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Catholics in politics are big in the news these days. But a truly Catholic politics might not be what you think. We talk about the meaning of politics form a Catholic perspective with theologian Andrew Willard Jones author of new book, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics.
Cy Kellett:
What is the place of the church in politics? Andrew Willard Jones is next. Hello, and welcome to Focus, The Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett your host. Before we start, let me just review where we are as Catholics in the public square right now.
Cy Kellett:
The U.S. Supreme Court within its abortion decisions has aroused the upset of many commentators. Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times says the fact that four of the courts, six Roman Catholic justices, and a fifth who was raised Catholic allowed a blatantly unconstitutional lottery remain in place pending appeal has barely been noted publicly.
Cy Kellett:
She says, “No one’s talking about their religious faith and how it affects their abortion rulings.” Nancy Pelosi, she’s a Catholic, she’s the speaker of the U.S. House of Representative. Recently, when she passed a bill that makes abortion more available or protects it more in law, she was asked this the Archbishop of San Francisco warns that the bill is nothing more than a child sacrifice.
Cy Kellett:
He calls on Catholics to fast and pray to defeat this bill. You’re Catholic, your reaction? Speaker Pelosi answered in part that the Archbishop and I have a disagreement about who should decide this. I believe that God has given us a freewill to honor our responsibilities. I don’t even need to go into all the difficulties. The bishops, the U.S. Catholic bishops have had with President Joe Biden regarding abortion and receiving the Eucharist.
Cy Kellett:
The Pope has gotten involved. Then, this is just abortion. I mean, what about Catholics in the public square on issues like marriage and transgenderism, immigration, the death penalty and others? We need to figure out what is our place in the public square and to help us do that. Andrew Willard Jones is here with us. He’s the author of The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics.
Cy Kellett:
Here’s what he had to say about our moment and about how we should understand politics from a Catholic perspective. (silence) Dr. Andrew Willard Jones, Director of Catholic Studies at Franciscan University in Steubenville. Thanks very much for being with us.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Thanks for having me.
Cy Kellett:
I was so excited to see your new book, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics, because I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there’s some controversy about Catholics and politics right now.
Andrew Willard Jones:
I’m vaguely aware of that.
Cy Kellett:
I opened your book and I’m thinking chapter one, because it’s a history of Christians in politics and I’m an American it’s going to be something like John Kennedy, given his talk to the Baptists down in Texas. Maybe Andrew Cuomo at Notre Dame, but no, you started with Adam and Eve.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That’s right, in the beginning.
Cy Kellett:
Why is that? Why would a book about politics start with Adam and Eve?
Andrew Willard Jones:
The general theme or the thesis, the argument I’m making is that this modern conception we have that our social world, our political world, our economic world, our social public world, that’s a world that operates outside of Christianity is mistaken.
Andrew Willard Jones:
In fact, if we go all the way back to the very beginning where we can see who human beings are, in our creative essence, who we are from the very beginning, all of that stuff is there. All of the stuff that we think of as politics that we think of as this public realm is there in the beginning as an aspect of Adam and Eve’s mission to order the world to God.
Cy Kellett:
This is actually somewhat revolutionary than if I follow this through, because what the average modern person and every Christian almost is fully immersed in this way of thinking. Thinks that the church is one of the pressure groups or influencers that operates within a secular society. It can do its thing. It can try to have its influence and it’s perfectly free to operate.
Cy Kellett:
Although, maybe that’s that too is coming slightly into question as we move forward, but maybe not even so slightly. In essence, you see what I’m saying? It’s an operator, just like the Pipefitters Union is an operator or over here maybe public schools are an operator. We have these various communities within the overall secular community.
Cy Kellett:
The church is one of those and we accept that role. Are we wrong to accept that role?
Andrew Willard Jones:
I think so, yes. I think that’s a mistaken understanding and that’s an understanding that has been, like you said, characteristic of modernity. What I’m saying is, what I’m trying to argue is rather that a proper understanding of the church is that the church is the redeeming of mankind in all of our complexity.
