Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #399: Why Belonging Matters — A Catholic Take on Culture and Conservatism

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Being Catholic #399: Why Belonging Matters — A Catholic Take on Culture and Conservatism · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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on Catholic Spirit Radio,
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89.5 FM and 92.5 FM in good old McLean County in Bloomington Normal,
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88.3 in Pontiac, 97.1 in Lincoln.
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89.3 in Morris Joliet, 89.1 in DeKalb Sycamore, 88.9 and 94.5 in the Rockford area.
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89.3 in Whitewater, Wisconsin, 88.3 in Clinton and Champaign,
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90.5 in Charleston and Macomb.
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We're going to have a great show for you today.
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I'm here with my wife Lynn and it's good to be back.
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I guess we missed how many times, about three or four times here in a row.
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We had just a lot of things going on.
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And of course, last week we had the tornadoes and storms that were going on.
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I hope everybody survived them all right.
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It seemed to us that we had one that went perhaps right over our house,
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our neighbor right next door had his tree in the front yard come down,
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and we had a lot of noise up above the house, but we really didn't have anything
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happen too much in our yard.
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We had one shingle on the corner of our garage missing, and that was about it and nothing else.
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Anything that more you want to say, hon, Atlin? Did I miss anything?
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No, in typical Midwest fashion, our neighbor was,
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He was standing looking out his front door, and the tree right near his front
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door was uprooted, just missed his car. He said, well, I was trying to decide
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whether I should go out and move the car, maybe.
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Yeah, it's a good thing he didn't.
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He said, voom, there went the tree, roots and all.
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Right next to the car, but not on the car. Yeah, but I see on Facebook and stuff,
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they make fun of Midwesterners,
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say there's a tornado warning and everybody goes outside to watch it. And that's very true.
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We just sat in our chairs, oh, well, you know.
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And there's also, it seems like a tornado is going on in our society.
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A lot of, I'm not going to comment on it too much. to the.
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Sort of like some problems with the Pope and the president.
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And then the SDLC, Southern Poverty Law Center, is in trouble because of it's
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actually promoting racism in order to fight racism.
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It's sort of like a fire department that has a dearth of fires and hires arsonists
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to go around starting fires. So it has more business and more,
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you know, can ask for more money and grow bigger and so forth.
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And I guess that's what the SPLC has been doing.
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So there are those things going on. It's quite an up and down in our society.
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So what I'm going to talk about today is the sense in a society of people being
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able to feel a sense of kinship,
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a sense of belonging and a sense of home. I'll talk a little bit more about it.
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As we go along here, because I'm going to get over here to my wife and let her
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have her say before we start on that issue.
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And I think that will probably take up most of what we have to say and read
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in this session today. Okay.
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I did ask you what you were going to do today, and he said I'm going to talk
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about something. Home. Home.
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That's what we're going to talk about. H-O-M-E. H-O-M-E, home. Home. Right.
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Well. You want me to read this before we start here? Yeah, go ahead.
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Intro, and then I'll go back to you again. All right. Okay.
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A society that despises itself will die. A civilization that reviles itself cannot endure.
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Thus, any account of cultural survival must begin with love,
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and love is necessarily anchored to the particular.
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We must love that which is ours, and love begins at home.
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Edmund Burke hints at this when he notes that our loves are formed in the little
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platoons, the home, the parish, the neighborhood.
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These are the places where our affections are cultivated. The local,
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the particular, and the place provide an orientation for subsequent loves.
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We begin with the particular and move outward toward the universal.
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But even with that, we never leave the particular behind.
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Ironically, even those who reject their patrimony and all that it represents
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shape their lives around that rejection. We are forever haunted by the idea of home.
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The notion of home is deeply rooted in our cultural consciousness.
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Consider some of our foundational texts. The Odyssey of Homer is an epic poem of homecoming.
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And those of you who got the Odyssey in high school, and we used to get it when we were freshmen.
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I hope people still get it in high school. I don't know if they do or not anymore.
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You got it, didn't you, when you were in high school? Uh-huh.
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You read the Odyssey. And the Odyssey is the story of Odysseus or Ulysses going home.
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After the Trojan War, he is seeking to go home.
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And because of his pride, he gets blown off course and he gets lost.
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And being lost is one of the most horrible experiences that human beings have,
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a sense of being, you know, gone.
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We have one of our Catholic writers, one of our great Catholic writers, Flannery O'Connor.
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And one of the things that she said is someplace is always better than no place.
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And the whole idea of Catholicism itself is for us to get our souls to return
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home where they belong, in heaven where they belong.
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And our journey begins and ends at home.
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And we're going to talk a little bit more about that. And I'll turn this back
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over to you until then, John. Okay.
