Our politics must arise from a counter-cultural Christianity

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 21, 2025

Vice President Vance offered an impressive profession of faith at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC on February 20th. At the same time, he is a key part of President Donald Trump’s push to increase access to in vitro fertilization. You would think that after sparring with Pope Francis over the concept of ordo amoris (properly ordered love), Vance could do a better job of sorting out his moral priorities. (For a further discussion of ordo amoris, see Phil Lawler’s post, The ‘ordo amoris’ and the bottom line.)

In vitro fertilization¹ is a laboratory process of creating a human embryo by using male sperm to fertilize female ova completely independently of the marital act. The marital act is by both nature and grace ordered to procreation through the marital embrace of husband and wife. Children are to be conceived, born and raised in familial love. The purpose and meaning of the marital act is a mutual spousal self-giving that begins in love and develops through the nurturing of sons and daughters, in families characterized by a fuller form of this same initial sacrificial love. In contrast, the process of in vitro fertilization bypasses the marital act, divorces procreation from love in favor of selective “design criteria”, reduces everything to a technological process, and leads to freezing, experimentation and murder for the untold millions of human persons “conceived” by this process who are never implanted in a womb.

Now I admit that even Catholics (who have received so much spiritually) have to grow into a complete understanding and commitment to Catholic faith and morals. But if it horrified us that the nominally Catholic Joseph Biden constantly acted contrary to Christ while still claiming to practice his “Faith”, it ought also to horrify us that J. D. Vance should be professing his Catholic faith publicly while participating in a Federal effort to increase access to in vitro fertilization. This is what happens when our commitment to the Church develops only or mostly or largely within the ideological restraints imposed by a secular culture. Every culture is to some extent secular, of course, in that human culture is inescapably “worldly”. But the first rule of an authentically Christian life, and especially of such a Catholic life, is to be serious about subjecting everything in our human “culture” to the light of Christ, and separating ourselves from—or reforming—those aspects of our culture which are stumbling blocks to fidelity to Christ.

Another example

In other words, our Catholicism is and must be deliberately counter-cultural. I admit that I’ve been emphasizing this for many years, but the necessity of the “counter-cultural” part has become increasingly important in the West over the past sixty-five years as so many in the Church have continuously redefined “Christian” good and evil. They have done this in accordance with the ever-shifting, and usually deteriorating, values of our dominant Western culture. And, unfortunately, the constant redefinition of Catholic faith and morals to accommodate our Western cultural breakdown has spawned huge academic and media industries.

Paradoxically, this was brought home again to me while reading a book about a man who has been dead for over a hundred years—Charles Coulombe’s biography of Blessed Charles of Austria: A Holy Emperor and His Legacy. On pages 58-59, Coulombe describes the historical efforts of the Habsburg emperors to protect the Faith and strengthen the Church, including their legal restrictions on Protestant worship in light of the Thirty Years War and the War of Austrian Succession, owing to the fear that Protestants would conspire with the Empire’s enemies. Coulombe knows that we may well recoil at such measures, and so he offers the following remarks:

This attitude may seem harsh to us moderns, but we too ban and punish those whose ideas we consider a threat to society, as witness the European criminalization of Holocaust denial and American treatment of so-called “hate-speech.” “Heretic” may be almost an epithet of pride today; in days gone by, it carried the same regard as “racist” or “bigot” do now. So do every society’s rulers attempt to safeguard their subjects from what they consider evil.

That, I submit, is at once a frightening, challenging, and illuminating passage, precisely because it is so shockingly accurate. And because it is accurate, we must take special care to base such restrictive decisions on the soundest of principles. Instead, we find an abuse of language and a blindness to the real meaning of things throughout our political, social, economic and personal lives today, but perhaps most obviously in our culture of pornography, sexual deviance, contraception, abortion and in vitro fertilization. Politically, to be sure, we often have to content ourselves with minor or partial victories, but we must always beware of aligning ourselves too strongly with the political leaders who create these minor and partial victories. Some of their own beliefs and judgments may well be deadly.

There is always a human tendency to be too comfortable in our alignment with partial truths. Yet the refusal to attend to the whole truth (or even an inability to grasp it) is just another form of relativism—as when Joseph Biden claims to be Catholic while aggressively fostering abortion, homosexuality, and trans-genderism, or when J. D. Vance professes his Catholic Faith while supporting in vitro fertilization. While it is true that politics remains the art of the possible, and we must do the best that we can, it is also true that we are in constant danger of downplaying the immorality of both the tactics and the leaders we prefer while exaggerating the immorality of the leaders and tactics we oppose—which is a huge factor in allowing our politics to shape our Faith, instead of insisting that our Faith must shape our politics.

Relativism will never do

It is not really as fatuous as it sounds to modern ears to suggest that the Truth, rather than mere Personal Desire, ought to be the first point of consideration in formulating a society’s morality, laws, incentives, and punishments. After all, it is only sensible to attempt to formulate laws and other standards of behavior on the basis not of personal desire but of what is actually true. For truth, as we all ought to know by now, is simply the mind’s grasp of reality.

While politics itself remains the art of the possible, it is not an adequate Christian response to wink at the immoral policies of the leaders whom we choose to support because the alternatives are so much worse. Nor is it helpful to speak of “democracy” or the “will of the people”. After all, nobody would ever really want to be ruled by the “will of the people” unless that will were in accord with his own understanding of good and evil. For this reason, it is absolutely absurd to attempt to do politics without the strongest possible insistence on objective standards of good and evil. The failure to insist that this is both possible and necessary is an invitation to ideological disaster.

