Christian America
One of the reasons I have long been hostile toward the idea of Christianizing America is that the variety of Christianity that would be in instantiated would be what Ross Douthat has called “Bad Religion” in a book subtitled “How We Became a Nation of Heretics.” I don’t trust power-hungry American heretics to treat Orthodox Christian better than secularist progressives would.
That concern has only grown
- the more deeply I am shaped as an Orthodox Christian (and see how that differs from mainstream American Christianities), and
- the more particularly sinister figures like Lance Wallnau appear to be leading Christian Nationalism.
These are not C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christians.” They are ideologues with plans for how to get power and how to (mis)use it once they have it.
Of course they’re not alone. Other groups seek power for illiberal ends, too. (To the best of my knowledge, none are Orthodox Christian and I would be surprised if they were.)
I don’t toss and turn in agony over these groups, but it leaves me in the camp of liberal democrats, and if you think “liberal democrats” means I’m a crazy lefty, you’re part of the problem. (Relative to today’s political spectrum, I think I’m positioned center-right because of deal-killer differences with those to my left.)
Alas, the hopes for liberal democracy do seem dim, and I pray daily “If this is the end of liberal democracy in America, guide us into a beneficial different path ….” I also thank God for my “living in a civilization where beliefs, texts, symbols, and ethical standards of Christianity are still woven into our common life.”* All it takes to assure that continues, I think, is for people to live as Christians — no political program required.
* Many, including even notorious atheist Richard Dawkins, looking soberly at the cultural alternatives, now call themselves “cultural Christians.”
Something for rumination
Both Dostoevski and Tolstoi made me cling to a faith in God, and yet I could not endure feeling an alien in it. I felt that my faith had nothing in common with that of Christians around me.
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness.
[Here I typed my pedantic gloss, but then deleted it to let readers ruminate on their own.]
What a well-formed Catholic believes about Jews and Irael
The Catholic position on matters of ‘Zionism,’ to which I fully subscribe, is as follows: all forms of antisemitism are to be unequivocally condemned; the state of Israel has a right to exist; but the modern nation of Israel does not represent the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies and hence does not stand beyond criticism.
Bishop Robert Barron, admonishing antisemitic “Catholic Mean Girl” Carrie Prejean Boller who was delusionally claiming that her ouster from the White House Religious Liberty Commission was anti-Catholic.
Stirring things up at Yale
A few years after I left Calvinist Protestantism for Eastern Orthodoxy, the great Yale historian of religion, Jaroslav Pelikan, left Lutheranism for Orthodoxy. I mentioned it to a friend who had attended Yale in Grad School.
“Well, that will stir things up,” he opined.
Me: “Why? I had no idea that Yale still had some strong religious tradition to offend.”
Him: “It will stir things up because people won’t understand taking religion seriously enough to change it.”
I thought of that as a read sociologist Ryan Burge’s recent post Inertia Still Rules American Religion.
“Inertia” has bad connotations. I encourage everyone to take a good hard look at Orthodox Christianity, but I also tend to cast at least a little bit of side-eye at people who switch Churches. I cannot entirely reconcile that except for the possibility that I’m a censorious ass. But try as a might, somehow, there seems to me to be something not entirely unhealthy about not looking at the grass on the other side of the fence if you’re being nourished on your side. (Have I equivocated enough?) Anyway, if your teeth are on edge where you are, come take a look at us.
(My experience pre-Orthodoxy clashes a bit with Burge’s definitional “If someone moves from one type of Protestant to another type of Protestant, that’s not a switch.” When I left generic Evangelicalism for Calvinism, it felt like a switch. The change from Calvinist to Orthodox, of course, was orders of magnitude “switchier.”)
The Ark of Salvation
[I]t’s worth thinking about the Church (Orthodox) as an ark of salvation and safety. It is an ancient image of the Church, a place where God gathers those who are being rescued. The ark is not an instrument of flood management, however. It is a raft. Modernity imagines itself as the manager of the world and its historical processes. It is an idea that is itself part of the destructive flood of our time.
…
From onboard the ark, we view things a bit differently. First, we trust that God is the Lord of the tsunami just as surely as He is Lord of the sparrow and the lillies in the field. The mystery of how He works all things for our salvation is summarized in His crucifixion. Most of that mystery is simply opaque. It is a confession of faith that the Cross represents the interpretation of all things. It is what I learned on board the ark.
That being the case, it is for us to give thanks for all things, try to stay dry, and wait for the waters to recede.
Fr. Stephen Freeman, Riding the Tsunami of History
Gratuitous
Having adopted a method of investigation which in its nature precludes the perception of spiritual qualities, it is gratuitous, to say the least, to pronounce that the object one investigates is to be explained in non-spiritual categories alone.
Yet it is the conclusions achieved by this kind of [circular] reasoning which for the last 300 years or more have been regarded as constituting knowledge in a virtually exclusive sense and which moreover have been termed scientific.
Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature
“I don’t believe in anything,” answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. “I’m a man of science.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Absence of Mr. Glass, a Father Brown mystery.
Fleeing the world
As St. Paisios (1924–1994) put it, “The monk flees far from the world, not because he detests the world, but because he loves the world and in this way he is better able to help the world through his prayer, in things that don’t happen humanly but only through divine intervention. In this way God saves the world.”
Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Redicovering the Goodness of Creation
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 