IN PRINT: BOOK REVIEW
SOULED OUT: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right

by E.J.Dionne, Jr.
(Princeton University Press, 2008, 251 pp., cloth, $24.95)

Reviewed by Msgr. Harry J. Byrne, a retired priest of the Archdiocese of New York.

The title of this perceptive book expresses the author’s view that after two decades the excessively dogmatic, partisan, and ideological religious right has “sold itself out” as a religious force because it has been too certain of itself, too insistent on the depravity of its opponents, and too closely linked with the fortunes of one political party. Religious winds blowing into the public square have been shifting. Christian religious traditionalists had been drawn into a voting bloc for the Republican party by clever operatives—Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, Karl Rove—and an appeal to moral values narrowly perceived as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Now the role of religion in public life is being renegotiated toward a wider range of moral values, including the demands of social justice, education, health care, war and peace, and concern for the poor and elderly.

The narrow focus on a few particular moral values and identification with one political party has evoked a rush of books bewailing religious activity not only in politics, but in life generally. Dionne calls upon these authors and liberals of the left to recognize the validity of a well-defined place for religion in political life. He urges them to admit the importance of religion’s role in helping to achieve many of the goals sought by secularists and the extreme left. In various parts of the book, he emphasizes the rich tradition of Catholic social values and their articulation in papal encyclicals, by individuals such as Dorothy Day and Msgr. John A. Ryan, and by the U.S. Catholic bishops’ “Program of Social Reconstruction,” issued February 12, 1919. The latter document called for a legal minimum wage, public housing for workers, labor participation in industrial management, and social insurance for illness, disability, unemployment and old age. These thoughts lead to the self-evident conclusion that sin is social as well as individual.

A chapter, “Conservative or Progressive?” deals with the interactions of these two forces, the changes experienced within each, and how individuals and groups can participate in both camps. William Jennings Bryan, known today for his fundamentalist opposition to the teaching of evolution according to Darwin, was during the same era rallying Christian citizens against predatory corporate interests and championing women’s suffrage, the federal income tax, railroad regulation, and other liberal causes. A progressive spirit imbued Catholicism, too, as evidenced by the bishops’ Reconstruction Program. In this period, the early twentieth century, liberalism was also transformed from what Dionne terms “a soupy optimism about human nature” to a more realistic, if not pessimistic, realism. Liberal optimism collapsed in the face of Nazi and Stalinist horrors. This collapse was given a theological cachet by religious thinkers. Dionne extensively quotes Reinhold Niebuhr as having taught liberals about St. Augustine and original sin.

More recently, religious conservatives broadened their moral agenda beyond sex to social justice. Meanwhile, Dionne quotes Peter Steinfels saying that liberalism has shifted “its passion from issues of economic deprivation and concentration of power to issues of gender, sexuality, and personal choice…”

The upshot of all of this change in the conservative, progressive, and secular-liberal camps has been a newly respected place at the public table for the religious individual or group and for religion itself. Symbols of this new presence, Dionne points out, are the recent appeals by Democratic politicians—Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards—for the “votes of people of faith.” Another insight regarding the change in religion’s role is seen in the difference between John F. Kennedy’s treatment of his faith in the 1960 presidential campaign as a politically inoperative appendage and that of Joe Lieberman, in his 2000 campaign for vice president, treating his faith as significantly operable.

The author addresses the popular notion of today’s culture wars by establishing the perspective that there have always been culture wars in our history—between Protestants and Catholics, between drinking Episcopalians and Lutherans against abstemious Baptists and Methodists, between immigrants and the establishment, between feminists and anti-feminists, between traditionalists and progressives, between pro-choicers and pro-lifers, between blacks and whites. He sees the 2004 election as a high point in polarization around religious and cultural issues, issues that were utilized by the Republicans to elect George W. Bush. But cultural and moral questions were already being displaced by other considerations—the economy, terrorism, foreign policy, health care, and the Iraq war. By the time of the 2006 elections, many of the moderates and the Catholics, no longer enamored of the Republican and Bush ascendancy, had gone back to the Democratic party, giving it control of the Senate and the House. The complex interplay of these many forces is astutely analyzed by Dionne, showing that the culture wars are far from simple.

At about the half-way point of his volume, Dionne turns directly to an analysis of his own Catholic church and what the future holds for it. He describes the remarkable accomplishments of Pope John Paul II in bringing down communism in Poland and elsewhere and his emphasis on individual human rights and opposition to war and the death penalty.

But while John Paul was progressive and liberal toward the outside world, he was relentlessly conservative within the Church, insisting on the “complementarity” of women to men, forbidding any discussion whatever of women’s ordination or optional priestly celibacy and placing limits on lay ministries. Dionne voices his own appraisal of the pope as “both powerful and serene” but expresses his anxiety about the split between conservatives and progressives that widened under this pope, the declining number of priests and women religious, a loss of balance between free inquiry and doctrinal rigor, and the ever-increasing centralization of church authority. The pope’s policy of appointing conservative bishops further served to give the universal church a John Paul II cast of mind.

Moving on to Pope Benedict XVI, Dionne traces his academic background and then his role as a confidant of John Paul II and prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, where he became the watchdog for orthodoxy. The author notes the rejection of Charles Curran, Leonardo Boff, and Hans Küng and characterizes the current pope as having been a force for further centralization of power in Rome. As Ratzinger, he saw the national bishops’ conferences as diminishing the responsibility and autonomy of individual bishops. Ratzinger declared the post-conciliar years as “decidedly unfavorable for the Catholic Church.”

In a chapter entitled “The Agony of Liberal Catholicism,” Dionne chronicles the movement of the church’s central administration in Rome under the two popes in a more conservative direction while significant parts of the church in the United States were moving in a progressive direction. Neuralgic issues and personalities involved are reviewed: the role of women in the church, birth control, Vietnam and Iraq, increasing centralization of authority in the pope, condemnation of theologians, and the impact of the two opposing currents on the 2006 presidential election. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput declared that a voter sinned by casting a vote for a pro-choice candidate. Bishops Raymond Burke and Michael Sheridan declared that pro-choice candidates should be refused Holy Communion. Most bishops and many lay Catholics were relieved when Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Washington chaired a task force which defused the situation with a nuanced statement asserting bishops’ responsibility and authority to exercise prudent judgment in their own dioceses and noting that justice issues in addition to abortion could be factors deciding for whom to cast one’s vote.

In his concluding chapter, the author provides a philosophical and historical analysis of the role of religion in U.S. public and political matters. His book, requiring attentive reading, is a masterful analysis of the evolutionary changes in the nature of Catholic conservatism and of Catholic progressivism. It also explores significant changes that have occurred in the secular-liberal attitude toward religion in the public square. An index and twenty pages of helpful notes assure the validity of the facts on which the author bases his analyses.