The Two Providences: Democracy and the Church’s Witness
Ephraim Radner
Every community has its thrift store run by someone – Goodwill, Salvation Army, maybe the local Methodist women. Where I grew up, it was a store run by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. As a child, my mother would drag me along as she poked around for this or that. The place was vast and dingy. One rubbed shoulders with people you wouldn’t normally spend time with. In my mind, I tend to lump all these kinds of places together in the category of the unpleasant haunts of the poor. I knew there was something vaguely religious about the place, and I recall the little brochures at the check-out about Frederic Ozanam, one of the Society’s founders – in the usual cheap and maudlin style of Catholic propaganda of the time. It was only years later that I discovered who Frederic Ozanam really was: a brilliant scholar of law and literature in mid-19th-century France, a tireless journalist, and one of the great liberal democrats of the Catholic Church in an era when democracy itself was not only suspect, but in some quarters, actually condemned as anti-Christian. As a young man, he helped form the Society of St. Vincent de Paul as a means of organizing young university students to live their Christian faith in a way that embodied the heart of Christ among the poor and that would, in some sense, provide a leaven of the Gospel in the midst of a chaotic society in which the Church’s life was being drowned in a sea of political confusion. The thrift store may have seemed a poor embodiment of that vision; but who knows?
I use Ozanam as a general exemplar of the argument I will make in this talk. It’s a very simple argument, and perhaps unexceptional in itself. Yet, because of our own confusions at present about what it means to be the Church in a society like America’s, I think the argument is worth making again and again nonetheless. What I want to say – and to say in the context of our church’s struggles of the present especially -- is that Christian holiness is the guarantor and goal of our political freedom; and that, by the same token, that freedom is the primary seedbed for our sanctity. We cannot pit them one against the other, or dare to ignore one over the other – as if being a Christian is simply a matter of “resisting” or “escaping” the “liberal culture”; or as if the pluralistic culture we are in must simply define how we live our Christian lives. We have come to a critical place in the history of the world – a place given instance in the particular travails and challenges of Anglicanism today – in which the holy character of our Christian lives represents the vocation we have been given for the larger body politic, and not just for the Church; and we can fulfill that vocation only as we are willing to embrace the pluralistic structures and attitudes whose destiny is, in fact, to assist and crumble finally in the face of the Christian Gospel.
As Anglicans – and this has been manifested to the world these past few years – we are confused by democracy; but that is perhaps because we are afraid of sanctity. And I aim this judgment today not just at liberals, but especially at conservatives Christians whose worries over an undeniably degenerate culture have, it seems to me, begun to push them into a dangerous animus towards democratic liberalism itself. That “the Church is not a democracy” is something we hear over and over from the lips of conservative Anglicans. Liberal Episcopalians, on the other hand, have frequently insisted that “democracy” within the church is one of the gifts that our church offers the larger Communion. The stiffened lines of confrontation between these two groups have sometimes ended up by creating blinders to the actual way democracy and ecclesial existence in fact ought to interact – “ought” in a divine sense: conservatives becoming suspicious of democracy altogether, liberals negligent of its religious dangers and consequent demands.
There is, of course, a wider context to our own ecclesial struggle, one that embraces many churches. Can one be a “democrat” and a “Christian”, more than one journal has asked, or can one be a Democrat (party-wise) and a Roman Catholic – a question we saw posed more recently, mainly around the issue of abortion; can one be a Republican and a true follower of Jesus? -- a question posed around the issue of war and poverty. This whole set of questions and their posing is rendered tense, because behind them is a confusion with which we are deeply uncomfortable. And that confusion is caused by the underlying commitments we all hold to democracy and diversity, commitments we in fact actually cherish. It is a tension felt explicitly by all sides in the current Anglican debates – by proponents of an imposed ecclesial authority, because they also hold a strong sense of pluralism’s radical value; and by liberal Anglican defenders of local ecclesial autonomy, because they also hold an uneasy conscience about the wholesale pluralistic relativization of divine obligation and, related to it, revelation that pure autonomy seems to imply. Curiously, Roman Catholic views of the present Anglican crisis mirror this confusion in a way: there are many Roman Catholics who deeply desire to see Anglicanism’s survival, in order that it might provide an example of a successful – because vital – democratic church. At the same time, there are many Roman Catholic who point – both gleefully and regretfully -- to Anglicanism as an example of such a hope’s vanity.
In what follows, I will approach this topic by tracing broadly the evolving place of democratic ideals in official Roman Catholic teaching. I will look at Catholicism, rather than Anglicanism, for the simple reason that Anglicanism has not confronted the development of democracy with the same clarity of challenge, and therefore the same degree of theological definition. American, and to a degree British political institutions provided a context for ecclesial life since the later 18th-century that was practically wedded to a range of democratic virtues that nonetheless had not by and large been self-consciously evaluated in theological (as opposed to political) terms (except perhaps by Dissenting thinkers in the previous century). The intimate relationship of Anglican self-identity with American-Anglo political culture simply meant that theologians tended to deal with political questions on a piece-meal and particular basis, as individual ethical problems, rather than in the context of larger systems.[1]
In Roman Catholicism, however, it is a different story. It is only lately that there has emerged a providential argument about democracy’s value in society as a whole, let alone within the church itself; and yet even at its most robust, that argument has been unable to break free from a concomitant acknowledgement of democracy’s danger, danger especially to the Church and her own providential mission. So, in the course of this talk, I want to pose the question: how hold the two providences of democracy and church together? Following official Catholic thinking here, I will suggest that the acceptance of the providential role of democracy is fundamentally tied to a Christian vision of the human person whose lively exercise of free will for the sake of God – what we call “love of God” -- is itself the embodiment of a holy vocation.
