What Truths Do We Hold? A Response to Questions and Critics

My June 9, 2026, essay, “Celebrating* 250 Years of American Mythology?,” has drawn over a hundred comments. As often happens in the comments section of any online forum, the majority of these are people arguing with one another about things that have little or nothing to do with the essay. But enough comments did engage the piece—sometimes in apoplectic terms—that the editor, Carl Olson, asked me to write a response to some of the comments.

Two caveats: 1. I rarely read the comments section in CWR or any other magazine for which I write. They are almost never helpful, and life is short. 2. It is important to note that Mr. Olson disagrees with some aspects of my essay. But he also understands that my arguments are not foreign to robust Catholic theological debate.

I understand that my essay presents a pessimistic view of the American founding. Indeed, many of the comments are evidence of the crisis I identify in my recent book, Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America. We Catholics often collapse the tenets of the Catholic Faith into the moral theory of modern liberalism. Many commentators do precisely that. The most vociferous comments on the June 9 piece embrace liberalism as the true view of the world, with Catholic doctrine either redefined in liberalism’s terms or simply subordinated to the tenets of liberalism. Thus, these commenters can only see the argument in terms of the left and right wings of American politics (all of which is a form of liberalism). While this is a strain that runs through the comments, in the interest of time and space, I’ll simply refer readers to Citizens Yet Strangers.

Suffice it to say here that many critics seem to confuse Catholic moral theology and American liberal political theory. I am not a liberal of any variety. I am a Catholic Christian. And I refuse to be constrained by the truncated moral and political in-house arguments of liberalism, even (especially?) when they are advanced by professed Catholics.

For purposes of this response, I have categorized the criticisms in the comments into four broad points: 1. My motivation in writing the piece; 2. The problem of “self-evident” truths; 3. The problem and provenance of “rights” language; and 4. The relationship of Hobbes, Locke, and Jefferson.

My “ideological motivation”

Some of the comments refer to my alleged “ideological motivation” in writing the original essay, claiming that there are “objective signs of some kind of external influence here.” Even though these signs are “objective,” the author of the comments does not identify them. (I am reminded of the line from the film, The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”) And because they are not self-evident, I do not know either the “signs” or the “external influence” toward which they point. Another comment identifies my “ideological bent” as “statist,” asserting that I have “statist inclinations.”

Still another commentator claims that my essay “communicates an alien ideology, alien to the Catholic ground of truth,” which he poses in apposition to “American ideas in the Declaration of Independence.” This is a shockingly damning comment and actually goes to the heart of the issue. Catholic moral theology only seems alien to one who has grounded his faith in American liberalism and reduced Catholic faith to this alien ideology.

The commentator says he or she will be “coming back to discover what ideologies are animating” my essay. He (or she) should instead ask what animates his (or her) reduction of Christian truth to American politics.

Unless an author expressly states his motivation, it is bad practice (or even bad faith) to reduce an author’s argument to ideological motivation. This problem is multiplied when one goes further to intimate malign “external influence,” as though the author is serving some kind of dark, sinister force, rather than expressing a thoughtful argument. This kind of conspiracy thinking is disturbingly prevalent among a certain kind of personality among U.S. Catholics (and non-Catholics). If one sees conspiracies everywhere, one cannot see a sincere argument anywhere. “Physician, heal thyself.”

In any event, my “motivation” in writing the June 9 column is the same as it was when I wrote my books, The American Myth of Religious Freedom (Spence 1999), and Citizens Yet Strangers (OSV 2024). It is to identify, from a Catholic perspective, problems that I see both in the philosophical foundations of American liberalism and the habit of Catholics to embrace those foundations uncritically—indeed to defend those foundations as some kind of divinely inspired self-evident truth. The fruit of that mentality is the inability to distinguish Catholic theology from liberal theory, a strain that runs through broad swaths of Catholic commentary, including comments to my June 9 essay. Indeed, many of the comments are empirical evidence of my “motivation” in analyzing the erosion of Catholic witness by liberal political theory, whether it is left liberalism or (as most of the commentators) right liberalism.

An example of this reductionist thinking is the comments that refer to me as a “statist.” This epithet demonstrates precisly the problem of taking liberal political theory as one’s foundational commitment and judging all things through that hermeneutic. It subscribes to the notion that there are two choices of truth: American individualism and some kind of authoritarian collectivism. This is not merely a failure of moral imagination. It is a rejection of the Catholic doctrine of solidarity, one of the non-negotiable principles of Catholic moral thought. Solidarity is not statism. But if one’s moral and political imagination is cabined in by dogmatic commitment to liberal political theory, that is difficult to see. It is true, of course, that I am not a liberal. But to assume that implies I am a “statist” (and there is no third option) is, to put it bluntly, a rejection of a central tenet of Catholic moral doctrine.

Ironically, the same commentator asserts that I am “suspicious of any claim of individual or mediating institutional dependence” from “state control.” This evinces not merely innocence of the doctrine of solidarity, but subsidiarity as well. To reduce my argument to a form of “statism” is to demonstrate evidence of unfamiliarity with these fundamental Catholic doctrines. I invite that person, and those who agree with the assertion, to read chapter 3 of Citizens Yet Strangers and Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, for starters.

