The Wages of Throne and Altar
Lord Acton was a Catholic who knew better than most that the Church is not made stronger by grasping at temporal power and is very often corrupted by it. He opposed the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council, and his most famous warning, that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, was written not about secular tyrants but about the moral judgment we owe to popes and kings alike. It is a fitting place to begin a conversation about postliberalism, because the movement Acton would have recognized at once is the one his intellectual heirs are now busy resisting.
On the latest episode of Acton Line, I spoke with James M. Patterson, associate professor in the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee and president of the Ciceronian Society, about Why Postliberalism Failed, the book he has written with Thomas Howes and published with the Acton Institute. It is a polemic that wins its argument less by assertion than by evidence.
Postliberalism offers a seductive narrative, especially to disaffected young Catholics. The story goes that liberalism is not merely flawed but founding-level corrupt, that the American order is a machine for manufacturing atomized consumers, and that the remedy is a confessional state strong enough to order society toward the good. Tear out the rotten liberal root, the argument runs, and a flourishing Christian civilization will grow in its place. The trouble, as Patterson and Howes demonstrate, is that we already know how it ends. We know because it has been tried.
The signal achievement of Why Postliberalism Failed is to replace speculation with the historical record. The authors trace postliberalism’s intellectual lineage to two unlovely sources: an extreme papalism that subordinates all political authority to the Church, and a reactionary European tradition that explained the rise of liberal modernity as a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons against throne and altar. These streams converged into an ideology that animated regime after regime in the interwar years.
Franco’s Spain, Vichy France, Tiso’s Slovakia, Pavelić’s Croatia—everywhere the postliberal vision was actually implemented, it produced the same harvest: economic stagnation, the persecution of dissenters, and the moral compromise of the Church it claimed to serve. In several cases it shaded into collaboration with genocide. This is not the fever dream of liberalism’s defenders; it is the documented career of postliberalism wherever it touched real power. Contemporary postliberals, in far too many cases, have not merely echoed these older thinkers but praised the regimes themselves, drinking, as Patterson and Howes put it, from the same poisoned wells.
There is a grim irony here that Acton would have savored. A program advertised as the salvation of the faith has, in practice, reliably delivered emptier pews and fuller graves.
What rescues the book from mere demolition is that it has something to defend. The American Catholic experience never required the dismantling of the constitutional order to live faithfully within it. Archbishop John Hughes, James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop John Ireland, Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and John Courtney Murray were not chaplains to a regime but builders of a civil society. They raised parishes, schools, hospitals, and charities that served millions, and they did so under a constitution that protected the free exercise of conscience rather than commandeering it. Their lives are the standing refutation of the postliberal premise: a faithful Church does not need a captive state.
This in not merely an American prejudice. The Second Vatican Council, in Dignitatis Humanae, already settled the matter the postliberals would reopen, recognizing religious liberty as a demand of human dignity rather than a concession to error. This project is not a bold recovery of tradition. It is a quarrel the Church has already had and resolved.
Acton’s maxim is usually deployed against secular ambition, but he meant it more broadly, and the broader meaning is the one postliberalism has forgotten. Power corrupts, and it does not become safe simply because the hand that wields it is consecrated. The confessional state does not sanctify politics; it secularizes the altar. The likeliest fruit of fusing throne and altar is not a renewed Christendom but a discredited Church. This lesson taught plainly across the twentieth century for those with ears to hear.
Patterson and Howes have written that lesson down with rigor and verve. It is, as I told James, a book whose timeliness is matched only by its unwelcomeness in certain quarters. A sure sign that a book is worth reading.