The Cross Was Not on the Ballot in 2024
The Cross Was Not on the Ballot in 2024
In past decades, adult catechism classes were home to disinterested 30-somethings pursuing confirmation as a prerequisite to the sacrament of holy matrimony and the occasional later-in-life neophyte of sincere faith. In recent years though, the baptismal waters have greeted a new kind of convert—the socially conservative young person. These neophytes find their way to the Eucharist via the new public square; YouTube, Instagram and Twitter have arguably produced the majority of Gen-Z and Millennial conversions. While most cradle Catholics abandon the pews by adulthood, these new folks take their place. Influenced by a romanticized representation of the Faith found online, they arrive at the neighborhood parish hoping not that the Church becomes more ‘accessible’, but actually more intensely steeped in aesthetic tradition, spiritual rigor, and a uniquely Catholic identity. That is, at least, a friendly and abstract description of this archetype.
In practical experience, it seems easy for young conservative converts to know Catholicism without yet encountering the Catholic Faith. They grasp the most visible and external aspects extremely well, demonstrating strong knowledge of the New Testament, liturgical history, and Church law. They never miss Mass on Sundays and holy days, pray the Rosary frequently, and perhaps even say grace in Latin. From the outside, they are doing Catholicism ‘the right way’. There is—after all—a literally endless array of wrong ways to do Catholicism. So this is good, they are within the doors of the Church.
These rules and rituals and pretty things, however, do not lie at the core of sacramental life in Christ. To follow Christ is not an ordered process. How quickly we forget that we worship a preaching carpenter born in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, executed naked alongside common thieves. We hold that God found it right to inhabit nowhere important and perform the physically impossible before peasants. We know as historical fact that his bizarre movement spread secretly across the known world with unprecedented success. Our Faith befuddles the steady, rational mind while remaining deeply rational and grounded. It transcends categories. To live the Catholic way is equally strange to modern sensibilities—the Faith is no self-help program, system of spiritual empowerment, or political system. It is a slow, tender, gruelling march up to Calvary. To be Catholic is to humbly and joyfully carry that which will eventually crucify you. This way of one's own cross is what the energized, conservative convert must embrace.
Under the hood, these converts are often exactly what they are: new Christians who have spent most of their lives away from the Eucharist and only a moment within the Church. Some convert to this most ‘based’ of religions for ornate Roman liturgies, political and social shelter, and a sense of anti-technocratic cross-generational belonging. Some others convert after reading every single document of every single Church Council and internally concluding that the Catholic Church is the most exhaustively correct of all correct things. Even more just convert because the Church often aligns so well with new right-wing populism. All of these roads to Rome are genuinely viable paths to the faith, but to become Catholic is not to justify one’s own sociopolitical and aesthetic identity. To become Catholic is not to fortify one’s rejection of a clearly broken and disordered modern world. It is that way up to Calvary.
To become Catholic is to know all kinds of death, and to accept regular deaths for yourself. When a vine is cut down, the tangled offshoots that fed from it wither as well. In the same way, when you plainly accept the Holy Spirit into your heart and Christ’s flesh into your literal bosom, you die in such a way that you do not carry these secular ideologies unchecked into your new Christian life. When one truly enters the mysteries of the Faith, this act does not crown existing social positions, it rather renders them grandly irrelevant. It renders cruciform what was good in one’s past life and renders defunct what was disordered.
This process of true conversion can only happen if one cooperates with the call of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, however, is unwelcome in the heart when it treats right-wing populism as gospel. If this notion makes you bristle, consider that third-wave feminism and the America-First movement are similar in form: they are ideologies founded in well-intentioned secular definitions of justice, born of desires for self-determination and economic prosperity. They are also both frequently filtered through the lens of Christianity by nominal Christians who wish to cite their faith in support of their chosen cause. For the feminists, God vaguely makes us all equal and equal now means identical. For the populists, God gives us rights to property and national sovereignty, and those things exist in a vacuum. In both instances, the individual uses Christian ideas, but does not give himself or herself to the Faith. The call to the Cross must be ignored in order to advance these secular goals.