“Self-evident” Truths

My suspicion of self-evident truths raised the ire of many commentators. In the first instance, my reticence to refer to “self-evident” truth is not categorical. I couch it in terms of probability, or as a problematic epistemological notion. Some commentators dismissed this questioning of self-evident truth by conflating irreducible logical principles with assertions of moral theories. The problem is illustrated by one extremely confused commentator’s reference to “more or less self-evident truths.” That makes my head spin.

Also making my head spin is one commentator’s accusation that I am “ridiculous” for observing that “the best argument that there are no such self-evident truths as individual possessive rights is that no one ‘discovered’ them until about the 17th century.” (I cribbed this, by the way, almost directly from Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal book, After Virtue.) It’s ridiculous, the commentator asserts, because uranium wasn’t discovered until 1789. To compare the discovery of a physical element to the “discovery” that the nature of the human person fundamentally changed to its opposite sometime in the 16th century is absurd on its face. Worse, however, is that this is exactly the kind of argument made by a Jesuit priest who has made a career out of claiming that we have “discovered” that same-sex sexual relationships and activities are good, and that the Church should conform its teaching to this discovery. The Jesuit’s “discovery” is actually rather mild if one has already determined that human nature itself changed in the 17^th century.

Rules of identity (A = A), non-contradiction (A is not non-A), exclusivity (either A or not-A), are irreducible. One cannot even address the truth or falsehood of them without using them or relying on them. If one wants to call these principles “self-evident,” I have no objection, even though I prefer the term “irreducible.”

But these irreducible principles of language (or informal logic) are a far cry from assertions of self-evident moral or political principles. Historical lack of the recognition of alleged “self-evident” moral principles is dispositive evidence that such principles are not self-evident. It is not conclusive evidence that such assertions or false, of course, which I explain in the June 9 piece. If nothing else, “self-evident” means that something is not open to the possibility of falsification or refutation. This is a handy tool for shutting down debate. If John denies Bill’s “self-evident truth,” John must be either deceived or dishonest. In the comments, I am expressly accused of the former and implicitly accused of the latter (again with the “external” “ideological” motivation).

In any event, the real issue is not whether the theory of individual possessive rights is self-evident. Rather, the issue is whether it is true. If rights are not true, they are, of course, not self-evidently true. But merely because they are not self-evidently true does not necessarily imply that they are false. Again, I say this in the June 9 piece, but it must have been missed by some.

One comment suggests that I do not “value rights.” This is a form of question begging. It assumes the existence of something in dispute for the sake of “refuting” the adversary party. It is true that I don’t “value rights.” But I do not value rights for the same reason I do not value witches, unicorns, leprechauns, married bachelors, or square circles. I do not value these things because they do not exist.

The Problem of Rights Talk

I recognize that the provenance of individual rights is a highly disputed academic argument. One commentator asserts that individual rights appear in the writing of the Salamanca School, a common refrain from those who fashion themselves by the oxymoronic mantle, “Catholic libertarians.” Rather than rehearse the arguments, I refer the reader to Fr. Ernest L. Fortin’s classic essays, “On the Presumed Medieval Origin of Individual Rights” and “The New Rights Theory and the Natural Law.” One can believe in natural law or natural rights. One cannot believe in both, any more than one can believe in square circles or married bachelors.

But what to make of the Church documents that invoke “human rights”? As a preliminary matter, I wish they would not. This is not because I think these assertions are engaged in falsehood, but because the use of any rights language causes confusion. When read by Americans, such language is always understood as Hobbesian/Lockean possessive individual rights. But, of course, this is not what any magisterial document means. Rather, when encyclicals and other magisterial documents use the language of rights, it is always a corollary of human dignity. (See above for the general problem of the commentators either ignoring or being innocent of Catholic Social Doctrine.)

The dividing line is this: One believes in the teleological destiny of the human person, or one does not. If one does not, possessive individual rights are the modern replacement for teleology. If we do not have a common destiny rooted in the solidarity of all humankind, then we all have disparate individual destinies (and claims) against everyone else. This is what Hobbes, Locke, and their heirs believed. The theory of possessive individual rights is posited to replace the teleological destiny of the human person, not to complement it.

Locke’s Agreement with Hobbes’ “Strange Doctrine”

John Locke and Thomas Hobbes disagreed sharply on the solution to their common conception of moral anthropology. They did not, however, disagree about that moral anthropology. For the purposes of my June 9 column, the important point is the moral anthropology, not the proposed solution. So, if one wants to say that it is wrong to conflate Hobbes and Locke, that’s fine, as long as we understand that the difference is in the practical implications of their shared theory of moral anthropology, not the theory itself.

Both believe that the natural state of the human person is individual and solitary, in which we are self-generators of moral law, with absolute claims against every other person. And, ironically, in terms of American commitments, both saw this as a problem to be solved rather than an accomplishment to be celebrated. For Hobbes, of course, the solution was to surrender one’s rights to the sovereign. For Locke, the solution is to trade the privileges of one’s rights with another for the sake of mutual peace. When I invoke Jefferson (who energetically and effusively praised Locke) as embracing both Hobbes and Locke, I am referring to the moral anthropology, not the proposed solution to it. If the moral anthropology is wrong, of course, neither “solution” can be satisfactory.

One can engage in good-faith discussions about such things as self-evident truth, natural rights, and the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. I am always happy to have those discussions. But dismissive, flippant accusations of bad faith, ideological motivation, ridiculousness, weirdness, and the like are neither conducive to such discussion nor capable of advancing an argument. On the contrary, they are replacements for discussion. Which is why I do not read the comments section, a salutary practice to which I now return.