Liberal IntegralismLiberals, not conservatives, have truly melded church and state.APRIL 28, 2022
CASEY CHALK
There’s a prominent Catholic parish in the Georgetown neighborhood of our nation’s capital that sends weekly email bulletins to its parishioners, many of whom are prominent members of the city’s elite political class. According to a friend who has been receiving those bulletins since 2018, the most common themes have to do with race, sexual or gender ideology, immigration, or the environment. In other words, the bulletin doesn’t sound all that different from Democratic Party talking points or the headlines and op-eds of the Washington Post.
Indeed, the church has prominently displayed a Black Lives Matter banner and a rainbow flag outside its building. It holds events to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity. At this parish, at least, contemporary liberal ideology, Democratic politics, and religion seamlessly overlap. The parish effectively operates as an extension of the same institutional left that controls mainstream media, academia, the entertainment industry, and the federal bureaucracy.
This phenomenon is not unique to the Georgetown church. Indeed, it can be found in many religious communities whose members and regular attendees lean left. Mainline, overwhelmingly Democrat-voting Protestant denominations voice their unqualified support for the LGBTQ+ community, Black Lives Matter, feminism, and open borders. Similarly, former editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz called Reform Judaism “the Democratic party platform with holidays thrown in” and the services in a Reform temple “the Democratic Party at prayer.” The same is true of many Catholic parishes whose congregants are predominantly left-leaning and often endorse and proliferate teaching in flagrant opposition to Catholic doctrine. On the left, the collapse of religion and politics is ubiquitous.
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All of that is true and demonstrates that the same intersection between religion and politics exists on the right as well. But there are some very obvious differences. For one, while liberal-leaning churches actively and unashamedly promote liberal political causes, the only political causes that conservative-leaning churches have aggressively promoted over the last several decades relate to the sexual revolution: namely, opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage (and, by extension, transgenderism). That points to a second difference: On the right, it has been the churches seeking to influence politics, rather than vice versa. It took a long time for conservative religious institutions and the broader pro-life movement to push the vast majority of Republican politicians into the pro-life camp.
This illuminates a third, and perhaps most important distinction: The leading voices on the right do not want church and state to collapse into one another, but rather want the church to retain an independent autonomous sphere from which it can critique and influence politics. In other words, conservative, religiously informed intellectuals aim to avoid what the late Richard John Neuhaus decried as the “naked public square.” They do not want to see church and state collapse into one another. Rather, they advocate either a state whose actions are more fully informed by natural law (e.g., Hadley Arkes, R.R. Reno) or a state that conscientiously applies certain religiously informed principles (e.g., Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari). None of these prominent conservatives actually want church and state to become identical.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/liberal-integralists/