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I hope everybody has a very blessed Easter. And remember, we're still in the
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Easter season, and that will come on until Pentecost, which will come up quick
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this year because it's a little bit early.
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Easter was a little bit early. So if you haven't done your Easter duty,
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confession and communion, do too so.
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Other than that, the weather has been great here.
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It depends, though, on, you know, every morning I get up and I say to Bob,
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now, which season is it today, spring, summer, fall, or winter?
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You know, I don't know. You don't know how to dress.
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I have to open the door and look outside or open the window or else you turn
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on a television and look at the weather and find out what the temperatures are
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and so forth to know whether it's summer or winter.
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We go from one day being summer, 80, 85 degrees, and then the next day dropping
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back down to maybe 40 degrees or so, and it feels like winter again with,
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you know, the wind blowing and so forth. Oh, it does.
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It really does. It's like a yo-yo going up and down.
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I mean, when you get up in the 80s and it's humid, and then we have terrible
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storm, tornadoes and stuff, and the next day it could be sleet and there's snow. Who knows? It's just.
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I'm not in favor of this kind of weather. But, you know, Ben Franklin said,
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everybody talks about it, but you can't do a thing about it.
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It's too early to be hot, and it's too late to be winter. Yeah. We need some spring.
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Yeah. People in the South don't quite understand this.
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You know, I know our daughter in Texas, she said, well, she misses the change of season.
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But on the other hand, she doesn't need three different outfits,
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or not outfits, three different things, seasons of clothes like we do.
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We have the fall, and we have winter, and then we have spring and summer.
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You know, it's just confusing and causes extra work.
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But, you know, it's the way it is.
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Okay, Bob, I don't really have much else to say.
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Okay, at any rate, what we're going to talk about is the fact that you can have
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all kinds of philosophical principles of how a country should live,
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and you can have the elites set down principles for living and so forth.
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But the point is, is that people do not feel a sense of belonging,
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a sense of feeling comfortable in their own country, a sense of feeling comfortable
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in their own neighborhoods, in their own towns and so forth.
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If they feel a sense of alienation or a sense of aloneness or a sense of.
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Feeling the togetherness that they want to feel and so forth.
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That comes before almost everything else. It comes before moral principles.
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It comes before philosophical principles.
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You can say that it shouldn't or it should. You can make an argument on whatever
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side you want, but that is rooted deeply in our nature, to want to feel the
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familiar, to want to live somewhere where the people are like ourselves,
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speak the same language as ourselves, and they have the same habits and customs
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and so forth of ourselves.
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And when people feel that that is starting to be taken away,
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they have a tendency to rebel and to become angry and so forth.
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I think you can see some of it in the sort of issue in the Catholic Church over the Latin Mass.
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A lot of people who never experienced the Latin Mass, like my wife and I did,
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still prefer the Latin Mass or want the church to keep the Latin Mass,
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not so much because they're familiar with it, but they want stability.
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They want something to stay the same. They want something that has a sense to
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them of home, and the church needs to feel like home.
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And we need to understand and remember that because that is a necessity that
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human beings have that will come before almost anything.
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About the only thing that will come before that maybe is oxygen and food. And other than that.
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They will demand it. And if they don't get it, they will be very anxious and
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you'll have a society that will be in turmoil.
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And I think a lot of our problems in our society stem from the fact of people
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trying to change things or operate on the basis of principles alone.
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And there's an article in the First Things magazine in the January issue,
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First Things magazine, the past issues here that I really haven't mentioned or anything yet.
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And it's sort of a particular article. It's called, it's under opinions and
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it's called Tucker and the Right.
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It's about Tucker Carlson and the sort of more strongly right-wing of the conservative
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movement that sort of is an illustration of this.
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And that's why I'm going to read it. And I think it does pertain to our Catholicism
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because the Catholic Church is a traditional church that has been in existence
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for 2,000 years, and the Latin Mass has been in existence for a long time.
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And there's a strong movement in the Catholic Church of people who want to keep tradition and,
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like I say, not so much because a lot of them have experienced a particular
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Latin Mass or the older Mass of the going to church, but they want to reach
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back for a stability they feel is slipping away.
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And so I think this article puts its finger on it. And so even though it may not.
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Refer to something Catholic in all parts of the article.
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It does, I think, put a finger on something that we need to understand.
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So I'm going to go ahead and read from it. Is there anything more that you want to say, Lynn? No, no.
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I think that'll be interesting. Okay, so Tucker and the Right by Glenn Lowry.
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Glenn Lowry is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Social Sciences at Brown University.
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And what he's saying is the elites
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in a lot of our universities had better understand and need to understand that
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it's important to have universal philosophical principles for a country to base
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its behavior and how it operates and so forth on.
