Review: MSW on Christ and Culture

A step back to look at 'Christ and Culture' for a week Part 1: Christ against culture
We must remember that Christianity has its own culture. All sects are a cultural. The challenge for the individual Catholic is to be counter-cultural WITHIN the Church. We must be dependent on Jesus, not the bishops, especially when they behave abhorently toward women, gays and people who do not think of sex as an evil to be overcome. It takes a solid relationship to Christ to speak against them.

Christ-of-culture thinking presents a too-tidy view of Christianity
Christianity is expert at cultural dominance. Indeed, by coopting existing custom, it has become the popular culture. It's leaders have consistently sought the convenience of using the state as an instrument of conversion. Too often, and even into the middle of the 20th Century, the Church was a leader in cultural censorship. Some sects are still as instrumental in organized racism as most were before the Civil Rights movement.

This rewards economic interests rather than bringing the Kingdom of God about, not the ethereal next-world, but for justice within this one. The Catholic Worker Christ is not at one with the bishops. It rejects the feudal arrangements that kept the serfs in line. This hearkens to the prophets and is inconvenient to the dominant culture.

Jesus of the poor is also Jesus of the sinner rather than Jesus the cultural enforcer. Jesus came not to discipline the sinners but to identify with their pain. This does not serve those who want to impose cultural hegemony.

Synthesists are one of three 'church parties' for Niebuhr, with Christ above culture
Thinking that there will never again be an Aquinas us a lapse into nostalgia.  The Distributists also pine for the 13th Century. That Century also laid the ground for the emergence of Protestantism and later, the Enlightenment.  Remember that Niebuhr was not Catholic. Indeed, Pius X would have called him a modernist. The Church is a community for Christ, but it is not Christ.

Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ as transformer of culture
Paul was expecting the imminent return of the Kingdom, as did Luther, as did many of the Catholics and Protestants in the 20th Century. I used to be one of them. The irony of Luther is that he was an Augustinian Friar. Either he or his spiritual director did not understand the purpose of his spiritual labors as a monk - they are to convert the comfortable to an attitude of dependence on God. Those of us with addictions and afflictions need no such discipline - life has done it for us.

Paul, Luther, et al are more Christ as codependent. It is the Christianity that has to go to confession every week and confess all mortal sins lest they be damned - who must go to Church every week for the same reason. It is the culture of the self-absorbed. They are easy to find in the Church. They are the one's who think Vertitatis Splendor is infallible and Amoris Latetia is heresy.

Augustine was culture over Christ. His view of sexuality came from Hellenism, not scripture, and perverted the Genesis myth into permanent work for the Church in fighting sexuality, adopting the asexual ideal as the highest form of love, rather than the province of those who others call odd ducks. Glorifying asexuality with immaturity (maturely developed asexuality is a charism, as are maturely developed heterosexuality and homosexuality) fuel our abuse crisis. It is ours because we have left our thinking to Synthesizers.

The Trads who also reject Vatican II believe the theory of evolution must be wrong because it is not consistent with the Genesis myth. The reality is that the Eden story is an allegory on blame. We disobey God not in seeking a conscience in violation of some purported innocence, but because we seek knowledge of the evil of others. God cannot look upon evil - that is the moral code of the Paradoxers. The reality is that God does not see it in us. He sees only what is in Him - our Good. His desire for us is that we look at ourselves and others in the same way. Only when we refuse to forgive (or accept) ourselves and others that problems occur.

Niebuhr left out a possibility that likely did not occur to him (unless it is in the conclusion) - Christ below culture. By Christ, I mean us. Instead of trying to dictate culture, escape it or conform to it, we give it an example by loving both each other and those who oppose us. If we do speak up, it is in defense of those that Christ defended - the poor and the outcast. This is the Christ who truly shares our humanity. Indeed, the purpose of Christ was for all of the Trinity to do so (they go everywhere together).

A God of Love is also a God of Humility. This is more fearful than a God of Power and Awe. This God demands the same of us. God does not worry for Themselves. They are without fear of how all will turn out. To them it is a whole and it is Good. They did not create the world for their own glory because Their Glory, Happiness, Being, Beauty, Love and Knowledge is perfect in Themselves. They have nothing to prove. Ever. That we wish them to is a reflection on us, not God. God is meek and humble of Heart, His yoke is easy and His burden light. Christ in and below culture is about its conversion, but it is to perfect our humanity - not as we hope it to be but as it was created as good.

What that "it" is should be the focus of our ethics. This is where Jesus meets Jeremy Bentham, except that it is not the greatest good for the greatest number but providing good to all. This is not the cop out of Christ in culture. Working for human dignity for all is much more of a challenge than focusing on the state of one's soul.

