Catholic apologist Michael Knowles joins Cy Kellett to explore the intriguing relationship between American democracy and Catholicism. Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights, Michael discusses how the future of religion in the U.S. may lead to a resurgence of Catholicism, highlighting the Church’s unique role in providing a universal authority amidst a diverse society.
Transcript:
Cy: Essentially, the question for you, Michael Knowles, is, how do we make the United States Catholic?
Michael: Really good question. And I think give it enough time is my simple answer. And it’s not just soft soap and wishful thinking, because Alexei de Tocqueville, who’s the greatest analyst of American democracy ever, writes in the second volume of *Democracy in America*, he says, look, it’s a Protestant country, but over time, it’s going to tend in two directions. It’s going to either give up religion entirely, because democracies hate heavenly authorities. So they want to give up any authority. But if they maintain a religious authority, they want that authority to be uniform. And the only religion that has a proper universal uniformity to it is the Catholic Church. And so America will give up religion entirely or will move to the Church of Rome, is Tocqueville’s words.
And I think a lot of people would have laughed at this until recently, because you’re now seeing a big uptick in Catholicism, especially in the United States, not merely because of mass migration, but because of adult conversions. And you’re seeing this throughout the West. You’re seeing this in France as well. I’m not terribly surprised to see it, because I think, you know, it’s the true Church and will survive all of the schisms and the heresies.
But another reminder, too, that even our political order established by pilgrims and Puritans and separatists and Protestants, not too many Catholics among them. If you look at the political order of the United States as it’s outlined in the Constitution, and you read St. Thomas Aquinas on the ideal regime in the *Summa Theologiae*, it’s actually kind of hard to find much distinction between the two. And so we might have more of a Catholic country than we think, even just below the surface already.
Cy: Do you have in your mind things that we can do to help bring that about? I mean, I know there are people who say, well, just live a good example, but I feel like there’s more that we could do than that.
Michael: Yes, well, prayer is good. You know, prayer, as a priest friend of mine, Father Ben Keely, points out, is really the first resort. It’s not supposed to be the last resort. But then we have to remember that religion is lived out. You know, it’s a public thing. It’s not just as some politicians want us to believe something that we do when we close our eyes in our own heads. You know, we have to. Religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves. So you gotta do that in public, where two or more are gathered. You know, that’s where our Lord is also.
So, you know, you have to do that in community. And sacramental theology, I think, is very attractive to people, especially today for this reason. We live so much of our lives virtually online, where the body doesn’t matter, people are drawn to the alternative. So we need to promote that sort of thing. We have to have the clarity of vision and the moral courage to actually live our life in a public way.
And we need to insist upon standards and norms that are properly Catholic, that is conducive to everyone’s flourishing. And we need to stop buying the nonsense fed to us by late 19th and late 20th century politicians who want to pretend that the American political order is supposed to exclude religion. That is not true today. That never has been true. And the very fact that our country is much more open to Catholicism than it has. We have a practicing Catholic vice president, for instance, something that most people would have thought was not imaginable. We can continue to promote that, and the secularists and the atheists can whine and scream. But the actual American political tradition, I think, is on our side. We just have to have the courage to follow it.
Cy: I imagine you must get it all the time, though, that when even the question that I asked you, there are people who will go, well, see that they want a theocracy. They want it to be a Catholic country.
Michael: Well, you know, theocracy has a real definition, though people abuse that term. You know, theocracy is ruled by religious clerics. And I don’t think, you know, we do have an American citizen who is a monarch of a country. That would be Pope Leo. You know, he is an American who happens to be a monarch, but he went to Rome to do that. He didn’t stay here in America. So no one’s asking for rule by clerics.
There are plenty of clerics I wouldn’t want anywhere near political power in the United States. What we’re acknowledging is that all polities have some relation to morality and to religion. It’s just inescapable. You know, if you’re gonna pass a law, forget about abortion or the death penalty. Say if you’re gonna pass a law about parking tickets or speeding, you’re gonna have to have recourse to some moral reasoning.
So what the secularists say is, well, we just don’t want you to have recourse to Christian moral reasoning. We want recourse to New Age moral reasoning or utilitarian moral reasoning or deontological. But you know, that’s just rigging the game. It’s totally preposterous. And for most of our country’s history, we did in fact have recourse to substantially Christian moral reasoning. And it worked a lot better than it does today.
I was a cradle Catholic, catechized in the 90s. You know, the 90s were a little bit of a loose time for catechesis, though I had some great teachers. And I fell away from the faith at 13, right at my confirmation, actually. And I was away for about a decade or so. And when I was coming back, not just intellectually to believe that God exists, but really coming back into the faith and the Church, Catholic Answers was a really invaluable resource for me. So I just love it. I recommend it to my listeners and friends and people who write to me. It’s just tremendous.