So, first, to the strange place of democracy in the Church. And speaking of “democracy”, I will use the term with a good deal of imprecision, as pointing to a range of institutions and political orderings that provide for universal suffrage, equality before the law, and the rights particularly of expression, religiously, intellectually, economically, and politically. In America, to be sure, we simply accept democracy as a social good, and we do so without much theological reflection. Although there are many people willing to claim, breezily, that “the Church isn’t a democracy”, we are, pragmatically speaking, eager to see that everything else is. To better glean the problematic Christian character of democracy, we need to acknowledge how recent it is a Christian presupposition, socially speaking. And this is true especially within Roman Catholicism, which has struggled mightily with the category and practice, and with the Church’s relation to it.
The turning point came, it seems, in the mid-19th-century only. It was a time when, like the late 1980-s and early 1990’s, there seemed to be a force sweeping across the nations of Europe and Latin America, overwhelming structures and traditions, imposing by the sheer power of the times popular suffrage, constitutional rule of law, and the legal protection of individual rights variously defined. And it was a force that both astonished in its strength and breadth, but also, because of its tenuous historical hold upon civic regimes and its rousing of resistance, raised the question: is this of God? Not only the failures of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, but the American Civil War itself were seen as grand-historical questions and tests to a reconfiguration of social life that was more or less novel: was democracy to be of ephemeral experimental consequence, or would it last, as if upheld by a divine hand? And churches like the Roman Catholic, struggled with this matter of discernment for a long time.
Two years after Frederic Ozanam founded the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Tocqueville made his own assertion in the famous introduction to his On Democracy in America, the first volume of which was published in 1835: democracy, he argued, was the product, quite literally, of divine providence. I will cite him at length, because his words both resonate with us, as well as touch off a sense perhaps of embarrassment. “Everywhere you look, you can see that the various events in the histories of peoples tend toward the advance of democracy. Every person has contributed to this through his or her efforts – those working for democracy’s success, those unconcerned with it, those who are its very declared enemies --- all of them pushed pell-mell along the same path [… ] blind instruments in the hands of God. The gradual development of equality is a providential fact. It has all the principle characteristics of such a fact: it is universal, it is lasting, it is beyond the reach of human manipulation, every event just as every human person has worked for its development. Can anyone intelligent possibly believe that a social movement that began so long ago could be done away with in one generation? Does anyone really think that, having done away with the feudal system and having triumphed over kings, democracy could retreat now in the face of the middle class and the rich? Will democracy cease her march now that she has become so strong and her enemies so weak? […] If the reflections of contemporary thinkers have led them to recognize in the gradual and progressive development of equality both their past and future history, such a recognition must imbue this development with the sacred character of a sovereign master’s will. If you wish to oppose democracy, therefore, it must seem as if you are resisting God Himself. What remains for the nations is that they adapt to the social condition that Providence has laid upon them.” This was God’s work.
Maybe so. But much of Toqueville’s marvelous book was elicited by the opposition to this divine work. T,’s long visit to America and careful outlining of social structures and attitudes there represented, in part, a way to buttress, through systematic detail , the claim that democracy indeed deserved to be granted, in observable terms, the “principle characteristics” of a “providential fact”. For not everyone agreed by a long shot. The debris left in the wake of the ancien régime and the Revolution, not to mention the Napoleonic expansion and collapse, had provided France with a makeshift constitutional monarchy, whose lurch by 1830 into Louis-Philippe’s “bourgeois tyranny” erected an arena of often violent political strife for much of the rest of the century. The constant press for new freedoms amid equally constant resistance and reaction made France one of the most intensely contested political landscapes of the era. People like Tocqueville especially – liberal aristocrats whose ties to the past had been willingly shed in favor of the hope for a better society built on a firmer foundation than the Revolution – eagerly and sometimes desperately went in search of the right path.
But the path was hardly clear; the Revolution and its destructive progeny had proven that. The cries during the Restoration for greater freedoms were met with numerous repulses, by whole classes and regions. Initially, some of the most liberal tendencies were found within Catholic circles, where the post-Revolutionary order still imposed limitations on the church’s activities and where in response, papal (“ultramontane”) support and allegiance was seen as a necessary balance to the French state’s power. Only a force from the “outside”, it was thought, could guarantee the French Catholics free scope for their life and work. Tocqueville may have believed in the providential advance of democracy, but he was both careful enough, and sufficiently engaged in a difficult and highly–charged debate, as to recognize that the advance itself carried with it a range of weighty challenges.
