An intellectual yenta. That’s what Leah Libresco Sargeant said when I asked her how she understands her vocation.
Properly speaking, yenta is Yiddish for a gossip or busybody—and maybe she sees some of that in herself, too—but some people use it to mean “connector,” and that’s what she is. Over the last fifteen years, Sargeant, an increasingly prominent Catholic intellectual, has been employed as a data journalist, a policy wonk, a university chaplain, and a head of HR, with stints at an effective altruism start-up and at Braver Angels, an organization that stages cross-partisan public debates. In a word, she’s always on the move. Her work life appears itinerant and diffuse because it is.
Sargeant has the gift of gab, intellectually speaking. Her love of ideas and eagerness to debate them are, for those of us who count a day a success when we avoid ideological conflict, as intimidating as they are inexhaustible. She is generous with those who disagree with her, but “pity the fool who comes for her in debate,” Sara Hendren told me. A professor of design and disability studies at Northeastern University, Hendren added: “I’d wager she is pretty much always the smartest person in the room.”
At present, the smartest person in the room works as a senior analyst of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Sargeant turned thirty-six last summer and lives in Maryland with her husband and their three children. Years ago, she entered Yale College as an atheist and exited as a well known atheist blogger, writing a regular post for the Patheos portal, a religion website—a lone voice, more or less, surrounded by believers.
You can imagine the shock in atheist circles, then, when about a year after graduating she converted to Catholicism. And ever since, Sargeant has been as public a Catholic as she was, briefly, a public atheist. In 2015 she wrote a memoir of sorts called Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers That Even I Can Offer. In 2018 came Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name. She continued writing at Unequally Yoked, her Patheos blog, but finally brought it to an end in 2017. In 2020 she started her Substack Other Feminisms, which at present count has more than five thousand subscribers. In the meantime, she began penning columns, essays, and reviews, often from a Catholic perspective, for publications left, right, and secular, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The American Interest, First Things, Commonweal, National Review, and more. When ESPN swiped Nate Silver from the Times, Sargeant joined FiveThirtyEight as a news writer. (A representative gem from that time: “The Sun Is Always Shining In Modern Christian Pop.”)
And now she’s come out with a new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. Its publication offers an opportunity to take stock of its author and the journey that led her to writing it. The subtitle isn’t an overstatement: the book is a manifesto for another kind of feminism, laying out both an overarching vision (especially in the opening pages), one discomfiting to the political left and right alike, and the concrete particulars, the decisions and values and policy choices, necessary to implement it.
Much of Sargeant’s profile comes from her role as a convener; she models discourse across the political divide, by writing for such ideologically diverse publications, and encourages it in others. As Angela Franks, a professor of theology at Catholic University of America, said, “She is always trying to bring people together.” Susannah Black Roberts, a writer and editor at Plough magazine, called it the gift of “salon-keeping,” recalling
a memorable afternoon “conversation about abortion with cookies,” in which she brought together a half-dozen women spanning the gamut of possibilities with regard to positions on abortion. She made skillet cookies (a specialty). We talked. The six of us did not at the end all agree, but we achieved accurate disagreement. It was wonderful.
In the words of Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, such examples show why Sargeant is “unique in the contemporary landscape.” She brings people together, but she doesn’t think doing so entails milk and water politics—as if it were an iron law that the friendlier you are to your enemies the more lightly you must hold your beliefs. Charity literally means love; to be charitable, therefore, is not to move to the middle, to become a mushy moderate or “squish.” It’s to treat your neighbor with respect, whatever you think of her beliefs. If Ezra Klein once decried “everything-bagel liberalism,” then Sargeant rejects nothingburger dialogue: the presumption that there is necessarily an inverse proportion between neighborliness and conviction.
For this reason, her own politics can prove hard to pin down. As Brown put it to me, Sargeant “pricks sacred cows on both political ‘teams.’” She wouldn’t tell me whom she voted for, citing her role at a think tank that works with both sides. All the more, readers will wonder: is she conservative or feminist, rationalist or religious, left- or right-wing, left or right brain? It turns out she’s all of them, or at least not merely one in each pair to the exclusion of the other. So long, that is, as she gets to define her terms.
For some, this element of surprise springs from inconsistency, idiosyncrasy, or a desire to be all things to all people. In the worst case, it means wearing different masks depending on one’s audience. In the case of Sargeant, the unpredictable is rooted in singularity of vision. Or, as Roberts put it to me, “Although she is adept (as all of us whose families are not Christian must be) at code switching, she has only one face to present to the world, only one self. This is the self you meet in her writing.”
