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In Christ there is no East or West: this is true and important.
This does not entail the ahistorical, apolitical, and amoral contention that Right or Left are somehow foreign to the Christian. The lives of many Catholic saints, blesseds, and venerables testify to this.
This does not entail the ahistorical, apolitical, and amoral contention that Right or Left are somehow foreign to the Christian. The lives of many Catholic saints, blesseds, and venerables testify to this.
Partisanship and political association is a value neutral, they only become good or bad depending on their aims and outcomes, which are often mixed and come down to motivation and intention.
There nothing morally superior or virtuous about excepting oneself from politics because of a faulty and individualistic conception of the political. That is simply to admit to not know what it means to be a social being, a political animal, and to poorly enjoy one’s community.
Every adult blessed with the gifts of language and intellect and so on has social responsibilities that are properly deployed through politics. There simply no exception to this rule. Responsibility emerges from freedom; to be a free adult is to carry a political burden.
Anyone who wants to play make-believe about this—and radical monastic retreat is NOT this even though it may seem that way—is acting like a child. Apolitical abstractions of Christianity are child’s play. They infantilize the faithful and corrupt the praxis of Christian life.
The expression of a hyper individualistic apolitical and ahistorical Christian and Catholic identity is NOT Christian or Catholic; is is supremely and quintessentially AMERICAN. It more American than MAGA. And it is more toxic as well. Grow up, America.
The twin evils of individualism and negative freedom rot the political nature of the human person and its unique responsibilities as adult and sink into an infantilized stupor of moralism that rejoices and boasts in a tepid and incestuous nonpartisan and apolitical pool.
Meanwhile, the status quo is reinforced and those on the margins of this ideal fantasy are left to feel guilty for being political TO SAVE THEIR LIVES or they have to leave entirely No. That is not pastoral or Christian or Catholic. It is cowardice and privilege.
What I admire about conservative, MAGA Catholicism is that it at least purports to have an idea of the good life and human flourishing and are accountable to reasons for that. They claim their ideological and political territory. I think they are wrong but they’re not apolitical.
What I have lost all respect for, and this includes my own sins of trying to fly above the fray of reality and politics in my past, is the one who tries to unify under false pretences and who will not bring real claims about our common life to the political table, to break bread.
This is the default position of most of the Catholic clergy and it is easy to see why. But that only makes it more not less damnable. We need a vastly more politically alive Church with real, adult political factions and parts that engage in the agonistic work of democracy.
To be clear: I am totally opposed to Integralism. I am not suggesting some clownish and equally childish Christian Kingdom. We need secular politics, partisan politics, real issues-based and solutions-driven political disputes along with their ethical and moral rationale.
There is a similar, if not identical, attempt to claim that education and schooling ought to be apolitical and value neutral. I am very familiar with this nasty lie which is most often a tool of the Right. It is another infantilizing analog to this issue in the US Church.
The Religious Left in the US, led by the Black Church (in all of its own variety), is not a club or label, it is a vision of the good life and human flourishing and has shown itself hard if not impossible to beat on political and moral issues, with varying results on solutions.
When the Left rises up against injustice, it is not an optional position in toto, it is only debatable at the level of action and policy and implementation. Those opposed to it on the Right, however, take a moral stance that is opposed to the Gospel. They must overcome that.
Instead, their trick is to wave a white flag of apolitical moralism and try to bring everyone to an abstract center. In other words, those who say you cannot be a Left or Right partisan and a Catholic are simply declaring a doctrine of the Right. They are outing their politics.
Just because the infantilized US-individualized white vision of a pure Catholicism, unstained by partisanship or political strife, is a tool of the Right doesn’t mean they need to know this or even believe it. They enact it.
And when they wear a Roman collar they are especially guilty and should repent and believe in the Gospel.
Both sideism is LITERALLY lukewarm and we should, like Christ, spew it from our mouth.
