Politics and Anti-Christ
This is late because it’s long, and is one of those cases where I bit off a bit more than I could chew in a few hours. If I were a well-known pundit, I would not have written this: the
propagandists would immediately accuse me of saying that all Democrats are
possessed by Satan. But as an obscure blogger I have the luxury of writing for
people capable of reason.
I’ve been thinking about this
piece by Alasdair MacIntyre, which someone posted
on Facebook a couple of days ago. I agree with its premises—that the Democratic
and Republican parties are both seriously deficient. I disagree with the
conclusion—that both are so bad that it would be wrong to vote for either of
them.
I’m always a bit surprised
to hear a Catholic make the point that neither liberalism nor conservatism is a
fully Catholic political vision, that the terms “left” and “right” are not
Catholic categories (and perhaps not even coherent) and are not useful in
articulating a Catholic political viewpoint, and so forth. I’m surprised not
because these assertions are wrong but because they seem so obvious to me as
not to require statement; to me they are axioms. Maybe I’m unusual, but I don’t
seem to run into many people who are unaware of this, though they may need to
be reminded of it from time to time. Not to say that they don’t take one side
or the other, but for the most part they seem to recognize that such positions
are responses to the issues of the day, not part of the faith. I myself at any
rate start with the assumption that neither right nor left is philosophically
or even practically consistent with Catholic teaching, but I do not conclude
from there that the proper response is to hold oneself aloof from the battle.
That’s an honorable position, but not the only honorable one. As frustrating as
it may be to us,“right” and “left”, Republican and
Democratic, are what we have to work with in American politics, and to denounce
them both and withdraw from the field strikes me as being just as problematic as
to identify too closely with one or the other.
It seems to me that those
who incline to the plague-on-both-their-houses view are often people who once
placed a great deal of hope in politics and are now disillusioned and sometimes
bitter. The person who posted the MacIntyre piece,
for instance, was once very active in conservative politics. (I’m not sure
whether he reads this blog or not; if so perhaps he’ll comment.) But I have
never expected much from politics, or been very active in it. And never for a
moment have I believed in such a thing as a “political solution” for broad
social problems. Even in my days as a radical leftist the revolution I had in
mind was more a psychological and spiritual thing than a political one. I have
very low expectations as to what good might be accomplished politically, but am
very aware that a great deal of harm is possible.
We can’t ignore the
historical and social context of our politics, and treat principles as if they
were pure abstractions. In a culture which owes most of its ideas to
Protestantism and the Enlightenment, and in which both those traditions are considerably
decayed, we can’t expect to implement a political order (even if we could agree
on what it should be) based on Catholic ideas about the common good. I regard
the political area with more hope of constraining the evil than of constructing
the good—not that we should ever give up on the latter, but we cannot
reasonably expect swift movement in that direction, because it requires
shifting some of the philosophical bases of politics.
It’s in that spirit that
I’ve voted for Republicans for the past thirty years. In this year’s
presidential election, as a practical matter, it doesn’t really matter who I
vote for, because my state is so dominated by the Republican party that my vote
is effectively irrelevant. I may not even vote, as I have no enthusiasm for the
Republican candidates—except that they are not the Democratic candidates. My
vote may not matter, but for the first time I am praying for the defeat of a
candidate.
In recent years there have
been a certain number of fundamentalist Christians who declared a Democratic
president to be the anti-Christ. They did it with Bill Clinton, and they’ve
done it with Barack Obama. I think it’s a preposterous claim, and yet:
depending on what you think the anti-Christ may be, it’s a plausible argument
that the left has made itself an instrument of the anti-Christ’s aims. No, I’m
not suggesting that the Democrats are Satanists. But their political program
has become anti-Christian.
I’m not referring, of
course, to the more or less ordinary things that the left claims to advocate,
and which used to be its mainstay: a reasonable degree of economic welfare for
everyone, protection of the weak and naïve from the predatory, racial justice,
and so on. I’m really talking about something more fundamental, something which
has largely eclipsed the old-style populist causes of the mainstream left.
Those have not been repudiated, but increasingly since the 1960s the left has
been driven by a quasi-religious desire for the transformation of society and
human nature itself. The main elements of the program involve sex, marriage,
and family: sexual freedom, “reproductive rights” (which should rightly be
termed a kind of anti-feminism, but that’s another story) and homosexual
rights, now including the newly-created idea that it is “hate” to believe that
the word “marriage” refers, intrinsically by definition, to something that
happens between men and women, not between men and men or women and women.
