Don’t forget Christ the King on election day: US politics shouldn’t have such an exalted position in our moral lives

Very soon, Americans will be in the early stages of detoxification from the quadrennial bacchanal that we call the presidential election. As I write, I don’t know which of the candidates will become the next President of the United States. But I do know that the US will, once again, be the loser.

Regardless of who wins, we will have elected someone who will not and cannot heal the wounds of our toxic national politics. The winner will continue to perpetuate the same divisive attitudes and policies that characterise our pathological political culture.

For American Catholics, this is yet another opportunity to rethink what it means to participate in public life generally, and US politics specifically. But this can only happen if we recognise the subordinate place that politics – especially American politics – should have in our lives.

More than any American demographic, Catholics should be wary of putting as much emphasis as we do on the outcome of political contests. Yet we seem to be no different from non-Catholics in seeing US politics as having some exalted position in our moral lives, both public and private. We situate this privilege in the pernicious myth of American political exceptionalism.

At its founding in the late 18th century, the country was arguably unique in the history of world politics. Rather than forming a set of political and legal institutions flowing organically from a common ethnic and linguistic identity, the US is wholly formed by a set of political ideas.

We have a politics but not a nation; what “joins” us as Americans is our common commitment to possessive individualism. This devotion is canalised in our Declaration of Independence, where we invoke the fiction of unalienable individual rights. Rather than being content with resistance to political tyranny, we institutionalised the pathology of possessive individualism.

At the heart of the American political system is our ironic agreement that we are all enemies of one another, expressed through our mutual claims of possessive autonomous rights. Having embraced this “new order for the ages”, as our currency reminds us, we revere the political and legal structures that codify our individualist claims.

Having thus oriented ourselves, the further we travel down the road, the more alienated we become from one another – and the more belligerent and poisonous our politics become. We have established our politics upon a foundation of contention and are surprised when people become more contentious.

American individualist ideology is not merely a pernicious view of the human person and political life. From the perspective of Catholic moral theology, it is a false one.

By subscribing to US-style individualism, American Catholics perpetuate a politics that is corrosive of our own faith – and we contribute to a culture that will continue its steady trend of hostility to Catholics and Catholicism. American liberalism has sold American Catholics the rope by which we are voluntarily hanging ourselves.

There is a better way. November is the month in which we are called to recognise Christ as King of all things, including of our moral lives and political commitments.

In 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. Originally celebrated in October, the Feast of Christ the King, as it is commonly known, was moved to the last Sunday in Ordinary time by Pope St Paul VI. This emphasises the eschatological nature of this feast that Pius XI articulated in Quas Primas, the encyclical creating the solemnity.

By placing it at the end of the Church year, Paul VI underscored that our liturgical lives cannot be separated from our political lives. On the contrary, liturgy should form and inform our politics, subordinating all other political theories, claims and practices, to the Lordship of Christ. Our politics should be ordered by and toward our allegiance not to the structure of American politics, but by the sovereignty of Christ, King of hearts and nations.

“It would be a grave error…to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs,” explained Pius XI, “since, by virtue of the absolute empire over all creatures committed to him by the Father, all things are in his power.”

This absolute empire is not one of autonomous individualism, typified by possessive rights claims. Rather, it is an antidote to this toxically false view of the human person. “When once men recognise, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony,” Pope Pius wrote.

American Catholics especially should use the occasion of electing yet another unfit president to reaffirm the authority of our perfect King.

Photo: Supporters of US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris gather near the Washington Monument to hear Harris speak on The Ellipse, just south of the White House, in Washington, DC, USA, 29 October 2024. The Harris-Walz campaign billed the speech as ‘a major closing argument ‘one week before the November 5 election. (Photo by AMID FARAHI/AFP via Getty Images.)

Kenneth Craycraft is Professor of Theology at Mount St Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati, OH.

This article appears in the November 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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