However you want to apportion the blame for the fracas on the National Mall featuring Native American activists, provocateurs from a group called the Black Hebrew Israelites, and some boys from Covington Catholic High School, no honest person can deny that the schoolboys were treated unfairly by the press and stone-throwers on social media.
But the outrage and the rush to destroy was not really about the high school kid with the patient smile — or the supposedly racist smirk, as so many chose to interpret it. It was and is an effort to inflict harm on the other side’s institutions. And Catholic schools are a prime target.
Don’t take my word for it. The attack dogs in these cases make it clear. One liberal journalist reacted to the incident with his own investigation of Covington Catholic, blasting it for being all-male, and signing off his viral thread with a tweet declaring, out of nowhere, “public schools rock.”
Other journalists spent their time dragging up bogus stories from the school’s past that were not only misleading but also had nothing to do with the particular boys on the mall.
The central figure in the Mall fracas, Nathan Phillips, it turns out, also brought a troupe of his fellow Native American activists to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in an effort to disrupt Mass with chanting and beating of drums.
In other words, the Catholic Church was the object of his protest.
The prior week, the media had been freaking out that Karen Pence teaches at a Christian school that demands its students and faculty follow Christian teachings, including on sexuality. “How can this happen in America?” one Washington Post editor cried on Twitter. In other words, it should be impermissible for institutions to maintain rules that don’t comport with elite sexual morality. You see, individuals may be allowed to believe those weird Christian views, but institutions are not allowed to uphold them.
This was right after two Democratic senators tried to brand the Knights of Columbus an extremist organization. The senators, including the very prosecutorial presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., were suggesting that membership in the Knights, a service organization, disqualified a judicial nominee. Why? Because the Knights are all-male and espouse Catholic teaching on issues like abortion.
Again, people are allowed to disagree with the court-made law on abortion, but institutions of civil society that hold such dissenting views as a matter of policy — they are the enemies of the people.
Alexis de Tocqueville warned us of this impulse. “Among democratic peoples it is only by association that the resistance of citizens to the central power can come about,” the Frenchman wrote, “consequently, the latter never sees associations that are not under its control except with disfavor.”
I’m not talking about all critics and all criticism of these religious institutions. God knows the Catholic Church and Catholic schools have culture problems. The recent recounting of what elite Catholic schools were like circa 1982 amid Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hopefully has encouraged today’s elite Catholic schools to ensure the masculinity they are inculcating is the virtuous kind, not the toxic kind. And the Church hierarchy’s recent handling of issues of sexuality has been wanting, to put it in mildest terms.
But the current criticism doesn’t represent an effort to help these institutions become better versions of themselves. It’s a campaign to force them to abandon what they believe in. Harris wants to prosecute the Knights until they drop their allegiance to Catholic teaching. The Washington Post editor wants to force Karen Pence’s school to abandon adherence to Christian teaching.
To force institutions to abandon their core beliefs is, in effect, to abolish these institutions.
Some believe that a hodgepodge of different institutions with different rules and customs undermines societal unity. In truth, these diverse institutions are absolutely crucial to social peace. Take away our little platoons, and our ability to shape the little world around us, and there’s no choice but to but fight bigger, fiercer fights with much higher stakes.
Anyone on the Left who thinks it’s a good idea to continue demanding conformity from religious schools, church-run hospitals, and faith-based groups — which is the same as demanding their abolition — should look at what secularization has yielded. Churches have always been the central institutions in America. Secularization of America since the 1960s has meant, in effect, the deinstitutionalization of the working class.
The elites, you see, have other institutions they can turn to — great public schools, college alumni associations, professional associations, country clubs, white-collar workplaces, and so on. The working class, in contrast, falls into what Emile Durkheim called anomie. Robert Nisbet called it alienation.
Secularization of the country has left swaths of Middle America alone and exposed. The results of alienation include the retreat from marriage, the rise of unwed motherhood, and an increase in deaths of despair.
Another result of deinstitutionalization and secularization: Trump. While researching for my new book, “Alienated America,” I found that among GOP primary voters, Trump did better as church attendance dropped.
Going after the other side’s institutions gets culture warriors, Left and Right, excited. But if you care about people, and not merely ideological warfare, you’ll call for peace in this war.
