Introducing Daniel J. Mahoney

An important Christian thinker to be aware of:

Let me preface this piece by saying that it is actually a bit of a “filler” piece. That is, later today I will post another article about today’s Australian federal election. It will only be later this evening (hopefully) that a clear result is forthcoming. And I am already bracing for what might be a less-than-ideal outcome.

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to share in a panel discussion about the election for Vision Christian Radio. I was joined by well-known Australian champions including George Christensen, Lyle Shelton, Michelle Pearse, Bernie Finn and Maryka Groenwald. Here is part of that interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGHNewOn9K8

With so many illustrious guests on, I could only say so much, but one point I did want to make was that our side (Christians and conservatives) has a tendency to NOT focus on the long-term and the bigger picture. The other side DOES do this. They are in for the long haul. We should be too, regardless of how a particular election goes.

So to prepare for a possible election loss tonight, I thought I would revisit those who do know about the importance of looking at the bigger picture. Many writers and thinkers come to mind. One such person may not be as well known as others, so let me very briefly introduce you to him here, if you are not already familiar with him.  

The American Catholic political philosopher and intellectual historian Daniel J. Mahoney has penned numerous important volumes over recent decades. Some of his more recent books include the following:

The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (Encounter Books, 2018, 2020)
The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (Wiley, 2021)
The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation (Encounter Books, 2022)
Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul: Essays on Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton (Wiley, 2023)
The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: Overcoming Despotism Old and New (Encounter Books, 2025)

Here I simply want to offer some quotes from the first and last titles. They give you a bit of a feel for the sorts of concerns he has and where he is coming from. As a conservative and a Christian, he sees the value of keeping things in perspective, and of reminding us about the much bigger picture. Here then are a few choice quotes.

The Idol of Our Age

He says this early on:

The book you are about to read is a learned essay at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and theology. It is a diagnosis and critique of the secular religion of our age: humanitarianism, or what I also call “the religion of humanity.” Writing in 1999, the Hungarian moral and political philosopher Aurel Kolnai had already noted the tendency of people in a democratic age to take their bearings from “man as such,” who, in this view, is seen as the “measure of everything”. That which is above man is forgotten or taken for granted, if not openly repudiated. This humanitarian impulse had already begun to corrupt Christianity itself, reducing it to an inordinate concern for “social welfare,” for the alleviation of poverty and suffering in all its forms. In progressive secular and religious circles, humanitarianism was seen as the effectual truth of Christianity, which no longer needed transcendental reference points. Kolnai, our deepest philosophical guide to the difference between the authentically religious attitude and the new humanitarian ethos, will make more than one appearance in this book. With rare penetration, he saw the inability of humanitarianism to come to terms with the drama of good and evil in the human soul. “Society” (whatever that is) would be increasingly blamed for evil and criminality, and legitimate punishment would be dismissed as distasteful, if not barbaric. Yet humanitarians enthusiastically welcome abortion and euthanasia and make them mandatory parts of a regime of human rights. We are living in a world turned upside down, a world marked by moral inversion. (p. 1)

Given that Pope Francis has just recently passed away, the concluding words of a chapter he has on him (“Pope Francis’s Humanitarian Version of Catholic Social Teaching”) are worth presenting here:

There is wisdom and insight to be found in the writings, speeches, and addresses of Pope Francis. He is at his best when he thinks and writes in continuity with the full weight of Christian wisdom and in continuity with the insights of his immediate predecessors. But when he departs from them, he tends to confuse humanitarian concerns with properly Christian ones. He often gives a one-sided “progressivist” reading of Catholic social teaching. Remarkably, he seems to have learned very little about the gravest evil of the twentieth century – totalitarianism – hence his troubling indulgence towards communist tyranny in Cuba. Perhaps he needs to pay more attention to the experiences of John Paul II with totalitarian Communism and Pope Benedict XVI with Nazi barbarism (he seems to be remarkably unaffected by his two great predecessors). If he did so, he would not see liberal capitalism as an unmitigated evil, as he often does, especially in his extemporaneous remarks. Pope Francis likes to emphasise those parts of Catholic teaching that are uncontroversial with left-liberal elites. His appeals to Catholic social teaching tend to be selective. It is all the more important, then, that his statements and writings be read in the context of the tradition as a whole, and not the other way around. One is well advised to follow a “hermeneutic of continuity” in approaching the thought of this and other popes. And it is imperative to resist the tendency to identify Catholic wisdom with a secular humanitarianism that lacks both intellectual clarity and moral rigor. So much will be lost if the church continues to “kneel before the world.” (p. 112)

And a final quote about a Pope he does much more prefer:

