Created Freedom under the Sign of the Cross: A Catholic Public Theology for the United States

Introduction

This book is a work of Roman Catholic theological ethics that examines freedom in the contemporary American social and political context. On the one hand, I argue against an overly individualistic notion of freedom associated with the triumph of neo-liberal ideas in American life, especially since the 1970s. On the other hand, I argue in favor of an understanding of freedom that is liberal; oriented to the good and to God; embodied and relational; sensitive to culture and history; and contextual but universal in its reach. As a matter of fundamental theology, Karl Rahner’s idea of created freedom provides the key term that carries the argument.

The theoretical problem that prompted this book—what in general terms I would call the abstraction of freedom from context and conditions—first presented itself to me in an immediate and concrete way. In particular, I have written this book for the men and women I met working in poor neighborhoods of West Baltimore; accompanying Santa Clara University students on alternative spring break trips to places ranging from the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans to the Navajo Nation; serving at the Catholic Worker Soup Kitchen on Skid Row in Los Angeles; and more. I do not assume that I know these men and women well—though I have conversed with many of them and listened carefully to their stories. In any case, at every turn my experience with them confirmed something hiding in plain sight in the increasingly libertarian culture of American society: their exercise of freedom for the sake of important goods was almost always far more difficult than the broader culture acknowledged. It was as if there was not only rich and poor, but there were also competing ideas of freedom—one abstract, belonging to the better off and presuming an effortless self-assertion (short only of government interference), and the other concrete, the purview of the poor, and prizing freedom no less while presuming many more obstacles to its exercise. These observations raised questions. Is it possible for Catholic theological ethics to have a more adequate concept of freedom—or related concepts like opportunity—that can be applied across such social divides? Or, similarly, is it possible to have a notion of freedom that can be said to be equal, not in the sense of assuring equal outcomes but in the sense of a common theoretical starting place shared by rich and poor alike? What might the theological anthropology of such a starting place be? And what difference might such a starting place make for how Catholic public theology speaks about ethical concerns related to social and political equality?

I found confirmation for such concerns in thinkers across the American spectrum. Political scientist Robert Putnam writes of the loss of a common fate in which one is even aware of the way children on the other side of the tracks are part of one’s moral universe—are our kids, to use Putnam’s phrasing that serves as the title of his powerful book.¹ He says: We are today so far from equality of opportunity, even for talented and energetic kids . . . that there is little danger that we might apply the principle too stringently.² From a more conservative perspective, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur C. Brooks argues that opportunity inequality—not income inequality—is the crisis we face today.³ Furthermore, moral philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has said that in the American context it is not as important to focus on whether freedom results in various unequal distributions of goods as it is to consider how the oppressive nature of unequal relationships results in the distribution of deeply unequal freedoms.⁴

The second concrete matter that gave rise to the focus of this book on the abstraction of freedom was less personal and more encompassing: the stark and increasing inequality throughout American society. Matthew Stewart has argued that we are in the third wave of American inequality.⁵ (The first two were the time of slavery followed by the Civil War, and the Gilded Age of the 1920s followed by the Great Depression.) This inequality now encompasses economic, political, and cultural fault lines. Thomas Piketty has argued that income inequality in the United States today is probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world, including societies in which skill disparities were extremely large.⁶ If facile meritocratic assumptions justify excessive pay at the top (i.e., I was paid the huge salary and therefore deserved it),⁷ the failure of social mobility locks in falling pay at the bottom.⁸ To be sure, the excessive income and wealth at the top of the scale has sought to entrench itself by converting such resources into plutocratic political power.⁹ But the challenge of political inequality has also been intensified by demographic changes. Political theorist Danielle Allen has argued that the increasing strains on American democracy are not so much evidence of old problems too long unaddressed. Instead, the strains point to a new challenge staring Americans in the faces of their many multicultural identities: How, for the first time in history, to form a democracy in which no one ethnicity or gender constitutes a majority.¹⁰ Moreover, the pandemic that has ravaged the United States since March 2020 has laid bare devastating inequalities that were always hiding in plain sight for anyone who wished to see.¹¹

