Pope Leo against false progressivism
+why my hot takes on sex are NOT important
So if you couldn’t tell already, we are OBSESSED with ’s book We Have Never Been Woke.
It was at the top of the Cracks in PoMo Winter 2024 Book List.
I reviewed it in RealClearBooks.
reviewed it for Cracks in PoMo.
I cited it in Law & Liberty.
And we just dropped our podcast interview with Musa [listen on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube].
AND I just reviewed it AGAIN for America Magazine, emphasizing that Catholics absolutely must read it…for reasons that converge very much with Pope Leo XIV’s invitation to revisit Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum.
I spell out why I think they’re both so important to read in the rant below:
While at the New York Encounter this past February, I ran into several people who said they really enjoyed reading our hot takes on topics related to sexuality. Not one person said they found the stuff we’ve written on material issues (education, urban planning, labor, economics, subsidiarity) interesting. Maybe that’s because it isn’t.
But that’s not the point. The point is, sexuality is not very important. It is secondary, downstream from material issues. All of this obsession with personal morality and identity is a distraction from what’s really at stake.
This is the point I tried to make in my review of Musa al-Gharbi’s book for America. Catholics allows themselves to get sucked into the culture war, forgetting that if they really want society to be more hospitable to “Catholic values,” we need to actually play a role in building society—no, not just through advocating for policy issues like abortion and religious liberty or through charitable works, but especially through actual old-school grassroots initiatives.
[We also wrote about this on the day after the election, and how most Catholics reduce their social responsibilities to voting, doing volunteer work, and virtue signaling on the internet.]
If we had stable homes, businesses, jobs, neighborhoods, and schools, we wouldn’t have all these kids with identity crises, proclaiming that they are depressed, neurodivergent, or non-binary (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”).
The fact that Pope Leo XIV not only took the name “Leo,” but also cited Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum is an invitation to all people—especially Catholics—to revisit the way we look at social issues…and to read Rerum Novarum. Most Catholics think Catholic social teaching amounts to sprinkling Catholic principles on top of mainstream left or right platforms. But Leo XIII reminds us that the the crux of CST are SOLIDARITY and SUBSIDIARITY…which are prioritized by neither Democrats nor Republicans. Thus, CST is A SECRET THIRD THING.
As I wrote in my piece about when I read Rerum Novarum with my high school students:
My students would regurgitate things they’ve heard AOC or Ben Shapiro say about socialism and capitalism, or what they’ve heard on TikTok about Critical Race Theory and the role of men in the “Bronze Age.” They rarely espoused original ideas, nor seemed capable of grasping nuance or developing any sense of intellectual consistency. And so, before looking at the Catholic Church’s proposal about society and politics, I decided it would be necessary to zoom out [by reading Marx and Adam Smith]. […]
We then dove into the origins of CST, reading Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and exploring his emphasis on subsidiarity, the role of the family, and the dignity of the worker, as well as his critiques of free market capitalism and socialism/communism. We spent a considerable amount of time digging into the anthropological assumptions of his social positions, and compared them to those of Smith and Marx. I found it to be essential to keep this question of what it means to be human at the forefront of our discussions on social, political, and economic issues. […]
I began to see that what’s most radical about CST is that it brings those of us living in a discourse of ideological abstractions into contact what the concrete. It impels us to “touch grass,” to come to our senses and use our common sense. The Church’s commitment to subsidiarity and emphasis on starting at the local level forces us to look at our family members, classmates, and neighbors in the face and ask whether we love them—whether we even know them—as well as we do whatever political “causes” we stand by.1
On that note, many are hoping that Leo will be “more progressive” than Francis was…meaning that he’ll go further with LGBTQIA++ and women’s issues. As much as we all know that I’m not one for Francis-bashing (esp. now that he’s dead), and as much as I believe that there was value behind Francis’ pastoral tone toward the gays (and use of slurs), I have a problem with people painting this gesture as “progressive.”
There’s nothing progressive about normalizing sexual “freedom.” This fortifies our culture’s esteem for individualism and expressivism, which is to say these are bourgeois issues that are part and parcel of late-phase consumer capitalism. As much as being nice to the gays is a matter of Christian charity, the prospect of normalizing forms of sex that are absolutely closed to procreation is far from progressive—a point I tried to make in my essays on the cognitive dissonance of queer anti-colonialism and on the queer2authoritarian pipeline (and which Dorothy Day attempted to convey to the Free Love hippies who came to the CW in the 60s).
Al-Gharbi’s work highlights how “wokeness” champions sexual libertinism as a progressive issue, while doing little to nothing to address systemic issues that oppress the working class. People being able to have sex with whoever they want or to identify however to want does nothing to alleviate the plight of workers—and in fact serves to entrench the capitalistic logic that keeps them oppressed.
I hope that Pope Leo XIV’s revival of Leo XIII’s legacy will provoke so-called progressive Catholics to realize that real progress looks more like effecting policy to strengthen workers’ rights than sacramentalizing gay marriages or trivializing gender difference. There’s a reason why BOTH sodomy and depriving workers of their wages are among the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance.
On a somewhat similar note, Leo XIV has already endorsed Francis’s challenge to Vance’s interpretation of ordo amoris and the Trump administration’s mass deportations. Fair enough. But given his affinity for Leo XIII, I hope he will also address the fact that capitalists posing as progressives are pushing for open borders in order to drive down wages & the quality of working conditions…something Francis rarely did. It’s one thing to welcome the migrant as Christ, and it’s another to enable a system of slave labor that only serves to strengthen elites.2
Anyway, we love Francis. But hopefully Leo XIV will get people to (a) look more closely a the Church’s social teaching, and to stop sprinkling Catholic buzzwords on top of mainstream political discourse and (b) recognize that symbolic activism is NOT a substitute for grassroots activism…that it’s anything but progressive and in fact is bourgeois.
And hopefully you will stop putting off reading Musa’s book, as well as Rerum Novarum. And we really hope you won’t only read our stuff about sex just because it’s spicy, but that you’ll also read our stuff about real issues too (as boring as it may be).
Lastly, register for our salon with on young men turning MAGA tomorrow at 5 pm EST.
I also wrote in America about how certain people in power—taking a page out of the books of Bernays and Lipmann—use culture war as a forms of social control, an Oz-like facade to hide what’s really at stake. For more on this, read Olufemi Taiwo’s book (which Musa cites), and watch all of Adam Curtis’s documentaries (esp. Century of the Self ).
The same way I have a hard time demonizing women who get abortions (especially poor ones who make that decision out of desperation) as murderers, I have a hard time demonizing working class people (esp. ones who can’t find stable blue collar jobs with decent pay and benefits, and who are forced to resort to gig labor) who applaud mass deportation as evil xenophobes. Abortion is bad. So are xenophobia and mass deportations. But Francis’s failure to address the broader implications of mass illegal migration came off as tone deaf and overly moralistic, and alienated so many misguided but well-intentioned Catholics. (For the record, Cardinal Sarah has a much better track record of addressing the both/and of immigration).
Reading through Rerum Novarum for the first time following Sarah Carter’s (Recovering Catholic) lead. I’m an evangelical who embraces CST as I’ve gotten to know it through the American Solidarity Party.