William Barr at a Blue Lives Matter Mass in 2019
Why do people go in one direction rather than the other? I don't remember much of any talk about party or politics - except that my mother voted for Ike in '56 "to give him a Congress he could work with". My parents, both Navy Veterans, deploring southern segregation, indifferent to party politics, Eisenhower voters, very Catholic, active in the school board politics, pro public school because Catholic schools had not yet been built in post-war suburban Long Island New York.
What changed for us? First Vatican II and ecumenicism, and John XXIII. Then John F. Kennedy - a Navy hero, young (their age), Irish Catholic, idealistic, aspirational. Then came the assassinations of JFK, and the inadmissible Goldwater - a hawk, and anti-civil rights. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy murdered. The night before he died RFK went to Mass with farm workers leader Cesar Chavez. The Peace movement, boycotting grapes, and eventually Fr. Daniel Berrigan and the Catholic Worker and the Catholic anti-war movement.
So I am a Vatican II Catholic, a returned Peace Corps Volunteer, etc. For William Barr growing up Catholic was a very different story. - gwc
William Barr, nation's top lawyer, is a culture warrior Catholic | National Catholic Reporter
by John Gehring
After mounted police and tear gas cleared a path of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park for a presidential photo-op last month, President Donald Trump — who almost never attends religious services — posed with a Bible in hand, silent and brooding. As the surreal scene played out live on television in front of St. John's Episcopal Church, the most influential Catholic in the Trump administration, Attorney General William Barr, stood close by.
The proximity was fitting. There have been few more stalwart loyalists to the president — who has cycled through cabinet officials and routinely publicly berates his staff — than Barr, a nearly four-decade veteran of Republican administrations, and a conservative Catholic who vigorously promotes a muscular Christianity that relishes in fighting the culture wars.
Barr helped pave the way for last week's federal executions — the first in 17 years. Yet he is often viewed as an ally of the pro-life movement because of his opposition to abortion. His enthusiastic admirers also cheer what they regard as his commitment to religious freedom at a time when many social conservatives view the rights of churches and religious institutions as under threat by secular forces.
Barr's critics counter that a Catholic at the highest level of government uses his influence to endorse a selective, ideologically driven understanding of religious liberty, and champions a nearly limitless view of executive power that is particularly dangerous, given Trump's disregard for bedrock democratic norms.
Of the myriad forces that have shaped Barr's views on politics, law and religion, a constant has been his connections to a tight-knit Catholic culture where fraternal organizations, think tanks and conservative clergy understand faith as a bulwark against perceived attacks on traditional morality, the family and church. While the attorney general doesn't name-drop theologians or directly cite the influence of Catholic doctrine, he draws both from longstanding Christian principles, and the grievance politics of the Christian right.
NCR did not receive any response to requests to the Department of Justice's media office for a statement from Barr about what his Catholic faith means to him or about Catholic leaders' criticism of his involvement in bringing back federal executions.
Religious right rhetoric
At 70, Barr has a low-key demeanor and a flat delivery style that belies his inclination to toss rhetorical grenades and frame issues in nearly apocalyptic terms.
At a widely covered speech at the University of Notre Dame last fall, Barr railed against "militant secularists," language reminiscent of Jerry Falwell's rhetoric in the 1980s at the start of the religious right movement.
Secularism, he said, could be blamed for "virtually every measure of social pathology," including "the wreckage of the family," "soaring suicide rates," "alienated young males" and a host of other social ills.
"Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery," the attorney general said at an Oct. 11 event hosted by Notre Dame's Law School and the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.
He lamented what he called the "macro-morality" of the welfare state and of "collective action to address social problems."
In contrast, he argued that Christianity "teaches a micro-morality" where "we transform the world by focusing on our own personal morality and transformation," an observation that ignores centuries of Christian teaching about pursuing the common good and social justice.
Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, declined an interview with NCR but at the time lauded Barr's talk, saying on Twitter that it was a "masterful, learned, and extremely important speech that should be widely read and pondered." Responding to critics of the speech, Deneen chided liberals' reaction as a "collective fainting spell."
Thomas Berg, a professor who specializes in law and religion at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, agrees with the attorney general on several things: federal funding for parochial schools; the right of religious institutions to terminate employees who violate their church's moral teachings or institution's ethical codes; and that real burdens on religious liberty exist.
Berg filed a Supreme Court brief supporting Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who argued on religious liberty grounds that he should not have to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. But Berg also filed a brief supporting same-sex marriage in the landmark 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges.
But Berg cautions that the attorney general's articulation of religious liberty at Notre Dame was problematic.
"His description of religious liberty is selective and that threatens to make religious liberty a vehicle for polarization rather than a solution to it," said Berg. "A real problem for the cause of religious freedom in general is that the loudest voices use it or confine it to only support their political side."
The attorney general, Berg added, "says nothing about the religious freedom of Muslims, Sikhs or non-Christian religious minorities, or how the president's travel ban arose from his hostile comments about Islam. You can't claim a commitment to religious liberty and be wholly selective about it."
Politics of Christian grievance
Barr grew up in a conservative family surrounded by liberals on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His Catholic mother, Mary, sent her four sons to Corpus Christi elementary school. Barr's older brother Stephen, now a physicist, heads the Society of Catholic Scientists. A Vanity Fair article profiled Barr’s father, a controversial educator at elite New York private high schools in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Born Jewish, the elder Barr became "more Catholic than the Catholics," according to the article.
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