Donald J. Devine
Bellevue University

What Should It Mean To Be An American Citizen?

National Meeting of The Philadelphia Society
What Is An American?
May 1, 2005
Miami, Florida

 Nonconformist Citizenship

It is pretty rich when the voice of modern U.S. progressivism senses "foreboding" in the land because a new conservative leader proclaims the need for society to "recover the capacity for nonconformism." Rich, for it was progressivism that metastasized from a newly radicalized late 19th Century Europe to successfully challenge traditional American beliefs and institutions in a way not achieved by any other foreign ideology or movement.

Progressivism replaced the traditional Judeo-Christian morality at the center of a diverse American social life with a new vision of scientific progress, cultural relativism and material prosperity that now dominates public morality. It transformed a vigorous local community-oriented society into one driven by abstract rules set by gigantic and remote metro-county, state and national bureaucracies. Its ideal of citizen representation was replaced by rule by government experts. This revolution that to a great degree successfully overrode the entire earlier consensus is now demanding conformity?

In the 1980s, E.J. Dionne, Jr.--the man Bill Clinton acknowledged as the intellectual force behind his New Democrat, progressive ideal--interviewed Joseph Ratzinger and asked him how a Christian leader like him could insist upon a traditionalist stance when so many of his own professed adherents will react negatively because they hold more liberal positions on moral issues? Ratzinger replied: "If it is true that a Christian faith taken seriously means nonconformity with a not inconsiderable number of contemporary social standards, then a more or less negative image is unavoidable. Nonconformists, after all, who enjoy great applause are somewhat ridiculous figures, or at least unconvincing." It was in this context that he concluded that the obligation of a Christian today is to recover the capacity for nonconformity.

Many Americans still adhering to the old standards who are concerned about the trend to relativism and bureaucracy in American mass culture today might agree with him at first blush. Yet, even many conservatives might find the idea of nonconformity troubling. Does not sound citizenship require a certain conformity in beliefs, patriotism, a love of certain common national values and symbols? Progressivism, which gave us the ideal of the melting pot and a common national citizenship, certainly must be upset, as the reaction demonstrates.

Upon Ratzinger's selection as pope, Dionne wrote that "liberal Catholics around the world were filled with anxiety and foreboding," wondering whether his vision of a "pure, hard and, if necessary, smaller core of believers [would] leave them out," especially given his earlier crackdown on liberals like the American theologian Charles Curran and the South American Marxist liberation theologians. The fact that Benedict XVI at age 78 was clearly only going to be a "transitional figure" did not override for Dionne the greater concern about the continuing "slow erosion of the progressive hopes created by the Second Vatican Council" in the Christian community nor "how urgent it is to revive" that earlier progressive vision for the future.

In the speech to his fellow electors just before voting, which many say led the participants to choose him, Cardinal Ratzinger saw the situation quite differently. He called for an "adult faith," one that does not follow "the trends of fashion and the latest novelty" but is rooted in a "friendship in Christ" that "gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false," a standard "fulfilled in love" for the "only thing that lasts," the "human person created by God for eternity." Yet, "today, having a clear faith based on the creed of the church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine,' seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires."

So, Ratzinger was not calling for nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity in Ralph Waldo Emerson's sense of simply following ones "own heart," but one "conformed and united with the divine will" but also in a context where values cannot be imposed and where it is essential to reach out to other faiths. This is a different sense of citizenship, one that is tolerant of other values and even acceptant that relativism might be dominant in the modern mass culture but one that is ready to confront it in rational debate over what is true. In fact, locked out of power, this confrontation inevitably is one based in voluntary associations, locally, and particularly in churches.

Alexis de Tocqueville found a similar citizenship in the early U.S. He discovered an America dominated by voluntary associations and local governments and only united in a general religious sense of Bible-based morality and obligation. Unlike in Europe, he was dumbfounded that he could find no evidence of the national government in everyday life. Even state governments were nearly invisible beyond the remote courthouse. The only place outside the capitol where the national government was evident was in the hearts of its people. Indeed, because the national government did little for or to citizens, each person could view it differently in his own heart to represent what was noble and moral about it for each. This resulted in greater love for country and more active citizenship than in any of the more prosperous nations of the Old World.

