What the ARC Conference Asked, and What Catholic Anthropology Answers

More than 4,000 people gathered in London from June 23–25 for the ARC Conference, hosted by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. The organization was co-founded in 2023 by psychologist Jordan Peterson and British investor Paul Marshall, and its stated aim is to foster human flourishing by drawing on the West's "moral, cultural, economic, and spiritual foundations."[^1] This year's theme was "The Age of Reconstruction."

The speakers included U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Harvard professor Arthur Brooks, author and scholar Carrie Gress, and children's rights advocate Katy Faust, alongside politicians, artists, and faith leaders from across the Western world. Soviet-born comedian and political commentator Konstantin Kisin opened the conference with a reflection on liberty. Austrian Member of Parliament Gudrun Kugler, who sits on the conference's advisory board, told the Register: "ARC brings all these different areas together, encourages public debate on many different pressing societal topics, so that more and more people understand what might be necessary to rescue Western civilization."[^1]

The conference was political in register. But its organizing questions, what sources of meaning survive social fragmentation, what happens when shared moral frameworks dissolve, what individuals owe to something larger than themselves, are not categorically different from what surfaces in the therapy room.

Meaning as a structural question

The Catholic intellectual tradition has long maintained that anthropology shapes psychology: how a culture understands the human person determines, over time, whether that culture can produce individuals capable of stability, moral orientation, and resilience. That claim is testable.

Epidemiological research has found that regular religious attendance correlates with substantially lower rates of depression, suicide, and substance abuse. Tyler VanderWeele and colleagues, in a 2016 study in JAMA Psychiatry drawing on data from the Nurses' Health Study, found that women who attended religious services more than once per week were approximately five times less likely to die by suicide than those who never attended.[^2] The mechanisms proposed, social integration, a coherent narrative of suffering, accountability to a community, are the structural load-bearing elements of a life, not theological abstractions.

Kisin, in his opening address, spoke about liberty in terms that gestured toward exactly this kind of structural thinking: what the West risks losing is not merely political freedom but the moral and cultural grammar within which freedom makes sense. That grammar, what Carrie Gress's scholarship on Catholicism and culture has argued is irreducibly grounded in a specific account of the person, cannot be improvised on demand once it is gone.

What the Catholic Christian meta-model supplies

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, developed by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, holds that the human person is a relational being created in the image of a Trinitarian God, oriented toward truth and goodness, and capable of genuine moral agency.[^3] The anthropological claim precedes the therapeutic one, and the therapeutic consequences follow from it.

When a person enters a clinical or coaching relationship carrying the weight of meaninglessness, a model grounded in this anthropology does not simply offer cognitive reframing. It provides an account of suffering that includes purpose, an account of freedom that includes responsibility, and an account of identity that is not exhausted by preference or performance. These elements constitute the character of psychological care when the model of the person is adequate to the full range of human experience.

Positive psychology, as a field, made genuine progress by studying what makes life worth living rather than only what makes symptoms remit. Martin Seligman's PERMA framework, positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment, identified real dimensions of flourishing. But the framework brackets the question of what constitutes genuine human goodness in favor of what registers as subjectively satisfying. A person can score well on every PERMA dimension while oriented toward ends that, across most moral traditions, would be judged insufficient.

The Catholic tradition supplies what positive psychology leaves formally open: a teleology. The person flourishes not simply when they feel well or function well, but when they are moving toward their proper end, union with God and authentic communion with other persons. Technique, on this account, finds its meaning within a metaphysical context it cannot itself generate.

Resilience is not built alone

One of the more useful corrections the ARC conversation can offer the mental health field is a check on therapeutic individualism. Resilience, in popular psychology, is often treated as a personal competency, something developed through skill-building or mindset training. These dimensions have real value. But they are insufficient on their own.

The evidence is clear that community belonging, narrative coherence, and a sense of transcendent purpose function as buffers against psychological collapse in ways that individual skill alone does not replicate. None of these resources are primarily individual achievements. They are inheritances, received through families, faith communities, and cultural frameworks that tell people who they are and what they are moving toward.

Kugler's observation, that she revisits the ARC conversations throughout the year and that they inform her professional and personal life, describes exactly this kind of inheritance in motion: a community of discourse that provides orientation beyond the moment.[^1] When such communities thin or break, individuals are left constructing meaning from scratch. The psychological literature documents what follows: rising rates of anxiety, depression, and what researchers now call deaths of despair, driven by suicide, overdose, and alcoholic liver disease, conditions that track meaning deficit more closely than material scarcity.

The therapeutic alliance, at its best, is a temporary scaffold for rebuilding what should be transmitted by a functioning civilization. The ARC conference, whatever one makes of its politics, was asking whether the scaffolding has become a permanent substitute for the building.

Getting the person right

Katy Faust's focus on children's rights pressed a point that runs through the conference's broader argument: the structures that form persons, families, stable communities, moral frameworks with genuine content, are the conditions under which persons can actually develop, not optional features of a good society.[^3]

The Catholic Christian tradition has been thinking systematically about these conditions longer than any other intellectual tradition in the West. Its anthropology is a foundation to be inhabited, not a starting point to be transcended. When the person is understood as relational, rational, free, morally accountable, and oriented toward transcendence, the therapeutic relationship changes character. A clinical encounter grounded in this anthropology becomes participation in a person's genuine movement toward wholeness, a different thing from symptom relief, though it produces that too.

The ARC conference asked what a civilization needs to remember about itself in order to survive. Catholic anthropology has a precise answer: it needs to remember what a person is.

References

[^1]: Andreas Thonhauser, "International Conference Promotes the West's Founding Principles," National Catholic Register, July 2, 2026. [^2]: Tyler J. VanderWeele et al., "Association Between Religious Service Attendance and Lower Suicide Rates Among US Women," JAMA Psychiatry 73, no. 8 (2016): 845–851. [^3]: Paul C. Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, eds., A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (Dives in Misericordia, VA: Divine Mercy University Press, 2020).