{"id":314,"date":"2016-05-13T18:48:37","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T22:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/jappersandjanglers\/?p=314"},"modified":"2016-05-13T18:53:35","modified_gmt":"2016-05-13T22:53:35","slug":"314","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jappersandjanglers\/2016\/05\/314\/","title":{"rendered":"The Corpse of Culture Wars Catholicism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"(A<\/a>
(A pro-choice rally in Dublin. Source: Wikimedia, Creative Commons License).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

In a recent piece in Crux<\/em><\/a>, Fordham professor Charles Camosy quotes Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet<\/a> on the Culture Wars<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The culture wars are over; they lost, we won [\u2026] For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers. That\u2019s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (\u2018You lost, live with it\u2019) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who \u2013 remember \u2013 defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn\u2019t work well after the Civil War, nor after\u00a0Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Camosy notes, Tushnet\u2019s rhetoric is part of the problem, but he isn\u2019t wrong about a certain reality: the \u201cconservative side\u201d in the culture wars has lost ground on a multitude of issues from gay marriage<\/a> to transgender-rights<\/a> (and that\u2019s not even including the fact that at the beginning of these so-called wars homosexuality itself was illegal<\/a> in some states). Only in the case of abortion has such \u201cwarfare\u201d produced desired results (and even those gains are diminishing<\/a>). With this in mind, Camosy notes that<\/p>\n

A record 43 percent of Americans now identify as independent. For millennials, that number rises to 50 percent. Latinos, while generally economically liberal, are also generally socially conservative. These two demographics will dominate our coming political realignment, and they have utterly rejected Tushnet\u2019s 1970\u2019s-style politics.<\/p>\n

Indeed, if Tushnet and others continue along these lines, they risk being compared to Japanese soldiers continuing to fight in Sumatra and New Guinea in the 1950\u2019s.<\/p>\n

But he did get one thing right: the culture wars are over. Not because one side lost and the other won, but because that way of seeing the world is in the process of being replaced by something else.<\/p>\n

It may be nothing less than providential that our national political, demographic, and cultural shift is taking place just as Francis fully seeps into our public consciousness. This is a pope who insists capitalism kills and climate change is a crisis, but who also compares contemporary gender ideology to nuclear war<\/a>\u00a0and abortion\u00a0to a Mafia hit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The left\/right culture wars persist today in much the same way a long-term relationship persists, long after it has actually ended.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This point is perhaps the point <\/em>for contemporary Catholics. More often than not, we hear it declared that we are \u201cCatholic first<\/a>,\u201d \u201cneither Left nor Right<\/a>,\u201d etc. And yet, the mentality of the Culture Wars, that is, the mentality of the Left-Right divide, dominates our discourse. Catholics, like myself, who represent this precise position (anti-death penalty, accommodating, though suspicious, of the welfare state, pro-life from natural conception to death, and most of all, uninterested in polarizing name-calling) are not often taken seriously. \u201cToo traditional\u201d and \u201ctoo conservative\u201d for much of the Left, and \u201ctoo liberal\u201d and \u201ctoo culturally accommodating\u201d for much of the Right. And yet, we are far from the actual <\/em>minority of the American Church, not to mention the global one (this, Camosy notes in his piece).<\/p>\n

The current controversy surrounding deaconesses<\/a> speaks volumes about this problem. On the one side, to speak favorably at all is to hand the Church to the un-grounded, the \u201cliberals,\u201d the \u201cFeminists.\u201d On the other, to mention the historical differences in male and female diaconal orders is tantamount to sexism. As a result, the Church remains politically paralyzed, interpreted by the culture at large as a \u201cboys club<\/a>\u201d broken apart only by the \u201cFrancis Revolution<\/a>.\u201d Of course, \u201cconservatives\u201d respond by making the Faith that much less attractive, that much less likely to convert hearts.<\/p>\n

