Our Lord’s Agenda

In the comments to a previous post, one reader writes, “you ignore Rick Santorum, and other True Catholics like him, at the peril of your own souls. You casually toss away a godly Catholic man to suit your own needs. I pray that you reverse your behaviors while you can, because to shortchange Mr. Santorum is to show that you have no regard for actually supporting our Lord’s agenda in US politics.”

There are a number of interesting things to explore here, but I want to leave most of them aside as beyond my remit. Certainly I have no desire to say about either the commenter or Mr. Santorum in this context.

But one phrase does give me pause. And it’s that bit about “our Lord’s agenda in US politics.”

Now, there’s a providential sense in which it’s obviously true that Our Lord has an agenda for the history of the world, in all its parts, which necessarily incorporates American history, which, in turn, includes American politics—and so, yes, Our Lord does have an agenda for politics.

But there’s another possible sense for that phrase, “our Lord’s agenda in US politics,” which makes me very, very uneasy. Which strikes me as both untrue to America and unrepresentative of Catholicism. And it has to do with the idea that we are somehow called to change the American political system into an explicitly Catholic government.

That would be to violate the social contract through which the republic was founded, of course, but, more, it would seem to dig down into something more Protestant than Catholic—to a sense that, in some serious way, politics is where the Lord’s will is primarily found.

And that, I fear, I cannot agree to. To be a Catholic, I have always felt, is to know that politics is not the primary thing: not the center of life, not the cause of our lives’ meaning. The American political arrangement works, when it does work, because it takes its place in an order in which it does not have first rank.

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