By: John Daniel Davidson, 10/17/17
Nearly 50 years ago in a broadcast on
German radio,
then-theology professor Fr. Joseph Ratzinger spoke in stark terms about the
Catholic Church’s future. He suggested—prophetically, it turned out—that the
Church would shrink:
From the
crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much.
She will become small and will have to start afresh
more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of
the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents
diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an
earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by
free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the
initiative of her individual members.
He would return to this theme again and
again down the years, before and after he became Pope Benedict XVI. The thrust
of his thought is that the modern Church is artificially large. The decline of
the faithful over the past half-century has left behind a skeletal
infrastructure without flesh and blood to animate it. Therefore, we should
expect to see Catholic schools and parishes, even cathedrals and basilicas,
close. We should expect fewer ordained priests and fewer parishioners. This
shrinking will be painful but also invigorating: those who remain in the Church
will be Christians who are fervently seeking the face of God, and from the
ruins of what was an inflated Church, a genuine faith will reassert itself and
bring new life to a dying world.
In America, the number of Christians
relative to the general population has been shrinking for many years, mirroring
a much more advanced state of decline in Europe, where it’s fair to say that
Christianity is not only waning but dying out. If Christianity’s cultural
dominance is at an end, what are the faithful supposed to think about this
epochal change? How are they supposed to respond? To borrow the title of
Francis Schaeffer’s 1976 documentary about the decline of Western thought and
culture, how should we then live?
Communities of Faith
A quartet of recent books tackles this
relatively old question with fresh urgency. The most talked-about of them is
perhaps Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option,
structured as a kind of tour of contemporary Christian communities that have
taken seriously Saint Benedict’s call to live apart from the world, according
to a rule. A senior editor and frequent blogger for the American Conservative, Dreher visits monastic and lay
communities alike, beginning with the Monastery of St. Benedict in Norcia,
Italy, where 15 monks and their prior have lived since 2000, when a handful of
Benedictines reopened the 10th-century monastery after 200 years of disuse.
(It’s now being rebuilt after a devastating 2016 earthquake.) The monks provide
Dreher with a convenient jump-off point: they are the living, breathing exemplars
of his thesis, that “the forces of dissolution from popular culture are too
great for individuals or families to resist on their own. We need to embed
ourselves in stable communities of faith.” Dreher isn’t exactly calling for
Christians to flee the world and shelter in monasteries en masse, but he argues it’s time for Christians to
consider honestly what going along to get along really means in a wholly
secular society—and what the alternatives might look like.
He takes as self-evident that Christians
have lost the culture wars in America. “Rather than wasting energy and
resources fighting unwinnable political battles,” he argues, “we should instead
work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can
outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.” Dreher is optimistic
about the future, dreary though it might seem right now. The church has
survived much worse than the trials it faces today, and it has always emerged
from seasons of winnowing and pruning even more fruitful and vibrant than
before.
It is not guaranteed, however, that the
church in the West will survive. Dreher’s
aim is to give Western Christians an idea of how to incorporate Benedict’s rule
into their churches and families and communities—and he offers specifics. To
begin, he argues that churches, especially evangelical churches, must adopt
liturgical forms of worship. Liturgies are an antidote to the scourge of
individualism and emotionalism that afflicts so many American
congregations—evangelical and Catholic alike—because liturgy combines
corporeality with transcendence, and inculcates Christian tradition and
teaching in ways that contemporary worship services cannot.
Pull your children out of public
schools—and don’t fool yourself that Christian schools are much different. Find
or establish a classical Christian school, and if you can’t do that, then
homeschool your kids. Run your home like a monastery, with fixed times for
family prayer each day. Immerse your family in the history of Western
civilization and the study of Scripture. And so on.
Dreher’s exhortations encompass even
the sort of living arrangements Christians should consider. He visits a lay
Catholic community on Italy’s Adriatic coast that began as an informal group of
young Catholic men who stuck together after college. It now numbers about 200
members and administers a community school, three different charitable
cooperatives, and maintains a close connection to the Benedictine monastery in
Norcia. He stops short of arguing that all Christians must up and join
a commune.
As the book unfolds, it becomes clear
that the “Benedict Option” is an artful piece of legerdemain; it’s really just
shorthand for living a radical form of
the Christian faith—“relearning the lost art of community,” as Dreher puts it.
