Steve Skojec

As I was finishing up my current issue of The American Conservative on the ride home last night, I came across a piece in the “Arts & Letters” section that was an unexpected delight. Writer Stuart Reid tackled George Weigel’s book, Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action, and did so with an intriguing and traditional look at Catholic Social Teaching.

Reid confronts Weigel’s neoconservatism and his hawkishness about the war in Iraq and his general understanding that Islam is presenting a large, looming threat to Western civilization.  Reid notes the following of Weigel’s observations with some irony of his own:

“It is, perhaps, ironic,” he notes, “that, at precisely the moment when a religiously grounded, existential threat to the civilization of the West has manifested itself with real power, a new atheism, dripping with disdain for traditional religious conviction, has risen up in the form of broadsides by bestselling polemicists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.”  Another irony, perhaps, but one that Weigel overlooks, is that Christopher Hitchens is one of the keenest supporters of the Bush-Blair war, partly because he is an international socialist and partly, one senses, because he sees it as a front in the secularist struggle against the God he both hates and refuses to believe in.

Reid gives credit to Weigel’s admission that the exportation of Western debauchery gives rise to some of our own difficulties in fighting the Muslim hordes, who, despite their bloodlust, seem to have a penchant for things like modesty in dress and some semblance of family values.

But Reid does not find Weigel’s reasoning compelling:

It’s a funny old world. In truth, both Weigel and Hitchens are children of the Enlightenment. Weigel, however, is a troubled child. As a good Catholic and a good American he feels compelled to try to reconcile the Enlightenment with Catholic teaching. That’s not easy. Pope Benedict XVI believes that some sort of reconciliation is possible, but I am not persuaded by Weigel’s approach, not least because it draws on what strikes me as too sanguine a view of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and the concepts of religious freedom and separation of Church and state.

One must take care here. Weigel is not only the Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a charter signatory of the Project for the New American Century but a fully qualified Catholic theologian and known as such to millions of television viewers. He has earned the right to be treated with sober respect. All the same, as a Catholic know-nothing, I find my eyes narrowing and my tongue clucking at some of Weigel’s rather oblique assertions.

In a key passage he proposes Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) as a model for reform-minded Muslims: “Rather than an Islamic Luther, Islamic reformers might better look towards the possibility of an Islamic Leo XIII: towards the possibility of a religious leader who reaches back into the deeper philosophical resources of his tradition in order to broker a critical engagement with Enlightenment political thought. … Leo XIII’s retrieval of authentic philosophy as a tool of social analysis led to a remarkable, evolutionary development of social doctrine in the Catholic Church, and eventually to the Second Vatican Council’s historic declaration on Religious Freedom, a high water mark in the disentanglement of the Church from state power…”

Unwary readers might conclude from this that the Second Vatican Council was definitive and that Leo himself was at the very least a lib-symp. Nothing could be further from the truth. Catholics have been rowing about the Council for the past 40 years and more. The two fiercest arguments have focused on the suppression of the old liturgy—perhaps the greatest act of vandalism in history—and on the declaration on religious freedom (Dignitatis Humanae, 1965). Leo himself was a friend of the poor and enemy of both socialism and industrial capitalism, but he was no friend of religious freedom and separation of Church and state. In his encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum (1888), he declared that separation was a “fatal theory” and described freedom of worship as a “degradation.”

Furthermore, “Justice … forbids, and reason itself forbids, the state to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness—namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges.”

Such a view would have appeared outrageous to Thomas Jefferson and seems outrageous to so many people today, including, probably, most Catholics. Maybe Weigel feels Leo’s words no longer apply, or—and this is more likely—that they must be interpreted in the light of developing doctrine. Certainly the Church now proclaims religious freedom but in the sense that men may not be coerced in matters of faith, not in the sense that it is understood by most Americans and Europeans: that religion is just a matter of taste; that one man’s religion is as good as another’s. The Church holds that religion is a matter of fact, not of opinion.

But to Weigel, religious toleration is the “first of human rights,” the doctrine that will lead to global understanding and happiness. At times he writes as if the United States were the ideal Catholic nation, now that the perfidious Catholics of Old Europe have abandoned the faith.

I am no convicted monarchist, and no student of Catholic social teaching (though I would like to remedy the latter). I do, however, find that Reid’s analysis rings true - enough so that I was nodding and smiling and murmuring approvingly like a fool on the train. There is something inherently incompatible about Catholicism and the American political philosophy. They’re not completely contradictory, per se, in every case…but pluralism mixes poorly with the absolute exclusivity of a religion that has the nerve to call itself “The True Faith.”

That great act of vandalism Reid speaks of — the stripping of the altars that coincided with the suppression of the now liberated Traditional Latin Mass — was a chief component in weakening us against all that is wrong with the West, including Islam. The egalitarianism with which we approach religion, also bolstered by the workings of the Second Vatican Council and its declaration on religious freedom, futher erodes our ability to put religious ideological conflicts in context.

The great Catholic armies of Europe once fought the Muslim hordes, and they were able to do so effectively because they were Catholic. They believed in something. They believed that their religion was more right than the enemy’s was, and that at the end of the day that fact actually mattered a great deal. They knew the fervor with which religion that inspired true devotion could imbue men, including men who had a religion that was wrong, like the followers of Mohammed. In short, they had a faith that gave them strength and which they found worthy of dying for in the great battle for the hearts, minds, and knees of Europe and the West.

And they won.

Without that strength of Catholic identity and worship and belief, there’s very little to stand in the way of the great comeback of Europe’s scourge, the now resurgent Muslim populace, a large portion of which is orthodox enough to really believe in the salvific power of jihad. Reid seems more dismissive of the threat of Islam than I’m comfortable with, but he nonetheless skewers Weigel with his own inability to see this great weakness that runs thick through the modern world:

The Pope understands the danger of militant Islam, of course, but he is more troubled by the moral relativism that grips Europe and North America. Weigel, too, understands the threat of relativism—and of Western decadence in general—but he has invested so much intellectual and moral capital in the war against jihadism and the belief that Islamism is a threat to Western civilization that he cannot see the paradox that stares him in the face: that the true existential enemy of the West is the West.

Taken to its logical conclusion, there’s no reason to believe that simply because we are our own worst enemy means that the vacuum we are creating won’t be filled by the members of what has recently surpassed Catholicism to become the world’s largest religion. In that sense, we do imperil ourselves with Islamism, for as we fade, if there is nothing to stop them they may well rise to take our place.