I’d like take a break from my colleagues’ discussions of family life and Christian vocation to talk about something far more worthwhile: politics. More specifically, the primary season is (already!) beginning, and candidates for every level of office are looking to build momentum.
If nothing else, the 2016 election proved how much primaries matter. The awful choice with which we were confronted in the voting booth in November was the result of a lengthy series of primaries in which candidates, party officials, media personalities, and voters all made decisions that contributed in some way to the result. Trump’s fixation on building a wall was not inevitable, nor was Trump’s nomination, or Clinton’s. If we are conscientious in the way we approach the 2020 primary season, we may be able to make a much more satisfying decision next November, or if we fail in 2020 as we did in 2016, at least we will have dared something different.
As Catholics, we are not politically unified. Many of us are more likely to argue with fellow Catholics over partisan politics than we are to argue with members of our respective parties about moral policies. We focus more on justifying our voting patterns and partisan affiliations than actually influencing our parties for the better. We are sycophants when we ought to be prophets, representing our respective parties within the Church more than the Church in our political parties.
What would happen if, for just one year, we reversed this dynamic? Instead of trying to change someone’s mind (or even just convince ourselves) about the merits of one party or candidate, let’s challenge our parties to be worthy of the support they demand of us.I have in mind one issue for each major party—one subject on which the party orthodoxy is so willfully morally blind that even the slightest challenge to it would be noteworthy and ever-so-welcome.
Republicans
The administration’s family separation policy was, from the very start, a moral travesty, and the depth of this policy’s turpitude has only become more apparent with time. The administration, with other viable policy alternatives, decided to detain children separately from their parents before their asylum hearings. These children were traumatized and maltreated, apparently with few or even no considerations made as to how they might be reunited with their parents afterward. All of this was done, rather transparently, in order to try to scare people away from applying for asylum. That is, people who were trying to enter America legally were subjected to needless and deliberate cruelty in order to dissuade people from attempting to enter through this entirely legal method.
Catholics who lean Republican must not hide from this awful truth. The Republican Party needs to understand the intentions and effects of this policy. If you’re a Catholic who leans Republican, talk to your politically-active friends about the family separation policy. They should be willing to agree that any reasonable person would be entirely justified in regarding the administration’s policy as deliberately cruel, and that "never seeing your children again" is.
Democrats
The board members of Democrats for Life of America have been quite vocal lately. Charles Camosy recently suggested that there is room in the Democratic presidential primary field for a pro-life candidate. I confess I see a great deal of appeal in the idea of a pro-life democrat like the governor of Louisiana stepping forward and showing just how much of the Democratic Party is in fact open to a pro-life candidate, regardless of whether they end up winning the nomination.
Here, though, I want to focus on what the laity can accomplish on the ground, as opposed to actions that depend entirely on the decisions of politicians. Michael Wear’s recent essay in The Atlantic offers insights that are more immediately relevant.1
“There is no sense that anti-abortion Republicans are influenced by the stories of women like Dr. Jen Gunter or Erika Christensen. There is no sense that pro-choice Democrats are aware of sincere pro-life Americans, or take seriously the claim that abortion is an attack on the very human dignity Democrats rightly invoke (and, yes, many anti-abortion Republicans ignore) when discussing immigration, poverty, or human rights. Now our politics are only for the absolutists, those who deny any place for doubt or humility.
[…] I have spoken with women who work at pro-life pregnancy clinics who condemn any language that shames women or increases the moral burden women feel. They work with pregnant women who are facing immense pressures and seemingly impossible situations every day, and approach the issue of abortion with compassion, not callousness.”What I would like to see from the Democratic side is a repudiation of the talking points that denigrate pro-lifers, either by pretending that pro-life pregnancy clinics don’t exist, or by pretending that these clinics exist only to shame and coerce women into giving birth. The truth is that the people most involved in the pro-life cause are working not to deny women a choice, but to empower them and give them the necessary resources (financial and otherwise) to recognize that abortion is not their only option.
Speak to your Democratic friends about the good work done by pro-life activists. Praise pro-lifers, and let your friends in the Democratic Party know that the single best way for a presidential candidate to get your attention would be to acknowledge the pro-life movement in good faith.
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The biggest obstacle, which I have thus far ignored, is that many Catholic Republicans will be inclined to think of the family separation issue as something that was fabricated or, at best, exaggerated by biased media, and many Catholic Democrats have a view of the pro-life movement that is colored by the worst elements of the movement. Catholic partisans will not be in a position to argue what I suggest above, because too few of them will even be prepared to believe the argument in the first place. Catholics on both sides are more prepared to believe partisan sources than members of their own Church.The bishops, for all their faults in moral leadership, can at least offer us an example here. The bishops have different interests and areas of activism, but they fundamentally trust -- or at least do not eagerly contradict -- USCCB committees on other issues. The bishops trust each other on abortion, immigration, and the environment more than they trust partisan sources.
We in the laity, meanwhile, have very little trust in each other. In losing trust in each other, we lose the ability to witness to the whole of the Gospel. We have become too much part of our parties, too defined by the dominant political culture, rather than living out our vocations in the different parts of the political spectrum. Catholics on the right aren't sufficiently familiar with the Church's involvement in serving immigrants, much less engaging in solidarity with immigrants. Catholics on the Left repeat tired lines about abortion opponents as being merely "pro-birth," and in the worst cases issue barely a whimper in defense of the unborn,2 so far divorced are they from the realities of pro-life activism.We need to pursue at least some small ways that we can renew trust in each other.
1 Also the author of a book that helped radically change the way this long-time Republican thinks about politics and the Obama administration.↩
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