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But the fact of belonging and familiarity and building a society on cultural
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familiarity, and familiarity comes from the word family,
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building a society on cultural familiarity comes first of those two things.
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You need both, but one is actually more important to people,
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more down home or more hits them in the vitals than the other.
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So I'll start reading this.
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It says something like a civil war is unfolding within the American conservative movement.
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But I don't think this just applies to the conservative movement.
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It applies also to the liberal movement, which is pretty predominant in our society.
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The liberals need to understand this idea of constantly criticizing our society.
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It is a killing feature of a society. As I said in the beginning,
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a society that despises itself will die. A society that constantly teaches its
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children that there is something wrong with it.
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And if the people finally believe that, that society is no good, it will die.
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And those people then are deliberately trying to crush or kill that society,
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and they need to be resisted, and they will be resisted.
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And we'll read an article a little later about Generation Z,
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that they are finally getting tired of this paradigm, and they are beginning
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to resist it. and they will probably resist it even further,
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and it will lead to trouble in the future.
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And so I think this does pertain to the Catholic Church because we ourselves are so traditional,
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and we have a split within ourselves over keeping tradition or moving away from
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tradition, and people are becoming
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anxious because of this move away from tradition, or a lot of people are.
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And they are doing things that they would not ordinarily do in order to try
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to preserve the familiar.
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And that is, you know, having special Latin masses of their own and so forth,
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simply because they are trying to hang on to something that is stable. So we'll go on here.
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So when we say the American conservative movement, I think this applies to everybody.
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It is not merely a dispute about policy agendas, foreign alliances,
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or the boundaries of political discourse.
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It is a deeper conflict, a struggle over the meaning of conservatism itself.
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I think it's a struggle over the meaning of a society itself.
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The recent controversy surrounding Tucker Carlson's interview of Nick Fuentes
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revealed a fissure that has been widening for years.
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And Nick Valentis is a figure who was a moderate,
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sort of moderate conservative person who moved far over to what we would call the right, I guess,
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that actually did move over to what the left constantly accuses of a fascist
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position, if you want to call it that,
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of a strong resistance and attack against what he feels is an attack on Western civilization.
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So we're going to have to stop here. We just got into it and take a break.
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So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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And we're talking about this sort of split in our society where there are people
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trying to hang on or preserve our Western cultural sense of belonging and feeling.
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That is a sense of home and a clash.
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And it's being represented here in this article between the clash with Tucker
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Carlson's interview of Nick Fuentes. and that.
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Clash of that interview in Tucker Carlson with the more liberal academia and liberal news media.
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And it's a clash between two visions, one grounded in universal moral principle
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and the other in cultural and civilizational loyalty.
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And actually, those two things should be united together and not separated apart.
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But if they are separated apart, the more important one that people will gravitate
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to is the cultural civilizational loyalty.
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People, in effect, they need a place of familiarity and belonging. They need a home.
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What might otherwise have been a marginal media dust-up became a moment of revelation
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about the future of American conservatism, but not just American conservatism,
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the future of America itself. For figures such as Robert P.
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George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University,
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and perhaps the single most influential moral philosopher within conservative
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intellectual circles, conservatism begins with the claims of natural law.
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Okay, and that's something that Catholics adhere to also.
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It's a natural law. The law written, as St. Paul said, on the hearts of men.
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Things that we can understand and believe in without having to learn or philosophize on them.
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That we can understand simply as being a human being.
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Its founding premise is the inherent dignity of every human being.
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An anthropology that descends from classical philosophy.
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Christian theology, and the Enlightenment. I don't know that it's so much from
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the Enlightenment as some of these people think. You know, actually...
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Comes more from Christian theology. For George, conservatism is first a moral project.
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It safeguards life, liberty, marriage, family, and religious freedom because
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these institutions reflect universal truths about the human person.
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George has spent his career articulating these principles in philosophy,
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public policy, and constitutional thought.
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His is an approach to conservatism that emphasizes the primacy of the permanent
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things, the universals that transcend time and place.
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Opposing this universalist strand is the ascendant nationalist wing of the right,
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a coalition influenced by the populist
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energies that surged after 2016 and represented by Tucker Carlson,
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Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and polemicists such as Johns Murak.
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In this particular branch of
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conservatism would be more
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or less the idea of the
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country as a place where people of like beliefs and like speech and like habits
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and so forth can come together and feel at home that this is our home.
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And I don't think it's just conservatism. I think this is something that the
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left has to understand also.
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It seems to be making a war on this, and at some point, people will rebel.
