The Question of Infant Baptism

Episcopal Cafe links to Fr. Arnold’s speculation about the uses of infant baptism.  Fr Arnold notes that the current discussions of open communion have the unintended consequence of diminishing the necessity to baptize children.  They would be able, he muses, to take communion whether baptized or not, and thus could delay being sprinkled by the pastor until they wanted to make the decision.

It’s a useful point, one that should help frame the discussion of open communion.  Would one, for example, be able to take communion and make a deliberate decision not to be baptized?  What is being said about baptism in such a case?  Is the understanding of baptism, in such an example, accurate?

Because it seems to me that most parents who want their child to make an adult decision will do just that.  They won’t baptize them.  This was my own case:  I chose to be baptized when I was 13.  My parents believed that religion was choice someone had to make with some deliberation and thought.   So is the question about the church just not doing infant baptisms at all, in any circumstance?   I can’t imagine there being such a rule inhibiting the church from doing so and remaining in the Catholic tradition.  Of course, even in free protestant churches they have ceremonies that have some elements of a baptismal rite for babies.

It will certainly, however, become custom that we baptize more adults.  This will naturally happen as our culture becomes dechristianized.  It does not, however, require any change in church teaching.

Is there an instinctive preference of the church body?   I’m not sure why there should be one.  We should baptize children and adults. What makes us catholic, I argue, is that we have a universal sense – we can do both without shame.  It’s not a zero sum game.

There’s another question that infant baptism and open communion skirt around: is there anything peculiar or distinctive about being a Christian?  Does being a Christian mean anything different than being a buddhist, Jew or Unitarian?  Or are we all the same religion deep down?  The problem is that usually when we say such a thing, we imply that everyone’s a secret Christian.

In my own practice I do spend a fair amount of time asking parents about why they want their child baptized.   I seek to have parents who can be informed as their child ask questions about their faith, who can say the baptismal covenant with some integrity.   I think, also, people may decide to reject Christ, but they can do this even after being baptized.

And this is the work of a pastor – to help others in their discernment. My ambivalence is grounded in the unwillingness of priests to share what the church traditionally teaches while breaking reasonable rules the church has ordered.   We’ve found lots of excuses for not sharing what a critical faith looks like; opportunities for parishioners to deepen their spirituality, or invigorate their sense of commitment.  We’ve become scared of asking people to sacrifice anything.

Are there any parents who are testing bringing children to communion before baptism?  Or is it an invented problem arising from our frustration that, in spite of our outward progressivism, our churches are not growing?   As I see it, an inclusive liturgical practice does not make up for parishes that don’t know how to care effectively even for the Christians already in their communities.   My suspicion is that our “inclusive” practices divert us from the practices that will truly make our institutions welcoming.

Nobody is really asking the church to give up infant baptism.  Certainly, however, we’ll have to baptize more adults as families decide to forgo the ceremony.  What do we offer someone who has decided to become baptized?  Do we offer them new life?  Of if we do not, or if we don’t think such a thing exists, than yes, baptism is irrelevant, and we not need it to orient our common life.

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Learning from North Carolina

Like most of my friends and colleagues, I am disappointed at the choice that North Carolina citizens made about amending their constitution.   I am not, however, surprised.  Although I’m fortunate to live in a state where marriages are legal, I still observe reticence and ambivalence even from people who intellectually support some sort of legal protection for gay couples.  I suspect that even in NY, if it had been put to a popular vote, gay marriage would have lost.

Yet, I’m not sure if the vote is a complete disaster.  Forty percent is far more than it would have been twenty years ago.  The publicity may have exposed the bigotry and fear at the root of the amendment.  I suspect the victorious side will find its satisfactions temporary.  The culture is simply changing so that it accepts the ordinariness of same-sex desire.   Laws will not stop it.  And people will be creative enough to live around it.  The law will be challenged. 

Gay marriage is one issue that is “low-cost” for those who oppose it.  “High cost” issues are those where people have some skin in the game – raising taxes for fire departments and schools.  The benefit of low cost issues is that the orienting party can find a easy target (in this case, gay people), without having to promise anything of great value to its constituents.  What, after all, do conservative churches get for opposing gay marriage?  Not much, except they feel better.  Their communities will not become richer (and they may become poorer); they will not become safer. It is one of the great misdirections, that politicians can offer the seductively sweet nectar of moral righteousness, while ensuring they don’t need to spend a penny on making their communities more livable. 