Sargeant rejects nothingburger dialogue: the presumption that there is necessarily an inverse proportion between neighborliness and conviction.
The elder of two siblings, Leah Libresco was raised in Long Island. Born to a Jewish mother and a father who grew up in a Catholic family, she describes her upbringing as culturally Jewish but not observant. Indeed, her childhood was sufficiently ensconced among non-religious Jews that, in her words, when she was “in AP European History, and we were learning about the Reformation, one of my classmates raised his hand to ask if Lutherans still existed.”
Her parents, both college professors, were not only secular but politically engaged. Her father was an early member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Her mother raised her to be a self-conscious feminist from an early age, so much so that when she was born, the school newspaper reported, “Libresco gives birth to baby feminist.” Moral activism, political involvement, feminist conviction: these were the givens of her childhood.
For Sargeant, however, what lay behind these principles was a deeper commitment to truth. It mattered whether you got reality right. If segregation is wrong, you oppose it no matter the cost. If women are people, you say so without worrying about other people’s feelings. And if someone believes you to be wrong, well that’s no insult: they’re paying you the compliment of serving the truth and—rightly—believing that holding false beliefs is bad, not neutral. Sargeant has always known that “my truth” is an oxymoron.
While atheism was as natural to her as feminism, when she arrived on Yale’s campus in 2007, she encountered thoughtful, serious Christians for the first time. She found herself in constant conversation with them, particularly in the context of the Political Union, a debating society she joined early on. When she graduated in 2011, she was moved but not yet persuaded by their arguments. She bid farewell to New England for a job on the West Coast, having earned a degree in political science (but leaving unfinished a planned fifth year, during which she would have completed a master’s in epidemiology and public health).
Such was her love for reason and argument that she fell in with the “rationalist” community. In fact, the job on the West Coast was at a new start-up, the Center for Applied Rationality (or CFAR). For the uninitiated, rationalism is a loose movement, largely online but associated with the Bay Area, that seeks to harness the mind in the service of promoting human well-being by avoiding cognitive biases. Effective altruism is one of its better known projects: targeting philanthropic dollars so they will do the most good according to various quantitative measurements, refusing to let sentimentality or the status quo get in the way of efficiency. (Often this means, controversially, working to guard against possible future harms, like intelligent AI, or working toward distant goals, like putting people on Mars, rather than helping people alive today.)
Rationalist writing is hard to define but easy to spot. It’s invariably tech-adjacent, both geographically and conceptually, because what technology wants, according to the rationalist worldview, is to help us: to reduce infant mortality, to increase length of life, maybe even to defeat mortality itself. What rationalism lacks in deontological commitments it makes up for in utilitarian calculations. And those calculations are cooked up with a confidence typical of Silicon Valley: masculine in mood, cold in affect, direct in rhetoric. Like Elon’s Muskrats, they let the numbers speak for themselves.
It was shortly before moving to California that Sargeant became Roman Catholic. Viewed from one angle—and certainly her readers and friends saw it this way—the shift from rationalist atheist to baptized believer was extreme. What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? Or for that matter San Francisco with Rome? For the new convert, though, it made all the sense in the world. Think of it as a two-step shift.
The first step was toward theism, not Catholicism. What changed her mind was morality. She became convinced that, if good exists, then God must too. She approached ethics just as she did mathematics, because deep down Sargeant is a quant. As Hendren put it to me, “Leah’s first love was math.” Looking back in Arriving at Amen, she describes her conversion in almost purely mental terms, as if she were the famed brain in a vat pondering the being of deity. “Math is written into the world around us,” she writes. She resolved to approach the objective existence of morality and its Maker “via proofs by contradiction,” a practice of mathematicians sussing out errors in their theorems.
As she turned inward to see the flaws in her premises, she surprised herself with an epiphany. “Morality,” she writes in Arriving at Amen, “wasn’t just a rulebook but some kind of agent.” She elaborates the point with more than a little self-deprecation: “I’d backed myself into a corner. There wasn’t anyone else in the world who talked about ‘the Platonic ideal of the Good as an active agent with a special care for humankind’ without shortening that whole cumbersome phrase to simply God.”
