Literacy versus Immersivity
The problem with Catholics is that they are bad Catholics; the problem with Protestants is that they are also bad Catholics. But perhaps they do not consider themselves Protestant anymore. Perhaps the word is an anachronism; perhaps the word is a slur. Protestantism rose with the printing press and fell with immersivity. It inhabited one specific form of literacy: in a world where people can no longer read—with attention and depth—you can only have post-Protestants. That there are Christianities focused again on a single form of literacy does not make them Protestant, if the single form is different. It does not make them Catholic either, of course—that is, it makes them bad Catholics.
Ross McCullough, The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster.
Some explanation is in order. This quote is not — at least not directly — a diagnosis of our present situation, because the book is fiction, set in a dystopian future. (See the book notes at Bookshop.org for more detail.)
That said, the idea that “Protestantism rose with the printing press and fell with immersivity” is striking (it was new to me at least) even if the “immersivity” referred to is beyond our current Virtual Reality headsets. It also meshes with Brad East’s provocative suggestion that Evangelicalism is not Protestant:
Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.
The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.
To my mind, what McCullough adds to East is the causality by which Protestantism disappeared: the neglect of reading and the valorization of spectacle and feeling — media literacy over print literacy.
Pernicious delusion
Buddhism, like hesychasm, begins with the search for inner stillness, which it sees as a necessary precursor to understanding the delusions we tend to call ‘reality.’ This is entirely in accordance with Christian teaching, and indeed with modern understandings of human psychology.
The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as we all do with our stories in the end.
Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both.
Whether we are writers or not, we create these personal fictions we call ‘identities’, and the older we get, the harder it is for that simple, primal stillness which is the precursor to true prayer to break back through. Back when I practiced Buddhism, I remember seeing with crystal clarity, at a level far deeper than the intellect, that if I wanted to progress spiritually I had to stop pumping out all these words. This was not because language itself was inherently bad – it is hardly avoidable – but because of something at once fuzzier and clearer, which even now I find it hard to explain. It was that words were part of the fiction of the world. It was so clear then – and it remains clear now – that spiritual progress, that work of theosis, requires us to drop all of our illusions. To smash through the cement of words and concepts and identities and opinions. To see ourselves naked before God. To make ourselves simple again.
Paul Kingsnorth, In the Desert of the Heart.
Where are our spoils?
Speaking of the retreat of print literacy, above, I’m reading Mark A. Noll’s classic book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
I tried to read it a few years ago and quit about 20% into it because I felt like a voyeur, peeking in on a family’s internal quarrel (and maybe feeling a bit of schadenfreude as I did). I’ve come back to it now because my interest now is less salacious and more about how it came to pass that the dominant American Christian tradition of my adult lifetime has so little interest in cultivating excellence in scholarship, the sciences and other “mind” activities, even as it exults in big-name athletes, actors and musicians (exemplars of excellence in their fields) who profess evangelical Christian faith.
That “scandal” ramifies: there are no evangelical Nobel Laureates, no evangelical Supreme Court Justices, and, as Noll put it, “not a single evangelical periodical in the United States or Canada that exists for the purpose of seriously considering the worlds of nature, society, politics, or the arts in the way that the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, or the Washington Post’s National Weekly Edition do for the general public.”
Again, from Noll’s “indictment”:
What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism.
Nevertheless, I have now seen a call for a kind of affirmative action in the worst sense:
Evangelicals are 23 percent of U.S. adults and one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs, with 81 percent backing Donald Trump in 2024. Yet despite six of the nine Supreme Court justices being appointed by Republican presidents, there are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court.
Aaron M. Renn, Evangelical Christians help the Supreme Court and elite institutions.
If you don’t earn it, maybe you can just demand it, as in We’re big and we helped elect you: where are our spoils?
Affirmative action for Evangelicals! The horseshoe theory of politics lives!
(The Washington Post has several letters to the editor noting the irony as well.) This was not Aaron Renn’s finest hour.
Not unrelated to DEI for Evangelicals
The religious right of a previous era really was trying to bring biblically based convictions into the political realm, with the aim of moving the latter into greater conformity with the former. Today, by contrast, “biblically based convictions” have been replaced, among many voters who would normally be defined as members of the religious right, by blatantly partisan convictions that are given a theological gloss.
Damon Linker’s hypothesis about the religious right. Beware, especially, the latter kind of “biblically based convictions.”
Wary of Contentment
A friend of mine was ordained to the Diaconate in the Orthodox Church last Sunday. He’ll probably become a Priest in a few more years.
The burdens of the Priesthood are great, even apart from a shortage of Priests. The foremost burden is that Priests (and Bishops) must one day answer to God for their parishioners as well as for themselves.
[I]f we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation and pastoral service, we have learned to beware, and to be wary, of all contentment, consolation and comfort before our co-crucifixion in love with Christ. We have learned that though we can know about God through formal theological education, we can only come to know God by taking up our daily crosses with patient endurance in love with Jesus. And we can only do this by faith and grace through the Holy Spirit’s abiding power.
The late Fr. Thomas Hopko, 2007, via Fr. Stephen Freeman.
As the current national government explicitly exults in its lethality, I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 