Catholic Republic, page 22
From the sacramental Catholic perspective, divorce is not only immoral, it is technically impossible. It suggests the falsity that two married people did not come together before God as one flesh, with the purpose (whether or not it was their intent) of creating an unalienable community of more than just two, of family. This is the case whether or not a given marriage has yet produced children.
The family, when taken out of the context of natural—and supernatural—community, will produce unnatural fruits. And one readily recognizes these bespoiled fruits in today’s America: heterosexual marriages between partners who refuse to spend time together, or with their children (especially fathers escaping to work to avoid time at home); homosexual “marriage” being conducted, with and without adoptive children, as an experiment.
These bespoiled fruits abound everywhere in America: in both the cities and the suburbs.
The False Dichotomy of Burbs versus Urbs
On the basis just described, there is a resultant problem with manliness and fatherhood common to both halves of Prot-Enlight (the Protestant religious Right and the Enlightenment secular Left). The current problem is that men in both camps either reject or resent the vocation for which their manhood was appointed: fatherhood.
Generally, each party inhabits their own domain of the American landscape: the religious Right sticks to the suburbs and the secular Left sticks to the city. The popular culture imagines the city and the suburb as opposites. Like each half of Prot-Enlight, however, they turn out to be made of the same stuff. I have labeled this false dichotomy the “’burbs versus the ’urbs.”7
And, just as the reader sees in multiple other corners throughout this book, Prots and Enlights have bitterly turned against one another in America, although they were once close allies against Natural Law Catholicism. Last chapter we examined how Prot-Enlights turned against one another within America’s legal culture. Next chapter we will examine how they have turned against one another in the realm of science and technology.
But when one turns here to the ongoing American debate about the family, the battleground is the popular culture of the suburbanites versus the popular culture of the urbanites.
Contrary to claims by generally liberal urbanites and mostly conservative suburbanites—and some very confused cross-breeds—“real America” still lives in the big and beautiful spaces. The crypto-Catholic American spirit of tough religiosity still lives in these rural places (which enjoy geographical majority with demographical minority).
Liberty interplays inextricably with old-fashioned self-and family-reliance in rural America. This is subsidiarity. It is virtually the only place anymore where the concept of holding property is not laughable. The moral self-reliance of the true Americanismc is ever present there. One assumes that it will continue to be so, as a minority position, as long or as short as our republic-in-name-only continues to exist. Rural America should be the haven of crypto-Catholicism.
Like the other 21st century dichotomies in America mentioned in this book, “the ’urbs vs. the ’burbs” turns out to be a false one. Urbanites and suburbanites, being non-rurals, have far more in common together than either side likes to admit. The urban-suburban false dichotomy perfectly reflects that of these two variant 16th-century ideologies which composed the early Union and which became the ideological grandparents. The reader knows these ideologies, of course, as Prot-Enlight: religious Right and secular Left.
Just like each camp of Prot-Enlight, urbanites and suburbanites only think they are cultural opponents.
Urbanites hold up as beautiful their cramped, vertical lodgings and freedom from the strictures of childrearing, in a sterile display of American hubris: cubist ugliness, metropolitan familiarity, downtown “squalid chic,” and heinous avant-garde art. (Compare this architecture with classical European buildings!)
Suburbanites take pride in comparable ugliness, but in its suburban form: a neutered and adventureless repudiation of the pilgrim nature of the Christian life (via unbending routine), an inorganic and calculating sort of family planning, comfier (compared against urban architecture) but equally unseemly assemblages of concrete and glass, and abundant soccer fields.
It’s pretty much all bad. But none of this analysis is as simple as, say, mocking the modern iconography of dorky dad jeans or mom minivans…or, for that matter, the metrosexual’s selfie. It bears far profounder and more interior meaning for America.
Each characterizing the other side malignantly, both the religious Right and the secular Left miss the point: American cities and suburbs are both wimpy. Our cities and suburbs are both ugly.d Each is profane, irreligious, and desacralized.
Visit the millennia-old republic of Rome, Italy, if you have the chance. The 21st century Italians constructed the Coliseum just as much as their counterparts in American cities or suburbs penned or signed—or fought for—the Declaration of Independence. That is: none.
Between the city and the suburb, one is unsure what is worse for republican civics: the half-gentrified squalor, the sterilized sense of the sexual organs, the vapid conversationalism, the ubiquitous arrested development, and the cartoonish androgyny of the city… or the effete risk-aversion, the humdrum of routine, the mother-knows-best socialism in sports, the play dates, and the petty acquisitiveness of the suburbs.8
Not an ounce of it bears the mark of true religious faith. Nor is there a corpuscle of Jeffersonian DNA in any of it. Not the vaguest specter of Washington or Mason hovers over it. Not a drop of blood or a single summoning of the vigorous spirit.
