A Road We're Not Taking (2020)

The trouble with Christendom redivivus...

PAULO NUNES DOS SANTOS/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

Solidarity Hall was born in 2012 as a kind of Third Way project out of a Catholic matrix. A major influence on our thinking was the work of Philip Blond and the ResPublica group in the U.K.

That was some years ago now—not only pre-Trump but pre-Pope Francis--and the political and social landscape since then has been shifting dramatically. American Catholicism, for its part, is undergoing nothing less than a theological crisis, one shared with American Christianity in general, as its compromised inter-faith chaplaincy to a collapsing empire damages its Gospel witness for likely many years to come.

Moreover, the banner of localism has increasingly been co-opted by nativists, distributism has become (or remained) the hobby of traditionalists, and most broad notions of the common good have disappeared in favor of calls for unity around compromised cultural institutions, various unsavory nationalisms, or even the fond hope for a new hybrid internationalism.

An example of the latter: this two-hour trans-Atlantic video conversation on "The Future of Post-Liberalism", hosted by ResPublica U.K.  In this exchange, the viewer will hear a number of striking propositions offered by an international group of intellectuals (American, British, Hungarian). They perhaps offer one version of the Third Way thinking from which we at Solidarity Hall began. But for a variety of reasons we don’t expect we will be joining them down this road.

Acting as a kind of self-identified “creative minority”, the group wrestles with ways to shore up (possibly through a restoration of “guardrails”, as one participant put it) what amounts to a particular version of Christian culture, including a specific Christian anthropology. (Shorthand for the latter: an Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology, taken more or less as revelation.)

Their preferred agenda, as they make clear, is Christian restoration via new institutions and a new elite. In other words: this exchange was about political theology, in William Cavanaugh’s sense of the term.

None of this group, I’m fairly sure, could be labelled nativist: indeed they agree on the need for an internationalist vision. Nor do they harbor any illusions about the need to replace our dominant neoliberal condition with a different political economy.

Where this political moment is taking them, however, is displayed in comments on the tormented topic of identity politics (I.P.). The lack of any such identity around class is aptly noted by Philip Blond at one point.

But, disappointingly, no specific thinkers or groups associated with I.P. are mentioned, other than Black Lives Matters, a movement apparently deserving a certain suspicion, merely because it is "approved" by the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc.

Of the spiritual dimensions of BLM, or of the racial justice uprisings’ implications for institutional Christianity, not a word here other than a feeble note of admiration for the "energy" of these causes.

From my notes, here are some statements by participants which will give a sense for their attempt to mix left economics with a kind of integralist superstructure:

• Wherever we live, we are now mostly controlled by offshore capital--there is no such thing as "patriotic capital" (P. Blond)

• John Locke's principle of "no harm" has now been weaponized as a form of social control, notably in the area of identity politics (P. Deneen)

• We need new cosmopolitan, universalistic legal and political structures--on the model of the Holy Roman Empire or the Hapsburgs (A. Vermeule)

• It's time for a new kind of Mt. Pelerin Society [referring to the group of free market ideologues who argued for neoliberal solutions in the 1950s] but with "pro-family principles and policies" (P. Blond)

• Overlooked in the rush toward identitarian politics are groups like white, working-class boys in the U.K. (Nick Timothy)

This aggrieved tone among certain kinds of public Christians today strikes me as one more form of the very kind of identitarian complaint they lament. When confronted with an image of a defaced or toppled figure of the Blessed Virgin, for example, their likely question is not a self-reflective “what might our church have done to evoke this kind of anger?” but, “how can we punish this insult to our institution’s worldly prestige!”

Finally, the coming “persecution”—just so we’re all braced for it—will not be a matter of falling statues. It will mean having to watch today’s Christian book-tour impresarios attempt to cast themselves as latter-day Solzhenitsyns, lost in their own self-created mental gulags. Connected with the rediscovery of Christian socialism lately, the use of the ahistorical argumentum ad Stalinum, I’m predicting, will only become more popular, at least within these circles of suburban revanchement.

Goodbye to all that.