Andrew Willard Jones:
When man is created in his entirety to be in communion with God, not in one aspect of his life, not in some spiritual realm, as opposed to a worldly realm, or something like that, but he’s created exactly to order the worldly, to be elevated into the spiritual. That is his commission. The fall and the damaging of his nature is the damaging of that totality of who he is.
Andrew Willard Jones:
The church, salvation history, and then the church is the process of the redemption of man again, in his totality, including his temporal being is being in the world. What that means is that what we tend to think of as the political or the economic, or whatever is integral to the mission of the church itself. This isn’t a secondary thing.
Andrew Willard Jones:
This isn’t like the pursuit of peace, the pursuit of justice, the pursuit of true, just, happy social order is the mission of the church. It’s the mission of the church, of course to extend to order that happiness or that human flourishing past the temporal, into the eternal. To move it past itself into what surpasses it into communion with God.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That ordering of the world itself toward God, isn’t an intrinsic aspect of what the church is, that is the church. A way of thinking about this would be to say that nothing falls outside the mission of the church.
Cy Kellett:
Here’s my problem listening to that. I feel inspired by it. I feel like it really is a revolution in thought, when you think about this because it begins to reorder what you think of yourself as a citizen and as a disciple, and all that. It reorders it all. Here’s my problem, I’m thinking of CNN. If you’re a guest on CNN, they would see this as a threat.
Cy Kellett:
Wait, are you trying to say, you want us to go back to the Middle Ages? I don’t know how else a secular person could respond to this. You’re saying you want the church to be in a position of cultural supremacy like it was in the Middle Ages, or they’d probably say Dark Ages. I don’t believe in the Dark Ages.
Andrew Willard Jones:
[crosstalk 00:07:07] To a certain extent that is, of course, that’s going to be the response of those who are trying to form a unitary power-based society that denies the truth of Christianity. That’s basically the response of the pagan Romans as well, which is the reason why they persecuted the Christians.
Andrew Willard Jones:
There is certain ways that we need to understand what the church is that mitigates that objection. One of them, and a very important one is to understand that the church is not merely the clergy, but it’s the clergy and the laity, it’s the community of the baptized. When I say that what we normally consider as the secular realm is it’s integral to the church, that carries within it the idea of the vocation of the laity.
Andrew Willard Jones:
We’re not saying, I’m not arguing in the book that means the priesthood runs the stock exchange. I’m saying that laity do and the laity need to order that towards the redemption of man. Which is of course, nothing new that is already in, for example, the documents of Vatican too.
Andrew Willard Jones:
What’s new is merely not even new, what’s maybe of note is merely emphasizing what that means. I’m trying to explore what that actually means.
Cy Kellett:
Well, one of the things that it seems to mean would be that the secular telling of history is actually deeply flawed and that it misinterprets what secularity is. Let me put it this way, the narrative that most people would be familiar with would be the modern world overcoming, that the modern world is the overcoming of a period of darkness that came before.
Cy Kellett:
A period of an inability to separate superstition and even religion from what really are properly secular realms. The moving forward progress is a matter of continuing that overcoming. Whereas, what you’re saying would be something more like even the whole modern world.
Cy Kellett:
As secular as it is, and even as anti-Christian as it tends to become over time is actually just a stage in the moving of the church through history. It’s just one more thing for the church to deal with and win for Christ.
Andrew Willard Jones:
The typical modern understanding of history is like you expressed, this idea that as Christianity has peeled back and removed that what’s left is the secular world. That was really there all along. It was just being oppressed by this parasite that’s on top of it. When you pull that off, what you have is what was there, truly there.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That’s not at all the biblical telling of history. In the biblical telling of history, man from the very beginning is ordered to God in his totality in the way in which he orders the world. When he falls, he doesn’t fall into secularity. He falls into the pagan God kingdoms of the age of nature, of The Old Testament, where he falls into Pharaoh, he falls into idolatry.
Andrew Willard Jones:
The whole story of the Old Testament of course is the story of this ever increasing idolatry among the nations. Then, God’s movement to Israel to pull them out of the idolatry, to prepare themselves for Christ who then comes and saves us, not from the secular world, but from the idolatrous world.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Then, we build Christendom. Christendom is a profoundly God-oriented world in everything that it’s doing, it’s orienting towards God, now when Christianity is peeled back in modernity, what we’re building is not a secular world in the sense of a world devoid of worship of gods or of powers.