Cy: Oh, you’re very generous. Thank you very much for saying that. I think you’re a Yale graduate. So here you are at 13. I wonder how much of your falling away from the Church was the intellectual challenges that the modern world makes of the Church, or was it something else? It seems to me that sometimes we are not in a good position to answer a 13-year-old’s question and we lose them.
Michael: Yeah. And you can’t answer a 13-year-old’s hubris is the real problem.
Cy: Fair enough.
Michael: Yeah. I was a punk kid who thought he was smarter than he was, and this was the age of the new atheists. And Christopher Hitchens with that delightful accent and, you know, Richard Dawkins with his Oxford pedigree. And so I just thought religion was for dumb people. And I fell away. I think some of it did have to do even with weak, I don’t know, liturgy, a kind of effeminate practice of the faith. But it was on me, you know, I was just hubris.
And so ironically, you mentioned I went to Yale and not too many people become more conservative and religious when they’re at Yale. But that place has a way of radicalizing some people at least. And so I became convinced God exists freshman year, and then it was really by the end of Yale and my first year afterward that I was convinced Christ is who he says he is and that the Church is who she says that she is. And that kicked off a big process of reversion.
Cy: Ah, how beautiful. What a beautiful story. Do they have like a Newman center there or something?
Michael: They did. Not that I availed myself of it very often, but they do. They had at the Thomas More Center, which I think I went to once or twice, maybe senior year. They have a wonderful parish, St. Mary’s, where the Knights of Columbus were founded. The headquarters is there in New Haven. But I’ve really only come to avail myself of those resources when I go back for reunions. There are students who are a little further ahead than I was, who were practicing there as students.
Cy: Well, I ask in part because the most common prayer request we get here at Catholic Answers is, will you pray for my children who have left the Church? And there are tons of parents who would like to know. Oh, he went to college and didn’t lose his faith the first year. He came to faith in God the first year. So give me the secret. How can a parent redo in their child’s life what happened in your life?
Michael: Well, I think you have to ask yourself why the child fell away in the first place. So for me, you intuited that it was the intellectual challenge of the modern world and pop culture. So then I get to Yale and I realized that there were a lot of people much smarter than me, many of them atheists, secular. But the smartest people, I noticed, had this funny habit of believing in God.
And so my roommate, randomly or providentially assigned freshman year, introduced me to, of all things, the ontological argument for God. And it was actually a version of it done in modal logic. So St. Anselm of Canterbury formulates the ontological argument, which is dismissed, though not wholly rejected, by St. Thomas Aquinas. Then it’s redone by Gödel and Leibniz, and a Calvinist who was at a Catholic university, Alvin Plantinga, did a modal logic version that convinced me. I said, oh, wow.
But even more than so, the argument itself, I think, is sound. I agree with Bertrand Russell on that. And I don’t think Aquinas really rejects it exactly, you know, though I understand his problems with it. But frankly, even more than the argument, the realization that smart people believed in God was a bigger part for me. And then that led me to read C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, you know, lots of other Hilaire Belloc. Wonderful, because Belloc is more acerbic and kind of more entertaining in that way.
But it led me to read some of those writers. And then I thought, oh, I probably ought to get around to reading the Bible. That would be an interesting thing to do. And some of the Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church. So look, that worked for me because of the problem that I had. Other people have problems that are more emotional with the Church, or I mentioned earlier, liturgical. I’m a great fan of reverent liturgy, especially the Traditional Latin Mass.
I think for some people who didn’t like the felt banners of the 90s and felt that it was irreverent or that there were liturgical abuses, I think liturgy is a way to re-enchant people with the Church and other ways as well, you know, so even just people have a problem with certain priests, you know, or they have to get over problems with family members. So I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution.
But to your point, the modern world does present an intellectual challenge to the faith. I think that is waning, actually, in the last five or 10 years. But if that’s your problem, then definitely a stack of Chesterton and Lewis and Belloc, and those guys are a good way back in.
Cy: Well, when we choose the faith, in some ways, we are also choosing our group. We’re choosing a whole collection of people. And so I say this to bring us back to your work on Pius XII, because one of the, you know, like, if you think if Hitchens can convince you that, look, people who believe in God are dumb, you don’t want to be one of the dumb people, so you won’t join that group. If people can convince you that the Catholic Church is just morally cowardly and hypocritical, you’re not going to want to join that group.
And it seems to me that that is part of the story of Pius XII is he’s presented to the world as this man who failed the greatest moral test of the 20th century. Is that who he was?
Michael: It’s a complete lie, you know, and Pius really suffered a kind of a white martyrdom…