The relation of Roman Catholicism to the American order has from the country's founding been fraught with mistrust, anxiety, and not a little incomprehension. For in spite of its aversion to having an officially established church, some sort of Protestant (or in our current age, post-Protestant) consensus has ordered its most important and formative educational, cultural, and political institutions. Even as Catholics have joined the mainstream of American culture, making up a majority of the Supreme Court, for example, there remains a sense of incongruity that usually just lurks under the surface but pops up in surprising and sometimes rather unpleasant ways.

So it is always refreshing, and even a bit shocking, to go back and read one of the nineteenth century's most original, most Catholic, and, provocatively, most American thinkers, Orestes Brownson. Brownson was born in 1803 in Vermont and over the course of his life traveled through Presbyterianism, Universalism, Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, and socialism before converting to Catholicism in 1844. Federici's well-edited volume here collects a number of Brownson's writings from this last period, offering an excerpt of his autobiography (The Convert) and other writings in which Brownson works to relate his Catholic faith to American constitutionalism, the Civil War, and much else between the years 1856 and 1874. What emerges from Brownson's pen is a profoundly optimistic picture of American politics, even amid the devastation of the war, an optimism driven by the idea that the founders built, to borrow a phrase, “better than they knew” and that Catholicism promised a means of fixing what ailed the country.

For my part, then, perhaps the most striking of Brownson's essays that Federici includes in the book is his “Beecherism and Its Tendencies” (1871), where Brownson rails against the evangelical Protestant movement centered around Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous abolitionists and evangelists. Brownson accused them of offering up “a purely subjective faith” (355) that denied, if only sometimes implicitly, claims central to Christianity, including the Trinity, the Incarnation, regeneration, atonement, and much more. Their error, he supposed, lay not in some misshapen version of Protestantism but in their Protestantism simpliciter, for on Brownson's account, they were driven to these views by the fact that their religious faith was deeply, maybe essentially, democratic (cf. 368). That is, “Beecherism” moved according to what was popular, and what was popular was the mob, not reason or virtue, and certainly not Christ or the church militant.

Brownson's invective toward the Beecher family's purported manifold heresies reflected his concurrent antipathy toward what one of his later essays calls the “Democratic Principle” (1873). He was committed to the idea that democracy properly understood was merely the unconstrained will of the majority, a view that he himself once held (394) but came to reject out of his close-up exposure to electoral politics and his conversion to Catholicism (and his subsequent recognition of human sinfulness). Democracy in this sense was inevitably tied up in an irrational subjectivism that ended up denying natural rights, natural law, limits on material consumption, and the like. So on Brownson's account, to the degree that American democratic order was Protestant and thus committed to the “Democratic Principle,” it was doomed to failure.

Brownson remained convinced, though, that it was not so doomed and that what America needed—indeed, what America was built for—was to be encompassed by “high-toned Catholic public opinion” (411). For Brownson was a kind of Catholic integralist, convinced that American liberal democracy could only function well if its public culture converted to Catholicism and embraced the moral and political truths that only the Catholic faith seemed to embody. Brownson's integralism, though, was no paean to a lost union of throne and altar; indeed, he expresses some dismay at the coercively confessional states in Europe (even if he somewhat romanticizes the Catholic and harshly criticizes the Protestant ones). Rather, Brownson is convinced that the American order is defined by a separation of church and state and an elevation of duties to God over the state. But this only makes sense, he thinks, in light of a distinctively religious claim about the superiority of “spiritual” power over the temporal. American democratic politics can work, but only if rightly understood, and “rightly” means here, according to Brownson's Catholic lights.

Reading Brownson's Catholic writings is perhaps especially bracing in our own day. As someone who teaches at a college founded by one of the Beecher family's abolitionist collaborators, I can see the ways in which Protestantism can indeed get so wrapped up in a kind of subjective sentimentality that it becomes “populist” in the worst sort of way, being “blown about” by every moral, intellectual, and political fad that comes down the pike. But insofar as we might think this subjectivist individualism a problem, it is far from just a “Protestant” problem; it is a problem that crosses denominations, confessions, faiths, everything. It is, I think, a democratic problem, one that Tocqueville presciently identified as “individualism,” the soft disdain for public life and the turn to intimate, material pleasure as the hallmarks of, if not the good life, at least the comfortable one.

Insofar as the Catholic Church offered something of an alternative that was not much taken up in the America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though, it is exceedingly difficult to see how it might be an alternative today. Riven by internal conflicts, weakened by what is now a global sexual abuse scandal, and having been at least partly reconciled to modernity, what has the church to offer? Further, among our American Catholic intellectuals, furious debates have broken out about whether the American liberal democratic order is even worth supporting, never mind saving. Integralism is back, but it is not Brownson's.

Reading Brownson is indeed bracing, and Federici's volume is well worth the time, if only to remember a day when intellectual life in America grappled with our deepest moral, intellectual, and theological questions with an optimism, indeed faith, that the American project had much to offer both its own inhabitants and the world. It is also worth the time as an occasion to reflect on whether that project has promise still or is just remembered from times gone by.