We have a serious problem with the way we categorize political and religious philosophies. We have them backwards. Conservatives are actually progressives. Progressives are conservative.
This became evident to me when I recently read two articles, "The Failure of Liberal Catholicism" by James Hitchcock, which appears in the May edition of Catholic World Report, and "Blessed John Paul II and His Times," which is available in the June/July number of First Things. How much trouble, I thought, could be avoided if we simply realized that in our time conservative has increasingly meant looking forward and adapting to a changing world, and progressivism has meant clinging to the past.
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James Hitchcock's essay is an absolutely devastating dissection of just how reactionary and contradictory liberal Catholicism has become. For liberal Catholics, the Church has been one 2,000-year epoch of patriarchal oppression, superstition and sexual repression. It was only broken by a brief shining moment: the 1960s. And they have been trying to return to that golden age for the past 40 years.
Hitchcock notes that left-wing Catholics are constantly preaching love and tolerance, but become apoplectic at the very mention of the Church they claim to love. Hitchcock offers examples from the writing of the very liberal National Catholic Reporter:
"...centuries ago the Eucharist was stolen from us and its time we took it back/ And there is no such thing as ordination."
"The Inquisition and witch hunts are alive and well....I am glad I am a mature Catholic who does not take seriously these nonsensical pronouncements."
"...repressively psychotic...Lies, denial arrogance, selfishness,and cowardice -- such are the notes of the culture within which Catholic priests now live."
Liberal Catholic have no real interest in progress, of moving into the future. They, like liberals in general, want to return to the 1960s. A good example is the current Medicare crisis. If we do nothing, the system will collapse. In other words, the system will change no matter what.
The reaction on the left is the claim that Paul Ryan and anyone else who proposes changing the system in order to save it want to kill old people and children. For liberal Catholics, the golden age was somewhere around 1968-70, when people had stopped listening to the bishops and the radicals had the upper hand.
A good bookend to Hitchcock's essay is "Blessed John Paul II and His Times" by George Weigel, which has just been published in First Things. Like Hitchcock, Weigel makes his case by simply given copious examples. While the Catholic left continues to denounce John Paul II as an anti-modernist, Weigel makes note of a few facts:
In the late 1940s, the future pope was "dissatisfied with aspects of the neo-Scholastic theology in which he had been trained."
He was "a vigorous participant in efforts to renew philosophical anthropology throughout the 1950s."
He was "a man who deliberately sought the intellectual companionship of of philosophers, theologians, historians, scientists, and artists from a wide range of intellectual perspectives."
He defended the universality of human rights before the United Nations
He held seminars that included agnostic and atheistic scholars
He revolutionized the Church's teaching on human sexuality with the Theology of the Body
John Paul II was a supporter of democracy who had no desire to return to the ancien regime
Weigel goes on for about three paragraphs citing the evidence that John Paul II was a thoroughly modern man. None of it, of course, matters to the Catholic -- and non-Catholic -- left, for whom everything boils down to one thing: sex. Anyone who claims that we shouldn't kill babies, and maybe ought to practice a little sexual restraint, is ipso facto reactionary, fascist, atavistic -- a thowback.
Weigel goes on to explain that John Paul II insisted that at the heart of every human life is the question of God, and that to ignore that reality is to cut yourself off from how that question is central to every age -- including the modern age. The response of liberalism to the horrors of the 20th Century was either outright appeasement (the useful idiots who were soft on Communism) or to set up an alternate magisterium.
In this liberal magisterium, you can still find honor and the virtues, or rather perversions passing themselves off as these things. It becomes honorable to support abortion, the culture of death, and the welfare state, and disgraceful, if not downright evil, to oppose them.
What John Paul proposed is that the ultimate progressivism, the final way forward to self-knowledge and joy, was not the isolating individualism of the culture of death, but the human flourishing that comes with making a gift of oneself. This is a challenging, intoxicating, and modern philosophy, no matter what the era.
And yet, over the last 40 years Christianity itself has not done the best job of keeping up with the most potent expression of modern spiritually: popular music. The popular story holds that, beginning with the Beatles, popular music cut itself off from the past and became the repository of avant-garde rebellion.
This is a false myth. In truth, rock and roll was reaffirming Christian truth even as it was questioning it. But that if for future columns. For now, I just want to note that while I was reading the essays by James Hitchcock and George Weigel, I was listening to a song, "Cry if You Want," by the rock band The Who.
Seeing The Who had a life-changing effect on me when I saw them in the late 1970s when I was 15. For years, I commingled their music with a youthful philosophy of rebellion and socialism lite. Years later, I realize that The Who were a lot more conservative than I thought. There is their anthem "Won't Get Fooled Again," which rejects politics, even liberal politics, as corrupt, and was named one of the most rock conservative songs ever by National Review.
And there is "Cry if You Want." Behind a simple martial beat, singer Roger Daltrey dresses down an aging hippie -- but in fact it seems to indict the entire 60s:
Once it was just innocenceBrash ideas and insolenceBut you will never get away With the things you say todayBut you can cry if you want
Don't you get embarrassed when going through your teenage books?Read the kind of crap you wrote, 'bout "ban the bomb" and "city crooks"
At the end of the song Pete Townshend, the genius driving force behind The Who, chants "let your tears flow/let your past go." It's advice the current left -- not the modern left, as there is no such thing, as there is nothing progressive about liberalism -- should heed.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearReligion and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
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