American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War

by D.G. Hart

American Catholic places the rise of the Unites States' political conservatism in the context of ferment within the Roman Catholic Church. How did Roman Catholics go from being perceived as un-American to becoming the most vocal defenders of the United States as the standard bearer in world history for political liberty and economic prosperity? D. G. Hart charts the development of the complex relationship between Roman Catholicism and American conservatism, and shows how these two seemingly antagonistic ideological groups became so intertwined in advancing a certain brand of domestic and international politics.

Roman Catholics, contrary to the standard narrative, were some of the most assertive political conservatives directly after World War II, and their brand of politics was one of the most influential means by which Roman Catholicism came to terms with American secular society. They did so at precisely the same time that bishops determined the church needed to update its teaching about its place in the modern world. Catholics grappled with political conservatism long before supposed rightward turn at the time of the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.

Hart follows the course of political conservatism from John F. Kennedy, the first and only Roman Catholic President of the United States, to George W. Bush, and describes the evolution of the Church and its influencet on American politics. By tracing the roots of Roman Catholic politicism in American culture, American Catholic argues that Roman Catholicism's adaptation to the modern world, whether in the United States or worldwide, was as remarkable as its achievment is uncertain. In the case of Roman Catholicism, the effects of the religion on American politics and political conservatism are indisputable.

Genres: American History

280 pages, Hardcover

Published October 15, 2020

About the author

Darryl G. Hart (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) directs the honors programs and faculty development at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and serves Westminster Seminary California as adjunct professor of church history. He has written or edited more than fifteen books, including Defending the Faith, a biography of J. Gresham Machen. He is coeditor of the American Reformed Biographies series.

Reviews

[Kimba Tichenor · Rating 4 out of 5]

D. G. Hart, an associate professor of history at Hillsdale College, draws on published primary sources and secondary sources to examine the rise of conservatism in the United States against the backdrop of growing US Catholic political involvement in the postwar era. Specifically, he focuses on how US Catholics, whose patriotism at the beginning of the century was considered suspect because of papal authority, became an integral part of movement conservatism. To this end, he delves into debates within the Catholic Church on Americanism and modernism as well as into the writings of prominent conservative Catholics, such as William F. Buckley, L. Brent Bozell, Michael Novak, and George Weigel. Although the arguments of these conservative Catholics were by no means identical, they each saw Catholicism as having an important role to play in the moral and political rejuvenation of the country under conservative auspices.

The book offers an excellent overview of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States and how two Catholic political presidential nominees -- Al Smith and John F. Kennedy-- fought to overcome American prejudices about papal influence. Similarly, the author's discussion of the Church's condemnation of Americanism, that is, accommodating the church's teachings to freedom, democracy and popular sovereignty, and how Vatican II overturned this condemnation is very thorough.

That said, there are some noticeable gaps in the discussion of postwar politics. For example, although the author acknowledges how the emergence of identity politics in the 1960s and 1970s confounded and disoriented conservatives whose focus had been on anti-Communism and limited government, he devotes very little space to the social issues that became politicized with this turn, that is, women's rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ rights. The author's minimalist approach to these topics is surprising given how important these issues have become for religious conservatives today (often serving as the litmus test for political candidates and for judicial appointments) and given how deeply these issues divided Catholics in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. the mass flight of American nuns from the Church, the founding of Catholics for Choice in 1973, the establishing of DignityUSA, a ministry for LGBTQ Catholics in 1969).

I would like to thank NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a helpful history of Catholics in America during the last century. Hart discusses the key tension for American Catholics: trying to reconcile the American ideals of democracy and religious liberty with traditional Catholic teaching on submitting to church hierarchy. Catholic teaching on submission to the pope seems to contradict the American political system of people voting for leaders.

The primary example of this American Catholic tension is John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic American president. Imagine this scenario: If the Pope gave JFK a direct command, does JFK have to submit to the Pope? This question does not just apply to the president, it also applies to every American Catholic. What do they do if the Pope commands something? Every American Catholic has to answer this question in some way. From this, we see that American Catholics have to live in tension with a political system that cuts against the grain of Catholic teaching.