It also behooves the progressive left to remember:  rational arguments rarely trump relationships.  The amendment passed because, in part, the church understands organizing.  They had at their disposal relationships built over years in their congregations.   The solution is not, in my view, trying to claim churches should not be involved in politics, but rather – to get organized.

“Movement” politics is different than organizing.  Movements arise and fall.  They can change culture; but they do not change who has power.  Organizing to challenge power, however, requires enormous patience.   And for this reason, progressives who seek immediate change are constantly disappointed.  Building institutions, building relationships and training leaders takes years.  It takes familiarity with people.  This familiarity is crucial because most people do not trust arguments.  They trust other people. 

Corporations and churches know this.  Corporations hire people who know Washington and have built years of relationships.  Lobbyists don’t simply commute from their homestate to WDC, they live there and get to know who makes the machine move.  Churches, as organizations, train people do get work done in groups – from having pot-lucks, to mission trips, to political organization.  The internet is a poor substitute for face to face relationships.  It can enhance, but not replace them.  A left that rejects the practice of lobbying; that does not build counter institutions or enable the ones that already exist; will continue to find itself sidelined and unprepared. 

So on the day after the election, do not despair.  The loss is, instead, an invitation to examine and study the opposition to happen next.  It is an opportunity to reorganize.  

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On Rowan

Well, he resigned.

Unlike many of those who I admire, I was a fan to the very end.  I remained impressed by his erudition and sensitivity.  I never doubted that he worked tirelessly to fulfill his thankless responsibilities.   The trouble he caused in England was necessary.  He often had the right enemies; when the tabloids dissed him, it raised his stature in my eyes.

I admit, I wasn’t that concerned about his decisions about the Episcopal Church and sexuality.  In my neck of the woods, my side won the battle.  There are openly gay and lesbian clergy; more will become nominated and selected to lead the church; and we are slowly, in due course, writing liturgies for same-sex couples.  I see that young people lack the homophobia of previous generations.  No gay person in my own congregation, or even in my own diocese, can worry about being disenfranchised by the church.   Since my state allows for gay marriage it is only a matter of time before I perform them myself.

Rowan, however, heard voices that I do not hear.  Not everyone in the world understands sexuality the way I, nor many of us in the US, do. We tend to see these issues through the lens of individual choice and preference.   It reflects more of a sea-change in other parts of the world.  And for many in the global south, our focus on sexuality seems like a first world problem.  Rowan was aware of many religious traditions that don’t yet understand modern, liberal, secular explanations of sexuality.

We underestimate the worth of those voices.  And while they could be wrong, Rowan asked different questions about the consequences:  how do we live with one another given our different contexts?

But what did Rowan do which changed the way TEC operated?   There was no way he could force the Episcopal church to toe the line.  He tried.  He hurt our feelings.  We can pout all we like because he never gave his stamp of approval, but we should have noticed we’ve still continued ordaining the priests and bishops we like.  Our presiding bishop still got to go hang out with other presiding bishops.  And so we’re still in the councils of the church.  This isn’t Rome.

Certainly, he made mistakes.  I believe he should have let Jeffrey John become a bishop, if only to expose how the English choose their bishops.  I think he might have been a bit more plain spoken about the real stakes in the communion.  It is possible that he did not get good advice, and that he was surrounded by people who were concerned with the machinations of English politics than the fate of the spiritual lives of people in the American church.  Sometimes I wish he could have been media saavy – his nuanced, thoughtful arguments were too easily made into fodder for ridicule by the British Tabloids.

Certainly Rowan didn’t understood the dynamics of the American Church very well.   And the confusion about his role in England, as the first foreign archbishop, is probably the same on our part.  The Episcopalian Church is more congregationalist in its order than we care to admit, perhaps, and the Anglican Church is interwoven with the English establishment in a way that Americans would find hard to fathom.  And perhaps spiritually we wanted him to be like the pope who we could ignore at whim (kind of like the way Americans treat Benedict).

