American Religious Liberalism

Fifteen: Demarcating Democracy: Liberal Catholics, Protestants, and the Discourse of Secularism

f i f t e e n Demarcating Democracy Liberal Catholics, Protestants, and the Discourse of Secularism K. H e a l a n Ga s t o n Fears that Catholicism would undermine the cultural foundations of Ameri­ can democracy abounded in the World War II era. As the historian John T. McGreevy explains in Catholicism and Ameri­ can Freedom (2003), many liberal Protestants, Jews, humanists, and naturalists believed that democracy required a thoroughly anti-­ authoritarian culture, and they suspected Catholicism of being fundamentally authoritarian in character. This po­liti­cal critique of Catholicism peaked in 1949 with the publication of the muckraking journalist Paul Blanshard’s infamous bestseller Ameri­can Freedom and Catholic Power, whichcalledforanorganized “resistance movement” to combat the “antidemo­ cratic social policies of the hierarchy.” Prominent non-­Catholic liberals hailed Blanshard’s “exemplary scholarship, good judgment, and tact” and sang the book’s praises in the mainstream press. McGreevy argues that postwar Ameri­ can liberalism took shape in opposition not only to racism and totalitarianism but also to Catholicism, which non-­ Catholic liberals regarded as a po­ liti­ cally authoritarian other to America’s free society and institutions.1 Although hardly the first scholar to recount these cultural battles, McGreevy has introduced them to non-­ specialist audiences, thereby making Blan­ shard and what John Courtney Murray termed “the New Nativism” central to our under­stand­ing of twentieth-­century Ameri­can liberalism.2 Curiously, however , McGreevy’s account omits Catholic participants, focusing exclusively on 337 338 K. Healan Gaston the contributions of Catholicism’s fiercest critics—primarily naturalists in the universities and on the Supreme Court, along with a few Protestant progressives . These non-­Catholic liberals articulated a potent discourse of authoritarianism that cast doubt upon the ability of Catholics to defend democracy.3 But the dearth of Catholic voices in McGreevy’s treatment raises the question of how Catholics themselves described the cultural requirements of democracy. In this chapter, I suggest that historians ought to view the discourse of authoritarianism identified by McGreevy as interwoven with a countervailing discourse of secularism. Each of these discourses involved the construction of a negative other—a frightening image of a group whose core beliefs negated social order itself.4 My research indicates that even the most liberal Catholics joined their more conservative coreligionists in employing the discourse of secularism both to combat charges of authoritarianism and to call into question the ability of non-­ Catholic liberals to adequately defend democracy. Us­ ing the writings of four prominent liberal Catholics—John A. Ryan, Carlton J. H. Hayes, John Courtney Murray, and John Cogley—I offer a new perspective on the struggle over the meaning of democracy between Catholic critics of liberal “secularism” and liberal critics of Catholic “authoritarianism” during the middle decades of the twentieth century. This chapter demonstrates that the discourses of authoritarianism and secularism functioned as two sides of a larger postwar debate about the cultural foundations of democracy.5 It also shows that by the early years of the Cold War, the discourse of secularism to which Catholics so powerfully contributed had begun to drive a wedge through the liberal Protestant camp. John A. Ryan: Liberal Catholic Identity and Democratic Orthodoxy John A. Ryan (1865–1945) personified liberal Catholicism for countless inter­ war Catholics, in­ clud­ ing Father Charles E. Coughlin, who dubbed him the “Right Reverend New Dealer.” Indeed, Ryan did much to make Catholics a cornerstone of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, to the chagrin of Coughlin and other critics. Growing up on a farm in Minnesota, Ryan had witnessed firsthand the rise and fall of the Populist movement before joining the priesthood in 1898 and becoming a leading voice of Ameri­ can Catholicism during World War I. Ryan’s unflagging commitment to social justice and many contributions to Catholic social thought soon became legendary. In his joint capacities Demarcating Democracy 339 as a professor of po­ liti­ cal science and moral theology at the Catholic University of America and the head of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), Ryan championed a living wage and industrial democracy between the wars.6 Yet Ryan cautioned in 1930 that being a liberal in economic matters did not necessarily require one to be a liberal in other realms, in­clud­ing “politics, governmental policy, religion, education, science, philosophy, ethical theory and practice, and social conventions.” An individual, said Ryan, “can...