CHAPTER 1
RESIDENT ALIENS
We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, this world, where God has placed us, is our place of holiness.
—MADELEINE DELBRÊL
Christians have many good reasons for hope. Optimism is another matter. Optimism assumes that, sooner or later, things will naturally turn out for the better. Hope has no such illusions.
That sounds like an oddly nervous way to start a book about our life as Catholic Christians. After all, the Gospel is supposed to be good news, a message of joy. And so it clearly is. The Christian faith is expanding rapidly across the Southern Hemisphere. In Africa, 9 million converts enter the Catholic Church each year. By 2030, if current trends hold, China may have the largest Christian population in the world.1
Even in France, once the “eldest daughter of the Church” and now the secular heart of an aging continent, signs of a living Church persist—small, implausible, but real. And in the United States, while many parishes are struggling to survive in the nation’s Rust Belt and eastern cities, many others in the South and West are thriving. The Church in America has an impressive number of movements and new communities energetically alive, and some extraordinary young leaders, both clergy and lay.
In other words, outside Europe, Christianity is very much alive and growing. And it’s not a passive faith. Jesus left us with a mandate to transform creation.
But doing that, of course, is easier said than done, even—or maybe especially—in a nation like the United States.
My goal when I wrote Living the Catholic Faith (2001) was simple. I wanted to help Catholics recover the basics of their faith so they could live it more fully. In Render Unto Caesar (2008, 2012) I wanted to help readers apply their religious and moral convictions more vigorously in the public square as good citizens. Looking back, I think much in both books remains useful. But if that’s so, why do a new book?
The reason is time. Time passes. Times change. Watersheds happen. In June 2015, in its Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states must license same-sex marriages and recognize similar marriages when lawfully performed out of state. The Court struck down the nation’s traditional understanding of marriage. That much was obvious. But in its effect, the Court actually went much further. It changed the meaning of family by wiping away the need for the natural relationships—husband and wife, mother and father—at the heart of these institutions.
With Obergefell, marriage and family no longer precede and limit the state as humanity’s basic social units grounded in nature. Instead, they now mean what the state says they mean. And that suggests deeper problems, because in redefining marriage and the family, the state implicitly claims the authority to define what is and isn’t properly human.
Buried in Obergefell is the premise that who we are, how we mate, and with whom we mate are purely matters of personal choice and social contract. Biology is raw material. Gender is fluid. Both are free of any larger truth that might limit our actions. And the consequences of that premise will impact every aspect of our shared political, economic, and social life.
Why so? Benedict XVI explained it simply and well: “[The] question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself—about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human … When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child—essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.”2
Obviously Obergefell is only one of many issues creating today’s sea change in American public life. But it confirmed in a uniquely forceful way that we live in a country very different from that of the past. The special voice that biblical belief once had in our public square is now absent. People who hold a classic understanding of sexuality, marriage, and family have gone in just twenty years from pillars of mainstream conviction to the media equivalent of racists and bigots.
So what do we do now?
Patriotism, rightly understood, is part of a genuinely Christian life. We’re creatures of place. The soil under our feet matters. Home matters. Communities matter. The sound and smell and taste of the world we know, and the beauty of it all, matter. As G. K. Chesterton would say, there’s something cheap and unworthy—and inhuman—in a heart that has no roots, that feels no love of country.
Thus, believers don’t have the luxury of despair. And the idea that we can retire to the safety of some modern version of a cave in the hills isn’t practical. Our task as Christians is to be healthy cells in society. We need to work as long as we can, in whatever way we can, to nourish the good in our country and to encourage the seeds of a renewal that can enliven our young people.
Americans learn from an early age that democracy is the gold standard of human governance. And its advantages are obvious. Every citizen has (in theory) an equal voice in the course of our nation’s affairs. But if America is (or was) “exceptional,” something unique in history, it’s not because this country is a New Jerusalem, or a redeemer nation, or has a messianic mission. Those things are vanities and delusions. When John Winthrop wrote his famous homily for Puritan colonists nearly four hundred years ago, the “city upon a hill” he imagined building in the New World was something genuinely new. It was the hope of a common life that had its foundations in humility, justice, mutual support, and the love of God.
That biblical vision has always helped shape the American story. The very idea of the “person” has religious origins. Even the concept of the individual—the building block of Western political life—has its early seeds in biblical faith.3 America has always been a mixed marriage of biblical and Enlightenment ideas.