But I believe Rowan understood what the long view looked like.  The English church will ordain women bishops; they will reject the covenant.   These debates needed to happen in the open, over time, in a messy, public, difficult way.  There was no avoiding it.  Although most of us wanted bold declarations and clarity, the Archbishop seemed to understand the dangers of moving too quickly.  I don’t think he idealized caution in itself, but he believed that listening takes a longer time than we like to believe.

Last year an Indian priest visited New York and said to me, “I understand more how the Episcopal church sees the world.  I don’t think my context is ready.  But I feel much differently myself.  And perhaps this will open even more minds.”  He said this after the Idaba process brought people of various perspectives together.  It was a model of mutual understanding, one which Rowan adapted to keep the Anglican communion in conversation.

I think that we’ll miss Rowan.  I’m personally glad he was often misunderstood.  It was an implicit, subtle challenge to the media and even to we liberals who work in internet-oriented, market driven time.  Perhaps over the long haul, we’ll see that he laid a good foundation for the perspectives of gay Christians to be heard throughout the world, and at some personal cost.   We don’t see it yet, but that story will be told.  And for all our focus on the issue of homosexuality, he wrote some remarkable, important words and essays that have gotten lost in the din.

So God bless you, Rowan.   Thank you for your service.

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Occupy Wall Street

Last December, Bishop George Packard, along with a handful of clergy and protesters, sought to occupy X park, owned by Trinity Church, an Episcopal church of great wealth and prosperity.

Of course, clergy in the interwebs are divided.  A few consider this a missed opportunity, and more militant ones paint Trinity Church with the Iron Heel’s colors.   The non-retired episcopacy wrings their hands and frets.  It’s a pretty good representation how the liberal elite think of occupy wall street.

I admit, I’m perplexed as to why the occupiers want the space owned by Trinity.  It’s hard for any institution to negotiate with a non-institution.  Might OWS consist of double agents (not necessarily Lutherans), republicans in liberal clothing, or Trotskyists?  Who is held accountable for the mistakes of individual saboteurs?

If only Dr Cooper could have asked for an insurance certificate.

But it does raise some questions.  Who is representing the occupiers?  Were there other opportunities to build relationships?  Who has authority?  Who pays the consequences?

The occupiers, to their credit, choose places that were not illegal to occupy.  Zuccotti Park was a safer choice than Goldman Sachs.  University campuses are probably easier to occupy than Bank of America.  Public spaces allow for the persons to participate, without actually threatening the private enterprises that control most commerce.

Over the last forty years, we’ve constrained and confined our public, democratic places.  The result:  environments where we have echo chambers, where extreme views are forbidden, especially those that critique commerce.   Each media institution has a modest particular “slant” so people don’t accidentally become informed about a variety of issues or perspectives.  All a businessman knows, thus, is business; but not much about anything else.  We are made into ideologues and consumers, rather than citizens of mutual concern.  We become limited: we examine how any change affects us personally, but have little consideration for its consequences upon other people.

The commons, our public spaces, the non-commercial locations where people of different walks of life can become safely acquainted, require public subsidy.  The institutions that protect liberty require commitment, from each according to their ability.   It is the cost for living in a country free from violence, where the different classes can engage each other without fear of theft or exploitation.

Surely, protests are where our parishes may step in.  When the government prohibits persons to organize freely, the church, whose primary role in the culture is precisely organizing voluntary work, can offers its space, in hospitality, toward the stranger.

This may be just one step along the movement’s maturity.   OWS will build  with already effective institutions and consider their next step.  But its hard work that requires patience, tenacity, resilience and courage.    If they could pay rent and buy the porta-potties themselves, perhaps they’d find more sympathetic relationships.

OWS, however, may want to analyze a bit who Trinity is.  It ‘s not simply the one percent.  It’s congregants are actually not all from the surrounding area.   They are engaged in multiple ministries world wide.  It’s not an enemy, nor should it be made one.

Building the movement to change the awful system of arrangements that has impoverished many Americans will take more than the deeds of the impatient.  It will take years of building relationships, of listening to the many individuals who can effectively contribute to revealing and changing the system.  Trinity is one of those organizations.  They are not the enemy, and need not be made to feel as if they are.

