Brendan Hoban: America and religion are often a toxic mix     

Western People 30.7.2024

As I write, the Democratic Party in America is struggling to cope onfour fronts: a series of gaffes on television that made President Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential election inevitable; the electoral gain its rivals, the Republic party, are harvesting from the assassination attempt on its candidate, Donald Trump; the challenge of finding an electable candidate within the space of a few weeks while carefully plotting a complex course through the intricacies of uncharted constitutional waters; and, not least, coming to terms with JD Vance, the new kid on the block, Trump’s running mate and presumptive vice-president.

It’s a big ask, you might say, something that would take a miracle to sort out. But in the demented world of  American politics and the complicated religious culture that is American Catholicism, miracles we’re told are not that exceptional. After all, if God (according to Trump) intervened in human history in the ‘miracle’ that saved him from assassination, maybe God might consider balancing things a bit more by intervening again on the other side. Not for the first time in history, God finds Himself or Herself, on both sides of an American debate.

America and religion are often a toxic mix. Nothing religious emanating from that vast country surprises anyone anymore. So Trump and Biden claiming the Almighty as a supporter of both sides is taken for granted.

But what’s unusual from a religious standpoint in this election is that it’s beginning to appear that a key constituent of Trump’s success will be the Catholic convert, JD Vance, who may end up not just as vice-president to President Trump for 2024-28 but possibly as President Vance from 2028-36, thereby embedding Trump’s poisonous populism in American political life. Vance – God help us – could well be the third Catholic President of the United States by the age of 43.    

Of course, ‘Catholic’ in America can mean a lot of different things to different people. The Catholic God is not just expected to support both opposing sides at the same time but to support both contradictory versions of Catholicism now starkly dividing Catholicism in America.

To see how complicated that might be, let’s have a look at what those two versions represent.

On the one hand there is what might be termed ‘the official Catholic Church’, headed by Pope Francis, which is now attempting to introduce reforms based on the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), overwhelmingly voted through by pope and bishops. That Council was an effort to move the Church away from nostalgia for a narrow, burdened confessional world into a more open conversation with the modern world.

On the other hand, the ‘unofficial Catholic Church’ longs for a restoration of the old Church, an imaginary idyllic institution from the past, a rigid legalistic religion where every question had an answer and where fundamentalism, fanaticism and Pharisaism, were prized.

In its American version, this hankering after an ultra-Catholic traditionalist religion has popularised a ‘Catholic’ culture that sanctifies core impulses in American life. For example that God is (as the Czech priest and philosopher-theologian, Tomas Halik, has written) ‘the creator of happiness and harmony in the world’ and God blesses the affluent for their wealth and by extension criticises the poor as responsible for their own poverty.  

It’s no surprise that JD Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, is a lover of the Latin Mass, which has become a totemic indicator of an acceptable traditionalism and which lovers of the old Church have used to indicate not just a chosen form of worship but a rejection of what the Second Vatican Council reform represents. Again Halik calls out this new form of ‘old Church traditionalism’ by defining it as ‘infantile’ and ‘unbalanced’.

Vance’s Catholicism places a focus on dissent from an emerging liberal consensus, on opposing gay marriage and abortion and on the attraction of a religion that stands apart from the consensus view. It is also, cynics might suggest, a good fit for Trumpism where what you oppose is a better definition that what you propose – and a productive line in widening the voter-base.

It is not that a reformed Church would shed its traditional opposition to (for example) abortion but that by widening its pro-life message to include (for example) banning the death penalty it reinterprets its message to ensure that its meaning is not distorted by ‘the changing cultural and social context’. (Halik).

The difficult truth for those Catholics who follow Trump because he presents himself as a pro-life force in America is that his pro-life strategy is not from a moral base of right and wrong but is geared solely to retaining the high number of Catholic voters that elected him president in 2016. So Vance may present himself as pro-life but how inclusive is that of protecting the lives of those on death row in America?

Vance, it seems, favours the wearing of veils in church (for women, of course), and is captivated by the writings of St Augustine and suggests a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as the first task of a Trump presidency. One might be justified in wondering how that strange mixture has become for Trump (and Vance) a successful recipe for hoovering up the votes of naive Catholics. It is mind-boggling that people who contend they are religious can be so easily deluded by the tactics of a con-man like Trump.

Meanwhile, full marks to Joe Biden, for placing his country before his personal ambitions. History will honour him for that choice, not least in that it gives America a working chance to save democracy and the world a reasonable hope to avoid the anarchy that will surely be Trump’s legacy.