Pope Benedict’s discussion of conscience and “the listening heart” is just one way in which his thought and work enlarges reason and reviews its “true greatness.” His reflections, at once theoretical and practical, theological and moral-political, can be fruitfully compared to the complementary witness of the anti-totalitarian dissidents of the East. Solzhenitsyn’s appeal to “live not by lies!” (and his concomitant insistence that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”) and Vaclav Havel’s reflections on “politics and conscience” point in the same broad direction. Solzhenitsyn and Havel’s admirable defiance of the Communist behemoth was inseparably a call for “living in truth.” That call did not cease to be relevant after the fall of European totalitarianism. Only by reconnecting truth and liberty, politics and conscience, can modern man free himself from what C. S. Lewis called “the poison of subjectivism.” By pursuing such a reconnection, we might take some sure-footed steps toward delivering on the promise of a liberty worthy of man. In doing so, we can begin to repel the humanitarian Sir version of Christianity – and of authentic political life. (pp. 126-127)

The Persistence of the Ideological Lie

Consider one of his comments on identity politics:

Identity politics claims to be egalitarian, but in truth it radically separates human beings in a manner only previously seen in the totalitarian ideologies and regimes of the twentieth century. Identity politics sees no struggle between good and evil in every human heart, as in the classical and Christian understanding of free will, conscience, and moral responsibility. It has no place for the drama of human existence. Like the totalitarians of old, in numerous institutions in civil society, especially our universities, the new ideologues pronounce who is absolutely guilty—and who is innocent and pure—with a monstrous self-assurance based on the visible signs of evil and injustice (e.g., whiteness and “heteronormativity”). Such a world—at once racialist and ideological—becomes a perverse spiritual despotism dominated by tyrannical ideological clichés that allow the woke to dispense with “the guilty” with remarkable impunity and cruelty. The old Christian anthropology cohered naturally with the requirements of liberal competence and civic responsibility since in a “mixed world of purity and stain,” imperfect human beings had to strive to “build a world together,” doing their best to respect one another as persons made in God’s image. Identity politics inexorably leads to soft or not-so-soft despotism, as the ontologically guilty are swept away and those who “cover themselves with the fig leaf of innocence” become the beneficiaries of an omnicompetent (and arbitrary) state that “allocate[s] resources to the innocents and to their causes.”

 

Civic responsibility and moral accountability thus have no place in the ideological schemes put forward by the denizens of identity politics. Such a regime—and we are indeed in the process of creating a radically new political order—is at once anti-Christian (or anti-biblical) and profoundly anti-liberal. And it wars with every aspect of our moral and civic inheritance…. (pp. 113-114)

In a penultimate chapter titled “A Time for Courage and Moderation” he says this:

In this book, I have repeatedly appealed to the lucid and elevating moral wisdom of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. Faced with human nature in extremis in the Soviet Gulag, Solzhenitsyn rediscovered a truth central to classical and Biblical wisdom, as well as to the sober moral and political wisdom of our founding fathers: “It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person”. To acknowledge this is to begin to find wisdom and self-knowledge, to reconnect wisdom and morality and to find the true grounds of political moderation.

 

In contrast, the woke – coercive moral and political fanatics to the core – renew the Ideological Lie in the name of fighting racial, ethnic, and sexual injustice. But they end up tyrannizing the soul, and polluting the public space with insidious and suffocating cliches, because they do not begin to understand the moral drama at work in every human soul. They only know how to negate and repudiate, to destroy the precious and fragile inheritance that has been passed on to us for our safekeeping. To meet this threat, we need New Statesman to arise – to be cultivated – among us. Pending that, each of us needs to have some “tincture” of the statesman in him or her. The gradual renewal of authentic liberal arts, civic, and religious education will, over time, allow “greatness of soul” to manifest itself in our minds.

 

With that said, people often ask me how we can renew the noble tradition of statesmanship represented by Solon and Cicero in antiquity, and but the likes of Burke, Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel, closer to our time. The first thing to do, of course, is to study them…. (p. 130)

And in his Conclusion, he writes:

This author prays every day that the “center will hold,” to borrow a phrase from W. B. Yeats. But with Pierre Manent, I acknowledge that a “fanaticism of the center” has taken hold of what the late Angelo Codevilla called the “ruling class.” These increasingly unaccountable elites defer blindly to the tyranny of experts, thoughtlessly prefer fashionable cosmopolitanism or globalism to humane national loyalty and prefer faddish relativism and moral experimentation to the old moral norms. In contrast, true moderation requires what the classics called “order in the soul,” salutary self-control and self-limitation guided by right reason, and not the emancipation of the human will from all humanizing—and civilizing—restraints. Too many contemporary liberals and centrists have forgotten the crucial moral, cultural, and spiritual preconditions of our political order. They dispense with them with remarkable ease. But liberty without law, including the moral law, is unworthy of human beings and is ultimately not in accord with the order of things. (p. 134)

As I say, I am writing this piece as much for myself as for anyone else. An unwanted election result can help turn a melancholic like myself into even more of a melancholic, so I at least need to remind myself of the bigger view on things.

Seeing that the spiritual ultimately transcends the merely political, there is always hope. Works by someone like Mahoney are a part of the intellectual and spiritual medicine that I am in need of. You might find him and his works to be good medicine as well.

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