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Linkage

I decided to clean up some of the links and add a few more along the side.   Most of them are political at this time.  They don’t reflect my own political thinking – but I find that the way they think is useful.  I’ll include more links once I get through the Christian Century list.

David Frum at Frum Forum, the conservative conservatives hate, in part because he maintains his principles while still affirming science and math.   He got lambasted by the Heritage foundation when he argued that the Republicans weren’t prepared for Obama’s health care successes.

Glenn Greenwald is a lawyer who writes for Salon.  He’s insightful, principled, and makes no excuses for Obama’s conservative foreign policy.    I find him stimulating, if a bit unaware of the complexities of power.  For that I turn to…

Walter Russell Mead is a writer from the realist school of foreign policy.  He’s brilliant, wry, and deeply anti-utopian.  He explains the world in discomfiting ways, and is steadfast in his refusal to offer idealistic solutions.

That’s just a few.  More articles to come out this year, as I continue to work on writing… writing… writing…

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Anglicans and Catholics

The Vatican has given a home to Anglicans.

I’m glad.  Everyone needs a home.

We, the Episcopal Church, were not a good home for everyone.  We’ve decided that gender and sexuality are no bars to liturgical authority.   So although we gave lip service to being inclusive, we’re not nimble enough to share our institution with those who think differently.

But God need not be a zero-sum game.  If anything, let us praise them for not to join the various splinter Anglican groups, with their army of mitre-hungry, purple loving priests, sects who have nearly as many bishops as congregations.

Instead, they’ve shown humility.  For a bishop, the formerly Rt. Reverend Steenson, to give up the benefits of purple for the sake of their view of truth, shows some spiritual depth.  Although I’m sure the former Bishop (now just an ordinary priest) didn’t give up the generous pension, we should not begrudge him many years of service for the Episcopal Church.  Instead, praise him for offering solace for disaffected Anglicans.   Their views may not be correct, but there’s no need for a war or judgement.  Our faith allows some grace that we may not know what the ultimate truth holds.

Anglicanism has always held its Catholic traditions close.   But for them gender and sexuality are crucial parts of it.  Let them now say their rosaries, pray to the saints and the pope.  We can, in different spaces, pray alongside them.  But perhaps now we can each do so with less acrimony between us.  We’re not fighting for the same crumbs anymore, and they will be in a church that loves them.

Let’s be honest – we’re secretly glad they’ve left.

It won’t be easy for them.  Many of them were politically conservative, and see religious traditionalism and contemporary conservatism as coterminus.  But they may be surprised by the Roman Church’s liberal views on immigration, health care and poverty.  They may find the Catholic Church too culturally strident on contraception.   They may be blindsided by the private accommodations of the Roman church to its closeted gay clergy.

And will they find their voices heard within the vast hierarchy of the church?  Or will they also eventually find themselves as sidelined as so many Catholics, who go to church but find their voices mute?    Perhaps this small ordinariate may provide even more grace, more room for the Roman church to consider matrimonial options for their vocations, as it struggles with the implications of mandatory celibacy.

So we need not gleefully either despair or cheer when people decide they need a different sort of authority.  When a Roman Catholic enters our doors, often they do so with guilt, ambivalence and fear.  It is our duty to handle their journey with charity and magnanimity.  It’s never easy to leave a family, no matter how challenging that family is.  We must respect that journey, even when it is not in our favor.

Gloating over the failures, the mistakes, or the challenges of our mother church is not our mission.  It speaks ill of us when we do so.   We want people to find a home that is best for them.

If it is within the Holy Roman Church, then let it be.   Our building of disciples need not include any anger or hostility toward the church that has held, however imperfectly, the gospel.  If anything, being good Episcopalians means, I suggest, helping the Roman Church become more responsive church.  We can do this by always welcoming their disaffected with joy and hope, and becoming diligent disciples of the same Christ in the way that we know how – by showing no bigotry toward them, or their church – the one that nurtured them.

I hope that is the Episcopal way.

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Havel and Hitchens

A few years ago, the department of defense conducted a study on the impact of alcohol on air force pilots.  The results were predictable.   Most pilots who drank any substantial amount had impaired ability to fly.  But one unexpected result was the discovery that 1 in 12 actually had improved coordination and focus.  

It’s not enough to change our laws about alcohol.  Nor is it information we would want to be taken advantage of.   

