Politics, CST and the Religious Sense

Boy, after a few sleepy days on the blog, no sooner do I leave the country than there’s a torrent of great posts, plus two questions specifically addressed to me from my co-bloggers. I’ll defer discussion of the subsidiarity paper that Rick mentions until I’ve finished reading it (though here’s a preview: at a first glance, I don’t think Barber really appreciates how comprehensive the personalistic foundations of subsidiarity are in the Catholic tradition), and comment briefly on the political debate below in indirect response to Mike’s question. First, I’ll say right up front that I find arguments over which political party’s policies better exemplify Catholic social thought to be mostly sterile discussions that often end up substituting moral abstractions for concrete human reality. One of the greatest virtues of the Christian position that CST represents is that its starting point and touchstone is the fact of human needs and our desire for truth, freedom and happiness – not programs or projects. The principles of CST are expressions, distillations, of an experience of life, not the other way around. CST is therefore fundamentally not ideological, and indeed it is specifically anti-ideological – that is, it gives us criteria of judgment with which to expose and critique all ideological positions, whether of the left, right or center, in favor of the real needs of human persons. Second, the most fundamental human need is that of meaning; i.e., the quest to satisfy the religious sense. That’s why in Catholic thought religious freedom is properly regarded as the first and truest human right, the foundation for all others. For that reason, I do think that it is hard to overstate how vital it is that political life be open to the human impulse to seek meaning and to seek satisfaction of the desire for truth that our reason points us toward. That dynamic is lived and formed principally through religious life and through education. So, without entering into the dispute about how specific parties and candidates stack up, I do strongly endorse Rick’s plea to regard those things with utter and uncompromising seriousness in judging our politics. With respect specifically to the relationship of religion to politics, although I would expect that Vince and I do not differ on this, I do think his post below could unintentionally be read as reducing the question of religion in public life to competing sets of moral principles rather than as something much deeper than and antecedent to ethics or politics. Our judgment shouldn’t be a function of “which particular expression of religious morality does each political party favor” so much as a question of “how can our political life be made most open to and supportive of our human need for and desire to satisfy our religious sense?” From that point of view, some contemporary political positions are decidedly more hostile to the truth of the human person than others are, even ones that can appear in other ways quite benign when the starting point is ethics rather than ontology, doing rather than being. And now you can call me coy, but having posed the question I won’t answer it. I struggle to do so all the time, and I think we all should lest the ever-present temptation to ideology and utopia should triumph over reality.