In particular, the example of American democracy – the most advanced form on earth – provided Tocqueville with two menacing observations bound up with religion in particular. First, religion is necessary to the maintenance of democracy, precisely because democracy left to its own devices is probably deadly. The “democratic principle”, as Tocqueville saw it, is founded on the movement towards “equality of condition”. As a form of political governance, democracy can go in many possible directions; but it is driven by the single dynamic that moves toward social equality. This dynamic, as Tocqueville discusses in many and various places in his book, takes on a kind of psychosocial life of its own – it drives men to thirst for acquisition, to garner, parlay, and maintain networks of power, to overthrow standards and traditions that get in the way, thereby to undermine webs of stability and community. Social equality becomes a voracious passion, once set loose; and as a condition, tapped into a providential movement, it works through all levels of human relationship as an unstoppable force, engorging society, transforming everything in it. “Once personal property began to provide influence and power, there was no new discovery in the arts, no improvement in commerce and industry, that did not thereby create some new element of equality among people. From this time on [late Middle Ages], every innovation, every generated need, every craving that demanded satisfaction, laid the progressive path towards universal leveling. Luxurious tastes, thirst for war, the power of fashion, the most superficial as well as the most profound passions of the human heart – everything worked to impoverish the rich and to enrich the poor.” In the process, desire incarnates itself in material ambition. While “materialism is a dangerous disease” anywhere, Tocquevelle writes, it is so most especially in democratic societies, as the drive to social equality turns everything tangible into a tool for individual satisfaction.
Tocqueville’s sense of the inevitable “commodification” and “consumerization” of life, as we might say, within democratic societies was almost prophetic. Without some internal social barrier lodged within the process, it could only lead itself to tyranny: in a world where not everyone’s desires can be satisfied, the thirst for equality and material satisfaction easily gives way to a centralized authority of some kind that will promise popular fulfillment while in fact reducing people to subjects – popular fascism; a communistic welfare state. In Tocqueville’s view, only religion could work to withstand this degrading and enveloping process, by providing a bedrock of moral direction, accountability, and shared values. To this degree the flourishing of religious life in America was a hopeful sign (see especially I.2.9; cf. I.1.5). Religion provides a respite from equality’s ambitions, and orders a sphere of “immaterial” satisfaction that counteracts the reduction of life to material acquisition (cf. II.2.15). The multiplication of religious sects, uncontrolled by the state, and generated by voluntary sympathies, is exactly the protection that democracy demands. Thus, democracy has an internal problematic that only religion can potentially contain.
The irony, of course – and this is the second danger -- is that religious life itself thereby comes to reflect, however contrastively, the diversity of ambitions from which it is supposed to stand apart. This fact means that on one level religion itself is swept up by the same forces as the populace in its driving democratic impulses, and is thereby itself weakened and transformed. The “pantheistic” tendency that de Tocqueville noted in American religion (II.1.7) is tied, he argued, to just that “leveling” process that democracy must inevitably pursue – the lowest common spiritual denominator that is bred by the push into “generalized” conformity. (Oddly enough, this is also a reason why Tocqueville thinks that Roman Catholicism will triumph within democractic societies: take away the priest’s authoritarian club, and its “catholic” claim fits will with a kind of popular egalitarianism). Far from withstanding the onslaught of egalitarian passion, democratic religion itself tends to turn into its mimicking child, furthering the democratic drift into servility. To be sure, Tocqueville does not offer this as a necessary outcome. The Church must somehow make her peace with democracy, as Catholics by and large had in America he argues, not the least because democracy is God’s own vessel (I.1.5f.). But he is by no means as sanguine as some have argued in his depictions of the possible destination to this vessel.
If this kind of religious situation is “providential”, then, it is so in the strangest of ways. For surely a vision in which religion is left in the powerful hands of democratic debasement conflicts with the providence of the Kingdom of God that would, in the vision of the Ascended Christ perhaps, subject all rule and authority to Christian sovereignty. (And Tocqueville does not say they are equivalent by any means). Surely, God’s providence does not lead the Church into a home whose very walls and rooms are designed – by the same God -- to sap her of the Gospel’s particularly and vigor! Indeed, there seem to be two providences at work, ones that function in their own compartments in a fashion, frankly, that American Christians have managed to juggle without much thought for decades, bumping up against their respective confines from time to time – as today – but not undoing their supposedly compatible distinctions. “I believe in equal rights and opportunities for all people in their diversity, but for a church with absolute, exclusive, and authoritatively imposed standards.” But, of course, the coherence of these two compartments is just what many Catholics of Tocqueville’s era and later have questioned.
It was an American Catholic, Orestes Brownsen, who most forcefully made the argument against what he called the “democratic principle”. A student of Tocqueville’s writings from a generation later, and a man with a long personal history of both political and religious development, he shared a deep commitment to political liberty, and to democracy itself as a supremely useful form of government. But defining the “democratic principle” as that attitude of life that demotes all social decisions to “conventional” agreement – that is, to humanly autonomous choice – Brownsen developed a critique of American culture that specifically picked up on the danger signs that Tocqueville had sketched 30 years earlier: the debased materialism of American egalitarian passions had in fact widened the gap between rich and poor, and rendered null the basis for common human commitment in the public sphere. Assessing a theological cause to this state of affairs, Brownsen laid the blame for American democratic degeneracy at the doorstep of ethical atheism: without an acknowledged divine origin to political rights – what Brownsen called the ius gentium (the law of the nations) given by God – the protections of the U.S. (or any) Constitution were simply given over to the minds and interests of autonomous individuals, vying in an arena where power exercised achieved political supremacy. That is, unless the State had some kind of basic religious foundation to its political decision-making, unless in fact the American Constitution is formally interpreted in terms of its “providential” character (p. 204), democracy must end as a vessel of oppression. Writing shortly after Vatican I, Brownsen had no qualms in speaking of the Pope as the only real guarantor of true freedom: “The moral order, that is, justice, eternal and immutable right, or the law of the nations, is by the divine will and appointment, according to Christian tradition, placed in charge of the pope, or the vicar of Christ on earth”. The “democratic principle” of autonomous “convention” must necessarily be the enemy of the Catholic Church. (“The Democratic Principle” [1873], in Brownsen, Orestes, Selected Essays [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955], pp. 192-226). While “liberty”, understood in specifically Catholic terms, might well be “providential”, Brownsen was not clear that democracy itself held title to that claim.
