THE FROG IN THE KETTLE

Touchstone Magazine Blog ^ | July 29, 2004 | S.M. Hitchens

[sauerkraut]

For explanation of the genesis of educated apostasy I find myself returning with great frequency to the episode involving heaven’s final (and unsuccessful) entreaty of the liberal bishop in C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce. The picture is not of a man who thinks his way carefully into unbelief, as that sort of unbeliever almost always portrays himself, but rather of one who, when he discovers there are rewards for abandoning orthodoxy, and that retaining his faith has a price in both the world and in the church, drifts into unbelief by way of what one might call purposive negligence—a strange combination of thinking and not-thinking. Finding certain needs and ambitions rewarded by lapsing, the once-Christian goes, unpraying, unthinking (in the proper sense), and unresisting, out of Christianity and into liberal religion.

Most of the older religious liberals I know, lay and clerical, did not start that way. They are what I call frog-in-the-kettle liberals, the products of their own desires and the churches that indulge them. Maintaining themselves in a deteriorating religious environment, they continuously acclimate themselves to it. Many give battle at first, for they know the new doctrines and practices wrong in the light of the old faith. But they find that to remain with that faith requires painful exertion—swimming against the stream of scholarly opinion, or appearing publicly odd, or alienating friends and family, or repenting of one’s sins. So, the stream of opinion is submitted to, the cultural expectations are met, amity is maintained through tolerance of the formerly intolerable, and the sins persist. In so doing the Christian conscience is destroyed by degrees, one concession building upon another. When it arises again (for while it can be suppressed, it is difficult to kill), it appears as an alien consciousness, a torturer, an enemy, any of its renewed approaches rejected with vigor, for it brings only pain.

In my own experience, people to whom this has happened typically remain professing Christians, or at least stay religious. There is often no need to abandon their church, for it has moved with them (indeed, the leadership has moved ahead of them), and so they find plenty of company in their spiritual exodus—clergy and laity who are following the same road, and will happily connive to establish a new religion they call Christianity from the disjecta membra of the real thing. It is, in fact, important for most of them to do it in company, to “stay with,” for one very good reason or another, churches that are determinedly apostacizing.

Their reasons for remaining in these churches are at first unobjectionable. They are interested in truth, and in fighting bad things. They do not wish to be precipitous, abandon a church just because it is having difficulties or is under attack, or adopt the attitude of the constitutional schismatic, the evidence of whose deplorable work surrounds us in a multitude of sects. The strongest repellant to friends who might call them to reconsider is their question as to whether leaving could possibly be an act of faith.

But how many of them have resurfaced after a few years under this (what turned out to be) defensive camouflage as nicely boiled liberals, trained and catechized, their systems reconstituted with a full set of objections to orthodox Christianity? Anticonversions of this kind are the solidest sort because they involve gradual and hence more completely rationalized (but not really reasoned) loss of faith--to change the metaphor, its stone-by-stone dismantling--and the substitution of other materials. They have only the appearance of reasoned change because reason is engaged only as a jobber and ignored in its capacity of general contractor. While the edifice is in the building—and a very substantial edifice it may be—first principles are hardly ever considered, thus contemplation of the essential arbitrariness of (and hence unreasoned motives for) the change is avoided.

Because a corrupted adult intellect must be used to effect these conversions--whereas Christian belief, being most often patrimonial, usually is not (no “little child” thinks like a liberal; he hasn’t the capacity for self-deception)--it is easy for the convert to regard orthodox faith as “simple,” and liberal faith, because it involves a process in which reason is used, but not properly, as advanced. Unless there is a reawakening of desire strong enough to break down a carefully and deliberately constructed system (with bad foundations), the unbelief persists.

The message of Hebrews 6 is that frogs who are cooked-through remain that way. The question of whether they got cooked because they willed to remain in the pot, or because they were hatched with the physiology of frogs, seems to be that both are the case.