Category: Christianity and the West

Reading the Results

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

Rod Dreher has a Roman Catholic friend who says, “There is nothing more depressing than people who say ‘things are great, couldn’t be better,’ when it’s so obvious that the opposite is true.” In that spirit and for the edification of non-Protestant Western Christians who hang around Old Life, I run down some of the pertinent reflections on Ireland’s approval of same-sex marriage.

Tim Stanley thinks (thanks to our southern correspondent) the church needs to reform herself — especially Irish Roman Catholicism — before tackling the world (maybe even the world’s climate):

And yet there certainly is confusion and muddle – and that’s the second, perhaps bigger thing that Catholics ought to worry about. The mission of Catholicism itself is obviously in need of renewal. Otherwise the Church wouldn’t have lost that referendum.

When I wrote that Ireland had rejected Catholicism, I got a lot of angry replies. Half said, “Good!” (which proved my point). The other half said, “But I’m Catholic and I voted for gay marriage.” This poses an interesting question. Is someone who calls themselves a Catholic yet who publicly rejects Catholic teaching still a Catholic? It’s not just lay Irish who were doing this but priests, too. And across the Western world there are clerics who are actively working to shift Church teaching in a new direction. One liberal Catholic wrote a strong rebuff of my piece for Time Magazine from which I infer the view that Catholicism is something more than just its doctrines – that 4 + 4 can equal 5 under certain special circumstances. What are the roots of this contrarian religious stance?

Ireland offers an interesting answer. There are two stories of the Irish Church. One is the powerful institution that became unhealthily entwined with the state – a state dominated by a single party that used populism, nationalism and corruption to stay in power. It was a Catholic consensus that was conservative in the worst sense: authoritarian, entrenched, out of touch with the real needs. Covering up paedophile abuse was the sickest manifestation of its fascism.

But the other story of the Church in Ireland is of an institution that disregarded a great deal of its teachings and majesty to lurch towards progressivism. A man raised in the Irish Church explained to me that congregants had been told since birth that Catholicism is all about equality, socialism, community, inclusiveness, family. Its liturgical style is represented in exaggerated form by the famous singing priest who broke with the formal Mass to give his rendition of a Leonard Cohen song at a wedding. This is the Church of motherhood: the Church that gives and gives and gives without asking anything of its congregants. It doesn’t really treat them as mature souls who can be spoken to honestly about the facts. It is a faith almost stripped of the less cosy aspects of its teachings.

Michael Sean Winters follows Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s line about the referendum functioning as a reality check and describes what that check should involve:

What does a reality check look like? The first thing the hierarchy – in Ireland and in the United States – should do is have some long listening sessions with young people. Ask them why they support same sex marriage. They are not trying to destroy Western civilization. Most of them are not gay or lesbian themselves. To them, society must be first and foremost about mutual respect and religion should learn to be more tolerant. They are not wrong to think that. It is good Catholic theology. Bishops and pastors and lay leaders should ask them how they seek to follow the Lord Jesus in their romantic and sexual lives. Do they keep religion and sex separate? Do they think God has something to say about the subject? Before preaching to the next generation of Catholics, Church leaders are well advised to listen to them first, and not just to the choir a la Mrs. Clinton, but a real listening session with people who are not hand-picked for their docility.

The second thing the leaders of the Church must do is stop using phrases like “intrinsically disordered” which have been a disaster pastorally and misunderstood theologically. They should have the courage to admit in public what many will admit in private, that the Church’s theology on homosexuality is woefully inadequate. They must stop acting as if knowing this one discrete fact about a person, the fact that he or she is gay, is enough to form a judgment about the whole person. We don’t think our society is justified in sentencing Dzohkar Tsarnaev to death on account of his one, truly terrible act; We should not justify societal exclusion based on one characteristic. The Church at Her best never ceases proclaiming the integrity and dignity of the human person, the whole human person, no matter their choices and their preferences, still less something over which they have no choice whatsoever.

Frank Bruni at the New York Times connects the dots between Ireland and the rest of the Roman Catholic West:

Take a look at this list of countries: Belgium, Canada, Spain, Argentina, Portugal, Brazil, France, Uruguay, Luxembourg and Ireland. Name two things that they have in common.

They don’t share a continent, obviously. Or a language.

But in all of them, the Roman Catholic Church has more adherents, at least nominally, than any other religious denomination does.