It was not as if Brownsen wished to see the end of the American experiment. He was a staunch Unionist during the Civil War. But, like many thinkers since – cf. Oliver O’Donovan’s highly regarded Desire of the Nations – he held that the state’s purpose was, in a sense, to “get out of the way” of the Church as she goes about her mission of establishing God’s justice, and if possible even to support it. And there are clearly various forms of government theoretically capable of doing this. Or is this not so? That is the nub of the question here: does God want democracy and all that it entails, and therefore must the Church simply deal with it, adapt to it, support it? But if so, how protect herself from the seemingly nefarious aspects of the democratic dynamic (if there is such a thing)? Understand where this touches matters at hand: the debate and conflict over Civil Partnerships and Gay Unions in Britain, Europe, Canada, the U.S. and now South Africa are bound up, from a Christian perspective, with the answers we give to the question of whether there are two Providences, as it were, and how they relate. What kinds of “civil rights” ought we to grant gay people in a democratic society, if in fact, as Christians, we cannot morally affirm the embodiment of these rights? Similar questions arise over flash-point issues like abortion, of course. But they also touch – and this is my point in bringing this whole matter up – the broad array of cultural forces, material, commercial, communal, intellectual and so on, that are arguably part of the democratic outworking.
The Roman Catholic church is still struggling with this, as I said. It is a live issue, and we must attune ourselves to it as Anglicans because in fact it informs our struggles even if we are ignorant of its presence. You have people like Richard Neuhaus, editor of First Things, who – along with colleagues – defends democracy (and, less certainly, capitalism itself) as the only known form of governmental order that can restrain the “monistic” drive of any state. A well-known manifesto he issued in 1981, in the midst of Cold War, remains the touchstone for his brand of political theology (Christianity and Democracy, 1981, republished in First Things in 1996). And Neuhaus is clear that, from a theological point of view, we should consider liberal democracy in divinely “providential” terms (a word he uses explicitly – cf. “The Vatican vs. Americanism”, First Things, 148 [Dec. 2004], pp. 64-84). But Neuhaus’ providential reading stands in stark contrast to the official teaching of the Roman Catholic church only 150 years ago, a teaching whose recent “development” may well grant space for a Neuhaus today, but that is still informed by deep tensions over the very character of “freedom” and its tendency to stoke the individualistic flames that rebel against the purposes of God.
Without engaging details, it is worth recalling what have become notorious statements – though hardly canards – by mid-19th-century popes on the evils of liberal democracy. It is not as if the Catholic Church had no idea of natural “rights”, even many associated with what became liberal democracy – the great Iberian theologians of Salamanca and Coimbra in the 16th century had long built up an impressive set of relatively liberal theories, based on Thomistic categories. But the fact is that much of this work had been practically left behind in the course of political turmoil in New World and Old. Gregory XVI, in his 1832 Encyclical Mirari vos, famously condemned various forms of “indifferentism” in religion. This included the social-political kind that characterizes “liberalism” and that presents the state as “indifferent” to the religious commitments of its citizens, which are relegated therefore to an unconstrained “individual conscience”. Gregory offered the following scathing judgment on religious liberty: “ from this most putrid font of indifferentism flows that absurd and erroneous view, or rather insanity, that liberty of conscience should be asserted and claimed for just anyone” (14). This perspective was reasserted by Pius IX in his 1864 Encyclical Quanta cura, which, referring back to Gregory, insisted that it was contrary to the teaching of the Church itself to affirm a state that would not penalize “offenders of the Catholic religion” (3). Pius quotes Gregory, in denying the orthodoxy of those who claim that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." Along with the Encyclical, Pius issued what became a notorious Syllabus of Errors – a kind of index of previously condemned errors -- that included the following heretical statements: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (15); “the Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect” (24); “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church” (55).
These condemnations, needless to say, beginning with Gregory’s, proved disconcerting for Catholic liberals like Tocqueville and more importantly, ended by deflating the movement generated by Lammenais, the hero of the Catholic liberals. But it did nothing to quell the political movement towards democracy that Tocqueville had insisted was unstoppable. As the Church resisted, the tide rolled on, and the two Providences confronted each other with an almost absurd contradiction, summed up in the phrase attributed to the ardent papist Louis Veuillot, as he addressed a liberal opponent: “I demand from you, in the name of your principles, that freedom which I refuse you in the name of my own!”
