We live in a country whose citizenry have been, almost from the beginning of the Republic, carefully coached to observe all the requisite protocols. What that means, as a practical matter, is, quite simply, keeping religion and politics in separate compartments. In other words, Church and State must never be seen in the same room. That being the case, the very idea of a confessional society becomes an affront to both law and custom. For all the appeal it may have in theory, the actual reality of a Christian culture tends to make people nervous and unsure. Is this really something, they ask themselves, we want to organize our lives around? The prospect appears to be an unwelcome one.
This is especially true, I think, for native-born Americans, men and women whose sensibilities have been largely formed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution and the whole elaborate mythology that has grown up around it. To propose a model of governance along the lines of, say, Christopher Dawson’s vision, where faith and life go together because otherwise one is forced to live an almost schizophrenic life, provokes a certain amount of pushback. Why, it seems positively medieval. Certain disclaimers, therefore, will need to be made.
Much of the problem, it seems, turns on the word public, a pesky little thing that tends to set people on edge. And yet what the word itself signifies is something entirely natural and unavoidable; it should not in the least feel threatening to anyone. And that is the fact that every culture is nothing other than an outward sign of, an embodiment even, of faith, any faith, so long as it finds enfleshment in people’s lives. People need to see and to smell, to touch, taste, and hear the sounds of a culture. And so, what every culture consists of is nothing other than the reification of a people’s religion, which is as natural and necessary as the air we breathe.
Take that as a given, therefore, a nonnegotiable minimum, and the whole argument falls neatly into place. Christian Culture—Catholic Christendom, if you like—is simply what happens when a political society finds its animating and fundamental principle of unity in the public profession of the Catholic Thing.
Again, the operative word here is public. Which is to say, it has got to be given visible, palpable expression. It can never be a mere Platonic idea, as in the Methodist version of the Catholic Mass, in which the Real Presence of Christ becomes an entirely ethereal event at which a group of people come together to evoke memories of Jesus, awakening perhaps a warm fuzzy or two over a glass of grape juice. There is no existential import to the event at all. And, to be sure, in its absence nothing real will ever happen. Only a pale, etiolated symbol lifted up, shared among others but never offered to God. Never, as in the sacrificial setting of Roman Catholic worship, God offering God to God, which is the deepest meaning and application of the phrase in persona Christi.
So much then for the definition. And the disclaimer? It is very difficult for native born Americans to think like this, including a great many Catholic Americans, who almost invariably think of themselves as primarily and essentially Americans. And as for the so-called Catholic component, it is at best an accidental and fortuitous addition, a mere footnote, easily detachable from the main event.
And the main event? Wholesale Americanization of countless Catholic ethnic groups pouring into this country over the past couple of centuries, their memories of the homeland progressively bleached away in order to hasten the day of complete absorption into the American Way of Life. Among the saddest examples, surely, are all those wonderful Italians who braved an unknown ocean to get here, only to forget as promptly as possible the language of Dante.
The point is, we Americans do not ordinarily think in the categories of Christian Culture when navigating our way through the American experience. And not, heaven knows, because we happen to be less generous or sincere in the practice of our Christian religion. It is not a moral failing so much as it is a failure of imagination, an absentee historical sense, for which no one is to blame. It is simply because we Americans have spent roughly the past two and a half centuries in a place where the whole corporate and institutional life of the nation has developed without any explicit or public recourse to Catholic Christianity at all.
Our Founding Fathers, for all that their vision remains noble and pure, were not exactly driven by holy desire. They were not interested in spreading the Gospel or creating a Christian Commonwealth designed to help others reach the Kingdom of God. If anything, their religious persuasion tended to be deist, given over to a God who was no more than a Clockmaker, who got everything going, saw it all ticking happily away, and then pretty much retired to His celestial God-Cave.
Ours is the first nation under God which makes no real provision for God in its public life, owing to a great and sundering wall of separation between Church and State, religion and politics, faith and life. Isn’t this why, to use Professor Dawson’s phrase, “the historic reality of Christian Culture,” which is the outcome of a people’s consecration to God of the entirety of the temporal order, could not possibly have emerged from within the American historical experience? With the lamentable result, to be sure, of our having marginalized whole areas of human experience, areas left untouched by the richness of the intersection of faith and life, grace and nature, eternity and time. Because it is only there, as the poet Eliot reminds, that all the polarities come dramatically together.
There at the still point of the turning world…
Where past and future are gathered…
Except for the point, the still point
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Has he not also reminded us that “A people without history is not redeemed from time,/For history is a pattern of timeless moments”?
We live in a society in which there are two and only two things that we must never talk about at parties and in public places. It is the great taboo tyrannizing over the world we inhabit, a world we ourselves have built in large part to avoid having to talk about them. And what are the two great unmentionables? Religion and politics. And yet they are the only two things in the world worth talking about. Worth fighting about, actually. “From quiet homes and first beginnings,” writes Hilaire Belloc, “Out to the undiscovered ends/There’s nothing worth the wear of winning/But laughter and the love of friends.”
It is from that world, a world configured to Christ, that we are likely to find such “laughter and friends.” Enough, certainly, to make “the wear of winning” not just worthwhile to have but both honorable and necessary to defend as well.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.