The trouble is that liberal democratic states also have a less visible, internal dynamic. In a democracy, political legitimacy comes from the will of sovereign individuals. Their will is expressed through elected representatives. Anything that interferes with their will, anything that places inherited or unchosen obligations on the individual—except for the government itself, which embodies the will of the majority of individuals—becomes the target of suspicion.
To protect the sovereignty of individuals, democracy separates them from one another. And to achieve that, the state sooner or later seeks to break down any relationship or entity that stands in its way. That includes every kind of mediating institution, from fraternal organizations, to synagogues and churches, to the family itself. This is why Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French observer of early American life, said that “despotism, which is dangerous at all times, [is] particularly to be feared in democratic centuries.”4
Tocqueville saw that the strength of American society, the force that kept the tyrannical logic of democracy in creative check, was the prevalence and intensity of religious belief. Religion is to democracy as a bridle is to a horse. Religion moderates democracy because it appeals to an authority higher than democracy itself.5
But religion only works its influence on democracy if people really believe what it teaches. Nobody believes in God just because it’s socially useful. To put it in Catholic terms, Christianity is worthless as a leaven in society unless people actually believe in Jesus Christ, follow the Gospel, love the Church, and act like real disciples. If they don’t, then religion is just another form of self-medication. And unfortunately, that’s how many of us live out our Baptism.
Until recent decades, American culture was largely Protestant. That was part of the country’s genius. But it also meant that Catholics and other minorities lived through long periods of exclusion and prejudice. The effect of being outsiders has always fueled a Catholic passion to fit in, to find a way into the mainstream, to excel by the standards of the people who disdain us. Over time, we Catholics have succeeded very well—evidently too well. And that very success has weakened any chance the Church had to seize a “Catholic moment” when Catholics might fill the moral hole in our culture created by the collapse of a Protestant consensus.
As a result, Tocqueville’s fear about democracy without religious constraints—what he called its power to kill souls and prepare citizens for servitude6—is arguably where we find ourselves today.
Many factors have added to the problem, things we can’t easily control. To cite just one example: The political impact of new technologies has been massive. They shape the nature of our reasoning and our discourse. They’ve moved us away from a public square tempered by logic, debate, and reflection based on the printed word, to a visual and sensory one, emotionally charged and spontaneous. And given the nature of our culture—as we’ll see later in these pages—technology’s influence will continue to grow.
The credibility of a liberal democracy depends on its power to give people security and freedom—with “freedom” measured largely by the number of choices within each person’s private control. The goal of modern technology is to expand those choices by subduing the natural world; to put nature at the service of society in general, and individual consumers in particular. As a result, modern democracy isn’t just “open” to modern technology; it now depends on it. The two can’t be separated.
Their cooperation leads in unforeseen directions. As the progress of democracy and technology go hand in hand, the political influence of polling, focus groups, behavioral experts, and market research grows. The state gradually takes on elements of a market model that requires the growth of government as a service provider. The short-term needs and wants of voters begin to displace long-term purpose and planning.
In effect, democracy becomes an expression of consumer preference shaped and led by a technology-competent managerial class. It has plenty of room for personal “values.” But it has very little space for appeals to higher moral authority or shared meaning.7 For the state, this is convenient. Private belief—unlike communities of faith—can fit very comfortably in a consumer-based, technocratically guided democracy. Private beliefs make no public demands; and if they do, those demands can easily be ignored or pushed to the margins.
Where does that lead?
Judges 2:6–15 is the story of what happens after the Exodus and after Joshua wins the Promised Land for God’s people. Verse 10 says that Joshua “and all that generation also were gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation after them, who did not know the Lord or the work which he had done for Israel.”
It’s a Bible passage worth pondering. Every generation leaves a legacy of achievement and failure. In my lifetime, many good men and women have made the world better by the gift of their lives to others. But the biggest failure of so many people of my (baby boomer) generation, including parents, teachers, and leaders in the Church, has been our failure to pass along our faith in a compelling way to the generation now taking our place.
The reason the Christian faith doesn’t matter to so many of our young people is that—too often—it didn’t really matter to us. Not enough to shape our lives. Not enough for us to suffer for it. As Catholic Christians, we may have come to a point today where we feel like foreigners in our own country—“strangers in a strange land,” in the beautiful English of the King James Bible (Ex 2:22). But the deeper problem in America isn’t that we believers are “foreigners.” It’s that our children and grandchildren aren’t.