Andrew Willard Jones:
What we’re rebuilding is a pagan world because that’s the option. From a Christian conception of history, the secular in the sense of a world that’s unconcerned with powers and dominions and unconcerned with rites and rituals, and the proper performance of these sorts of things.
Andrew Willard Jones:
This is not an option. This is an anthropological impossibility. If we abandoned Christianity, what we will move into is a neo-paganism. That’s my argument.
Cy Kellett:
Well, it seems to be being born out everywhere. It really does seem to be being born out everywhere. The analogy between that simple little story right before Abraham comes into the world of the Tower of Babel, it seems like that’s a story about us.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Absolutely. The tragedy of paganism of that self-deification, which I think the essence of paganism is that men trying to make themselves gods, end up being the slaves of their own power. The idols are always fake. This is what the Old Testament people are saying, “Don’t you see, it’s just a piece of wood. You can kick it over.” It’s not real and yet they’re enslaved to it.
Andrew Willard Jones:
The mechanism or the reason they become enslaved to these idols is because they are building the idols in an attempt to dominate their own world. It’s an attempt of self-deification. You have the kings that present themselves as gods to men, as the mediators. This is a mission that is always self-destructive and ends in slavery. Slavery for everyone.
Andrew Willard Jones:
When I say that when we’re moving into a new paganism, it doesn’t mean that we can expect to start worshiping Jupiter again, that’s not the point. The point is that we build structures of power that we end up worshiping because we fear the punishments and desire the rewards that those structures provide us, and we lose control of them. They become gods.
Cy Kellett:
Like Facebook.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Yeah, like Facebook.
Cy Kellett:
People feel enslaved to Facebook. If millions of people are actually enslaved to Facebook. You build these things and then they become the God of your world because you don’t have God in your world.
Andrew Willard Jones:
The insight is to realize that’s all paganism ever was. In the ancient world, that’s all it ever was. It was just different forms of that kind of self-slavery. That is what Christianity comes to save us from, to order our power underneath the infinite power of God. What that does is it means that any instance of human power always is undermined by the transcendent.
Andrew Willard Jones:
It’s always a mediation of transcendent power. It can never be closed in on itself and become absolute. There’s always a humility in human power when it’s ordered to God. That when God has removed, that it becomes rather a scramble for who can present itself as the absolute power. It becomes a fight for domination.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That’s when you get the emergence of the gods, that’s what the gods are. That’s all they are. This is St. Augustin, St. Augustin knew this.
Cy Kellett:
St. Augustine has really all over this book, but I want you to deal with two things with me. Then, we’ll talk about The Two Cities. The immediate question that comes to mind then, if the church is all the way from Adam and Eve, moving through history and its primary function is to make it such that we can have a society that is in communion with God, rather than a society that’s making false gods.
Cy Kellett:
Christendom doesn’t look like a Dark Age, it looks like people struggling to do that. The first question I want to get, I’ll tell you both, and you answer them how you like. The first question I have is then what happened to Christendom? Why did it fail? Then the second question is, if this is what has happened to modernity, is there a path out of it?
Cy Kellett:
That’s not a historical question, and maybe you don’t want to deal with that. Why did Christendom fail then? Why couldn’t we have, for example, the modern era, just be a continuation of Christendom? Then, what’s the path out of the current problem we’re in?
Andrew Willard Jones:
There’s no reason why Christendom had to fail. It’s a tragic story. There’s no necessity to this. What I think we have to realize or see is that Christian order is always vulnerable. It’s always vulnerable to sin because it’s based upon love. We all know from our own relationships, when you love another, you pray that they’ve returned their love.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Your love that you’re showing them has a certain efficacy and encouraging them to return the love, but you’re always exposing yourself to the pain or the vulnerability of them not doing so. What I mean as a society that is based at the piece that it pursues is a piece that’s rooted in charity, it’s a society that’s always vulnerable to sin.
