“There were giants on the earth in those days,” we read in Genesis. The gauzy way we view the past can exaggerate the greatness of our forebears, but when I think of David Carlin, who died shortly before Christmas after a long life, I can’t help but think that he was a man whose likes we won’t see again in these days.
I came to know Dave in the early 2000s, when I edited his first two books. Two decades of ensuing friendship would increase my respect and fondness for him, but right from the start I sensed in him something rare and compelling. A philosopher and sociologist by training, and a college professor by day, he took up politics, too, reaching the rank of Senate majority leader for his home state of Rhode Island. And he looked the part: with his silver hair, strong jaw, bushy brows, and electric smile, he would have appeared right at home at a Kennedy reunion in Hyannis Port.
Dave’s politics, too, were straight from the Irish-Catholic, New England, mid-twentieth-century form book. He proudly called himself a “Blue Dog” Democrat. Not to be confused, he warned me, with “Yellow Dog” Democrats—those who were so party-loyal that they would vote for a yellow dog if it had a D next to its name—the original Blue Dogs were a particular breed: frugal, working-class and devoted to unions, distrustful of the rich and of Republicans, fans of New-Deal-era policies that they credited for their families’ upward mobility, and, perhaps most notably, socially conservative.
Above all, Dave was a faithful, foursquare Catholic, and pro-life to the core—from a time when pro-life Catholic Democrats still roamed the earth in abundance.
Beginning in the late eighties and accelerating through the turn of the millennium, though, the landscape had begun to change. As his party became more culturally elitist and more identified with social, especially sexual progressivism (championing abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, transgenderism, godlessness, and deviance, with ever-decreasing tolerance for dissent within the ranks), he found himself increasingly estranged from his roots. One of Dave’s great intellectual gifts was summed up in a maxim he liked to quote—“Ideas have consequences”—and he foresaw with clarity that a political philosophy committed to such ideas was ultimately incompatible with Catholicism. One would have to go.
He even wrote a book about it; and even though at the book’s end he made allowance for Catholic Democrats of his vintage to stay within the party to change it, in the two decades that followed, he seemed to lose hope in that possibility. As many Democratic social conservatives and blue-collar folk migrated toward the right, he (reluctantly and sorrowfully) did, too.
Or did the right migrate toward him? To my knowledge, Dave never abandoned any of his paleo-Democrat principles or turned in his Blue Dog card. That integrity alone marks him as a rare sort, as does his farsightedness about the connection between ideas and social change. (He modestly credited such gifts to a rigorous Dominican education.)
Dave’s other book in which I had a hand also displayed his rarity. In an analysis that combined sociology, philosophy, and religious history, he sought to identify the reasons for Catholicism’s decline beginning in the late 1960s. In internecine Catholic polemics today, we often see blame put on the Council generally, or on liturgical reforms, Communion in the hand, “infiltration” by some shadowy evil, and so on. Others, conversely, blame a failure to accept and nourish Vatican II’s vision with sufficient zeal.
Dave, however, didn’t pick a predictable side, because he thought all these answers were simplistic. The Council did play a role, he wrote, but not primarily through anything it expressly said or did. Rather, in its innovations (however defensible they might have been) it shattered the Tridentine Church’s sense of immutability. By itself, this might have been worked through, but it unfortunately happened at the same time as two other phenomena: the generalized rebellion against authority of the late sixties and the ascendancy of secularism. These three factors combined in a potent poison cocktail.
The Church (in the West, at least) had for centuries stood guard against its old Protestant foe, he said, but when it finally let down its ramparts to enter a new age of ecumenical (and interreligious) friendliness, it found that familiar enemies had been replaced by the forces of unbelief: in theology and philosophy, in behavioral sciences, in the arts, in popular mores. And it wasn’t prepared for that fight, at least not in the era’s climate of social upheaval and fresh doubts about former certainties.
In drawing out this point, Dave presented what I’ve called the Carlin Thesis, which I have never stopped finding insightful and useful. The post-Reformation history of Christianity, he demonstrated, has been a succession of compromises with the prevailing secularism, in each case producing a Christian-secular synthesis that left Christianity de-contented in doctrine, squishier in morals, more skeptical about the Bible, and less reverent in worship.
This movement applies mostly to historical Protestantism, he noted. But postconciliar Catholicism has suffered from it, too, and it will continue to suffer whenever Catholics likewise compromise; when our attempts to bring Christ to the world make us worldly instead. Let us heed that warning!
All this is now beyond Dave’s care, as he begins his journey to a new, perfect, and lasting world. But the force of his writing, advocacy, public service, faithful witness, and gentlemanly bearing remains for us to profit from. I pray for the repose of his soul, and I look ahead hopefully to meeting him again in glory.