The corollary question, "whether real Christian faith, particularly of the conservative kind, is really reconcilable with American nationalism," is trickier. Historically America left more room than most nations for real religion combined with real variety because it was literally a community of communities. Federalism, localism and the sheer size of our country allowed for many communities to form and thrive, rooted in religious identities. As we've become more homogenized, superficial and thin as a culture, under the pressures of mass production, consumerism, hyper-mobility, and the cult of efficiency, this has become more difficult. Everyone wants to be comfortable wherever the highest paycheck happens to lead them. And many ideologues are now insisting that to be an American means solely to buy into our nation as an abstract ideal of maximum individual autonomy — a principle destructive of faith and, not coincidentally, of real liberty because it undermines the local associations that make meaningful freedom possible and protect it from the centralized state.

John Courtney Murray wrote of our nation's founding as establishing articles of peace, which Catholics in particular (but this goes for people of faith in general) should accept as a kind of minimum basis for living with other people in, well, peace. But these articles (e.g. religious freedom) are minimal in the sense that they only tell us how to order our political life, and what is most important is our religious life, then our social life. Politics, in this view, in the conservative view and I think in any really rational view, is important only to the extent that it is relevant to how we lead our lives in general. Governments are good or bad according to how well they protect and foster our families, churches, and local associations, not according to how equal they make us all, how good they are at destroying anything that may get in the way of our satisfying various appetites, etc.

Because constitutionalism and decentralization are so crucial to the flowering of religious community, real religious faith historically has been more consistent with the American way of life than most any other. Sadly, the more America becomes centralized and homogenized, the less special it becomes, and the less friendly toward meaningful religion. Which is why I agree so strongly with the crunchy drive to return to more locally based communities in which people can live their faith with their fellows.