The Tempting of Traditionalism, Part I

 As it is election season in America, there is a lot of talk about how faith and politics intersect.  Its also something that is a bit new:  the first election where traditionalists are getting a bit more cache in the mainstream.  Whatever one thinks about it, the President tweeting Taylor Marshall and Archbishop Vigano is a thing that happened, and its raised the profile.  Elsewhere in the Church, one finds voices saying Catholics have to vote for Biden, others saying its a mortal sin.  Wishing it wasn't like this is silly and stupid:  it is like this, and it will continue to be like this, so we better figure out how to process it.

A lot of Catholics I know are very worried about the growing affinity for Trump in Catholic circles, especially the more traditionalist ones.  I share that worry, but I'm afraid their inability to understand some key things means they will fail to understand why that affinity is growing, and what to do about it.  We're going to talk about what to do about it, but we need to do so on our terms, not on the terms of outsiders, or of those who wish those Catholics nothing but ill will. 

There is a growing affinity for Trump (and for nationalism in general) in traditionalist circles because a lot of the things he runs on (or professes to believe) are a problem in the Catholic Church as well.  The failure to understand this is why most of the critiques fall on deaf ears.  Without getting too granular, Donald Trump is president because trust in the governing class of Americans has cratered.  Like modern government, the Catholic Church is heavily bureaucratized, and those bureaucrats not only wield immense power, but also generate nothing but immense contempt from wide swathes of those they help govern.  The West was rocked by a financial crisis and by a migration crisis throughout Europe, the Church was rocked by an abuse crisis.  It isn't surprising that Catholics would seek analogies to the present political system to understand our woes.  It isn't just familiarity, the Church is going through a similar crisis in liberalism.  That these analogies have limits is important, and we'll get to that, but we need to understand why those analogies have such pull, even if you don't like it.

Another similarity is the current crisis is a stark reminder of how bad of shape the Church/society is in right now.  15-20 years ago it was common to talk about a coming golden age of the Church.  More recently there was talk of a "Francis effect" which would help make that renewal a reality after previous attempts never materialized.  Western political systems had the same optimism, whether at the fall of the Berlin wall, the election of Barrack Obama, take your pick.  The nationalist crisis within liberalism is causing a debate right out in the open:  is it really a renewal if so few experience it?  Or in the case of the Church, is it really a renewal when Mass attendance continues to decline, discord is now increasingly nasty and out in the open among bishops?  

People don't want to consider that reality because that reality scares them, and because they have not spent adequate time thinking "what if they are right?"  The elites of the West were utterly blindsided by the current tumult, even if it was clearly on the horizon.  In the Church, admitting we're in a really bad position right now would imply that our leadership either put us there, or did little to stop the slide to where we are.  For various reasons, that's a bridge too far for many.

Yet the refusal to admit that is why many trads find the Trumpist temptation so appealing.  At the very least, it isn't built on a lie:  society really is in a bad shape, just like the Church.  If you're annoyed by the elites in the Church, well we're annoyed with the elites in government who refuse to get the message.  So vote for us.  One can poke a thousand holes rhetorically in this argument, but one has to realize the appeal of it, as well as the failure of anyone to offer a compelling alternative.

Later this week I'll talk about the limits of those analogies, and why we should be on guard against them.  But this seemed like the perfect use of "let's write something only a few hundred people will read", because honestly, those few hundred people are likely to be thinking about it as well.