in one-dimensional materialism, trivialized life and death, and learned to avoid thinking or talking about life after death.
This book grows out of the Frank M. Covey, Jr. Loyola Lectures in Political Analysis, that Mr. Kraynak delivered in 1998. He takes note of the triumphalism with which liberal democracy has been proclaimed the end form of human government, and of the fact that even conservatism and Christianity have more or less embraced this notion, despite a long tradition of skepticism towards democracy on the part of conservatives in general and the Church in particular. He then proceeds to a powerful argument that this embrace is a mistake, that Christians should keep some critical distance from democracy, and that they should realize that Christianity is more important to democracy than is democracy to Christianity.
of freedom and equality, nor are they easily discarded without removing the core of Christian faith.
What then is the appropriate stance for a Christian to take towards liberal democracy? And what might a more fully and explicitly Christian political system look like? These are the questions that this book seeks to answer.
self-help methods; and death cannot be conquered by anything but an omnipotent God.
to totalitarianism in the twentieth century.
the rights of persons in a liberal democratic political order.
If one accepts the Kantian formulation, as Mr. Kraynak convincingly argues that modern Christians have, then liberal democracy itself becomes a moral imperative, because it is the most effective way to vindicate these universal rights of all persons.
premise of human autonomy or the natural freedom of the autonomous self that underlies most doctrines of rights.
Where Kant's philosophy places its emphasis on the individual and the rights that each individual asserts against the whole world, Christianity is concerned with a much broader picture, with the individual as he relates to God, family, society, and other individuals. It can come as little surprise then that the triumph of Kant's vision has given us an utterly atomized political regime, in which individualism is so rampant that the society barely coheres any longer and there seems to be no greater concern for most people than the material well being of the self. For almost two centuries there was a sufficient residue of Christian morality to hold things together, and the 20th century struggle with totalitarianism gave us the illusion that liberal democracy still served an elevated purpose, but particularly in the 1990s we saw how hollow our society had become, how materialistic, how demoralized.
And yet, even with all these criticisms, there is something undeniably attractive about liberal democracy, even, or especially, for a Christian. For all its faults, liberal democracy has generally delivered a culture in which human suffering is alleviated more efficiently than in any other system and where human dignity is more fully recognized, whatever its basis. What more is it that Christians have a right, even an obligation, to demand from politics? It is here that Mr. Kraynak really challenges not just liberals and libertarians, who are well aware of the conservative critique of their philosophies, but conservatives and Christians as well, asking them to reimagine what kind of political regime we might have.
temporal happiness in accordance with the fallen but rational nature of man.
We can see then how dividing the world into the two cities serves to protect divinely ordained structures from interference by the state, practically removes them from the political sphere, while leaving less important topics to be dealt with politically, though still in accord with Christian prudence.
and this approach is superior to uncompromising ethical idealism or unprincipled expedience.
in ordering and elevating the human soul.
Of course, one suspects that he harbors little hope, and no realistic expectation, that America will anytime soon adopt such a regime, but in his discussion of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, he shows that there is still much justification for such a system and that nations that are still in the process of establishing orderly government might do well to take this option seriously.
or nearly impossible in order to protect the union of male and female and to encourage the procreation and proper rearing of children.
are unworthy tasks of modern educated women.
Much of this will seem like merely the familiar litany of conservative social legislative proposals, but Mr. Kraynak makes it clear that these are not simply political positions that need to fight it out with other coequal alternatives, but moral necessities that must precede the rough and tumble of mere political skirmishing. The legislation produced by the political process--the city of Man--must serve the end of trying to create something approaching a city of God, else Christians are obligated to question the legitimacy of the system. And the issue that this invokes for people of every political and religious persuasion is that if liberal democracy, instead of leading towards the city of God, is actually leading away from it, if liberal democracy has become antithetical to the very Christianity that provides its moral support, then how can democracy survive in the long run? And if it can not survive this self-inflicted damage, then shouldn't we all take a more skeptical look at liberal democracy and examine some alternatives?
despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.
Some will say this goes too far, that it is too dismissive of the good that has been accomplished by the raising of people's living standards, but who, on September 11th, did not welcome the chance to leave behind the atomized, demoralized, utterly empty culture we were becoming. Surely the eagerness with which the entire society embraced the notion that everything had changed suggests that we were just waiting for a change to come, suggests a monumental dissatisfaction with what we had become. And though his advisors backed him off to a more politically correct position, one can not fail to realize that the aspect of the President's summons to arms that has really resonated with Americans is the way in which he has cast this as a crusade, a war of Christianity and Western values against an enemy who opposes both. One can hardly have failed to notice that the events of September 11th unleashed a torrent of God-talk and a public reaffirmation of Christian belief that stunned the rationalist/atheist/leftist intellectual elites into a discombobulated silence and that completely changed the tone of American political discussion. This radical return to a more morally and religiously centered political discourse may well prove to be short lived; it may be little more than the last gasp of religious belief in the West. But it might, on the other hand, mark a turning point, a first shaky step on a path back towards a politics that seeks to create that dim reflection of the city of God. If, by chance, this latter scenario is possible, then Mr. Kraynak has laid out a compelling vision for how we might salvage the city of Man. If the former is true, if America too is to become a post-Christian nation, then Mr. Kraynak has offered a warning that those who welcome this eventuality would do well to take seriously. If, in the eagerness to be done with the restraints of Christianity, liberalism end up destroying liberal democracy too, will it have served humanity well here in the material realm? And suppose, just suppose for a second, that Christianity represents transcendent truth and that Man's Fall, our sinful and mortal natures, can only be redeemed by omnipotent God, then mustn't we owe Him a greater obligation than to tend to our own selfish desires?
not take seriously the existence of evil.
that leads directly to its own atrophy. It must extirpate itself.
In these authors, and in others, we see an emerging strain of thought on the Left that liberalism is untenable without religion, specifically without Christianity, and yet it is intolerable to the Left to accept Christianity. These folks seem content to turn liberal democracy into some kind of suicide pact, rather than reexamine their hostility to religious beliefs. What Mr. Kraynak has done here is to demonstrate that Christians need not play a docile Thelma to liberalism's Louise and take this plunge over the precipice, but can, indeed must, instead recognize that liberal democracy is not an end in itself, but merely a means, and perhaps not the best one, to achieve more important ends. In so doing, he has written a truly fascinating book, one that I fear too few people will ever be forced to grapple with. One can only hope that a mass market edition of the book will one day be forthcoming and reach the wide audience it warrants.
Although the movement has largely flown under media radar, John Paul faces a growing conservative opposition to this embrace of liberalism, understood in the classic sense.
--Duties to God and neighbor come before one�s own rights.
--Pronouncements of a hierarchically structured church grounded in divine revelation take precedence over individual conscience.
--Original sin implies distrust of weak and fallible human beings.
--The common good must come before individuals.
--Charity and sacrificial love are higher goods than the potentially selfish assertion of rights.
I reached Kraynak by telephone at Colgate to discuss this negative judgment about Western, especially American, culture.
Kraynak argued, in fact, that the sexual abuse scandals in the American Church have their roots here.
I asked Kraynak which figures in the American hierarchy he felt were most sympathetic to his concerns. He named Cardinals Francis George and Avery Dulles, along with Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Obviously many Catholics would have reservations about the way Kraynak sizes things up, but he represents an important current of opinion, raising serious questions about the spiritual and moral dangers of consumer culture. This is a familiar discourse from the left; what is intriguing about this movement is that its energy and center of gravity is on the right, seeking to combine doctrinal orthodoxy with a strong counter-cultural impulse.