* * *
SOME YEARS AGO, the singer Bobby McFerrin had a hit tune called “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” The lyrics were less than complex. Basically he just sang the words “Don’t worry, be happy” more than thirty times in the space of four minutes. But the song was fun and innocent, and it made people smile. So it was very popular.
That was in 1988. Before the First Iraq War. Before 9/11. Before Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, the Second Iraq War, the 2008 economic meltdown, the Benghazi fiasco, the Syria fiasco, the IRS scandal, the HHS mandate, Obergefell, refugee crises, Boko Haram, ISIS, and the 2015 and 2016 attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Orlando, and elsewhere.
And yet, in a way he never intended, McFerrin had it right. Despite all the conflicts in the world and in our own nation, Christians shouldn’t worry. We should be happy. John Paul II, in the first moments of his pontificate, urged us to “be not afraid.” This from a man who lived through the Second World War and the two worst murder regimes in history. And when Pope Francis called us back to the “joy of the Gospel”—as he did in his first apostolic exhortation—he, too, reminded us that, as Christians, we have every reason to hope. We have no excuse to look as though we’ve just come back from a funeral.8
Given the turmoil in the world, this stubborn faith in the goodness of life can seem naive. Skeptics tend to think of religion as either organized sentimentality or a kind of mental illness. But Christian faith rightly lived has never been an escape from reality, an emotional crutch, or a weapon for hurting others. It’s true that people can and do misuse religion to do terrible things. We see that happening in the Middle East and elsewhere today. If and when we Christians do that, though, we betray the Gospel we claim to serve.
More than fifty years after Vatican II, the world is a bloody and fractured place. Some of those fractures reach deeply into the Church herself.
But this isn’t news. It’s always been so. Scripture is a record of the same story told again and again, in different ways but always with the same theme, for more than three thousand years. God loves man. Man betrays God. Then God calls man back to his friendship. Sometimes that call involves some very painful suffering, and for good reason. God respects our freedom. But he will not interfere with our choices or their consequences, no matter how unpleasant. As a result, the struggle in the human heart between good and evil—a struggle that seems burned into our chromosomes—projects itself onto the world, to ennoble or deform it. The beauty and the barbarism we inflict on one another leave their mark on creation.
But still God loves us, and his love endures forever.
It’s worth rereading paragraphs 84–86 in Evangelii Gaudium because in it, Pope Francis forcefully warns us against the kind of pessimism about the world that can turn the hearts of good people into slabs of stone. “Nobody can go off to battle,” Francis writes, “unless he is fully convinced of victory beforehand. If we start without confidence, [we’ve] already lost half the battle … Christian triumph is always a cross, yet a cross which is at the same time a victorious banner borne with aggressive tenderness against the assaults of evil. The evil spirit of defeatism is brother to the temptation to separate, before its time, the wheat from the weeds; it is the fruit of an anxious and self-centered lack of trust.”9
There are no unhappy saints, and joy and hope are constant themes in the work of Pope Francis. Like Saint Paul, he sees the source of Christian joy in the act of preaching the Gospel, in a passion for living the Good News and actively sharing the person of Jesus Christ with others. This is why he has such urgent words for tepid Christians. This is why he can seem so impatient with believers who let their hearts grow numb. If we don’t share our faith, we lose it. Without a well-grounded faith, we can’t experience hope, because we have no reason to trust in the future. And without hope, we turn more and more inward and lose the capacity to love.
People typically see Jorge Bergoglio as a man formed by the example of Ignatius Loyola and Francis of Assisi. And of course that’s true. His spirituality is clearly Jesuit, and his desire for a pure and simple Church close to the poor is clearly Franciscan. But his hunger for God also has other sources.
In a 2013 homily to the general chapter of the Order of Saint Augustine, Francis asked the delegates to “look into your hearts and ask yourself if you have a heart that wants great things or a heart that is asleep. Has your heart maintained [Augustine’s] restlessness or has it been suffocated by things?”10 The passion and restlessness in this Pope’s own heart mirror the great Augustine who saw that our hearts can never rest until they rest in God—the God whom Augustine longed for as life’s “sovereign joy.”
It might seem odd to link Pope Francis and Augustine. Between them runs a canyon of imagined differences in personality and style. For the mass media, Francis is the sunny reformer dragging an ancient institution into the light of the twenty-first century, while Augustine is the grim Christian polemicist from a dark and barbarous past. But appearances can be deceiving. We should ask ourselves: What really constitutes barbarism? And which moment in history is really the one with more light? There’s a paradox about Francis that reporters tend to gloss over. The Pope who smiles so often, speaks so kindly, and holds joy in such high regard also has the awkward habit of talking about the devil.
