Liberal Pieties (Page 3)

"Our culture is a Protestant, and not a Catholic culture," Harvard University's Howard Mumford Jones wrote in describing "The Drift to Liberalism in the American Eighteenth Century." "It is a Protestant culture begun in dissent and retaining dissent as its chief characteristic." Like Sweet and Blanshard, Jones was writing in the period between the 1930s and 1950s, when much intellectual firepower was trained on defining "Americanism" and "American culture," a culture described by Henry Steele Commager as "practical, democratic, individualistic, opportunistic, spontaneous, hopeful"; by Talcott Parsons as freedom-loving and entrepreneurial; by Robert Merton as distinctly suited to reason and experimental science because of its climate of "organized skepticism"; by Charles Morris as "non-dogmatic."

The resilience of those definitions is evidenced, in a backhanded way, by the recent profusion of T-shirts, buttons and other paraphernalia of protest against the Bush Administration proclaiming "I Want My Country Back," the implicit notion of a hijacking reifying the ideal. Now as before, the problem with liberalism is the problem with any faith: Belief in the ideal necessitates delusion. For young Thomas Whall in the 1850s, dissent was not an option because for a child in the church it was unthinkable, and for an American it was allowable only within the terms of right-thinking. Catholicism was excluded from right-thinking, even from Americanism. Today the spiritual descendants of the Eliot School authorities are legion, and include George W. Bush, whose foreign policy flows from the "City on a Hill" exceptionalism that the Boston elite embraced and whose definitions of liberty and individualism are similarly situational.

We may sneer at Bush's assertion that God commanded him to invade Iraq, but the roots of that claim are deep in a tradition of American goodness. This country's overseas imperial adventure began, after all, with Calvinist missionaries from Boston, midwives to the destruction of Hawai'i, who counseled a suffering people that the cure for all ills lay in Jesus, buttoned-up sexuality and private property. McGreevy, I should note, says nothing about liberalism's role in securing relative freedom and wealth at home by imposing unfreedom and penury abroad. Whatever arguments may arise for or against liberalism or Catholicism, he leaves them largely to the reader.

On the subject of slavery, for instance, a key point of contention between liberal and church elites, he does not assign hypocrisy. He doesn't need to. In the same breath that it denounced Romanist mind control in the Eliot School case, the Republican Boston Atlas and Bee opposed "the monster institution of human slavery and for the same reasons." Although there were some heroic Catholic laymen and clergy who eventually joined radical Republican ranks, officially the church reckoned that slavery might not be such a bad thing--if it wasn't a matter of buying and selling, if slaves weren't "thingified," to borrow Martin Luther King's memorable phrase, if they were allowed to marry, if lynching stopped, if they were treated well, preserved as families and, especially, brought the good news. In other words, if slavery wasn't slavery. In 1839 Pope Gregory XVI barred Catholics from participating in the slave trade, though not from owning slaves. In America, Catholics of the reformist/fantasist opinion argued that there was no reason whites couldn't be slaves too, and, with respect to freemen, they rarely segregated churches and generally accepted black-white intimacy so long as it was within the holy sacrament of matrimony. Beneath this surface confusion, however, lay a crude consistency. For the issue of slavery forced a choice between love, the "queen of virtues," and authority, what Philadelphia's Bishop Francis Kenrick plainly named the "social order." Kenrick, writing the first US textbook in Catholic moral theology in 1843, bemoaned the atrocities that defined slavery but worried more that immediate emancipation would mean chaos, radicalism, institutional concessions to individual rights. In one of many reiterations of the church's original sin--its identification with power in the Holy Roman Empire--"Love thy neighbor" took second seat to preservation of order.

Now, many prominent Abolitionists held to a similar hierarchy of values, only in their case "order" was laissez-faire economics, which they called "freedom." McGreevy is helpful here, linking both mainstream liberal opposition to chattel slavery and nonchalance toward wage slavery to the laissez-faire commandment of "freedom of contract." The Nation's founding editor, E.L. Godkin, despised slavery and unions, considering the latter combinations in restraint of trade, and until about 1917 the magazine was exceedingly hostile to workers' movements, supporting law-and-order reflexes, whether in the form of the hanging of the Haymarket anarchists or the violent suppression of strikes.

The church, for its part, rejected freedom of contract, saying such freedom was an illusion where workers struggled to survive. "Free competition," wrote the Italian Jesuit Matteo Liberatore in the late 1880s, "is a terrible weapon, most effectual to crush the weak and reduce whole populations to economic slavery under a rod of iron wielded by the potent rulers of social wealth." Or, as Marx put it more succinctly, "It is not individuals but capital that establishes itself freely in free competition."

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