In our day, in the US, we are all Christ-of-culture accommodationists
I am fairly sure that there are few accomodationists. That would be progress, but I am getting ahead of myself. Niebuhr's description of culture is excellent, though out of date. When he was giving his lectures, Mary Douglass was writing and releasing Purity and Danger, which was the tip of the spear in the Cultural Theory movement she later shared with the great Aaron Wildavsky (from whom I learned it). Later works were her work Leviticus as Literature and Elaine Pagels more recent tome Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation. Any understanding of Christianity or culture is incomplete without reference to this overall theory. Also necessary are familiarity with Daniel's Dennett's Breaking the Spell, which treats God as meme and is similar to Hegel's theodicy (which is about the meme rather than the experience of God). Perspective can also be added with Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First 3000 Years, including his account of Vatican II and St. John Paul's part in it. There is quite a bit of further reading to do on this topic.

Probably the most influential spiritual author of that era, who riffs off of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience (whom Niebuhr mentions and who uses his brother's famous Serenity Prayer) is Bill Wilson. He is the Aquinas of this era and is essentially a philosophical pantheist (as is the recovery movement - the real source of spiritual but not religious). Ironically, his work is based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, which he learned from Rev. Sam Sheppard and more thoroughly from his spiritual mentor, Fr. Ed Dowling, S.J. Bill considered conversion to Catholicism, but felt it would disrupt AA if he had done so.

Understanding all of these (some of which are still on my reading list) explains how we got to where we are, in union with Christ and Culture. Niebuhr is a good Calvinist, which stresses as much as Catholicism, the sovereign prerogatives of God. Doing so only gets one so far. As I wrote yesterday (above), Christ comes below culture at his best. It is the only place real conversion can come from. The irony is that a God who is not humble is not worth worshiping because such a God is flawed by an agenda for Its (or Their) own sake. It is precisely where the Church needs to come from for a revival to occur.

Going back to the current state of the Church, Christ In Culture would be an improvement. The reality is that the St. John Paul clergy (especially the bishops) have lapsed into Christ Against Culture, reacting to the loss of Christ Above Culture in all of its forms. The hegemony of the 1950s was a brief golden age. It was not ghetto. It tried to put progress into a ghetto they called Modernism. The evolution of culture and Vatican II simply fought back.

The period of St. Pius X and its revival under St. John Paul stressed the Culture of Paradox where everyone was pressured to go to Mass on a weekly basis, rather than transform their inner life. As Dennett noticed, a belief in the belief in God was more common than actual faith. It always is. The culture of frequent (if not weekly) confession of all (natural) thoughts sexual could not continue. Humanae Vitae was its natural boiling point and it is where many got off, even if they continued to attend Mass. Instead of attacking the economic conditions which cause the use of birth control, the Church stressed sexuality as the cause at its own peril. The combination of this reaction to Augustine's asexual ideal and the lack of cultural pressure to look Catholic has led to the rise of the Nones. A culture of accommodation would at least have people in the door. That would imply actually caring about the life of the Church.

As luck would have it, Bernie Sanders is running for President and some of his campaign is tinged with thuggery (which in recent days has received attention in their treatment of Senator Warren). The entire movement is tainted by what can politely be called attitude or more accurately, a persecution complex rivaling Russia after the Great Patriotic War or Germany after the Treaty of Versailles. The Millennial generation has a point. There privileged upbringing has not prepared them for the vicissitudes of capitalism, which are not fair - especially to them. Their reaction to these are natural and explainable, but do not bode well for our future. They seem to be copying the College Republican alumni in the GOP blow for blow in nastiness. I hope that there is a silent majority to overcome both toxic strains.

This is where the Church could come in. If we were smart, we would buy and forgive their student loans and make Catholic college free. We would be more vocal about the rights to families to a living wage, both a higher minimum and a much higher Child Tax Credit (each should be tripled) and should set an example by offering these benefits to employees. It should also lay off the sour grapes over gay marriage, quit firing gay employees who marry - indeed, it should celebrate their unions with a Mass. This is where the humility of God comes into play. As a Church, we are not really following Christ down that path. Also, ordain women and abandon the toxic misogyny of Hellenism that has plagued the Church since St. Augustine. We must take the initiative in converting the culture by first converting the Church. Calling for this takes the courage that only comes through Grace.

Catholics in politics, including and especially our Catholic politicians, need to be open to the courage to call for conversion by the Church. While it was perfectly fitting to rest on Digntatis Humanae and its stress on freedom on conscience in society in justifying not imposing criminal penalties for abortion, the path of courage is to explain publicly and privately why the social decisions from Roe v. Wade to Webster v. Texas and Perry v. Brown were rightly decided. Indeed, Dignitatis would allow no other option. The majority cannot impose its moral preferences on individuals or classes of individuals. Further, the law is not a social statement - it is the use of violence by the state to enforce its wishes. A better use of such violence would be the above steps to use tax policy to provide for the economic well-being of families. The Right to Life's resistance to such solutions must be called out - and the Church with it. Doing so would involve not rebellion against the Church or accommodation to culture, but the kind of loving correction oft practiced by the Christ of Scripture, Sacrament and Encounter.