A Community of Communities
This leads to the fourth main contribution: the importance of families and a rich and varied civil society.
Human persons are not radical individuals. We are social beings and flourish in community. We are born into families and into cultures, and flourish in communities. At the heart of society is the family. The family is the fundamental unit of society. While the state recognizes the family and has a place in regulating it, family is not simply a construct of the state. It is a natural community and a biological and sociological reality that exists prior to the state. This is one reason why the attempts to redefine marriage is an overreaching of state power and ultimately a totalitarian act. The state acts as the arbiter of reality itself. If biology can be redefined, what possible limits remain?
A Christian vision of government recognizes both the independence and social dimension of the family and its need to have space to flourish and live out its responsibilities. As Robert Nisbet and others have noted, the Christian vision of the family in politics sits in between the all controlling paterfamilias of Rome and the radically individualist nuclear family of modernity. Basic social and political issues such as education and private property are embedded in a robust role of the family. In education, the parents, not the schools, government, or churches are the primary educators of the children. In Rerum Novarum Pope Leo XIII grounds his discussion of private property not simply in economic or political terms, but in the light of the family.
While families are essential, they cannot flourish on their own. The common good requires rich and varied civil society or what Alexis de Tocqueville called “intermediary institutions.” These include civic and neighborhood groups, churches, mutual aid societies, charitable organizations, schools, and various types of sodalities and voluntary organizations that solve social problems and build community.
One way to think about civil society is as a community of communities that promote the common good and encourage solidarity and human flourishing.