Catholics and the Next America

First Things ^ | 9/17/2010 | Charles J Chaput

[markomalley]

One of the key myths of the American Catholic imagination is this: After 200 years of fighting against public prejudice, Catholics finally broke through into America’s mainstream with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president. It’s a happy thought, and not without grounding. Next to America’s broad collection of evangelical churches, baptized Catholics now make up the biggest religious community in the United States. They serve in large numbers in Congress. They have a majority on the Supreme Court. They play commanding roles in the professions and in business leadership. They’ve climbed, at long last, the Mt. Zion of social acceptance.

So goes the tale. What this has actually meant for the direction of American life, however, is another matter. Catholic statistics once seemed impressive. They filled many of us with tribal pride. But they didn’t stop a new and quite alien national landscape, a “next America,” from emerging right under our noses.

While both Barna Group and Pew Research Center data show that Americans remain a broadly Christian people, old religious loyalties are steadily softening. Overall, the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation, about 16 percent, has doubled since 1990. One quarter of Americans aged 18-29 have no affiliation with any particular religion, and as the Barna Group noted in 2007, they “exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. In fact, in just a decade . . . the Christian image [has] shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people.”

Catholic losses have been masked by Latino immigration. But while 31 percent of Americans say they were raised in the Catholic faith, fewer than 24 percent of Americans now describe themselves as Catholic.

These facts have weight because, traditionally, religious faith has provided the basis for Americans’ moral consensus. And that moral consensus has informed American social policy and law. What people believe—or don’t believe—about God, helps to shape what they believe about men and women. And what they believe about men and women creates the framework for a nation’s public life.

Or to put it more plainly: In the coming decades Catholics will likely find it harder, not easier, to influence the course of American culture, or even to live their faith authentically. And the big difference between the “next America” and the old one will be that plenty of other committed religious believers may find themselves in the same unpleasant jam as their Catholic cousins.

At first hearing, this scenario might sound implausible; and for good reason. The roots of the American experience are deeply Protestant. They go back a very long way, to well before the nation’s founding. Whatever one thinks of the early Puritan colonists—and Catholics have few reasons to remember them fondly—no reader can study Gov. John Winthrop’s great 1630 homily before embarking for New England without being moved by the zeal and candor of the faith that produced it. In “A model of Christian charity,” he told his fellow colonists:

We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ . . . That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must look not only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren . . . We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So we will keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Not a bad summary of Christian discipleship, made urgent for Winthrop by the prospect of leading 700 souls on a hard, two-month voyage across the North Atlantic to an equally hard New World. What happened when they got there is a matter of historical record. And different agendas interpret the record differently.

The Puritan habits of hard work, industry and faith branded themselves on the American personality. While Puritan influence later diluted in waves of immigrants from other Protestant traditions, it clearly helped shape the political beliefs of John Adams and many of the other American Founders. Adams and his colleagues were men who, as Daniel Boorstin once suggested, had minds that were a “miscellany and a museum;” men who could blend the old and the new, an earnest Christian faith and Enlightenment ideas, without destroying either.

But beginning in the nineteenth century, riding a crest of scientific and industrial change, a different view of the Puritans began to emerge. In the language of their critics, the Puritans were seen as intolerant, sexually repressed, narrow-minded witch-hunters who masked material greed with a veneer of Calvinist virtue. Cast as religious fanatics, the Puritans stood accused of planting the seed of nationalist messianism by portraying America as a New Jerusalem, a “city upon a hill” (from Winthrop’s homily), with a globally redemptive mission. H.L. Mencken—equally skilled as a writer, humorist and anti-religious bigot—famously described the Puritan as a man “with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

In recent years, scholars like Christian Smith have shown how the intellectual weakness and fierce internal divisions of America’s Protestant establishment allowed “the secularization of modern public life as a kind of political revolution.” Carried out mainly between 1870 and 1930, this “rebel insurgency consisted of waves of networks of activists who were largely skeptical, freethinking, agnostic, atheist or theologically liberal; who were well educated and socially located mainly in the knowledge-production occupations, and who generally espoused materialism, naturalism, positivism and the privatization or extinction of religion.”

This insurgency could be ignored, or at least contained, for a long time. Why? Because America’s social consensus supported the country’s unofficial Christian assumptions, traditions and religion-friendly habits of thought and behavior. But law—even a constitutional guarantee—is only as strong as the popular belief that sustains it. That traditional consensus is now much weakened. Seventy years of soft atheism trickling down in a steady catechesis from our universities, social-science “helping professions,” and entertainment and news media, have eroded it.

