Catholic America

Even the Catholics are Calvinists', one exasperated cardinal was overheard saying of the United States once. American Catholicism was a large part of my doctorate, and has been on my mind a lot lately, partly because of its remarkable success as a political ideology.

For instance, from being an all-white, protestant, blue blood board of guardians for most of its history, the Supreme Court has recently developed a catholic majority. This has proved to be right of centre but by no means automatically concerned with the expansion of conservative shibboleths into the constitution. The Chief Justice is a catholic scholar; Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito are also, and Justices Ginsburg and Breyer are Jewish.

To anyone who knows the history of the court, the emergence into the court of two of the western world's intellectual religions--I'd count Presbyterianism as a third--is interesting. Secular critics in universities don't really seem to know how to criticise the court; some have even resorted to accusing it of using, catholic-style, broad-brush principles to moderate effect, and of 'christocentric secularism' whatever that is.

It's not just the court and agent Dana Scully who are associated with America's majority religion. I note today that the three candidates most talked of for the Democratic Vice-presidential nomination (Kathleen Sebelius, Tim Kaine, and the great great Mad Jose Biden, late of this blog) are catholics.

As an aside, I wonder if that isn't going to get Obama into trouble; Sebelius can be hit by the abortion issue, and Kaine is untested nationally. Biden is the only one of them who could come through anything, including the presidential primaries, and still raise a respectful smile.

In America, catholics were torn between ethnic and religious attempts to make them a voting bloc over the years, but it is remarkable that they were never captured or taken for granted completely by any one political tradition. The occasional dig about abortion or distortion from some materialist with an agenda just seems to bounce off catholic politicians, unless, like John Kerry, their general public position is weakened or contradictory.

In American culture, freethinkers and genuine intellectuals like Camille Paglia can look to the benefits of her lapsed catholic heritage in shaping her, and other cultural icons, male and female, could look to the compatibility of catholicism and the republic. I look to the anaemic rubbish people get taught in schools these days and am half inclined to despair.

To be Fair to Ms Paglia, whose mind and spirit I admire, she saw traditional catholicism as providing a link to antiquity and as being an incubator of a largely pre-catholic heritage. She also decries the recission of Latin that occurred after 1962 in the church.

I do find it curious that a hyper-calvinist country like America could adopt a fairly resilient catholicism easily, to the point where a pope who inherited the excommunication of 'the American heresy' could stand on a white house lawn and proclaim the values of American liberty to the biggest audience ever assembled there.

The contrast with England, as the United Kingdom and English society, collapses around it, is profound. I think that traditional English anticatholicism, which is very much alive and which plays to the need of many English people to moan at and hate things, is also the outlook that cleared out the channels for the antisemitism which runs through a great deal of English middle-class life and its fractal parallels down the social ladder.

That a lively thing could be life denying is curious, but by no means unusual. Yet many in this country seem to think that an illiterate intolerance of a presumed church whose logic, diversity, and good works they do not bother to understand is de rigeur to be an enlightened person.

Perhaps English prejudices are simply social and commercial. Very few people ever lost money or job opportunities by being anticatholic in this country, and, as they used to say 'you don't need a visa to enter England--a barclaycard or american express will do'. Money trumps everything here and genuinely antimaterial faiths won't get that much toleration from the middle classes.

Of course there are deep flaws in catholicism, and in the political culture of the united states. They both reflect not the crooked but the splintered and occasionally decayed timber of humanity, and can be as bad as people can be. I also note the class-based nature of truly anticatholic phenomena. Working-class people sometimes grasp the collectivist nature of christian democracy, and its distrust of capital, often just by meeting their coworkers.

People who bother to talk to others also quite swiftly realise that a church with a non-politically correct line on sex is not some acetic wilderness full of repressed people by any means at all. As a frustrated Woody Allen once said, 'from here on, I'm only going out with catholic girls'.

Just once, though, it is uplifting to contrast the remaining catholic areas of Ireland, and Europe, and the catholicism of the United States, with the tearing and vapourising fabric of secular modernity which many are wrapping themselves in the west as they head towards a very different sort of world. That this should often be accompanied by a literally stupid ecological cult is very saddening. Here is a link to a site with which I do not necessarily agree but which at least puts forth science as a basis for discussion, not socialised consensus.

Europe and America can learn a great deal from each other. Their intellectual classes, who are mostly hopeless, can start by asking how it is that freedom of speech, the existence of non-state communities which can deliver care, and support to communities and inspiration to individuals, and an ethic that seeks to form coalitions to achieve ends is much more attractive than sitting around hating things and embracing the empty faith of atheism.

I should emphasise that point. None of us have an absolute, provable, grip on truth. We can arrange facts with our reason, and uncover the world through science; we can behave ethically with little or no reference to religion; but we live, and reinforce ourselves by our awareness of the humanity of others.

This in itself is something buttressed by faith, manners and restraint, and religions often inculcate that; if they don't, they are about political agendas and should be treated as such.

I have a great deal of respect for agnostics; indeed, David Hume must rank amongst the first class of any philosophers in all time. I have no grip on what is dead-certain true, except that I and you are alive, reader, and that one day we are going to die--and nor do you. Let's resolve to try not to protect ourselves against the dark by embracing anger or hate, and by exploring ideas in the meantime.

Summer morning thoughts. Here is a Mad Jose Biden video, for no good reason at all.