Catholics can make two opposite mistakes about politics. One is to treat it as beneath us, as though concern for heaven means indifference to the earthly city. The other is to treat politics as though it were ultimate, as though the right election, the right law, or the right movement could save the world. Neither mistake is worthy of a Catholic. As you and I know, our true home is in heaven. But our neighbors live with us here and now, in the body, in families, neighborhoods, schools, towns, and nations. One of the chief ways we order that shared temporal life is through politics. 

That is why Catholics should engage in American civic life. Not because politics is everything, but because it is something important. Not because America is perfect, but because gratitude and responsibility are still both owed for imperfect goods. Here are five reasons.

5 Reasons Catholics Should Engage In American Civic Life

1. Because love of neighbor has a public dimension

Our Lord commands us to love our neighbors, and our neighbors do not exist in the abstract. They live with us in a common world. They need peace, order, protection, education, and the conditions that make ordinary human life possible. Politics is one of the main ways we organize that life together. In the classical and Christian tradition, it is the most comprehensive way we order our temporal lives in common.

That means indifference to civic life is not a sign of spiritual seriousness. Sometimes it is just a failure to notice where charity should operate. A Catholic should care about the laws, institutions, customs, and habits that shape whether his neighbor can live a stable and dignified life, especially regarding how much that life can contribute to his or her capacity to hear and respond to the Gospel. Even when politics is frustrating, and it usually is in this vale of tears, it remains one of the ordinary arenas in which love of neighbor takes concrete form.

2. Because politics is about the common good

Many people now hear “politics” and think only of parties, campaigns, and internet outrage. But politics is something more basic than that. Properly understood, it concerns common action and justice in view of the common good. It is about how a people lives together, what it honors, what it protects, what concrete ways of living it inherits and then passes on to the next generation, and how it secures conditions under which human beings may flourish.

Catholics should engage in civic life because the common good does not take care of itself. It requires judgment, deliberation, sacrifice, and prudence. Prudence matters especially in political life because political action deals not with clean abstractions but with difficult circumstances, competing goods, and the stubborn particularity of real life. The work of citizenship in a republican nation is to exercise judgment for the sake of the common good we participate in together.

3. Because gratitude for America is a virtue, even if America is imperfect

A Catholic does not need to pretend that America is spotless. No serious person thinks that. But neither should we speak as though this country were nothing but hypocrisy and oppression. Such cynicism is lazy, and it leaves people unable to love and serve the place they actually inhabit, and whose laws and customs have given them a political community in the first place.

The American constitutional order has provided a home for its citizens, including its Christian citizens. That does not make it sacred. It does mean it deserves gratitude. We can show deep gratitude for the American political order while refusing to identify the American city of man with the City of God. That is just the right posture. A Catholic should neither sneer at America nor worship it. He should be grateful for what is genuinely good in it, honest about its defects, and willing to work for its flourishing and advancement.

4. Because the Church is transpolitical, not apolitical

The Church’s mission is not political in the partisan sense. She is not a policy shop, and she should never reduce her voice to advocacy jargon or talking points. But it does not follow that she is indifferent to civic life. The Church is transpolitical, not apolitical. She transcends politics, yet precisely because she transcends it, she can speak to it.

Christianity has flourished under many kinds of regimes. It does not prescribe one constitutional arrangement for all peoples in all places. Yet faith does inform citizenship. If you want good citizens, Augustine suggests, then you should want people who obey the commandments and live the Beatitudes. Grace does not abolish nature. It perfects it. So Catholics should not withdraw from public life as though the earthly city had nothing to do with the heavenly one. Nor should they let politics absorb the faith. The right course is to enter civic life with the freedom that comes from knowing Caesar is not God, but that our Christian formation can help us to fulfill our civic obligations as expressions of charity. That leads to the last point.

5. Because American civic life needs what Catholics have to give

Catholics do not enter civic life empty-handed. We bring with us a richer account of the human person, a stronger understanding of moral obligation, a deeper sense of the common good, and a steadier view of freedom than the modern habit of treating freedom as autonomy. We know that human beings are ordered to truths and goods higher than the state can bestow. We know that grace and virtue matter. We know that our neighbors are not abstractions, mere individual rights-holders, but persons to whom duties are owed and whom we are called to love and pray for.

Catholicism can act as a kind of leaven in the American scene. America was not founded on explicitly Catholic premises, but the Catholic contribution can make something already good better. Catholics do this most effectively not by turning the Church into an arm of a party, but by living the faith well: growing in holiness, growing in virtue, evangelizing, raising children, serving institutions with integrity, and contributing to the civic order with seriousness and humility. 

Catholics should engage American civic life, then, not because politics can save us, and not because America is beyond criticism. We should engage because temporal goods are real goods, because our neighbors need them (and us), because gratitude is owed for real blessings, and because the truth about man and God should not be absent from public life. 

Image: Photo by Janay Peters on Unsplash