American Catholics (and Others) after the Election

Editorial Note: This is the second essay in a three-part series on how Protestants, Catholics, and Jews can respond to our cultural moment while learning from and depending on one another. We hope you enjoy this reflection by Daniel E. Burns.

This was a tough election cycle for the Catholic Church.

For my whole lifetime, the Church in this country has sought to make abortion into our single most defining moral and political issue. And yet this month, the right to kill one’s own child in the womb continued to tally up major electoral victories. Seven out of ten states voted to enshrine that right in their constitutions. In Florida, a similar initiative won 57 percent support (more than Trump–Vance did there). And the first pro-life Catholic presidential-ticket candidate since 1928 has narrowly won by, among other things, promising to protect some two-thirds of existing American abortions.

There are still some things to celebrate, and hopefully, there will be more in the coming years. But Catholics should not expect big national wins on moral or cultural issues any time soon.

This will hopefully produce a moment of sobriety after all the post-2016 dizziness that has afflicted American conservatives, Catholics included. Ever since Orestes Brownson first suggested that this was the time of fulfillment and the Kingdom of Catholic America was at hand, American Catholic intellectuals every couple generations have promised (in different ways) a Catholic Moment, in which a few brilliant Catholic intellectuals will finally teach their fellow Americans how to rebuild one nation under God. It’s never been true and still isn’t. Our place in America is important but modest, and it will remain so.

For if our country is going to be saved from its long decline, it will be mainly by Protestants. There are a lot more of them. The culture war has always been largely a war between them and the secularists. Even if the tiny number of living saints in our own weak and timid Church were each the Curé of Ars, it would take generations before they and their exponentially multiplied successors could convert enough Americans to outvote believing Protestants.

I would love to have been born in a country where our local city councils were fighting over whether to shut down schools for Reformation Day or for All Saints’ Day. But my grandchildren will not be born in that country. And I try not to think about where my great-grandchildren will be born. As it is, my local city council has spent years debating whether hardcore erotic novels will remain in the children’s section at our library. If they ever make the right decision, it will be only because of combined pressure from a lot of Protestant, Catholic, and (in our city) Muslim families.

Mutual Aid

What, then, can Catholics do to help Protestants recover their own faith and revive this essentially Protestant nation? Not all that much. But there are a few things we could be doing better to help Protestants as well as other religious Americans, even as we also keep pursuing whatever small political victories we can.

First of all, as St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI often urged on the basis of their personal experiences: Catholics can hold onto and nurture their own friendships with serious adherents of other denominations and faiths. We can collaborate with each other on projects to improve our neighborhoods and broader society. We can learn from each other in dealing with the many challenges of running a godly household today, from the sublime to the mundane. We can read good books and argue about them together. Wherever possible, and to the extent that our respective traditions permit, we can pray together to our common Father—for his blessings on our country, at least.

Second: Catholics can build up our own local religious communities and make our Protestant and Jewish friends jealous of how well they work. Right now, there’s not a lot to be jealous of. Catholics could actually learn a lot about reviving Catholic lay life by talking to Orthodox Jews, Mormons, and some Protestants. But there is at least one important area of life for which those groups will all be looking to us instead: education, from preschool to university. As the authors of the Blaine Amendments knew well, Catholics have been running “sectarian schools” for far longer than anyone else in this country.

I have argued in these pages that all morally serious Americans need to be building more schools right now. If that is so, then by building up great Catholic K–12 schools, we not only form our own children but also provide a much-needed example to other parents. And Catholic universities will be an example to others for better or for worse. Archbishop Charles Chaput once publicly warned Brigham Young University not to abandon its religious mission as so many Catholic universities—although not all, fortunately—had abandoned theirs.

Third: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews need to continue to have each other’s backs, including on social and legal issues that we don’t see eye to eye on. I think Catholic charter schools would be a very bad idea. But if Protestants want to start a Protestant charter school, Catholics should be offering to help write their legal briefs.

Similarly, since October 7, 2023, many Catholics have seemed uncomfortable saying anything about Jews or Israel that could sound too “political.” But at a time of rising anti-semitism in our own country, we should recall the words of Joseph Ratzinger, addressed on the floor of Vatican II to Middle Eastern Catholics who thought the declaration Nostra Aetate might sound too pro-Israeli: 

I well understand and appreciate the difficulties of our Eastern brethren. But in my opinion the Church, which has been commanded to preach the truth “in season and out of season,” cannot now be silent on this matter without incurring guilt.

Common Challenges

All these types of collaboration are possible because of the high level of friendliness between American Catholics, Protestants, and Jews today. The main credit for that historic achievement goes to our enemies, who have brought us together far better than either our faith or our works could have done. As Edmund Burke could already see at the beginning of the first great secularist political revolution, different denominations “begin more and more plainly to discern that we have all a common cause, as against a common enemy.”

Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, indeed any Americans with some memory of how humans are supposed to live: all today are facing a common set of challenges from American culture. Those challenges are well known. A quick list will suffice here.