And all of them belong to the vanguard of 20 nations that have decided to make same-sex marriage legal.

In fact, countries with a Catholic majority or plurality make up half of those where two men or two women can now wed or will soon be able to.

Ireland, obviously, is the freshest addition to the list. It’s also, in some ways, the most remarkable one. It’s the first country to approve same-sex marriage by a popular referendum. The margin wasn’t even close. About 62 percent of voters embraced marriage equality.

And they did so despite a past of great fealty to the Catholic Church’s official teachings on, for example, contraception, which was outlawed in Ireland until 1980, and abortion, which remains illegal in most circumstances.

Irish voters nonetheless rejected the church’s formal opposition to same-sex marriage. This act of defiance was described, accurately, as an illustration of church leaders’ loosening grip on the country.

Finally, the folks at Commonweal explain gay-friendly Roman Catholicism in the wake of Ireland’s referendum and the recent Pew report:

So what other answers might there be to the question of why American Catholics are so supportive? I have three suggestions and I hope that readers will add more. First, perhaps the fact that Catholics have a celibate clergy that includes a large number of gay men means that the fear bred from ignorance is less likely to be operative than in other traditions. Second, could it be that a natural law approach to ethical questions, that is, that reason should guide our thinking and our conclusions, is bred into the Catholic bone? Third, might Catholics be so imbued with the sacramental principle that they recognize any expression of genuine love to be evidence of God’s presence in the world, and hence to be cherished rather than condemned? In Ireland or here or elsewhere, the actual principal difference between leaders and people, on same-sex issues or birth control or religious freedom or perhaps many other issues, is that the leadership thinks deductively while the rank and file think inductively. Experience trumps ideology, which—strangely enough—is Pope Francis’s consistent message!

Meanwhile, the one with the power to interpret has not spoken, as Stanley notes, “Pope Francis remained silent on the Irish vote during his Pentecost Sunday address.” Bryan and the Jasons are in good company. Perhaps Pope Francis’ silence owes to his residence in Vatican City which is encircled by Italy:

Many people were taken aback this week when Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, called Ireland’s referendum to allow gay marriage “not only a defeat for Christian principles, but also somewhat a defeat for humanity.”­ The reason for the surprise is because the 60-year-old cardinal has been portrayed as being more open-minded than the stereotypical Vatican bureaucrat or the average Church conservative.

“I was deeply saddened by the result,” Cardinal Parolin told the press. “Certainly, as the Archbishop of Dublin said, the Church needs to do a reality check, but in my opinion it must do so in the sense that it has to actually strengthen its entire commitment (to marriage) and also make an effort to evangelize our culture,” he said.

The cardinal’s comments turned the heads of those that believed (perhaps a bit too naively) that Pope Francis had led the Church to adopt a more conciliatory tone in dealing with the so-called culture wars. But it is precisely culture—and Italian culture in particular—that is the key to understanding Cardinal Parolin’s strong reaction.

Italy has remained the most conservative country in all of Europe when it comes to social conventions and customs. At least up to now. It does not allow stem-cell research and has some of the most restrictive legislation concerning other bioethical issues. It does not even recognize so-called “living wills” that allow individuals to refuse life support in cases when they are left comatose.

No It's Not

Published on by D. G. Hart788 Comments

Evangelicalism’s greatest problem is its beliefs. So thinks Jake Meador:

Evangelicalism’s biggest problem with regards to those outside evangelicalism isn’t our image, it’s our beliefs. That’s why Louie Giglio was uninvited from President Obama’s second inaugural. That’s why there was a mass freakout about Chick-fil-a despite the fact that even gay rights activists admitted that the leadership at Chick-fil-a was consistently kind and gracious to them. That’s why laws so modest and restrained as the Indiana RFRA illicit such outrage and why the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby ruling met a similar reaction last year. The groups being attacked in these cases are not Fred Phelps clones or even Pat Robertson clones. They are simply ordinary evangelical believers trying to live out their faith.

If the issue actually was that most cultural elites outside of the church simply didn’t understand what we actually believed and had all sorts of wrong ideas from seeing one too many stories about Fred Phelps, then maybe a rebranding campaign could “work” in the way that marketing campaigns work. Trying to convince everyone outside the church that we’re cool and “get it” and care about all the things Portlandia hipsters care about would get us somewhere. I’m not sure it’s a place worth going, mind, but it’d be something.

