by Michael J. Baxter, Theology Department, University of Notre Dame [Page 2 of 2]  3. PUBLIC THEOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY Permit me to make a sweeping generalization about Catholic social ethics which is too complex to explain or defend fully here, but which needs to be made anyway: Catholic social ethics today continues to posit a separation between theology and social theory and it does so in two ways: first, by extending John Courtney Murray's project of providing the nation with a "public philosophy" (or now, a "public theology") to which all in a pluralistic society can appeal; and second, by reinforcing that project with a theoretical paradigm quite distinct from the neo-Scholastic one that shaped Murray, a paradigm inherited from Max Weber. The genealogy of this Weberian paradigm is long and complex, tracing from Ernst Troeltsch, to H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr, and to James Gustafson, whose influence in the field of Catholic social ethicists today is pervasive.35 For our purposes, we should note that this paradigm is structured along the lines of an antinomy between religion and politics, each of which performs a distinct ethical function.36 Religion, for Weber, furnishes an ideal vision that forms the basis for an "ethic of ultimate ends," while politics determines how ethical ideals may be approximated in a world of conflict and violence, thus functioning as an "ethic of means." These two ethical functions complement each other, Weber maintains, but they operate within distinct life-spheres governed by distinct laws. It is the task, indeed the "vocation," of the politician, working within the domain of the state, to ensure that ethical means be appropriate to real-life circumstances. The politician must ensure that the harsh realities of necessary means be segregated from the lofty vision of ultimate ends, thus avoiding irresponsible attempts to put religious ideals such as, say, the Sermon on the Mount into practice in the "real world" of politics--which is, as Weber himself acknowledges, a world of ethical compromise. It is this religion/politics antinomy, along with the dualism between ends and means, that has given rise to the litany of antinomies that shape the discourse of social ethics in the Troeltsch-Niebuhr-Gustafson tradition: ideal/real, absolute/relative, individual/social, sect/church, love/justice, Christ/culture, kingdom/history, and so on. My point in identifying this paradigm, along with that of Murray, is to emphasize that in the field of Catholic social ethics they have combined to form the distorted lens through which the Catholic Worker is read. This distortion is evident in the readings of the Catholic Worker offered by two very different thinkers, George Weigel and Charles Curran. In Tranquillitas Ordinis George Weigel, a neo-conservative, presents what he calls "The John Courtney Murray Project" over the course of 150 pages and then he pauses to deliver an overtly hostile critique of, among others, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker.37 "Given the Weberian choice between an 'ethics of responsibility' and an 'ethics of absolute ends,'" he writes, "Dorothy Day unhesitatingly chose the latter." There is no problem with this in itself for Weigel; the problem is that "Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker did not heed Weber's advice to eschew politics. The movement may have rejected 'politics as a vocation,' but it eagerly embraced politics as an avocation." This was especially the case regarding its approach to Soviet communism, which was "distorted by the apocalyptic horizon and its failure to distinguish relative evils." As regards Day herself, Weigel grants that her religious intuitions were sincere and intense, but this does not detract from her shortcomings as an absolutist unwilling to make the compromises and prudential judgments necessary in the political arena. She should have avoided politics altogether. Thus Weigel assures us that "Dorothy Day's life and witness remains a powerful sign in modern American Catholicism," but finally, "the enduring truth of [her] life rests . . . not in her political judgments, but in her faith."38 A surprisingly similar reading of the Catholic Worker has been offered by the liberal Catholic moral theologian and social ethicist Charles Curran. In American Catholic Social Ethics, Curran focuses on one of the Catholic Worker's leading theological spokesmen, Paul Hanly Furfey.39 The primary positive feature of Furfey's "radicalism," says Curran, is that it is "prophetic" and thus has "the ability to see the problems." Whereas "Catholic liberals at times might tend to overlook some problems . . . , the Catholic radical possesses a methodological approach which makes one sensitive to the real problems facing our society." And yet, while the methodology of Catholic radicalism serves to make "Catholic and others in our society aware of the dangers of conformism," it is deeply flawed, as Curran sees it, in that it has not been "effective in helping the lot of the poor and oppressed in our society." The problem here is that it has a "one-sided emphasis on the change of the heart of the person with comparatively little or no stress on the need for the change of institutions or of structures."40 Thus, while the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker has been "awe-inspiring and of great spiritual beauty," their program "has not been effective. They have concentrated only on the derelicts and have done little or nothing to help the poor of the ghetto change the conditions in which they live."41 Nevertheless, Curran affords Day and the Worker a limited place within his "catholic and universal church," to wit: "within the total church there must always be room for a radical Christian witness. Individual Christians, but not the whole church, can be and are called to a radical vocation and witness within the