Onward Fortnight for (Financial) Freedom! (Or Thoughts on liberalism and Catholicism)

Over the past few years, the Catholic Church has rallied itself against ostensible political threats to its religious freedom in a nationwide movement called Fortnight for Freedom. Given that over the past few years health care reform (aka "Obamacare") has been passed, gay marriage has become (more) normalized and the expansion of civil rights to that group has been codified, and the Catholic Church has not had to shutter its doors, I think that there needs to be a movement to prepare for the next existential threat to Christian autonomy. But rather than emphasize the immediate challenges to the autonomy of the theological space, the focus should shift to emphasize the necessity of accumulating sufficient monetary resources to combat the ever-possible, rarely-present, secular threat.

I say this tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek to bring to the forefront a question whose species I have discussed before in the form(s) of the ongoing internal Catholic dialog on the nature of Catholicism and liberalism. It would seem to me that what the Catholic Church and other Christian and non-secular sects have to encounter in the form of the modern liberal state presents a different kind of risk to the identity of religious practices than the kind of threat which may have existed in premodern societies. The social and political commitments that the liberal state demands of Catholics and other religious peoples is not necessarily an existential risk of the type that communities of yesterday may have presented to their opponents. It does present Catholics and other Christians with a choice, but the answer that they must give is not one that results in either a physical or a spiritual death; rather, it would seem that the liberal state demands that the Christian choose between being able to live a faith in its fullest expression or living the Christian faith in a partially-expressed way. In each case the result is that the believer experiences something akin to a spiritual amputation or even worse lobotomy.

It would seem that the challenge to the believer which is presented by liberalism is one which exerts an existential and spiritual (if not physical) crisis because against the truth of the love of and that is Christ, the modern liberal state presents nothing. Against the truth of the faith it pulls a philosophical sleight-of-hand by prohibiting the truth of Christianity to "be," instead presenting it as one option among many choices that can be chosen in this modern era (something that a few commentators have no doubt picked up on).

The Catholic is left asking a question that is perhaps worse than the choice of death: Can a Catholic (or Christian) be a Christian in a liberal state if the truth of Catholicism is not accepted by the state? I think the dilemma for the Catholic in the liberal state is captured in an NY Post article from June

Pope Francis recently emphasized that “religious freedom is not simply freedom of thought or private worship. It is the freedom to live according to ethical principles, both privately and publicly.”

The Catholic looks at the modern liberal state and witnesses an intractable and intrinsic threat to live his or her life according to the principles of his or her faith. The despair present in that realization ought not to spur only a more vibrant or vocal display of religious identity, but it should also bring into the forefront an opportunity to more fruitfully explore the dimensions and understand the Truth as an individual believer (or community of them). The same opportunity for self-and-other-witnessing presents itself to other Christian and non-Christian believers who make their homes in the modern liberal state. The option for the Christian in the face of an ontological (if not ontic-in-the-form-of-death) rejection of the truth of faith is not only to publicly witness for the faith in acts of political expression (which is often the modes by which the liberal state forces the believers to express themselves), but a non-political witness grounded in a quiet meditation and exploration of the Truth found in the scripture(s) and tradition(s) of their religious communities. To live along side of the state and leveraging the liberal state as a means to be a witness to yourself of the truth of your tradition is a demand of the liberal state that challenges Christians and other believers in fundamental and subtle ways that were not possible in the premodern era. Let us Christians take up the existential-ontological challenge to the truth of our faith that liberal modernity presents to us by turning our witness inwards and becoming witnesses to ourselves in an effort renew our faith against a community that responds to the truth with indifference or apathy. Give to ourselves the time of day for the truth of faith that the liberal state does not give to it.