When Tim Kaine accepts his party’s nomination for vice president tonight, I expect him to talk about his Catholic faith, his Jesuit education, the role that religion has played in inspiring him to a life of public service.
I don’t expect him to acknowledge how the demands of party loyalty have erased any Catholic distinctiveness in his politics, any evidence that faith should trump partisanship when the two actively conflict.
The erosion of Catholic distinctiveness is a long-running story in American politics. The church’s social doctrine stresses both economic solidarity and social conservatism, calling Catholic politicians to either a pro-life, pro-family liberalism or to a one-nation conservatism, neither racist nor Ayn Randian.
But as our politics have polarized — with a similar polarization in post-Vatican II Catholicism, of course — these combinations have become intensely difficult to maintain. Its
last moment in the sun was arguably the George W. Bush era, when “compassionate conservatism” tried to draw on Catholic ideas about fighting poverty, and Democrats responded to their 2004 defeat by increasing religious outreach and recruiting more socially conservative candidates.
Tim Kaine was one of those candidates. Running for governor of Virginia in 2006, he offered a version of Mario Cuomo’s “personally opposed, but …” maneuver on abortion. But he also played up his support for a partial-birth abortion ban, parental notification laws and “informed consent” provisions designed to persuade women to carry pregnancies to term.
This earned him the
enduring suspicion of abortion-rights activists. But after ascending to the Senate in 2010 he never did anything to justify that suspicion: While describing himself as personally pro-life, he compiled a lock-step, 100 percent NARAL-rated voting record.
Meanwhile his party moved in a
more pro-abortion direction, dropping its Bill Clinton-era rhetoric about making the procedure “rare” and amending its platform to call for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which bars public funding for abortion.
And now Kaine has moved with them. Less than a month ago he
described himself as “traditionally a supporter of the Hyde Amendment,” but since joining Hillary Clinton’s ticket he’s
reportedly reversed that position, sweeping away the last trace of actual pro-life policy from his repertoire of views.
What remains isn’t a distinctively Catholic liberalism, or a “
Pope Francis Catholicism,” as some credulous observers have suggested. It’s just a liberalism that likes its usual agenda read in the light that comes in through stained glass.
Of course Kaine’s surrender to party orthodoxy isn’t the only Catholic surrender happening this year. On the Republican side, prominent Catholic politicians like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio spent several years trying to walk their party’s rhetoric back from its un-Catholic, “makers vs. takers”/“47 percent” turn, and making limited but promising attempts to
bring economic solidarity back into the G.O.P. policy agenda.
And then came Donald Trump, inviting Republicans to embrace a more authoritarian form of solidarity, unmoored from any real social conservatism and united by white-identity politics rather than a vision of the common good. Which to their credit, both Ryan and Rubio resisted … but only up to a point, because in the end partisanship trumped Catholic principle. (Mormon principle, it’s worth noting, seems to be made of sterner stuff.)
So this is the “Catholic” politics we have in the America of 2016: Catholic liberals who endorse unlimited abortion, and Catholic conservatives who endorse an authoritarian buffoon.
Jesus wept.