church."42 Notice here the similarities between Weigel's and Curran's reading of the Worker. Both find it lacking in responsibility when it comes to institutional change. Both appeal to criteria of effectiveness. Both extol the Worker for its inspiring example, but its significance is restricted to the realm of individual witness. Both are indebted to the Weberian paradigm of politics. Differences in tone and emphasis notwithstanding, the readings of the Catholic Worker offered by Weigel and Curran are equally condescending and misleading. And this is true, I would submit, of a host of social ethicists dedicated to developing a "public philosophy" or a "public theology," whose considerable differences give way to a common reading of the Catholic Worker's ecclesiology as "sectarian." This is a key word in the lexicon of Catholic social ethics done in the Troeltsch-Niebuhr-Gustafson lineage. It is invoked as a way to dismiss the claim that Christian discipleship entails a form of life that is embedded in the beliefs and practices of the Church and therefore cannot serve as the basis for universal, supra-ecclesial ethical principles that are then applied in making public policy.43 In this dismissal, it is possible to detect the lineaments of the kind of Weberian critique of the Catholic Worker offered by Weigel and Curran, namely, that Gospel ideals do not pertain to politics and must therefore be translated from ends into means, from absolute into relative terms, so as to have a more direct bearing in the world of pragmatic policy making. But such a translation reproduces the former neo-Scholastic separation of theology and social theory that Peter Maurin criticized in his easy essay. It also runs counter to the consistent claim of Maurin and Day that true society is rooted in the supernatural life of Christ and cannot be abstracted from the beliefs and practices of the Church. Most importantly, this "public theology" approach fails to take seriously a contention that has been central to the life of the Catholic Worker from the beginning, namely, that the modern nation-state is a fundamentally unjust and corrupt set of institutions whose primary function is to preserve the interests of the ruling class, by coercive and violent means if necessary-and there will always come a time when it is necessary. Those working out of the Murray tradition of "public theology" find this assessment of the modern nation-state to be intolerably negative. And indeed it certainly is negative-but Day would add that this is for good reason. After all, she was formed politically by the Old Left during and after the Great War. This was the era of the Committee on Public Information, the suppression of journals such as The Masses, the Palmer Raids, the shut-down of the Wobblies, and the Red Scare of the twenties. The history of state-sponsored political repression was very much intertwined with Dorothy Day's personal history (as is especially clear from the first part of her autobiography44), and it left her forever wary of the claims of the state, as she herself indicates with the title of the chapter in The Long Loneliness on anarchist politics: "War is the health of the state."45 The title comes from a phrase in an essay written by Randolph Bourne as the Great War was drawing to a close.46 It was well-known among the Old Left in the years after the war, and it is worth reviewing at length because it obviously reflects Day's worldview. The essay decries the way in which a nation's population during war is transformed into a single herd that conforms to the aims and purposes of the state. In times of war, Bourne observes, the state realizes its "ideal," which is "that within its territory its power and influence should be universal." It makes a claim on "all the members of the body politic," for "it is precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd," Bourne continues, and "war sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches." Thus the state becomes "the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's businesses and attitudes and opinions."47 As an open supporter of the International Workers of the World (I.W.W.) or "Wobblies," an anarchist union that was subjected to intense governmental scrutiny and repression during and after the war, Bourne was concerned with the ways in which control is exercised over the population by means of the police, courts, prisons, and other state-sponsored institutions. But he is particularly insightful about the subtle mechanisms by which conformity is ensured through a complex network of symbols, attitudes, and customs that produce what he calls "State-feeling" or "State-enthusiasm."48 Old symbols are taken out and dusted off. Old slogans are brought back into circulation. "Public opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the schools, becomes one solid block. And 'loyalty,' or rather war orthodoxy, becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations."49 This is true in the academy, when the "herd-instinct" becomes the "herd-intellect,"50 and also in the churches, "when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for taking more or less in literal terms the Sermon on the Mount."51 The mechanisms that produce this "State-feeling" are so subtle, so well dispersed, reaching each cell in the body politic, that conforming to it feels natural and right, so much so that it feels natural and right to kill for it. By using Bourne's provocative aphorism as a chapter title in her autobiography at a time when the nation was in the throes of the cold war, Day reminded her readers that the Catholic Worker is "radical" in two related senses. It is radical in the sense that it addresses the roots of social reconstruction by grounding it in the person and work of Christ, and also in the sense that it refuses to conform to the order-or disorder-imposed by the modern nation-state. This second sense of radicalism is crucial