Hart does a good job in working through JFK's presidency and the Catholic tensions there. This material was wonderful. JFK was a key turning point in American history. One historian described it as the end of "Protestant America." Hart discusses the issues around JFK’s funeral service which was a traditional Catholic service in Latin. This ceremony was rather strange for much of Protestant America. At one point in the funeral, Jackie Kennedy genuflected before Cardinal Cushing and kissed his hand. While this action was a common Catholic practice, some were rather offended at it. What did this genuflecting mean? Was the President less than a Catholic Cardinal? What about separation of Church and State?

I think Hart is at his best when he is working through specific historical moments, like these around JFK’s funeral.

The middle section of the book was slow and it seemed to wander a bit. In the middle part, Hart focused on the ideas of various writers rather than specific historical events. The history of ideas is important but it wasn’t always clear why these ideas were being discussed. If Hart had grounded the ideas in specific moments in American history, that would have helped draw out the tensions he was highlighting. For example, Hart could have discussed other key Catholics in American society and how they were wrestling with this tension in their lives. Jim Lovell, of the Apollo Space program, comes to my mind. How did his Catholicism shape his work with NASA?

I was also hoping to see Hart explain more of how Catholics influenced the rise of the Evangelical Right and the Pro-life movement. It seems this tension that Hart is discussing applies there also. It is also significant that many Catholic politicians disregard Catholic teaching on Abortion and Marriage. Hart did not get into that material very much. He referenced some ideas in that direction but not specific events or moments.

The end of the book was helpful as Hart covers more recent Catholic figures, such as Richard Neuhaus and Ross Douthat. In the last section, Hart shows how the tension for American Catholics has not gone away. He highlights this with his discussions on Neuhaus, First Things, and president Bush.

In summary, this quote highlights the key issue for American Catholics: “There is no longer one way to do theology, to worship at Mass, to confess sin, or to prayer,” Dolan wrote. “There are various ways of being Catholic, and people are choosing the style that best suits them.” Loc. 3387 of 4362

[Lloyd Earickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Religion has a unique role in American history.  Many of the colonies established along the Atlantic seaboard which eventually fought a revolution and became the first thirteen United States were founded by religious sects seeking a place to flourish, or to escape persecution, away from the strictures of English and European religious establishments.  Where in England the Puritans had a poor reputation for their stubborn insistence on addressing everyone with informal thees and thous, in America they provided a foundational ethic of modesty and hard work.  Significantly, these various sects, in forming the United States, from their experience established and enshrined the importance of religious toleration.

At the time, this religious toleration applied primarily to various types of Protestantism.  Catholicism was more or less tolerated with a degree of suspicion, and Judaism also, but, like many of the other founding principles, rights, and freedoms established in the Constitution, this limited religious toleration of the time laid the groundwork for the expansive religious toleration as the freedom for religious exercise is conceived today.  Significantly, the so-called free exercise clause of the first amendment to the Constitution did not establish a purely secular state.  It did not establish freedom from religion, as other democratic revolutions would, but a freedom for religion.

Indeed, the separation of church and state enshrined in the same amendment under the establishment clause has long existed in a certain tension with the free exercise clause.  In a majority-Protestant population, and with Founders who used the language of religion, albeit not a specific denomination’s, to establish the principles upon which the republic is founded, it was perhaps inevitable that a kind of civil religion should arise.  Debate continues today about that tension between establishment and exercise, fueled in more modern times by determined secularism, the struggles of the Cold War, and the avowed atheism of ideologies like communism and political systems like the USSR.

This is background to a simple statement, which many Americans take for granted, that there should be a separation between the church and the state.  Indeed, the establishment clause, which creates that separation, is seen as integral to the free exercise clause, for if a state religion should be established, it would inevitably impinge upon free exercise.  Dominant Protestantism and the American civil religion easily incorporate and adapt to these conditions, but other religions do so less readily.  Indeed, it may be the dominant factor behind a lingering suspicion of Catholicism which endured well into the twentieth century, for Catholicism traditionally is a fundamentally theocratic faith.