Andrew Willard Jones:
It’s susceptible to the power-hungry, it can be preyed upon. What happens in Christendom I think is that there’s a choice that’s made against God. I think a choice that’s made that’s beginning to be made in favor of human power. That’s explicable in the same sort of way that when you and I were fall into sin, it’s explicable.
Andrew Willard Jones:
We know better, but we do it and that leads us, then there’s a tendency then for a snowballing effect, one vice leads into the next vice. One sin leads into the next sin. We always have an opportunity to repent and return and God-willing, hopefully we will, but that might go on for a while.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That we’re descending into corruption. This happens in the church periodically where you go, where the church, the body of the faithful as a society is it descends into corruption, and then hopefully reforms itself out. It has and it will historically. That goes to the second part of your question.
Cy Kellett:
It’s like 600 years now. You know what I’m saying? You’re saying that this happened and you described perfectly this cycle of decline where you actually lose. This is something I think nobody wants to admit that the modern world, as much as it’s a world of progress is also a world of decline. At what point will this repentance happen? That’s what I’m looking for.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Listen, maybe this gets a little esoteric, but there are cycles and there are patterns and the biblical pattern, if you read the Bible, the plot line that happens over and over again is this is abandonment of God, falling to slavery, crying out for deliverance. Then God moving to deliver them repenting, returning to God, and then doing it again.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Now, this is the plot line of our own spiritual lives. It’s a plot line of the story of salvation history. It’s the plot line of the church in history. What I’m saying is that dynamic happens at different degrees of scale. It’s happening daily in the church, daily in our little lives, it’s happening. It’s happening on a slightly larger scale.
Andrew Willard Jones:
If we pull back from history as a whole, we see that plot line cycling through on a larger scale. What I’m saying is that when you’re saying it’s been 500 years, it’s been 600 years, that’s right. Of decline takes a long time because that’s the way culture works. Then it will no doubt take 100 years, several hundred years to reform.
Cy Kellett:
I see.
Andrew Willard Jones:
I think it will happen. Think about that cycle again, this gets maybe a little bit esoteric, but that cycle of 500 years or so is in the biblical narrative itself. How long is Israel in Egypt? 400 and whatever 30 some years? How long has Judges going on 400 and whatever years, how long is the Davidic Kingdom? 400 and however many years, the cycle.
Andrew Willard Jones:
There’s an anthropological reason for that because that is about the length of time that historical memory resets. The culture shifts. I think that’s how long it’s been, it’s been 400, 500 years since the reformation. Now, we’re resetting. The collapse that we’re witnessing is the end of that cycle. If you ask what I think.
Cy Kellett:
Wonderful insights. Obviously, the metaphor that you draw on is St. Augustine’s metaphor, the city of God and the city of man. You think that even after all this, this 1,500-year-old metaphor is still solid, it still works.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That there are communities that are aiming down, aiming down. They’re trying to secure control over the world. They’re looking down at the world as if they’re the highest thing in the cosmos, and that’s the city of man or the earthly city. Then, there are communities that are looking up that are putting their powers beneath the infinite power of God and attempting to order the world into communion with God.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That’s the city of God. Of course, all of us are members of both cities in different compartments of our lives, in different times in our lives. There are also, just like I was talking about how these patterns are at smaller scale and larger scale, there’s an also historical dynamics that are one city or the other. That where one city or the other is predominant.
Andrew Willard Jones:
With that framework for history allows us to do is to conceive of the totality and the complexity of history without ever introducing some notion of the secular or some notion of something that is not concerned with man’s ultimate end, which is communion with God. That realm doesn’t exist.
Andrew Willard Jones:
The city of man is ultimately leading to perdition and it’s doing that through communion with the devils. It itself has a supernatural orientation, it’s just down instead of up. There isn’t an option for a human orientation that isn’t one or the other.
Cy Kellett:
I suppose this is the lie of the modern secularism that it’s neutral.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That’s right. It’s neutral, but it’s not, it can’t be. The world, if human beings, if we’re right, if Christians are right about the creation of the cosmos and the creation of the cosmos by God for the purpose of being in communion with God. If we’re correct about that, then where would we find an indifferent place?