In other words, both \u201csides\u201d of the Church are stuck in the spirit of a bygone era, an era that, as Camosy attests, has not been with us for some time, and is only fading fast. This is why the Catholic-GOP alliance<\/a> is dead; this is why our society sees the Church as a relic<\/a>; this is why so many Catholic leaders have sat by unable to understand the Bernie-Trump phenomenon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On that last point, George Weigel\u2019s hapless confusion<\/a> stands out as a solid testament:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s become a clich\u00e9 to say that \u201cno candidate and no party fully embraces the vision of Catholic social doctrine.\u201d True enough. But previous election cycles gave Catholic voters a prudential choice between candidates who embodied at least some of the major themes of the social doctrine. What is the thoughtful Catholic voter to do when\u00a0neither\u00a0of the presidential candidates is even minimally committed to human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity, as the social doctrine understands those concepts? When one party has elevated lifestyle libertinism to the first of constitutional principles (and is prepared to kill unborn children, jettison free speech, and traduce religious freedom in service to hedonism), while the other is prepared to nominate a fantasist who spun grotesque fairy tales about an alleged connection between an opponent\u2019s family and Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before he closed the deal?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Catholics have been compromising for too long, selling the anti-abortion fight to elites interested in usury<\/a>, the effectual overturning of Rerum Novarum<\/em><\/a>, and, frankly, unseemly behavior<\/a>. What we need now is a commitment not to war, but to peace, not to heat-filled and hateful rhetoric (\u201cpro-aborts,\u201d \u201clibtards,\u201d \u201cboys clubs\u201d), but to incinerating the political idols we have fashioned for ourselves with the burning love of the Spirit. The way forward for the Church, the way toward reclamation not only of souls, but of our very identity, lies in an end to such inanity. Choose: obscurity in a house divided or revitalization in a house united.<\/p>\n

And, in case anyone had any doubt that such an inability to face the times in the love of God has plagued the Church before, I offer you a prescient reminder from the mouth of Jacques-Alain Miller<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There is something sublime in the\u00a0Syllabus. The Pope, besieged by the French and the Italians, entrenched in his small Vatican island, says: \u2018No, never!\u2019 It can be held that Pius IX was right to maintain that position in the beginning, that the status of the Church had to be confirmed. But history is dialectic.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

So there was the epoch of the Syllabus<\/em> [of Errors]<\/em> \u2013 the epoch of the \u2018No!\u2019 \u2013 and then there was the epoch of Rerum Novarum<\/em>, in 1891. Leo XIII did not say: \u2018We must be reconciled with the spirit of the times\u2019, but he went ahead and did it. We must, he said, take into account the working class, accept democracy, the Church is not bonded forever to the aristocracy. The aristocracy was slipping little by little out of history. To attach the legacy of Christ \u2013 we can say this in Marxist terms \u2013 to a class condemned by history would be a betrayal of the legacy handed down by the apostles.<\/p>\n

And thus, on the gaming table of history \u2013 which we can think of as a casino table, Pascal\u2019s wager being nothing else but eternal life represented as a green cloth \u2013 with Rerum Novarum<\/em>, the Pope \u2013 who is sometimes called Pius IX, sometimes Leo XIII, but who is in all cases the Pope \u2013 takes the wager of the Church and moves it, from the aristocracy to democracy.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really know what the effect of Rerum Novarum<\/em> was in Italy \u2013 I did not learn that in school \u2013 but in France, the Catholics, monarchists, reactionaries, \u2018all the old rightwingers\u2019, who detested the French Revolution, when they met up with Rerum Novarum<\/em>, said to themselves: \u2018That is not possible! How can a message come from Rome say just the contrary of what Pius IX\u2019s message said?\u2019<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

So then, what did people think in France? What rumor was spread throughout the country? That this was an imposture, that the Pope had been changed, that it was a double who had promulgated Rerum Novarum<\/em>, while the real Pope was held prisoner in the caves of the Vatican. Is this so absurd? Today we\u2019re told that Saddam Hussein has eight different doubles. So, it was believed that Pope Leo XIII had one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent piece in Crux, Fordham professor Charles Camosy quotes Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet on the Culture Wars: The culture wars are over; they lost, we won [\u2026] For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers. That\u2019s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2640,"featured_media":315,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,5],"tags":[226,225,151,227,107,150,116],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-politics","tag-abortion","tag-culture-wars","tag-democrats","tag-marriage","tag-politics","tag-republicans","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Corpse of Culture Wars Catholicism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In a recent piece in Crux, Fordham professor Charles Camosy quotes Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet on the Culture Wars: The culture wars are over; they\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jappersandjanglers\/2016\/05\/314\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Corpse of Culture Wars Catholicism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In a recent piece in Crux, Fordham professor Charles Camosy quotes Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet on the Culture Wars: The culture wars are over; 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