In the inaugural issue of Commonweal, founding editor Michael Williams put the mission of the magazine succinctly. While the journal would not be an “authoritative” or “authorized” spokesperson for the Catholic Church, it would nevertheless be “definitively Christian in its presentation of orthodox religious principles,” a perspective lacking in the increasingly secular cultural and political journalism of the day.
The need for such a journal was urgent, he wrote, since the agnostic scientific humanism then being promulgated among the educated classes—a faith he had embraced in his bohemian days—meant an end to the truer humanizing influence of Christianity. In opposing that secularizing agenda, the editors believed 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.”
Covering the Scopes “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, the following year, Williams’s sympathies, if not his intellectual convictions, lay with William Jennings Bryan and his Evangelical Christian followers. The trial and the cultural conflict it created—though not necessarily the debate over evolution itself—demonstrated that there was indeed a “war upon Christianity” being waged by a “host of strong and determined iconoclasts.” Williams admired the ardent faith of the rural Christians who had gathered to oppose the delegitimizing of the Bible in public life. “Are Catholics going to take the same personal interest in the spread of the doctrines of their Faith as these enthusiastic fundamentalists take in theirs?” he asked. “What is needed, and what everyone imbued with a truly Christian, Catholic, and apostolic spirit craves today, is that this doctrine shall be more widely known, more deeply understood, and more penetrating in its effects on men’s moral lives.”
Catholicism, in Williams’s view, offered a far stronger rational basis for traditional creedal Christianity than Bryan’s faith, and the American experiment in liberal democracy desperately needed what Catholicism offered. Enlightenment rationalism, with its belief in scientific materialism and progress, tells us nothing about morality or the meaning of our lives. Williams believed that those secular faiths had been discredited in the industrialized slaughter of World War I, which was proof of our fallen nature. Further proof would be provided by the Nazi extermination camps, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ongoing possibility of nuclear annihilation. Reason unmoored from revealed religion, Williams believed, cannot tame the passions or instill the virtues civilization and social comity depend on. Liberal democracy itself was threatened by a citizenry untutored in religion. Williams also knew that Bryan’s sectarian Christian nationalism threatened democracy’s first freedom, the freedom of religion. Nevertheless, Williams argued, “so far as really vital Christian principles and beliefs are concerned, the struggle that is impending is not between Catholics and Protestants—it is between valid Christianity and modern paganism.”
That sentiment is being voiced again by many conservative Catholics and other religious believers today, and it raises an awkward question for liberals who think religion has no place in democratic politics. Does the much-hyped rise of the “nones” and the evident decline of Christianity in the United States threaten American democracy? Both the consolations and the challenges of religion have been lost for millions of Americans. Unless you think all spiritual aspirations are fanciful or just malign, is it not reasonable to suspect that their absence has made our world a harsher and less forgiving place, where the dignity and inherent worth of every human being is increasingly questioned?
That danger received a flamboyant analysis more than fifty years ago from an unlikely and controversial source. In The Armies of the Night, the 1968 Pulitzer Prize–winning account of his participation in the anti–Vietnam War march on the Pentagon, the novelist Norman Mailer did not shy away from the Christian antecedents of American culture and politics. Presumably his intuition about the importance of Christianity to the country’s identity was strengthened by the rough-and-tumble, often unspoken faith of the Texans he served with in World War II. But when it came to Vietnam, Mailer thought, American Christians had lost their way by waging an unjust and obscene war—using a godless corporate logic and technology—on a people who had done us no wrong and whom we knew nothing about. Sounding in many ways like Michael Williams, Mailer asserted that “we are burning the body and blood of Christ in Vietnam. Yes, we are burning him there and as we do, we destroy the foundation of this Republic, which is its love and trust in Christ.”
Mailer was not being facetious; although Jewish, he took Christian claims seriously, believing that humankind existed in an ultimately spiritual, morally meaningful, and transcendent reality. American Christians, he argued, were caught in an impossible conflict between their faith and a deeply utilitarian and materialistic culture, one that split
their mind from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery, a son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology. Nothing was more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ.
Mailer’s fears about technology’s grip on the country might seem less hyperbolic today. Enormous wealth, power, and prestige are now in the hands of a small number of technologists eager to pursue the age-old fantasy of melding man and machine so that we can cheat death and become as gods. In addition to predictable eugenic aspirations, their utopian plans include the colonization of Mars for a chosen few and the creation of “nanobots” that will enable us to upload our brains to the cloud and finally live forever unshackled from our vulnerable and imperfect bodies. In this increasingly technological and atomized world, many Americans feel they have little control over their own lives, and that sense of powerlessness is destroying their trust in the compromises democracy requires.
For decades, secular liberals have been warning about the evil of mixing religion and politics, insisting that religion remain a private matter. But what if it is religion that provides us with the social and moral practices needed to defend human dignity? What if we need a religious tradition’s strong sense of the past to bind us to one another and to a common future? After all, religiously motivated political movements have helped accomplish a good number of liberal goals. Egalitarian religious convictions helped fuel the American Revolution, abolitionism, the Progressive Era, women’s suffrage, the New Deal, the civil-rights and the anti–Vietnam War movements. Why would liberal secularists want to deprive the nation of the energies of religious people, especially when Christianity’s special regard for the poor and distrust of wealth and worldly power are among its most authoritative teachings?
Writing about the “folly of secularism,” the philosopher Jeffrey Stout, who is not religious himself, put it this way:
If I am right in holding plutocracy to be the most significant contemporary threat to democracy, the pressing question is how to build a coalition to combat the threat. The answer, I submit, is not to exclude religious moderates…. If major reform is going to happen again in the United States, it will probably happen in roughly the same way that it has happened before. It will not happen because of secularism, but in spite of it.
Michael Williams and Norman Mailer both insist that at the center of existence there is a mystery, not an algorithm or a void. If we are to preserve our humanity and our democracy, we must also preserve that sense of mystery. Mailer put his faith in democracy in theological terms: “America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people.” That is a sentiment shared by the founders and subsequent editors of this magazine. It is a precious, if precarious, legacy.
A hundred years ago, Michael Williams asked if Catholics were prepared to spread the doctrines of their Church with conviction and passion. Seventy-five years later, the historian Eamon Duffy answered in the affirmative, as we all should in celebrating the centennial of this magazine. “We [are] too inclined to forget that a Catholic response to the needs of the world needs to be Catholic as well as responsive, if it is to be of any use to a world that has never needed the wisdom of Catholicism more,” Duffy wrote. “I could find no way of holding on to the values of Christianity while denying the account Christianity gave of reality.”
Duffy urges us to trust and keep faith with the Catholic tradition, not an easy thing to do in a time when all inherited authority is deeply suspect. The tension between Catholicism and contemporary secular culture, already strong, will likely grow stronger. The Church cannot simply be assimilated to secular moral norms without losing its identity, but the pressure to assimilate will intensify. It will be the job of Commonweal, as it always has been, to resist that pressure without succumbing to sectarianism or giving up on American democracy.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