He maintains, with good reason, that for the church in the West to survive and
preserve her traditions, Christians will need to incorporate every aspect of
their lives into their faith. But of course Christians are supposed to live
like this anyway, so his branding of “the Benedict Option”
can be irritating; as more than one reviewer has noted, it seems neither
Benedictine nor optional. One suspects, however, that Dreher means only to grab
the attention of distracted Christians and point them in the direction they
should already be heading.
A Culture of Truth
That’s the purpose, too, of Anthony
Esolen’s slim volume, Out of the Ashes. A
fellow now at Thomas More College (after being shamefully hounded out of
Providence College in the spring for blaspheming against the campus “diversity”
gods), Esolen writes in a biting, somewhat antiquated prose that is at first
arresting for the contemporary reader. But he has just as many specifics in
mind as Dreher, although they are at once more expansive and more ordinary—yet
no less radical. Anyone familiar with Esolen’s prolific writings on Christian
life and culture knows that he pulls no punches, and this book is no exception.
He begins with a candid, self-conscious admission: “In this book I shall
indulge myself in one of civilized man’s most cherished privileges. I shall
decry the decay of civilization.”
But Esolen isn’t joking around. He is
alarmed, and will cause his readers to be alarmed, not only at the decay of
Christian culture but the decline and disappearance of community. We are
turning in on ourselves, he argues, and the things that once bound us
together—family, yes, but also local clubs and associations of all kinds—are
simply disappearing. Insipid, often wicked entertainments and pleasures are
replacing them, and enslaving us in turn. We have arrived at this impasse,
writes Esolen, because we have been telling ourselves massive lies—lies about
what it means to be a man or a woman, lies about what families are, and
especially lies about who God is and what he desires for us. We have to “clear
our minds of cant,” he writes, in order to recover our civilization and live as
we were meant. This is no easy task. “It is almost impossible in the modern
world not to accept lies as a matter of
course” (emphasis in the original).
Esolen means to reveal the deep
deceptions of modern life and walk us slowly back to reality. The reading can
be uncomfortable at times, because he is asking us to reconsider not just how
we worship and how we educate our children, but also how we think about nearly
everything we do, day in and day out. His refreshing answer to the deluge of
lies is to immerse ourselves in things—the physical
reality of the created world:
Things, in their beautiful and imposing integrity, do not
easily bend to lies. A bull is a bull and not a cow. Grass is food for cattle
but not for man. A warbler is alive but a rock is not. The three-hundred pound
stone will not move for a little child or a boy or a feminist professor. Water
expands when it freezes and will break anything unless you allow for that.
Things are what they are. They know no slogans, and they do not lie.
And they give
witness to the Glory of God.
Much of our predicament, he argues,
comes from a deep, self-imposed alienation from the world of created things,
from the glory of nature and the deep truth it conveys. “I have asked my
freshman honors students at college where in the sky the sun will be, in the
middle of the afternoon in September, here in Rhode Island. They don’t know,”
he writes. “They are strangers to the world, but they certainly are not strangers to the lies and folly that are the stock in
trade…of mass entertainment, mass education, and mass politics.”
To restore our culture, we must create
(or recreate) lives and communities based on the truth. That means not only
restoring a correct understanding of manhood and womanhood, but restoring a
correct relationship to work, perhaps teaching our children a trade. It means
bringing things like hospitality and unsupervised play back to life. Esolen
follows a kind of ruthless logic:
Because
children should be able to play freely outdoors and for hours on end, there
should be neighborhoods for them to play in. Because there should be
neighborhoods, there should be in these locales the natural though informal monitors
of the neighborhoods: elderly people on their porches, many mothers, and men
and women at work in family businesses nearby. Because there should be such
neighborhoods filled with people, our social policies should favor them and
support them, and our cultural expectations likewise. Therefore we should not
subordinate the family to work; the double income family should not be the
norm; we should reconsider all things that tend to remove father and then also
mother from the place where they live.
Where Esolen’s diagnosis loses me is
when he comes to consider how to build a society around these sorts of dictums.
What sort of community does he envision? Where are the majorities that would
adopt such policies? It seems clear from his conclusion that he does not
foresee the wholesale restoration of American culture, or even that such a
restoration is possible. Like Dreher, Esolen sees instead insular outposts of
Christians—practicing a peculiarly vibrant Christianity, to be sure—beset by a
sick and dying mainstream culture. It is a vision of Christians as a
beleaguered minority, somewhat walled off from the wider world, attempting to
resurrect a specific way of life that, in the end, sounds an awful lot like
life on an American farm in the late 19th century. One gets the sense Esolen is
fine with that.
