Rauch Among the Mormons

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, the latest book by the longtime policy journalist and public thinker, argues three things:

--first, that throughout American history Christian churches have played an essential role in enabling our liberal democracy to properly function;

--second, that America’s Christian churches (mostly, though not exclusively, Protestant ones) have of late abandoned this role, and by so doing have contributed to the breakdown of liberal and democratic rules and norms in American life;

--and third, that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has continued to model exactly the sort of role which historically American Christian churches had once played, and that therefore, the more the rest of American Christianity can learn from and perhaps even emulate the Mormons–very specifically, the room which he believes LDS doctrines and practices make for a pluralistic civic theology–the healthier America’s democratic culture and institutions will be. 

Given the praise contained in that third point–and given the philosophically liberal presumptions which underlie it–it’s not surprising that Rauch and his book have received a positive, bordering on enthusiastic, reception among intellectually-inclined mainstream American Mormons, while a small philosophically (as opposed to merely politically) conservative minority have viewed Rauch’s arguments far more suspiciously. Who is right? Assessing that requires considering Rauch’s claims in somewhat more detail.

Rauch is well-known as an advocate of classical liberalism and political moderation; indeed, a large part of his reputation as a writer has been built on the fact that he is both an unapologetic atheist and a gay activist, yet neither reasons nor votes the way most Americans would stereotypically assume a gay atheist would. Throughout his career, Rauch has presented himself as a consummate pragmatist, always asking careful questions and eschewing any kind of controlling ideology. Of course, as with pragmatism generally, this kind of evidence-based, practical-minded worldview does tend to support a particular ideological position–namely, a classically liberal, utilitarian, and secular one, in the spirit of John Locke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. Early in Cross Purposes, he describes his ideological preferences (though without calling them that) succinctly: “the modern tradition of freedom, toleration, minority rights, and the rule of law.” In support of such aims, he sees “three linked social systems” as essential: “liberal democracy to make political choices; market capitalism to make economic choices; and science and other forms of open critical exchange to make epistemic choices” (p. 12). He is and long has been a consistent defender of responsible, thoughtful, but nonetheless total individual choice, in matters of politics and economics and religion, unfettered by custom or community.

Still, he's no libertarian. He knows that there are things that he does not and perhaps cannot know, and thus needs reign in his drive for individual autonomy and trust at least to a certain degree in the slow, patient work of ideas and options through society and culture. It is that conservatism in his nature which has led him, a non-believer, to take seriously the historical role that Christianity has played in the development of the American democratic system that he prizes. In the book, he repents of his one-time intellectual over-reliance upon the separation of church and state when addressing social and political problems; he now views his youthful celebration of “apatheism”–the ideal of simply “not caring very much one way or another about religion”–as “superficial” (p. 5). Instead, he now believes “not just that secular liberalism and religious faith are instrumentally interdependent but that each is intrinsically reliant on the other to build a morally and epistemically complete and coherent account of the world” (p. 21).

In his view, since secularism and freedom of choice cannot fulfill the human need for belonging and meaning, and since the Christian religion cannot escape its inability to account for the physical laws and the moral horrors of the universe, what is necessary–and what he believes that “the United States has been generally good” at for most of its existence–is for both American Christianity and liberal democracy to do their part in holding up the walls of our civic home. Creating an environment wherein this balance can be maintained requires “that the Constitution be interpreted in a way which is consistent with the well-being of law-abiding faith communities, and that God’s work be interpreted in a way which is consistent with the well-being of democratic pluralism” (p. 33). The rule of liberalism in matters of politics and law must always accommodate religious exceptions, he affirms–but at the same time, the rule of Christian faith in society and culture must always give way to liberal protections and rights. This is a complicated balance, but it is one Rauch has confidence in, and one that he seeks to persuade his secular readers to be confident in as well.

Having laid his foundation, Rauch proceeds to build an argument that aligns with a good deal of other contemporary sociological research and political observation. First, that over the 20th century, mainline Protestant churches became less culturally distinct, losing their ability to mold their parishioners and implicitly direct them towards the virtuous role they had historically played in America’s civic order. And second, that Protestant churches which rejected the mainline’s compromise with secular liberalism gradually moved in an ever more partisan direction, adopting a paranoid and conspiratorial version of Christian teachings which Rauch refers to as “the Church of Fear.” This transformation led them to acquiesce to–and eventually triumphantly embrace–the vulgarity, immorality, and cruelty of Donald Trump’s paranoia and defensiveness as their perfect political avatar. And while I will not deny that my personal political judgments are a factor here, I would still insist that the passages where Rauch brings receipts, showing how thoroughly un-Christian it is to support Trump and the party he has built in his image, are really the best in the whole book. 