This co-opting of the Faith in convenient pursuit of earthly ends is incompatible with life-giving faith. It is a shield from the terrifying rays of God’s grace. In contrast to this process, when we simply pray Godwards and cease to use our Faith—when we simply live and breathe the love of the Cross—we realize that this Christian faith is hardly convenient. Death, after all, is rather inconvenient.
One such death that the young convert must undergo is political. In the escalation to the 2020 presidential election, the very conservative Fr. James Altman released an impassioned video statement titled “You cannot be Catholic & a Democrat. Period.” He is correct, even if not complete. The Democratic party explicitly and formally supports views of moral anthropology that plainly reject Christian doctrine. It then is scandalous to outwardly align with the Democratic party and still profess the Catholic Faith. Such a dual profession is also just incoherent—two masters cannot be simultaneously served—and so it really means nothing.
Here’s a wild reality: you also cannot be Catholic and a Republican. Note that there is a difference between voting for a politician and “being” a professed member of his or her party. What I mean is that it is also scandalous to outwardly align with or exalt the Republican party without voiced caveats while upholding the Catholic Faith. Naturally, Catholic politicians must operate pragmatically within the system as it stands, but ordinary Catholics are bound to place their political allegiances beneath and within the Church. No notion of the ‘separation of church and state’ is even remotely relevant here, because to be Catholic is to hold that the Church has cornered the market on objective truth and that all other organizations are painfully fallible and human. The United States will fall. The Church will not. The second person of the Holy Trinity established the Church. Fallible men established the United States.
When one becomes Catholic, his or her faith must reorder all previously held political beliefs and alliances. Otherwise, this faith is conditional, shallow, and unprofitable for holiness and salvation. This is not a commentary on the moral mechanics of civic voting or strategic compromise, but rather a reminder: there is great spiritual danger in allowing a political party or faction to exist as a parallel moral authority in one’s heart.
When we vote and organize—which we should—we must possess the intellectual and emotional capacity to act as reflections of Christ shining in a broken world, rather than as participants in this corrupted and decadent social order. We must be able to say “I am not a Republican; I am simply protecting the rights of the unborn” or “I am not a Democrat; I am strategically fighting for the worker and the impoverished.” We must be Catholics that happen to vote, not Democrats or Republicans that happen to be Catholic.
Now naturally a Catholic is bound by a hierarchy of values—of which the right to life is principal—and so in many cases we are bound to the pro-life candidate. When matters of human life are not significant factors though, we are often bound by other laws. Consider that the Church recognizes four sins that “cry out to heaven for vengeance”. The first two are willful murder and the sin of Sodom. The latter two are marvelously different: oppression of the poor, and defrauding laborers of their wages. Conservatives of Catholic identity are comfortable with the first two, and progressives with the latter two. A mature, Godwards spiritual life will embrace the reality that the Faith fails to reside within the language and goals of either temporary American political faction. This way recognizes that we are called away from the world and into self-denial and simple joy.
To follow Christ is to be like Him: He gave unto Caesar yet professed he was King; accepted the Cross, yet rose from the dead; obeyed the law yet dined with prostitutes. Within the context of America's systemically forced simplistic political dualism, this view makes no sense. In computer science terms, it produces an ERROR code—no one knows how to deal with it. Right-wingers find this view soft and unuseful, and progressives just sloppily toss it into the "basket of deplorable" ideas. Case in point: no one knows what to make of it.
What it is, however, is the Cross. The Cross is an ancient Roman torture device, but it is also a profoundly confusing symbol: that God would voluntarily endure the unfathomable out of love. Catholics don't need three nails and two boards to live out sincere love of God. Most of us are not remotely strong enough to endure until Martyrdom. If we were, God might have sent us our executioner a long time ago.
Actually, we just need to be OK standing apart from both postmodern secular tendencies and the strange new right-wing movement that instrumentalizes Christianity for political gain. That is a very small cross, but it is a cross nonetheless. Will we carry it?
