The term “culture warrior” is often invoked, usually pejoratively, to describe a certain kind of conservative Catholic who fights in the political sphere for the Catholic viewpoint to be enshrined in law on certain hot-button issues. I say “pejoratively” since the charge is often made that these issues are best fought on the cultural level, via the path of persuasion rather than on the political level. Conservatives are thus accused of being simplistic and naïve in trying to impose by law points of view that have not prevailed in the cultural domain on the level of argument.
As with all caricatures, there is a modicum of truth in this assessment. And it is indeed true, by and large, that the conservative viewpoint on these issues has lost the cultural battle. This fact makes all political moves seem oriented toward an oppressive curtailment of activities that a majority have come to view as basic civil rights. This is certainly how the mainstream media do portray things, as we saw after Roe v. Wade was struck down. Conservatives were, and are, portrayed as coercive bigots intent on imposing a narrow “sectarian” view of abortion through draconian laws.
Obvious double standards
Nevertheless, I firmly reject this caricature, and for several reasons. First, while it is accurate to say there is a modicum of truth in the caricature, there is also more than a little deflection at play here. Quite often, when employed by “NCR(eporter) Catholics” it is used to justify paying no attention whatsoever to the public importance of these issues, relegating them to the putatively “private” realm of sexual morality, with the use of the utterly crass and inaccurate term “pelvic issues.” They may pay lip service to the importance of abortion, for example, and claim that it is indeed a part of the seamless garment of life ethic—but then proceed to put it on a back burner as an embarrassment.
Eventually, the mask drops entirely and we see that, for them, not all “pelvic issues” are equally apolitical and private. How many “Pride” flags will we see flying outside of Catholic institutions in June? How many comments on “X” from Fr. James Martin will we see celebrating the political gains made by the “LGBTQ+ movement” (or “community”) over the past twenty years? Apparently, the private sexual lives of same-sex attracted persons are a matter of deep public concern and importance. So important, in fact, that those in the Church who fight for this cause are never dismissed as mere “culture warriors”. Nope. They are instead lionized by leftist Catholics as champions of human rights.
This brings me to the second problem with the caricature. Who within the Catholic world gets to decide what counts as a “culture war” issue and what doesn’t? For example, abortion is a form of homicide, a form of premeditated murder, and yet we are told that we should not agitate in the political sphere to end it and to stick to purely cultural forms of persuasion. But when it comes to a fundamental question of human rights—in this case, the very right to life—there can be no question of kicking the political can down the road until such time as a more favorable cultural situation emerges.
Meanwhile, we are told that there can be no compromise with the forces of bigotry when it comes to “LGBTQ rights”. In almost every state where “gay marriage” was put up to a vote of the people, including deeply Blue California, it was voted down. The LGBTQ revolution happened in large measure as a result of top-down judicial imposition. So it would seem that the very designation of what counts as a culture war issue and what doesn’t is largely an invention of the Catholic Left—and is actually a form of rhetorical violence since its aims are malicious and deliberately tendentious. In other words, it is a form of propaganda. Culture has changed as a result of judicial decisions and nobody on the Catholic Left is arguing that these issues should have been resolved apolitically on a cultural level only.
Roe v. Wade is yet another example of a new class of rights, nowhere envisioned by the Constitution, suddenly emerging by judicial fiat. While it is true that a large segment of the American electorate was open to this liberalization, a large segment was not. The imposition of Roe v. Wade created an immediate, massive and ongoing backlash on the cultural level that poisoned our politics at its root, turning every Supreme Court nomination into a cage match, to the death, between deranged political pit bulls. And yet nobody on the secular Left opined that maybe the “culture” was not ready for legal prenatal homicide via judicial authority alone.
Polluting culture with trendy politics
What these two examples show us (specifically, Obergefell and Roe) is that the law has pedagogical value and that, once enacted, laws can change the culture in deep and profound ways.
A few years ago, Georgia passed a law saying that, in the public schools, there are to be two and only two kinds of bathrooms: one for people with penises and one for people with vaginas. Which is, of course, the pure commonsense realism of the entirety of human history and culture. The Left went berserk, including the sex-and-circuses Catholic Left, and threatened economic boycotts against Georgia and so forth. It was the usual bilge. Yet, today, with only small pockets of dissent, the law has had its effect, which (at the very least) means it has depoliticized bathrooms and returned them to the genuinely private sphere. And if there ever was a “mere pelvic issue”, bathroom usage, from toilets to urinals to bidets, would certainly be near the top of the list.
Along these lines, do I even need to mention the entire march of civil rights for African Americans? From the Civil War to the post-war constitutional amendments, on through the battle against Jim Crow laws and segregation, there is no way one can say that America waited until there was a deep and broad public, cultural consensus before it sought political and legal remedies to our racial sins. And why is that? Because the issue was deemed far too important, too foundational, and too constitutive of who we are as a people to be left to cultural drift as the only proper remedy.