Rauch shows how evangelical (again, primarily Protestant) Christians have dismissed their previous insistence upon personal character in judging candidates, and in so doing ignored Trump’s criminality; how their gleeful identification with Trump as a cultural fighter has underscored how little faith they actually have in God’s providence; and how their embrace of what Rauch calls “sharp Christianity” has prevented them from articulating even a semblance of adherence to the Christian imperative to forgive and love, rather than fight and punish. It is, frankly, a damning indictment–and since he believes that those imperatives have been central to the develop of the civic culture within which American democracy developed, it is an indictment of Trump’s Christian supporters as un-American as well. All of which leads him to conclude:

[S]ecular liberalism and Christianity have separate purposes. They do not need to ally (and should not); but they do need to align, at least well enough so that democracy’s wheels don’t come off. . . . In that respect, we seculars are entitled to hold the church accountable to the democracy of which it is part. We are entitled to hold it accountable for the choices it makes. While the church’s relationship with God is its own business, secular Americans are justified in reminding our Christian friends that the Church of Fear is toxic for them and for us. We are not out of our lane to suggest that what Russell Moore calls 'confident Christianity'–one which 'constantly reminds us that this life is less important than the next [and] demonstrates something of what it means to forgive and serve one another'–needs repair for all our sakes. In short, we have standing to hope, perhaps even insist, that Christians get their act together (p. 89).

As I wrote at the beginning, Rauch believes American Mormonism provides a model of action that Christians could use a blueprint to repair themselves. But should we accept as accurate his overarching historical account of American civic pluralism? Should we accept as correct what he sees within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as contributing to it? And if we do not accept one or both of these, does that mean the conservative critique of Rauch is correct? 

Let’s begin with what I assume to be the most obvious problem (at least for the likely readership of this essay; were I a Roman Catholic, Rauch’s Protestant-centric account of America’s civic culture would probably rankle even more). Any Mormon who is remotely familiar with our own history ought to be prompted to ask Rauch why his initial description of the American bargain between Christianity and democracy doesn't incorporate an explanation for the profoundly anti-pluralist attacks on Mormonism that defined its nineteenth-century development. After all, perhaps the single greatest argument that America’s liberal democracy was not, in fact, built within the liberal civic walls he describes was the official exclusion and persecution that violently drove the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints out of the United States entirely. And this is not a parochial point; placing nineteenth-century anti-Mormonism alongside slavery and Know-Nothingism as clear signs that America’s Protestant Christian civic culture was heavily dependent upon racial, ethnic, religious, and gender exclusion is broadly accepted as a key component of any historically honest consideration of America’s civic identity.

Yet the only discussion of this defining example of religious oppression in American history which is present in Cross Purposes isn’t to be found Rauch’s description of the intellectual components of America’s liberal democratic culture, as it should be; rather, it appears as one of the motivating reasons why Mormons–on Rauch’s reading–are so supportive of that democratic culture: “the modern church’s...memory of persecution has bred sensitivity to the importance of religious freedom and pluralism” (p. 108). Contrary examples from Mormon history–like Brigham Young’s politically illiberal State of Deseret or the economically illiberal United Order of Enoch–receive no mention in the book. Joseph Smith’s Council of Fifty does get a mention, but even that rhetorical embrace of religious authoritarianism–however quickly abandoned–is instead presented entirely in terms a defense of freedom and religious choice, emphasizing how “Smith went so far as to...propose constitutional revisions requiring ‘the armies of the government’ to enforce ‘principles of liberty’ for all people, not just the Protestant majority” (p. 110). That Rauch passes over the complications of Smith’s not-always-coherent embrace of both religious authoritarianism and republican freedom, to say nothing of other explorations of very real authoritarian alternatives present throughout American history is, perhaps, predictable, but still unfortunate.

My point here is not to claim that LDS church members (like myself), or Americans generally, necessarily must have some secret, ambiguous authoritarianism historically buried in our belief system. (Not that the rise of Trump hasn’t led some historians of American religion to suggest exactly that.) Rather, it is to claim that Rauch’s understanding of America’s liberal democracy and its relationship to expressions of religious faith, both as a matter of history and a matter of theory, is simplistic, and it requires papering over many ideas and actions that cannot be neatly arranged into a straightforward argument against the terrible choices which Christian churches that have embraced Donald Trump’s person and agenda have made, however worthwhile such an argument may be. 