The real problem seems to be the lack of religiosity in both the city and the suburb. The urban or suburban man who figures there is nothing worse than death (i.e., the irreligious man) will cling to survival and to lifestyle accoutrements with the coward’s iron grip. Thus, the solution to our problem seems to be loosening the grip on life, which not coincidentally has been the ostensible reason for the flight to the countryside. Think of the words of Curly from City Slickers:
You city folk … spend about 50 weeks a year gettin’ knots in your rope. Then you think two weeks up here’ll untie ’em for you. None of you get it. Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shit.”9
(Sadly, Curly fails to identify the redemptive love of Christ on the cross as the “one thing,” but it’s Hollywood… one takes truth where he can get it.)
Aside from the reluctantly-childbearing household, there is another familial trend in the suburbs, one notch over on the spectrum: a childless, urban-admiring, yet married household. This increasingly typical household includes only two monogamous people, contraceptively childless and wanting to treat marriage as one long date. This trait—once thought of as an exclusive characteristic of the urbanites (minus the monogamy)—makes clear the larger false dichotomy.e
And as insinuated above, even in the suburban households which do contain children, the worldly drive to emulate the more stylish, urban mindset remains visible, if subtle.
But whether children bless a suburban household or not, something deeper in the roots of Prot-Enlight impels folks in the American suburbs (and the cities as well) to turn their eyes away from their families and toward their jobs and possessions. The next sections will explore that phenomenon in detail.
Protestant Work Ethic: The False Equation of Vocation and Profession Technically speaking, the average Catholic will receive six out of the seven sacraments. This is because there exists a fork, as it were, in the sacramental road. One chooses either the vocation of Holy Orders, or the vocation of matrimonial family. As we saw above, too many Catholics today borrow Prot-Enlight assumptions constituting a non-procreative, non-vocational married life.
In milder cases, this might even be so in households that have children (which has worked profoundly negative effect even in the semi-traditional suburban household).
Barring serious medical problems, a marriage is called to holiness through offspring. As a married Catholic, your vocation lies in your spouse and family. Childbearing is the true alternative to the ordained, priestly life. Remember Mother Teresa’s famous words: “Not everyone is called to be successful; everyone is called to be faithful.” One way or another. Neither priest nor lay should attempt to escape it.
Now, the false vocation—wildly popular in America—is “your job.”
If mistaken to be a vocation, then labor and not family, comes to be seen as sacred. Such a view degrades the average suburban family in today’s America.
But in reality, family is the end and labor (wealth) is merely the means. It is not the other way around. In other words, family is the vocation; labor and wealth merely support it. How did the average American, many Catholics included, come to view his job as his vocation and his family as basically ancillary to this?
As the reader can probably guess, the answer to this question has everything to do with American foundations in Prot-Enlight. As the reader might not guess, it has more to do with Prot and less to do with Enlight (which is the opposite of what we’ve seen thus far, wherein the latter usually tricked or goaded the former into following its camouflaged progressive doctrines). Recall from the beginning of this chapter how Martin Luther called marriage a “worldly thing.”
After the Reformation in the 16th century by and large rejected the sacraments, the average Protestant still craved the daily grace that the sacraments conferred. A need for a substitute for the sacraments—as if this were possible—was felt by most Protestants.
Recall Thomas Aquinas’s teaching that all of man’s cravings are natural, within the proper context. The other side of that coin is that even natural cravings can be placed into unnatural contexts: in those cases, the appetites are satisfied with disordered substitutes. This is precisely what happened to the Protestant—particularly the American Calvinist—yearning for daily grace, following upon the Reformation’s rejection of the sacraments.
Paraphrasing Max Weber, who famously wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, World Heritage Encyclopedia suggests that
the Reformation profoundly affected the view of work, dignifying even the most mundane professions as adding to the common good and thus blessed by God, as much as any “sacred” calling. A common illustration is that of a cobbler, hunched over his work, who devotes his entire effort to the praise of God.10
But what has labor necessarily got to do with sacraments, after all?! It was an attempted Protestant substitute for them. The same insightful synopsis of Weber’s argument explains:
Weber traced the origins of the Protestant [work] ethic to the Reformation … the Roman Catholic Church assured salvation to individuals who accepted the Church’s sacraments and submitted to the clerical authority. However, the Reformation had effectively removed such assurances. From a psychological viewpoint, the average person had difficulty adjusting to this new [desacralized] worldview, and only the most devout believers or “religious geniuses” within Protestantism, such as Martin Luther, were able to make this adjustment, according to Weber. In the absence of such assurances from religious authority, Weber argued that Protestants began to look for other “signs” that they were saved.11
In other words, diligent labor replaced—at some psychological level—the role formerly played by sacraments, in the Calvinist Protestant world of America. This was the world of the early Puritans, who influenced American economy at the beginning of the American experiment.