For Richer or Poorer
If Dreher and Esolen see scattered
Christian communities restoring and preserving civilization amid a hostile,
aggressively secular order, R.R. Reno sees the inevitable collapse of that order,
which he argues is much weaker than it appears. Reno, the editor of First Things magazine and a theologian by training,
lays out a program for restoring American culture by exposing the tyranny and
deception at the heart of the secular regime. His book, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, which derives
its title from T.S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society,
is organized by imperatives: defend the weak, raise up the poor, promote
solidarity, limit government, and so on.
Reno is especially concerned with a
“hyper-individualistic” American society. But his approach is slightly
different than that of Dreher and Esolen. Drawing heavily on the work of social
scientists like Robert Putnam and Charles Murray, Reno argues that American
individualism has distorted our sense of what freedom is, to the point that our
notions of freedom harm the poor and the weak while serving the interests of
the rich and powerful. Treating these societal ills means pushing back against
our ingrained notions of freedom and the American dream. “Taken in isolation,”
writes Reno, “the American dream produces the conditions for ever larger
government, more coercive laws, and a culture of denunciation and censure that
limits freedom, though always for the sake of a supposedly greater freedom.”
Only freedom properly understood, he says, can serve as a check against the
tyranny of government and the systematic exploitation of the poor by the rich.
Indeed, he is singularly concerned with
the plight of the poor because he sees their predicament as the direct result
of a half-century of policies and changing cultural mores that favor the rich
and well-educated while leaving everyone else behind. Murray’s argument in his
2012 book, Coming Apart, is that
well-educated Americans live more or less the way most Americans did 50 years
ago. They marry, attend church, and are involved in a host of mediating
institutions that bolster their communities. Less-educated Americans, by
contrast, are isolated. Few of them attend church, belong to civic
organizations, or interact with any organized group besides the government. For
them, social maladies like divorce, single parenthood, and drug addiction are
the new normal.
Reno deploys Murray’s argument to
advance a more nuanced thesis. Whereas Murray styles this phenomena as a
passive “coming apart,” Reno sees an active war against the weak by the strong.
The point of this war might not be to despoil the poor, but that is the effect.
The goal of the upper class, Reno writes, is to impose a culture of
“nonjudgmentalism” that allows the rich and well-educated to do as they please,
freed from all the old strictures to decide what is right for them, consequences be damned—even if that means the
ruination of those less fortunate.
Nonjudgmentalism, Reno argues, works for
the well-to-do because they have the discipline and knowledge to navigate a
world in which there are no rules. In a particularly fascinating passage, he
cites a book written by British anthropologist Mary Douglas in the late 1960s that
explains this phenomenon. Douglas studied two systems of authority and social
control, the “positional control system” typical of the working classes, and
the “personal code system” typical of the upper class. In a positional or
“restricted” code system, “social roles are assigned to one’s social position
rather than negotiated,” explains Reno. “So that if my position is that of a
father, I must abide by a ‘restricted code’—that is, I must behave as a father
is expected to behave.” That stands in stark contrast to the personal code,
which gives no set answers or guidelines for social behavior.
The result of the dominance of the
personal code of social control is the reigning nonjudgmentalism we see today,
which values reasons over rules and, Reno maintains, necessarily favors the
rich over the poor.
In her study, Douglas cites one example
of the deleterious effects of the personal code being imposed upon the working
class, when English Catholic bishops in the 1960s lifted the requirement to
abstain from meat on Fridays in favor of a personal discipline each Catholic
would chose for himself. That robbed working-class Irish Catholics of “an
important identity marker,” writes Reno, one that reinforced “their sense of
cultural integrity in a historically inhospitable Protestant society. The
progressive elites of the church, seeking a more ‘modern’ and ‘intentional’
form of Catholicism, heedlessly undermined the system of social control that
suited working-class Catholics and gave their lives dignity.”
In essence, this is precisely what has
been playing out in American society over the past 50 years, at nearly every
level, and it relates directly to Reno’s overall indictment of our misguided
sense of freedom. Whose freedom, he asks, does the sexual revolution serve? Or
the therapeutic culture that undermines strong convictions—what Pope Benedict
XVI called “the dictatorship of relativism”? Certainly not the weak and
powerless. In a modern American culture where the only real bulwarks against
government power are family and church, those most vulnerable to oppression are
those without families, without church.