By his own account, Francis has read Lord of the World—Robert Hugh Benson’s novel about the Antichrist and the end of the world—three or four times. And when he speaks about the devil, which he does with some frequency, he doesn’t mean a symbol of evil or a metaphor about man’s appetite for destruction. Francis means exactly what the Church has always taught. Satan is a real personal being, a supremely intelligent spirit, a rebel against God, and an enemy of everything human.11
Lord of the World was published in 1907, at the start of a young and hopeful twentieth century. It was a time when the new power of science seemed sure to bear fruit in an age of reason, peace, human dignity, and progress, without the primitive baggage of God or superstition. If the modern era had a high point of confidence in humanity’s independence and possibilities, Lord of the World captured its pride perfectly. And yet within ten years, every shred of that confidence and an entire way of life had been annihilated by the First World War. The twentieth century, despite its accomplishments, became the bloodiest, most irrationally fanatic and destructive in history. It’s hard to imagine anyone not believing in the existence of the devil after the Holocaust, the Gulag, or Pol Pot.
So again, what constitutes barbarism? And which moment in time is really the darker—the world of the fifth-century bishop of Hippo, or the world of today’s bishop of Rome?
The irony of the present moment is that the same tools we use to pick apart and understand the natural world, we now use against ourselves. We’re the specimens of our own tinkering, the objects of our social and physical sciences. In the process, we’ve lost two things. We’ve lost our ability to see anything sacred or unique in what it means to be human. And we’ve lost our capacity to believe in anything that we can’t measure with our tools. As a result, we’re haunted by the worry that none of our actions really has any larger purpose.
The post-Christian developed world runs not on beliefs but on pragmatism and desire. In effect—for too many people—the appetite for comfort and security has replaced conviction. In the United States, our political institutions haven’t changed. Nor have the words we use to talk about rights, laws, and ideals. But they no longer have the same content. We’re a culture of self-absorbed consumers who use noise and distractions to manage our lack of shared meaning. What that produces in us is a drugged heart—a heart neither restless for God nor able to love and empathize with others.
There’s a passage from Augustine’s City of God that’s worth remembering. In describing the Romans of the Late Empire he wrote:
This is [their] concern: that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living [so] that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquility; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependents, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, let no impurity be forbidden … [In] his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will … [and let] there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for everyone who wishes to use them, but especially for those who are too poor to keep one for private use.12
Sound familiar? True, prostitutes for the poor may seem like an odd government entitlement. But surely it’s no more “odd” than presidents and lawmakers today who help poor people kill their own children with abortions at low or no cost—not only in this country but around the globe.
Augustine began writing City of God in AD 413. He wanted to defend the empire’s Christian community against pagans who blamed Christianity for the decline of Rome and the breakdown of the world they knew. But over the years, he built the text into what Thomas Merton called “a monumental theology of history” and “an autobiography of the Catholic Church,” both timeless and universal. Despite its great size, the book’s key ideas are fairly simple.
Augustine argues that when Adam sinned against God, creation fell with him. Nature, including human nature, is now crippled by evil. Sin infects all human endeavors. Man by his own efforts can’t be perfected. For Augustine, Rome is a new Babylon and the symbol of earthly power for every generation. But Rome is merely the material face of another, deeper reality. In the mind of Augustine, every inhabitant of our world actually belongs to one of two invisible cities that will commingle until the end of time—the City of Man, consisting of the distracted, the confused, the indifferent, and the wicked, and the City of God, made up of God’s pilgrim people on earth. In Augustine’s words, “The two cities have been formed by two loves; the earthly city by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience.”13
Sinners hide among the saints, and saints among the sinners. Only God knows the truth of each person. And only he can winnow the wheat from the chaff at the end of time. Meanwhile, the two cities interpenetrate and overlap. That leaves Christians with the task of seeking to live their faith well in a fallen world. And it brings us finally to what Augustine says to us today.
Can an African bishop dead for nearly sixteen hundred years offer anything useful to American Christians who live in a very different world?
Augustine might answer this way:
First, he would say that we don’t in fact live in such a different world. Many of the details of daily life have changed—our tools, memories, and expectations; our frames of thought and our command of nature. But the human condition is the same. We’re born; we grow; we die. We ask what our lives mean. We wonder whether any larger purpose guides the world, and why the people we love age and weaken and then pass on. Beauty still pierces our hearts. Hurting the poor and the weak still shames us. Augustine’s two cities are still with us. And in their essentials, they’re still very much the same.