Young people fear commitment, fear the lifelong bonds that true love requires, fear the sacrifices involved in the great cycle of birth and death. They form fewer and fewer families. Existing families continue to break down. Loneliness and friendlessness are everywhere, accompanied predictably by hatred, resentment, and contempt for our neighbors. Technology exacerbates all this, cuts us off from one another, and poisons our children. Mental illness continues to skyrocket. We wade ankle-deep in psychiatric medications. Drug addiction is uncontrollable. Overdoses in 2023 killed almost twice as many Americans as the entire Vietnam War did.

In 1945, C. S. Lewis already saw it all coming: “Men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from the Earth their mother and from the Father in heaven.”

The true solution to these evils can come only from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God whom Jesus of Nazareth called his Father. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews must agree on that much. Loving obedience to our creator, with individual and common lives ordered according to his plan, is what our fellow Americans are missing. It is what God expects all of us to offer them, in whatever small ways we can.

The differences between our respective faith communities’ understandings of God’s plan for human beings are sometimes significant. Only when compared to the devastation around us do they appear insignificant, and very rightly so. Our common ground in the American cultural and political context is one not of indifferentism but of mutual respect. Good Catholics prefer good Protestants or good Jews to bad Catholics, and so on. And we all agree that even a mediocre Protestant, Jew, or Catholic is generally better off than the many Americans who would not know what to do with a Bible if someone handed it to them.

Uniquely Catholic Challenges

One challenge that confronts American Catholics, far more than (I think) Protestants or Orthodox Jews, is the need to push back against the distortions in our own self-understanding caused by Protestant electoral and cultural pressures.

For example: the Catholic Church’s special focus on abortion is reasonable insofar as abortion is a unique crime. It targets innocent human life at a uniquely vulnerable stage, and it strikes at the two most natural human relationships (mother-child and father-mother). Abortion also forces Americans, more than perhaps any other moral issue, to clarify what we really mean when we use highly ambiguous terms like “rights,” “freedom,” and “pursuit of happiness.”

But divorce is also a uniquely grave moral issue—for almost exactly the same reasons, in fact. And Catholic teaching on divorce rests on even firmer biblical ground than Catholic teaching on abortion. Yet the US Catholic Church has caved on divorce, to a simply astonishing degree. We hand out what we insist on calling “annulments” at a rate at least ten times higher than the rest of our global Church, often with much less hassle (i.e., due process) than civil divorces require. In no aspect of praxis—homiletic, pastoral, canonical, political—does our Church appear to be fighting any harder against divorce than the Chinese Communist Party is fighting against capitalism.

Why has our Church treated these two grave (and related) moral issues of our time in such radically different ways? One reason, I suspect, is that we felt supported by American Protestants on abortion and not on divorce. So a silver lining to our recent losses on abortion may be that they free us up to get more serious about divorce. We might even inspire some Protestants to get more serious about it too. Can we ever expect the churches of Martin Luther or Thomas Cranmer to pay more attention to divorce than the church of Thomas More is willing to?

As for abortion, it should remain a defining issue for Catholic moral teaching and Catholic institutions. But it need not always remain such a defining political issue for conservative American Catholics. It should be a defining political issue wherever something significant can still be done about it politically—as is true in many states, including my own. But if the scope for political action narrows, particularly at the federal level, there will be room for other issues to crowd out abortion on our list of political priorities. Just because other policy areas are less morally clear-cut (economics, war and peace, etc.) does not make them any less important to human flourishing.

Either way, conservative Catholics urgently need to unlearn their habit of shrill moralism about Catholic politicians’ abortion politics. We should be delighted whenever we get a few people into office who believe that unborn life is innocent human life, and who will sincerely work to reduce the number of abortions in this country. We cannot, we cannot, expect those same officeholders to be also the Church’s chief public witnesses to the intrinsic evil of abortion. They should say in public only as much or as little as is appropriate to their role in our constitutional order. They should leave the task of catechesis, by and large, to those who do not bear the burden of civil office in a hostile regime. And from all of us—who do not bear that burden—they have the right to expect support, prayers, and a great deal of patience.

Parting Advice

Public Discourse asked me for advice to Protestant and Jewish readers. I’m not qualified to give it, but here are two small pieces anyway.

I’ve seen some of you worrying about political theories that you’ve heard young Catholics experimenting with. Please don’t worry so much. I make my living teaching political theory to young people (mostly Catholics). Like Socrates’ young students in the Republic, they do need to try out all sorts of outlandish political ideas while maturing intellectually, particularly as they navigate this strange stage of their country’s decline. I’m honestly a bit skeptical if you don’t remember adhering yourself, when younger, to a political philosophy that you’d now find embarrassing. So just wait to see how these folks actually behave when they’re older—toward you and all their fellow citizens. By their fruits you shall know them.

Finally, please stop listening to any Catholics at all (young or old) on Twitter/X. Somehow the emptiest barrels manage to echo even more loudly there than elsewhere. People who get their interreligious dialogue from social media get the interreligious dialogue they deserve. And, if I may end on a Davidic note: the last thing that American religious believers need, today or ever, is what we deserve.

Image by Reimar and licensed via Adobe Stock.