In this clever and insightful book, D. G. Hart shines light on the turbulent journey of conservative Catholic thought in the modern United States. He traces four phases. As late as the 1920s, to be a conservative Catholic meant advocating for a church-state merger that made the Catholic Church dominant over the state. Some conservatives in the United States and elsewhere, especially Europe, followed the papacy's lead in condemning liberalism, democracy, religious freedom, and individualism. During the Cold War and after the rise of totalitarianism, as Hart shows, to be an American Catholic conservative meant touting the divine role of the United States in world affairs and celebrating the special gifts of American freedom. Conservatives had become Americanists and, as Hart argues, the guardians of this august tradition had embraced modernity. Conservativism now included a preference for limited government. It also entailed curbing the papacy's influence over political and social affairs. By the twenty-first century, after a phase under the influence of thinkers like Richard Neuhaus and Garry Wills during which conservatives pushed for the importance of Catholicism in keeping liberalism on a moral path, Catholic conservatives embraced intellectual formulations like the Benedict Option and (re)condemned liberalism. Some of them now seek to escape liberalism's alleged moral malaise with efforts to form blessed and heavily fortified Catholic pods.
American Catholic takes readers on a thrilling ride, full of twists and turns; it traces gradual slides into fresh conservative paradigms followed by abrupt reversals. In tracing this trajectory, D. G. Hart has provided an important intellectual history. He has provided clarity about how and why Catholic conservatives changed courses in the modern context and, in so doing, Hart has plotted out the trajectory of an important intellectual lineage. Catholic conservatives, he shows, embraced Americanism, once condemned by Leo XIII, and they became unflinchingly modern in their attempts to update faith to suit liberal politics. As these men liberalized the Church—limiting the influence of the papacy over modern politics—they moved American culture to the right. Hart offers historians of religion in modern America a dazzling irony with which to think.
Readers will find a familiar cast of characters in American Catholic. Hart focuses on figures like John Courtney Murray, Brent Bozell, Bill Buckley, George Weigel, Garry Wills, and Richard Neuhaus. Some lesser-known characters appear periodically in the book, but men like Bozell and Buckley are the central protagonists of Hart's story. The sources Hart consults are published books and published articles (almost all of which come from the National Review). American Catholic, then, is a history of public thought. Hart makes up for the somewhat narrow source base with his creative and entertaining readings of these sources. This book is a highly readable text that moves the reader efficiently and effectively through a complex, multilayered narrative. Hart's prose is lively and lucid. Even when Hart is a bit snarky, his writing is endearing. The narrative moves through eight chronological chapters organized around Catholic conservatives’ relationship to Americanism at a given moment in the twentieth century. This book ends by placing Patrick Deneen, Rob Dreher, Ross Douthat, and Adrian Vermeule into this genealogy.
Like John McGreevy's Catholicism and American Freedom, Samuel Moyn's Christian Human Rights, James Chapel's Catholic Modern, Giuliana Chamedes's A Twentieth-Century Crusade, and Katherine Dugan's Millennial Missionaries—books that explain how conservatives embraced seemingly liberal ideas like human rights and religious freedom—Hart's tome helps to explain the particular ways Catholic conservatives have come to inhabit secular liberal modernity. This is a tradition that is constantly repurposing itself to inject Catholicism into the American experiment in effort to improve the nation. For Buckley, religion gave America a heritage of freedom; for Bozell, it meant maintaining libertarianism; for Wills, Catholicism gave a centrifugal liberalism important doses of community-level cohesion; for Neuhaus, the Church provided moral clarity for democratic republicanism. This is actually what late nineteenth-century popes feared, but the Second Vatican called for: Catholicism should not seek to judge the modern world so much as to become a critical resource inside of it. As so much good history does, Hart's book gets readers thinking about other possibilities and potential roads not taken. Above all, it forces scholars of modern American Christianity to reckon with these important ironies. Catholic conservatives now play on the ground of modern liberalism, the very ground the papacy has encouraged them to occupy. Conservatives helped to liberalize the church.
Hart's study is valuable for the ways it shows how the condemnation of Americanism in the early hours of the twentieth century shaped the remaining years of an important century. He brings into American history the insights offered by James Chappel regarding European church history: over the course of the twentieth century, the church moved from an anti-modern institution to an anti-totalitarian institution. This is hugely significant.
One wishes, perhaps, that Hart would have been willing to push even further his razor-sharp insights in order to tell us why these thinkers, in addition to adapting to liberalism, also seem now to be lost and bereft of some real political solutions. Would it also be possible to say that Catholicism in the modern world—particularly the conservative brand—is a bit rudderless? Hart wants to hang onto the utility of this tradition, and there is much to be admired in staking out such a position. This book is empathetic, as any good intellectual history ought to be, but it could have also been more critical. What might it mean that the options thinkers consider now include integralism and the Benedict Option? Is there a way out of secular modernity for Catholicism? In a sense, however, Hart, an accomplished and influential thinker, generously leaves such conclusions to be entertained by the reader.