It is from this point that American Catholic picks up its argument, which is…well, it’s hard to say with specificity.  Hart seems to set out to explore a few core questions – How did the American Catholic church resolve the inherent conflict between the US tradition of religious toleration and the papal teaching of the Church’s temporal authority over states?  How did American Catholicism become a driving force in the conservative movement?  How did American Catholicism influence, and how was it influenced by, the changes in the greater Catholic church in the mid-twentieth century? – but if there is a unifying argument he is attempting to make, it eluded me in lengthy, achronological discussions of various and unfamiliar religious thinkers and writers of mostly the mid-twentieth century.

Do not take this as too harsh a critique, for American Catholic was highly educational.  The history of Catholicism in the US, and its interaction with events in the mid-twentieth century, are topics with which I had only the most glancing of familiarity, and I learned an enormous amount from American Catholic about aspects of history which are rather outside my usual areas of study.  I was never bored reading it, but it also didn’t really have a coherent story to tell.  Even a science book like Charge presents a certain unity of structure, which was mostly absent from American Catholic.  Perhaps that is a deliberate reflection of the somewhat chaotic cultural processes which the book describes.

The other issue with the book is its narrow focus.  While Hart tries to acknowledge, in places, that his chosen lens of analysis is not the only tool by which to understand the events which he examines, there remains a certain sense of the old hammer-nail adage to, for instance, the examination of Catholicism’s role in the rise of the American conservative movement, or the influence of American Catholicism on the events and decisions of, and stemming from, the second Vatican council.  Since these events are inextricable from other cultural shifts and impetuses, the result is sometimes myopic, leaving the reader to feel we are only seeing part of the picture.  To present more would rather undermine the book’s deliberate focus, but there almost needs to be a companion analysis or history piece to provide that additional context.

Of far more interest are the theological arguments, especially in the first half of the book and leading up to the second Vatican council.  Traditionally, the Catholic church called for a state religion – Catholicism, naturally – subservient to the spiritual and temporal authority of the Pope, and endorsed divine-right monarchy as the closest reflection of God’s will.  Indeed, it maintained a suspicion of liberalism, religious freedom, and democracy well into the twentieth century, in large part driven by the avowedly secular turn of most European democratic movements.  America’s Catholics, though, consistently argued that America was different.  Then, when the second Vatican council embraced pluralism, at least to a certain extent, America’s Catholics…continued to argue that America was different.  Hart does a much better job presenting the pre-2nd council theological debates than those coming after its decisions.

Perhaps of the greatest interest in American Catholic is the acknowledgement of some of the foundations, largely from the political and cultural movements of the 1960s, of the modern tensions between establishment and exercise.  These are perhaps most dramatically encapsulated in recent court cases involving instances where free religious exercise of an individual affects others.  At the heart of these cases and the public debates surrounding them is that which made the difference between the American Founding’s concept of religious freedom, and that enacted by other democratic polities, such as France: freedom for religion versus freedom from religion.  Hart's book does not give us much insight into where the debate might go, but it does help elucidate some of its origins.  Catholicism has played a significant role in the US, especially after the Second World War, and American Catholic, for all its sometimes chaotic presentation, offers important history and insight into that role.

[Mark Seeley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book as it follows the trajectory of my life, remembering the assassination JFK when I was in 3rd grade to the present debates with current thinkers like Brad Gregory, Patrick Deenen and Ross Douthat.

As a hardened Protestant, I was unfamiliar with many of the names. . . John Courtney Murray, George Weigel, Brent Bozell. And the particular tensions between Catholic orthodoxy and American ideals of freedom and democracy.

I think the subtext of the book is a moral tale about assimilating modernity into the life of the church. Hart tells the story of traditional Catholic orthodoxy sucumbing to liberal or "Americanist" ideals and beliefs regarding liberty and democracy.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Jason S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Traces the Americanist thinking among Roman Catholics in the US during the 20th century. At many points reads more like history of conservatism and National Review. Hard to follow the thesis