In short, although she resisted the conclusion (or was it a solution?) with all her strength, she finally welcomed its inevitability. “I had just enough love in me to be able to be warmly surprised to find out the rules I loved, loved me back.”
For anyone who knows the story of C. S. Lewis’s conversion, Sargeant’s will sound familiar. Between his early years as an atheist and his later turn to Christian faith, Lewis lived as what you might call a “simple theist.” He disbelieved in an afterlife; he did not suppose God would reward or punish him for his behavior; nevertheless he was compelled by his reason, above all by his conviction in the transcendent truth of right and wrong, to believe in God. Sargeant’s conversion story is basically the same as Lewis’s. Plus math.
So much for the first step. But why, in particular, did Sargeant become Catholic? Why not return to Judaism, the faith of her foremothers? For that matter, why not a variety of Protestantism?
All her life, Sargeant was after truth, and when she encountered the Catholic Church she came face to face with an institution’s claim to Truth with a capital T. In our conversation, she alluded to G. K. Chesterton’s description of the Church, in his 1908 book Orthodoxy, as “a truth-telling thing.” It is precisely the least attractive teachings of the faith that turn out, on further investigation, to be true. Beyond one’s own powers of scrutiny, here is something that demands trust. In other words, the Church is not only the recipient of divine grace but a medium for it; not only the agent of faith but the object of it; not only subject to God the Father but itself humble sinners’ mater et magistra, mother and teacher of all.
Sargeant went on to compare her encounter with Catholic Christianity to reading “a well-written fantasy novel.” It’s coherent; you could see yourself living in this world; it all hangs together—that is, if it existed. But in the case of Rome, it does exist. You can go there. Someone is saying Mass right now, just around the corner. The liturgy isn’t an illusion. For Sargeant, it proved to be reality itself. And if it was true, then the consequences—professional, familial, personal—were immaterial. You follow the truth wherever it leads, no matter the cost. And so she did.
Having done so, she never looked back. She didn’t become the stereotypical “bad convert,” a fundamentalist utterly blind to the flaws of her new tribe. Nor did she become the “apostate” of Max Scheler’s description, driven along “by the struggle against the old belief,” living “only for its negation” and “engaged in a continuous chain of acts of revenge against [her] own spiritual past.” Such a person—we all know the type—“remains a captive of this past, and the new faith is merely a handy frame of reference for negating and rejecting the old.”
Sargeant’s conversion story is basically the same as C.S. Lewis’s. Plus math.
What then did she become? Catholicism comes in many forms, after all. It wouldn’t be wrong to call Sargeant traditional. But her faith is traditional in the most boring of ways: she affirms whatever the Church teaches about faith and morals. No matter the subject, her writing reliably reflects this affirmation. Yet readers attest to being constantly surprised, challenged, and delighted by her work. If one can know what she thinks by reading the Catechism, what’s left to surprise?
Answer: not her background convictions, but how she applies them to concrete questions, especially questions about public policy and the modern household. Anyone who has read papal encyclicals knows they aren’t easily politically coded (even if some conservatives would prefer to mark the good bits in gold and the bad bits in red). The same documents that defend the disabled, the elderly, and the unborn also speak up for the poor, the migrant, and the oppressed. Rome’s teaching cuts both ways, and Sargeant wants that double edge to cut American politics, too.
You could see this desire at work in an essay she wrote for First Things in November 2024, following the election, with the anodyne title “How to Fix Our Broken Dating Culture.” Without naming him, the piece is a dispassionate slapdown of J. D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment. The timing and venue showed Sargeant quietly working to police her right flank in the wake of a conservative victory. More substantively, the year prior she wrote in Deseret News about the moral and political similarities between abortion and immigration:
Whether a refugee is walking through Mexico or a baby is cradled in a suitcase—or, before then, in her mother’s womb—someone is on the way. Someone whose name we may not yet know, someone whose particular personality is yet to be revealed to us. Someone we know primarily through their need—they cannot survive unless we open the door to them and make them welcome.
This very set of issues—maternity, pregnancy, and family life—had always been close to her heart. These were to prove particularly painful at home. In 2016 she married Alexi Sargeant, a fellow Catholic writer, and in the ensuing years she suffered six miscarriages, an experience she has written about quite openly. Since then, she and Alexi have welcomed three babies into the world. In the new book, in fact, she opens her acknowledgements by noting that she “finished this book proposal while on maternity leave for my second child and turned in the full manuscript a few weeks after the delivery of my third.”