Such inequalities of material resources and power obviously raise many significant issues of social ethics. But I am especially interested in the way that an abstract, neoliberal notion of an equality of freedom has served often as a primary justification for such unequal distributions. George Monbiot aptly summarized the mindset that allows such an understanding of freedom to sanction inequalities and stifle efforts toward equality: Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.¹² This book is dedicated to identifying deficiencies in this understanding of freedom and to making a case for a better, more contextual understanding. But for now it is helpful to note how the abstraction of freedom is correlated with hardened inequalities. The sociologist Charles Tilly has identified different modes of the analysis of inequality—some favoring a focus on personal attributes and some favoring a focus on structural and cultural forces. As he puts it, analyses of inequalities too often assume that individuals should be understood as units of clear, purposive thinking detached from internal, confounding complications like powerful passions. Likewise, such analyses also often assume that these abstracted individuals are immune to the power of external forces imposed by living in a social and uncontrollable world of relationships. To the contrary, Tilly argues, persistent unequal distributions are the result of complex interactions between contingent, vulnerable individuals oriented from the start to a web of relations and institutions. Only by seeing persons in such a light, he says, can the hardened shape of inequality come into view.¹³

So how did we arrive at this particular point of abstraction in the history of freedom in the United States? There are competing explanations. Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed offers one that is insightful but finally insufficient. Deneen argues that modern liberalism, driven by its subjectivist notion of freedom, engendered a vicious, self-defeating cycle. Individuals turned to state and market to liberate themselves from given conditions of constraint. Some such constraints were, in fact, oppressive. But other conditions—for instance, the connection between freedom and moral duties or freedom and community—were often perceived as oppressive when seen through the lens of a subjectivist freedom. In any case, neither state nor market was concerned with such distinctions between reality and perception; the imperative was to remove the conditions, whatever they were. In the course of this process, Deneen argues, power accumulated in state and markets. Correspondingly, the power of individuals declined as the process stripped away the moral and communal conditions that in fact oriented or enabled the exercise of freedom. The individual alone—free but bereft of the purpose or possibility of actually acting freely—was left to face the tutelary power of state and the pervasiveness of the market.¹⁴ Deneen is a harsh critic of what he considers the inherent flaws in the liberal notion of freedom: chiefly, its celebration of subjectivism, self-making, and unfettered choice.¹⁵ He laments the sharp break between this fatally flawed modern notion of freedom and its medieval predecessor, in which a world of obligation, virtue, and self-discipline enframed freedom. In that era, Deneen notes approvingly, freedom was understood to require moral self-rule on the part of individuals and the political community.¹⁶

But there are problems with this account, beginning with the way that Deneen deploys the word liberalism both as a highly unified philosophical perspective on the world and as an almost personified agent of historical change. There’s little acknowledgment of different traditions within liberalism indicated, for instance, by the nineteenth-century struggle between the classic liberal commitment to free labor and the rise of an industrial owner class who re-invented liberalism to favor the interests of capital.¹⁷ Moreover, throughout the book, the disembodied abstraction of liberalism is frequently doing this or that—for example, Deneen says that liberalism seeks to transform all of human life and the world¹⁸ and he also says that liberalism undermines education by replacing the definition of liberty as self-restraint with the definition of liberty as autonomy.¹⁹ But this imputation of agency to an abstraction in fact undermines the significance of freedom understood on its own terms. Liberalism seems to bring about changes, not real human beings making concrete choices in specific circumstances. Moreover, freedom in the book is either oriented to self-restraint or subjectivism. But there is little sense for why modern freedom has had such a powerful and emancipatory appeal in the face of constraints of structure and culture. And there is little sense in turn of the modern, liberal appeal of freedom for its own sake, neither understood primarily in terms of self-rule or subjectivism but in terms of what Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray described as the primordial demand of . . . dignity . . .that [a person] acts by his own counsel and purpose, using and enjoying his freedom, moved, not by external coercion, but internally by the risk of his whole existence.²⁰

Daniel Rodgers in Age of Fracture offers a more compelling account of the current American predicament around freedom. Rodgers eschews a grand centuries-long narrative and focuses instead on the dramatic change in the construal of freedom over the last fifty years in the United States. By doing so, he specifies more clearly the causes and changes that characterize the current situation. He also more deftly evokes the interplay between ideas and convictions and structure and culture. A personified force called liberalism doesn’t affect all this change. But liberal ideas in a wide variety of hues clash with practices, institutions, and events and out of this churn emerges Rodgers’s fractured, American world. One key mark of this world—our world—is that freedom has become individualized and privatized, released of its larger burdens . . . cut loose from the burdens and responsibilities that had once so closely accompanied it.²¹ Another key mark is how much this stripped-down understanding of freedom represents a change from the recent past. Rodgers notes:

Conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the [twentieth] century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.²²

Rodgers traces this fracturing in economic, political, and cultural spheres. But his analysis puts special weight on economics: the real-world and theoretical developments in the last fifty years that have had a preeminent causal power on the rest of society. It is important to note that for Rodgers it is not simply economics per se that has played this causal role. Instead, it is a highly abstract view of microeconomics and markets that has cast a powerful spell. This way of thinking draws heavily on finance capitalism and downplays market imperfections. And these abstractions have been applied both to markets in themselves and to society more generally. Rodgers says of this strain of economic thought: It stood for a way of thinking about society with a myriad of self-generated actions for its engine and optimization as its natural and spontaneous outcome. It was . . . a disaggregation of society and its troubling collective presence and demands into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces.²³ The effects of such individualized and ideal market theory on the meaning of freedom were profound. To imagine the market now, Rodgers notes, was to imagine a socially detached array of economic actors, free to choose and optimize, unconstrained by power or inequalities, governed not by their common deliberative action but only by the impersonal laws of the market.²⁴

An emphasis on the possibility and normative importance of unconstrained choice—what Rodgers calls the most contagious of the age’s metaphors—carried with it as well a problematic approach to equality.²⁵ Indeed, one of the signs of the times was the dismissal of concerns about equality at all—whether equality of result or equality of opportunity. Another was the libertarian conception of an equal liberty in which the liberty in question was detached from community, institutions, and power. And still another was the detachment of such a sense of liberty from the past. Here, in fact, lies one of the key paradoxes of our time about the meaning of freedom. On the one hand, there exists a widespread commitment to a libertarian sense of freedom that is considered historical, insofar as any distributions in society that follow from the exercise of such freedom should be considered just primarily because the distributions are the result of such exercises of freedom (and, in that sense, are historical). On the other hand, this libertarian conception of liberty is detached from the past and from a full historical accounting of what might shape the exercise of freedom today. Rodgers notes: Like the models of perfect markets, the libertarian vision of society was radically timeless. . . . In its ‘historical’ understanding of justice as a transmission chain of free, voluntary transactions, actual history trailed away in footnotes and silences and vanished.²⁶ In the end, after the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, we are left with an American scene prizing an abstract freedom detached from what Rodgers calls webs of dependence and connection: history, structures, institutions, society, equality, race, class, and responsibility commensurate with such contexts.²⁷

American society, then, is going through a convulsion, its long-standing assumptions about freedom and equality under pressure from increasingly assertive libertarian philosophies (which have in any case often played a significant role in American culture) and increasingly evident social inequalities. What can Catholic theological ethics offer to clarify and correct the confounding issues at stake in this convulsion? Important recent work has been done in this regard. I think, among other publications, of Meghan J. Clark’s The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: The Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights, Christine Firer Hinze’s Glass Ceilings and Dirt Floors: Women, Work, and the Global Economy, and Matthew T. Eggemeier and Peter Joseph Fritz’s Send Lazarus: Catholicism and the Crises of Neoliberalism. Much of this work has rightly criticized common views of autonomy and freedom for the way their abstract, individualistic character provides intellectual cover for unjust social inequalities. Correspondingly, this work has sought to correct such views by arguing that freedom must be understood in light of its inherent connection to relationship and its inalienable immersion in context. I agree with the thrust of such arguments—both critical and corrective—but wish to turn the focus even more to the concept of freedom in itself.

Catholic social thought has had an ambivalent relation to the concept of freedom, accepting it in principle but either subordinating it to the demands of the hierarchical social order as in the writing of Leo XIII;²⁸ or, more recently, seeing it as little more than an empty proceduralism ineffectual in the face of vast social inequalities;²⁹ or fearing freedom as the leading edge of an unwelcome sexual and reproductive revolution set on remaking nature itself; or subordinating freedom to truth in a way that makes the former feckless and empty apart from its controlling direction by the latter.³⁰ But important recent sociological, philosophical, and theological work has been done to recover a richer sense of freedom by, among others, Orlando Patterson, Amartya Sen, Elizabeth Anderson, Walter Kasper, Shawn Copeland, Peter Joseph Fritz, and David Hollenbach. The work of these scholars recovers a sense of the importance of freedom for its own sake and for the sake of important goods. But their work also embeds freedom in a world of sharp constraint and empowering possibility. In any case, it is imperative that Catholic theological ethics turn specifically to the logic and language of freedom when addressing a liberal society like the United States. At the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church committed itself to the free society.³¹ Leading Catholic social theorist Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Germany has argued that freedom is the preeminent principle of Catholic social doctrine.³² For the sake of self-consistency, the Church must speak the language of freedom. For the sake of having the gospel heard in liberal society, it must do so as well. Catholic public theology should not cede the space of freedom to its contemporary libertarian usurpers.