The silver lining in Reno’s thesis is
that he sees the writing on the wall for the ruling class, by which he means
the “reconstitution of elite WASP culture as post-Protestant and ethnically
diverse but intellectually homogenous,” a development he calls “the most
important change in American society of the past half-century.” This elite
class, powerful and culturally dominant though it might be, is in fact fatally
weak. Its downfall will be a consequence of the ruin it has brought to the rest
of the country. We can already see this emerging, as the pathologies that once
belonged to the inner city now spread among the middle class in suburban and
rural areas. “At some point,” Reno suggests, “people will notice what the
post-Protestant WASPs have done.” And when they do, Christians will be
ready—not to become the next establishment, but to exert influence on it,
“turning it in directions that promote wellbeing for everyone,” not just the
well off.
Reno’s book is a departure from both
Dreher’s and Esolen’s, because he’s more concerned with illuminating the ruling
class’s ideology and exposing its injustices than with giving Christians ideas
and inspiration about how to revive their faith. And yet his focus is
complementary to theirs. When the establishment collapses, as Reno believes it
inevitably will, countercultural Christians—the “Benedict Option” set—will need
to be ready to influence and guide the next establishment. Those in power “may
not become Christians,” he acknowledges, “but they might find themselves newly
grateful for a renewal of Christian influence on society.”
Living as Aliens
The power of that influence should give
Christians hope. Charles Chaput, the archbishop of Philadelphia, makes a strong
case for hope in Strangers in a Strange Land.
Chaput is a rarity among American prelates: a leader who takes seriously the
doctrines of his faith and how Christians should live them out in a dizzying
postmodern world. His book is more pastoral in tone and purpose than these
others, but it is no less unsparing in its diagnosis of our time. As he
explains, the principles of the American Founding, which are harmonious with
the tenets of the Church, have been discarded. “We’re passing through a
religious revolution in America,” he warns.
For many
generations a common Christian culture transcended our partisan struggles. It
gave us a shared framework of behavior and belief. Now another vision for our
nation’s future has emerged. It sees no need for Christianity. And in many
cases it views our faith as an obstacle to its ambitions.
Like the other authors, Chaput sees in
this revolution a chance for the Church to rediscover its calling and revive
the culture around it, and Christianity’s rich history should be its guide in
this effort. One of Chaput’s chapters is devoted to the Letter to Diognetus, a 2nd-century apologia in which its
anonymous author defends Christianity. This was a time when paganism was dominant
and most Romans viewed adherents of the new sect as dangerous, disloyal
cultists, who did not accept the gods and the system of public piety that every
other Roman practiced.
The letter’s description of Christians
would have been startling to the Romans. Followers of Christ, the author
writes, live in their own countries,
but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure
everything as foreigners…. They marry, like everyone else, and they beget
children, but they do not cast off their offspring. They share their board with
one another, but not their marriage bed…. They busy themselves on earth, but
their citizenship is in heaven.
Chaput notes that these early
Christians, who lived in a time of sporadic persecution at the hands of the
Roman government, “didn’t build fortress enclaves” or “manufacture their own
culture or invent their own language.” Rather, they transformed Roman culture and
appropriated elements of it to their own uses, emboldened by a radically
different understanding of their place in the world than the pagans among whom
they lived.
Chaput’s point is that Christians today
must resist the temptation to retreat from the world because the world is after
all in great need of them: “If we want to follow Jesus, we must love the world
too and remain in it, as he did, to work for its salvation.” In a passage
quoting a column by Dreher that calls for “intentional separation from the
mainstream,” Chaput cautions that Christians cannot “give up on the good still
present in American society,” while also working to preserve Christian
community and, as Esolen exhorts, rebuild American culture. To do that,
Christians today must rediscover the spirit of the early church, which based
its claims on nothing but the fact of the Resurrection.
In the second century, Chaput says,
Christians had no great cultural achievements, no power, and scarcely any
history. Yet the author of the Letter to Diognetus likened
Christians to the soul and the world to the body: “The soul is shut up in the
body, and yet itself holds the body together; while Christians are restrained
in the world as in a prison, and yet themselves hold the world together.” These
early believers could write like this because they knew what they were about.
As Chaput notes, “The only thing that could validate such a statement was this:
Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. If the Resurrection happened, then that
fact changes everything.”
Light in the Darkness
These four authors take different
approaches to the same theme—the aggressive secularization of mainstream
society and its implications for the church—but they all arrive at a similar
conclusion: a renewed church will see society safely through the dark times
ahead, so Christians must begin renewing the church now. If there is anything
wanting in these volumes, it is perhaps a more complete discussion of what all
of this might cost individual Christians. The authors do talk about the
sacrifices attendant to something like the Benedict Option—but not in detail
about the possible future of persecution.
