Douthat, Walther, & Me

Last September, I got an email from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. It was an invitation to participate in a panel discussion with him and Matthew Walther. Walther is a columnist for the American Conservative and editor of the Lamp, a new Catholic literary magazine. The proposed discussion would focus on the possibility of a “Catholic politics” in the United States and would take place at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D. C. Douthat extended the invitation because I had written a column for Commonweal commenting on the knee-jerk response of Times letter writers to two of his own columns and to a piece Walther had written for the Times titled “This Is Why America Needs Catholicism.”

I am an admirer of Douthat’s work, and eagerly accepted the invitation. One of the unexpected benefits was reconnecting, if all too briefly, with CUA professors and Commonweal contributors Chris Ruddy and David Cloutier. Chris was an intern at Commonweal several decades ago. Chris’s wife, Deborah, and their eldest son, whom I last saw when he was an infant and who is now a freshman at CUA, made the reunion all the more pleasant.   

Except for his Times piece, I was unfamiliar with Walther’s opinion journalism. I learned he had been a national correspondent for the Week, as well as a contributor to a number of conservative publications. I had found his Times piece, which argued that Catholic social teaching’s economic moderation and social conservatism could bridge our current political divisions, idiosyncratic and idealistic. He seemed to embrace a pretty unnuanced sense of Catholicism’s history. But in my Commonweal column I focused on questioning the assumptions of the Times readers who had responded to Walther’s piece, not on his own political and theological enthusiasms. His plea—that Americans “set aside the standard ideological divisions of coalition politics in an attempt to apply the full range of the church’s social teaching to the problems of modern life”—had an undeniable Commonweal ring to it. But his commitment, as expressed in the Lamp, to “undiluted” and “immutable” Catholic orthodoxy naturally raised a measure of skepticism.

As you would expect, Douthat was a welcoming and genial moderator. Walther was cordial and friendly, but seemed determined to provoke, usually in a wry way, but sometimes not. Discussing the politics of abortion, for example, he claimed it involves chopping up babies for body parts. Responding to Walther’s essay, I noted the irony that his call for a vigorous engagement between the Church and American society mirrored Commonweal’s own mission statement, now nearly one hundred years old. In Commonweal’s first issue the editors wrote, “As opposed to the present confused, confusing, and conflicting complex of private opinions, and personal impressionism…the editors of Commonweal believe that nothing can do so much for the betterment, the happiness, and the peace of the American people as the influence of the enduring and tested principles of Catholic Christianity.”

Walther, I assumed, would resonate to such sentiments. But I cautioned that there is an abiding tension—one that Walther seemed to ignore—between Church teaching and the liberal democratic institutions of the United States. Unlike Catholicism, liberalism eschews comprehensive visions of the social and political order and is agnostic about the nature of the good. It accepts conflict and competition as permanent, often beneficial features of society and politics. As James Madison wrote, “Ambition must counteract ambition.” In discussing the interaction between Catholicism and American culture, one must acknowledge the inevitable tension between the two and not try to resolve it once and for all.

Walther began his own remarks by elaborating on a point he had made in his Times essay about how the Church, and especially the popes, manages to get things “right 100 percent of the time.” Again and again, the popes had been “right about everything, every time.” He claimed that only the Church had spoken for economic and political solidarity between the two World Wars. And no one else, he argued, had understood the malevolence of the “technocratic liberal paradigm” made manifest by artificial contraception. He also claimed that the presidential candidate who most convincingly appealed to Americans’ craving for “some kind of vision of the common good” wins every election. He included Donald Trump on that list. In an aside, he claimed the pandemic was little more than a “distraction from the major issues of the day.”

I disagreed with the proposition that popes are generally infallible on political issues. Papal infallibility is for the Immaculate Conception, not for opinions about technocracy. I didn’t know quite what to make of Walther’s claim that the Church was the only force to speak out for economic and political solidarity in the last century. It is widely acknowledged that Catholicism’s resistance to liberal democracy and its alliance with monarchies and autocracies did a great deal to alienate the growing industrial working classes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, Catholicism’s notion of solidarity was inseparable from its embrace of an inherited social and economic order—and when push came to shove, it usually chose hierarchy over solidarity.

Obviously, there is a strong element of romanticism in Walther’s social criticism. He suggested, for example, that Pope Francis’s visceral and poetic way of talking about the environmental crisis is more persuasive than an emphasis on weighing costs and benefits. He also proposed that state representatives, rather than voters, elect the president. Local legislators, he insisted, are more in touch with the real needs of people than anyone in Washington. “They would vote for crazy people who would do crazy stuff,” he admitted, but that would be a welcome development. My experience as a reporter and editorial writer at a midsize local newspaper contradicted that assumption. I don’t doubt that state legislators would do “crazy stuff,” but in my experience municipal and state politics is intensely personal rather than ideological. It is also frequently dynastic, with grudges and vendettas going back generations. Walther’s idealization of his friendly state rep, like his idealization of papal authority and the Church’s prophetic condemnations of modernity, seemed like a practiced schtick.

In the same theatrical way, Walther lauded the “radical and reactionary” Catholic editors of Triumph magazine for embracing the Black Panthers in the 1960s. Catholic liberals, he insinuated, are too timid or religiously deracinated to see the spiritual dimension of the Panthers’ protests. As he wrote in his Times piece, “rioting was an understandable response to the ‘terror that always haunts men confronted by meaninglessness,’ the actions of people ‘yearning to make contact with the divine.’” Having been confronted by Black Panthers on a number of occasions when I was in college, I can say with confidence that “the divine” was not on their list of demands. Money usually was.

I left the event frankly puzzled over what Walther’s actual political intentions were. Later I learned that he hasn’t been a registered voter for years and that he describes himself as a reflective cynic. Perhaps I am being pollyannish, but it seems to me that voting, no matter how frustrating, is a necessary first step in political engagement, and that cynicism is no politics at all.

Not long after our panel discussion, Walther published a piece in the Atlantic titled “Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID.” As the title makes clear, the article was designed to provoke outrage, which it evidently did. When it comes to the pandemic, folks in Walther’s part of Michigan were unfazed and unconvinced. “I don’t know how to put this in a way that will not make me sound flippant,” he wrote flippantly, “but no one cares…. Outside the world inhabited by the professional and managerial classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many, if most, Americans are leading their lives as if Covid is over, and they have been for a long time.” Sure, there have been inconveniences. When public Masses were suspended, Walther and his family had to settle for praying the rosary at home. But fear of Covid is the obsession of elites, the same folks who like to impose restrictions on pregnant women drinking alcohol or “eating crudos or kibbeh nayyeh.”

Thirty-four thousand people have died from Covid in Michigan. Walther and his friends are indeed lucky not to have been touched by the disease. But if this approach to the common good is what an immutable and undiluted Catholic politics looks like, it is the last thing America needs.