Earlier this month, several Catholic scholars and media figures flooded my inbox with links to a New York Times op-ed by Matthew Schmitz about the influence of a group of conservative converts to Catholicism, particularly Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance, of Ohio. They were outraged that the convert was telling others that Catholicism was shaping their politics.
What was all the fuss about?
Schmitz was not wrong to call attention to a phenomenon that has been going on for some time, particularly since the emergence of the Moral Majority as a key player in conservative politics in the 1980s. As I argue in my book, God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right, Falwell was surprised to learn that about 30 percent of the Moral Majority’s early members were Roman Catholic.
Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and a Republican activist who approached Falwell about entering politics, said following the results of the 1980 Senate election, “My proudest moment was when the story jumped out of the paper that Catholics in places like Dubuque, Iowa, had helped elect an evangelical president.” [Charles] Evangelicals in areas like Grassley and Mobile [Alabama] helped elect Catholics [Sen. Jeremiah] Denton.”
As the Religious Right took shape, not only did Catholics become part of the movement’s popular base, but a similar movement also emerged among conservative intellectuals at the same time.
Evangelicals had little of the capacity for sustained moral and intellectual reflection on society from a particular religious perspective that Catholicism offered. Some Calvinists were influenced by Abraham Kuyper, a fascinating theologian and statesman whose views on certain social issues overlapped with Catholic ideas, but he would have been unknown in the small Bible schools where most 20th-century evangelical preachers received their theology.
In the 1980s, Catholic commitment to social democracy was largely ignored in Ronald Reagan’s White House and Margaret Thatcher’s 10 Downing Street, where a commitment to laissez-faire economics was sacrosanct. After the 2008 economic collapse, when even Alan Greenspan was forced to admit that faith in markets was misplaced, conservative intellectuals felt the need to question neoliberalism. A good thing.
Returning to Schmitz’s Times essay, it’s not a bad thing that conservatives are abandoning laissez-faire economic thinking, or that they’re raising questions about the public interest.
Yet these postliberals fail to understand the humanistic sensibility of Catholic theology and are too dismissive of the achievements of the liberal political order. No one would want to live in a country that lacks the American commitment to democracy, religious freedom, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to petition the government.
It is also odd that Schmitz does not acknowledge the irony of a group of conservative intellectuals joining a “Catholic” or “universalist” denomination only to then find themselves promoting Christian or other forms of nationalism. To be sure, Catholic social thought is based on an organic understanding of society, rather than a Lockean contractualist one, but when we Catholics talk about the “common good,” we know that our concern for the “commons” does not stop at national borders.
But liberals tend to overstate Christian nationalism a bit: According to religion data expert Ryan Burge, only 6% of Catholics have a “very favorable” view of Christian nationalism, and 14% have a “somewhat favorable” view. Forty-one percent have never even heard of Christian nationalism.
And as I have argued, Christians can and should shape their hopes and critiques of society based on their religious beliefs. From Dorothy Day to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., American Christians have done so.
Integralism, the most frequent form of Catholic nationalism, has attracted the attention of intellectuals, but does it have staying power?
My colleague Brian Fraga reported on a conference at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, where some truly outrageous ideas were proposed. The fact that Vance, who attended the conference and who may become an intellectual power broker in a second Trump administration, was there is worrying, but the ideas that integrationists are peddling are ideas that only academics like.
And like any debate on the right, it’s not always easy to assess the extent to which it has been distorted by Trumpism: the former president makes everything seem crude and old-fashioned.
While integralism could become part of the ugly mess if Donald Trump comes to power, a second Trump term would be frightening for many reasons and pose more familiar dangers to the First Amendment, such as freedom of the press and assembly. And because postwar Catholic teaching embraces human rights and democratic norms, these conservative converts can find no justification in Catholic theology for an all-out attack on liberalism.
It’s an interesting question as to why The Times tends to feature mostly conservative Catholics in its opinion section: after all, liberal Catholics only need to be self-critical of both liberalism and Catholic doctrine to overcome the challenges posed by these converts.
I am glad that they swam across the Tiber, and I hope that they will continue to do so: perhaps they will finally gain a deeper, more humane understanding of the Church’s social teaching.