Catholic Pearls Before American Swine

Michael Novak is, and for decades has been, one of America’s most widely-read and widely-respected Catholic thinkers, and what Michael Novak thinks right now—or thought as of June 7 of this year, at least—is that Americans “live like pigs” and that American Christians ought increasingly to fear for their safety.

Such were the inspiring messages Mr. Novak delivered to a group of graduates from St. Michael the Archangel High School in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  To take Novak’s latter warning first, he advised students that committing to Christianity these days is a perilous undertaking:

“The last eighty years have seen by far the bloodiest years for Christians, the most ruthless persecution, in the history of the Church. Nazism and Communism recently carried out the deaths of millions of Christians and Jews, often in most horrible ways. In Nigeria today, young Christian girls are being kidnapped by the hundreds for sale as slaves. Throughout Pakistan, bombs are set off in Christian churches, men with machine guns swing church doors open and mow down everyone in sight. Long, long lines of Christian refugees are being driven out of their homelands with nothing of their own but their strength of soul.” ¹

Terrible stuff, to be sure; but surely, some graduates must have thought, none of that applies to America?

“Don’t you dare think that the persecution of Christians will never come to America. Oh, for a long time it will not be that severe. First you will be called names. Then, when you voice your public beliefs, you will be punished for what you say. “You are on the wrong side of history,” they will say. “You are a bigot.” The things you believe must not be said, ever, in an enlightened era. A priest here and a nun there will be banished when they preach the gospel on controversial matters—unless they confess the opinions of secularists.

“In sum, one reason not to be a Christian today is that it may bring bad things on your head if you actually believe what Catholics have always believed, and then say so, even at a dinner party with fellow workers whom you had thought of as friends. Try it and see.”

Note how Novak says “you will be punished for what you say” only to follow with examples, not of actual punishment, but of simple (if sometimes uncivil) disagreement. Talk about defining persecution down: awkward exchanges at dinner parties are now considered a form of persecution?  Dinner parties are notoriously inappropriate places (as are workplaces) to discuss religion or politics; maybe Catholics ought not to use them to lecture the rest of us about our sinful natures and sinful behaviors?  In any case, a thinker of  Novak’s stature ought to know better than to conflate the horrors of Nazism, Communism, and today’s anti-Christian violence overseas with anything that American Christians are facing now or ever will face in this country.  The passing acknowledgement that “for a long time it will not be that severe” serves only to emphasize Novak’s unfounded claim that sooner or later it will be that severe--a dubious proposition at best.

It isn’t, however, only persecution that Christians must fear, but the myriad temptations of our debauched culture:

“Television, Hollywood, and music-makers intend with all their lures to entice you into a way of love and sex that is not only not Christian, but positively destructive of those who fall into it. The media do not report the damage.

“In France seventy years ago (as we remind ourselves this weekend), and on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and Tarawa, our grandparents did not fight bitter and bloody wars for liberty, only so that we could live like pigs. Most of the world looks at how we live, in our films and television shows and during our Super Bowl halftimes (in the whole world, the largest television audiences of all time), and says in disgust that we are decadent. Vladimir Putin said that just last week.”

I never bother watching the Super Bowl halftime show, so I have no idea what scandal it provided this year; and I’ll bypass the easy point to be scored against Novak’s citing Vladimir Putin as a moral authority.  Unlike Michael Novak, I can’t speak for “most of the world” (if they’re so disgusted by us, why are they watching our Super Bowl?); but do you know who else, besides St. Vlad, “says in disgust that [America is] decadent”?  Islamic fundamentalists like the late Osama bin Laden, that’s who.   Which doesn’t disprove Mr. Novak’s allegation, of course; but it gives one pause.

Michael Novak has long been a stalwart defender of free-market capitalism, so you would think he would recognize that “television, Hollywood, and music-makers” are doing no more than what capitalism’s amoral ethic prescribes: they are out to make a buck, and in pursuit of that buck they’re willing to give the customer what the customer wants, whether it’s good for the customer (or for the larger society) or not.  Free-market capitalism takes the utilitarian maxim—pushpin is as good as poetry—to its logical conclusion, in which even pornography is as good as poetry or anything else.  But of course, the market doesn’t dictate people’s desires, it merely reflects them; or so Michael Novak and other defenders of capitalism have told us.

Mr. Novak certainly knows the arc of modernity: Protestantism and the Enlightenment combined to take authority away from the Church, transfer it to the state, and affirm the autonomy of individuals--the autonomy of individual conscience, for one thing, and the autonomous individual's right to Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness for another. Then free-market capitalism swooped in to both commodify and exploit everything and everyone in sight, and here we are now in the 21st century.  Mr. Novak no doubt thinks that both the Reformation and the Enlightenment were tragic errors, but his approbation of capitalism makes his critique of modernity incomplete and unconvincing.

Conservative Christians have apparently decided that sexual behavior is the ground upon which they’re going to make their anti-modern stand.  That makes sense; Christianity, after all, long ago came to terms with both wealth and power, thereby limiting its ability to critique the world on those grounds—so what’s left? War and the endless worldwide reign of violence?  Christians haven’t been able to do much to make a difference in that area, though lord knows (so to speak) that many of them have tried.  

So Christians like Michael Novak (and Rod Dreher, among others) are drawing the line at the “axis of abominations”—homosexuality, birth control, and abortion²— and in doing so they are merely echoing the many scathing words that Jesus himself brought to bear on those subjects—except, of course, that he didn’t.  Jesus regularly and emphatically denounced self-righteousness, hypocritical moralism, and wealth and greed (treasure on earth and all that); sexual sinners like prostitutes he readily forgave, and for the most part he simply ignored the issue.  The beatitudes, as I recall, make no promises to the exclusively heterosexual, the professionally chaste, or the dogmatically certain.

I have no idea what the graduates of St. Michael the Archangel thought of Michael Novak’s address, but I hope they’re smart enough at least to get a second opinion.

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¹ http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/staying-catholic-modern-world  

² To be accurate, and fair, Rod Dreher does not, to my knowledge, oppose birth control on principle.  He's just routinely hysterical that the LGBT are coming.