American liberalism turns 250 this July. But like members of a family in a fight at a birthday party, we are not in a celebratory mood.
I propose a gift in view of our dampened celebration: the work of the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray. Not since his death in 1967 have national events made his thought more freshly relevant than today.
Murray appeared on the cover of Time in December 1960 under the heading “U.S. Catholics and the State,” a month after the election of John F. Kennedy as the country’s first Catholic president. He contributed more than any other single thinker to the Second Vatican Council’s “Declaration on Religious Freedom” (“Dignitatis Humanae”). By century’s end, however, Murray’s vision seemed out of step to many Catholics. To many mainstream Catholic political liberals, he seemed too traditional; and to radical orthodox “postliberals,” too assimilationist.
Today, in addition to postliberal Catholics with pacifist leanings like William T. Cavanaugh, there are “New Right” postliberals with integralist tendencies in the mold of Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. The former group has not wanted the church to cede too much to the liberal nation-state’s imperialism, the latter to its secularism. Some in the first group have advocated a kind of Christian exile from political modernity; many in the second a Christian conservative revolution to overthrow it. Neither has had much use for Murray.
Some “New Right” postliberals have claimed the revolution has already been won. The theologian Chad Pecknold recently proclaimed that “we won’t be returning to Liberalism—in its ‘classical’ or modern forms—ever again. The age of Liberalism has ended; and the Postliberal Age has begun.”
If such “game over” declarations are not mere trash-talking or wishful thinking and the sun truly has set on our American liberal democracy, then, of course, turning to Murray again is pointless. For it was the American liberal constitutional order Murray devoted all his intellectual and theological energies to defending on Catholic grounds.
On the other hand, if the goal is merely putting down the postliberal insurgency of the past decade—led by Pecknold and Deneen among others—and returning to the liberal status quo ante, Murray will be of little use, either. The liberalism Murray defends is not the kind we often think of. Liberalism as purely values-neutral proceduralism wasn’t what Murray embraced; he lamented a relativistic philosophical liberalism that had been gaining ground in 1950s academia. He also criticized continental European liberalism as “monistic,” because it denied religion’s place in public life.
Murray’s understanding of liberalism maintained contact with deeper roots. And it is for this reason that it can help steer us between both Christian authoritarianism and doctrinaire secularism.
The rise of secularism and Christian nationalist backlash
Secularism in the United States never gained official status, of course, but was coming to hold increasing sway in the years before the rise of Donald Trump. Politically mainstream liberal Catholicism—downstream of JFK’s assurance that a public officeholder’s “religious views are his own private affair”—smoothed out Catholicism’s tensions with ideological liberalism in liberalism’s favor. This can be seen, for example, in then-gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine’s remarkable statement declaring himself “personally opposed” to the death penalty—something only government could ever carry out in the first place—as he pledged not to bring his private stance to bear as governor of Virginia (a promise he indeed kept).
To find a path today between such a post-Christian politics and the reactionary Christian nationalism it helped give rise to, perhaps no single idea offers more promise, among the many Murray offered, than that of the political principle of the sovereignty of God. “The first truth to which the American Proposition makes appeal,” he wrote in his 1960 classic We Hold These Truths, “is stated in that landmark of Western political theory, the Declaration of Independence. It is a truth that lies beyond politics; it imparts to politics a fundamental human meaning. I mean the sovereignty of God over nations as well as over individual men.”
As a structural element of American liberalism the sovereignty of God is not a thick theological principle—which Murray, as a Catholic, did of course hold. It is rather a baseline juridical recognition of a sovereign power transcending that of the state. In this sense it might be considered roughly analogous, on the level of politics, to a “higher power” in recovery programs, enabling people of diverse religious beliefs (including “nones”) to pursue a common good without dilution of their convictions or traditions. In this sense, and because it functions to limit state power, the political principle of the sovereignty of God is a liberal principle.
