Catholic Education Needs Civic Formation

There is a movement afoot in American education to restore the teaching of civics in a way that presents America as lovable and worthy of its citizens’ service. The most prominent places to see this new movement at work are in the creation of new civics institutes at public universities (for instance, ASU, UT Austin, UFL, OSU, UTK, UNC, and USU). Catholics are well-positioned to join this movement. What we need now is for Catholics to do so eagerly.

Catholic schools and universities speak frequently, and rightly, about the formation of the whole person. They speak about service, solidarity, human dignity, vocation, and the call to holiness. What they often speak about less confidently is citizenship. One can move through a good deal of Catholic education in America today hearing many worthy things about community and discipleship, while hearing much less about the formation required for life in a republic. That lack is a problem—and an opportunity. In the American context, civic education should not be considered an optional supplement to Catholic formation, but rather essential to that formation. It is one of the ordinary ways in which Christians are called to love their neighbors.

That claim may seem odd to ears accustomed to hearing politics discussed either in procedural, therapeutic, or activist terms. Civics is often reduced to instruction in the mechanics of government: the branches, the separation of powers, elections, courts, Congress, and the Constitution. Those topics are, of course, important and should not be neglected. But they are the base, not the heights, of civics. Sometimes, civics—or a substitute for it—is treated as training for activism under the heading of some politically correct ideology and has for its goal the production of the Social Justice Warrior of common parlance. Neither approach reaches the heart of the matter. Since we all live concretely in the world, and politics concerns the widest field of human action, Catholics need to treat civics as formation in the discipline where we first and foremost meet our neighbors, whom our Lord calls us to love.

The reason is not difficult to state, though it is easy to forget. We do not love our neighbors in the abstract. We love them as persons living alongside us in families, towns, parishes, neighborhoods, schools, and nations. We share with them a political community, and that political community does not sit lightly atop an otherwise self-sufficient private life. It shapes imagination, conduct, expectation, speech, memory, aspiration, and the ordinary moral temper of a people. It shapes the schools our children attend, the laws under which we live, the level of trust or mistrust in our common life, and the conditions under which friendship and family life themselves flourish or decay. It affords us a field of action and deliberation broader than any other. If that is so, then part of loving one’s neighbor is caring whether he has been formed to think and act well as a citizen—and carrying out our own obligation to make sure that we ourselves are.

Christians should be especially well-equipped to see this. The Christian knows that the earthly city is not the city of God and that politics is not the highest thing. But it does not follow from that truth that politics is of little account. We are placed, by providence, among particular persons in a particular order of common life. We do not encounter one another simply as isolated bearers of rights or as disembodied souls passing through neutral space. We meet one another as people formed by a history, a language, a set of institutions, a national inheritance, and a way of life. If one wants to know one’s neighbor in any concrete sense, one has to know something of that inheritance and those institutions. Charity moves through such particulars. It does not hover above them.

For that reason, the old Christian and classical insight into political life remains indispensable. Thomas Aquinas understood the political community as the most comprehensive community in the temporal order. He did not mean that it comprehends man’s highest end. The political community gives broad scope to speech and action concerning the things held in common, and it is in the political community that we find a distinctively rich field for the exercise of human excellence. A republic, such as our own American republic, above all, depends upon citizens capable of ruling and being ruled in turn. It therefore depends upon judgment that comprehends the goods of that republic.

Judgment means the capacity to deliberate about contingent matters under conditions that do not admit of strict demonstration, to weigh goods that are genuinely goods and yet may stand in tension, to discern fitting means in the midst of inherited circumstances, and then to act. This is why civic education, if it is more than information transfer, has an intimate relation to prudence. And prudence, though it is not the whole of moral life, is no small thing. It is among the virtues most necessary to those who must live and act with others in the world as it actually is. And prudence must take into account the various particulars of the political community’s historical situatedness. Catholics have a tendency to want to escape particulars by reference to metaphysics, cosmology, or the principles of the faith, without doing the hard work of transposition into the messier concrete realm where we meet our neighbors. Civics education is an indispensable aid in doing the work of transposition from the more abstract realms of thought into embodied human life, for the sake of charity.