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And I think you're seeing this rebellion in Nick Fuentes, who has moved extremely
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over to the right, and also in Carlson, Kevin Roberts, and the Heritage Foundation.
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This faction sees conservative molest as an expression of moral philosophy than
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as a defense of Western civilization, and that is because of the left's attack on it.
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There's less attack on our culture, and they're looking at our culture as something
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that is important and needs to be preserved and hung on to,
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and a concrete culture, a historical inheritance with its own people,
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faith, memories, and vulnerabilities.
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This conservatism is particularist rather than universalist.
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It begins with cultural loyalties.
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Whereas George begins with human dignity, Carlson begins with civilizational survival.
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In other words, there are more and more people in this country,
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and they're sort of being put on the right, whether they are or not,
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as Carlson and so forth is, and they
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see our country in a struggle for survival against the forces of liberalism
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that are trying to destroy the very things that hold our country together and
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make it a place where we all feel as if we can belong and be in it as a family,
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as groups of people who understand and care for each other.
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Carlson sees a beleaguered West beset by global elites, and there are,
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and I would have to agree with him, porous borders. And we have had porous borders.
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We have had millions of people coming across our borders. This is disturbing to people.
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And cultural disintegration, whereas we are having to try and take our culture
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and have it adjust to all kinds of different cultures coming in from all different parts of the world.
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Somehow or another, we are being called bigoted and so forth unless we adjust
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to these cultures rather than the other way around.
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And the people are beginning to resist this, and these people are being called
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names, and they're being classified as nationalists or Christian nationalists,
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especially Christian nationalists.
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Or fascists and so forth along these lines.
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And a lot of them are trying, people are trying to put them in a camp of Nick
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Fuentes has moved, you know, someone, he and his group who have moved far to
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what we would call the right.
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I don't really look at it as right so much as right and left is moving to extremes
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of wrong direction, but we need to be patriotic.
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We need to have a country that we can believe in and live in and see as people
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like ourselves and our family and feel comfortable to belong in.
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And that is something that all people yearn for, and there's nothing whatsoever,
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in my opinion, wrong with it.
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There's nothing wrong with being a Christian nationalist in the sense of being
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a Christian and in the sense of being nationalist, that is, looking to the interests
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of your own country first, because this is where you live and this is your home.
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The recent dispute over Carlson's treatment of Nick Fuentes brought these differences into sharp focus.
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Carlson's critics, including George, Ben Shapiro, and others,
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and Ben Shapiro would be a little bit more on the liberal side, really,
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and others in the moral universalist camp, argued that he had given a platform
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to a figure who traffics in anti-Semitic rhetoric and white nationalist themes.
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For them, this was not merely a lapse in judgment, but a failure of moral responsibility.
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Carlson's defenders countered that conversation does not equal endorsement,
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and that conservatives must not mimic the left's cancel culture by excommunicating
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those who question dogmas about foreign policy or Israel.
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They argued that a movement committed to the free inquiry must not shrink from
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difficult conversation.
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And so now we're getting into a little bit of a different area here,
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but still it centers around the fact that Carlson and others are trying to defend
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what I think a lot of people are feeling anxious about,
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and that is our own Western civilization.
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And the Catholic Church certainly is at the heart of that.
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And so it's at the heart of these arguments, whether it wants to be there or
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not. And I think we as Catholics should understand what's going on.
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Beneath this quarrel lies a more fundamental question.
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Is American conservatism about preserving a moral order or protecting a civilizational identity?
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And I don't think it should just be American conservatism centered around this.
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Liberalism at one time professed to protect the civilizational identity,
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that is the Western identity.
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Liberalism was considered part of the West and part of Western civilization,
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and it was considered part of being patriotic.
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Now, a lot of it seems to have moved against the Western civilization,
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and the movement countering that, the movement resisting that,
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is called conservative because it's trying to keep what we have instead of constantly
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giving in to this idea that somehow everybody in the world in their particular
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civilization or their particular culture is somehow moral and okay except ours.
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And people are getting tired of this. And when those people rebelled,
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they're being called conservatives.
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So there's where we have this conservative-liberal split. But it's not as conservative-liberal
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as people think. It's more a split in how we look at the place we call home.
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It is grounded in rights and duties that apply to all human beings or in the
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defense of a particular way of life that belongs to a specific people?
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In other words, is it one or the other? Well, it's both, but it's being split into one or the other.
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On the one hand, we have elites saying that we should live up to all these high,falutin.
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Classic, humanitarian, and universal human principles.
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Well, maybe we should, but at the same time, we have to have a place to do that
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from, that place that has to be familiar, that place that has to have a culture
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that we can all belong to.
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That place has to be as...
29:11
And Flannery O'Connor, one of our Catholic writers, said someplace rather than no place.