But the events of the past five years, or at least the past three years, should make it abundantly clear that ours is not a credibility problem. The issues are much greater than that. As Rod Dreher noted several months ago (and David Sessions made much the same point here), what we’re actually talking about are two societies that have beliefs about the basic nature of reality that are fundamentally antagonistic to one another. Note that they aren’t simply fundamentally different, but antagonistic. Set next to a difference of that nature, the attempts at finding superficial similarities look rather silly–which is precisely what they are.

Consider this if you want to make a big deal of Christian belief. Once upon a time the Christian world divided with important cultural implications when the Western Church added filioque to the Nicene Creed. Or remember the 16th century when beliefs really did matter to the differences between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and the societies that underwrote them. Or remember too a more recent past when differences of beliefs made even liberal Protestants worry about a Roman Catholic president like Josiah Bartlet.

Beliefs have mattered.

They don’t any more. What matters now are divisions over morality, yes. And you can’t have a full-bore ethical system without some kind of theological or philosophical system. And that leads to a host of doctrinal differences that should actually divide Jake Meador from Rod Dreher. But for now those doctrinal convictions don’t divide the two bloggers.

What matters and has always mattered in U.S. history is morality and the degree to which personal moral convictions must be implemented as public policy or law. In the 1970s thanks to Francis Schaeffer channeling neo-Calvinism (in part), evangelicals bought the idea that neutrality didn’t exist, that faith went all the way down (read identity politics), and that secularism was stripping the public square of clothes. It was possible and still is every single day to practice most of one’s Christian convictions — Sabbath observance? — without turning it into law. Heck, you can even voluntarily choose life (even though Christians are right to try to protect the lives of innocents).

So the credibility that evangelicals seek has taken a beating because of the way they have conducted public arguments. Would they have won? Would social life have turned out any better if they didn’t adopt the very logic of gay rights — that one’s political identity cannot be distinguished from one’s personal convictions? I doubt it. News from Ireland today about the referendum on gay marriage suggests that Christians have few tricks up their sleeves in public debates.

But the difference has far less to do with beliefs than with politics and especially the age-old American trope of LIBERTY.

Woe to Dualism

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

Is Neo-Calvinism the gateway drug to Islam?

Here‘s why I ask:

Western observers have difficulty making sense of this Renewal because of our Western biases concerning religion and politics: “The most important source of Western confusion about the meaning of the Renewal is the insistence on distinguishing between Islam as religion and so-called political Islam. Neither of these characterizations is in fact applicable. Islam is far more than a religion, and its political dimensions have no such autonomy. Islam is a pluralistic way of life that in all its varieties is insistently holistic and therefore unavoidably political. . . . Islam as lived faith refuses any division between the religious experience and human efforts to act in this world. In short, there is no such thing as political Islam. There is only Islam, although it is subject to adaptations and a wide variety of human interpretations.”

“Insistently holistic.” Every square inch.

Of course, other ways exist for affirming Christ’s lordship and recognizing the sacred-secular dichotomy. But those are radical.

Can Israel Save U.S.?

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

News that Charles Stanley is declining an award from the Jewish National Fund prompted me to wonder if U.S. support for Israel would wane if the State of Israel legalized gay marriage. First the news about Stanley:

Megachurch pastor Charles Stanley has turned down an award from a pro-Israel Jewish group, citing controversy over his views about homosexuality.

The Atlanta-based chapter of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) had planned to honor Stanley this week with its prestigious Tree of Life Award for his long support of the state of Israel. But a number of local rabbis and other Jewish leaders had protested the decision.

At issue are Stanley’s past statements that homosexual sex is immoral and a comment he made to a newspaper in 1986 that AIDS was a sign of God’s judgment.

But on closer inspection, it doesn’t look like gay marriage is an option in Israel:

In Israel, all valid marriages conducted abroad are recognized by the state, and foreign same-sex marriages are recorded for statistical purposes. That means a gay couple that weds in, say, the Netherlands remains wed in Israel. But that doesn’t mean a gay couple in Tel Aviv can walk down to city hall and procure a marriage license. Marriage is an exclusively religious institution in Israel, with separate religious authorities for Jews and Muslims, Christians and Druze. For Israeli Jews, marriage policy is dictated by the Chief Rabbinate, which is under the exclusive control of the Orthodox—and firmly opposed to gay marriage. Since the country has no civil marriage, gay couples seeking to marry within the borders of Israel are out of luck (as are any Jewish Israelis seeking a non-Orthodox marriage ceremony).