Labor ostensibly became “an outward, visible sign of inward, invisible grace.” Strangely enough, the mis-definition and false sacralization of labor crowns Americanism. What is stranger still, is that many American Catholics have accepted the latent but strong Puritanism involved by such a substitution.
Weber himself draws out the final implications, prognosticating the ultimate outcome of the Puritans’ materialistic substitution for the sacraments:
The Puritan wanted to work in calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the Modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.12
Translation: material ownership is not evil, but it is not for everyone, in spates. That is because bountiful ownership is not necessary, for the rich man or the poor man, to do what he was made to do: holiness through fatherhood (if not priesthood).
Mother Teresa, one more time: “Not everyone is called to be successful; everyone is called to be faithful.”
But most rich folks forgot the part about universal faithfulness while all socialistic, envious folks forgot that some good people will achieve material success.f And this is the story of American and Western materialism in the city and the suburbs. It is embraced by secularists, and even by many Catholics, almost as universally as by the Protestants who engendered it. The “light cloak” of the American provider, the father, became an “iron cage,” which would ultimately rend the American family asunder rather than draw it together.
But it will be seen below how only the Catholic view can realize the vision of material goods in their proper context, a “light cloak” valued but not overvalued by its owner.
At this point, one must put the facts into their proper context. Materialism is the first nature of secularists, who in America followed the lead of Protestants, instead of vice versa. As a sort of perverse first principle, secularists will always be attracted to materialism: after all, material goods and material comforts are the only solace consistent with their ideology. This same materialism is something of a second nature for Protestants, who wanted all along to keep Christ but to jettison his Church-based sacraments. Weber hit the nail on the head in identifying labor as central to the Protestant attitude about daily grace. But most surprisingly, under Puritan influence, wealth acquisition assumed a third nature for American Catholics, who assumed two aspects of materialism—careerism and consumerism—not as a purposeful substitution for Christ (as the secular Left) or for the vocation of family (as the religious Right), but in the name of their disordered commitment to each.
This seems to be why so many American Catholics embrace Prot-Enlight materialism.
To put this in the terminology of the previous section, one might confidently say that careerism and consumerism characterize both the American suburbanites and urbanites. And virtually all Americans—the secularist, the Protestant, and the Catholic—bought into the consumerism-careerism combination for mostly different reasons. Catholics and (in a non-sacramental way) Protestants bought into such materialism in the name of family. Secularists did so generally instead of family (simply because materialism is the only effective atheist pleasure sufficient to distract one from his inevitable grave).
But not a whit of this careerism or consumerism should be seen to condemn capitalism, which absolutely can be ordered around the family.
We will examine exactly how to do this. The blame belongs with the manner in which Calvinist Protestantism (and secular Enlightenment thought) approached capitalism. They did so with careerism and consumerism, which stem from Prot-Enlight American failure to locate the true source of daily grace—the sacraments. Hold that thought, regarding careerism and consumerism. Before discussing these two dimensions of materialism further, we must briefly discuss what capitalism actually is. On that matter, there seems to be a great deal of confusion.
Subsidiarity and True Capitalism
Because we’ve already seen that true republicanism—and true Catholicism—requires natural rights (Chapter One), subsidiarity (Chapter Two), an independently moral citizenry (Chapter Three), and a commitment to natural community (Church in Chapter Four and family here in Chapter Five), the sort of political economy required by all this is already fixed: a free and natural one. This means capitalism.
Free, natural economy requires moral oversight by family, not government.
Government rule of the economy, or the centrally-planned economy, is fundamentally incompatible with each of the elements of true republicanism named above.
Here the reader should not make the easy mistake of misinterpreting what Max Weber said above. All capitalism is not inherently Calvinist. Similarly, all capitalism is not inherently materialist. But everywhere, even in the Catholic world, just such a mistake seems to dominate the assumptions about political economy.
Au contraire: proper capitalism is very Catholic.
Whereas any one of the above listed chapters’ content could be used to disprove the moral validity of the centrally planned economy, the simplest way to view political economy is through recourse to the three natural rights (life, liberty, property) which we’ve already examined so thoroughly.
Leaving aside life, for the moment, the natural rights of private liberty and private property, being rights,13 should not without strong cause be removed by government. Rejecting the centrally planned economy—that is, capitalism, or whatever else one names that rejection—involves one thing only: the principle of governmental non-interference with those two rights.
Liberty in the economic sense most often means liberty of contract,g the people’s freedom to bargain over the terms of their own contracts without unnecessary governmental interference.