The contradiction could not last on this level. Still, it only slowly resolved itself.
Leo XIII, although known for his 1891 Encyclical Rerum novarum upholding the right to private property and free association, had, only 3 years earlier, in an encyclical on Freedom (Libertas) issued a stinging attack on the concepts of separation of church and state, a free press, and unregulated private education. Summing up his views, he wrote “that man, by a necessity of his nature, is wholly subject to the most faithful and ever enduring power of God; and that, as a consequence, any liberty, except that which consists in submission to God and in subjection to His will, is unintelligible. To deny the existence of this authority in God, or to refuse to submit to it, means to act, not as a free man, but as one who treasonably abuses his liberty; and in such a disposition of mind the chief and deadly vice of liberalism essentially consists.” (36). Rerum novarum, in any case, made a strong case against the free market, and for the need for a range of government interventions bound by Catholic law. In 1895, furthermore, Leo addressed the American Catholic Church in particular, and while appreciative of the unimpeding “liberty” granted the Church by the American Constitution, was clear that the separation of Church and State was not the ideal ordering of government. God’s purposes would in fact be better served if the Catholic Church “enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of public authority” (Longinqua 6). And these themes regarding the necessity of Catholic constraints upon the state and the social life of a nation, and the evils of “liberal” individualism and unregulated liberties of expression and inquiry, were repeated and developed in the next century (e.g. by Pius XII in Quadrigesimo [1931]).
The travails of Europe in the 1930’s and 40’s, however, seemed to move discussion in a new direction. Catholics, like Jacques Maritain, were active in the post-war reconstruction of local and international relations, and had central roles in the articulation of e.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose shapes were founded on the affirmed confluence of natural law and democratic principles. To all intents and purpose, a revolution had occurred. By 1953, Pius XII could address Italian jurists with a not-so-tentative defense of toleration – toleration of diverse views, even religious ones. While all human beings, he argued, were called to stand “unconditionally” for truth – the Catholic truth, of course – there was a possibility in many circumstances of tolerating error for the sake of a greater good, such as mutual peace, a secure space for discourse and witness, etc., much as God permits evil in His providence. Thus, permission and providence seemed finally to meet: “Christ in the parable of the cockle gives the following advice: let the cockle grow in the field of the world together with the good seed in view of the harvest (cf. Matt. 13:24-30). The duty of repressing moral and religious error cannot therefore be an ultimate norm of action. It must be subordinate to higher and more general norms, which in some circumstances permit, and even perhaps seem to indicate as the better policy, toleration of error in order to promote a greater good” (Ci riesce, V,1953, Pius XII). We need to note carefully this opening to pluralism of commitments, for Pius indicates its usefulness to the achievement of some “good” “greater” than the mere suppression of error. Still, toleration for the sake of such a good, whatever it may be, must also be pursued by those who insist on witnessing to a single and absolute truth now made civically relative: it is in the interest of the good, and not in conflict with the truth to which I witness, that I work to uphold a civic order in which many purported truths are protected. The two providences then, are not exactly resolved so much as ranged alongside each other in what is meant to be a non-conflictive set of compartments – perhaps itself providentially maintained.
Within a decade, John the XXIII’s famous Pacem in Terris had reorganized Catholic social teaching along lines that, only a century before, at least had the appearance of being liberal heresies: opening with a vibrant description of basic “human rights” given by God, including the right to liberty of religious conscience (classically citing Leo XIII in a way seemingly contrary to the latter’s intention), John defined the State’s role (e.g.60-65) in terms of “protecting and expanding” the freedoms guaranteed by the exercise of fundamental human rights, even in the context of economic relationships.
While nowhere affirming liberal democracy and the free-market as central to the guarantee of human rights and duties, there is much in the encyclical that implies it. Including a not-so-veiled description of human coming-to-awareness about political participation and rights, to which any state constitution must bow (cf. 75-79). When the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis humanae (1965) appeared a few years later (drafted, we are told, by among others the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray), it provided a full-blown affirmation of the right to freedom of conscience and religion. By the time that John Paul revisited Rerum novarum in 1991, the “legitimate autonomy of the democratic order” was listed as something to which the Church was obliged to defer (Centisimus annus 47). To be sure, John Paul II maintained a strong commitment to a freedom grounded in God’s eternal moral order – akin to Brownsen’s Catholic conception of the ius gentium -- but by now the secular, pluralistic, and democratic state had become the acceptable vessel for the pursuit of and witnessing to that order.
There were and are many Catholics – most famously the schismatic Abp. Lefèvre -- who think this has all been misinterpreted, and that the embrace of liberal democracy and its pluralistic gear has been excessive. There are those who see Murray’s standard explication of Dignitatis humanae‘s affirmation of religious freedom in terms of the highest norm for church-state relations as skewed, and itself a break with traditional Catholic teaching that would hold all societies as divinely obligated to the Catholic truth – hence Catholic “establishments”, as in the Dominican Republic, would be acceptable. “The Church, at any rate, is not a democracy”, they say.[2] Maintaining, even through the imposition of discipline, the standards of an absolute truth within the Church is perhaps all the more necessary within an accepted pluralistic society. In the 19th century, one of the great anti-liberal Catholic thinkers, and a pioneer of what later contributed to the theoretical foundations of fascism, Donoso Cortes, held to the view of a necessary “equilibrium of repression/dictatorship” in the relationship of church and state: in a liberal democracy, he argued, there is required a dictatorial church. But a dictatorial church is not so easy to achieve, even if one believed it were necessary – for the just the reasons Tocqueville outlined. Democracy and its character is highly infectious among all the institutions within its fold. While it is possible for churches to “buckle down” at various periods of its history, it remains to be seen whether a liberal democratic context in particular provides for such a possibility.
