Combatting the “Naked Public Square”

"To insist that my freedom alone matters, that nothing else—neither God nor the gender He gave me—may interfere with the exercise of it, is to nullify the entire order of created existence."

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

There are no political solutions to the current decline of Western culture.

Does anyone know what the central myth of America might be? I mean, isn’t there a story out there we tell ourselves about our origins? Our destiny as a nation? What is it that defines us as a free and independent people? 

The answer, from the beginning, has been the belief that, at least in the public life—among friends and strangers alike—no one can tell us what to do or to think. It is our singular privilege, as it were, to remain entirely on our own, at liberty therefore to take ourselves to Heaven or Hell, without anyone getting in the way either to impede or promote the journey thereof. Each of us possesses an absolute sovereign sense of self, so that concerning the great questions of life and death, Heaven and damnation, it is for us alone to adjudicate the outcome. No one, not the church nor the state, has the right to intervene in the choices we make. 

Complete corporate neutrality, in other words, must be the governing norm in all situations that impinge on the private individual, who, in order to remain secure in his or her freedom, must not be constrained in any way, lest our sacred autonomy be compromised or even inconvenienced. In the circumstance, the business of the state is to broaden as far as possible the range of human possibility, including even the right to reconfigure one’s own nature, the very scaffolding of the soul. Not happy about being a boy? Not a problem. Governments exist to ensure that the perfect biological fit is yours for the asking. It is for you alone to decide.

This is all madness, of course. Sheer grotesquery. To insist that my freedom alone matters, that nothing else—neither God nor the gender He gave me—may interfere with the exercise of it, is to nullify the entire order of created existence. And the absurdity of the thing has about as much to commend as the geometer’s attempt to square the circle. Let pure potency be the thing that defines one, which prevents any limit ever being placed upon the choices I make, and I might as well go off to a lunatic asylum, or spend my days writhing in a state of mortal despair, because the burden of such an autonomy will have eclipsed the universe itself. The fact that a great swath of lunatics appear determined to impose such lunacy upon the rest of us only confirms the state of insanity in which we now find ourselves.  

We are thus faced by a kind of soulessness in the public life, with the result that the supernatural itself, the order of grace and the work God intended it to perform in the perfection of nature, has been completely stripped of any political or cultural significance whatsoever. So pervasive has this myth become in the body politic, so widespread the fallout from its poison, that nearly everyone now believes that religion is nothing more than what a man or a woman does with their privacy. For some it is playing golf, while for others it is talking to God. It hardly matters which pastime, so long as it’s private and that it not be inflicted upon others.

An utterly perverse and unnatural state of affairs has grown out of such reductionism, one which has long determined the public discourse between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. Which is that politics must always proceed without any reference to God—certainly not the God who has counted the hairs on each man’s head, i.e., a God intensely interested in everything that bears upon the life of man, including his politics. 

And the consequence of dismissing God from the world he made? On the one hand, we as a people, a nation and a society, can sustain no large-scale vision of the human spirit. All of our issues become economic, matters of money, never metaphysics. Process, not purpose. The triumph of technique not truth. Mystery must give way to machinery, the maintenance of which is all that matters. “Where there is no vision,” the Book of Proverbs says, “the people perish.” Life is about getting and spending, nothing else need distract us from the pursuit of sensual pleasure or material satisfaction.

And the other calamity? That without an overarching vision, a transcendent point of reference, we are less and less able to impose even the most minimal moral discipline. Having removed the ultimate sanction—to wit, a God, who, in His providential care of the universe has enacted laws to allow us freely to choose the good—there can be no commonly agreed upon good with which to try and inculcate the young. Only the self-centered self may decide, whose defining impulse is to do what pleases him and not what pleases God. Or even what may conform to the nature God inscribed in him at the moment He made him in His own image, having summoned him to an eternal destiny where all his desires shall be met and surpassed in the most unimaginable way. 

What we have got in this country, therefore, is a situation in which everything distinctively Christian has been swept clean away. In the shaping of the nation’s public life and policy, no Christian need apply. What the late Richard Neuhaus once called “the Naked Public Square” has more or less encamped itself on every main street in the land. While, at the same time, we have witnessed widespread acquiescence by Christians themselves to that exclusion. 

Two examples come readily to mind. One, an educational system so secularized that no longer does it wish to stand on the shoulders of giants; indeed, it is so embarrassed by the wisdom of its ancestors that it has chosen instead to cancel it altogether on the grounds that so myriad a number of dead, white, European males have nothing to teach us. Two, the attack on innocent human life on a scale that rivals all the bloodletting of the last century. So many dead babies over the course of the last half-century or so cannot but defile a people in the sight of God, for whom each child is a gift of such unique and irreplaceable value that He alone knows the worth of each child formed in His image and likeness. 

What is it that finally holds a society together? What enables it to cohere? Nothing less, St. John Henry Newman reminds us, “than a common reverence for a certain sacred possession.” Concerning which there are but two choices—either we honor and defend it because it is sacred to a Christian people, and thus try and shape the world according to that vision; or we simply submit to the fallen Spirit of the World, which Christ came to rid us of, which means we are in a state of despair, without hope in the Church’s mission of sacramentalizing the world, raising it to the dignity of the sons and daughters of God.  

There are no other choices…