What makes Rick Santorum so threatening – and what’s at stake in the HHS battle

I haven’t been at all surprised by the vitriol of many of the attacks on Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum I’ve seen on the internet recently.  They’ve been personal and vicious and have largely focused on his Catholicism.  Many of these attacks have come from Catholics themselves.

In the Washington Post, a columnist accuses Santorum of wanting to rule by “fatwa,” while in the Huffington Post a self-described Catholic accuses Santorum of belonging to a “barbaric…cult” where “black-robed cleric[s]” cast spells over followers’ “cannibalistic reverie.”  Santorum is also accused of waging “jihad,” which makes me wonder whether it would be permissible to use references to Islam as an insult if the candidate were actually a Muslim.

I’ve been a little bemused, but not surprised, at some of the Catholics I’ve seen posting on Facebook attacking Santorum in unusually nasty terms; bemused because I’ve heard many of these same people talk about how we need to put our faith into action, about how Catholicism is not only about worship but contains an integral social dimension.  Mr. Santorum clearly believes the same thing, and yet the attitude of many of his Catholic critics seems to be “How dare he talk about how faith informs his social vision?”

While no one has to agree with Santorum on every issue, shouldn’t we at least be happy that a public servant clearly takes his faith seriously and is unafraid to talk about it in public?  Yet it seems Santorum threatens something quite fundamental in the worldview of his critics, and the vitriol flows out of this threat.

I’m not going to discuss particular policy proposals, nor by any means am I offering an endorsement of Mr. Santorum’s candidacy.  What interests me here is the question of what is so threatening about him to the secular left (and the part of the Church that takes its cues from the secular left).  I think the answer has nothing at all to do with his policies.  In fact, to flip Don Corleone’s phrase on its head:  it’s not business; it’s strictly personal.

Feminist hysterics aside, Mr. Santorum is not going to criminalize condoms, and the social policies he advocates hardly amount to shocking novelties in conservative thought:  he’s against abortion and thinks that traditional marriage, the status quo for centuries, should remain exactly that.  Some of his economic policies even have a decidedly liberal tinge.  What sets Mr. Santorum apart, however, is his integrity.

Mr. Santorum’s beliefs are not just policy positions but form the fabric of who he is and the way he and his wife have chosen to live their lives.  He doesn’t believe in aborting children who have Down syndrome because he and his wife are raising a daughter with a fatal genetic defect, trisomy 18.  And as media echo chambers thunder with the pronouncement that you simply must use contraception to be happy and healthy and modern, the Santorum family stands as evidence that there is another way.

Integrity is powerful (perhaps because it’s rare), and it is threatening.  Thomas More and Socrates were not executed because anything they did was harming others; they were executed because they refused to give up who they were.  They were executed for their integrity.

Rick Santorum’s policies may not all be the best imaginable, but there are no artificial divides in his life between what is public and what is private, and for those who have built careers on moral compartments and ethical fudges, the possibility that it might have been otherwise is something of which one does not want to be reminded.  When we do wrong, especially if the wrongs are small and incremental and washed over by a sea of words, we often tell ourselves it cannot be otherwise.  This is one of the arguments we hear in various forms when the Catholic left tells us we should not worry so much about abortion (it will never change… there’s nothing you can do… this election isn’t about that…)

Integrity is also what’s at stake in the battle over conscience rights provoked by the Obama Administration’s determination to force contraception coverage even on those who are morally opposed to it.  The issue isn’t how many people agree with the morality of artificial birth control or not.  The Administration’s allies have cited numerous statistics showing just how widespread the use of contraception is today, and such figures only prove how unnecessary the Administration’s mandate is.  What is at issue is whether the minority that believes contraception is bad for families, bad for culture, and bad for society will be allowed to live with integrity.  Or will they be forced to contradict their own beliefs, to destroy who they are.

The reason Catholics engage in health care, education, and charity is not cheery do-gooderism; it is because by doing so we are bearing witness to our faith in Jesus Christ.  We are saying, “This is what the love of God looks like incarnate in the world.”  We cannot bear witness if our integrity is compromised.  We cannot say, “This is what the love of God looks like,” if simultaneously and publicly we are committing sin.

Today the world—the media and now even the government—tells us that our religion is a fairy tale.  It’s not real!  It’s not realistic!  It’s not modern!  We can answer them with words, but the most effective answer is to prove them wrong with our lives:  to live the faith, whole and complete, with integrity.

But we will have to remember that there is no greater threat to those who oppose what we stand for than integrity.  Integrity is powerful because it is counter-cultural, and it provokes verbal and literal violence.  Those who live with integrity are sometimes killed.  But we Christians believe in the resurrection of the dead, and to live with integrity means that on the day of judgment there will still be something left of us to rise.

AL, SJ