The very experience of democratic pluralism shapes ecclesial expectations. As one Latin American student of Church and State recently put it: “The Catholic Church, over the last few years, in its documents and by the action of its faithful, has encouraged citizenship and democracy in society. At the same time, it is maintained as a hierarchical institution with limited participation of the laity […] The Christians who act in politics and in society to build democracy, upon returning to the Church, by a duty of coherence, begin to demand a more active presence in the decision-making instruments of the Church itself” (Luiz Alberto Gomez de Souza, “Roman Catholic Church and the Experience of Democracy in America”, Kellogg Institute, Univ. of Notre Dame, 2005).
And in America, the “duty of coherence” has deep roots, surely. Even Richard Neuhaus, seen as a great American ally to programs of the Vatican, still stands behind his 1981 manifesto, which explicitly – and in a very American way – issues a call for the “open church”: “We are pledged to the goal that our churches be open churches. An open church engages sympathetically the diversity of Christian views both within and outside denominational structures. An open church welcomes dissent for the strengthening of truth and the correction of error. An open church makes decisions in the light of day, not in the shadowed corners of bureaucratic power. An open church has leaders who are not afraid but eager to engage in the fullest consultation with all its members. An open church addresses social issues not so much to advance a particular position as to inform and empower people to make their own decisions responsibly. An open church understands that the church speaks most effectively when the people who are the church do the speaking, and leaders speak most believably when they speak with the informed consent of those whom they would lead. Sometimes leaders can and should disagree with the views of the majority. To disagree, however, is not to disregard the views of others. Leadership in an open church is marked by candor and never by contempt for the convictions of those with whom we differ. In these ways, an open church becomes a zone of truth-telling in a world of mendacity.”
This may sound like liberal boiler-plate; but it comes from someone viewed by many as a distinctively anti-liberal thinker -- at least, as things now stand; although Neuhaus represents, in his way, a kind of liberalism that is properly bred in our bones. In any case, how are we to explain the changes in Catholic teaching on this matter? Someone like Avery Dulles argues that the differences between the 19th century papal pronouncements and, say, Dignitatis humanae are overdrawn (cf. Avery Dulles, “Religious Freedom: Innovation and Development”, in First Things 118 (Dec. 2001), pp. 35-39). Contemporary Catholic teaching, including Dignitatis humanae, he says, maintains a continuous commitment to the one truth of the Catholic faith, to the incapacity of human reason for choosing the truth uninformed by revelation and by the Church, and to the responsibility of the state – seen institutionally or as a conglomeration of the citizenry – to further this truth. In other words, the Catholic Church has not given up its claims to an exclusive truth, and to the moral obligation of all people, including governments, to embrace and uphold this truth. Further, Dulles argues that development of “social doctrine” must in any case follow an uneven course, pressed by the “vicissitudes of history”, in this case simply the change from monarchical constraints to more democratic constraints (hence, without claiming any instrinsic divine value to historical change itself).
Even Dulles, however, argues that that, not only the spread of democratic regimes, but also the horrendous failures of European socialism and world communism especially, necessitated a reappraisal by the Church of intrinsic values of various political structures.
And that is the point: there may well be intrinsic value – in the sense of divinely ordained value -- to certain political structures, like liberal democracy. The theological assertions that undergird Dignitatis humanae and other Catholic realities are more than pragmatic. Rather, they are based on the recognition of certain essential realities about the human person: “Truth, however, is to be sought after in a manner proper to the dignity of the human person and his social nature. The reason is that the exercise of religion, of its very nature, consists before all else in those internal, voluntary and free acts whereby man sets the course of his life directly toward God. No merely human power can either command or prohibit acts of this kind. […] It is one of the major tenets of Catholic doctrine that man's response to God in faith must be free: no one therefore is to be forced to embrace the Christian faith against his own will. Therefore the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature. In consequence, the right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it and the exercise of this right is not to be impeded, provided that just public order be observed” (10).
It is not as if this freedom, created by God as the “natural” character of the human person in relation to Him, was something that itself came to be only in the 20th-century; rather, it simply was not apprehended before in its fullness. And however much the Christian truth – in this case, of the Catholic Church – is necessary to “inform” a free conscience, any measure of coercive imposition, whether two centuries ago, or today, must in itself be an illicit constraint upon the God-given liberty of the human creature through which alone true faith can be formed. Dignitatis humanae itself opens by enunciating the way that the embrace of the right to religious liberty is bound to discovery of a long-hidden truth – not unknown in its principles to the Church, but historically ungrasped. Hence, the providential character of its recognition: “A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man, and the demand is increasingly made that men should act on their own judgment, enjoying and making use of a responsible freedom, not driven by coercion but motivated by a sense of duty” (1).
