This new collection of the Catholic writings of Orestes Brownson is very welcome. Brownson (1803-1876) was one of the few original political thinkers America has produced. Born in 1803 of Vermont Yankee stock, he traversed the full range of American religious and political opinion, including time spent as a friend and ally of Emerson and the community at Brook Farm. He was for a time a Universalist preacher, but he converted to Catholicism in 1844. He wrote several major works of political philosophy including The American Republic (1865), and his Catholic writings earned him the sobriquet “the Newman of America”.
After his conversion, Brownson needed to defend his position as both fully Catholic and fully American. His combined defence of Catholicism and the American experiment – he contended that the two identities could coexist and, indeed, that the American republican experiment needed Catholic thought and practice to be successful – had few defenders. This new edition collects Brownson’s significant pieces on the church/state question and on the relationship of Catholics to America.
When Brownson was writing, anti-Catholicism was at a fever pitch in the United States, with many Americans thinking that Catholics could not make good republican citizens. Catholics, they believed, were beholden to a foreign power and immersed in superstition, and so lacked the intellectual and religious independence and productivity America demanded, and which groups such as the Know-Nothings believed could come only from Protestants.
This view has far from faded, though now it is often used as an attack by secularists on Catholic believers to exclude them from the public square. A recent example of this enduring prejudice was when Catholic judge Amy Coney Barrett was accused of having “the dogma living loudly within you” by Senator Dianne Feinstein during her judicial nomination proceedings.
For its part, the Church has condemned various versions of what it called Americanism, including the idea of value-free toleration of other religions, most famously in the letter Leo XIII wrote in 1899 to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore called Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae. In that document, Leo described “the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive, and would have, the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world”, especially concerning the view that “in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions”.
The occasion for the letter was the publication of a biography of Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists and a friend of Brownson’s and who, like Brownson, defended Catholicism in America, and America to Rome. In particular, there was fierce debate over whether Catholics could live in a society that publicly proclaimed adherence to no religion.
A few decades later, Vatican II’s statements on religious freedom seemed to clear the way for a Catholic to fully support the American constitutional order, a view espoused by writers such as John Courtney Murray SJ, in his 1960 work We Hold These Truths. This was taken up by later writers such as Michael Novak and George Weigel, who have argued that there was a strongcoherence between the principles of the American founding and Catholic social and political teaching.
More recently, however, Catholic writers have criticised this position as in fact surrendering to a kind of Americanism. According to this view, liberalism by its nature is not neutral but is actually hostile to religious belief generally and Catholicism in particular. Liberalism is a kind of contra-Christianity and so Catholics must treat its institutions with suspicion. The Church endures and need not ally itself with any form of government to its own disadvantage. This is particularly so with regard to America, which was founded by Protestants who had no love for the Catholic Church.
These writers, such as Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, promote what they call “integralism” which seeks to recover a more robust view of the Church as a governing power and a counter to liberalism. Kevin Gallagher, a Catholic writer in the vanguard of this movement, has written that it was a mistake for Catholics such as Murray “to see the mid-century American political settlement as the very embodiment of Catholic social teaching”, especially with regard to economics.
But Brownson may help to bridge this divide. In his introduction, Federici,
a professor at Middle Tennessee University, writes that “Brownson recognised the value of republican institutions and checking and restraining human will and appetite”.
Brownson’s defence of the Constitution was unsurprising. But he went beyond that to articulate a relationship between permanent truths and that republican form of government found nowhere else in American political thought. He rejected the nativists who thought Catholic political principles meant clerical rule. But he likewise rejected those who regarded government as a merely civil contract with no enduring obligations or transcendent purpose. In the 1873 essay “The Papacy and the Republic”, he wrote that “what the state needs, is a spiritual authority above and independent of it … and to enforce through the conscience of the people respect for [the rights of men] and obedience to them”.
Brownson was convinced that a representative republic could not enforce belief in any one church, but nonetheless could not settle questions of truth by popular vote or mass opinion. As Federici says, he forced reconsideration of “essential questions regarding political order and provided insights into its spiritual foundations”.
Brownson centred his conception of politics squarely on the Catholic notion of the common good. That was why he could not fully embrace any kind of unmediated democracy, which would be driven by momentary passion that had no necessary relationship to the common good. And that is also why he thought that the government needed more than the “consent of the governed” to operate. Free government needed a people that would accept norms above itself. For Brownson, those norms are provided by the Catholic Church. So unlike those who sought perhaps too close a relationship between Catholic thought and the Enlightenment, Brownson rejected that entirely. He argued instead that the true principles of the founding were in fact Catholic ones, properly understood, and could only be defended in Christian terms.
Given his personal history, Brownson insisted that the various Protestant denominations could not provide the continued moral basis for a free government because they were just as likely to split and disagree among themselves about basic truths. As Federici says, Brownson was a little too dogmatic and should not have ruled out “Protestant Christianity in all its variegated forms as a possible, if not ultimate source of spiritual enrichment for the political and social order”, and at times he was a little too enthusiastic about the imperial ambitions of Americanism.
Federici suggests that later thinkers such as Irving Babbitt and TS Eliot made a better distinction between Christianity and secularism as the cultural dividing line. But Brownson anticipated such a development, and his arguments are better aimed at what he called an emerging “humanitarianism” that would sap free government of its foundations. That ideology has largely replaced even the generic Christianity that was the nation’s civic religion until just a few decades ago.
As Dan Mahoney writes in a recent book, Brownson “was a friend of popular government … but an implacable foe of a conception of democracy that divinises the human will and reduces the origin of free government to an illusory social contract that empties citizenship of its moral content.”
Brownson wrote that “The American constitution is not founded on political atheism, but recognises the rights of man, and, therefore, the rights of God.” Over the course of his life he explored what that connection means for a pluralistic, democratic politics.
Gerald J Russello is editor of The University Bookman
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