This arrangement—whereby marriage is in the control of the Orthodox rabbinate—is part of what Israelis call the status quo: an understanding between secular and religious Jews regarding the balance between religion and state. The status quo affects not only marriage, but also the education system, family law, supervision of kosher restaurants, and the opening of shops and public transportation on shabbat.

So for now, evangelical Protestants don’t need to worry about gay marriage undermining their support for Israel, though it would be curious to see how American Protestants who support a Jewish state would sort that ethical dilemma out. But could it be that Israel has the solution to U.S. marriage debates? Make marriage exclusively a religious institution and eliminate civil marriage.

As odd as that may sound, not so long ago, in 1930 when H. L. Mencken was married to Sara Haardt, the couple needed to find an Episcopal priest because Maryland did not provide civil marriages.

Three World Leaders on Easter

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

Can you place a name with a text?

Door Number One:

. . . we give thanks for the extraordinary sacrifice that Jesus made for our salvation. We rejoice in the triumph of the Resurrection. And we renew our commitment to live as He commanded – to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Door Number Two:

We cannot live Easter without entering into the mystery. It is not something intellectual, something we only know or read about… It is more, much more! . . . To enter into the mystery means going beyond our own comfort zone, beyond the laziness and indifference which hold us back, and going out in search of truth, beauty and love. It is seeking a deeper meaning, an answer, and not an easy one, to the questions which challenge our faith, our fidelity and our very existence.

Door Number Three:

That after all is the heart of the Christian message. It’s the principle around which the Easter celebration is built. Easter is all about remembering the importance of change, responsibility, and doing the right thing for the good of our children. And today, that message matters more than ever.

Did He Really Say That?

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

David Robertson does his best impersonation of a 2ker (minus the fear of Islam):

Why is Islam a threat to our society?

It was Christianity that brought the sacred/secular divide into the Western world. It was Christianity, especially after the Reformation, which taught that there were two kingdoms and that the one was not subject to the other. It was within that Christian context that secularism was able to develop and flourish. Christianity is the bedrock and foundation of our secular society. Islam is different. Islam has no doctrine of separation of the spiritual from the political. Islam is, and has always been, a political movement. There can be no such thing as secular Islam.

So secularization is a good thing. The sacred/secular divide is a good thing. The separation of the spiritual from the political is a good thing.

What 2k’s sayin’.

I wish the defender of Christian Scotland would employ this argument when he is tempted by political Christianity.

Thought Experiment

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

Is the persecution that U.S. Christians face comparable to that experienced by Syriac Christians?

On the situation in the U.S.:

If the media, the law and our elite institutions succeed in lumping Christian sexual morals in with white racism, how long will it be before believing Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox (and many religious minorities) find themselves labelled as members of “extremist sects,” no more to be trusted with the care of their own children than the Branch Davidians were?

Does that sound crazy to you? Then ask yourself why the German government, and the European Court of Human Rights, felt justified in seizing a Christian home-schooled student — with the apparent approval of the Obama administration. Think about the moral views you teach your own kids. Would your local education bureaucrats approve?

Perhaps Chicago’s cardinal, Francis George, wasn’t guilty of hyperbole when he said, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

On Syria’s Christians:

Based on my contacts with Archbishop Behnan Hindo of the Syriac Catholic Church and Bishop Aprem Nathanael of the Assyrian Church of the East, who are the only heads of Churches remaining in Hassakeh, the situation over there is still very tense. People are in disarray and filled with fear.

The invasion by the Islamic State and its supporters on some 30 Christian villages on the Khabur River Feb. 23 resulted in the killing of more than two dozen people, the kidnapping of around 300 and the uprooting of around 2,500 people. The survivors had nowhere to go other than to Hassakeh, the capital of the province, where they obtained refuge in church halls and some abandoned buildings.

In Hassakeh, people manage to survive because of the presence of the Syrian National Army that ensures security, along with the Kurdish Protection Army and some Christian defense groups, which are monitoring and defending the city. Because of the ongoing tension, the region is besieged by terrorists. It happens that sometimes those entities clash among themselves, as occurred a few weeks ago. But what is most feared are the booby-trapped explosives that usually hit civilians and cause a lot of destruction, as well as instilling more fear.

