Neocon Gnosticism

by Christopher Manion

The warhawks have reached a new level of desperation – and sadly, it is the level of raw sewage.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece by a Mr. Rod Dreher. The byline reads, "Mr. Dreher, a Catholic, is a senior writer for National Review."

Now, I must confess that I have written for both of these publications. I can only wish Mr. Dreher had benefited from the critical eye of the editors I had, because we would have been spared his spiteful, cheap, and self-congratulatory little diatribe. But as Eric Voegelin once said, "I have to spend 95% of my time addressing other people’s errors. It leaves me so little time to do serious work!"

Mr. Dreher’s brief can be easily summarized: The Pope didn’t solve the problem of homosexual predators in the American Catholic Church, therefore, he has no moral authority to lecture us on war. To wit:

How did the Church fail to protect these children? Mr. Dreher: Bad bishops:

Evidently Mr. Dreher wishes the Pope, and his predecessors, had disciplined bad bishops, and perhaps bad priests as well, not only for propounding or permitting sexual sins, but for abandoning the moral teachings of the Church for the past forty years. So do I. But that has very little to do with the assertions that Mr. Dreher insists follow naturally and logically from it – namely, that "the Church" has no moral authority – either to lecture Mr. Bush, or to teach Mr. Dreher and me how to achieve salvation, or anything – all because of the Pope’s failure to fire bad bishops.

Several issues arise here. First, a curiosity. Mr. Dreher is identified as "a Catholic." Now, when I wrote for National Review and the Wall Street Journal, I was never identified as "a Catholic" (although I am), even though I often wrote about issues of ethics, religion, and politics. I have never seen other writers there identified by their religious affiliation. Strange.

This curiosity is compounded because Mr. Dreher appears to identify himself as a Catholic in order to garner additional authority to condemn the Church as an institution with no moral authority.

Mr. Dreher: "I’m not schizophrenic. Neither am I."

Nonetheless, I believe the editors considered it necessary to so identify Mr. Dreher, because his argument, what there is of it, does not derive from the Catholic tradition, but from the gnostic tradition – sadly, a common trait these days among some (but by no means all) of American warmongers (see my earlier treatment of William Kristol and Cal Thomas, "Blessed are the Warmakers"). The gnostic departs from the Christian tradition, while continuing to use its language and symbols. He sets himself apart from the sinful nature of man and the existence of evil in the world, and blames that sin and evil on the governing authority (in this case, the Pope). He then offers himself and his sinless, idealistic party as the political (always political) alternative worthy of bringing history into a future that will be free of this hypocrisy. Mr. Dreher’s syllogism requires that the pope be a perfect administrator, able to prune away all evil from his bishops and priests, before he is qualified to teach anyone – let alone our fine president! – about morality. He gives his assertions the gnostic guarantee: "The future will be better, but you must shed your attachment to evil institutions (the Church, the Pope) and limitations on our power (the Constitution, international law, the balance of powers). These artifacts have produced the present evils. We must go boldly and powerfully into the future, and turn the world upside down."

In Mr. Dreher’s view, the Pope is morally unfit to lecture Mr. Bush on moral matters of worldwide importance, including the fate of millions – billions – of believers. However, Mr. Dreher, "a Catholic," is supremely fit to lecture the Pope on morals. And he proceeds to do so

To quote my dad’s old friend and colleague, Knute Rockne, "You don’t spit on a man’s head when you’re standing on his shoulders."

The contradictions of American conservative gnosticism of the twenty-first century do not end there. To illustrate, allow me to adopt entirely and verbatim Mr. Dreher’s logic and language, but to make some substitutions in the lineup.

Mr. Dreher’s contradictions don’t end there. He is still hung up on Church authority. Even though the Church has no moral standing to lecture Mr. Bush, Mr. Dreher asserts that "The Vatican has been resolutely unmoved by arguments based on Catholic just-war doctrine that defend war on Iraq." Again we find the gnostic fingerprint: first, Mr. Dreher is forced to rely on the Church’s authority to find such arguments compelling, when he has just confirmed the Church’s lack of authority. This is possible because the gnostic recognizes the manipulative power of traditional religious symbols, even as he cynically empties them of their original content and fills them with the elements of his ideological program. Second, the arguments he refers to are actually major alterations of classic Catholic just-war teaching, alterations whose authors consider the situation in Iraq so important that the doctrine’s fundamental prohibition of offensive wars of aggression must be amended because of the new and unprecedented character of weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Dreher appears to anticipate that a reader or two might look it up, and expose his deception, so he contradicts himself again to throw us off his trail: "Now, Catholics are not obliged to agree with the pope on this issue. The rightness or wrongness of this or any particular war is a matter of opinion." Principle or opinion, Mr. Dreher? Consistency comes at too high a price for the warriors, poor dears, so they indulge in Mao’s "principle of dialectical contradiction" instead. Do you like principle? We’ve got principle. Is principle too burdensome? It’s just a matter of opinion. Is the opinion offensive? Slime the pope.

Mr. Dreher does refer to the arguments of a couple of principled grownups, however, and I take these people seriously. Admittedly, I find their conveniently re-tooled "just-war" arguments to be an indulgence in situation ethics at its worst, but let me make a personal comment: the two most prominent proponents of this view are friends of mine. And they are fine men, with whom I disagree on this point. These men, and some other fine Catholics, support the war on Iraq. But they do not feel compelled, as does the "appalled" Mr. Dreher, to personally attack and otherwise slime the Holy Father in order to make their argument. For instance, when Michael Novak returned from his recent trip to the Vatican, unsuccessful in his attempt to see the Pope and to change the mind of His Holiness on the war, he didn’t come back to the US and attack the Pope out of spite.