But it might explain how Hitch was able to drink and write so effectively.  I have, myself, attempted the same, but with unimpressive results.  After the third glass I resort only to watching repeat Louis CK or cat videos.  

Clearly Hitchens entertained his many admirers, which is perhaps one reason he was able to resist how the media trivializes the serious.  With a prodigious memory, Hitchens could pump out witty, trenchant and convincing articles about many number of political and literary subjects.    He could seem authoritative in spite of a lack of authority on any given issue.

He did, however, know who to read.  He was friends with great authors; he knew who had inside information and what parties to attend.  If being a “liberal” means a skepticism of any authority, he maintained that position with some confidence as the local gadabout to whom the media turned

Havel, however, though a liberal, understood the limits of media.  In a sense, Havel remained someone who valued integrity, thought he would be outmaneuvered by a more politically sophisticated other Vaclav, who understood that the currency of power was more convincing than the currency of international adoration.  Hitch’s liberalism he gleefully attached to the neo-conservatives, who would admit no sense of failure in the war upon Iraq, blind to the many deaths his commitment to secularism would justify.    What’s an Islamic life when we’re delivering godless government to the Arabs?  

At their best they were both uncompromising toward some sort of authority, offering a voice of the individual conscience against the state and any sort of ideological tyranny, unyielding in exposing hypocrisy.  Yet although both loved engaging others, Havel practiced the hard work of politics. Hitchens was satisfied with writing about the suffering of others, but although he was impatient with any sense of grey aside from the people he supported.

While I occasionally admired Hitchen’s aggressive, take no prisoner’s style, Havel, the philosopher, was patient, searching.  Hitchens attacked weakness in personal shortcomings while Havel sought to expose the big lie.  

 And God?  Although Havel was an agnostic he was comfortable with religious language, and understood its place within human experience and literature.   It may be that Havel, having placed beauty, love and truth at the forefront, understood how atheism’s truncated imagination fit well within totalitarianism, adopting a reverent agnosticism that was plastic, magnanimous and forgiving.  Although Havel was no lover of religion or its institutions, he understood that the religious impulse could equally threaten the powers of tyranny, and not merely justify them. 

I wish, of course, Hitchens had actually debated a religious intellectual of some stature.  Although he had some quick and effective ripostes that revealed the ignorance of his opponents, he could get sloppy when speaking of religion.  Would not the Archbishop of Canterbury have found delight in sitting across from him?  Perhaps not.  ++Rowan lacked the quick soundbite or the irreverent humor.  The theologian David Bentley Hart had the erudition and an equal vocabulary, but probably lacked the charm.   Was there not a single theologian who could correct Hitchen’s misrepresentations, or expose his cleverness as simply poetic shoddiness?  He was routinely opposed by charlatans and mediocre intellects.

I admit, although I was occasionally enthralled by his attacks on Islamic Fundamentalism, I believe Hitchen’s understanding of Islam was shallow.  He ignored the data how the political and economic instability and oppression anchored of third-world hostility towards the west.  He could give some lip service to his opponent rhetorically, but ignoring it with his quicker, glib retorts. 

Of course, Hitchens  believed that analysis was capitulation.  It meant he got some issues seriously wrong.  As he said, vindication was one of his greatest pleasures, and he was hesitant to give it up.  

But in both of them we have lost two public intellectuals – men not confined to the academy, forced into tightly narrow disciplines, or seduced by it; who engaged and entertained, who were not shy in speaking their mind.  They read far and wide.  They reveled in communicating with princes and presidents, with writers.  Our age does not reward wide reading or memorization, but on glib, infuriating or optimistic soundbites that conceal, rather than reveal, our current plight.  Our academics are specialized and Balkanized, relying on the paycheck of demanding institutions, lacking the time to contribute to the needs of the public.  And they do not develop the skill to speak on Fox News.    

I will miss both witers, and hope that other intellectuals may rise to take their place in the public and in politics. 

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Is this the Church’s Moment?

Christopher Hedges recently gave a speech challenging churches, in particular Trinity Church, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street.  When Christopher Hedges boldly proclaims this is the church’s moment, my ears perk up.    Christopher Hedges knows religion, he knows church, and he’s philosophically sophisticated.  And I’m sympathetic, but as someone in the religion business, here are some instructions about how to reach out to church leaders and congregations.