Can we have a little perspective on Indiana?

Proto-Protestant On A Roll

Published on by D. G. Hart57 Comments

And Constantinians (all kinds) should be very afraid:

Leithart’s Christ is not the Christ of Scripture. I say that not as a theological liberal who views Christ as a type of Gandhi and finds the idea of a coming Judgment to be abhorrent. I say this as a follower of Christ who understands the nature of the Spiritual Kingdom and our call to suffer as martyr-witnesses in This Age. The Triumphalism of Leithart is only to be understood in light of the Second Coming and in a context in which sin has been eradicated. A Postmillennialist like Leithart looks for the Church to bring in a millennial golden age, a Church through the force of cultural transformation to all but eradicate sin. Through culture and legislation (and presumably the Spirit) the reign of Christ will be brought to bear on This Age. Christ returns after the world has been Christianized… again a term and concept I would argue is the result of abstract philosophical commitment and speculation, not the fruit of New Testament exegesis.

I’ve always found it ironic that Calvinists, believers in Total Depravity would embrace such a vision of Christianization. I too embrace Total Depravity and believe there’s no Scriptural warrant for this view. They would argue the Spirit will effect this change. The same Spirit inspired the New Testament and provides a very different interpretation of the Old Testament than they will grant or receive and nowhere is there any suggestion that sin will in any way be diminished before Christ’s return or through the cultural efforts and/or political expressions of the Church.

Like the Dispensationalists they prioritize the Old Testament and its prophetic visions over and against the New Testament and its interpretation of them. In their systems The Old Testament interprets the New rather than vice versa. Rejecting the Apostolic hermeneutic they insist (like the Dispensationalists) that a future chiliastic kingdom is the destiny of the Church. The Dispensationalists believe this promise to be centered on Israel of the Old Covenant. The Postmillennialists rightly believe The Church is the New Israel and the inheritor of its promises but it wrongly believes that not only will the Church conquer Palestine, it will politically and culturally conquer the whole world. One camp believes the political millennium will be based on the Jews, the other on the Church but their basic assumptions are the same. They both embrace a politico-cultural doctrine of the Kingdom.

Both schools seek prophetic fulfillment apart from the Christocentric teachings of the New Testament. Both reject the New Testament’s teaching that all the Old Testament promises, types and symbols point to and find their fulfillment in Christ (2 Cor 1.20).

Somewhere between the Crusades and the National Council of Churches

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

That somewhere is the Land of 2k.

The reason for this reminder stems in part from a post over at Rorate Caeli about modernized Roman Catholics who don’t have much to offer Muslims:

What does modernized Catholicism do faced with Islam and its terroristic religion of violence?

Does it ask Islam to accept modernity? Does it ask it to put the person at the center in the place of God? Does it ask Islam to accept the trinomial of the Revolution, freedom-equality-fraternity? Modernized Catholicism, reinterpreted, has the audacity to expose itself, by submitting that the Catholic Church, after an erroneous refusal of 200 years, has [finally] understood how to embrace modernity, by restructuring itself into a more mature phase of religion. Consequently, the modernized Church is asking Muslims to try and take the same steps, so that they can join the assemblage of the modern religion which puts man at the centre.

What will real Muslim believers understand from this invitation? They will understand that we no longer believe in God, that we have become agnostics, that the dogmas of the Masonic religion, which support the centrality of Man, have thrown out the true dogmas – the dogmas of God!

What a disaster!

The Muslims will be confirmed in their idea that the Christian West is immoral and should be opposed.

Conservative Protestants know the feeling. If you asked Protestant modernists what they offer to Muslims, you’d also likely want to duck if you were the one to deliver the answer to the inquiring Muslim. But when this Roman Catholic op-ed writer says that Traditional Roman Catholicism has the right proposal for Muslims, you do wonder what he or she means by traditional. As much as Pope Benedict XVI might have proposed reason instead of power, plenty of popes well before Benedict showed muscle rather than intellect to Muslim infidels — think Crusades and Inquisition.

In which case, the alternative to a modernist Islam is a spiritual Islam — one that regards the spiritual as more important than the temporal. The papacy may have learned this lesson the hard way after 1870 when the pope lost his temporal estates. Even so, between 1870 and 1962, the papacy did seem to know implicitly that its power was spiritual not temporal, and it still ran a conservative church with lots of condemnations of departures from the truth.

