CATHOLIC LIBERALISM AND THE LIBERAL TRADITION.

• Author: Brady, Kathleen A.

INTRODUCTION

Criticisms of liberalism are nothing new. All political traditions have their detractors, and as in the past, today's critics of liberalism include those on the left and right as well as religious believers and those without religious affiliations. (1) However, in very recent years, far-reaching and deepening critiques have been emerging from an unlikely source. Throughout American history, the nation's religious communities have been among the strongest defenders of religious freedom as well as other fundamental liberal values such as limited government, democratic institutions, civic equality, and other civil freedoms. Conservative Christians have been no exception. (2) With other Americans, they have disagreed about how to understand fundamental liberal commitments and how far to take liberal rights and principles. (3) They have also voiced concerns about tendencies within liberalism that have troubled others as well, including narrowly individualistic understandings of human freedom. (4) However, until recently, most of the debates about liberalism within America's conservative Christian communities have been internal to liberalism broadly understood. They have been about how to understand widely shared liberal values and realize their demands and promise rather than abandon them. (5)

In very recent years, however, this landscape has changed quickly and dramatically as new strains of deeper criticism have emerged and gained traction within many of America's conservative Christian communities. These new strains have moved from internal critiques to challenges to liberalism itself, with some of liberalism's strongest detractors abandoning liberalism in favor of postliberal or antiliberal visions of the state that reject and even invert liberal values. For example, among liberalism's most radical Catholic critics, complaints about insufficient protections for religious freedom and the exclusion of traditional believers from public life have morphed into the advocacy of a confessional state that favors and promotes a specific understanding of religious truth. (6) Liberalism's Christian critics, especially the most radical, remain few in number, but their influence inside and outside the academy has grown as discontents with liberalism have accelerated and spilled over into the rough and tumble of American politics. Regardless of whether one believes that their influence is dangerous or beneficial or somewhere in between, it is important to engage these critics, and this paper does that. I begin with an overview of the most common criticisms of liberalism followed by an examination of the merits of these assessments. I argue that most of these criticisms attack a caricatured version of liberalism or at least versions that not all of liberalism's defenders share. However, underlying many Christian critiques of liberalism is a natural longing for the integration of religious and political values. But integration can be understood in many different ways, and it matters very much what integration looks like. At this point, I will turn my focus to Catholic integralism, which includes some of liberalism's strongest critics and most developed visions for a postliberal state. Where Catholic integralism goes most deeply wrong is in its understanding of the religious authority it purports to rely upon. However, these flaws invite consideration of what the Catholic Church does say about the relationship between human freedom, truth and political power. What one encounters in the Church's social doctrine is a version of liberalism, though one with a much richer and more nuanced understanding of liberal values than more familiar conventional versions. Indeed, Catholic social teaching also contains insights that can point the way to the renewal and revitalization of the liberal tradition.

1. CHRISTIAN CRITIQUES OF LIBERALISM

   While today's Christian critics of liberalism each emphasize different concerns, a consistent set of complaints has emerged. One type of argument zeros in on liberalism's elevation of the value of autonomy. Because liberalism envisions human flourishing in terms of autonomy, liberal regimes work to undermine the communities, social groups and religious institutions in which individuals grow and develop, and they strip human beings of constitutive social, moral, and spiritual norms. (7) They also subject their members to depersonalized market forces that operate without ethical meaning and direction and replace networks of meaning and support with the inequalities and shallowness of a consumerist culture. (8) In the place of withering social ties and relationships, a powerful state acting as an "agent of individualism" (9) protects an ever-expanding space for self-creation and self-gratification. (10) Thus, liberty takes the shape of license, and the state becomes a destructive force that mows down culture, tradition, and adherence to unchosen human ends. (11) The result, critics argue, is discontent and instability as politics frustrates the desire for human meaning and destroys inherited belief systems and institutions. (12) This type of critique takes aim at a version of liberalism known as "comprehensive liberalism." Comprehensive liberalism understands human autonomy as a central--if not the central--element of human flourishing. (13) Liberalism's Christian critics argue that this form of liberalism fundamentally misunderstands the true character of human flourishing and ties politics to a debased understanding of human nature and ends.

   A different critique has been leveled at what is known as "political liberalism." Named by its first and most prominent proponent, John Rawls, political liberalism rejects the idea that politics should be guided by any comprehensive moral, religious, or philosophical understandings of the good. (14) Rather, political liberalism calls for a political society of free and equal citizens who possess different understandings about human flourishing but agree to live together according to political principles and rules that can be accepted by all of them. (15) Central to political liberalism is the idea of public reason, a moral requirement that political discourse and decisionmaking be governed by shared liberal principles and generally accepted forms of reasoning and common sense. (16) Political liberals believe that only political principles that can be justified to all those who are subject to them are legitimate. (17) The problem with political liberalism, critics argue, is not that it erroneously equates human flourishing with autonomy but that it eschews comprehensive moral questions altogether. (18) It proposes an empty and shallow politics where controversial normative claims must "sneak in" (19) in "muffled" (20) or "smuggled" (21) forms if they come in at all. Political liberalism, like comprehensive liberalism, is destructive. It labels those who will not play by the rules of public reason as unreasonable, and it curtails their participation in public life, even sanctioning their suppression when necessary to preserve liberal values. (22) As with comprehensive liberalism, the result is civic division and instability. (23)

   To these critiques are added others. For example, liberalism claims to be neutral, but it is not. (24) Comprehensive liberalism is plainly not neutral; it elevates human autonomy over other understandings of human flourishing, and it switches out a politics based on virtue and the common good for a politics oriented to self-creation and self-authorship. (25) It also abandons older religious visions that see human flourishing as integrally bound up with a relationship with God and conformity to divine direction for human life. (26) Political liberalism is not neutral either. It claims to describe a fair system of social cooperation for free and equal citizens, but it marginalizes those it labels as unreasonable. Only those who agree to leave their deepest normative commitments in the private sphere are welcome in public political discourse, (27) and even the exit rights of those who dissent from liberal commitments may need to be curtailed to preserve liberal values. (28)

   Complaints about liberalism's destructiveness go further to the erosion of religious freedom. Liberalism's demands override religious claims when they come into conflict, and religious believers with traditional views about marriage, family, and human sexuality increasingly face threats from expanding understandings of the liberal commitment to equality. (29) For example, political liberals and others have construed the principle of equal respect and citizenship to curtail religious exemptions from antidiscrimination laws outside of private religions settings. (30) Public-facing religious exercise must submit to the demands of equality, effectively marginalizing religious believers and entities with traditional beliefs. (31) Thus, for example, even where other providers exist, religious bakers or wedding photographers who refuse to facilitate or endorse same-sex marriages are cut off from full participation in the nation's economic life. (32) Those who resist are labeled bigots. (33) Liberalism's relentless drive to secure the conditions for an ever-expanding individual autonomy also demands compliance from religious traditionalists who would stand in the way. (34) In the most extreme version of this critique, religion becomes a target and enemy of liberalism. (35)

   Additionally, critics argue that the logic of liberalism undermines the theoretical foundations of religious freedom. On the one hand, the requirement of secular public discourse renders traditional religious justifications inadmissible, leaving only weak replacements. (36) Because liberalism cannot recognize the existence of transcendent obligations superior to the demands of the state, religious freedom also becomes vulnerable to countervailing claims and interests. (37) Moreover, the...