Most pastors are an open-minded, well-read, sympathetic bunch.  And like everyone else they have their anxieties.

But of you want to engage or make demands upon churches, learn who they are.

It’s not hard.  Call the church and make an appointment.  Don’t make demands or ask for a favor.  Just to learn about the priest and the challenges of running a modern church.

In a busy church you may instead talk to a curate or a priest for community formation.  Get to know them also, though they might not be in charge.

Meet the sexton, the person who cares for the building.  Also meet the lay leader who has some authority in the church.

Why? Those people get work done.  Church people are hard workers.  They gather in order to solve problems.  They want to help.   They’re doing a lot of the unsexy serving that happens on a regular basis.   Over the last 40 years, they’ve done lots of work that has been ignored by the media.

In bigger churches, it will be easier if you are an “institutional representative.”  If you’re not intending on joining the parish, it’s easier to get some time if you have connections with other people.  That’s what “institutional representation” is:  a way of verifying you’re not just some random person who wants time, but someone who has relationships and represents what others believe.   Clergy sometimes are very available, but in busy parishes, like corporations, they allocate their time and have gatekeepers.

Our culture has become so radically balkanized between church people (who feel besieged) and the non-religious (who are perplexed).   Churches have been burned by social justice groups.  And social justice groups seem to find most churches ideologically suspect.

I can affirm that when I visited Occupy Wall Street, I was met with unexpecedly friendly and supportive faces.  I’mused to people fleeing when I’m in my collar, as the world puts me in an unsavory category.   Here, instead, they sought my blessing.     And I, instead, felt myself blessed.

However, our institutions have resisted, by and large, commodification.  Although we are imperfect, we’ve been negotiating the public-private debate for decades.   We’re private organizations who exist for the public.   This makes us responsible in a way that our government is not.

And we may get things wrong.  But I’m sure, in the case of Trinity Wall Street, that Dr. Cooper has a lot on his plate.   He has many voices he needs to consider, and his sympathies are most likely pulled in multiple directions.  I would argue that it is not his role to take sides, but to maintain connections.    And for this reason, it is crucial that an institutional representative of Occupy Wall Street sit down with any clergy for the sole reason to help every priest discern what is actually going on.

Because occupying property owned by Trinity Church isn’t actually occupying Wall Street.  That would mean trying to enter the buildings that house the institutions of power.  Trinity might actually be able to help the occupiers, but offering space might be the least effective way it can help.  But we don’t know.

Any movement, whether Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party, that does not lay a foundation by getting to know the players in other institutions such as the church, may find itself disappointed in the church’s reaction.  This is not because we aren’t sympathetic:  but we seek to fulfill our obligations also to all sorts of conditions, including those who are not part of whatever movement is around us.  Our reticence is not disapproval.  And our hesitation should not be interpreted as cowardice.

When I was asked in my class about how I felt about Occupy Wall Street, I hemmed and hawed.  I said I was sympathetic:  the social contract had been undermined over the last forty years; those who’d been most responsible had not been brought to justice; and our system seemed devoid of character and virtue.

But over the last few weeks, it has simply been: I don’t always know what is going on.   I’m sometimes skeptical of authority, while appreciative of its effectiveness.  I think it is an emerging movement rather than a focused one.  I’m baffled by those taking it to the university (why there?) or the ports.  But I’m attracted to its energy.  It’s intriguing how social media has transformed the national dialogue about wealth.   I hope it will invite a better discussion of how our nation builds wealth, and the complexities of class.  But as a priest, I still exist in the world of face-to-face relationships and am instinctively wary of ideological posturing or movement politics.

Chris Hedges is surely right to ask churches where they stand.  We must be more open about talking about our economic condition, the roots of our current malaise, and clear about the system’s shortcomings.

But churches do not properly engage movements.  They engage individuals.  When there is danger, of course the church must offer shelter.  But sustained engagement, one that offers the hospitality of the church, requires first that people in the movement and in the church do the necessary work of listening and learning about one another.  It is through these relationships we can build the bonds that can sustain us as we critique our disastrous system.  Occupy Wall Street will only strengthen if it builds relationships with other institutions, or else the movement will fizzle.