The Turkish Republic may have also taught Islam a similar lesson when it abolished the caliphate and turned the nation’s mosques into centers of religious as opposed to political life.

Separating the spiritual from the temporal also bears on the recent discussion between Rod Dreher and Noah Milman about whether Republicans have anything to offer social conservatives. In response to Dreher’s earlier suggestion that social conservatives may need to adopt the Benedict Option of cultural withdrawal, Milman points to a Jewish community that did withdraw and is still as politicized as an Blue or Red state constituency:

Consider Kiryas Joel. This village in Orange County, New York, was designed as an enclave of the Satmar Hasidic sect. Satmar are the most insular of Hasidic sects, going to enormous lengths to keep themselves uncontaminated by the larger culture. But they participate in commerce – and they most certainly participate in politics. Specifically, they vote as a bloc for whichever candidate best-supports the narrow interests of the community.

And, funny thing, but politicians respond to incentives. This is a community that rigidly separates the sexes and imposes a draconian standard of personal modesty – and that strives mightily to impose that norm as a public matter in their community. Don’t even talk about homosexuality. But none of that prevented a Democratic candidate for Congress from earning their support by promising to help them with facilitating the community’s growth. And with their help, he narrowly won his election against a Republican who had previously earned the Satmar community’s favor.

I am not writing a brief for Kiryas Joel or Satmar. I think that kind of insulation is extremely destructive, not only for the individuals involved but for any kind of authentic spiritual life. But it seems to me that this is what the Benedict Option looks like in the real world – or, rather, this is a somewhat extreme end of what it might mean.

And my real point is that that approach – a focus on nurturing a spiritual community, maintaining however much integration with the rest of the world as is compatible with that priority, and orienting one’s politics on the specific needs of your community – is completely compatible with playing the two parties off against each other. Satmar stands opposed to basically everything the Democratic Party stands for. Heck, it stands opposed to basically everything America stands for. For that matter, it stands opposed to basically everything the rest of the American Jewish community stands for as well – it’s resolutely anti-Zionist, extremely socially conservative, refuses to cooperate with non-Hasidic groups – it even has a hard time getting along even with other Hasidic groups. And it still gets courted by Democrats.

The really funny thing may be the recognition that confessional Presbyterian communions like the OPC get courted by neither Republicans nor Democrats. Part of that owes to the fact that Orthodox Presbyterians do not inhabit a Congressional District. But it also has to do with the doctrine of the spirituality of the church (still disputed in OPC circles, mind you). If the church is a spiritual institution with spiritual means for spiritual ends, and if the temporal matters of this life are just that — temporal — fading away in comparison to what is coming on That Great (not Pretty Good) Day, then the best alternative to either a sword-wielding pope or caliphate, or a pandering set of pastors or bishops, is a spiritual church. That means, a group of believers who worship together each week under a ministry reformed according to the word of God and who know that in the light of eternity political parties, geographical territories, and military conflicts don’t matter.

Does Christianity Unify?

Published on by D. G. Hart46 Comments

From George Washington to the National Council of Churches (and their evangelical counterpart, the National Association of Evangelicals), white English-speaking Protestants in the U.S. have insisted that religion of the right and moral sort will unify the nation. It doesn’t take very long in chronicling the history of Christianity to understand the difficulties of this pious (and sentimental hope). When our Lord said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26), he was not exactly recommending Rotary Club or the Chamber of Commerce to his disciples. Even if you take those words as hyperbolic, sort of like gouging out eyes and handling snakes, most believers have enough experience of converts to Christianity who lost ties and associations with family members over the faith.

Why then would Peter Leithart continue to laud unity as a mission of the church, even in the face of life in real congregations where church members are hardly unified except on matters like those affirmed by Paul — “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:5)? One answer for Leithart’s continuing belief in the unifying mission of the church is his man crush on Constantine and most subsequent Christian emperors. In a series of recent posts, Leithart promotes a church-based social unity.

First, he frets that America is becoming increasingly fragmented and that such disunity owes to the demise of Christian civilization:

America is abandoning the last remnants of our historic Christian foundations. This is most obvious in law, where specifically Christian claims are ruled unConstitutional precisely because they are Christian claims. It’s evident in the universities and among intellectual elites, who cannot make sense of a theological argument that claims to be a public argument. Theology is by definition private opinion, dangerous and tyrannical when it demands public assent.