These are the issues on which the party as a whole is most committed, and on
which it will not compromise. It’s always been an implicitly anti-Christian
program, and the Obama administration has made that opposition explicit with
its recent attack on religious liberty.
I’ve never made a study of
the idea of the anti-Christ, and am certainly open to correction from someone
who has, but if we assume that the essential aim of the anti-Christ is to
separate men from God, then it makes more sense to expect that he (it?) would
work for the establishment of an earthly paradise than that he would inaugurate
a regime of violent oppression. People seem sometimes to expect it to be the
latter. And that a man like Hitler is satanic is not in doubt. But the
anti-Christ is not merely an agent of evil, but a powerfully subtle and
seductive one. The key to understanding it seems to me to be that found in Mark
13:22: that it would be able to deceive, if it were possible, even the very
elect. That surely must mean that it will bear much more of the appearance of
good than a brutal oppressor ever could. The anti-Christ will be an oppressor,
certainly, but one who will succeed by making his subjects happy.
I’ve been arguing for a long
time that the dystopia toward which modern civilization has often appeared to
be heading is more plausibly depicted in Huxley’s Brave New World than
in Orwell’s 1984. Certainly history is on my side in this argument.
Violent totalitarianism in the forms of fascism and communism have been pretty
soundly defeated. Totalitarian Islam has a lot of energy but is attractive only
to a small minority within Islam itself. Fascism has almost no support anywhere
in the world, and although Communism survives it is in control in very few
places (whether China can currently be described as a truly communist system
seems very debatable). And the reason that the one is more or less defunct and
the other still holding on buttresses my argument: communism at least promises
something much more benign than fascism.
Today’s left has much in
common with the communists of old, but its implicit totalitarianism is at once
vaguer and more potent. It appeals to the dream expressed in John Lennon’s
awful song “Imagine”: if we can just get rid of religion, nationalism, and
other atavistic forces, “the world will live as one.” In a society which is
dominated by practical materialism and utilitarianism, this is a very appealing
vision, to say the least. This is what anti-Christ promises: not conquest and
riches for some at the expense of others—the elect would never fall for that—but
peace and justice and plenty for all, the same things that the Church wants.
Only: anti-Christ makes the rejection of God a condition for the achievement of
its heaven on earth.
And now the Obama
administration has moved to assert openly its power over the Church: to reject
the historic American accommodation between Christianity and the state by
decreeing that in matters of conscience the Christian must bow to the state,
and not in some rarely-occurring circumstance like conscientious objection to
military service, but with an order that requires hundreds of religious
institutions to violate their own teachings. The apparent intention is to define
“freedom of religion” as the freedom to do what you like inside your church,
but not in public life. This goes far beyond the sorts of specific wrongs and
mistakes that any government can be expected to commit at times. It is the initiation
of an explicitly anti-religious principle—Christians of “conservative” theology
are its main target, but it would affect Jews and Muslims and everyone else as
well.
Arguably this development is
possible only because there is no positive statement of ultimate good in the
American system; this was by design, but it could only work as long as there
was broad agreement about fundamentals. That agreement no longer exists, and
the resultant struggle can be expected to continue for a long time.
I’ve never been inclined to
think much about the end times, to watch for signs and fret about prophecies. Maybe
I’m being overly apocalyptic now, and this is really just another episode in
the long struggle of church and state. I would like to think so. But what seems
different in our situation is the power our wealth and technology have given
us. It now seems plausible to many that we do in fact have the means to make
life perfectly comfortable, if only we will give the enlightened ones the power
to make it happen.
I am by no means unaware of
or indifferent to the fact that the capitalist program favored by most of the right
in this country, and by the Republican party, is profoundly corrosive of Christianity,
and for that matter of any system of belief rooted in the eternal and in the
notion of objective good and evil. But the undermining of Christianity by
capitalism is a side effect of the pursuit of wealth and pleasure, not a
consciously-defined program to be implemented by the state; in fact it’s all
too unconscious, which keeps many people from seeing how it works. But it’s
only an especially powerful manifestation of the lure of the world against
which the Church has always warned us, and as such is not a new enemy. The left’s
program is not new, either, but it has never had at its disposal such powerful
tools, or ground so well-prepared to receive it. I often think, when
considering the current social and political landscape, of something I read
years ago. I think it was in an early issue of Caelum et Terra, but I’m not sure, and I don’t know who the author
was, but he speculated that the United States could in time become “a
tabernacle for anti-Christ.”
Light On Dark Water 
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