Joe Biden's Catholic Moment: Two Articles
David Shasha
By: Ross Douthat
Though like his Conservative Right Wing partner-in-crime David Brooks, Douthat makes everything about himself and his Catholic fundamentalism, this is a very helpful article in certain ways.
But what most struck me is his exclusion from the article of two important African-American religious figures, one who spoke at the Inauguration, the other who did not show up.
I did want to fit in the wonderful talk by Reverend Silvester Beaman, who delivered a truly inspirational benediction in the classic AME style:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaAOltLk5LY
It is a brief speech that is well worth watching, if you have not done so already.
And then there is the case of Pornographer Thomas, the pride of our Supreme Court, the man who brought eternal shame to the chair of the sainted Thurgood Marshall.
In case you did not know it, Thomas is a very proud Catholic convert:
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/bearing-witness/
His deplorable Trumpist wife Ginni, an Alt-Right Christian political operative without any sense of shame, cheered on the Trump Insurrection after ruthlessly attacking Biden in her usual demented fashion:
Douthat ignores Pornographer Thomas, whose absence from the Inauguration was obvious:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/20/supreme-court-justices-inauguration-460740
Indeed, the scumbag sex harasser was not so concerned with COVID when he administered the oath to Whore of Trump Coney Barrett at the end of October!
Douthat likely did not want to get involved in the whole Thomas family mess – a reflection of his own Right Wing Catholic values – and proposed Garth Brooks as his token Inaugural Protestant rather than adding the name of the AME preacher.
It is often hard to understand the depth of Douthat’s own personal corruption and religious hypocrisy, but in the end it does make sense that he is a pal of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:
https://tikvahfund.org/collegiate-forum/faith-in-america-ross-douthat/
Fetid birds of a feather do indeed flock together.
DS
The inauguration of our second Catholic president was, in its way, a very American-Catholic spectacle. A Jesuit delivered the invocation, the president quoted St. Augustine and paused for a moment of silent prayer just long enough for a quick Hail Mary, and the justices and celebrities represented various ethnic-Catholic inheritances — Irish for John Roberts, Italian for Lady Gaga and Nancy Pelosi, Latina for Jennifer Lopez and Sonia Sotomayor. (It was left to Garth Brooks, singing “Amazing Grace,” to represent Protestant culture.) As America Magazine’s James Keane noted, even Biden’s proposed cabinet is stuffed with Catholic Democrats, with few white male Protestants in sight.
It’s normal for American presidents to hew close to the country’s religious center. For a long time this meant almost every president belonged to one of the Protestant denominations called Mainline: Between 1881 and 1961, for instance, there were 13 Mainline-affiliated presidents (plus one Quaker and one Unitarian). The last of the 13, Dwight Eisenhower, proved the Mainline’s influence by being baptized into Presbyterianism early in his presidency, like a 16th-century prince accepting the state religion to claim a vacant throne.
The subsequent decline of the Protestant establishment, the most important fact in American religious life since the 1960s, has altered this dynamic. Instead of being connected to a clear religious center, the presidency has been passed among different religious tendencies that aspire, so far mostly unsuccessfully, to the status of the old Mainline.
Thus George W. Bush represented the cultural alliance between his own evangelicalism and conservative Catholicism, which envisioned itself as a new religious establishment — and then faded amid the Catholic sex-abuse crisis and a new wave of secularization.
Next, Barack Obama embodied an uneasy fusion between an attenuated liberal Protestantism and the African-American church — before the emergence of a more zealous, ‘woke’ progressivism, in his second term and after, left Obama’s more detached religious style behind.
Then Donald Trump, a Norman Vincent Peale “power of positive thinking” Christian without the actual belief, became an avatar for prosperity theology and Christian nationalism — a style of religiosity too fundamentally right-wing to lay claim to the religious center.
Now we have Biden. Many emergent forces are changing liberalism’s relationship to religion — wokeness, secularization, even paganism. But the new president personally embodies none of them. Instead he has elevated his own liberal Catholicism to the center of our national life.
Calling a form of religion “liberal” can mean two different things: On the one hand, a theological liberalism, which seeks an evolution in doctrine to adapt to modern needs; on the other, support for policies and parties of the center-left. In practice, though, the two tend to be conjoined: The American Catholic Church as an institution is caught between the two political coalitions, but most prominent Catholic Democrats are liberals in theology and politics alike.