Murray was also at pains to show that it is an outgrowth of Christianity’s historic differentiation between the temporal and spiritual orders, the latter having priority. The temporal power was limited in Christian antiquity by the freedom of the church. This is retained in American liberalism but broadened to encompass civil society generally, a sphere in which the church is situated together with other religious and non-governmental institutions. Due to the priority and inviolability of this differentiated space, the state, ever reminded of its penultimacy, is subject to judgments of truth it cannot suppress. So it is that Murray can say, as an insight the church has uniquely offered politics, that “those who deny the sovereignty of God over human society are the most dangerous enemies of human liberty.”
In two ways, renewed appreciation of the liberal principle of God’s sovereignty can help us respond to threats to human liberty from authoritarian governments.
God’s sovereignty as curb on state power
First, it can help us recognize that the gutting of civil society institutions must always be of grave concern to the church. For Catholics to applaud the Trump administration’s ambitious attempts at an American cultural-ideological makeover—the sledgehammer blows to D.E.I. and academic “woke” culture, disemboweling of the bureaucratic state, removal of watchdog agencies and further attacks on mainstream media—is shortsighted regardless of concerns about bias. A shift in culture cannot be state-imposed, no matter how ostensibly aligned with Christian values, as Murray well understood when he warned of the authoritarian modern state that “creates the ethos of society, embodies it, imparts it to its citizens, and sanctions its observance with rewards and punishments.”
Whenever states go after civil society actors, the autonomy of the church and of her own activities will not be spared for long, as one no longer has to look to places like Russia to see; with the elimination of federal funding for Catholic agencies that work with immigrants and refugees, not to mention such pronouncements from government officials like border czar Tom Homan calling the Catholic Church “wrong on immigration,” we can already see egregious red flags here at home.
Second and relatedly, it can help us spot fake public religion. When the state takes upon itself the role of being the source and arbiter of religious messaging, we should be on high alert. The tensions between statements of Pope Leo and those of the president and his Catholic cabinet members all must be understood in this context. Vice President JD Vance’s advice to Pope Leo to stick to internal church matters amounted to an effort to keep religious messaging—in anything related to public affairs—under the state’s own authority. And when Pope Leo stated that the Lord “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” it was in the context of another public statement, by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: Mr. Hegseth’s public lip service to God’s sovereignty was actually a fundamentally irreligious act of domesticating it, a self-authorizing move to further render state power limitless.
Authentic public religion
The answer to such blasphemous public religion is not to render religion merely private. Murray’s path of liberalism is not only opposed to postliberal Christian nationalism, for that is not the only mode by which modern sovereign states in the West have sought to exalt themselves and to eliminate what transcends them. Murray’s liberalism, with the principle of God’s sovereignty at its heart, is also opposed to post-Christian laïcité, that form of liberalism in which only secularism is allowed in the official public space. In liberalism of this sort—Murray called it doctrinaire liberalism—the nation and the people as a whole close off any structural space by which they can ever be subject to a word of transcendent moral judgment.
While one might not be able to imagine Hegseth’s unhinged holy war rhetoric uttered by a public official in continental Europe, neither can one imagine a figure of national stature meaningfully engaged in prophetic public speech such as Martin Luther King Jr. was during the Vietnam War, with resonance for our moment today: “God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment! And it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You’re too arrogant! If you don’t change your ways, I’m going to rise up, and break the backbone of your power.’”
On top of the advantages of protecting civil society (the church included) from state control and of clarifying when public religion is bogus, the principle of God’s sovereignty over the state keeps open the possibility of national humility and repentance. It seems unlikely that our wounded family can heal without this. Here we might contemplate anew Lincoln’s words of 1863, when he proclaimed amid the devastation of the Civil War “a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer” to be undertaken “in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon.”
Blessed—if not quite happy—birthday, America! Let’s treat ourselves by rekindling our appreciation, with John Courtney Murray to encourage us, of the sovereignty of God—as a political principle constitutive of our American liberalism and as an antidote to our despair and to our pride.
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