As I said last week, the doctrine of Naturalism, the principle that society can be organized without God, fails to achieve the common good it longs for and has inherited from Christian culture. By divorcing God and man, faith and science, revelation and reason, societies set themselves on a dark and lonely path. But why is God necessary for the survival and flourishing of secular society? In our pluralistic society, wouldn’t the Church’s presence in the public square be intolerant toward nonbelievers?

As St. Augustine once said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This isn’t merely a good mantra or a bumper sticker, but reveals that God made every human person to flourish in relationship with him. When we don’t rest in God individually, our hearts are restless and we search after lesser things. When we don’t rest in God communally or societally, something similar happens. We chase after countless shiny objects that our culture and our governments promise will make us happy, but we end up unfulfilled and our society ends up broken, lonely, and dull.

When modern society rejects God and his Revelation, when it tries to solve the world’s problems without God’s guidance, it inevitably goes astray. When the State ignores God, the laws it passes and enforces are subject to the whims of whoever holds power at that given moment. In our own country, the ⅗ Compromise, the Dred Scott Decision, and Jim Crow Laws all demonstrate what happens when the natural law planted by God in our hearts is not reflected in just civil laws. The same can be said of attempts to expand abortion, euthanasia, and gender ideology that harm the vulnerable and the voiceless. When the State does try to tackle social problems like poverty, racism, or international relations without God or his Church, its attempts falter since it imperfectly understands only some aspects of reality.  It focuses on technical solutions that prize efficiency, speed and fixing problems through algorithms, policy, or legal enforcement. The truly human (and therefore religious) approach focuses on interpersonal connection and interior conversion to foster virtue and make sacrifices for the common good. God’s natural law implanted in our hearts and his divine law revealed in the Church guide reason to discern and craft solutions that help humans achieve their God-given destiny.

So am I proposing a theocracy or a State where all the politicians are Catholic and impose the faith on others? Of course not! Humans have an inalienable right not to have their consciences coerced by others. The Gospel is always a proposal and an invitation, not an imposition or a domination. But the false notion that the Church and State must always and everywhere be completely separate and alienated from one another does not help the State to govern justly or the Church to act as leaven within society. As we’ll learn next week, if all authority (including civil) comes from God, then his Church has a role to play in being salt and light for the world.

-Fr. Stephen