A recent study of eighth and twelfth grade students by John Chiodo and Leisa Martin and reported in the Journal of Social Studies Research asked what citizenship meant to them. First of all, almost all of the students had an answer. The specific results were interesting too. A majority said citizenship was helping people in the community and through their churches. Another fifth said citizenship was obeying the rules of community, church and school. The rest said patriotism (undefined) and loyalty, respect for others, and work and being employed. Interestingly, as with the Americans in de Tocqueville's time, national government and even its symbols were missing although, also following him, more aggressive probing finds that when the national government and its symbols are raised, they are viewed positively.

Of course, the students were only in the early stage of social indoctrination from the outside world, today primarily from progressive cultural elites in the media and arts, and a supportive bureaucracy controlling a massive welfare state. Citizenship apparently begins locally but is gradually "liberated" from the concrete ways of home, community, church and local school. A more abstract nationalized culture delivered through a mass media starting in infancy with television, and then teen music, art and entertainment, and finally an "adult" culture mired in cultural relativism, all kept in order by a score of government regulators cumulating in the Supreme Court as final arbitrator of national morality. While it might accept a multiculturalism of views, it all must ultimately be resolved by the supreme experts at the top.

Progressivism might be relativistic in its citizenship symbolism and imagery but it is not anarchic. Former Harvard president, Derek Bok made its case well. The national welfare state is essential to public life today, he says, and its leaders must lead and make decisions for society in the public interest. While some public participation is important in a progressive democracy, most forms of popular involvement such as referenda and local activism do not necessarily lead to sound results as understood by the best experts. Moreover, public opinion data demonstrate, he argues, that people really do not want to give more time to active citizenship. Only half even bother to vote. So the public can only be more involved through citizen education and deference to expert decision-making.

Right at the beginning, the major theorists of the progressive welfare state recognized the paradox. As Gunnar Myrdal noted, for the experts to improve social welfare they must be free to plan more comprehensively. But progressivism also taught that democracy required people to participate in the government to give it the necessary legitimacy. Yet, that very participation could create pressures against the best expert programs. Unfortunately, people were reluctant to grant the necessary power to do what the experts knew was required. Therefore, welfare state participation must be mainly symbolic rather than active. Power must be centralized and moved to experts in obscure bureaus and in courts less susceptible to popular pressure. To a great extent, those experts have been remarkably successful in bringing the progressive program to the United States and even more so in the Europe from which the doctrine sprung.

So, Ratzinger is correct. The only recourse for those who support the old citizenship based in Judeo-Christian morality and freely represented in local communities, civic associations and churches is nonconformity against the ruling progressive morality to which it cannot delegate the definition of virtue. Moreover, unlike for the progressives, from the very beginning of Western civilization, Aristotle required that true citizenship must involve active, local participation. The Americans of de Tocqueville's day did not wait for orders from experts, they organized associations, schools, churches, enterprises and local governments, acting in accordance with the public morality that surrounded their everyday lives. American and Western society worked not because of an expert plan and a supreme national power but from its diversity, the preservation of which James Madison dedicated his new national government.

If unity of citizenship is the goal, Islam is the solution. Christianity at its heart has a trinity. As Fareed Zakaria has noted, it was the Christian Church that was the first institution in history to challenge the undivided unity of national power. At the height of Christian unity, the dominant form of social life and power was plural, decentralized. There was a common belief in the principles of Judeo-Christian virtue but often disagreements on how they should be applied and it mostly could not be enforced universally except by moral suasion. De Tocqueville noticed this too when he saw a similar more-or-less common moral culture in the U.S. but that the national institutions did not force nor require a uniformity locally. It only needed a few common ideals living in individual hearts.

Progressivism may seek a unitary vision and a unitary power for its view of citizenship. Christians and conservative supporters of the Tocquevillian vision cannot. True conformity cannot exist in a civilization of decentralized power, of church and state, of state and society, except as Ratzinger noted, in the hearts of individual persons. A certain nonconformity is an essential aspect of the old American citizenship. On the other hand, it is not surprising that others might look upon the reinvigoration of this vision with some anxiety and foreboding.