You follow the truth wherever it leads, no matter the cost. And so she did.
At first glance, the new book, The Dignity of Dependence, is something of a departure. It’s published by the University of Notre Dame Press, whereas the others were trade books, and her intended readership is not only fellow Christians but a wide swath of policy wonks, lawmakers, social conservatives, secular feminists, and the kind of ordinary citizen who doesn’t find herself described by any of these labels.
On the other hand, the book is a culmination and synthesis of her public writing for more than a decade. It gathers together her major interests while expanding and integrating them into a unified moral and political vision. This vision is, at bottom, about what it means to be human: “No just society,” Sargeant writes, “can be built on the basis of a false anthropology.” Injustice, that is to say, springs from lies about who we are. For Sargeant, the fundamental lie is ideal-masculine autonomy. The evidence for this lie is all around us. As she writes in the book’s opening line, “The world is the wrong shape for women.”
Her core proposition is that the world does not have to be misshapen for women; its shape is contingent, and could be changed. She suggests we begin by admitting that “full autonomy is not a possibility for any adult”—much less for the young or the elderly. An alternative vision would instead place “dependence at the heart of our account of what it means to be human.” For dependence is not something we grow out of, or perhaps a grave condition a few unlucky souls suffer from. Nor is it shameful, as though we fail to achieve full humanity just to the extent that we rely on others. As she puts it, “Unlearning the world’s contempt for weakness isn’t a simple intellectual shift—it takes sustained, lived countercatechesis.”
This is not Pete Hegseth’s Christianity of push-ups; it’s something like the opposite. The countercatechesis Sargeant has in mind refuses to accept the terms of a misogynistic world as the cost of acceptance. “Women,” she insists, “cannot live a full, flourishing life when our basic biology is treated as a design flaw. We cannot pay an entry price in blood for an illusion of equality.” In brief, “Equality for women is not the same as asserting interchangeability with men.” Hence, any “feminism that fears acknowledging difference will be unable to advocate fully for women or children.”
The most powerful sections of the book are when Sargeant moves from high theory and morals to the minutiae of navigating, in a woman’s body, a world made for men. Her examples come from daily life: the height of countertops, standard medical dosages, and automobile safety. Each is geared toward “the typical user,” which is code for “the modal man.” The first is inconvenient; the second, harmful; the third, deadly. Car manufacturers have, on Sargeant’s telling, repeatedly blamed the victim, “as though women sat closer to the steering wheel on a whim. But this ‘choice’ is determined by design.”
The point extends to the workplace: “A culture that keeps proposing fixes to allow employers and others to work with a woman without being inconvenienced by the fact of her being a woman is one that treats womanhood as a congenital deformity.” Then she lists the fixes: breast pumps, hormonal IUDs, artificial wombs, abortion. And even these must “be silent, slimline, and secret,” lest the perceived pathology of women’s biology be rendered in all its visceral visibility. Better to require “disabled users to participate in their own erasure.”
Many readers, even skeptical readers, will nod at much that Sargeant has to say here, not least the detailed attention she pays to public policy, social safety nets, and the ways the market penalizes care. Fewer readers, I suspect, will be persuaded by her treatment of the Pill, except those already convinced. To be sure, there are many reasons to wonder about hormonal birth control—as evidenced just last month in a New York Times story titled “Who Am I Without Birth Control?”—but it is difficult to move from her critical questions to her staunch opposition absent the authority of Catholic dogma. There is, you might say, a certain kind of unspoken political Catholicism at work throughout the book, sometimes below the surface.
For Sargeant, that’s a feature of her work, not a bug. Yet for the segment of her audience that approaches the book allergic to Catholicism, or to the mixing of religion and politics, it’s a challenge she has to work to overcome, particularly on issues like birth control and abortion. The book as a whole is a success, to be clear, but it’s at its weakest, argumentatively speaking, when she presents major positions apart from their supports in Catholic teaching. In truth, such positions always depend on Catholic supports; the only question is whether one points them out.
The Dignity of Dependence belongs to a raft of works by younger female writers, scholars, and public intellectuals who are neither politically progressive nor anti-feminist. In a 2023 essay for First Things, Erika Bachiochi, director of the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute (which provided Sargeant with a fellowship for $20,000 to support the writing of her new book), termed this movement “sex-realist feminism.” The phrase is meant to capture philosophically what for most people are common-sense truisms: men and women are different; men and women are human; the humanity of women is not measured by the extent to which it approximates that of men. The asymmetry between women and men, therefore, is not a problem to be solved but a fact, even a gift, to be acknowledged, accommodated, and celebrated.
