Categories: CULTURE

The Catholic Culture Podcast: 134 – The Political Form of Evil

Jun 13, 2022

D. C. Schindler’s book The Politics of the Real: The
Church between Liberalism and Integralism is one of the
richest entries in the ongoing Catholic debate over liberalism,
political authority, the common good, and the relation between
Church and State.

Schindler offers subtle, convincing arguments as to why
liberalism is “the political form of evil”, specifically consisting
of a rejection of the Christian form – specifically, the
Jewish-Greek-Roman synthesis embodied in the Catholic Church.

Liberalism creates a situation like that described by comedian
Stephen Wright: “Last night somebody broke into my apartment and
replaced everything with exact duplicates.” It adopts aspects of
the Western tradition but only on radically different grounds, with
a fragmented vision of reality. Even when liberalism claims to make
room for religious tradition, it does so only by reconceiving
religion as a mere object of individual choice – that is, precisely
as non-traditional.

But Schindler goes beyond criticizing liberalism, offering a
profound and beautiful ontology of the social order and a somewhat
different model of the relation between Church and State from the
one proposed by Catholic integralists.

Schindler joins the podcast to discuss the book, including
topics such as:

Why objecting to non-liberal philosophy as “impractical” is a
rejection of man as a rational creature
Liberalism’s false claim of neutrality (or
non-confessionalism)
The “Christian form” and its fragmentation
Why liberalism is “the political form of evil”
The roots of liberalism in medieval nominalism
The anti-Catholic meaning of the Declaration of Independence’s
“laws of nature and of nature’s God”
How the “neutral public square” subverts every tradition it
“makes room for”
The problem with distinguishing “civil society” from the
state
Why property is central to understanding the relation between
individuals and society