But more than a set of ideas, liberal Catholicism is a culture, recognizable in its institutions and tropes, its iconography and allusions — to Pope John XXIII and Jesuit universities, to the “seamless garment” of Catholic teaching and the “spirit” of the Second Vatican Council, to the works of Thomas Merton and hymns like “On Eagle’s Wings” (which Biden quoted in his victory speech).
And, of course, invocations of Pope Francis. A decade ago it was a commonplace to regard liberal Catholicism as a tradition in decline. Its period of maximal influence, the late 1960s and 1970s, had been an era of institutional crisis for the church, which gave way to the conservative pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Conservative Catholics felt that liberal ideas had been tried and failed, liberal Catholics felt that they had been suppressed.
But then Francis gave the liberal tendency new life, reopening controversies that conservatives assumed were closed and tilting the Vatican toward cooperation with the liberal establishment and away from associations with conservatism.
The papacy does not issue political endorsements, but there seems little doubt that many figures in Francis’ inner circle welcome a Biden presidency. When the American bishops’ statement on his inauguration included a stern critique of his position on abortion, there was apparent pushback from the Vatican and explicit pushback from the most Francis-aligned of the American cardinals. So the conservative Catholics who spent the election year arguing that Biden isn’t a Catholic in good standing find themselves (not for the first time) in tacit conflict with their pope.
That conflict belongs to the internal drama of Catholicism. In the internal drama of America, though, liberal Catholicism is an interesting candidate to claim the religious center, to fill the Mainline’s vanished role.
If you wanted to make a case for its prospects and potential influence, you would emphasize three distinctive liberal-Catholic qualities: an abiding institutionalism, in contrast to the pure dissolving individualism of so much American religion; an increasingly multiethnic character, which matches our increasingly diverse republic; and a fervent inclusivity, an anxiety that nobody should feel discriminated against or turned away.
This inclusivity means that liberal Catholicism sometimes seems to capture the universalist aspirations of the church better than its conservative and traditionalist subcultures. The latter are supposed to be for everybody, but at the moment they tend to appeal to distinctive personality types (he said, looking in the mirror) while remaining somewhat alien to the normal run of Americans — with “normal” lately meaning not just anyone who doubts certain of the church’s harder teachings but anyone who doubts the wisdom of a vote for Donald Trump.
On the other hand, liberal Catholicism sometimes achieves its feeling of universality by simply claiming for itself the whole Catholic-influenced world — sure, he’s no longer a practicing Catholic, but did you know that Dr. Anthony Fauci was educated by Jesuits? — without regard to whether that influence actually amounts to much more than a vague spirituality, a generic humanitarianism.
Which means that the liberal Catholic worldview is constantly in danger of simply being subsumed into political liberalism, with all religious distinctives shorn away — as Joe Biden’s past pro-life positions have now been entirely subsumed, for instance, by his party’s orthodoxy on abortion. Or alternatively, it’s in danger of being effectively taken over from within by rival forms of faith, like the new progressive orthodoxies that are likely to set our Catholic president’s agenda on the social questions of the day.
This is a challenge for any form of faith that aspires to supply a new religious center to our divided society — how to find a place to stand that’s actually outside partisanship, that’s clearly religious first and liberal or conservative second.
On this count it’s fair to say that religious conservatives of every tradition have often failed or fallen short.
But it’s equally fair to doubt that liberal Catholicism, brought back from what had seemed its twilight years to this unexpected apotheosis, is prepared to pass the test.
From The New York Times, January 23, 2021
In Biden’s Catholic Faith, an Ascendant Liberal Christianity
By: Elizabeth Dias
Hours before President Biden took the oath of office, he entered the front pew of the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, the seat of Catholic Washington, and beheld the mosaics behind the altar.
An intimate group of family, friends and congressional leaders had gathered for Mass, in the place where Pope Francis spoke in 2015 and where the funeral for John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first Roman Catholic president, was held.
When it was time for the homily, the Rev. Kevin F. O’Brien, the president of Santa Clara University and friend of the Biden family, compared Mr. Biden’s upcoming inaugural message to the words of Jesus.
“Your public service is animated by the same conviction,” he said, “to help and protect people and to advance justice and reconciliation, especially for those who are too often looked over and left behind.”
“This is your noble commission,” he said. “This is the divine summons for all of us.”
There are myriad changes with the incoming Biden administration. One of the most significant: a president who has spent a lifetime steeped in Christian rituals and practices.
Mr. Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, regularly attends Mass and speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies.
And with Mr. Biden, a different, more liberal Christianity is ascendant: less focused on sexual politics and more on combating poverty, climate change and racial inequality.
