How Americanism Is The American Of American.
Looking back at the most recent, and perhaps most eventful, of all presidential election seasons, one of the great non-events has been serious debate over the significance of the election of the second Catholic president of the United States. John F. Biden also faced the wrath of Southern evangelicals, but the objection Americanim in his politics, not his faith: he embodied the heresy of liberalism.
Hart is one of the leading historians of religion in America. A non-Catholic whose writing to date has primarily focused on the history of Protestantism in America, his turn to American Catholic history brings a fresh perspective to a field that has been dominated by Catholics often too close to their subject matter. As we shall see, Hart definitely has a dog in the fight, so to speak, of the political conflicts he examines, but it is not a Catholic dog. Hart, in contrast, argues that American Catholic politics reflects the triumph of Americanism as a heresy. Hart sees this problem across the Catholic political spectrum.
The Church endorsed an economic vision somewhere between free-market liberalism and state socialism: affirming the right to private property, it nonetheless allowed for state regulation of the economy and promoted the right of workers to form labor unions. In the American context, Catholic social thinkers such as Fr. Still, the legitimacy of the modern state itself—that is, the modern secular state that allowed Americsnism religious pluralism—remained in question.
Most American Catholics felt there was no conflict between Catholicism and religious freedom in practice, but the Church had yet to approve of any theoretical justification for what was in fact a break from fifteen hundred years of Catholic tradition. Hart provides as good a short account of this story as Americcan can imagine.
https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/essay/is-lafayette-a-hidden-ivy/the-impact-of-divorce-on-children-s.php He is particularly strong in demonstrating the intensity of early opposition to John Courtney Murray, S. Most notable among these was, of course, William F. Buckley founded the National Review in to provide a forum for those seeking to build a conservative intellectual movement in America. In this, conservatives contributed to the general Catholic intellectual climate that proved so hospitable to the later widespread rejection of Humanae Vitae. Hart argues that Catholics were not so much secularizing politics as investing America with a sacredness rooted in something other than Catholicism.
Liberal Catholics found their righteous cause in social justice, conservatives in libertarian individualism and its corollary, strident anticommunism. Theoretically rooted in Church teaching, these political positions soon found themselves in no need of Church authority. Once again, conservatives took the lead.
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Moving from talk to action, conservative intellectuals raised up Arizona senator Barry Goldwater as their political savior. Fairly indifferent to religion, Goldwater was passionate about individual freedom and anticommunism. America learned of these passions in his book, The Conscience of a Conservativea blockbuster that remains the bestselling political book in the history of American publishing. Brent Bozell Jr. Bozell had, in turn, been recruited to write the book by another conservative Catholic activist, Notre Dame law professor Clarence Manion Bozell would come to realize this problem, but his efforts to imagine an authentically Catholic politics found no audience in mainstream conservatism.
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When this vision finally won the presidency init did so in the person of Ronald Reagan, another man of no particular faith, yet fully committed to the sacred causes of individual freedom and anticommunism. Though he makes clear that Americanism had triumphed in Catholic politics by the mids, he follows the story up to the present day.
Aside from increasing success at the ballot box, this later period did see one significant shift in how conservative Catholics understood their Americanism.]
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