Andrew Willard Jones:
Where would we find a place that’s indifferent to whether it’s moving to or away from God. It just doesn’t exist. That’s a delusion that human beings create in order to find a place where we don’t have to worry about God.
Cy Kellett:
You remind me of the very first line of the Didache, the teaching of the 12 apostles. There are two ways the way of life and the way of death. They don’t give you a third way.
Andrew Willard Jones:
There’s no third way. That’s right. Where would it be? What would it be?
Cy Kellett:
I think many, many people, and I really do want to say this, I hope that many, many people will pick up this book and read it especially because a lot of our conversation about Catholicism and politics is strikes me as exceedingly petty. It doesn’t really have to do with a desire to revivify the city of God. It has to do with recrimination.
Cy Kellett:
One side you’ve got people saying crazy things, really things that are unjust, like you can’t be a Democrat and be a Catholic. Then on the other side and there’s probably 500 sides, it’s a prism now. It’s not really a dichotomy, but on the other side, you’ve got people saying, “Well, essentially a Christian is just a nice secular person and just be nice.”
Cy Kellett:
The pettiness of it is really frightening. Is that your hope that this book will speak into that and say, “Come on, let’s have a little more adult conversation about this.”
Andrew Willard Jones:
Yes, very much so. I think that you’re right that there’s a pettiness, I think a large reason for that is because we have forgotten just how important Christianity really is. We become issue-focused. We become obsessed with particular issues. We think if we just got that issue right or this issue right, then everything would be okay in the world.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Everything’s fine except we’re wrong here, we’re wrong there. To step back and go, “No, no, there’s a bigger historical, supernatural dynamic going on here.” It’s not that the issues in the individual issues aren’t important, they can be terribly important and fights should be fought.
Andrew Willard Jones:
They have to be put it within the context of the overall mission of the church to convert the nations, all of the nations. That the solution or the victory is found in that, and we’re not going to win in the world. The world is not going to become a just place.
Andrew Willard Jones:
It’s not going to become a place of charity and kindness, and all these things we would like, other than through a conversion to the truth. That’s what produces that. What we need to do then is focus on that and say, “We’ve got to convert these people. We have to convert the world.”
Andrew Willard Jones:
This has happened before. This isn’t hopeless. We did it to the Romans. We did it to the Romans and we converted them by showing them that a social order was possible that was not based on power and violence, and greed. That there was a social order that was possible, and that it was beautiful and that people were happy in it, and that attracted people.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Then, we showed them that we were fearless and we showed them that they couldn’t dominate us through their power structure, because their power structure was predicated upon fear and we weren’t afraid. They’re helpless against us.
Andrew Willard Jones:
We have a carrot and a stick. We’re showing the beauty of the life and we’re extracting ourselves from their power structure simultaneously. That’s what converts civilizations.
Cy Kellett:
You don’t think just putting angry tweets on Twitter will do it?
Andrew Willard Jones:
Won’t do it, I’m afraid.
Cy Kellett:
I think you’re taking a very controversial position there. The book is The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. It’s by our guest, Andrew Willard Jones. I want to just recommend it again and again, and again, it’s a very, very fine work of perspective, more than anything I would say.
Cy Kellett:
It’s work of history that grants a perspective. Your sense that if I can muster this perspective, if I can enter into this understanding of the church as beginning with Adam and Eve and having a cosmic significance that moves through time and is more important even than whether which side of the culture war I’m on.
Cy Kellett:
Not that there’s not a right or wrong side in the culture war. I’m not saying that, but it’s even more important than that. Do you think that this has a practical effect on my day-to-day life here? For me, I’m an American, I’m a Californian, and all that. Will I be a better citizen if I have this perspective?