Rauch makes a good deal of the LDS doctrine of agency, and connects that doctrine (one which, under Rauch’s reading, stipulates that, as all of God’s children have the ability to make choices, the process of choice–if not necessarily the end result–must be respected and tolerated and negotiated with) to several passages in sermons and speeches of President Dallin H. Oaks: “Oaks argues for an alignment between God’s moral constitution and Madison’s political one. Speaking for the church, he sees patience, negotiation, and compromise...as social and spiritual ends unto themselves” (p. 96). Rauch’s discussion of Oaks’s ideas is thoughtful, and his connection of them to larger LDS perspectives on matters dear to Rauch’s heart (he describes the surprise passage of the “Utah Compromise” in 2015, which provided protection against housing and employment discrimination to Utah’s LGBTQ population, as “inspirational”–p. 100) is obviously sincere. But it is difficult to square his praise of Utah Governor Spencer Cox for apologizing to LGBTQ Utahns for his past offenses in 2016, with his silence regarding Cox’s vocal support for Donald Trump and opposition to the interests of trans individuals in 2024, or his quotation of polls from 2016 and 2020, showing comparatively low levels of support for Trump among LDS Republicans, while failing to note more recent polls which show that support for Trump increased among all Mormon demographics in 2024. To be sure, these snapshots are part of a complicated story. But a complicated story about LDS history and culture–one where our appreciation of personal agency and public spiritedness is deeply entwined with our own particular, prophet-idolizing Church of Fear–is not what Rauch wanted to tell. 

In some ways the critique of Rauch made by conservative–or “post-liberal”–Mormons is thus correct here. Ralph Hancock’s pointed challenge--“how can religion ‘align’ itself with liberalism...without at some level in or some way ‘supporting’ Rauch’s liberal (that is, atheistic and ‘scientific’) understanding of truth and of humanity?”–is a hard one for those desirous to accept Rauch’s conflation of being a good Mormon and being a good (that is, non-Trumpist) modern American to deal with, and his fierce dismissal of Rauch’s key theological claim about Mormonism–“his understanding of ‘agency’ is neither a remotely adequate phenomenology of human choice nor a serious rendering of LDS belief”–is undeniably true. Unfortunately, Hancock’s conservative rebuke of Rauch’s longed (and simplistic) for rapprochement between liberal principles and Christian churches in America is also, in it’s own way, superficial. Rauch’s summation of the message of Christianity as “Don’t be afraid. Imitate Jesus. Forgive each other,” is obviously incomplete, and designed to point out an easy alignment between Jesus and his hero James Madison. But it is a substantive message, nonetheless, one grounded in a deep conviction of and commitment to Jesus’s loving, sacrificial gift of grace. To claim, as Hancock does, that the characteristics of Christianity which Rauch correctly condemns many Christian churches for having abandoned in their partisan, paranoid embrace of Donald Trump--namely humility, forgiveness, and tolerance--are somehow actually insufficient to allow for a “substantial participation as Christians in public life” is pure nonsense (or at least, nonsensical assuming one accepts such giants of liberal Christianity from Dorothy Day to William Sloane Coffin to Fred Rogers to Eugene England as Christians, which I assume Hancock would, though perhaps only with large, grudging asterisks beside their names).

To be fair to Hancock, none of those Christian leaders had to explicitly confront what he considers to the primary challenge to maintaining a substantive Christian anthropology today: namely, gay marriage and other assorted LGBTQ issues. Rauch himself frequently underscores how difficult these concerns–or indeed, his own marriage to his gay partner–are for certain Christian believers, which is again what brings him back to the LDS church, and how he believes its chastening failure in the fight against same-sex marriage made it re-dedicate itself to its supposed inner liberalism: “After its Proposition 8 debacle in 2008, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has foregrounded those elements of its faith which harmonize with America’s constitutional order” (p.120). Rauch believes, in short, that even Mormonism’s illiberal elements (which he does not theologically explore) point in the direction of a Christianity at peace with pluralism and negotiation. The LDS church changed regarding plural marriage and the priesthood ban on Blacks, after all, and yet it remains a substantive, in no sense “thin” church. So why shouldn’t the rest of Christianity follow its example, and make its way through a culture supportive of gay rights respectfully too? And it is this prospect which most horrifies conservative critics of Rauch’s vision of Mormonism–in Hancock’s words, the fear that “LDS church members have been insufficiently appreciative of the positive cultural and evangelical effects of the church’s alliance with Roman Catholics and others” in opposing gay marriage; the fear that the institutional church, in its drive to “participate in the fashioning of legislative compromises” over LGBTQ issues, will not fully attend to the “trade-offs of these compromises and their long-term effects”; and the fear that Mormons will take a little too seriously the idea of “peacemaking,” which comes “perilously close to endorsing not only the fundamental dignity of all God’s children, but even the ideological self-understanding of those with whom we find that we must compromise.” These are the sorts of terrors that will keep those who find the substance of their Christian faith mostly fully defined by few passages from Paul’s Letter to the Romans and a few pages from Spencer W. Kimball’s The Miracle of Forgiveness awake at night, that’s for certain.