Obviously many faith-friendly exceptions exist in each of these professional fields. And other culprits, not listed above, may also be responsible for our predicament. The late Christopher Lasch argued that modern consumer capitalism breeds and needs a “culture of narcissism”—i.e., a citizenry of weak, self-absorbed, needy personalities—in order to sustain itself. Christian Smith put it somewhat differently when he wrote that, in modern capitalism, labor “is mobile as needed, consumers purchase what is promoted, workers perform as demanded, managers execute as expected—and profits flow. And what the Torah, or the Pope, or Jesus may say in opposition is not relevant, because those are private matters” [emphasis in original].

My point here is neither to defend nor criticize our economic system. Others are much better equipped to do that than I am. My point is that “I shop, therefore I am” is not a good premise for life in a democratic society like the United States. Our country depends for its survival on an engaged, literate electorate gathered around commonly held ideals. But the practical, pastoral reality facing the Gospel in America today is a human landscape shaped by advertising, an industry Pascal Bruckner described so well as a “smiling form of sorcery”:

The buyer’s fantastic freedom of choice supposedly encourages each of us to take ourselves in hand, to be responsible, to diversify our conduct and our tastes; and most important, supposedly protects us forever from fanaticism and from being taken in. In other words, four centuries of emancipation from dogmas, gods and tyrants has led to nothing more nor less than to the marvelous possibility of choosing between several brands of dish detergent, TV channels or styles of jeans. Pushing our cart down the aisle in a supermarket or frantically wielding our remote control, these are supposed to be ways of consciously working for harmony and democracy. One could hardly come up with a more masterful misinterpretation: for we consume in order to stop being individuals and citizens; rather, to escape for a moment from the heavy burden of having to make fundamental choices.

Now, where do Catholics fit into this story?

The same Puritan worldview that informed John Winthrop’s homily so movingly, also reviled “Popery,” Catholic ritual and lingering “Romish” influences in England’s established Anglican Church. The Catholic Church was widely seen as Revelation’s Whore of Babylon. Time passed, and the American religious landscape became more diverse. But the nation’s many different Protestant sects shared a common, foreign ogre in their perceptions of the Holy See—perceptions made worse by Rome’s distrust of democracy and religious liberty. As a result, Catholics in America faced harsh Protestant discrimination throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This included occasional riots and even physical attacks on convents, churches and seminaries. Such is the history that made John F. Kennedy’s success seem so liberating.

The irony is that mainline American Protestantism had used up much of its moral and intellectual power by 1960. Secularizers had already crushed it in the war for the cultural high ground. In effect, after so many decades of struggle, Catholics arrived on America’s center stage just as management of the theater had changed hands -- with the new owners even less friendly, but far shrewder and much more ambitious in their social and political goals, than the old ones. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, despite their many differences, share far more than divides them, beginning with Jesus Christ himself. They also share with Jews a belief in the God of Israel and a reverence for God’s Word in the Old Testament. But the gulf between belief and unbelief, or belief and disinterest, is vastly wider.

In the years since Kennedy’s election, Vatican II and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, two generations of citizens have grown to maturity. The world is a different place. America is a different place—and in some ways, a far more troubling one. We can’t change history, though we need to remember and understand it. But we can only blame outside factors for our present realities up to a point. As Catholics, like so many other American Christians, we have too often made our country what it is through our appetite for success, our self-delusion, our eagerness to fit in, our vanity, our compromises, our self-absorption and our tepid faith.

If government now pressures religious entities out of the public square, or promotes same-sex “marriage,” or acts in ways that undermine the integrity of the family, or compromises the sanctity of human life, or overrides the will of voters, or discourages certain forms of religious teaching as “hate speech,” or interferes with individual and communal rights of conscience—well, why not? In the name of tolerance and pluralism, we have forgotten why and how we began as nation; and we have undermined our ability to ground our arguments in anything higher than our own sectarian opinions.

The “next America” has been in its chrysalis a long time. Whether people will be happy when it fully emerges remains to be seen. But the future is not predestined. We create it with our choices. And the most important choice we can make is both terribly simple and terribly hard: to actually live what the Church teaches, to win the hearts of others by our witness, and to renew the soul of our country with the courage of our own Christian faith and integrity. There is no more revolutionary act.

Charles J. Chaput is the archbishop of Denver.