This is why I think one of the most misused phrases, often employed by those who would dismiss us as mere culture warriors, is “politics is downstream of culture”. But this is only partly true and when it is elevated to some lofty status as an ironclad law of human nature it is deeply misleading. Because the lines of causation are not just one way, and quite often in our history the reverse has been true. Culture is, in fact, very frequently downstream of politics.
There is also the phrase, “You cannot legislate morality!” Tell that to Rosa Parks! Furthermore, it is sheer lunacy to suggest there isn’t a core moral claim in almost every piece of major legislation. Laws are by nature coercive. A stop sign is coercive. And thank God it is. The purpose of the coercive aspects of the law is to foster a moral vision of the common good on this or that issue—no matter how seemingly mundane. I am a notoriously impatient driver and I hate stop signs and red lights. But I am pleased to be coerced into safe driving since I value my life and the lives of everyone else on the road.
But we have gone so far down the path of caricaturing cultural conservatives as potential fascists intent on criminalizing everything fun and pleasurable, that my words here will be construed by many as a call to turn America into Catholic Sharia land. Never mind the Left has turned America into a pornified septic tank and a circus freak show of the “dragification” of everything. Never mind it is now the case in many States that parents can lose custodial rights to their children if they “misgender” them. Never mind it is now considered to be a form of rank bigotry if you think eight-year-old boys and girls should not have their bodies surgically mutilated beyond repair. Never mind the Left opposes all laws intended to prevent the soft infanticide of letting babies born alive after an abortion die of neglect. Never mind the modern Left doesn’t even have the virtue any longer of being the anti-war party. Or the anti-wealth party. Or the anti-surveillance State party.
Never mind all of that. Because, according to them, the Catholic culture warriors are here to turn all of our daughters into bipedal, ambulatory baby incubators for churning out the future fascists of America.
Rejecting the Catholic Left’s push for political and cultural hegemony
Finally, there is also the fact that many Catholic liberals, not content to criticize the politics of pro-life Catholics, are now moving the goalposts even further and claiming that even focusing on these issues in a purely cultural way, via the path of persuasion and evangelization, is deeply suspicious.
Returning to my last essay—on Massimo Faggioli’s fever dream of a new “Trump-Catholic” axis emerging—we see how Faggioli originally lumped Bishop Barron and Word on Fire into that axis. His evidence was that Bishop Barron likes to interview social conservatives, including Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. I guess Professor Faggioli was counting on nobody noticing that in none of these interviews is there even a hint of political advocacy for Trump. But, for him, being a socially conservative Catholic in and of itself is evidence enough of a closeted support for Trump, which (it goes without saying) he believes is awful.
Ponder that fact for a minute. Let it sink in. Because the claim is that not only is it wrong to be a culture warrior in a way that focuses on electoral politics, but it is also now deeply suspicious to focus on socially conservative issues in a way focused on the broader politics of the cultural polis and its many venues for public dialogue and conversation. We are damned if we focus on electoral politics. And now we are damned if we simply focus on the politics of culture, the latter being viewed as a mere cover for the former.
Therefore, it would seem that what the Catholic Left wants is both political and cultural hegemony. What they want is for all of the Catholic “deplorables” (indietrists!) to crawl back into their buried school buses on their Fatima survivalist compounds and to shut the hell up. But this is how Catholic liberals have always acted and so it should come as no surprise. They have a dead-end ecclesial project, which has failed spectacularly wherever it has been tried, and a theology that is little more than a warmed-over “Kantian/Marxist/Mall Rat” confluence of faculty lounge pretentiousness and the idolatry of the culture of sex and Mammon. Which is why they resort to the authoritarianism of the ecclesial bureaucratic apparatus. Synodality via Motu proprio. The typical faux democracy of the totalitarians.
While I am at it, I may as well address the fact that the combox attached to this article will remind me I am not a fan of Donald Trump. So how, it may be asked, can I offer up an apologia for pro-life politics all the while dismissing the man who really, more than any other, engineered the overturning of Roe? All I can say is that I give him kudos—and big ones—for that, and I harbor no ill will toward any Catholic who will vote for him for that reason. But my overall politics and my reasons for not voting for him or Biden are too complex to parse out here. It has something to do with my post-liberal soul; in fact my opposition to both candidates is not grounded in an indifference to politics at all, but the opposite. That will have to suffice for now until, perhaps, a future essay.
I will end with a proposal. Let us retire the use of the term “culture warrior” since it is at best a vacuous term meaning whatever we want it to mean. At worse it is a derisive term designed to malign in order to dismiss. I propose instead that we call ourselves by a different name. I would propose we call ourselves “Catholic sanity activists”.
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