Surprisingly to me, I find myself thinking that President Oaks’s words provide a better guide to the complexities of maintaining a binding Christian faith in the midst of a world of individual choice, as well as a better guide to the doctrinal imperatives behind such supposedly banal principles as showing respect to and non-violent acceptance of those whom one disagrees with, than do either Rauch or his critics. Rauch celebrates Oaks’s comments from the University of Virginia in 2021, “Going Forward with Religious Freedom and Non-Discrimination,” but that speech leaves aside explicit consideration of LGBTQ issues, mentioning them only in passing, preferring to avoid any explicit reference to doctrines or ideas, and instead endorsing the view of a colleague that practical, informal, non-rule-based trade-offs often work well in addressing questions about compromise where “abstract principles sometimes cannot.” Hancock describes Oaks’s General Conference sermon “Balancing Truth and Tolerance” as a “classic address,” highlighting its martial language “We are cast as combatants in the war between truth and error. There is no middle ground.” However, he seems to fail to fully appreciate the sermon’s very next sentence: “We must stand up for truth, even while we practice tolerance and respect for beliefs and ideas different from our own and for the people who hold them” (italics added). The post-liberal rejection of Rauch’s version of Mormonism appears to insist upon a supposed distinction between respect and tolerance, between people and the beliefs they hold--Hancock in fact goes so far as to state that it simply isn’t possible for religious believers to function honestly in an environment of democratic compromise while holding to a doctrinal understanding that their opponents are “profoundly and disastrously wrong.” Yet that admittedly hard, deeply Christian thing is pretty much exactly what Oaks is calling the Mormon faithful to do. 

Rauch is too much of a secular liberal, too committed to open inquiry, to automatically assume that any one view is “profoundly and disastrously wrong.” In contrast to the paranoia of the post-liberals, Rauch’s view of Christianity–even that Christianity which he believes has been horribly twisted into an advocacy for authoritarianism–is neither dismissive nor domineering; on the contrary, he holds up the minority position, what he calls the “exilic mindset,” as something profoundly honorable (p. 135). Like Oaks, Rauch understands the virtue of those see the world in accordance with a different truth than he. (In his General Conference address, Oaks insisted that, even when believing Mormons enjoy a majority position in a community, “they should always be sensitive to the views of the minority,” something that those members of the LDS church who have become convinced that they, and their conservative Christian allies, stand alone, defending Western Civilization, against the woke and LGBTQ hordes, perhaps ought to be reminded of.) So while Rauch’s articulation of that virtue is far from philosophically complete, he has nonetheless perceived something about kindness and respect, compromise and forgiveness, something that too many Christians in America have forgotten. If this gay atheist has found a way to use Mormonism–or at least one small, perhaps insufficiently developed part of it–to call those Christians (including some members of our own tribe) back to those principles, we owe him our thanks, and ought to listen to him as well.

On Superman, Sentimentality, and Citizenship (or, What Gunn's Superman Knows About America that J.D. Vance Apparently Can't Comprehend)

Daniel McCarthy expanded upon his New York Post editorial, the one I responded to previously, in the pages of his journal, Modern Age. His expansion—“Superman After Liberalism”—isn’t a rebuttal to my response, but he tagged me nonetheless, so I’m going to take the opportunity to respond once more…particularly since the way McCarthy is pursuing his case against James Gunn’s Superman provides me with an important contract to Vice President J.D. Vance, who recently, on the occasion of receiving an award from the Claremont Institute, gave a speech on citizenship which was about as antithetical to the deeply American moral sentiments of Superman as I can imagine.

McCarthy’s argument against Gunn’s vision of the Superman character isn’t changed by his expansion, but he does elaborate on his thesis in some interesting ways. He’s not wrong that “the problem of reconciling the exceptional with the egalitarian” has been a subtheme to telling super-heroes stories ever since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster essentially evented the genre (and if McCarthy had either the pop culture knowledge or inclination, he could have made the obvious point that recent comic, cinematic, and television incarnations of Superman—from Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie to Henry Cavill in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel to many, many others—have all taken different positions on how to address this narrative problem). Nor is he wrong—though he is, I think, incomplete—in suggesting that Siegel and Shuster’s original solution, and the one that supposedly served the character so well for decades, was to write Superman as motivated by a New Deal-era confidence in liberalism as a form of patriotism, the result of his, through his adopted parents, “assimilation into Kansas and America as the land of the free.” I don’t see how anyone remotely online—to say nothing of comic books fan over the past 85 years who have (likely unlike McCarthy) actually consumed Superman media—could be unaware of this aspect of Superman’s history, especially given how relevant it is to debates that McCarthy (and Vance) are deeply involved in today.

McCarthy sees the Superman of the James Gunn film as having abandoned this confidence, as American liberalism has also abandoned it (or maybe, depending on how much and what sort of postliberalism McCarthy embraces, it was fated to turn away from it, in favor of identity politics and government-managed pity). Instead, he sees the Superman played by David Corenswet as unexceptional, bland, and weak (McCarthy makes much of how Superman’s unwillingness to kill makes him reliant upon other heroes capable doing the necessary “dirty work”). And while he allows that there probably could have been, even within his framework, a way of telling the Superman story that asked the “right questions,” this one absolutely isn’t it; in Superman, he sees only a left-liberal film that is so frightened that “fascism has already taken over this country” that its titular character lacks “a place of his own,” leaving him to articulate only lame liberal sentiments with no moral strength of their own.