That is also why a serious liberal education remains bound up with civic formation. Liberal education is an education for the responsible exercise of freedom. In the American case, all of this has a particular urgency. Ours is a constitutional republic that presupposes an uncommon degree of moral and intellectual formation among ordinary citizens. It assumes citizens who know their own history, culture, and laws; who are able to make distinctions, to deliberate about means and ends; to weigh claims advanced in the name of the common good; and to bear the discipline that self-government requires. Such a regime cannot finally be sustained by technique alone. Nor can it be sustained by citizens who have been trained chiefly in suspicion.

This is one of the reasons Catholic education in America should recover its confidence in teaching America itself. That does not mean a pious nationalism, or a neglect of all of the various tensions quite obviously present for American Catholic life, still less a refusal to tell the truth about slavery, injustice, hypocrisy, and the many ways in which the nation has failed to live up even to its own standards. But neither does truthfulness require a Howard Zinn- or 1619 project-style deconstructive pedagogy in which the country appears chiefly as a villain and oppressor. A student taught to regard his country primarily as an engine of oppression will be condemned to live out a cynical and demoralizing delusion, more likely to become alienated from the actual inheritance that he must understand if he is to judge, serve, improve, or reform it. What is much more likely to produce young Catholic men and women who are passionately dedicated to serving America under God is not deconstruction, but love.

Every student deserves the chance to discover what is genuinely lovable in his own country. In the American case, that includes real political and moral goods. For all the flaws and complexities involved in the historic relation of Catholics with America, America has proven to be a place in which Catholics can flourish, serve, contribute, and even lead, in ways that exceed many—perhaps most—of the historically Catholic European countries in which the relation of Church and political order was first charted out.

Catholic institutions have special reasons for undertaking this work. They often describe themselves as preparing students for leadership and service, but service in a republic has an inescapably civic dimension, which must not ignore the particularities of the American republic: its constitution, founding, institutions, history, language, culture, territory, etc. The graduate of a Catholic school or university will vote, hold public office, serve on boards, work in industries with both economic and trans-economic effects, raise children, speak in public, judge laws, weigh political claims, and help sustain or weaken the institutions nearest to him. If he has been formed to be morally earnest but civically unserious, then his education has been incomplete in a way that matters. He may possess generous sentiments while lacking the habits by which one actually contributes to a common life. Or he may carry into public life a religiosity or moralism detached from the texture of American political existence, as though Christian witness could afford to be innocent of institutions, history, and prudence. It cannot.

Something more specific is therefore needed. Catholic education should acquaint students with the American constitutional order and the arguments surrounding it. It should familiarize students with the language, culture, and territorial space that shape America through time and space. It should teach American history in a way that is truthful without being merely corrosive. It should place the American experiment in relation to the longer inheritance from Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Christendom, and early modern constitutionalism out of which it emerged. It should reintroduce students to the language of the common good, to the discipline of prudence as practiced in light of the knowledge of particulars, and to the distinction between technocratic expertise and political judgment. It should help them see that citizenship is not a distraction from Christian discipleship, but one of the ordinary fields in which discipleship must be expressed.

It should also recover a certain confidence that Christians, when well-formed, can be among the best citizens. Augustine understood very well the limits of politics, but he also understood that rightly ordered loves shape temporal life. A Christian whose loves are being healed and ordered is not thereby made indifferent to the earthly city. He is made more capable of acting within it without illusion and without despair. He is freed, at least in part, from the intoxications of ideology and from the moral vanity that so often accompanies political fervor. He is better positioned to seek justice without imagining that politics can save him. This is no small civic advantage.

If the Church in America wants renewal, its schools and universities cannot leave civic formation to chance. The Catholic Church is used to taking a counter-cultural stance in America. We should welcome the prospect that, in a time when most institutions of public instruction are ideologically captured by deconstructionists, Christian faith empowers us to teach what is lovable about America and our fellow American citizens under God. It is not only good for us to do so, but also good for our non-Catholic fellow citizens to see us do so.

We should form citizens capable of understanding the country we have inherited, judging it truthfully, loving what is good in it, and serving their neighbors within it with charity and intelligence.

(Editor’s note: This essay was published originally on the “What We Need Now” site and is republished here with kind permission of the author.)