“Christianity undergirded the development of Western liberalism (in the old, good sense of the word),” Rich Lowry pointed out earlier this week. Christianity has been “indispensable in the creation of human rights and ultimately of secularism itself,” which — here Rich quotes Larry Siedentop — is “Christianity’s gift to the world.”

I appreciate the smart, ringing defense of Christianity in the strongest terms that are acceptable to those for whom the political values of liberalism and secularism reign supreme, but I hope we don’t lose sight of the value of Christianity on its own terms. If the greatest contribution that the universal Church has made to humanity is a benign political philosophy, to hell with it, as Flannery O’Connor would say.

As Christians see it, the faith is not the means to an end. It’s the end itself, the goal, the “one thing necessary,” to which secular liberalism, as a political ecosystem in which churches often find ways to flourish, has to some extent proved itself conducive.

Christians and secular liberals can collaborate, join together in alliance for some limited definition of the common good, or at least do business together, but they adhere to different belief systems that, in many important details, plainly clash. Of course, not all liberals believe in secularism, Christianity’s most rebellious child, so let’s bracket that and consider liberalism by itself.

It reflects well on Christianity that many thoughtful liberals (in the old, good sense of the word) proudly claim it as the parent of their worldview. Nonetheless, although liberalism does not necessarily pit itself against the faith, conservative Christians — or, more generally, social conservatives of any faith (or none) — have reason to be cautious about it. It’s always potentially wayward, inclined to excess in the direction of individualism, where respect for the dignity of the individual begins to shade into sheer atomism. On the spectrum between collectivism and atomism, between Karl Marx and Ayn Rand, liberalism falls somewhere in the middle but is susceptible to drifting in either direction, although the pull of atomism on it appears stronger, at least in the Anglosphere.

The Catholic Church in particular is wary of both extremes. Its anti-Communist bona fides could hardly be more solid, and so we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss as just so much soft Italian socialism the Church’s longstanding reservations about free markets and liberalism. Granted, in an isolated case, depending on the pope or the Vatican official expressing the reservations, soft Italian socialism may be exactly what is being espoused. On the whole, though, caution about classical liberalism is a coherent feature of Catholic social teaching and reflects a legitimate concern to avoid what the Church appears to regard as the form of political extremism that is equal to though opposite Communism.

Conservative Catholics are divided on the question of liberalism. They fall roughly into two camps — call them the Murrayites (after the mid-20th-century American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray), who think that Catholicism and liberalism are complementary and mutually reinforcing, and the Communio school (after the Catholic scholarly journal founded by, among others, Joseph Ratzinger), whose members think that liberalism is driven by its inner logic to marginalize spiritual values and establish a kind of materialism in their place, through a process that is still unfolding.

In the view of the Communio school, liberalism unchecked leads to a kind of impoverishment that is essentially the same as the impoverishment to which Communism leads, although the paths they take to get there are different. Liberalism’s track record of producing material wealth along the way is obviously superior, however, and the temptation to assume that we’re all liberals now is considerable. “The contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals,” Alasdair MacIntyre, a leading voice of the Communio school, argues in After Virtue. “There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question.”

The subhead to Rich’s article reads, “Christianity gave us the modern world.” Yes, but remember, the modern world is a mixed blessing, and it is not Christianity’s primary gift to us in any case.