I’ve already talked about how wrong this argument is. The lame liberal sentiments that McCarthy sees in Superman’s wonderful final words to Lex Luthor—

I’m as human as anyone. I love, I get scared, I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human! And that’s my greatest strength.

—could, I suppose, be understood as validating a kind of moral individualism and even fatalism. That they lack much by way of realpolitik thinking, and thus arguably open the door to a hypocritical Machiavellianism, showing a face of kindness and sympathy to the crowd while justifying self-interested actions behind your back, is also perhaps true. (Superman didn’t seem too worried about the fate of his clone, for example.) But of course, it’s not like the downsides—the exclusionary classism, racism, sexism, and more—so frequently present in more rigorously particular moral systems are difficult to identify either.

More importantly, to fail to understand the moral strength—and, on an admittedly somewhat attenuated level, what I think can only be understood as an aspect of self-sacrificing Christian love—that is just as possible to be found within this kind of compassion-driven ethical universalism is a major mistake. It’s one that has been made by haters of Rousseau and every attempt within the context of modernity to follow the path toward moral legitimacy—a civil religion based on rights and consent and small-d democratic efforts to build communities of action and legislation—which he suggested for centuries now. I have no idea if James Gunn or David Corenswet have ever heard of Moral Therapeutic Deism, and I definitely reject the idea that what viewers of Superman saw on the screen is just another version of some self-centered, MTD, make-it-up-yourself-morality. But denying that there is any moral substance, any heroism, to someone who puts forward, first and foremost, kindness and concern and sentimentality and good deeds, absent any explicit patriotic attachment or sectarian confession or nationalist vision, is simply a complete misreading of the moral thinking at work in this long, centuries old, deeply important liberal Christian tradition. It’s a complete misreading of the religious sensibility that, as a resident of Kansas, I still see plenty of evidence of all around me, obtaining in communities and families that are interconnected and wired and far less self-sufficient that many who prattle on about “heartland values” insist on making them out to be, but which issue in friendliness and service and charity nonetheless. And finally, frankly, it is a complete misreading of American republicanism as well.

So now let’s turn to Vice President Vance’s partly thoughtful, but mostly pedantic speech, one that Superman would never be pretentious enough to give. In talking about citizenship, Vance starts by making a serious, complicated point:

Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we're doing [in the Trump administration] is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It's hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.

That social bonds and civic strength develop organically over time through the routines of ordinary life is an undeniable communitarian truth; the whole notion of “social capital” is built upon that understanding. And hence, it’s not unreasonable to see the challenges of ethnic, religious, racial, cultural, and (I think especially) linguistic diversity as genuine ones, ones which immigration restrictions might be an at least partial solution to. There is good research in support of this—but also evenmoregood research that challenges it, making the argument that the obstacles posed by diversity are actually, when one controls for technological distractions and economic barriers which prevent people from interacting as humans (anthropologically social creatures that we are) normally would, quite small, and in any case that such obstacles, absent political polarization, actually fall quite fast.* Robert Putnam, the scholar who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded in a later study that the difficulty Vance highlights is a short-term one, one that—in immigrant societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.”

Presumably, Vance—or at least his speech-writers—are smart enough to know all this. Which means that in holding to this argument, he unintentionally (or, who knows—maybe intentionally!) reveals that his hope through serving in the Trump administration isn’t to fine-tune immigration policy, but rather to change America  away from being an immigrant society at all. And his case for this is plainly ideological—or even, I think, theologico-political, and not in a good way. In the most notorious passage in his speech, he claims:

If you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself. If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

Some of the reasoning here is obviously puerile. (“Must we admit all of them tomorrow?” So, you’re assuming that “hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence”—perhaps in part because their own French or Japanese or Canadian or British or Italian or Australian or Norwegian political cultures have long socialized them to accept similar principles of government by consent and natural rights—actually would all want to come to the United States in the first place?) And some of it worryingly strange. (As John Ganz pointed out, the Anti-Defamation League is hardly a “woke” entity these days, but somehow Vance nonetheless thinks it important to insist to castigate them, suggesting that he really does think that anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and others so-inclined should be given a pass, presumably because they had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.) But the parts of it which bother me the most are, I think, anti-republican in the most malicious way.