What replaces our historic Christian consensus is a patchwork of disconnected communities. The thin public “theology” of liberalism doesn’t meet human needs. No one tribe can command universal assent, and so we retreat to our tribal affinities, to our small communities where consensus is still possible. Secularization is in a symbiotic relationship with by postmodern fragmentation.

The problem with this view, at least from a paleo-conservative perspective, is that America has never been more centralized, the national government has never consolidated more of social life and that the laudable small communities and worthwhile regional diversity of the early republic that Barry Shain documented are casualties of national economies and foreign wars.

Back to Leithart — despite the current fragmentation of church and society, we should not be discouraged. Maybe Constantine can happen again:

The Constantinian settlement is gone in much of Europe, waning elsewhere. Many of these disruptions have persisted to the present day, but each new disruption has produced tectonic shifts in the church.

Why would we think, then, that the current topography of Christianity is permanent? We have no reason to assume this. We have every reason to assume the opposite, to expect that sometime, somewhere, God will shake and reconfigure the church yet again.

And if the church recognizes that it has the solution to the woes of contemporary society, perhaps Christendom will yet return if the church recognizes unity as its mission:

There is no traditional religious replacement for the loss of this establishment, and what effectively replaces it is a consensus about the freedom of the individual to do whatever he wants. The normal resources that establish identity – family, work, community – cannot serve that purpose. Divorce rates are high, and families are broken; work is insecure; mobility and double-income households have damaged neighborhoods as sources of community. Se are told to construct our own identity but denied the resources where people have historically discovered their identity.

The church has an enormous challenge and opportunity in this setting. Alienation from God is at the root of these social ills, and the church is the steward of the mysteries of the gospel. But the churches’ proclamation of the gospel is to take not only verbal, but communal, social form as the church. As in the early centuries, the churches can provide communities of intimacy, friendship, and material support for lonely people; churches have the resources to give lost moderns a sense of identity with a community, a tradition; churches can provide support for failing families, and a network of brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers for those who come from broken families.

Aside from the sort of objections that come from Letter-to-Diognetus conceptions of Christianity not as culture but as cult, Leithart misses arguably the greatest weakness of his proposal and it comes from a post that appeared just before this series on church and unity. From his reading of Scott Manetsch’s recent book on the Geneva company of pastors, Leithart observed what happens to the ministry of the church when it becomes part of an effort to unify and regularize society — even a Christendom inspired one:

Confessionalization “modernized churches and transformed the clerical office in a number of important ways. Church life became more carefully regulated, supervised, and documented through the codification of confessions, catechisms, and church ordinances; the establishment of eccclesiastical bureaucracies; and the creation of disciplinary courts. . . . Likewise, the clerical office was increasingly professionalized with the establishment of formal educational requirements and more detailed guidelines for examination and ordination. In this process of modernization . . . clergymen emerged as quasi-agents of the state, serving as a crucial link for communication between political leaders and their subjects; supervising public discipline; and providing administrative resources for the state (such as maintaining baptismal, marriage, and death registers).” In Geneva in particular, “the Small Council’s campaign to gain control over clerical recruitment and election was indicative of a broader strategy to bring the city[s pastors in line with the political objectives of the governing authorities. The ministers were gradually transformed into quasi-agents of the state who were not only paid out of the state coffers but were also hired, supervised, and dismissed with significant involvement of the magistrates” (96).

Why in heaven or within Christendom would Leithart expect the church’s mission of unity to turn out otherwise than either the liberal Protestantism of Europe, the liberal Protestantism of the mainline U.S. denominations, or the social gospel/teaching of Pope Francis and his papal predecessors? Does Leithart really think that when Pastor Smith goes to Washington he won’t be forced by political compromise and the demands of social unity to trim and cut his “thus, sayeth the Lord” to some version of the Great Society?

Update: then there is the view that (culture) war unites more than Christ:

But they’re the old insults. That’s the important thing. They’re getting worn out, frayed around the edges, long in the tooth. They’re losing their power as Evangelicals and Catholics grow in friendship and the world itself pushes them closer together. The two boys yelling at each other are two brothers. At some point, probably when someone else attacks one of them or both of them, they’ll stop yelling and start acting like brothers.