Joshua Mitchell Should Talk to Archbishop Chaput

AmConMag: Fashioning a Post-Fusionist Christian Politics by Emile A. Doak
As the traditional conservative coalition unravels, the faithful must provide a better way. A recent AEI panel discussed the possibilities.

Christian anthropology is relational; man flourishes in a community properly ordered towards the common good. And like most things worthwhile, community and the common good have limits. The increasingly ridiculous notion of Facebook as a legitimate global community illustrates the former. As for the latter, as Reno argued, the language of the “common good” is ill-suited to global realities. Sure, there are global goods, things like peace, prosperity, family—things that are as true in America as they are in Afghanistan—but these are not the same as the singular, indivisible, communal, and limited common good that is the proper object of all political and social life. The common good emerges from the relationships, traditions, and cultures that provide purpose to a polity. And these elements can only develop when rooted in a specific place over time. It’s no wonder that introducing a massive influx of new people with new relationships, traditions, and cultures has caused such anxiety among those already navigating the most fragile social fabric—the most fraught common good—in American society. While the topic of mass immigration understandably draws sympathy for the immigrant seeking a new and better life, this sympathy must be balanced with a renewed awareness of the effect that mass immigration has on the social fabric of communities tasked with absorbing it.

This is the new Christian political project. Working towards electoral goals with regard to select hot-button issues, while laudable, is increasingly a relic of a past age. Western democracy has reached a tipping point, leaving Christians—the laity especially—to imagine a new political paradigm that protects both subsidiarity and solidarity, one that buttresses against the ill effects of both state and market, globalism and ethnic nationalism. In a world where global managers have severely eroded our sense of place and home, and a “dangerous romanticized [ethnic] nationalism,” to quote Mitchell, is on the rise in response, we need another option. To find one, we on the right will need to engage in the same kind of unorthodox debate that was on display at AEI Wednesday evening.