The danger of post-Christian America
Joshua J. Whitfield says believers should not isolate ourselves from the nation’s inflicted spiritual chaos — our country still needs us.
“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.” Said Alexis de Tocqueville, the great political philosopher and observer of our young democracy.
Impressed by religion in early American life as lived both in public and private, he observed religion “takes no direct part in the government of society,” even though it remained “foremost of the political institutions of that country.” So combined were the “notions of Christianity” and liberty in American democracy, he thought it impossible to “conceive the one without the other.”
Now Tocqueville wasn’t a believer. Although baptized Catholic, he lost his faith early on in life. Yet he appreciated religion and its social and political good. It was, in his mind, “indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions,” indispensable for America.
But of course, ours is a different time. With many people plainly more dismissive and hostile toward any sort of faith, religion doesn’t wield the influence it did at the beginning of our history.
Rod Dreher in his book “The Benedict Option” calls it the “Great Flood,” the sudden collapse of Christian culture and civilization, fallen alongside the rise of a rather powerful and positive hostility toward any sort of faith and its public exercise. Dreher claims we’ve witnessed an epochal shift in the West on a scale unseen since the fall of Rome, toward a genuinely “post-Christian America.”
And it does feel we’ve entered the dusk of some culture’s day. Religion just isn’t as significant as it once was, and that change has made us different. Following the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, Dreher suggests it’s incumbent upon Christians not only to recognize this new reality but also, as MacIntyre recommended, to set about creating “local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained.”
This is Dreher’s sermon: that if Christians do not preserve their “ways of thinking, speaking and acting,” then soon “we will have nothing to stand on at all.” Dreher calls for the “Benedict Option,” again an idea borrowed from MacIntyre who said the West needs a “doubtless very different” Saint Benedict, who famously left the corruption of Rome to become the acclaimed founder of western monasticism in the 6th century.
And Dreher dreams of nothing less than a Benedictine renaissance among Christians, something more than monasteries. Christians, he says, must change the way they participate in politics, the way they educate their children, even the way they have sex, unabashedly divorced from the ways of world. It’s a broad project, essentially spiritual and even apocalyptic, but certainly challenging. And it’s a project for which I am deeply sympathetic, influenced as I am, like him, by the same lights of the same tradition.
But there’s something wrong with it. And that is, our country needs Christians.
What’s missing from Dreher’s “Benedict Option” is an account of justice as both Aristotle and Aquinas would have understood it — that is, justice as commitment to civic virtue and the common good. The danger of the “Benedict Option” is it risks sectarianism, risks becoming nothing more than a reframed rehearsal of privileged middleclass conservatism, identity politics with an edge.
To practice justice is to render each person his or her due. To be committed to justice is to trust in the capacity for truth each person possesses naturally, no matter their faith. Which means justice requires dialogue, argument, patience. And that’s precisely what Dreher’s book is short on. Which is precisely the danger.
To be committed to justice is to be committed beyond one’s tribe. We are still one nation, still one people, divided and bitter though we be. What we need isn’t escape and entrenchment but trust and witness, redoubling our efforts for the common good. We do indeed need to be better Christians, which is what Dreher gets right. But we’re also still citizens, still invested in the messy relative peace of the common good. And this is what Dreher gets wrong.
But it’s also missing what Charles Péguy called “mystique,” that sense of the eternal suffusing the temporal, that sense of the sacredness even of the secular city that should inspire commitment and even sacrifice for the common good, not escape. And even among Christians.
“Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics,” Péguy said, and this is what Christians should remember. We don’t need to become monks but rather mystics, seeing things more deeply than our blind and pitiable materialist fellow citizens. Though politics “laughs at mysticism,” Péguy said, still we must remain mystical within the politics of the earthly city. We must remain in the city to speak our truth, even looking for the truth which God sometimes hides in others beyond our kith.
This is our better tradition, both Christian and American. And it’s more what we need: mystics for justice and not selfmade refugees.
Joshua J. Whitfield is pastoral administrator for St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and a columnist for The Dallas Morning News.