for reading the Catholic Worker from its own radicalist perspective, for it challenges public theology's state-centered understanding politics by disclosing the possibility of reading "public theology" as ideology, that is, as a constellation of ideas that legitimate the dominant power relations of capitalist order by depicting particular forms of social and political life as natural or universal.52 One way to begin reading "public theology" as ideology would be to examine the word "public," which is supposed to signify the inclusive nature of the workings of liberal democracy in the United States. From the perspective of the Catholic Worker, the mechanisms of the state have never really been "public" for much of the population-the ones who live in shelters and S.R.O.'s, who work the fields or sweep the floors at McDonalds, who live a paycheck away from eviction, who are not counted in the census, who live in constant economic depression. Similar criticisms could be made of notions like "freedom," "justice," "the common good," "civil society," and "the limited state," words or phrases that conceal the dehumanizing world of those who live in the bottom fifth of "our society." Public theologians, of course, respond that this is the situation that they seek to reform, which would seem to be a worthy task; but this kind of reformist agenda only serves to reinforce the assumption that the only effective mechanism for implementing justice in the modern world is the modern state. It is this assumption that Dorothy Day, with the help of Robert Ludlow, rejects in her chapter on the state and Christian anarchism, in favor of a localist understanding of government and politics grounded in the power of the cross.53 The power of the cross moved Dorothy Day beyond the pale of the Old Left, where religion was seen only as part of the ideological superstructure that kept capitalism running smoothly. In her journey from natural happiness to supernatural love, she discovered another kind of religion, with a social program at least as radical as any she had encountered among the Marxists, socialists, and anarchists of her youth. Having been singed by "the dynamite of the Church," she could pose the startling question, in the first issue of the New York paper, "Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist?" The question pointed to a crucial flaw in the standard critique of religion put forth by radicals of the Old Left, namely, that it was a critique of bourgeois religion, religion that conforms to norms established by the social relations of capitalist production, religion that is designed to legitimate the workings of the state and market. That critique failed to consider the possibility of another religion, one founded on a Lord who preached love of enemies and good news to the poor, who healed the sick and welcomed the outcast, who made the rulers of this world tremble, and who bestows upon His followers the power to do the same. This is the religion that was proclaimed by Day in the first issue of The Catholic Worker and, as has been amply demonstrated by Catholic Workers ever since, it was-and is-a genuinely radical religion. But this theological claim can be explicated only from a radicalist perspective. Given the present configuration of the field of Catholic social ethics, this requires distinguishing the radicalist perspective of the Catholic Worker from the bourgeois perspective of Public Theology and unmasking Public Theology as a discourse which legitimates the nation-state. It requires a demolition of public theology using "the dynamite of the Church." 4. NO MORE PLAYING A WAITING GAME Unmasking public theology as ideology is a theoretical task, a scholarly task, and one would expect that one place where such a task might be accomplished is the Catholic college or university. But here we run into a problem. The theoretical paradigms and institutional structures shaping Catholic colleges and universities today continue to separate theology from social theory and therefore militate against a supernaturalized social theory such as that embodied in the Worker. It is by no means a coincidence, therefore, that these Catholic schools all too often function as production sites of capitalist theory and training centers for capitalist practice. At times, the ethos of these schools is so drenched in late-twentieth-century capitalist culture as to lead one to conclude, in darker moments, that the shepherding being done at these schools is the kind that raises sheep not for the Church, but for the market.54 But resisting capitalism is a problem we face not only in our schools. It is a problem for everyone everywhere, as some Leftist theorists of hegemony began to recognize earlier this century. One of the first such theorists in this country is mentioned in The Long Loneliness, very briefly. He was the brother-in-law of Forster Batterham (Day's English, anarchist common-law husband), and when Day first met him, he was "writing the first of his strange books."55 This was Kenneth Burke, the Marxist literary critic who informed the radical left of the thirties that revolution is a cultural as well as an economic struggle, and that (in the words of Frank Lentricchia) "a revolutionary culture must situate itself firmly on the terrain of its capitalist antagonist, must not attempt a dramatic leap beyond capitalism in one explosive, rupturing moment of release, must work its way through capitalism's language of domination by working cunningly within it, using, appropriating, even speaking through its key mechanisms of repression."56 If the point provides a helpful corrective to Peter Maurin's image of dynamite (perhaps the image of termites is more appropriate), it only heightens the urgency of the message of Peter Maurin's easy essay. Catholic scholars will have to do more than play a waiting game.57 Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XIX, No. 3, March-April 1999.  |
