Click here to read the first part of Paul Chu’s series on the Role of Religion in Contemporary Society. 

In 1896, the great American psychologist and philosopher William James gave a talk to a collection of philosophically-minded Ivy Leaguers, young men from Yale and Brown, entitled “The Will to Believe.” While many of his arguments are fascinating and valuable, I am more interested in what the talk indicates about the cultural mindset and prejudices of the America of his time.

James comments on Pascal’s wager:

It is evident that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in Masses and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a living option. Certainly no Turk ever took to Masses and holy water on its account; and even to us Protestants these seem such foregone impossibilities that Pascal’s logic, invoked for them specifically, leaves us unmoved.

For anyone who might happen to be bristling a bit at the casual anti-Catholicism here, he follows shortly after with this:

Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for “the doctrine of the immortal Monroe,” all for no reasons worthy of the name.

And lastly:

A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

What James was both describing and evidencing was a set of cultural guidelines and boundaries which both direct and delimit what is thinkable — a sociological version of what political thinkers refer to as the “Overton window.” Although it could, as he points out, seamlessly accommodate agnosticism, this particular set he describes could justly be characterized as a form of civic religion.

Individual national cultures import their own peculiarities into their particular flavor of civic religion — such as the doctrinal latitudinarianism of the Anglosphere, quite noticeable in James’s words above. An Anglophone gentleman of James’s time had no particular need to think too deeply, provided he knew what was done and what was not done — hence the usefulness of the dead issue. Of course, this is awkward for the English-speaking world of our time, where everything is a live issue.

I should note that there are still regions of the world where civic Christianity persists, where people live (with extensive adjustments) in an atmosphere of cultural guidelines and boundaries not wholly unlike what William James was both describing and demonstrating above. There is also, however, the secular, technocratic Global North that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger described in Truth and Tolerance as he wrote: “Only in modern Europe has a concept of culture been developed that portrays it as a sphere separate from religion, or even in opposition to it.” It is this culture which has essentially eradicated civic Christianity. Whether this is for better or for worse, remains to be seen.

All of this is but to frame my central consideration here: Christian nationalism. In raising this issue, I am not concerned with theocracy per se, nor with integralist theories of government, nor with the relative merits of any public policies whatsoever. None of this is really my point, here. I am concerned – indeed, I might even say distressed – at the consequences for the faith of a project to revive the civic Christianity of Christendom artificially, or rather to engineer a Frankenstein monster of Christendom-era civic Christianity in contemporary conditions. For all the legitimate critiques of civic Christianity one can evince (and I have many in mind), I dread this development in a different way. For absent knowledge of theological doctrine, and absent the guidelines and constraints cited by James – which are neither theological doctrine nor positive law, but instinctive – we can expect, not a return to civic Christianity, but a mutation unlike anything seen heretofore. This mutation may be more destructive to true Christianity, to religio vera, than any other system to date, religious or atheistic.

In a column from last year, Ross Douthat at the New York Times offered an array of possible definitions of “Christian nationalism” in the American context:

Definition One: The belief that America should unite religion and politics in the same manner as the tribes of Israel in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (the more extreme case) or Puritan New England (the milder one) – with religious law enforced by the government, a theocratic or confessional state, an established form of Christianity, and non-Christian religions disfavored.

Definition Two: The belief that America is a chosen nation commissioned by God to bring about some form of radical transformation in the world – the spread of liberty, the triumph of democracy – and that both domestic and foreign policy should be shaped by this kind of providential aim.

Definition Three: The belief that American ideals make the most sense in the light of Christianity, that Christians should desire America to be more Christian rather than less and that American laws and policies should be informed by Christian principles to the extent possible given the realities of pluralism and the First Amendment.

Definition Four: Any kind of Christian politics that liberals find disagreeable or distasteful.

The first of his definitions describes the kind of theocracy I have just excluded; the fourth is obviously rhetorical pleading. This leaves the second and the third.

Douthat clearly realizes, as evidenced in a book and other shorter works on the topic, that the second option he presents constitutes a peculiarly American heresy – in some cases metamorphizing into a Christianity without Christ or even without God. Although he does not explain it so, I would interpret it as a particular mutation of a Bible-based Anglophone Protestantism, in which a mixed group of itinerant settlers internalize readings of the Tanakh – the Christian “Old Testament” – to the point of an identification with the Biblical Israel; the (far more understandable) development in the Black church of an identification with the Biblical Israel in its exodus from slavery is a confirming parallel.

In his book, Douthat cites examples of American messianism[1] spanning political left and right – think Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush – and offers in response a revival of the trans-denominational “institutional Christianity,” made up of mainline Protestantism (or perhaps a past vintage thereof) and his own preferred Catholicism.

