DOUGLAS KENNEDY ON THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION LA TRIBUNE DIMANCHE - CHRONIQUE 3

22 SEPTEMBER 2024

GOD IN AMERICA… AND THE NEW CATHOLIC RESURGENCE

“Almighty God hath created the mind free” is an oft forgotten (and intriguingly ambiguous) phrase from that revolutionary document, the American Declaration of Independence, drafted and signed in Philadelphia in 1776. Its primary author, Thomas Jefferson, was a man of many contradictions – a Virginia slave owner, intensely cultivated and intellectual (of course, he spoke fluent French), and hugely influenced by Rousseau. Like such other key figure in the American Revolution – George Washington, Benjamin Franklin,  James Madison - Jefferson (who later became the third president of the United States) was also an avowed Deist – where a belief in God is based on reason, not divine revelation… and where all Christian orthodoxies are eschewed.

In short, the intellectual undercurrent of the American Revolution was one rooted in  secularism. Because Jefferson and his deistic colleagues also understood that America’s origins were profoundly theocratic. Though every American schoolchild (this one included) is taught that the ‘pilgrims’ who arrived in what became the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 were escaping religious persecution, it was actually fanatical Puritans who created the first outpost in this New World . Theirs was a brutal ecclesiastic regime, where anyone who spoke against the hardline norm was severely punished. As such it could be argued that the American Puritans were precursors (in theocratic deed and practice) to the Taliban.

No wonder that the central authors of  the American Constitution in 1787 – Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay - were insistent that, in this new country, there would be an absolute separation of church and state…. and one which rejected manifold Puritan orthodoxies: Manichean doctrinairism, ecclesiastical absolutism, and a certainty that God favors us (which can be now seen as the origins of American exceptionalism).

As such, from the end of the  eighteenth century onwards, there has always been a secular bulwark in the United States, ensuring that the evangelical impulse in the American psyche – and with it the possibility of religious fanaticism – is kept in check.

Since the 1980s – with the rise of televangelism and the Faustian Pact that the Republican Party has made with a growing born-again Christian movement – the United States has seen itself in the midst of an ever-virulent debate between those advocating for a progressive, inclusive, secular America… and those insisting on America returning to its Puritan origins: a Christian country run on Christian principals.

The successful assault on the federally mandated right to abortion, the desire to overturn gay marriage, the threat to limit access to contraception, and the belief in the reinforcing of traditional sexual roles (with the woman being the mother and ‘homemaker’)… these regressive doctrines have become a hallmark of the evangelized Republican Party. And in Donald Trump they found the perfect mouthpiece for their social conservatism. Because Trump let the evangelicals know: If you ignore my venality, my history of sexual assault and unapologetic adultery… and I will deliver every regressive social deed you want in exchange for your votes.

The born-agains were key to Trump’s victory in 2016. They are considered cornerstones of his electoral strategy this year. After all this is the President who was able to appoint three conservative Supreme Court justices during his four years in The White House, thereby forming a super-majority that was able to deliver to the evangelicals their Holy Grail: the overturning of Roe v Wade… which mandated federally guaranteed abortion.

But what is most interesting about all six conservative Supreme Court justices is that - in a country where just under twenty percent of the population identify with the Church of Rome - two-thirds of the justices of the nation’s highest court are profoundly Catholic. Writing in the legal journal Verdict, two distinguished law professors (Marci Hamilton and Leslie Griffith) explained the intense lobbying behind imposing hardline Catholics on the Supreme Court, tracing it back to the work of an arch conservative lawyer named Leonard Leo – who was a member of the rightwing organization, The Federalist Society:

“Leo has been a dedicated servant to the Catholic faith through many positions….

President George W. Bush’s campaign appointed him as their Catholic strategist…  becoming the Court’s conservative Catholic Justice-maker. He is responsible for the Catholics on the Court since 1991. In 2016, he played a pivotal role in creating candidate Donald Trump’s list of 20 jurists and attorneys as potential nominees to the Supreme Court”.

The second of Trump’s nominees, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused of sexual assault while a student at the very elite, very Catholic lycée, Georgetown Prep (and later while an undergraduate at Yale). But he was still confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. So too was Trump’s final appointee, Amy Coney Barrett – who, besides being the mother of seven children, was a member of an extreme Catholic group, The People of Praise, which has been compared to a cult – and where (according to a Guardian investigation):

“… members are expected to be obedient to male authorities, or group heads, and are expected to give 5% of their earnings to the group. Heads are influential decision-makers in members’ lives, weighing in on issues ranging from dating to marriage and determining where members should live”.

The very fact that Coney Barrett’s father serves as the cult’s legal counsel  - and that there have been accusations of physical and sexual abuse leveled at the People of Praise – made her elevation to the Supreme Court astonishing. But the Republican desire to have a sixth hardline anti-abortion judge on the bench made them embrace her nonetheless.

To see just how far reaching the Catholic Church is within conservative American politics one needs to also consider Trump’s running mate for Vice President , JD Vance. Raised within Pentecostalism – a true Bible thumping, hellfire and damnation evangelical Protestant church… but then receiving an elite education at Yale Law School (these two opposing facets of his life recounted in his bestselling memoir, ‘Hillbilly Elegy’) - Vance was baptized a Catholic in 2019. As the New York Times noted in an article on Vance’s conversion:

“[Catholicism] has also infused his politics which seeks to advance a family-oriented, socially conservative future through economic populism and by standing with abortion opponents”.

Indeed, with his calls for childless women not to teach school, and his now-infamous denunciation of women liberals as ‘childless cat ladies’, this advocate of rigid codes of sexual conduct (in which anything out of the heterosexual norm is heretic, and a woman should have no reproductive rights whatsoever), stands in opposition to the sort of progressive, ‘aid the indigent’ Catholicism embraced by President Biden. Indeed the current American President is a serious member of the Church of Rome who (as reported in The New Yorker) was seen with rosary beads in his hand while watching the live-cam transmission of the special forces mission to assassinate Osama Bin Laden for perpetrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His is the sort of Catholicism first reflected in the New Frontier liberalism of John F. Kennedy – himself the first American Catholic to be elected President in a country where it was always assumed that a practicing RC could never ascend to The White House.

Biden is, as such, only the second Catholic to reach the pinnacle of American power – but now finds himself at odds with a new-found conservative Catholic movement which has already made forceful inroads in the modern American body politic.

And though I know many a serious Catholic who would never vote Republican (because they come from the liberation theology/socially responsible side of the Church), the fact remains: Vance is the face of an energized Catholic traditionalist movement which has fully embraced Trumpism. As can be seen in the way they brought the Supreme Court under their control, they are shrewd manipulators of the system… and ruthless at forcing their doctrinal conservative agenda on a country that is simultaneously fighting to retain its essential secularism.