Andrew Willard Jones:
I think so. I think one of the things that does is it makes you realize that the power scramble is the city of man’s game. The conflict over who dominates who is their war, that’s their fight. The way we win is not by winning that, there is no winning that. The way we win is by showing another way, which is a way of peace and love.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Now, I don’t mean that in some sort of weakling kind of way. I mean that accompanied always with the cross and the willingness for martyrdom, the bravery of it. In that way, how does that look in your everyday life? How does that look? It looks like actually stepping up into positions of vulnerability and responsibility. Actually doing things in the areas of your life that you have power.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That might be your family, it means your community. It means your city, it means city council. It means your school board. It means whatever, but it means exposing yourself to that vulnerability and acting in the world at the level in which you can to bring the peace and the stability that’s possible through Christianity into those areas of the world.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That’s the way we show the world with Christianity looks like. Fighting at the highest levels of power is something that we sometimes have to do as a rear guard action. That’s never going to be the thing that wins. How does it affect your daily life? It affects your daily life because you realize the most politically important thing you can do is probably walk next door and meet your neighbor and be his friend.
Andrew Willard Jones:
You’re not his enemy. He doesn’t think you’re as enemy because you vote differently than he does. Maybe that sounds too simple, but I think that’s basically about right.
Cy Kellett:
Well, when you say it, you think of the incarnation that God himself does not come down and wrestle with the emperor. He comes down and he makes friends one by one, he makes friends.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Then he defeats them, he defeats the emperor through his resurrection. Pontius Pilate can’t figure out what Christ is talking about. Christ is talking about some kingdom that’s not of this world. The Romans kill him. They do everything that’s in the power of the world, which is torture and murder, they do.
Andrew Willard Jones:
He rises from the dead and he rises from the dead in his body, not as like a ghost, but his body itself. The thing that the world dominates escapes their grasp. That points to the final victory and the confidence we can have, the fearlessness we can have in facing the world is rooted in the resurrection. The reality of the resurrection.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That is a defeat of the world. That is a contending with the world that doesn’t leave the world alone. This isn’t some sort of quietism or retreatism. It’s very aggressive. It’s about transforming the world, but it’s not about transforming the world by winning the war that the world is fighting. That’s not going to transform anything. That’s just more war.
Cy Kellett:
Our guest, Andrew Willard Jones, the Director of Catholic studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville. I just feel so grateful for this conversation. I hope we will have many more conversations. The book is called The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. I’m forgetting the publisher. You want to tell me the publisher?
Andrew Willard Jones:
Emmaus Road. It’s Emmaus Road Publishing.
Cy Kellett:
Emmaus Road Publishing, you can find it anywhere, wherever they got books, you can find The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. I hope you will get it. I hope you will read it. I’m going to throw this out to you as my last question. I don’t think the coming decades are going to get easier on us. We better prepare ourselves.
Andrew Willard Jones:
I think that’s right. I think a period of suffering is coming and that is when it’ll be trying, but it’ll be hopefully where we shine.
Cy Kellett:
Praise God.
Andrew Willard Jones:
That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.
Cy Kellett:
Amen. Go next door and make a friend. Thank you very much, Dr. Jones.
Andrew Willard Jones:
Thank you.
Cy Kellett:
I want to recommend again, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics by the very fine theologian, Andrew Willard Jones. Particularly his general thesis that we think of the church as this little thing that functions inside this big neutral society called secular society.
Cy Kellett:
When in fact, that’s backwards. Secular society is a moment is an event, a historical incident that is ongoing, it’s important. It’ll have lasting effects all the way to the end of the world, but it’s part of the great story of the church. Redeeming the world by the power of Jesus Christ. It’s the part of the story of the church and its work.
Cy Kellett:
It’s not the other way around. When we think of society as under the dominion of the church, under the dominion of Christ, our king, that changes our perspective on politics. At least I think it does, we’d love to hear from you. You’re always welcome to email us focus@catholic.com is our email address. If you’d like to support us financially, we do need your help.
Cy Kellett:
You can do that by going to givecatholic.com. Give in any amount, givecatholic.com. If you’re watching this on YouTube, don’t forget to like and subscribe. If you’re listening on a podcast somewhere, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get it, don’t forget to subscribe so you’ll get an update when a new episode comes out.
Cy Kellett:
If you’d give us that five star review and a few nice words that really helps to grow the podcast. We’ll see you next time, God-willing right here on Catholic Answers Focus.