Although I find some value in his analysis at some points, I see the problem somewhat differently. I see the central issue as syncretism, and the particular flavor of Christian nationalism he describes as but a step short of a cultural appropriation of the Abrahamic Covenant, if not indeed the Mosaic Covenant. Call it an Israel Complex; taken this way, the world’s two largest denominations founded in the United States – the LDS/Mormon and the Seventh Day Adventist – are quintessentially American in their self-understanding as new Israels, and today’s evangelical and fundamentalist Zionists barely less so. If I am right in drawing this connection, this tendency in the case of America could potentially impinge, as a more self-aware mimicry of the biblical Israel, on the frankly theocratic Definition One. Yet all these heresies disregard Christ’s words to Pilate: My Kingdom is not of this world.

Which brings us to Definition Three, which Douthat seems to uphold as wholesome, as “normal American Christians doing normal American Christian things,” as he puts it – and whether that be wholesome or not, it would seem a fairly accurate description of what American Catholics are like, at least the most vocally Catholic-identifying among them. And even prescinding from the claim that “American ideals make the most sense in the light of Christianity,” we come face to face with two problems: the history of civic Christianity itself, and the project of its proposed reconstruction.

In the former America, the America of Christendom, there prevailed the very same civic Protestantism I cited from William James in my last post: non-denominational, latitudinarian… and anti-Catholic, whether as superciliously as James and his listeners, or as militantly as Horace Mann and the founders of the American public school system in the mid-19^th Century.[2] As secularism took hold over the course of the 20^th Century, this civic Protestantism evolved into many of the secular and putatively sacred pieties of contemporary American society.

Here, America provides a test case for the rest of the world, inasmuch as the United States was always far more of an idea or ideology and less of an organic, evolutionary unity than other nation-states. This is not to deny that the Protestant civic Christianity of 19^th Century America was largely a natural cultural phenomenon, but to suggest that the culture itself was less organic and more ideological, even confessional, than most cultures: “a nation with the soul of a church,” as G. K. Chesterton put it in his 1922 work, What I Saw in America.

To the extent this is true, not only the American tendency toward an Israel Complex and messianic impulse, but all American civic Christianity, constitute a syncretism; to overcome this syncretism would require the humility of America recognizing itself as a nation among nations, rather than postulating itself as a quasi-religious project. Unfortunately, in an atmosphere of secularism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization, the opposite trend seems far stronger – that other nation-states will be increasingly defined, not by organic cultures evolved over time, but by some sort of “creed,” as Chesterton put it with regard to America, a century ago. The world, in this respect, is becoming more like America – and this is not a good thing.

The response of many who see contemporary secularism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization with dismay has been to turn to some sort of Christian or ethnic nationalism, to restore (as they see it) by political force the status quo of civic Christianity and ethnic bonds. Yet both civic Christianity and ethnoculture – prescinding from the many crimes and atrocities committed in their name and in many cases by their agency – depended in their very natures upon being organic outgrowths of daily life in (at least partially) stable societies and cultures. Under current conditions, this is generating the contemporary face of Christian (or ethnic) nationalism that I have mentioned with such concern : the attempt to restore artificially and enforce by state power an ideologically generated and dubiously understood simulacrum of the civic Christianity of Christendom and/or of an organically evolved civil society – and worse still, to apply it to the nation-state, which is much too large to wear it well.[3] It is not surprising that fascism took hold, not at all in the ancient kingdoms of England or France; only partially in the less ancient, more ethnically divided, and less stable kingdoms of Austria and Spain; and fully in Germany and Italy, which had long been widely divided petty kingdoms and city-states, and had existed as nation-states for well under a hundred years. The insecurity of these new nations was a fertile seed-ground for the fascist project – and religious insecurity can have an analogous effect.

Responding to these sociopolitical phenomena is well above my pay grade – indeed, on some level, all of this is well above my pay grade. But I am a Catholic, and I’m trying to keep my faith in this world we have. Keeping sound theological and spiritual moorings seems at present to be a sine qua non, at least for me.

In trying to prepare this post, I went back to Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World of the Second Vatican Council, and found this:

It is very important, especially where a pluralistic society prevails, that there be a correct notion of the relationship between the political community and the Church, and a clear distinction between the tasks which Christians undertake, individually or as a group, on their own responsibility as citizens guided by the dictates of a Christian conscience, and the activities which, in union with their pastors, they carry out in the name of the Church. (GS 76)

This passage directly cites political “responsibility as citizens guided by the dictates of a Christian conscience” – although its main thrust is to distinguish such work from the activity of the Church.[4] Nonetheless, this civic responsibility does redound personally on me, as on all of us.

The passage then goes on to point out that:

It is only right… that at all times and in all places, the Church should have true freedom to preach the faith, to teach her social doctrine, to exercise her role freely among men, and also to pass moral judgment in those matters which regard public order when the fundamental rights of a person or the salvation of souls require it. In this, she should make use of all the means – but only those – which accord with the Gospel and which correspond to the general good according to the diversity of times and circumstances.