The republicanism of Thomas Jefferson has been endlessly analyzed, and no doubt will long continue to be. But broadly speaking, Jefferson’s republicanism was a fascinating—some would say incoherent—mixture of the aristocratic and the democratic, a mixture of Enlightenment confidence, agrarian sentiment, and noblesse oblige. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is not a crystalline distillation of all those ideas, but it does hit all the main points of it, especially as its ideas were later amplified and refined through centuries of American experience and practice. Jefferson’s vision was one of rational human beings exercising their natural right to collectively achieve independence, not solely or even primarily in order to remain virtuous farmers, or to instantiate through the power of a new social contract their own preferred res publica, but simply in order for their personal and communal development, as productive citizens, to be free from the interfering interests of powerful others in their civic spaces. Whatever the inconsistencies one might find in this theoretical framework, it is a substantive one, reflective not of unstated assumptions about some natural necessity regarding borders and identity, but rather of the explicitly stated assumption that a God-and-nature-given sensibility will show the rightness of a free people being able to work out their independence as part of civil order they choose for themselves, absent any distant hierarchy (whether spatially or temporally).

No one actually familiar with the philosophical and historical arguments here can deny that notions of sovereignty—of the right of a people to collectively define and govern their communities, including the borders thereof—were an important component of these republican visions that shaped America’s political culture. But Vance would have us believe that sovereignty needs to be the central concern of anyone concerned about citizenship and freedom:

What does it mean to be an American in 2025? For one, I think it has to mean sovereignty. More precisely, American citizenship must mean belonging to a nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern world that's hellbent on dissolving borders and differences in national character.

The Declaration is by no means a culturally placeless document; among the particulars that Jefferson levied against King George were claims that his actions were stirring up the continent’s native inhabitants to war and allowing the Catholic French to establish a dangerous foothold in Canada. Jefferson was not so idealistic as to ignore all concerns about security and identity. But the power of the document—and really, the power of this kind of liberal republicanism in general—is the way it connects with sentiments of liberty whose natural rightness were, in Jefferson’s view, becoming undeniable with the transformations which moved Western civilization away from the ancient and medieval worlds, and towards a more rights-based one. Jefferson’s embrace of the Enlightenment is hardly defensible in every particular, especially when it comes to race and religion. But the fact that America’s political culture became entwined with Jefferson’s hopes—his belief that, as he put it in one of the final letters he ever wrote, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God”—is inseparable from what this country has meant to the history of the world. To reduce that all to obsessions over sovereignty (and apparently not so much, in Vance’s mind, popular and democratic sovereignty, which is a crucial aspect of self-governance, but rather martial sovereignty, since he seems especially worked up about the fact that “so many young people…say that they would not die for their own country…[or] put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for our common nation”) is a serious conceptual loss.

Fortunately, the history of America is filled with people who have understood this country’s civic self-conception more accurately than Vice President Vance does. President Abraham Lincoln, for one, who in perhaps his greatest and most influential speech, emphasized that the carnage of the Civil War, and the kind of community those who waged it were motivated by, was one characterized by a simple, singular “proposition”: “that all men are created equal.” But also, how about the political theorist, and refugee from the Holocaust, and naturalized U.S. citizen, Hannah Arendt? There’s isn’t a smidgen of flakey idealism to be found in her writing—and yet, her whole understanding of her adopted country began with her appreciation of the power of the demos to build civic spaces and secure liberty through revolutionary action, action which is not dependent upon some kind of prior security, but upon a spontaneity available to all. There is, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader, devout (however flawed) Christian, and democratic socialist, whose commitment to all three of those collections of moral principles formed the pillars of the “beloved community” that he believed all free people ought to and someday would be able partake of, with Jefferson’s words in the Declaration guiding him towards his refusal “to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” And what about Zohran Mamdani, the likely future Mayor of New York City? On July 4^th, he posted his sentiments: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.” And Vance—kind of like McCarthy, come to think of it—found that bland statement of liberal patriotism simply horrifying. “There is no gratitude in those words, Vance ranted. “He dares on our 249th anniversary to congratulate [America] by paying homage to its incompleteness and to its, as he calls it, contradictions?....Who the hell does he think that he is?”

Well, for one thing, he appear to think—if only in terms of structure, not substance—pretty much the exact same way Vance himself thinks, if he were only honest or self-reflective enough to notice it, since our Vice President actually ends his own speech saying “we must get to work”—which I think must mean that even he agrees that the work of American citizenship is, well, “unfinished.” But that’s just more puerile rhetoric from angry man, or at least a man who knows his position in the Trump administration and the plaudits he receives from the MAGA base depends upon his performative anger.

A better answer, of course, is that Mamdani, like all good Americans this summer, may not think he’s Superman, but he’s surely been inspired by Malik Ali, the falafel vendor who believes in Superman, jumps into a crater to help him up during his first tangle with the Hammer of Barovia/Ultraman, and then is pointlessly murdered by Lex Luthor while the latter tries to get Superman to tell him the location of his home. Because Superman does have a home, a place—a place of homely, maybe even “bland” liberal republican and Christian virtues, all that not particularly sovereign stuff about doing good and feeling compassion and treating everyone equally and trying again and again, despite all his and our limitations and mistakes. It’s the sort of place that teaches a person to, when offered a falafel by a vendor after saving someone from being hit by a taxi, accept it gratefully.

