(s.m.) In apparent contrast to the advance of secularization, today the West is witnessing a burgeoning of conversions. Many of which are closely intertwined with a political stance.
They are conversions to Christianity that could be defined as “cultural,” often experienced as a “choice of civilization.” Key figures in the current power structure of the United States, such as Vice President JD Vance (in the AP photo, with his Indian wife and their three children), Secretary of State Marco Rubio, technocrat and humanist Peter Thiel, and activist and hate victim Charlie Kirk are part of this group. This phenomenon does not feature likewise prominent names in Europe or elsewhere today, but it certainly did in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it still inspires a sentiment widespread on the political and cultural right, expressed by the triad : “God, country, family.”
The following is an original critical analysis of this phenomenon written for Settimo Cielo by Roberto Pertici, a former professor of contemporary history at the University of Bergamo and the author of important books, the latest of which is The Renan case. The first cultural war of united Italy, published in 2025 by il Mulino.
Pertici’s is a byline that Settimo Cielo readers have already had the opportunity to appreciate a number of times, in a dozen of his agile and dense essays published between 2018 and 2023 and dedicated to analyzing the current season of the Church.
Let it suffice to recall here a few of these essays, whose titles give an idea of the contents but certainly not of the compelling interpretative originality that the author demonstrates :
> The End of “Roman Catholicism?” (April 13, 2018)
> Historicizing Vatican II (August 31, 2020)
> The Post-Council and the “Great Leaps Forward” of Modernity (September 14, 2020)
> Is a “Religious Rebirth” Possible ? I – From the Council of Trent to the Early Nineteenth Century (April 22, 2022)
> Is a “Religious Rebirth” Possible ? II – From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to Today (April 28, 2022)
Once again, the floor is his.
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God, Country, Family. A Triad to Be Corrected
by Roberto Pertici
1. If religious faith is viewed as a historical and human phenomenon (thus setting aside the endless and centuries-old theological discussions on its supernatural foundation), various “modalities” of it can be identified : faith by family tradition, by environmental background, through the influence of a charismatic personality, by group or sect spirit, or in reaction to unbearable sufferings. Over the last two centuries a very significant role has also been played by faith closely intertwined with a political stance : so intertwined that it has often been unclear which of the two elements had priority, that is, whether a given political stance arose from a religious stance or vice versa.
The crises of conscience and opposing stances that arose among French Catholics at the time of Pius XI’s condemnation of “Action Française” clearly demonstrate this fundamental ambiguity. And in the “Renouveau catholique” of the early twentieth century, in that group of often great writers and philosophers (for example, Carl Schmitt), to what extent was their religious stance determined by the more general critique of modernity and the need for authority, of which the Catholic Church seemed to them the last bastion ?
Here I would like to mention a typology, which might be called “cultural,” contiguous in some way with the one just recalled. It is seen when an intellectual with a secular background and no familiarity with the religious dimension reaches the more or less conscious conclusion that (to quote Martin Heidegger in 1976) “only a God can save us” (political, cultural, civilizational salvation) and thus decides to leap the divide and undergo a “conversion” experience. In short, religion as a cultural option and a “choice of civilization.”
These observations of mine are not intended in the least to bring into question the sincerity of such conversions, because they are not meant to delve into an internal forum that is unfathomable. Faith often resolves itself into a series of more or less commonly accepted and wisely regulated habits : a reality well known to the founders of religious orders, who give central importance to the “rule.”
Nor is it worth pointing out the discrepancy between religious precepts and the lifestyle of many of these converted intellectuals, who often get on more or less dramatically with their “sins,” because the hope that their religious choice will strengthen them against “temptations” quickly fades, assuming it was ever entertained. So it is pointless to question Chateaubriand’s faith because of his multiple love affairs at every age. In part because similar situations are found in all other forms of religious consciousness, to which the eternal “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” or the more modern “who am I to judge?” apply.
2. Let’s try to schematically understand the phenomenology of “cultural” conversion. It has already been mentioned : behind it is the sense of a personal or epochal failure, of finding oneself at a dead-end impasse, in the midst of a historical storm that has erased all the usual points of reference. The great historical cataclysms of recent centuries have often prompted a revival of religious life : the Restoration after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the French defeat of 1870, the two world wars. Or the great cultural crises : that of positivism in the late nineteenth century, even (in some) that of Marxism in the late twentieth century. Other times they are personal situations : after his 1913 novel The Failure, it was already foreseen that Giovanni Papini would either shoot himself or convert. Partly through the influence of the tragedies of the First World War, he chose the latter path.
How does the intellectual in crisis emerge from this painful “cul-de-sac”? He realizes that he cannot escape with the usual cultural handsprings, but by upsetting the applecart : by turning his back all the codes and unspoken assumptions of his caste and returning to a practice of obedience. Yes, of obedience : no need for astonishment at the word. Those on a path of conversion seek a framework of values and a code of behavior that are both new and old, and that will definitively order their existence, a framework guaranteed by a millenary and glorious institution. New and old, I said : because for many it is also a return to the words of their childhood, to the faces of beloved teachers, to the prayers learned from their mothers. When the philosopher Benedetto Croce polemically perceived in these choices a desire to return to childhood after experiencing adulthood, he was not entirely wrong.