It is not mine to judge how the Church has exercised this moral, rather than political, role. Gaudium et Spes recounts how “the Church by her very universality can be a very close bond between diverse human communities and nations, provided these trust her and truly acknowledge her right to true freedom in fulfilling her mission” (GS 42). It does seem evident to me that the Church is no longer widely accorded this trust and respect, and that this is due not only to secularity and the hardness of human hearts, but also to the sins and errors of civic Christianity, including those of the Church in its civic role under the regime of Christendom – Gaudium et Spes notes that “all those dedicated to the ministry of God’s Word must use the ways and means proper to the Gospel which in a great many respects differ from the means proper to the earthly city” (GS 76).[5] Again, it is not mine to judge how well this is being done – this too is above my pay grade, and I am grateful for that.

Nor do the desire to enforce orthodoxy and the impulse to wield power with a heavy hand always originate with those in authority. In 1982, Cardinal Ratzinger lamented:

The shepherds of the Church not only find themselves exposed today to the accusation that they still hold fast to the methods of the Inquisition and try to strangle the Spirit by the repressive power of their office; they are, at the same time, attacked by the voice of the faithful, who accuse them more and more loudly of being mute and cowardly watchdogs that stand idly by under the pressure of liberal publicity while the faith is being sold piecemeal for the dish of pottage of being recognized as “modern.”

I will make one modest suggestion in response, one which I would apply not specifically to the situation of prelates, but in an analogous sense to all of those “citizens guided by the dictates of a Christian conscience” to which Gaudium et Spes refers. It is now evident that the long reign of Eurocentric Christendom is well and truly done, at least in its original homelands and their cultural correlates in North America, Australia, et al. We can make a strong case that we in our time have found ourselves in these fifty-odd years in many respects closer to the Rome of the Empire than to the Rome of the Council. If this is true, we would perhaps do well to follow the guidance of the great patrons of Rome – St. Paul: We cause no one to stumble in anything, in order that no fault may be found with our ministry, or in the Douay: Giving no offence to any man, that our ministry be not blamed; and St. Peter: Be subject to every human institution for the Lord’s sake…. For it is the will of God that by doing good you may silence the ignorance of foolish people. Out of love for Christ and the Church and hope for its ministry, I would pray that Catholics, at least, heed these words enough to refrain from bringing shame upon the Gospel through presumptuousness, arrogance, or deceptive dreams of restoring a lost temporal Christendom.

Notes

[1] This messianism found its way into the American Catholic Church as well, through a phenomenon I would refer to as “American Fatimism,” by which some American Catholics took the defining mission of the 20^th Century as anti-Communism (“Russia spreading her errors throughout the world”) and American superpower status as rendering their country the chosen people in a mission from the Blessed Virgin herself. Michael Agnew, in his academic study “Russia Will Be Converted”: The Fatima Crusade’s Marian Apocalyptic Discourse During and After the Cold War, describes this as follows: “Out of the Fatima narrative, conservative Catholics such as those active in the Fatima Crusade have developed a unique and indeed marginal worldview in which American political and Catholic religious goals are fused and couched in eschatological terms.”

[2] It is worth considering how this latter is tied to the beginnings of the American parochial school system in the 19^th Century. Its founder, the redoubtable Archbishop John Hughes, went to great lengths to protect the Catholic children of New York from anti-Catholic civic Protestantism; recent moves in Oklahoma and Louisiana to return particles of civic Christianity to the public schools must have “Dagger John” turning over in his grave.

[3] There is a level at which the whole concept of the nation-state itself is at fault here; as I recently observed to a particularly gifted student who has become a friend, there are a thousand little things you can do for your neighborhood, your village, or even your city, but almost the only thing you can personally do for your country as nation-state is to fight in a war. Thus, the nation-state has relied on regular transfusions of blood – or, as I put it to my friend, “taking lives and land and money and resources and setting them on fire.”

[4] The intersection between the Church’s missions outside of Europe and the legacy of colonialism is another, much thornier issue; where the missionary impulse was significantly – indeed, to some contemporary sensibilities, offensively – natural in its truth claims, it was accompanied by notions of “civilization” and cultural superiority that were quite distinctly civic. Nonetheless, I would question whether colonialism could justly be called a form of civic Christianity en bloc.

[5] This wise warning, which could have prevented so many of the wrongs committed by the civic arm of the Church, nonetheless places a remarkable burden of conscience on bishops and pastors, to run what are in effect corporations, even large ones, not by worldly wisdom but by the guidance of the Gospel. I suspect that, contra many who have implicated a religiously motivated (if theologically erroneous) clericalism in the concealment practiced by so many bishops in the face of the scandals of the 20^th century, “the means proper to the earthly city” – especially preservation of financial assets and social credit – likely played a greater role.

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