures.
Social life is natural to human being.
Political life—at least in the modern truncated technological sense of the term—is not. Political structures may sometimes contribute to the proper ends of civic life. As a means to the nobler vocation of civic friendship, politics should be at the service of human community, not its end. As such, political identification is—or should be—but one of a variety of aspects of civic life that do need recourse to politics to manifest and celebrate the natural social nature of the human person. The principle of subsidiarity implies that these non-political civic associations—clubs, teams, guilds, fraternal and sororal organizations—should have greater purchase on our public moral lives than should political identification. The subsidiary role of politics is to create and sustain the formal structures that permit these mediating structures to flourish.
When political life becomes the primary—or even sole—way that people identify their public moral responsibility, this principle is turned on its head. Politics is no longer ordered toward broader civic engagement, but rather all civic life is ordered toward political life. And, in the American political system, this political identity inevitably devolves further into partisan loyalty.
Because there are only two serious choices for partisan loyalty in the United States, the negotiation, political compromise, and coalition-building present in the multi-party structures of most other western democracies is not available in American political life. Instead, we have a two-party, zero-sum game, in which there are winners, losers, and no incentive for conciliation. The two parties have become jealous gods, demanding uncompromising loyalty and pure devotion, and pronouncing anathemas on the worshipers of their rivals. This not only discourages compromise; it condemns any such efforts as heresy, punishable by exile.
[P]olitics is the new American religion, with two competing sects worshiping at the altars of a pair of rival gods.
Would that we Catholic Christians in the U.S. were witnesses against both this reduction of civil life to political identity, and political identity to partisan loyalty. Pockets of resistance might be identified here and there, but the overwhelming evidence is that Catholics are full participants in this impoverished version of social life. We have elevated politics above civic friendship, and we cannot be distinguished from non-Catholics in the dispersion of devotees to the rival partisan gods. This makes the presidential election the holy of holies, in which we find the ultimate fulfilment in this truncated counterfeit of authentic human community.
The way towards a solution is for Catholics to affirm the entirety of Catholic moral teaching as subordinating and relativizing all other claims on our moral, social, and political lives. If we do this, we will find that we simply cannot fit our commitments into the rival-gods partisan structure of American political life. It might be Quixotic, but at least it would be a witness of a richer life, ordered by higher things than quadrennial election of the high priest of another faith.
Kenneth Craycraft is a licensed attorney and the James J. Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. He holds the Ph.D. in theology from Boston College, and the J.D. from Duke University School of Law.
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