Thus, it is not the case that democratic systems are simply useful to the Church, so long as other forms of, say, theocracy are pragmatically impossible; nor even that, on the tally sheet of governments helpful to Catholicism, democracy happens to score high. As John Rawls has written, the premise of political liberalism – at least of his own theoretical definition – is that the constituencies of the commonwealth understand their participation not simply as a modus vivendi, good enough as long as something better doesn’t come around. Instead, there is among these constituencies an “overlapping consensus” about the values that undergird the functioning of the liberal state. Each group buys into and supports the pluralistic character of liberal democracy, though for a variety of reasons that are not the same, but that, based on their own “comprehensive” vision, nonetheless “overlap”. (cf. John Rawls, Political Liberalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005], pp. li-lvii). In this case, something like DH offers its own reasons for the buy-in – the nature of the human person and of faith. Though these reasons are particularly Christian, they sufficiently overlap with other groups’ values as to form an interlocking support to the functioning of liberal democracy itself. The Church – like anybody else – is free (and in her eyes called) to persuade others of her truth, to influence legislation, to engage the levers of power that are open to all, as long as she does so according to accepted standards of public reasoning and engagement that maintain the shape of the political order itself. She does so for her own reasons, of course, however much the practical form of her engagement follows patterns shared with other groups. But even Dignitatis humanae had affirmed that “inquiry is to be free, carried on with the aid of teaching or instruction, communication and dialogue, in the course of which men explain to one another the truth they have discovered, or think they have discovered, in order thus to assist one another in the quest for truth” (3).
It is important to understand, however, that this is not a pragmatist call to public reasoning, where the Church thinks of herself as but one party to a larger common seeking after truth, in the way William James conceived of pluralistic dialogue. Nor is this an embrace of a view that sees, with Mill, the “virtues” of life within a democratic polity as formative in themselves of human integrity. No; this is a particular Christian calling that understands the arena of pluralistic dialogue to be the divine vessel for the enactment of human faith in God according to the truth that the Church herself grasps and lives. And the distinction is crucial.
1. There is a Christian truth (from a Catholic perspective, it “subsists” in the Catholic church).
2. This truth is sufficiently clear within the Church as to be able to be articulated within the public sphere.
3. Unless this were so, human faith in God could not exist, and the actual encounter with God that faith alone provides would be impossible.
4. Freedom of conscience and the social space where this is permitted exercise, therefore, serves the Christian truth, and not the other way around; and the articulation of Christian truth is all that keeps permitted freedom of conscience from devolving into a debased human wandering.
The relationship of human error and freedom of conscience is thereby clarified somewhat: God providentially wills a political order in which human error is granted space to be freely chosen (cf. Ci riesce), because that is the only arena in which true Christian faith can arise which might, in its vigor and witness, curb and correct human error itself in its essential power over the human heart. This means that, in Tocqueville’s terms, democracy is rightly willed by God for the exercise of Christian faith (which must be free), even while the Christian faith, in its clear articulation and practice, is necessary for the ongoing integrity of democratic life. As he put in a famous paragraph: “Religion perceives that civil liberty affords a noble exercise to the faculties of man and that the political world is a field prepared by the Creator for the efforts of the mind […] Liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and its triumphs, as a the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims” (I.1.2). The two Providences are in fact one. But they are one only within a perspective whereby the Church sees herself as being called to maintain a vigorous, even liberal, democracy in conjunction with a clear and articulate Christian witness.
To put the matter this way does not resolve particular issues regarding “dual allegiance” – Catholic politicians, for instance, in the face of Supreme Court rulings permitting laws that legalize abortion. For it does not adjudicate clearly the practical way in which a Christian witness against abortion might cohere with a political duty to maintain permissive laws that are accepted and even entrenched through a politically legitimate democratic process. But it does show that there is a Christian calling to engage the potential for such a resolution: God wills it, and not some simple divisive judgment for one aspect or another.
For American Anglicans, for whom the democratic context of desire and decision-making is unconsciously rooted, to put the matter of the Church’s providential coordination with democratic institutions in the way that I have, is important in a very different way. It is to make clear that we are not faced with a zero-sum game with our political and cultural context when it comes to Christian witness. We do not betray our commitments to democracy when we seek out, articulate, and embody in our lives the particular truths of the Christian Gospel. We struggle in a very different direction from most Roman Catholics (although in America and Europe these days, perhaps we are closer in our attitudes than any of us like to admit). For us, the question is whether we dare clarify our Christian articulation, and enact their presuppositions. And the answer, within this argument, is that we must – that is our vocation within a democratic society more than anything. Like John the Baptist, we have a “testimony” to give to the people of Judea and all the people of Jerusalem.
One of the greatest challenges to this vocation within a democratic context is that, as Anglicans, we have failed to maintain a sufficiently clear theological anthropology, if you will, one that could maintain the distinction between context and identity: pluralism has become something that marks our communal lives within churches, and of course our life among churches. This forms the lived impression that the church itself represents the material from which the democratic society is framed, and things like “diversity” become goods in themselves. To some extent, this is inevitable, and in fact the nature of Christian faith as a free commitment to God, because it is never temporally complete, means that faith must be itself granted the space for renewal within the Church over and over. The notion of an “open church”, in Neuhaus’ phrase, cannot therefore be antithetical to the Christian purpose. Nor is it possible simply to evict the reality of pluralism from the midst of the Church’s life, as some desire – a desire that misconstrues the character of the church’s historical life at present.