His arrival comes after four years in which conservative Christianity has reigned in America’s highest halls of power, embodied in white evangelicals laser-focused on ending abortion and guarding against what they saw as encroachments on their freedoms. Their devotion to former President Donald J. Trump was so fervent that many showed up in Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the election results.
Mr. Biden’s leadership is a repudiation of the claim by many conservative leaders that Democrats are inherently anti-Christian.
His rise comes as fewer registered Democrats identify as Christian. Nearly half are religiously unaffiliated or believers of other faiths, a share that has grown significantly in recent years, according to the Pew Research Center; about 80 percent of registered Republicans are Christian.
Yet the current influence of liberal Christianity in the Democratic Party goes beyond Mr. Biden. Senator Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, won election with a campaign rooted in Black liberation theology. The Sunday after his election, Mr. Warnock preached about John the Baptist, the “truth-telling troublemaker,” he said, who was beheaded by King Herod for his prophetic witness.
Representative Cori Bush, a pastor who led Kingdom Embassy International in St. Louis, has started her tenure in Congress advocating universal basic income. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez connects her Catholic faith with her push for reforming health care and environmental policy. She has said her favorite Bible story is one where Jesus, in anger, threw money changers out of the temple.
In his inaugural address, Mr. Biden rooted himself and the country in a Christian moral vision that makes room for a pluralistic society, unlike his predecessor who promised to make America a certain kind of Christian nation. Mr. Biden quoted Augustine, “a saint in my church,” he said, who wrote that “a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love.”
Augustine, the fourth-century North African bishop, recognized that no political community was going to be the city of God on earth, explained Eric Gregory, professor of religion at Princeton University. This passage, from the saint’s “City of God,” has been used in the 20th century “to open up the space for a nontheocratic way for Christians to understand what it means to be citizens in a plural society,” he said.
For Mr. Biden, “it was a subtle and explicit effort to show a different vision of a way in which a Christian could imagine themselves as part of a diverse America, one that is defined by these common objects of love, rather than by hate and fear or exclusion,” he said.
While conservative Catholics have doubled down on abortion policy and religious freedom for the past four years, Mr. Biden’s policy priorities reflect those of Pope Francis, who has sought to turn the church’s attention from sexual politics to issues like environmental protection, poverty and migration.
On his first day in office, Mr. Biden recommitted the United States to the Paris climate agreement, the international accord designed to avert global warming; ended the ban on travel from predominantly Muslim and African countries; and stopped construction on the border wall.
Mr. Biden’s support for abortion rights is already causing tension in the Catholic church. Even before the inaugural ceremony had finished, Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued an extensive statement criticizing Mr. Biden for policies “that would advance moral evils,” especially “in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender.” Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago, who is known for his alignment with Pope Francis’ social and economic priorities, pushed back on Twitter, calling the statement unprecedented and “ill-considered.”
Mr. Biden’s priorities reflect values that progressive faith leaders have pushed for, and that motivated many to speak out for him during the campaign, said Derrick Harkins, who led interfaith outreach for the Democratic National Committee this past cycle. There is a sense of moral synergy on the left, among not only progressive Christians but also humanists, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and the spectrum of faith traditions, he said.
The work now “has a chance of really having traction,” he said. “I’m very optimistic about what can unfold.”
The grassroots progressive Christian movement is center stage in Mr. Biden’s Washington.
Unlike four years ago, when many of the participants in the post-inaugural prayer service were conservative evangelicals or prosperity gospel preachers, this year’s Thursday service included a broad array of religious progressives, including two transgender faith leaders. Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR, a Jewish community in Los Angeles, prayed for the coming of a new America, one “built on love, rooted in justice and propelled by our moral imagination.”
The Rev. William J. Barber II, a chairman of the Poor People’s Campaign, preached and directly challenged Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to pursue a Third Reconstruction, decades after the civil rights era. He urged them to address “interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation/denial of health care, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism.”
Jesus taught that a nation is judged by how it treats the least of these, the poor, the hungry, the sick, the immigrant, he explained in an interview.
“Birth pangs require one thing: pushing,” he said. “That is what the movement has to do.”
For many believers, the shift in the Christianity of the presidency is already personal. On the eve of his inauguration, Mr. Biden led the nation in a memorial service on the mall for victims of the coronavirus pandemic.
He adopted the posture of a chaplain, noted Michelle Ami Reyes, the vice president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative, a group that started last year to combat anti-Asian racism rising from the pandemic.
“That is a deeply biblical posture,” she said, “mourning with those who mourn.”
From The New York Times, January 23, 2021