By freedom, I am referring to an inherent, uncoerced, and spiritual dimension of human beings—a dimension intimately associated with reason and an awareness of personal responsibility. In philosophical terms, I think of freedom as especially reflecting the feature of . . . being the ultimate source, or originator, of one’s choices. . . . For human beings or any created persons who owe their existence to factors outside themselves, the only way their acts of will could find their ultimate origin in themselves is for such acts not to be determined by their character or circumstances.³³ Freedom and responsibility are expressions of an inalienable human dignity and natural, given properties of persons. Freedom and truth are mutually implicated as a matter of the given sociality of human persons: To respect one’s own and every other person’s freedom—to respect the natural law of persons—is, therefore, an implication of every person’s rational obligation to respect and recognize the truth.³⁴ Of course, such given, natural aspects of freedom are the most encompassing philosophical category. And such natural notions of freedom become specified in many different contexts. For instance, the word liberty applies especially to the legal status of a member of an organized group or society.³⁵ For this work of social ethics, I consider another specification of freedom—the word autonomy—to mean a second-order capacity of persons to reflect critically upon their first-order preferences, desires, wishes, and so forth, and the capacity to accept or attempt to change these in light of higher-order preferences.³⁶ In this book, I intend to focus on freedom precisely because of its encompassing nature. To reflect on freedom allows us to reimagine terms like liberty and autonomy, and to consider anew the many different dimensions of freedom in the American social and political context. Moreover, freedom has ultimate significance in the Catholic theological understanding of human destiny. As theologian Karl Rahner put it, freedom is the presupposition, created by God, to make it possible for God to give God’s self to human beings in love.³⁷

This is a work of public theology, and I am especially interested in the manifestation of elemental notions of freedom in an American social and political context. To that end, several remarks are in order. First, by calling this a work of public theology I wish to bring the theological wisdom of the Catholic tradition to bear on the public conversation about American society. By appealing ultimately to theology (though with plenty of sociology and philosophy along the way), I believe a more coherent and communal notion of freedom can and should become part of this public conversation.³⁸ Also, my argument is oriented to the post-secular time in which I think we are living. Thus I do not think that public theology today must primarily combat a relentless secularism. Nor do I accept the secularization thesis that holds that religion will inevitably fade away under the force of modernity. Instead, I accept as fact the fragmentation of grand narratives and the awareness of diverse moral traditions. In the post-secular world, the forces of religion and secularism both remain, but in a new tension. In a personal sense, to believe at all is conditioned by the awareness that one may choose not to believe.³⁹ Moreover, religion has recovered a vital public presence—but this recovery has occurred alongside the declining purchase of religious institutions. What characterizes post-secularity is, said Elaine Graham, its very paradoxical and unprecedented nature. The emergence globally and nationally of revitalized religious activism as a decisive force, alongside the continuing trajectory of institutional religious decline accompanied by robust intellectual defence of secularism in Western societies, takes us into new territory, empirically and theoretically.⁴⁰ As a theological response to the post-secular, I argue in this book in terms of fragments that find a final unity in the Catholic theological tradition.⁴¹ Thus I appeal to sociology and philosophy for analogues to theological claims. And thus I reject an overarching, exclusively theological argument, even if I am ultimately arguing on behalf of an understanding that I call created freedom under the sign of the cross. Theological reasons undergird my argument throughout. But sociology and philosophy help shed significant light on the meaning of the vulnerable, hopeful idea of freedom that is the focus of the book.

The central theological concept in this book is what Rahner calls created freedom. In Catholic theology in the last decades, this concept has often been invoked as a restraint on an otherwise outsized Promethean freedom disdainful of moral truth. "Freedom is not determined by its opposite but by the fundamental relationship between freedom and truth, that is, between the gift of created freedom and its divine Giver . . . genuine freedom denotes the truthful enactment of created existence," said Reinhard Hutter, commenting on John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor.⁴² I accept how the created status of freedom signals its orientation toward truth. But the prevailing formulations of created freedom in the last