One thing that we should know now—even if we have been very slow to recognize it except in other places—is that life under an ideological government is a miserable life devoid of justice. After all, justice is achieved when each person receives his due. And this unquestionably implies that justice is impossible if we do not know what is rightly and rationally both required of and due to ourselves and others. It ought to be evident that in governing we always face a choice between what people (or their leaders) want and what they are due. Therefore we might as well acknowledge that just government is impossible without some objective way to discern the difference.

What this means is, first, that just government is always threatened by the wayward desires of those in power; and, second, that just government is intrinsically impossible in a society which does not recognize moral objectivity—that is, in a society which recognizes neither the natural law nor Divine Revelation. Notice that I have said impossible. This is not debatable, and things will not get better until far more of us recognize this fundamental fact of life.

The absurdity of modern politics

Of course, there must be government of some kind to prevent chaos, and to protect the weak from the depredations of the strong. If the job of government is to enforce the will of the powerful against the weak, then of course nothing further need be said. But if anyone recognizes that the job of government is the proper ordering of society for the common good, then by its very nature government must itself be bound by some objective standard of the Good rather than by the whims of this or that powerful group at any given moment, even if such a group goes by the name “we the people”.

These observations are incontestable. Without them, the only possibility is moral and political chaos. Therefore, the first step is to get people to acknowledge that an objective standard of human behavior is essential to human flourishing, and that without advertence to such a standard there is no possibility for controlling the misguided excesses which so frequently undermine the common good. For this reason, it is as politically absurd as it is metaphysically ridiculous to allow anyone to hold office or even vote who does not recognize an objective standard of good and evil. A verifiable common standard is relevant not only to the criminal law but to every form of law. Clearly it is a dangerous folly for anyone to pretend that there are no objective standards by which we can judge and shape our laws and customs.

This is why “we too [must] ban and punish those whose ideas we consider a threat to society”, even if we are unable to do this perfectly. Every society must do this, and every society will always instinctively seek to do this. But the key lesson we must learn from this basic social reality is that the only way to avoid abject tyranny is to recognize some objective standard of the Good and therefore of Justice. Neither majority rule nor the rule of any particular group provides any mechanism at all for the recognition of this objective standard. No political or voting formula will magically secure justice without a clear understanding of what justice is.

Yet it is precisely on this sort of fantastically illogical assumption that politics is most frequently (or at least most nominally) based today.

The only alternative

The only rational alternative is a commitment to conduct politics in accordance with the Good. As it happens, the most remarkable movements in history that have produced coherent accounts of the Good are (a) The formation of the Jewish people in accordance with the Decalogue and the Prophets; (b) The philosophical and legal principles, derived from the nature of things, advocated primarily by the wisest of the Greek philosphers and the Roman jurists; and (c) The raising of all of these to greater perfection through the order of Divine grace and Revelation in Christianity, the earthly source of which is the Catholic Church. There are other insights here and there, but nothing that remotely approaches the fullness of this combination.

How, then, can anybody argue that we must keep Christ out of politics? It should be sufficient that Churchmen are neither trained nor authorized for secular rule. After all, the maximum possibility for a just political order can be offered only through a cohesive and authoritative Catholic instruction, which alone incorporates the legal, philosophical, moral and spiritual benefits of all three sources. It is not for nothing that Christ came in the fullness of time, and that the fullness of time just happened to be at the culmination of Jewish development, Greek philosophy, and Roman law—and on the verge of the impending human failure of all three when left to themselves. Nothing could be more wrong-headed than to deliberately exclude Christian teachings and insights from the social, economic and political organization of our worldly affairs.

Even granted that the best of us make many mistakes when it comes to advocating for particular policies and laws, it is much better to start from a firm grasp of reality and with the aid of Divine grace than to privilege the shifting desires of powerful cultural figures who claim their policies are the “will of the people”, or insist on what “everybody knows” to be right—which is very frequently a lie, and which can mean nothing good if “the people” themselves are malformed.

Counter-cultural formation

It is just this kind of situation which reveals so clearly why an authentically formative Christianity must be counter-cultural, in the sense of contrary to what is merely “worldly”. Any Christian who takes the world’s ideas as his guide to politics and law is doomed to make things worse. Christianity is supposed to shape the culture to Christ for the good of His Creation, not to allow Christ and Creation to be shaped by mere worldliness and sin. Unless we as Christians commit ourselves to a deliberately counter-cultural Christian formation, protecting ourselves at every turn against any privileging of dominant cultural ideas over the objectively known will of God, we cannot hope to improve things.

On the other hand, it will also often be more painful to undergo and remain faithful to a proper Christian formation—a deliberately counter-cultural formation in the sense that we take Christ and His Church and not the dominant culture as our guide. This will mean recognizing that we have become a beleaguered minority and so we must cultivate both our courage and our intelligence accordingly, but it will also mean recognizing that the only way forward is through an authentic Christian fidelity.

“So do every society’s rulers attempt to safeguard their subjects from what they consider evil.” Indeed, our contemporary rulers are seeking to do this all the time without really knowing what is evil and what is not. That must change. Even deeply committed Catholics will not make perfect political decisions; political options are often exceedingly complex and universally imperfect. But the effort to do politics with a clear-headed and deliberate Christian fidelity is absolutely essential. And if such a change does not begin with those of us who are now in the Catholic Church, it is not likely to begin in our time at all.

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¹ For a thorough discussion of the immorality of in vitro fertilization, see Peter Colosi’s impressive study of Catholic Wisdom on the Origin of Human Life and its Link to Human Relationships, which we have just added to our library.