Or as Bachiochi puts it, drawing out the legal implications:
Men and women are sexually dimorphic manifestations of the same kind of being: a rational creature ordered to excellence. Each human being is an integrated and personal unity, distinct from every other individual who will ever live. Our law—if it is to govern us in all our multi-faceted nobility—must be fashioned to honor our shared humanity, recognize our sexual asymmetry, and provide room and scope for our irreducible individuality.
The list of sex-realist feminism’s allies and fellow travelers is long; at a minimum I’d name Abigail Favale, Jennifer Frey, Sara Hendren, Christine Emba, Angela Franks, Eve Tushnet, Amber Lapp, Anne Snyder, Tish Harrison Warren, Bonnie Kristian, Karen Swallow Prior, Susannah Black Roberts, Nadya Williams, Madeleine Kearns, Clare Morell, Katelyn Walls Shelton, and Rachel Roth Aldhizer. All of them are Christian, split more or less evenly between Catholics and Protestants. To that list we could add writers as varied as Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, Abigail Shrier, Freya India, Katherine Dee, Kat Rosenfield, Clare Coffey, B. D. McClay, Tara Isabella Burton, Jennifer Banks, and Elizabeth Bruenig. We might even include Bari Weiss, who like Sargeant is something of a digital salonnière.
Where the first group is pro-life, supports traditional marriage, and is broadly skeptical of reproductive technologies, this second group is more eclectic: not all religious, not all conservative, not all particularly political. Nevertheless both groups are distinct from the old- and new-school feminisms of a Michelle Goldberg, a Jill Filipovic, a Rebecca Solnit, an Amia Srinivasan. For the latter, abortion is a nonnegotiable right, because reproductive autonomy is a necessary condition for gender equality, especially in a market economy. And beside or behind access to abortion comes the rest of the sexual revolution: contraception, no-fault divorce, the destigmatization of promiscuity, and same-sex marriage. In Srinivasan’s words, “Monogamous marriage, the heteronormative family, and norms of chastity are … parts of a patriarchal infrastructure, designed to secure men’s access to women’s bodies and minds.”
Yet if sex-realist feminists reject such a view, they do not go on to dabble in trad-wife cosplay, or even the more serious (I mean less fantastical) version of traditional housewifery represented by an online influencer like Allie Beth Stuckey. It’s always been a tricky business, conservative women leaving the home to tell other women not to leave the home. That’s not the flavor or the message of the women in view here. For what they are, to a person, is unabashed intellectuals writing for the public square. They may be contrarian, but rarely are they reactionary. And while Sargeant belongs squarely in the first camp, her work is published so widely and in such different venues that readers across the ideological spectrum, including those who oppose it, consistently engage with her work.
“I thought in college that feminism was a leviathan of lockstep progressive orthodoxy, one that wasn’t really concerned with women who don’t fit that public mold,” Valerie Pavilonis, an editor at The Dispatch (and an Arc contributor), told me. “But Leah’s Substack reminded me that there are a lot of ways to be a feminist—other ways—while still respecting the dignity of each woman as an embodied, loved individual. From her writing you really get the sense that she cares about other women, especially since she’s so attentive to her commenters. Here is a woman who isn’t trying to lasso a countercultural movement for her own gain. And there’s really nothing quite as feminist as that.”
Sargeant is known for her smarts—Robert P. George, the Princeton political scientist and noted Catholic thinker, told me, “Leah writes lucidly and insightfully about an astonishing range of subjects”—but also for her hospitality. She’s known to bake cookies for her enemies. Rod Dreher once called her “the den mother of the Benedict Option.” From all I had heard about her—and no doubt because of my own prejudice—I’d supposed her a crunchy conservative, a granola mama, a right-brain creative and free spirit in touch with earth and body and feeling.
By way of reminder: “Crunchy conservatives” was a hip term a couple decades ago, given life by Dreher’s 2010 book Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots. These conservatives could be mistaken for leftists because of their approach to food, land, home, education, and consumerist capitalism. They were skeptical of the establishment—only not like libertarians but like hippies. A figure like Wendell Berry looms large, himself a politically scrambled agrarian who has long rejected the partisan status quo. Painful though it may be to admit it, in his own way Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a successor to the Crunchy Con impulse. And from a distance, then, you might suspect Sargeant of being MAHA-adjacent. Her use of a doula, for example, could serve as a proxy for larger anti-establishment beliefs, as could her rejection of the Pill.