29:18
We can't live someplace in some country that is not really a country that is
29:23
something that somehow all things, all people. It can't be that way.
29:27
We have to have a love for our own. And if we don't and other people do,
29:33
we will go out of existence. And I think more and more people are recognizing that.
29:38
One could say that the universalist right worries about moral legitimacy,
29:42
whereas the nationalist right worries about cultural extinction.
29:47
And moral illegitimacy is important, but you have to have a culture from which
29:54
you can oppose moral legitimacy before you can do any fighting.
30:00
In other words, you have to have a home from which you can operate before you
30:04
can operate on any particular basis at all.
30:06
And when people are deprived of that home, they will do almost anything to get
30:11
it back, to rebuild it, to defend it, and so on.
30:15
And they can do some very mean things as well as good things in doing that.
30:21
And it's not a wise idea to make a war upon it. This tension is not new.
30:26
It is antecedents in the intellectual history of American conservatism stretching
30:32
back to the mid-20th century.
30:35
The original conservative coalition, the so-called fusionist project,
30:40
sought to reconcile libertarians, social traditionalists, anti-communist hawks,
30:46
and Catholic natural law theorists.
30:49
And Catholics should understand this feeling of being left out to a certain
30:54
extent because in the first part of this nation, when Catholics first came here,
30:59
they wanted to be part of the nation.
31:01
They wanted to be patriotic, and they were sort of like frozen out.
31:06
There were a lot of laws in various states against Catholicism.
31:10
Protestantism put up pretty strong barriers against Catholicism,
31:15
and Catholics really didn't feel part of the nation at first,
31:18
and they had a yearning to do that.
31:21
And they need to understand that it is important to feel as if you belong and
31:27
other people are like yourself.
31:30
Buckley's National Review, Irving Kristol's neoconservatism,
31:35
Goldwater's libertarianism, and Reagan's evangelical alliance all depended on
31:41
maintaining a precarious balance between universalist commitment and civilizational loyalty.
31:47
And there was also on what he would call the more liberal side,
31:51
but liberalism back in an earlier time did not mean being unpatriotic are ceaselessly
31:57
and endlessly criticizing your home.
32:00
And that's what a lot of it seems to mean today.
32:02
And people are starting to take stands and split on account of that.
32:06
And if there is a split between those people who demand to have a home and those
32:12
people who are trying to be, in a sense, citizens of the world and destroy that
32:16
home, there is going to be a lot of trouble.
32:19
In fact, there's going to be ultimately perhaps a civil war.
32:23
That equilibrium was always fragile. The old right of the 1930s and 1940s,
32:29
led by Robert Taft and the America First Committee, had been isolationists.
32:35
Nationalist and wary of foreign entanglements. It was skeptical of global institutions
32:40
and submission of cosmopolitan elites.
32:42
And that's not so far from our own founders.
32:45
I mean, George Washington himself said, beware of entangling alignments.
32:50
In other words, have trade with foreign countries, but not entangling alliances
32:55
with foreign countries.
32:57
Don't get involved with Europe and so forth. There was a lot of that.
33:00
Of course, we did because the right changed and it moved toward that.
33:06
And this is what it says here.
33:07
The new right that emerged after World War II reversed these tendencies,
33:13
embracing international responsibility and moral universalism,
33:18
especially once the Cold War framed America's struggle against the Soviet Union
33:23
as a defense of global democracy.
33:26
The rise of neoconservatism in the 1970s and 1980s intensified this universalist impulse.
33:33
Figures such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podoretz, and Gene Kirkpatrick argued
33:39
that America should use its power to defend democracy and human rights abroad.
33:44
Many leading neoconservatives were Jewish Americans whose commitment to universalist
33:48
ethics aligned with the American creed.
33:52
For decades, this coalition kept nationalist particularism in check.
33:58
But the paleoconservative critique, and when you use the word paleoconservative
34:02
here, that simply means sort of ultra-conservative or conservative going back to an earlier time.
34:09
In other words, the conservatives going back again to Robert Taft in a time before the 1940s.
34:16
Articulated by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis is an author who wrote a lot about
34:22
the managerial society and how the managerial society opposes.
34:27
This idea of non-universalism, this idea of particularism.
34:33
The managerial society wants people to be the same almost everywhere.
34:37
It's a sort of a bland liberalism in which people can be managed and be the
34:43
same almost everywhere, and there's a huge opposition by conservatives against that.
34:48
And so this is a split also in our society.
34:52
Paleo-conservatives warn that the The conservative establishment has subordinated
34:57
national interests to abstract ideology and foreign entanglements.
35:01
They were skeptical of immigration, free trade, and especially America's close
35:06
relationship with Israel.
