(5:19 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Mmm... pluralism...

[Note: This post turned out to be a lot longer than I intended. Still, I hate deleting anything I've written, so I'll let it stand.]

In a somewhat bizarre move, Richard's dad gave him The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism by D. A. Carson as some light honeymoon reading.

I browsed through the book, mainly by looking through the rather intimidating index of names and finding out what he thinks of people I like. My favorite was Carson's "take-down" of Hans Urs von Balthasar: he quotes something pluralistic from HUVB, then states that supports his position with the longest list of startlingly misinterpreted and decontextualized scripture quotations that Carson had ever seen. Since HUVB is probably in the top five among the most important theologians of last century, and was regarded during his lifetime as the most learned man alive, I'm somewhat skeptical about the idea that he just plain got it wrong. Maybe he did, though -- I may never know, since Carson doesn't provide this "worst ever" example.

It's also fun when he brings out a kind of "pop-Foucault" idea ("all discourse is determined by power"), then turns it against Foucault in order to argue that we shouldn't trust Foucault, either. He goes down the slippery slope far enough to dismiss Foucault, but not far enough to distrust himself -- and if there was ever a discourse that presented itself as advocacy of pure truth while really being about assembling greater political power, it certainly must be contemporary evangelical Christianity. We're forever told that we must defend the truth, but then the truth turns out to be such a small thing -- wives, submit to your husbands; teachers, make the children pray in school; fags, at least try to be a little more discrete; don't burn the flag; don't get an abortion; don't have sex unless absolutely necessary; don't drink or smoke; stop asking so many questions.... God is apparently so fragile that he must be defended by every conceivable strawman argument, and he is apparently so powerless that people will forget about him entirely unless schoolchildren are made to recite his name every day while pledging allegiance to a nationalistic emblem. (Please note that I am not directly attacking Carson here, since I didn't read more than ten pages out of his big thick book -- it may well be that he has a more nuanced and authentically Christian view of postmodernism/pluralism than most evangelical apologists.)

Anti-postmodern polemic is yet another example of the inhospitality of contemporary evangelicalism. We can see it elsewhere in Cal Thomas's criticism of Howard Dean, a Christian, for having a Jewish wife and for allowing his children to be raised as Jews and for generally being the wrong kind of Christian:

What exactly does Dean believe about Jesus, and how is it relevant to his presidential candidacy?

"Christ was someone who sought out people who were disenfranchised," he told the Globe, "people who were left behind." Dean makes it sound as if Jesus might have been a Democrat.

"He fought against self-righteousness of people who had everything," the candidate continued. "He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2,000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it."

Not really. If that is all Jesus was (or is), then he is just another entry in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, to be read or not, according to one's inspirational need.

C.S. Lewis brilliantly dealt with this watered-down view of Jesus and what he did in the book Mere Christianity.

Said Lewis, who thought about such things at a far deeper level than Dean: "I'm trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I can't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God -- or else a madman or something worse."

Yet Cal Thomas had just quoted Dean as saying he was "committed believer in Jesus Christ." In the other quotes, Dean seems to be drawing some practical applications of that belief, and it is strange that Thomas would be so disdainful of the idea of standing up for the outcast and downtrodden. This comment, quoted by Atrios, is right on:

This is why some Dems feel like they have to stay distant from religion when they campaign. It's not because they don't have strong faith, it's that no matter what they do, it will never be the right way to hold that faith. They end up looking weak and worse, anti-God when they get sucked into that lose/lose argument.

Being a "Christian" is about belonging to a particular culture in the evangelical mindset -- a culture where people are patriotic Republicans who don't indulge in smoking, drinking, adultery, carpet-munchery, or buggery. Literally nothing else matters, not whether someone spreads lies and/or misinformation that lead to a war, not whether policies are enacted that enrich a few while leading to suffering for many, nothing. It is an entirely obscurantist discourse, where the name Jesus is functionally meaningless, except as a shorthand for a particular arbitrary program -- a program that can never be questioned or analyzed, since it is lifted to the dignity of a divine mandate. This is exactly the kind of Christianity that Nietzche dismissed as nihilistic -- no matter how many people's lives it helps to "hold together," no matter how many people manage to somehow use this belief structure to pull themselves out of a genuinely damaging situation (as when George W. Bush used evangelical Christianity to overcome alcoholism), it is still incredibly destructive.

I know and love many good people who are caught up in that culture, and I know that several of them are trying to reform it. Perhaps if I had more faith, I would believe that God can work, even in evangelical Christianity. As it stands, though, I cannot be personally involved in it -- I would be too ashamed. I know that the Catholic Church has a lot to be ashamed of as well, but the same Counter-Reformation that produced a narrow, dogmatic theology also produced a real impetus toward working to make a difference for the poor and downtrodden. The same Catholic Church that is so unwelcoming of women in certain ministry positions and shows such a profound inflexibility on matters of sexual expression is also completely comfortable with ministering to people who will never become Catholic, both in the Third World and in the ghettos of the First World.

When the Protestants got tangled up in a million theological disputes about the meaning of the Eucharist or the precise process by which one is justified by faith, and created ever more divisions, the Catholics decided to start getting shit done. Although Catholic leaders can be every bit as obscurantist, nihilistic, and power-hungry as Protestant leaders, at least the infrastructure for genuinely transformative action in the world exists and is taken to be self-evidently worthwhile in the Catholic Church -- there is no question that one should help the poor or that large-scale charity operations must exist. In evangelical circles, that is still a debate -- there is still a genuine fucking debate about whether we as Christians should be all that concerned about the poor, rather than about getting people to join up in a certain culture and mouth certain words.

In the Catholic Church, there is still room for the insane old lady who doesn't pay any attention and just prays the rosary over and over while looking at old photos -- is there room for a person like that in a mega-church? Is there really room for that person? Does the presider in a contemporary evangelical church really go out of his or her way to serve the disabled and the elderly? Or are we all supposed to be self-sufficient productive people, fully capable of serving ourselves out of our own little personal glass of grape juice and having the exact right thoughts in our head when we do? Is it not the case that the evangelical "seeker-sensitive" service expresses a genuine intolerance of the continued existence of non-Christians, so that every guest must be shoehorned into the evangelical subculture as soon as possible?

This is old ground that I've been over again and again. Call it an update of my old, somewhat obscurantist essay about why I'm still Catholic. To condense my thesis: in the Catholic Church, there are many people who are actively, obviously living the gospel in a very radical way, these people are held up as examples, and strong institutions exist to support and encourage their work. A lot of bullshit happens alongside that, but the continued existence of genuine saints and the continued exhortation to genuine sainthood seem to me to make it all worth it.

(Let it be said that there is now an evangelical-style Catholic movement in the United States and elsewhere, with a heavy emphasis on apologetics, tracts, and "deep personal commitments," complete with its own version of revival speakers and its own methods of looking down on "nominal Catholics" who don't believe hard enough. I strongly reject this movement, even though a website and book produced by that movement were decisive in convincing me that I needed to join the Catholic Church. It's as though I could only make my way in by convincing myself that it was just like evangelicalism, then found out that it was basically nothing like evangelicalism, and then found that that was the only thing that could keep me in.)

(Also, let it be noted that I deserve credit for coining the term carpet-munchery.)

| permalink | Main Page