But Sargeant believes in authority. Once a rationalist, always a rationalist. Sargeant may love beauty, but as noted above, her kind of beauty is exemplified in mathematics. She didn’t change her mind about God, ethics, or politics because warm empathy led her rightward. It was cold, unfeeling reason that did the trick. The warmth came later. She’s a pro-expertise wonk who looks to spreadsheets to solve problems. Institutions per se are not worthy of our skepticism, granting that institutions, like anything else, can fail us.
Put it this way: Her spiritual leanings are not woo. By her own telling, they are Pelagianism and gnosticism, technical terms from Christian history that name two major heresies, or false doctrines.
The first describes her native impulse to earn her way, to merit what she gets, to bypass mercy by never admitting her need for it. In her heart the hero of Les Misérables is Javert, not Jean Valjean. She is tempted to believe, with Kant, “that true religion is not to be placed in the knowledge or the profession of what God does or has done for our salvation, but in what we must do to become worthy of it.” Plainly put, a person must “make himself antecedently worthy of receiving” the grace of God. Which is to say, to be owed what is meant to be given freely.
The namesake for this heresy is Pelagius, a Christian teacher in the early fifth century. Pelagius aroused the ire of Saint Augustine because he ascribed to human beings a kernel of moral agency untrammeled by sin. Augustine’s rebuke was severe: if we can live upright before God on our own, then Christ died for nothing. Grace is truly grace only if it is absolutely needed, absolutely universal, and absolutely free.
Augustine is Sargeant’s patron saint. Like Augustine, she was an unbelieving, wandering seeker whose mind had to be convinced before her heart would follow. “Late have I loved thee,” prays Augustine in the Confessions, “O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved thee!” He continues:
And behold, thou wert within and I was without .… Thou didst call and cry out and burst in upon my deafness; thou didst shine forth and glow and drive away my blindness; thou didst send forth thy fragrance, and I drew in my breath, and now I pant for thee; I have tasted, and now I hunger and thirst; thou didst touch me, and I was inflamed with desire for thy peace.
The bodily metaphors are no ornament, for the body is central to the second heresy, gnosticism. Prior to conversion, the body presented a problem for Augustine and Sargeant alike. For Augustine, the problem was the body’s appetites. For Sargeant, it was the body’s stubborn thereness, its limits and frailties and unending neediness. She says that, even now, she can be forgetful about the body: playacting as pure mind, chattering to her husband about “the book I’ve just read on eels” without picking up on the obvious signs of his physical exhaustion.
“I’m better about the physical world than I used to be,” she says, but the temptation to treat her body as “a mech suit for my brain” has never fully left her. Christians call this heresy “gnostic,” after a popular strain in the early Church that minimized or demonized the body in favor of the spirit trapped within. Sōma sêma, as the Greeks put it: the body is a grave. On such a view, bodies are disposable meat, and selves synonymous with the soul. The ideal becomes a bodiless existence, or at least a life as detached from the body as law, wealth, and technology will allow.
In this sense, Sargeant’s new book is not merely an anti-gnostic tract. It’s a treatise targeting her own former belief system. Before anyone else, the strong medicine is meant for herself.
So no, Sargeant is nobody’s idea of a crunchy con. Her unreconstructed rationalism is closer in affinity, if not in substance, to transhumanism. And the attendant tone, which strikes some readers as cheerfully unflustered, infuriates others. For instance, in July 2022 Sargeant wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times about ectopic pregnancies in which she consistently, but without explanation or apology, referred to “the baby.” It’s the baby “who is ectopic,” the baby who “implants somewhere other than the uterus,” the baby for whom the “situation is fatal.”
Pro-choice readers were outraged. The following week, in The Washington Post, Erik Wemple wrote a response titled “New York Times won’t correct its errant essay on ectopic pregnancy.” Wemple quotes Beverly Gray, a physician who teaches at Duke University School of Medicine, who said, “I think the thing that stood out to me the most is this narrative that physicians who provide abortion care are not compassionate.” And Wemple also quoted Louise King, a physician who teaches at Harvard Medical School, who remarked, “I was frankly offended on all of our behalves.”