But it is critical, nonetheless, to see that we are called, as Christians, to something beyond the settled virtue of pluralism if the voracious drive of democratic passion is not to engulf Christian life itself. I have no intention here of exploring the kind of ecclesiology implied by this very particular calling, informed by a particular political context. I want only to insist that we recognize that there are such implications, and we had better think them through and live them out. The call, for instance, to be “of one mind and heart” (cf. Phil. 2:1ff) is a specifically Christian calling that, because it is founded upon a prayer of our Lord Jesus Himself, must find its fulfillment within the democratic context in which we have been placed by God. “Oneness” of thought and life, that is, cannot be trumped by democratic “diversity”, but it must find a place within it that does not, at the same time, turn us into democracy’s enemies. Indeed such a place is absolutely demanded. And the current conflicts in our church run the risk of contradicting this demand.
So, I am today only indicating a vocation, not outlining its form. It is the vocation, so to speak, coherent with the call to “let your light shine before men” (Mt. 5:14-16), given as a command whose consequence is a promised turning of the minds and hearts of men. If the Church and the churches themselves have devolved into a kind of mirror of the democratic arena, which they have, we are nonetheless left with the same calling at least among ourselves, as Christians, as we are given to the world: the persuasive force of reason and example even within our own midst. The Church may not be in fact a democracy; but having acted like one, or having been subsumed into one, she needs herself to be converted to her own mission. The failure of Anglicans and others to see this as a primary need, threatens to give over the churches to the powers of tyranny that Tocqueville himself warned might be waiting, hovering over the devolution of democracy.
The coherence of articulated faith and life is what I call sanctity in the context of the church. Thus, holiness – not the dictatorship of authority -- becomes the primary vocation of a democratized church – within and without. I return to the example of Ozanam, precisely in the midst of the great liberal catholic conflict of mid-19th century France. It is not really possible for us to imagine the wreckage of the Catholic Church’s witness during this period, one fraught with divisive argument, fear, and anger, inextricably bound to continued social upheaval. In the midst of this, in 1833, Ozanam and his friends sought some way forward. An advocate of democracy, a student of Protestant notions of liberty, a believer in the “providential” advance of these two realities (like Tocqueville) in and through the Church herself (cf. Acton), he recognized the impossibility of the Church’s capture of the social arena except through the free exercise of faith, confronted with the evidence of Christian truth. In founding the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, he did so on the basis of some of the very liberal “freedoms” his own Church held in suspicion: lay participation and government, free association, engagement with the laboring classes. Within these structures, Ozanam believed, “friendship” would grow among members and classes within which the source of faith would itself be nourished, encouraged to turn to God by the very witness of self-giving. In other words, Ozanam founded the Society for the sake of converting the Church herself, and through it, her surrounding culture by the exercise of charity.
But the point is that the social freedoms given by democracy are meant to be the seedbed for a particular kind of social change, that is tied to the power that alone can effect godly change: holiness – the visibility of the Spirit -- that itself overthrows the power of social oppression. It is not the case that sanctity is “simply” independent of freedom, and can flourish anywhere. Of course it can, even in slavery. But the power of human holiness is to change the world. And it carries the world with it, according to the providence of God, according to the very means by which God orders human history for the sake of faith. Oppression is an evil that can only be met by sanctity; but it is an evil because it also suffocates it, as we know from the example of ancient Israel. In the midst of oppressive contexts, holiness takes the form of martyrdom, as Christ himself and the apostles demonstrate (cf Dignitatis humanae 11). That is its term. Within the widening sphere of constitutionally guaranteed rights to plural consciences, the demand for such witness is not lessened, but actually heightened – for now it is the only “leaven” through which a vast and confused lump can be transformed.
The current crisis in Anglicanism covers, as we know, the globe, and touches nations whose governments vary widely in their collective sense and experience of freedom. Our churches themselves have adopted differing characters within these contexts. But if in fact the “two providences” have finally come to merge in their human apprehension, as I have argued, the strategies we adopt in the face of our conflicts and divisions cannot simply be ones of choosing liberal or anti-liberal attitudes. My experience with the church in, for instance, Haiti has made that clear: we are to build up and engage democracy for the sake of faith; we are to embody our faith in holiness for sake of democracy’s conversion. Where the blurred lines occur, as they do all over the world and Church in our era, we are given no choice (in faith) but to die in love. Against all this, we are, it seems to me, currently in a posture of rebellion.
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[1] You can see this, for instance, in the 1948 Lambeth resolutions taken in the face of still-being written United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: these were almost self-evident matters of ethical duty, not difficult issues to be explored within a larger theological context.
[2] It is the Catholic Church’s deep-seated and theologically motivated suspicion of democracy’s moral dynamics that has led the church to align herself at various points with fascisms of both the Right and the Left. The question here is whether the legitimacy of these suspicions, however, even as they are upheld by traditional moral concerns, can ever be allowed to justify such alliances – yesterday or today. On the way moral suspicions with democratic liberalism can move in opposing radical directions, see Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