35:08
Their warnings did not dominate conservative politics until the populist wave
35:12
following 2016 revived them.
35:15
And there has been sort of a split in the conservative movement.
35:19
So we're going to stop here and take a break. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
35:22
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Hi, this is Bob Johnson. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
38:02
We're back from our break. We've been talking about our country as a home,
38:08
as a place where people of like mind and like language,
38:12
like beliefs and so forth can feel as if they belong and as if the history of
38:19
their country belongs to them and that history is something that is respected
38:23
and held dear by all of the people.
38:27
And when it's constantly attacked and they are constantly made to feel that
38:35
somehow or another they are wrong simply for existing or being in it or wanting
38:41
to believe in something that they have inherited and want to keep as their home,
38:47
there becomes a resistance, and rightly so.
38:52
And between the two, that is the idea of universal moral principles that can
38:57
be applied worldwide everywhere,
38:59
and the human need for a particular home and a particular place with particular
39:06
people with particular memories and particular remembrances and histories that they can all—.
39:15
Refer to together and believe in together, when those two things flash,
39:20
the people will ultimately choose to believe in those things that are near to
39:25
their heart's home and heart.
39:28
And it will win out against what they will see as simply cold and unmoving moral
39:37
principles that really don't,
39:39
in their minds, will begin to apply less and less to them, and they will begin
39:44
to reject simply because their home is being rejected.
39:48
So, in other words, on the one hand, you have that.
39:53
On the other side, universal right, though morally correct, and rejecting anti-Semitism
39:58
sometimes speaks as if universal principles alone can sustain a society.
40:03
And we don't want anti-Semitism. We don't want racism.
40:08
And our society is almost devoid of racism.
40:13
And yet we have organizations such as the SPLC, it comes out now,
40:18
that won't take that, won't take their success for an answer.
40:22
In other words, there's too much power and too much money in fighting racism.
40:26
And so they actually go around behind the scenes promoting racism in order to
40:31
be able to go out, you know, in front of the scenes and fight it.
40:35
And of course, this is deceitful and illegal and, you know, not good at all.
40:41
And it splits society and they're
40:43
constantly attacking our country as if somehow it's a racist country.
40:47
And in doing so, they use Western civilization as a whipping boy and start attacking
40:53
Western civilization itself, attacking the very idea of people feeling at home.
40:58
And we have a new generation of young people, especially, you know, young.
41:03
White people who are getting tired of being called racists when they're not
41:08
and getting tired of having their society being criticized constantly all the time.
41:13
And if you do that long enough and you keep calling people Nazis and calling
41:17
people extremists and so forth, eventually they are going to resist.
41:22
And in resisting, they could become the very thing that you don't want them to become.
41:25
And so it's something that we should understand.
41:29
And as Catholics, we should understand it to a certain extent,
41:32
because a lot of it happened to us when we first came over into this country,
41:36
and we have adapted since, and we feel that this is our home,
41:40
and we need to feel that it's our home.
41:41
We need to feel that we're comfortable here, and we understand this,
41:45
I think, a little bit more than others do.
41:49
The conflict between these two factions would be difficult enough if it concerned
41:53
only geopolitics or intellectual style, but it also touches on the internal
41:58
dynamics of American identity.
42:01
And so, you know, it's something a little bit more. To make sense of all this,
42:06
I'm going to skip here a little bit.
42:08
Let us turn to the experience of Black Americans, not because the histories
42:13
of Black Americans and Catholics and Jewish Americans and so forth are identical,
42:18
but because the structural problem that these groups have faced is analogous.
42:24
How to reconcile a strong subgroup identity with full membership in the American
42:29
civic nation and Catholics have had to go through that early in this nation's history.
42:34
Black Americans have a unique and foundational place in American history.
42:38
Unlike Jewish Americans or other immigrant groups such as Catholics,
42:43
we are not a diaspora with an external homeland.
42:47
Our ancestors' arrival on these shores was coarse and brutal,
42:51
but our presence is inseparable from the nation's founding contradictions.
42:55
We are not an added population, but an integral one, a people forged in America's crucible.
43:01
And yet for centuries, our identity was viewed as incompatible with American citizenship.
43:07
We were faced with the perpetual question, were we Americans?
43:11
Could we be? Should we be?
43:13
The black freedom struggle answered those questions with clarity.
43:16
We are Americans, and our fate is tied to the nation's fate,
43:20
but that patriotism was not native.
43:22
It did not ignore the injustice inflicted upon us.
43:25
It was a patriotism grounded in struggle, a love of a country that demanded moral redemption.