The offense isn’t accidental. Consider a more recent essay, written in January for Commonplace, an online journal published by Oren Cass’s American Compass think tank. Titled “Pro-Life Laws Didn’t Kill These Women,” it opens this way:
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, everyone, pro-life and pro-choice alike, waited with quiet dread for the first body to fall. Not the steady, rainfall-like pitter-patter of over 1,600 deaths per day of children in the womb. The first real body. Not a puzzle of tiny limbs being reassembled in a products of conception lab, but a woman who had breathed and lived, and whose own heart would have kept on beating but for an abortion ban.
In what follows, Sargeant offers an alternately impassioned and bloodless investigation of four plausible candidates for deaths caused by pro-life laws. In each case she delves into the medical and legal weeds, and in each case she judges that the laws were not responsible. “Poverty and marginalization,” instead, “are the preexisting conditions that put a woman’s health at risk and make abortion ‘necessary.’” Yet “these conditions aren’t easy to escape—it’s not a matter of diet or exercise or time. If this level of risk requires abortion, it implies that the social determinants of health make it impossible for poor women to carry safely to term.”
In a word: “Expecting poor women to rely on abortion to protect them from care deserts or underinsurance is oppression redistributed.” Such a sentence, together with the moral and political conclusion it distills, is a Rorschach test for readers. For some, it illustrates everything infuriating about Sargeant’s work. For others, it’s just the opposite.
Anne Snyder, editor of Comment magazine, is in the latter camp. If you thought Augustine a lofty comparison for me to draw earlier, Snyder deems it too limiting. To describe Sargeant, she volunteered a veritable stack of saints, Catholic and otherwise: “Dorothy Day meets Howard Thurman meets Edith Stein meets St. Augustine.” That’s quite a list, but what she was reaching for, I think, was the alluring blend of math, philosophy, generosity, and love for the down and out that one finds in Sargeant’s writing.
As a final example, then, consider “Dependence,” an essay published by Plough in 2020. There Sargeant calls for “an illiberalism of the weak.” She argues that the liberal self is a useful fiction created by modern political theory: useful because it grounds a new way of organizing a society; fictive because it describes no actual extant human being. At best it is an ideal which an able-bodied man in his twenties or thirties might pretend to realize for a time. I say “pretend” since even a billionaire, be he a tech-lord or superstar athlete at the peak of his professional or physical prowess, cannot achieve true liberal autonomy without the constant help of a minor army of invisible others.
For Sargeant, the liberal self fails men just as it does women—in addition to failing children, the elderly, the unborn, the disabled, and all other groups our economy would prefer to keep out of sight, out of mind.
An illiberalism of the weak stands opposed to a liberalism of the autonomous self but also to a postliberalism of the strong. If the latter describes the politics of Silicon Valley, this is its antithesis. For whatever else one may think of where Sargeant landed, she successfully escaped the orbit of tech-right ideology. It may have been a close call, but she got out, and it was ultimately faith in a God who humbled Himself to the point of sharing our lot—conception and gestation, birth and suckling, learning and growing, suffering and dying—that did the trick.
The resulting illiberalism is far more than a mere exhortation to care. It is a political and philosophical rejection of an inhuman and therefore inhumane anthropology. Our society isn’t neutral about what it means to be human, and for good reason: neutrality on the subject is impossible. We are always already legislating morality inasmuch as our laws always already presuppose a vision of the good life—what enables it and what obstructs it.
For whatever else one may think of where Sargeant landed, she successfully escaped the orbit of tech-right ideology. It may have been a close call, but she got out.
In the words of Hendren, for whom Sargeant was crucial in her own return to faith, “Like Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry, Leah’s body of work has a prophetic sweep, redescribing the present so we can see what’s right in front of us with fresh eyes and see our way to a different kind of future.” Lasch and Berry are useful analogues, not least because they too are fugitive figures; across their work they never sit still for long. Perhaps we could call them, if not intellectual yentas, then “philosophers of a humane economy.” That’s Sargeant’s term of art for Alan Jacobs and L. M. Sacasas, but she might just as well be describing herself.
When I asked her, directly, to place herself on the political map, she didn’t pick a partisan tribe or an ideological label. She replied with one word: “Catholic.” Then: “I care more about being Catholic—and about being right—than about being right or left.” There again was the primacy of truth. All of us, together, have got to get reality right. Admitting weakness is a good start. But everything turns on where it ends: namely, with a society that is no longer the wrong shape for anyone, without exception.