At the culminating moment of the crisis a decision is triggered, an act of the will, the “will to believe.” It is not by happenstance that I take up the title of William James’s famous lecture (“The Will to Believe,” 1896), because it is ultimately a manifestation of religious pragmatism. Since one reaches the conclusion that religion is indispensable to society at a certain historical moment, one strives to accept it and make it one’s own with all the baggage of beliefs and practices that it entails, even those most alien to the mindset in which one was raised. One avoids any critical examination of each of them ; one accepts them en bloc, because they rest on the authority to which the intellectual now feels the need to submit, holding that it right and necessary to do so.
In Italian culture the fiercest critique of this religious pragmatism was that of the great historian Adolfo Omodeo in his 1939 book on Joseph de Maistre, when he warned that one cannot adhere to a religion or persuade others to adhere to it “with the argument of utility and the well-known aphorism that nothing useful can be false,” and added polemically : “One cannot therefore arbitrarily implant a dogma that is deemed useful, a belief like a stake, in the consciences of individuals and peoples.” In short, religion can be judged indispensable on an individual and social level, but one cannot adhere to it solely in the name of this utility ; one cannot decide to believe in God because it is useful to our life or to that of our time.
Against this backdrop the cooling and even the disappearance of certain religious situations is understandable. Precisely their historically determined character, their responsiveness to the color of an era, when times change, inevitably loses its inner drive.
Reading Émile Zola’s The Fortune of the Rougons, I was struck by his observation : “Until 1830 the townsfolk [of Plassans] were devoted Catholics and fervent royalists ; even the lower classes swore only by God and their legitimate sovereigns. Then [after the July Revolution and the end of the Bourbon monarchy] there was a sudden change ; faith was lost ; the working class and the bourgeoisie deserted the Legitimist cause and gradually espoused the great democratic movement of our time.”
It struck me because the same thing happened with a number of great intellectuals, whose biographies thrill me and make me think : Lamennais, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Michelet. All of them were Catholics (and Legitimists) until 1830, then in various ways abandoned Catholicism, moving over the next twenty years to variously humanitarian religions and to democracy. We owe to this transition works like Words of a Believer, History of the Girondists, The People, and even Les Misérables. The change of the “Zeitgeist,” of the spirit of the times, also irremediably affected their religious faith.
3. Can we humbly draw a political and cultural corollary from these seemingly airy considerations ? On the cultural and political right there are some today who, with the best of intentions, invoke the triad : “God, country, family.” If I could, I would advise them to drop the first element. God is like courage for Fr. Abbondio in The Betrothed : if one does not have it, one cannot give it to oneself.
What would these people like to do to reawaken a new religious consciousness ? Propagate beliefs and practices that often even the Church no longer insists on ? Return to Catholicism as the state religion ? Be content with symbolic acts like the crucifix in public offices or schools ? They could try, if they have the ability, to restore the possibility of religious thought in relation to contemporary culture : but complaints about relativism and nihilism are not enough for operations of this kind, otherwise one returns to the tautology of “only a God can save us” and religious pragmatism.
If it is out of some Machiavellianism that God is set at the head of the famous triad, that is, to establish a preferential relationship with the Church and thus gain its political support, I believe that those who propose it are miscalculating : the Italian hierarchy, its newspapers, its “think tanks” seem to me now organically incorporated into the progressive world.
But even if it were possible to return to the era of Cardinal Camillo Ruini (to cite the closest Italian example), it must be ket in mind that these political alliances with the ecclesiastical world always turn out to be ephemeral : the Church conceives of them (and rightly so, from its perspective) as entirely instrumental, to address a given context, but then moves past them if the context changes (and the context includes, perhaps, a change of pope). It used and discarded Luigi Sturzo and Alcide De Gasperi ; today wouldn’t it use and discard…? Well, let’s not name names. And then, is it certain that the game is worth the candle, that is, that the specific weight the Church has today in Western societies justifies a total “ralliement” to it, even on the level of principles ?
I would leave God to each one’s conscience, without inserting him into a political project. At most, an environment should be ensured in which religious freedom is effective (also for new citizens arriving from abroad) and social life is not dominated, even in non-Christian communities, by the presumptions of “priests” of any kind.
Religious freedom and secularism : these are the demands that a political power (of any color) must ensure in contemporary society. “Country” and “family” are instead issues on which politics can, indeed must, have its say, and everyone is called to make his own choices and fight his own battles. It is preferable to abandon all religious pragmatism and leave things to the Spirit, to use evangelical language for a moment : the Spirit who, as everyone should know, “blows where he wills” (cf. John 3:8).
(Translated by Matthew Sherry : traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
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