[annalex]

I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:18)

[25] ...Christ [...] loved the church, and delivered himself up for it: [26] That he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of water in the word of life: [27] That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any; such thing; but that it should be holy, and without blemish. (Eph 5)

Holy Ghost hath placed you bishops, to rule the church of God (Acts 20:28)

You should read the Bible every now and then. That will make you Catholic.

[annalex]

Have you ever heard of the parable of the talents? Christ says increase is good because with it we help our fellow man.

Most patristic scholars understood the talents in the parable as the gift of faith and similar virtues, not as material wealth. This is not how the Presbyterians understand it? No surprise then you speak like you never heard the Gospel.

JEROME; Calling together the Apostles, He gave them the Gospel doctrine, to one more, to another less, not as of His own bounty or scanting, but as meeting the capacity of the receivers, as the Apostle says, that he fed with milk those that were unable to take solid food. In the five, two, and one talent, we recognize the diversity of gifts wherewith we have been entrusted.

Catena Aurea Matthew 25

If you use your increase for charity then it is good. If you build a three car garage, and listen to Joel Olsteen on tape, like your regular fat American, then such "increase" does you damage.

go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow me. [22] And when the young man had heard this word, he went away sad: for he had great possessions. [23] Then Jesus said to his disciples: Amen, I say to you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. [24] And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19)

A good Christian does not boast of of his prosperity.

[RnMomof7]

Catholics comprise only 24% of the US population. Slightly more than half of them vote Democrat. The plain and simple math is that far more Protestants voted for a Protestant Obama than did Catholics.

Now you have no way of knowing that do you? Catholic lump all non Catholics together as Protestants.. We look at the saved vs the unsaved, not denominations

[RnMomof7]

Protestant countries like Zimbabwe, Congo, Malawi, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Rawanda, Swaziland, and Tuvala?

A child can see through this answer..

[RnMomof7]

What or FRoman Catholic FRiends always seem to forget is that Calvin was trained as a Catholic priest. Nothing to see here really. He was a Reformer but every once in a while he reverted to his training.

I think this is an important point GC

Both Luther and Calvin had a Catholic history ...so we often see some of Rome in their thought.

[RnMomof7]

I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:18)

Well first you have to PROVE Rome is HIS church .

Now that is hard to do because scripture has no role for priest, or pope, and has not teachings of apostolic succession.. so it would seem the new testament church was far more like my church on a Sunday than a Roman church.

Second we need to look at what was meant by the quote you gave

GATES are not an OFFENSIVE weapon, one puts up GATES to keep people OUT . You do not bring gates to FIGHT a battle, you put up gated TO KEEP THE WAR OUTSIDE YOUR PROPERTY.

This verse means that believers will storm Hell with the real weapons of our warfare

2Cr 10:4 (For the weapons of our warfare [are] not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds 1) a castle, stronghold, fortress, fastness
2) anything on which one relies
2Cr 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

The elect / the saved are to storm the gates of hell with the weapons that God has given us AND WE WILL PREVAIL

Eph 6:13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
Eph 6:14 Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
Eph 6:15 And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
Eph 6:16 Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. Eph 6:17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:

[metmom]

Now you have no way of knowing that do you?

What a wet blanket you are. You know that some people never let facts get in the way of a good agenda. You just had to go and spoil it, didn't you?

[wagglebee]

Now you have no way of knowing that do you? Catholic lump all non Catholics together as Protestants.. We look at the saved vs the unsaved, not denominations

Then would the Catholics who DID NOT vote for Obama be saved or unsaved? And what of the Protestants who DID vote for Obama, are they saved?

[bkaycee]

You should read the Bible every now and then. That will make you Catholic.

Funny, when I read the Bible, It convinced me to stop being Catholic.

John 6:28 Then they asked him, "What must we do to do the works God requires?" 29 Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent."

[wagglebee]

Funny, when I read the Bible, It convinced me to stop being Catholic.

John 6:28 Then they asked him, "What must we do to do the works God requires?" 29 Jesus answered, "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent."

Odd since much of Protestantism is based on IGNORING the Discourse on the Bread of Life.

Our Lord even speaks of those who leave His Church:

After this many of his disciples went back; and walked no more with him. (John 6:67)

[Quix]

That will make you [Roman] Catholic.

[Jaded]

Don’t see too much of that on FR.

[Mad Dawg]

So sad.

In the Aenead there were half carrion bird half maiden creatures who would descend on a feast, devour part of it and foul the rest with their droppings.

Here we have a thoughtful piece on the place of religion generally and Catholicism specifically in America. Chaput, despite my disagreement with him about illegal immigrants, is one of the leading intellectuals in the American Catholic episcopate.