43:31
This posture, what I have called black patriotism, offers a model for resolving
43:36
the tension between universal ideals and particular identities.
43:40
In other words, between having what the left often calls universal ideals,
43:45
or at least the elite often call universal ideals, And at the same time,
43:50
believing as ordinary Americans in a country that is theirs,
43:56
a country that has its own language,
44:00
its own mores, its own culture, its own way of doing things and so forth,
44:05
and being proud of that, not somehow being constantly criticized for being an
44:10
American, that somehow it's bad.
44:12
And if the left doesn't stop this, it's going to drive a wedge between people
44:18
who love their home and themselves and, like I say, lead to more than they probably bargained for.
44:27
In this sense, the black experience reveals the possibility of a civic nationalism
44:32
that is both universal and particular, both aspirational and rooted.
44:38
And I think Catholics can identify with that, that this Catholics that came
44:43
over here, they both became patriots and loved this country and at the same
44:47
time loved their church and wanted to do both.
44:51
Didn't want to put one ahead of the other or the other, you know.
44:55
I'm not trying to say that they shouldn't love God and their church first and
45:01
then their country, but they didn't want a split between the two.
45:06
It shows that layered identities, cultural, religious, historical,
45:10
need not threaten civic belonging.
45:12
In other words, we can belong to different groups. We can have different identities.
45:17
We can do all those things and still have a civic belonging,
45:22
a love of our country, a love of its morals, a love of its language,
45:25
a love of its people, a love of the places that are here and that we understand
45:30
and the way we behave and our morals, and that these are all good things, not bad things.
45:35
And just because we have had bad things in our history, so has every other culture.
45:40
We're not any different.
45:41
And this war between one side and the other has to stop,
45:46
this constant criticism that somehow America, which is probably one of the least
45:50
racist or the least racist country in the whole world and other things that somehow we are the worst,
45:58
nation that has ever existed.
46:00
And that's what you seem to hear from a lot of the left anymore. And so.
46:05
What they're saying here is that
46:06
if people want to be conservative in that sense and love their country,
46:10
this article is asking that you have every right to want to love your country
46:17
as your home and all of the particulars of your country, and you should,
46:22
but you can love the universal principles too, but the universal principles
46:26
must not ever crowd out the fact that where you live is your home,
46:30
and you must feel a sense of belonging there, and it's something that you should
46:35
be proud of and not criticize in an abject way.
46:40
The fact is that, yes, there have been things wrong in our country and our nation,
46:45
just like in everybody's country and nation, and we have done a lot to correct
46:49
those things and we will continue to do more,
46:52
and that's what a nation should do, and we should be congratulated for it and
46:57
not criticized for it for all the progress that we have made and for the progress
47:02
that we can still make that it will still be to come. So.
47:07
At the same time, it must resist the temptation to use universalist rhetoric
47:11
as a way to ignore the cultural preconditions of liberty.
47:15
In other words, you have to have a home, and you have to have a society,
47:20
and you have to have a language, and you have to have and expect people to adjust
47:26
to that language and assimilate to that language.
47:28
And if people come here from other places, they have to be expected to assimilate,
47:33
to love the country that you're in, not to be critical of it,
47:36
of everything constantly and all the time, and to take issue with it.
47:40
Or otherwise, you know, why should they even be here?
47:42
And the people that live here have a right to demand that.
47:45
And there's nothing wrong with loving your home and expecting others to do the
47:50
same. So, immature conservatism recognizes that universal principles require
47:56
concrete communities to sustain them.
47:59
You can't have these universal principles, and you can't just retreat into the
48:05
university or the academic community and somehow or another expect it to be
48:11
a substitute for the people that live here in this country.
48:14
And that those communities are enriched rather than threatened by the presence
48:19
of diverse histories and identities.
48:21
In other words, they celebrate diversity and criticize everything native has got to stop.
48:28
Diversity is not some kind of a god that we can worship and diversity is not
48:34
some kind of a huge strength.
48:36
Diversity can be a contribution, but it's not the be all and end all of everything.
48:41
And our country is not to be criticized for everything that has happened in
48:47
the past that hasn't been good.
48:48
That has happened all over history.
48:52
Well, black Americans, Jewish Americans, Catholic Americans,
48:55
and other Americans, by their distinct histories, all can belong to a society.
49:02
Common nation. The civil war within conservatism will not be resolved by the
49:07
choice of universalism.
49:08
And the fact is that this person is standing with conservatism itself as against
49:13
the liberalism that is trying to split us and destroy us.
49:17
And he's saying that the conservatism itself needs to stay unified.
49:21
It will be resolved by an integration of the two,
49:24
that is, by the universal vision of universal human cultural principles and
49:33
also by a particularist vision of a particular place in a particular society
49:38
with a particular language and particular mores and behaviors and so forth that
49:43
everybody can belong to.