Mr. Dreher obviously feels a greater sense of desperation. He lurches on, and next perverts history, alleging that "the Vatican's monumental efforts, both diplomatic and pastoral, to avert war with Iraq have focused the attention of the Holy See and summoned its energies behind a cause like no crisis in living memory."

Either Mr. Dreher is still young enough to be in school, or else he indulges in convenient and voluntary amnesia, another classic gnostic trait. Most Catholics today acknowledge and welcome the efforts of John Paul II over many decades to bring down Communism. This effort was ultimately successful well within "living memory" because the entire world (excepting the younger Mr. Dreher, it appears) recognized the commanding moral authority of this very unique and historical pope and his leadership of the believing free world.

No matter. For Mr. Dreher’s manipulative gnostic enterprise, the war against Iraq must be seen as an even more monumental than the Cold War, a cause "like no crisis in living memory" precisely because the entire world recognized the danger of communism, and the morality of the common cause against it made by John Paul II and an earlier American President, Ronald Reagan.

Quite in contrast, in today’s monumental crisis, the entire world decidedly does not see things our way. And so, Mr. Dreher and his ideological cohorts have been called into battle, to discredit all the countries, institutions, leaders, powers, and dominions that dare to question this war, while chasing after renowned moral authorities like Angola and Cameroon with billions in promised bribes, more popularly known as foreign aid and trade concessions.

Meanwhile, the American people who dare to think about the war are scratching their heads at the "bait-and-switch" routine of announced goals of the war. It’s like watching a game of three-card Monte in Central Park: "Why, if the public won’t buy the WMD argument on the basis of self-preservation, we’ll give them regime change. If they don’t buy that, we’ll appeal to their ideals and predict a Wilsonian democracy in some far, foggy future for Iraq. If they don’t buy that, we’ll threaten to brand them with dark and subterranean and totally unprovable anti-Semitism. And if they don’t buy that, well, we’ll slime the Pope!"

It is a classic ingredient of the gnostic lust for power, the promise of the peaceful, unfettered future after the conflagration, most familiar in Karl Marx’s prediction of a post-revolutionary socialist paradise, that predicts perfection in the future – always a bit imprecise in detail but a matter of ideological faith – only if the gnostic program comes to power and if the barriers posed to it by traditional moral authority are discredited and destroyed. Like Marx’s attacks on his left-Hegelian competitors, Mr. Dreher’s attack on John Paul II is unusually personal, vituperative, and preening. Like other gnostic apparatchiks, Mr. Dreher’s professes to be morally appalled by a particular immorality, in this case the well-known malfeasance of American bishops. But he is able to employ this minor moralism because it does not get in the way of his major premise, which is war. He will not, I reckon, begin complaining (but the Pope will) when USAID, America’s foreign aid agency, pushes programs in "free Iraq" that expropriate property in the name of "land reform." Or will he object when AID imposes mandatory artificial birth-control programs and free, government-funded abortion in Iraq, as it has tried to implement in Afghanistan? This will constitute an official element of U.S. policy, of course, and will offend the traditional Moslem population of Iraq the way it has the Moslem population of Afghanistan. But the warhawks won’t mind. You always have to break some eggs to make an omelette.

I would be surprised if any U.S. Catholic – except possibly Mr. Dreher and his ideological cohorts – believes that the Catholic Church actually condones homosexual rape as a matter of policy. Nor does any sane American believe that Secretary Rumsfeld approves of heterosexual rape or prostitution. No, the very real and outrageous incidents that have come to light (and all the rest that haven’t) are the results of the sins of sinful men, some of them in powerful places. As Cardinal Newman put it, "being a great theologian doesn’t make you more holy; it only makes you more guilty when you sin."

Most Americans understand that. Most Catholics do, too. Mr. Dreher chooses to ignore it, in order to browbeat (one can hardly say "persuade") Catholics and others who admire and even follow the Pope’s moral teachings. It might also serve to appeal to those dark, powerful, subterranean, and totally unprovable currents of anti-Catholicism among the millennialist ranks of fundamentalists who support Mr. Bush. Either way, it is a sign of the desperation of the warriors, that they strain for moral authority, even if it can be grasped only by sliming the world’s most admired and authentic moral authority.

Even after all this, if Mr. Dreher hasn’t convinced you, no sweat, it’s just a matter of opinion anyway. Logic and reason really don’t apply. Of course, Mr. Dreher gilds his opinions with a patina of reason, and rhetoric, but ultimately it boils down to assertions, passion, anger, and bombast, because rational discussion comes at too high a price – someone might actually persuade too many Americans to question the war. And, as Dick Nixon would say, "that would be wrong."

And it isn’t that Mr. Dreher doesn’t approve of authority – he’s just against the moral authority of the Holy Father, the Successor of Peter, whom Catholics see as an unerring teacher of faith and morals, a moral leader (as Stalin observed) with no political power. That’s the authority Mr. Dreher resents and rejects. He doesn’t mind at all that Mr. Bush, the most powerful politician in the world, might claim unlimited Divine authority, personally, privately, and directly anointed from God.

Brace yourselves.

March 10, 2003

Christopher Manion [send him mail] writes from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. He avoids Maryland whenever possible.

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