The real issue is what is the Christian understanding of man and society. Are we by nature essentially a-political, even a-social?

What is the Christian Understanding of the Social Order?


By Thomas Storck 

Last year two authors, Fr. Gregory Jensen and Nathan Gill, wrote articles for Ethika Politikataking issue with previous articles of mine dealing with the American social order and with religious liberty. Fr. Jensen wrote in response to my article, “The Catholic Failure to Change America,” and Mr. Gill was immediately replying to my answer to his yet earlier response to my 2013 article, “The Revenge of Religious Liberty.” Although my two articles were different in focus, they both were premised on the Enlightenment character of American culture and politics, and both Jensen and Gill take issue with this premise. Due to their similar outlooks the fundamental issue between each of them and myself is essentially the same, and I direct this reply to both writers.

In the article of mine to which Fr. Jensen was replying, I lamented the fact that, although millions of Catholics had immigrated to the United States, we have had little substantive impact on American culture, which remains essentially Protestant and Enlightenment. Fr. Jensen’s article is a defense of American individualism, a qualified defense to be sure, but a defense nevertheless. He begins by quoting Robert Bellah that “individualism ‘lies at the very core of American culture.’” This I am afraid is true, but is this a good thing or not? Key to Fr. Jensen’s argument is the assertion that, despite its faults, individualism offers “opportunities” to Christians, opportunities, for example, for anyone to embrace the Gospel and adhere to that ecclesiastical body that he considers correct. Fr. Jensen instances both myself and Metropolitan Jonah of the OCA (to whom he is also replying) as people who took advantage of the liberty offered by American individualism to convert to a different religion, Catholicism and Orthodoxy respectively.

But Fr. Jensen also appeals to the very nature of God. He writes,

What modernity highlights, or so it seems to me, is that God appeals to our freedom, to our love of liberty and our desire to be creatively self-expressive … Aren’t these, after all, qualities that reflect His glory? Aren’t human freedom, liberty, and creativity part of the image of God in each and every single human being?

Yes, our free will, our freedom to choose among goods, is central to the image of God in us, but since we retain that freedom of choice in any and every circumstance of life, absent a state of intoxication or the like, this liberty has nopolitical implications, or at least not the political implications often ascribed to it by upholders of the liberal state. Human beings always possess freedom of choice, but before the Enlightenment few political thinkers argued from that to the necessity or desirability of a regime that elevated political liberty to its highest principle.

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