49:45
The future of our nation depends on whether we can achieve that synthesis.
49:50
So does the future of conservatism. And if we are willing to learn from the
49:54
stories of those who have wrestled longest with the tensions of identity and
49:58
belonging, such as Black Americans, Jewish Americans, Catholic Americans.
50:03
We may yet find a path that avoids both abstraction and resentment,
50:07
both moralism and tribalism.
50:09
A conservatism that achieves this synthesis will be intellectually coherent,
50:14
morally serious, and culturally grounded. It will conserve not only the inherent
50:19
senses of the past, but the promise of the future.
50:22
And so this person is a solid conservative in the sense that he believes in
50:27
America. He's an American nationalist.
50:29
You could call the person, if he's a Christian, I don't know,
50:32
a Christian nationalist.
50:34
And there's nothing wrong with those things.
50:37
And there is something wrong with people who constantly criticize a country
50:40
in order to somehow or another ruin it or attack it and bring it down.
50:45
It seems to me that they are deliberately trying to take our country down.
50:51
Many groups, many of these groups. You're right, they are.
50:55
It's not haphazard. There's a plan there.
50:59
And they often use this idea of universal principles to do it.
51:05
And the fact is, is that what the article here is saying, what I agree with
51:09
also is, is that you have to have both.
51:11
You have to have the universal idea of the dignity of all human beings.
51:15
But at the same time, you have to have a particular country and its way of life
51:21
that you uphold, love and defend. And there's nothing wrong with that.
51:25
Other countries will perfectly do the same for theirs. and you do not have to
51:31
go to war with each other, you know, simply because you are different.
51:35
It's a shame that people think that somehow or another you have to be alike.
51:41
Yeah, that you all have to be alike. But you do have to be unique,
51:44
and you have to defend your own uniqueness.
51:46
And you can always root out the bad and keep the good.
51:51
And there's always going to be—this is a fallen world. We Catholics ought to
51:56
understand it better than anybody else.
51:58
The church has been teaching it for 2,000 years.
52:01
And the fact there's always going to be the bad with the good.
52:05
And no country is going to be free from the defects of the human beings that live in it.
52:11
And the fact is that it doesn't mean that all of the good things in that country
52:17
should be abolished simply because there are some of the bad.
52:20
I need to acknowledge, too, this idea that all people are created equal under
52:28
the law is one thing, but we are not all equal in our abilities.
52:35
And we're not all, not all cultures are equal either.
52:40
No. And that's why equity and all this stuff on the left are destructive.
52:48
You know, equity is destructive. Yeah.
52:51
People should have the equal, you know, opportunities to the extent that they can have.
52:57
That's not even possible for the government or anybody else to give everybody
53:00
an equal opportunity at everything.
53:03
I mean, the fact is that, you know, I was born in a family whose income was
53:09
certainly not anywhere near the Rockefellers and yours wasn't either.
53:12
And so in that respect, we were not going to be equal.
53:15
But the fact is that we were still able in a free country to make what we wanted
53:21
to of our lives and some people started with absolutely nothing and if that's
53:25
what they wanted to become extremely wealthy they succeeded and you know anytime
53:31
you believe that somebody can somehow or another,
53:35
abolish all of those differences that you're believing in fairy tales that and
53:39
you're believing in someone that is going to exercise power over you that you
53:43
shouldn't want them to have.
53:45
I remember back in university days and stuff when sitting in an anthropology
53:53
class and learning that or being taught that all cultures are equal.
54:00
They're not. They're not. They're not.
54:03
And all cultures are not equal. We shouldn't ever be taught those things.
54:06
All cultures are equal. All cultures are not equal.
54:10
There are things that are good and there are things that are bad.
54:13
Some of those things you can discern simply by the natural law.
54:16
That's what Catholics believe, that it's written on your heart.
54:19
If you see a culture that is somehow or another burning babies or torturing
54:24
babies or something like that, that culture is wrong.
54:28
And there's nothing wrong in stepping in and stopping it from happening.
54:32
And we can't go any further. We're getting to the end of the program here.
54:36
But the point is, is that if we're going to have a split in our society.
54:41
People are going to come down on the side of this is their home,
54:44
and that's more important to them than universal principles.
54:47
We shouldn't have to have that happen. But that will be the case,
54:50
and that can lead to a split in a country and actually to a civil war.
54:57
So at any rate, St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
55:01
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
55:04
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host,
55:10
by the power of God, trust in thou, Satan, and all evil spirits who wander through
55:15
this world for the ruin of souls. Amen.
55:19
You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit
55:23
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