Catholic Social Teaching and the Non-Catholic Writers Who Advocate It
By: John Thomas
Tags: Politics, Christianity, Spirituality, Culture, Religion

Should Protestant conservatives follow the political doctrines of Rome?

Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash

The call for conservatives to adopt and implement the Catholic social teachings of human dignity, solidarity and subsidiarity has been steadily growing over the last several years. What’s surprising is that this call has come from unlikely places.

In 2016, National Affairs founding editor and veteran of the Bush administration, Yuval Levin, published, The Fractured Republic, in which he argued the need “to work toward a modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is putting power, authority, and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.” For Levin, the tendency in our society to appeal either to hyper-individualism or a centralized welfare-state has hollowed out our “mediating institutions”: families, schools, non-profits, and various other civic organizations, and the only way we will be able to address the challenges that lay ahead is by empowering those institutions to implement solutions at the face-to-face level.

To be sure, Levin articulates the Catholic concept in somewhat pragmatic terms. His version of subsidiarity is devoid of its more Catholic, spiritual flavor and is instead offered as a path forward simply because centralization is no longer realistic in our diffuse society and radical individualism is harmful as evidenced by any number of disheartening metrics well-known today. And for Levin, subsidiarity isn’t a cure all, he merely suggests that an adherence to it would mean “an incremental revival.” In another place Levin muses that subsidiarity “…is a way to live in tension, not resolve the tension.”

This summer, writer Jake Meador called conservatives and evangelicals to consider the merits of both solidarity and subsidiarity in his book, In Search of the Common Good. Meador refers to our current cultural malaise much the same way Levin does, and claims “solidarity gives us a way of thinking about politics that foregrounds peace as a political goal.” This peace is built on the understanding that “life goes better for us when we share common purposes, hopes, and goals with the people closest to us, either relationally or physically.”

This peace, however, is not merely the lack of conflict. Meador quotes Timothy Keller to argue for a more holistic picture of peace, invoking the idea of shalom, or right relationship. Writes Keller,

“Just as rightly related physical elements form a cosmos or tapestry, so rightly related human beings form a community.”

Medor spends less time on subsidiarity, though unlike Levin, notes its Catholic origins. He praises the doctrine for its ability in helping “us to recognize the unique social utility offered by different human institutions and frees up those communities to do what they are best at.”

Also this summer, Peter Wehner, the veteran of three presidential administrations, championed Catholic social teaching as a way to heal our “frayed republic” in his book, The Death of Politics. While Wehner is the only of the three authors to commend the totality of Catholic social teaching to conservatives and evangelicals, he provides the least detail about what doing so could look like. Whereas Levin’s is a book-length treatment advocating subsidiarity, and Meador’s is a detailed and precise call to embrace both solidarity and subsidiarity, Whener offers only definitions of the three cornerstones of Catholic social teaching, where they come from, and bundles his call to adopt them with four aspirations Christians should have when engaging politics.

Wehner seems to envy the political treatise found within the Catholic tradition and bemoans a lack of “authoritative theological construct in place to check, channel, and refine raw partisanship cloaked in Christian garb.” His appeal to Catholic social teaching is therefore part of a broader call for Christians to adopt a coherent vision of faith and politics.

But is there really such a need among evangelical Christians? While there is certainly much evangelicals like about all three aspects of Catholic social teaching, it is unclear how they represent a departure from the conservative status quo or from what many evangelicals already believe.

Take for example human dignity. This term is found within evangelicalism’s understanding of life, and is in fact one of the driving forces in evangelical political participation. There is perhaps no group that better understands and is more unified around the ideas that humans are distinct in God’s Kingdom and are of particular value in God’s economy than evangelicals are.

As for solidarity, it is at its root level the combination of Jesus’ call to love neighbor as self found in Mark 12:31 and to love the least of these found in Matthew 25:40–45. Evangelicals know these verses well and have access to them in scripture. Is there really a need to read about them in the Centesimus Annus?

While Protestants might not have a perfect understanding of subsidiarity from scripture alone, many conservatives will be familiar with the general tenets of the concept from their understanding of federalism. Though the two aren’t identical, they are close enough to wonder how embracing subsidiarity would represent a departure from the conservative status quo of limited government.

Subsidiarity also represents a unique challenge in that even when it is implemented through the empowerment of “mediating institutions” there are no clear criteria delineating which problems should be solved at which level of society. Meador gives an example, lauding subsidiarity as a way to make the case that health care might be an issue best solved at the federal level. Such a statement is far from unanimously accepted. In fact one Catholic writer, arrives at the exact opposite conclusion, stating, “the ACA is an example of a violation of the principle of subsidiarity, whose repeal would be well called for.”

Finally, all three books position themselves as a way to heal our “fractured” or “frayed” republic. While there are other arguments contained in these works that would undoubtedly have positive and moderating outcomes if implemented successfully by evangelicals and conservatives, it is not clear how adopting Catholic social teaching would contribute to that healing given the left’s hesitancy to recognize the benefits of such implementation. It is no secret that on the left, the doctrine of human dignity is subordinate to the pursuit of individual choice. Doubling down on human dignity, while it is certainly the right thing to do, won’t bridge the gap between progressives and conservatives any more today than it has in the past.

Nor will adopting an ethic of subsidiarity. Levin comments on what it is about subsidiarity that worries progressives, writing,

“[Progressives] implicitly believe that most local (public and private) American institutions are thoroughly infested with racism and elite class animosities, so that decentralization involves handing over power to institutions that can’t be trusted with it because they are structurally oriented in favor of the maintenance of privilege, rather than, as conservatives incline to think of them, better situated to understand and attempt to address social problems at a personal level.”

While this snapshot of America’s local institutions doesn’t give everyday Americans their due, it is nevertheless how at least some progressives feel about subsidiarity. The point then is that embracing subsidiarity, as envisioned in Catholic social teaching, or by the Protestant and Jewish writers who advocate for it, is not likely to heal our fractured republic.

In The Death of Politics, Peter Wehner quotes a Michael Gerson article from the April 2018 issue of The Atlantic, in which Gerson, describes Catholic social teaching as,

“The doctrinal whole that requires a broad, consistent view of justice, which — when it is faithfully applied — cuts across the categories and cliches of American politics. Of course, American Catholics routinely ignore Catholic social thought. But at least they have it. Evangelicals lack a similar tradition of their own to disregard.”

Evangelicalism specifically and Protestantism in general are decentralized expressions of Christianity and can hardly be faulted for lacking broadly recognized political doctrines similar in scope to Catholic social teaching. Indeed there is a certain irony in lamenting this lack — a natural consequence of the decentralization advocated by subsidiarity. While there might not be a Protestant version to point to, evangelicals, at least in theory, agree with the principles undergirding Catholic social teaching. And with Catholics “routinely ignor[ing]” it, and Protestant and Jewish writers repeatedly advocating it, it is clear that Catholic social teaching is something evangelicals and conservatives already know just as well as their Catholic counterparts. Whether or not it will bring the fruit Levin, Meador, and Wehner anticipate, is less so.

John Thomas is a freelance writer. His writing has appeared at The Public Discourse, The American Conservative, and The Federalist. He writes regularly at Soli Deo Gloria.