Resurrecting Caelum et Terra
by Jeremy Beer
T is difficult, in retrospect, not to think of the end of the Cold War as a missed opportunity for orthodox Catholicism in America. The dominant school of Catholic political and cultural reflection since the collapse of the Iron Curtain has been of a neoconservative or neoliberal cast, orthodox in doctrinal and moral matters, progressive in most economic and some political ones (no matter that this progressivism is known as conservatism). Tracey Rowland, in her recent Culture and the Thomist Tradition, helpfully affixes the label “Whig Thomism” to this school. The adjective captures its flavor, politics, and perhaps even its intellectual antecedents nicely, even if the noun may credit its program with a philosophical precision to which it rarely ascends.
One way to characterize the defects of the Whig Thomist project is to understand it as a failure to transcend the dichotomous categories of the Cold War, during which we were regularly reminded—by intellectuals and politicians alike—that our choice was simple: freedom or totalitarianism, capitalism or socialism, statism or individualism. Thus, though its first issue appeared in February 1990, not long after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, First Things, the flagship journal of the Whig Thomism, has nevertheless drawn on the dominant anticommunist narrative of the Cold War which holds that the Soviet defeat meant, necessarily, the triumph of liberal democracy–emphasis on liberal. On this reading, even John Paul II (as Richard John Neuhaus has argued) is a liberal, or at least sympathetic to liberalism properly understood, and the importance of his pontificate has been to prepare the way for a rapprochement between Catholicism and the liberal tradition.1 For Neuhaus and his fellow Whig Thomists, there is no going back from this liberalism, no viable alternative.2 There is only an argument—a vitally important one, to be sure—as to what precisely this victory of liberalism means, especially for religion.
The Whig Thomists have, to their credit, voiced a number of misgivings about contemporary culture. But they have simultaneously refrained from undertaking any sort of deep critique of Western liberalism, arguing instead that the rejuvenation of religious faith can leaven liberal democracy sufficiently for its institutions and assumptions to allow for Christian flourishing. The important thing is that there not be a “naked public square” (Neuhaus’s coinage) denuded of specifically religious content. As for the basic tenets of liberalism and its economic manifestation, capitalism, the Whig Thomists have had few qualms. In fact, they have typically argued that the American system of “democratic capitalism” is best for all concerned, including the Church, which can thrive in the new dispensation as it never could have under the only truly thinkable alternative, state socialism. Indeed, the liberal state acts as a guarantor against the Church’s committing again the authoritarian blunders that stain its past.
Unfortunately, the Whig Thomists’ understanding of liberal democracy as a praeparitio evangelii has meant that they have had to leave a range of issues essentially unexplored. Thus, First Things has usually responded dismissively—or else with implausible optimism—to critics of technology, consumerism, mass society, modern warfare, and environmental degradation, especially when those critics have insisted on linking their concerns to the intrinsic logic of liberal capitalism. This response is understandable, for to the extent that such critics have sought to articulate fundamental critiques of liberalism, they hack at the root of the only genuine, historically available option for Christians today. If they are not cranks, they are knaves or fools.
