When you hear the phrase “Catholic social teaching” what comes to mind?

Is it the nebbishy history teacher at your Jesuit high school who ran the Amnesty International Club and had an Obama bumper sticker on his Prius? The red-faced angry nun who showed up every year and screened Romero at your Newman Center? The underemployed blogger who spends 12 hours a day on social media arguing that his M.A. in Catholic Studies entitles him to a “just wage” of $100,000 per year (or generous welfare payments) to support his growing family?

It seems that Catholic social teaching has absolutely zero organic influence of its own, that it’s treated as merely a club that one faction or another can pick up and use when it’s handy, then toss aside the moment it proves unwieldy.

And that’s a tragedy, because the tradition of Catholic social teaching is a rich, philosophically complex and nuanced method for understanding political and economic problems. It rests not on religious authority but reason. It’s not infallible and doesn’t pretend to be — though the moral principles it rests on are ones that no Christian can rightly deny, such as: the sanctity of life, the claim of the human person to freedom, the existence of a moral law that transcends every legislature on earth, the central role of the family, and the duty of the rich and lucky to offer aid and opportunity to the poor and the unfortunate. Those are truths that every reasonable person should be able to agree on, whether or not he’s Catholic or even Christian. And it’s on those building blocks that Catholic thinkers, some of them popes, have constructed the method of thinking that is Catholic social teaching.

Instead of a brickbat for use on the piñata of the moment, Catholic social teaching is much more like a really carefully chosen personal library, full of wise books that repay deep reading and careful reflection. Is it possible to rescue this sophisticated tradition from the demagogues and opportunists? I believe that it is, and have made it my mission to do that. Because without the balanced, tempered wisdom that thousands of thinkers, hundreds of bishops and dozens of popes have offered us over the centuries, we really will be rudderless, floating left and right with every ideological windstorm — even as major party candidates abandon Constitutional principles and common decency. In an age of demagogues, what we need more than ever are philosophers, like Augustine, Aquinas, Leo XIII, Edith Stein, Elizabeth Anscombe and John Paul II.

We live in very challenging times. As we face a historic election that will determine the slant of the Supreme Court for the next 30 years, the avowedly pro-life candidate for president keeps flip-flopping on crucial issues and shooting off parts of his feet.

Every week, politicized Muslims kill a priest inside a church, or throw Molotov cocktails at bus passengers, or hack up women and children in the streets of a Western city, yet our pope looks for every other possible pretext other than Islam for the attacks — insisting, against all evidence, that ISIS’ creed is really (secretly, deep-deep down) a “religion of peace.”

The Democratic nominee for vice-president loudly acclaims his Catholic credentials, as he strips off the last few qualms he once had about taxpayer funded abortion. The current vice-president, also publicly Catholic, actually performs a same-sex wedding. Neither of them faces any consequences from his bishop.

If any moment cried out to heaven for a clear Catholic witness it is right now, right here in America. We can’t wait for it to come from our clergy, so it will need to come from laymen — from you and me. That’s unsettling because we’re used to taking direction from men in collars, but it actually makes sense. The Catholic Church teaches that it’s the job of ordinary believers to take the basic principles laid out by the Church over centuries and figure out how best to put them into practice. Sometimes they will have to disagree with clergymen, and that’s okay — as it was when Catholic Englishmen disagreed with the pope of their day who denounced the Magna Carta. In that spirit, John Zmirak and I penned our “Open Letter to Pope Francis on Muslim Immigration.”

Over the next few weeks, right up through the election, I will unpack one key principle of real Catholic social teaching — not the culturally approved folderol that’s popular in Jesuit faculty lounges with rainbow flags or bishops’ conferences addicted to federal charity contracts, but the hard-core truths about human life that Western civilization has learned over 20 centuries, with the guidance of the Church, sometimes in the teeth of prominent prelates who laid down with the world’s big dogs and came back with fleas.

It might seem odd to quote Martin Luther at this point, but there were certain things he was right about, and one of them was this: “If you preach the gospel in all aspects with the exception of the issues which deal specifically with your time, you are not preaching the  gospel at all.” If we trim and snip off all the aspects of historic, apostolic Christianity that offend the social, business, and political elites of our country, in the hope of being “winsome” or “exercising influence,” of somehow baptizing the monstrous culture that accepts a million abortions per year but cringes at “microaggressions,” we are far worse than useless. We are active collaborators with the Enemy.

I will start with the three most important truths of Catholic social teaching: Freedom of Faith, Freedom for Families, and Freedom from Violence, then work through the other key implications of 2,000 years of Christian political philosophy and statesmanship, including the crucial importance of strictly limiting the power of the godless, utilitarian state over individuals, families, churches, and all the other free institutions of civil society.

I hope you’ll stay with me through what promises to be a wild ride through complex errors to the land of sweet reason and truth.