"The zone of the soul and the purview of conscience"
Here are some paragraphs from an article with which I agree:
Frankly, it is bizarre to see presidential candidates—men and women campaigning for the right to serve and guide the broad national agenda—talking at some length about the issues of contraception, pornography, sin, Satan, and sex. Those issues, which are matters of great importance to the goodness and wholeness of a person, belong to the zone of the soul, reside in the purview of conscience, and should be worked out in the realm of civil society. On the whole, these are matters that are to be handled by parents, priests, preachers, friends, and family, not by presidential candidates. Certainly a president needs to be a man of character, but the fact that government has grown so large and invaded every aspect of life explains why presidential candidates are talking, or are feeling forced to talk, about these personal topics, rather than those that pertain to the public issues that constitute the national agenda.
Conservative candidates for president need to be focusing on the size and scope of a government that has breached its constitutional boundaries and exceeded its fiscal possibilities. This abuse occurred due to a lack of constitutionally conservative government and profligate spending designed to subsidize and buy off larger portions of the populace. Those issues are within the purview of the political. One quick way to begin defusing the culture wars is to put government back within its constitutional boundaries and focus on restoring civil society to its proper—and indeed, larger—place it must occupy if America is to remain the free, virtuous, and authentically pluralistic place it has been in the past.
My faith teaches me to convince others of the validity and goodness of certain truths, person to person, forming a culture that leads to a moral consensus. That is where the true morality of a nation is formed, not in the electoral or political sphere. Until Leviathan is slain, we will continue to see presidents and presidential candidates acting as preachers, proclaiming their morality, and continue to wonder at the sight of preachers talking politics from the pulpit. Perhaps due to the unwholesome reality created by American’s present cultural, moral, and political disorder, such a chaotic mixing of roles and issues is necessary, but I can’t shake the feeling that it is a bad idea for the civil society, personal conscience, and the public square.
Wow. The author must be a secularist, or a fiscal conservative, or—horrors—maybe someone from the Mitt Romney campaign. Oh, wait...
Fr. Phillip W. De Vous is the pastor of St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church in Crescent Springs, KY
Sorry, my bad.
