A number of long-term trends, including the collapse of mainline Protestantism, has led to the death of religious liberty, killed by the very groups who long defended it.
The answer, and the second reason religious liberty is dying, is that liberalism has abandoned the distinction of public and private life—and the necessity of keeping government out of private life, once so crucial to it.
In short, many people running elite institutions in this country think of “traditional” Catholics, or faithful Christians of any sort, as enemies. They are using the power of these institutions to reduce legal protections for these religions because they see them as threats to concerns of their new political coalition.
Which brings to mind one of the many great books I have started but not finished: Subtracting Christianity A collection of writings by Joseph Sobran, printed by Fritzgerald Griffin Foundation.
Catholics have rightly been appalled by the spectacle of the FBI investigating “radical traditionalist Catholic groups.” If it were not clear already, this is part of a broader campaign against what the National Security apparatus of the United States sees as “disinformation” and “threats” to the government. This campaign appears to be coordinated with elements of the Biden Administration and possibly with help from former members of the Obama administration as well.
The most striking instances of this are the prosecution of Donald Trump and those involved in the protests of the 2020 presidential election in January of 2021. It appears for all the world that the Biden administration and its allies are using the administrative state to attack its perceived enemies, which apparently includes faithful Catholics.
How have we come to this pass? Catholics have come to trust that such boundaries would not be crossed, and some commentators have wondered how liberalism could embrace such obvious violations of religious liberty. Especially since the end of WWII, Catholics have come to expect the government to protect them from the depredations of others. Until recently, it did. How did this come about?
A couple of long-term trends are at work here. The first is the collapse of the old mainline Protestant churches. The reason why this affects religious liberty is that, in practice, religious liberty as Americans understand it was always predicated upon a rapprochement among the various Protestant bodies in this country. Religious liberty allowed the potentially warring factions of Protestantism to work together; this was a necessity during the American Revolution, but the Constitution made it permanent.
When Catholics became a large enough minority in this country, and nativist anti-Catholicism reared its head, it was the old mainline Protestant bodies—the more liberal ones, mostly—that defended religious liberty for things like parochial schools in the Supreme Court and other elite institutions. With the decline of old mainline churches in the 1960s, this compromise—in which the various Protestants agreed to safeguard Catholic religious liberty in order to safeguard it for themselves—collapsed with them.
Suddenly, the Protestants most likely in the past to deny Catholics their full religious liberty—mostly Evangelical Protestants—became allies with Catholics against a new, more secular elite, as embodied in Roe v. Wade and other milestones. Catholics gained political allies but lost the patronage of the old WASP establishment that once protected Catholics’ religious liberty.
A more secular elite has succeeded the old WASP establishment, one that is no longer concerned with protecting religious liberty, as previously understood, because conservative Catholics and others who benefited from this are no longer part of their governing coalition. This is reflected in changes these elites have sought to promote in American society.
From cradle to grave, progressive elites have been bred since the ’60s to believe that racism, sexism, and other past evils were going to disappear from all areas of life, not just politics. Once the older generation of Americans, with their racism and homophobia died off, so the thinking went, their beliefs would die with them. This belief can be summed up in the phrase “the right side of history.”
This phrase was prominent in progressive rhetoric during the Obama administration, of course. I never took this kind of talk seriously, since my training as a historian led me to regard these types of ideologically charged beliefs with suspicion. Hindsight proves how deadly serious most progressives took it. The election of Obama seemed to have been a signal for these elites that the time had now come to cleanse the nation of its sins.
As we all know, “history” had other plans. Trump’s election shook them to their core, as it demonstrated that all of their planning and activism to control institutions could fail. Much of the hysteria emanating from the Left, but also the brazen attempts at undermining Trump’s election, stems from the puncturing of the narrative these elites created for themselves about the way the world is supposed to work.
That may be the case, but what does this have to do with the Church, or even religion in general, other than its being part of the social fabric which the Left wishes to transform? The answer, and the second reason religious liberty is dying, is that liberalism has abandoned the distinction of public and private life—and the necessity of keeping government out of private life, once so crucial to it.
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