Second, Augustine would remind us that as long as the City of God and the City of Man are commingled, “we [believers] also enjoy the peace of Babylon.” In other words, the temporal peace and security provided by the state allow us to sojourn, imperfectly but more or less unmolested, toward heaven.14 Therefore Christians have a duty to pray for earthly rulers. And when possible, we should help to make the structures of this world as good as they can be.
Which raises the issue of politics. Augustine’s attitude toward politics was a mixture of deep skepticism and a sense of moral obligation. For Augustine, sin infects even the best human motives. No political party is pure. No political order, no matter how seemingly good, can ever constitute a just society.
But we can’t simply withdraw from public affairs. Saint Benedict could retreat to the Italian countryside, but Augustine was a bishop intimately tied to his people and their society. For Augustine, the classic civic virtues named by Cicero—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—can be renewed and elevated, to the benefit of all citizens, by the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Therefore, political engagement is—or at least it can be—a worthy Christian task. Public office can be an honorable Christian vocation. But any Christian involvement in politics needs to be ruled by modest expectations and a spirit of humility. Success will always be limited. No legal system will ever be fully just.15
Third and finally: If the key sin of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an overweening pride in human progress, Augustine might say that the key sins of the twenty-first century—at least, in much of the developed world—are cynicism and despair. Not the brand of despair we see in the panic or severe depression that drives some persons to suicide. Rather, Augustine would mean the kind of despair that’s really a subtle inversion of pride. He’d mean the icy, embittered vanity that defies reality and truth, despite its own failures, and that comes from the mouth of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” As Satan puts it, better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.16
I remembered that line after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in France, when a magazine cartoonist told the world not to pray for Paris because “We don’t need more religion! Our faith goes to music! Kisses! Life! Champagne and joy!”17
One has to wonder whether the murdered would feel the same.
That stubborn refusal to see anything beyond the horizon of this earthly life fills the air the developed world now breathes. The temptation exists even in the Church to compromise with destructive patterns of life and to reduce the beauty of Christian truths about marriage, sexuality, and other inconvenient matters to a set of attractive ideals—which then leads by little steps to surrendering her redemptive mission. What the world needs from believers is a witness of love and truth, not approval. And that requires from all of us—clergy and laypersons alike—a much greater confidence in the Word of God, the power of grace, and the ability of people to actually model and take joy in what the Church believes.
Again: We live in a time when the product of man’s reason—the creature we call science—now seems to turn on and attack reason itself, to discredit free will, and to diminish anything unique about what it means to be human. But as a culture, we still cling to the idea that progress is somehow inevitable, that science and technology will one day deliver us from the burdens of being human. And our educated classes seem willing to believe in almost anything to avoid dealing with the possibility of God. “Anything but Jesus” could be the motto of the secular age.
Augustine would find none of this surprising, or even very foreign. The Rome of Roman greatness, the Rome of people’s happy imagination and memory, no longer existed, and had really never existed, when he wrote City of God. We need to examine our own nation with the same hard realism. Patriotism is a form of love, and real love sees the world as it truly is. There is much to love, and much that’s worth fighting for, in this country we call our home. As Christians, we’re here in part to make the world a better place. But our nation is not our home, not really. And Augustine would tell us never to forget that.
We need to share the urgency of Pope Francis in preaching the joy of the Gospel. And that raises the question: What is joy? Joy is more than satisfaction. It’s more than pleasure or contentment. Even the word “happiness” doesn’t really capture it. Joy is the exhilaration we find in being overcome by great beauty, or in the discovery of some great truth or gift, and the passion that drives us to share this exhilaration with others, even if we suffer in the process. In effect, we don’t possess joy; joy possesses us.
One of the reasons that Pope Francis sometimes seems so frustrated with the state of the Church today may be that, in his experience, too many Christians tend to confuse doctrine and law and rituals and structures with the real experience of faith. Obviously these things are important. Augustine would say that they’re very important, because without them our faith is disincarnate and little more than a collection of warm feelings. The Church is harmed by an overly sentimental or anti-intellectual spirit in her work. In an “emotivist” age, the last thing we need is a flight from clear teaching.