Did the Kents introduce Superman to falafels while he was growing up? Probably not—probably he came to like them because he’s just another struggling modern person, appreciating the good food and other good works human beings can achieve. There is a substance to this very American, very liberal, very “bland” struggle. It’s a substance I’m happy to admit is in some ways parasitic upon, and therefore must necessarily connect to, all sorts of deeper traditions and values and visions; there’s a reason why I call myself a communitarian and a civic republican and a Christian, after all. But to allow the fact that the Christianity and republicanism and community attachments of modern Americans (like, I think, James Gunn’s Superman) tend to be rather liberal to become a reason to reject their sources entirely is the worst sort of cutting off your nose to spit in your own face. Of course, when you’re talking about a political movement that’s all about reacting against the America that actually exists, not to reform or improve or correct it but rather to just reject its reality, then maybe that kind of cutting and spitting is what passes for respectable thought. It wins awards from the Claremont Institute, apparently.

Thoughts on MacIntyre

Via Alan Jacobs, I’ve learned that Alasdair MacIntyre passed away on Thursday, at the age of 96. Unlike other philosophers, theologians, and political theorists I’ve written memorials to on my blog over the years, MacIntyre’s work—which engaged deeply with issues of ethics, Aristoteliansim, and rationality—never had a major impact on my own. Still, I don’t see how any English-speaking student of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped by After Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981; I was, like everyone else, and in that sense I owe him as much a debt as any other thinker I linked to above.

For a long time, my understanding of that debt was inextricable from the liberal-communitarian debates which academic philosophers and political theorists (including folks like me who were trained to become such, and for whom even if it didn’t quite work out that way, still can’t get that debate off my mind) who are today in their 50s were inundated with in graduate school. MacIntyre always denied being a communitarian, though he was lumped in with them anyway, and I think not inappropriately so. Beyond all the sturm und drang which attend any kind of intellectual argument over the drawing of disciplinary and ideological lines, there remains the simple fact that MacIntyre self-professed “revolutionary Aristotelianism” ultimately pointed to the local community, to the centrality of tradition, and to the continuity of stories and language—in other words, to things and phenomena very much beyond the ambit of the sovereign, rights-bearing individual—as the starting point to any of kind rationally defensible moral philosophy, to say nothing of any kind of actual civic health. By making the—I still think highly persuasive—argument that liberal individualism leaves us with what he called a mere “emotivism” as a basis for understanding, interpreting, and judging our own and others’ actions, he absolutely add significantly to a broad set of communitarian ideas which are still valid today.

Of course, today it is the postliberals who are most interested in claiming the communitarian MacIntyre for themselves. As bizarre that MacIntyre himself apparently found the prospect that his writings had somehow inspired people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others to embrace the goal of a retreat from and an overturning of the current liberal order, MacIntyre’s contempt for the conservative acceptance of capitalist inequality (when asked in 1996 what he still retained from his pre-Aristotelian Marxist phase, MacIntyre simply stated “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post”) probably isn’t enough to prevent that appropriation. Fred Dallmayr—who, as I’ve written, understood what it means to move beyond liberalism much better than most of those who parade that label—noted in a chapter from his book Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World that MacIntyre’s thinking, which he called “stellar,” nonetheless evinces a certain “metaphysical realism” and “functionalism,” thereby undermining ways of thinking about our situation which call for a more immanent, more attendant, more patient approach. MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelianism absolutely does not call for a revolutionary communitarian imposition, but it’s possible the way in which he formulated those ideas opened up an interpretation of them that he firmly disagreed with.*

But it would be wrong to make any set of reflections of MacIntyre’s immense philosophical achievements to rest entirely upon the political contestation over his prioritization of community. Far better, I think, would be to say something about how MacIntyre defined the communities of tradition, locality, and story in question. Because that can take us in an interesting direction.

In a book of MacIntyre’s that doesn’t appear to me to get much critical praise, but which was very important to me once upon a time (maybe even more so than After Virtue), he explored a fundamental, philosophical challenge to communitarian ideas, though he didn’t use that language to set up the problem. Essentially: if you’re not going to employ universalist concepts whose rationality are available to all individuals equally, and rather are going to insist upon the priority of concepts that have some communal, historical, or cultural particularity, then how can you avoid relativism? In short (and as the title of the book in questions asked): if you’re going to tie the possibility of rational, moral judgment to particular communities, then Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? should we employ? MacIntyre’s answer to these questions is dense and rewarding, and pretty much impossible to briefly summarize. But the first step is recognizing how forthright he is in accepting the puzzle. There is no attempt to sideline what it means accept that Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment, cannot be made logically universal:

But since practical reasoning, as Aristotle understands it, involves the capacity to bring the relevant premises concerning good and virtues to bear on particular situations and since this capacity is inseparable from, is indeed a part of, the virtues, including justice, it is also the case that one cannot be practically rational without being just. And for reasons which are in essentials the same as those which entailed the conclusion that one cannot be just apart from membership in some particular polis, one cannot be practically rational apart from membership in some particular polis. That one’s rationality should be not merely supported by but partly constituted by one’s membership in and integration into a social institution of some particular type is a contention very much at odds with characteristically modern views of rationality (p. 123).