Dreher hints at this theme in a chapter
titled, “Preparing for Hard Labor.” Christians, he argues, need to reconsider
the role of work in their lives, not just because it has taken on an outsized
role in modern life, but because Christians are not going to be left alone by
the progressives that dominate our economy: “We may not (yet) be at the point
where Christians are forbidden to buy and sell in general without state
approval, but we are on the brink of entire areas of commercial and
professional life being off-limits to believers whose consciences will not
allow them to burn incense to the gods of our age.” It’s easy to think of recent
examples pulled from the headlines—Christian bakers, florists, and wedding
planners who decline to participate in same-sex weddings, foster parents who
refuse to affirm the ideology of transgenderism at the behest of state
agencies, employers who won’t provide contraceptives to their employees. The
list of mandates, large and small, will surely grow longer as our progressive
scheme of government persists.
Dreher does not say so explicitly, but
it might be that Christians will have to reconcile themselves to a kind of
second-class status that they have never really known in America. That means,
to put it bluntly, preparing for relative deprivation and hardship. As these
books make clear—and anyone with eyes to see already knows—the long peace that
has persisted in the West between church and state is at an end. This will come
as a shock to Christians who assumed their cultural dominance was permanent.
Chaput, in his pastoral way, alludes to this.
He writes about three different kinds of
mourning that are unique to Christians: grief for our own sins, the grief we
feel living in a world full of sorrows and suffering, and a third kind, which
is measured in the cost of discipleship: the
sorrow of those who accept the cross of Jesus Christ in this life, die to the
world, and prefer the joys of God to worldly offerings. This kind of mourning
comes from those who hurt because of their commitment to Jesus. Being disciples
makes their lives harder. Maybe it’s enduring ridicule from doctors because
they’re not on the birth control pill and they’ve had a fourth kid. Maybe their
tithing means they can’t take a vacation they hoped for. Or maybe it’s taking a
pay cut because working more would take them away from their family. Or
maybe it’s something even worse. Maybe it’s losing your job. Maybe it’s having
your business seized by the state. Maybe it’s going to prison because you
refuse to obey laws that violate your Christian faith. Such things have
happened before. What makes us think they will not happen again, here in
America?
Pope Benedict XVI was right: it is time
now to reconcile ourselves to a smaller, more faithful Church. For serious
Christians—will there be any other kind before long?—that will mean integrating
their faith so thoroughly into their lives that they risk being labeled a
“zealot” or a “fundamentalist” by erstwhile friends and colleagues, and perhaps
labeled something worse by the government. It will mean becoming rather strange
in the eyes of the world. Benedict said as much in that radio address nearly 50
years ago, when he warned that the Church “will lose many of her social
privileges” and “make much bigger demands” on believers. But he closed with
these words of hope:
The real
crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I
am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the
political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. It may well no
longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently;
but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will
find life and hope beyond death.”
The authors of these volumes do not say
so in such plain terms, but their arguments in effect echo Benedict: the
hardship to come is more than a necessity, it is a blessing.
Comments
50 years ago was 1967.
The war against Christianity was embraced in Europe, because they endured World
War I and World War II and they were toast. The war against Christianity
started in the US in 1947 with the “separation of church and state” scam and
got worse. By 1967 the unraveling of the US was predictable.
I agree with Pope
Benedict's observation, but I believe we should try to shrink the governments
that have attempted to replace God, because it has failed. See my blog posts
dealing with Church Decline and American's Christian History at
ntlconsulting.blogspot.com.
I have always agreed
with Bishop Chaput, Archbishop of Philadelphia and I have routinely disagreed
with his fellow American Bishops because they are political liberals.
I always liked Pope John
Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI and I am currently on strike against Pope
Francis. If the church is meant to survive, it will have to live in the world
and join the Trump Agenda.
I don’t agree with
Dreher or Esolen or any of the others. They are still working on the society or
the culture, or reinventing Plato’s Republic, when all we really have is
ourselves and our God.
Instead I would look to
teaching others how to develop a personal relationship with the Lord as the
first priority. I believe that this needs to be done by living actively in the
world to be God’s hands and feet. We need to serve our families first and those
God sends us to help. This is the one-on-one stuff Mother Theresa experienced
as she cared for the dying in Calcutta.
This doesn’t require a
church, or clergy, or philosophers. It just requires that we be mindful of God every
day and that we try to figure out what He wants us to do. We are fully equipped
to use our feelings to know when we are doing ok and when we are not. The feelings we need to be looking for are
gratefulness and inner-peace.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA
Tea Party Leader
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