But Augustine would likely agree with Francis that the structural elements of Church life become empty and dead when they’re not animated by love—in other words, if they don’t proceed from a living relationship with Jesus Christ and the interior joy it creates. We can too easily use them as a hiding place from the real task of discipleship, which is preaching the joy of the Gospel by our lives and our actions.
Did Augustine know joy? Read his Confessions. In his sermons, Augustine called this earth “a smiling place.” Portions of his work read like a litany to the goodness and beauty of creation.18 His biographer Peter Brown describes him as a man immoderately in love with the world. And the reason is simple. Augustine loved the world because he was in love with the Author of the beauty and goodness he found there.
What does that mean for us today? Augustine would tell us that the real problem with the world is bigger than abortion or poverty or climate change or family breakdown, and it’s much more stubborn. The real problem with the world is us.
As Augustine said in his sermons, it’s no use complaining about the times, because we are the times. How we live shapes them. And when we finally learn to fill our hearts with something more than the noise and narcotics of the wounded societies we helped create; when we finally let our hearts rest in God as Augustine did; then—and only then—the world will begin to change, because God will use the witness of our lives to change it.
* * *
TIME PASSES. TIMES CHANGE. Watersheds happen. I sat down to write this book for everyday Catholics and others who love Jesus Christ and his Church more than they love their own opinions; people who know that something’s gone wrong with their country, but don’t understand why, or what to do about it.
That expression—“everyday Catholics”—needs some unpacking. In twenty-eight years as a bishop, what I’ve seen is this: Most of the adult Catholics I know have families and demanding jobs. They’re often harried and fatigued and distracted. But they’re nobody’s fools. Most of us ordinary believers were born with plenty of intelligence, and today more than ever, we need to use it. If our mass-media culture works to make people shallow, gullible, angry, and dumb much of the time, it’s because we let it.
Since you’re reading this book, you’re probably different. You probably like to think, and want to think, as a grown-up real person, in a mature Catholic spirit of faith. And you might suspect (wisely) that too many people aren’t thinking at all. Adults deserve adult food for thought, and in these pages I’ll try to honor that. To that end, I’ve included endnotes where useful, and they can lead to some great additional reading. But they’re not exhaustive.
The structure of this book is simple. Chapter 2 revisits the America we thought we knew and in many ways did know, along with the ideals and virtues it embodied. For readers already well versed in our nation’s history and the Catholic role in the story, chapter 2 might be flyover country, something to scan on the way to the rest of the book. But for the many others who, until now, have taken the Jack Nicholson approach to worthwhile but unwanted invitations—“I’d rather stick needles in my eyes”—chapter 2 is for you.19
Chapters 3 through 7 outline where we are now and how we got there. And chapters 8 through 12 speak to our reasons for hope, and to how we can live as Christians, with joy, in a very different world. That new world poses questions we all need to face: How do we fit into a deeply changed and changing nation? How do we grow in our faith? Where do our real loyalties lie? And how did we one day wake up in a culture we thought we knew but now seems so foreign?
We’re passing through a religious revolution in America. For many generations a common Christian culture transcended our partisan struggles. It gave us a shared framework of behavior and belief. Now another vision for our nation’s future has emerged. It sees no need for Christianity. And in many cases it views our faith as an obstacle to its ambitions. We’ve become, in Stanley Hauerwas’s famous phrase, “resident aliens.”20 We’re tempted to turn bitter and quit the struggle. Nobody likes to be driven from his high seat, yet this is exactly what has happened to American Christianity. Many believers are ill equipped for life on the “outside.” But we need to fight this temptation. And to do so we need to approach twenty-first-century America with a spirit not of anger, but of clear judgment and of love.
Love is grateful: We need to thank God for all the good in America, not just in the past, but today.
Love is patient: We need to recognize that we’re not going to “win” many of the culture-shaping struggles we face—at least, not on our own time. Only on God’s time.
Love builds up: We need to do what can be done rather than anguishing over what can’t.
Patriotism can be manipulated by demagogues. It can be a cheap substitute for religious faith. But at its core, it’s a good thing. When Saint Paul speaks of love, he says, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7). By “love” he means the Christlike charity made possible by God’s grace, and he calls us to this spirit of love in our life together as believers.
Our relationship to the nation we call America is not our relationship to Christ’s body, the Church. There are things we should not bear, should not believe, should not endure in civic life. But we need to welcome some, and maybe a great deal, of bearing and believing and hoping and enduring, for the sake of saving what can be saved.
Because for better or worse, what happens in this country has meaning for a much wider world.
Copyright © 2017 by Charles J. Chaput