Robert. F. LEAVITT. The Truth Will Make You Free: The New Evangelization for a Secular Age – A Study in Development. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019. PP. 319. ISBN 978-0-8146-4668-7. Reviewed by Matthew R. PETRUSECK, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA

Robert Leavitt’s treatment of secularization and the Church’s response in the form of the “new evangelization” is historically rich and descriptively nuanced. However, the book’s normative proposals on how church and society should move forward ultimately remain ambiguous.

Leavitt’s analysis traces the development of two interwoven but distinct strands: 1) the establishment and growth of the “secular” as an independent epistemological, social, and political realm, especially in the wake of the treatise of Westphalia (1648), which ended Europe’s religious wars; and 2) the Church’s developing self-understanding, often times defensive, as it increasingly has found itself moving from the center of social and moral life (including political life under some version of the “altar and throne” model of governance) to the margins.

In addition to providing historical insight, Leavitt also examines the philosophical underpinnings of secularism, and provides a generous, even sympathetic, analysis of why and how secularity has come to dominate the west. Indeed, he strongly implies at points that God intended (or at least permitted—the difference between the two is vitally important theologically, but Leavitt does not clarify which he means: the Church’s loss of cultural dominance in order to chasten its self-certainty and reorient its disposition to the world. He writes in the introduction, for example,

Is it too far-fetched to suggest that the birth of the secular order of life and the emergence of a modern human identity in culture, despite all the problems and grievous errors in them, create a seedbed which can be harvested appropriately by the Christian faith? And, does not the very creation of the secular principle of religious freedom, starting from Hugo Grotius and John Locke and crystalizing in the European Enlightenment, and which in its own form the church itself approved at Vatican II, amount to a seed of the Word in a secular age? (4)

This moderate approach, bathed in a spirit of constructive compromise and dialogue (though “dialogue” more in the vein of Pope Francis’s sense of amorphous “encounter” rather than Benedict XVI’s sense of seeking a better understanding of the truth qua truth), permeates the book. Ultimately, Leavitt calls for a refreshed engagement with secularity, and sees within it—especially in its embrace of religious freedom (an embrace, he fails to recognize adequately, that secularity is rapidly abandoning in its virulent and anti-science imposition of LGTBQ+ gender and sexual ideologies)—the possibility for a substantive and mutually-enriching peace between the religious and the secular. He concludes,

Today, the secular state needs to be “worldview neutral” and to accommodate different convictions of conscience and belief as much as possible. It cannot treat religious citizens, who disagree with secular worldviews on the meaning and purpose of human life, as second-class citizens. But, Christian citizens must also respect the rights of pluralist secular states to make laws based on constitutional principles, even as believers reserve the right to protest and not participate in practices which violate their moral principles and not be punished by the state for that (297).

For those who are interested in learning about the historical development of secularism and the new evangelization, Leavitt provides a well-researched and comprehensive resource.

However, for those already laboring in the trenches of the new-evangelization, especially those who know the arguments of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, there is little in the book that illuminates the path forward. While the normative proposals in The Truth Will Make You Free can be difficult to pin down—that is, identifying what Leavitt believes Catholics should do specifically in light of his analysis—it appears that Levitt makes his recommendations from within a Kantian and post-Kantian paradigm of religious argumentation. What I mean by this is that Leavitt appears to assume the validity of the Kantian claim that truths about the existence and nature of God and how both relate to reality in general and human conduct in particular are outside the realm of reason and thus cannot be settled by public debate. To be sure, Leavitt clearly seeks to carve out a space for “religious” arguments in the public sphere, unlike, for example, early versions of John Rawls and other secular philosophers. But that’s precisely the problem for many contemporary Christians—“carving” out a space, or insisting that the state make exceptions for those who have religious objections to state policies, begs the most important question: What is the foundation of the political order itself and must that foundation necessarily be grounded in a doctrine of God in order to be coherent and have moral authority?

As far as I can tell, Leavitt believes that question is either dead or moot. We live in the realm of the secular now, and what we religious people need to do is to fight for our rights and recognize that others should be able to fight for their rights, too. In other words, to be a Christian nowadays is to recognize that we must make a reasonable petition in the court of the secular king and hope that we will get a fair ruling. But what if the secular king, and secularity itself—defined as a total and totalizing horizon of existence devoid of any substantive grounding in the transcendent—is just an illusion, a Leviathan whose most ingenious trick was to shame (and frighten) its subjects into jettisoning metaphysical questions about politics and morality?

If that’s the case—and I think there is good reason to argue that that is the case—then the new evangelist’s fundamental missions is not to petition for a few lands on the margins of the new empire. Rather, it is to stop kneeling and asking for favors in the court of the secular altogether, working, rather, to expose the false authority hiding behind the curtain. That is not a call for a neo-theocracy—what kind of Bible-believing Christian can actually believe in a theocracy?—but, rather, a revolution in the name of first principles and, with a hat tip to Kant, the condition for the possibility of anything being true at all. In the end, Leavitt’s approach may get us a temporary truce, but only a reorientation of society back to the transcendent has any hope of setting anyone free.