This is hard work.   We are in a culture that values immediacy and quick answers.  To ask OWS and churches to sit down first and learn about each other seems like a waste of time.  I suggest that this view of “time” suggests that capital itself controls the game, commodifying the work it takes to strengthen the bonds of trust that can build alternative organizations.  It is when we first sit down, without demands, to listen to each other that we can understand what is actually going on; and from there, what work needs to be done.

And that work is the challenge.

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A Search: Of Catholicity, Google Auto-Complete, and the Episcopal Church

A Search: Of Catholicity, Google Auto-Complete, and the Episcopal Church.  Fr. Hendrickson’s post gathers some wisdom from a modern technological practice.

 

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A Response to Amanda Marcotte on religion’s death throes

Amanda Marcotte got the memo.  Religion in America is dying, and the religion of bigotry is finding it hard to maintain its followership.

We liberal protestants have known institutional decline for about forty years.  Since Sgt. Pepper’s and Vietnam, our communities have slowly been devastated by all sorts of economic and social forces.

But it’s not the old order.  The old order she refers to is young.  It arose in reaction to liberal Protestantism’s social victories, especially around race.  Once, fundamentalism was considered by the elites a backwater worldview held by hicks and southerners.  Its theology was historically condemned by the church Catholic.  But after race was confronted institutionally in private schools by the federal goverment, Ralph Reed and his associates organized conservative churches into their current political force as a cohesive wing in the Republican Party.  Like Amanda, I look forward to its self-destruction.

Overall, however, I’m not as sanguine about what a godless country means.    For the American religion has also been diverse, sometimes thinly held, and pragmatic.  In particular, I’m thankful for liberal Protestantism, once a powerful part of American politics.

For at the Ohio Wesleyan Conference in March, 1942,  the Federal Council of Churches created the moral framework for the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, decolonization, and civil rights.   It’s leaders included industrialists, policy makers and heads of churches.  In England, the Malvern Conference gave the spiritual support for the modern British welfare state.  It is no coincidence that the most important successes of liberalism came with the support of powerful religious institutions.

Yes, I know.  Religion’s horrible.  Remind me, again, about the children’s crusade; the religious wars and the inquisition, Galileo’s excommunication, and the Scopes trial.    But I’ve yet to read a serious scholar who argued they weren’t also about resources, personality and urbanization.

Yet while the power of religious institutions has declined, citizenship has not improved.   The country pays lip service to Martin Luther King, but the plutocrats read Ayn Rand.  The elites themselves have been delivered from even paying lip service to Christian virtue, jettisoning the justice of any kind of restraint.    While the patriarchy has diminished, evolutionary psychology is now the faith of young men.   While liberal religion is mocked, it has been replaced with a much more powerful faith in tax-cuts.   And believing in tax-cuts is just that:  a faith, a faith that is more powerful than the burdens of Christian conviction.

I’m skeptical that this is improvement.

The collapse of religious institutions will not necessarily mean enlightenment or justice.  Instead we may be rewarded with competitive cynical technocrats, shielded by a cool irreverence, disinterested in any sort of ideals save the power of the market or the military.  I’m skeptical that we should be cheery about the Brave New World that may replace it.

We remain creatures who need hope, meaning and a just imagination to limit the power of those who consider the restraint of religion arduous.   Religion provided that language, however insufficiently its institutions followed its own rules.  The dismantlement of the sacred and reverence may merely mean more people who worship consumer culture.

Surely, the end of ignorance means the capitulation of some traditional religious teaching.  Let those particular traditions whither on the vine.   But it will not mean that superstition and illogic has been defeated.  Nor will what comes next be an explosion of peace, charity, or wisdom.   Those will remain rare, the narrow road, the eye of the needle.  Fortunately, we need only a mustard seed’s worth for the world to keep moving, for redemption to remain on the horizon.

I trust that the churches may still, in perhaps a much more modest form, cultivate apostles who can speak truthfully, be charitable to their opponents, be open to conflict, and willing to change their mind when proven wrong.    Perhaps we can dispense with ideology, and return to seeking what wisdom remains in our precarious, broken, and imperfect world.

Gawain de Leeuw2 Comments