This is, I think, one of the big differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. Catholics affirm that God primarily works through secondary causes, and thus His authority is normally mediated through human institutions. Thus, we always owe *something* to those institutions, even when the people in them are corrupt (as they usually are). Protestantism, as far as I can tell, removes most of that mediation for a direct "me and God" approach to authority. This lends itself naturally to the classical liberal order that America was founded on.