But almost before the pixels are dry on your post in come the winged shrieking creatures to foul the conversation to wrench it away from the OP and direct it into how Catholics ruined the American movie industry for crying out loud.

This is not debate. This is not discussion. This is an exercise in sociopathy and psychoneurosis, a living parable of the deadly effects of the capital sin of wrath.

I dare say the antis in their game of whack-a-mole think they are accomplishing something. And in fact they are. Day by day they make me ever more delighted to have shaken their dust off my feet, ever more grateful to have been pulled from the wreck and brought safely into the ark.

Future America is either Catholic or barbaric.

One need look no further than this thread to see how true that is.

[count-your-change]

Just at a glance, The Congo is about 50% Catholic with the rest being native and Protestant religions.
Rwanda (bloody Rwanda) is majority Catholic,
Zimbabwe has religions that try to mix native belief and traditional Christianity as the majority.
Malawi has Catholics and Presbyterians as the majority religion. Malawi also has a history or religious persecution.

Anyway, that's enough to show whoever made that list doesn’t know what they're talking about.

(Some of the information came from CIA Factbook on each country.)

[Natural Law]

"Now you have no way of knowing that do you?"

Mind reading again?

[Natural Law]

"A child can see through this answer.."

Then get a child to explain it to you because it is as fair a comparison as your suggestion that underdeveloped Catholic countries are the fault of the Church.

The truth is that largely Protestant sub-saharan Africa is the most destitute and hopeless place on the planet. Like Latin America and the Philippines, that is not the fault of any religion.

[wagglebee]

So, which method of execution do you favor for heretics? Burning at the stake, or maybe the rack? Probably the stake based on the Scripture verse you posted.....

The Catholic church's track record on Inquisitions is not one anyone should wish for.

Funny the difference between Protestantism and Catholicism.

Really, why don't you explain this "difference"?

Can you cite specific cases from similar eras where Catholics and Protestants treated heretics differently?

Perhaps you would like to discuss the case of Michael Servetus. He was found guilty in abstentia of heresy by the Catholics in France based on the letters sent to them by John Calvin and sentenced to death. However, Servetus had escaped to Geneva, where he was tried by the Protestants, again sentenced to death based on letters written by Calvin and burned at the stake.

The TRUTH is that torture and execution of heretics was ACCEPTED by both Catholics and Protestants until at least the 17th century.

Catholics call for the heavy hand of Rome to crack down on people and force them into line.

Oh and what do Protestants prefer be done with heretics? When some Protestant suggests that Jesus Christ was nothing more than a "good man" whose teachings about things like sex are "outmoded" is the Protestant a heretic or just someone to sing an extra verse of "Kumbaya" for?

[bkaycee]

Odd since much of Protestantism is based on IGNORING the Discourse on the Bread of Life.

Certainly, as born again Christians, we are very much at home in John 6. We understand the metaphor, not the extreme wooden literal meaing.

John 6:40For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day."

63The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit. and they are life.

[wagglebee]

Certainly, as born again Christians, we are very much at home in John 6. We understand the metaphor, not the extreme wooden literal meaning.

I apologize, I can never seem to remember that "sola scriptura" is supplanted by metaphor when Catholics read it a certain way.

I do need to ask though, what about the many millions of Protestants whose belief in the Real Presence is nearly indistinguishable from Catholic beliefs? Are they not "born again" enough for you?

As far as the other butchered verses from John 6, of course flesh alone is nothing, it must have the Spirit, that's why He said it is Spirit AND Life.

[27] Therefore whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord. [28] But let a man prove himself: and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice. [29] For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord.
-- 1 Corinthians 11:27-29

Perhaps you would like to explain how a person can unworthily participate in a "metaphor"? How can a person be guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord for not discerning a "metaphor"?

[Natural Law]

"The TRUTH is that torture and execution of heretics was ACCEPTED by both Catholics and Protestants until at least the 17th century."

There is a tendency for all to judge the historical world through a 21st century lens and be shocked and revolted. The fact is that life was brief and brutal for all.

The fact is that capital punishment was a nearly universal punishment for all crimes. Heresy was treated as the most heinous of crimes by Protestant and Catholic alike. If one could be executed for taking ones purse or life, how much greater the punishment for the taking of ones soul.

Outside of the Catholic Church mercy was a rare commodity. The prevailing thought was that animals deserved deserved no mercy because they lacked a soul. Those who had willingly forfeited their soul had willingly assumed the status of animals. Fair and just by modern standards? No, but those weren't modern times or people.