Philosophical liberals will, of course, tear their hair out at that conclusion, but the rigor with which he makes this argument has stood the test of time: we are not self-constructing, but rather socially constituted beings, and thus mostly think, and judge, by and through those institutions and histories and forms which characterized our constitution. Okay—but does that mean all of them? Obviously not; some communal phenomena and constructions are far more relevant to questions of justice and rationality than others. For MacIntyre, the primary one—obviously so, given the importance he attaches to stories—is language, and the structural forms by which language is conveyed. On his reading of history, the boundaries of any shared, spoken, written language are what give us linguistic communities, which in turn provide our social communities. He never quotes Herder or Gadamer in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?, but he’s plainly working in the same vein as them: trying to articulate, in Aristotelian terms, a philosophical hermeneutics, a way of understanding the constituting power of language over time and through the social bonds and interactions which define us.

The complaint about linguistic communities is, of course, obvious: languages change! They change through translation, through interpretation, through just the generational process by which stories that revealed to one set of listeners one set of references upon which they could reason, end up revealing to another, later, set of listeners an entirely different set of references, because of geographic or technological or cultural change. MacIntyre acknowledges this, insisting the every tradition is open--by definition, as a spoken, written, particular thing—to evolution: “[T]he time and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through the language-in-use which gives expression to [their tradition] may encounter another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use, and may discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history, and their own language-in-use, it [nonetheless] provides a standpoint from which, once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second language, the limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within their own tradition” (pp. 387-388).

That’s a long sentence, and appropriately so, because he’s talking about a long process. (Whether his own articulation of Aristotelianism supported it or not, his work on thinking through the real world process of phronesis absolutely had a patient, immanent character to it.) MacIntyre is telling us that in encountering differences, and as we learn about them and even embrace them, there will always be a constant need to maintain our own received traditions, stories, and language—not to defend them from some kind of pollution, but because it is through working through their interaction with one another that we can see clearly what one story can teach which another story cannot.

It's worth saying in conclusion that, dense as MacIntyre’s work often was, he could be viciously funny (at least in an academic sense). One of my favorite passages from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has stayed with me for decades, because it’s such a thorough dumping on those who talk blithely about “the Western tradition” or “the Christian tradition” as something to be defended. Building upon his own careful philosophical consideration of linguistic communities and historical traditions, he takes the time castigate the type of teaching every one of us who has ever had to take on a survey course usually fall into, faulting both modernity, but also a flawed conservatism that doesn’t understand what it’s about:

The type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges [guilty!], in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else as is possible if one is to reach Satre by the end of the semester. If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a reintroduction to the culture of past traditions, but is a tour through what is in effect a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reaching of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as “the Judeo-Christian tradition” and sometimes “Western values.” The writing of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives, such as William J. Bennett, turn out in fact to be one more stage in modernity’s cultural deformation of our relationship to the past (pp. 385-386).

It’s not surprising that a man who could write a passage like that was the kind of professor who insisted on referring to his students as “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and once handed out a “B minus minus” as a grade. Thinkers like this leave a profound legacy, and even if MacIntyre’s is, I fear, fated to be misappropriated, his own arguments make it clear that, so long as we speak our language and tell our stories, there are always practical possibilities for some St. Benedict, like MacIntyre himself, to come along a remind us of the immense gifts of connection and continuity we possess. Requiescat in pace, sir.

*Update, 5/27/2025: Noah Millman’s tribute to MacIntyre is really superb, and in talking about his piece with our mutual friend Damon Linker, Damon made an observation which clarifies what I was gesturing at in this paragraph very well: “In the end, though, I’m not a MacIntyre admirer. I get my Aristotle from Strauss. And the problem Noah notes early on in his piece — of MacIntyre projecting Aristotelian theory onto the lived reality of the ancient and medieval worlds — is a big problem and the ultimate source of the influence he had on the ‘postliberal’ right. This influence made MacIntyre uncomfortable, but it was his own fault for eliding crucial distinctions in a way that made it sound like he was describing a lost world of moral wholeness and meaning that was banished by the Enlightenment, etc. That’s garden-variety reactionary romanticism, and it’s unfortunate MacIntyre gave it fuel.”