Faith here and now

Chesterton called America “a nation with the soul of a church.” He was largely right. Not all Americans buy into the whole of our national creed, but it’s real, and it dominates public life.

It can also be at odds with the public good and the Faith.

One part of that creed that has become ever more demanding is equal access to careers, wealth, and choice of lifestyle. That demand is sometimes slighted, like other ideals, but it is basic to respectable mainstream thought, and ever more concerns—traditional social and moral standards, and often even safety and practicality—have to give way to it.

One reason for its growing centrality is ideological: it affirms that a system more and more run by bureaucrats and billionaires, and motivated by the pursuit of power, position, and money, can nonetheless be just.

Indeed, that system now claims to be the only just system. Others either don’t work, such as socialism, or involve discriminations now considered intolerable, like systems based on conceptions of the human good or on ties of religion, culture, or nationality. That leaves, as the one allowable choice, something like the EU made global.

Other reasons combine the personal and the philosophical. The weakening of traditional and informal ties means that career, wealth, and chosen lifestyle have come to define who people are, so pursuing them seems to be their most serious concern. That view gives rise to a moral principle: since such things now seem central to human life, equal dignity demands equal access to them.

Influential voices within the Church also accept equality regarding career, economic well-being, and lifestyle as an overriding ideal. Many voices have been calling for nonjudgmental accompaniment of nontraditional lifestyles. Meanwhile, pronouncements of the Synod on Synodality seem to view current problems regarding the relation between the sexes as mostly a matter of insufficient career opportunities for women.

The situation is worth some thought. Jesus Christ constantly warned about the spiritual dangers of riches: they are a snare and a distraction. The same evidently applies to careers, since the pursuit of a career is at least as likely as possession of wealth to become a distraction from better things. And Christ’s call to take up our cross and follow him doesn’t sit well with an ideal of open-ended lifestyle choice.

So some of our most admired ideals spring from the assumption that career, wealth, and choice, in general, are our highest social concern, and their equal availability trumps concerns regarding human well-being and a good life in community.

That state of affairs seems to be one reason many Christian leaders have turned against American society. That is especially true of those most aligned with mainstream public thought—Christian progressives. Given the spiritual nullity of the social ideals these leaders accept as authoritative, why would the continuing existence of any particular society matter?

For many, it doesn’t. Hence, the current attitude of respectable religious people toward immigration. Migration should be free, and to the extent limitations may theoretically be permissible, they generally shouldn’t be enforced. Such policies would merge distinctive societies into a uniform global bureaucratic and economic order. Few progressives have a serious problem with that.

But what then?

Progressives don’t really like the social order they are promoting. It is an extreme case of the materialistic bourgeois society they have been rebelling against for centuries. Even so, they basically accept the view behind it, that at bottom life is about getting our own way. The consequence is that their rebellion defeats itself.

The more politically minded among them think wealth and power need to be divided more equally. For some reason, they think this will usher in a Golden Age. But there are limits to how far that effort makes sense, since it is impossible to enforce equality without the enforcer making himself superior.

Those who have tried to break away from such views, like the hippies of the ’60s, have made creativity and open-ended personal freedom their goals. But that never seems to lead anywhere except boredom, dissipation, and eventually a renewed pursuit of the wealth, power, and position that enable their holders to do as they please.

What to do for progressive spiritual leaders, for whom transcendent faith—God as the eternal and unchanging source, goal, and standard—has given way, as their prime focus, to secular social goals that always lead to disillusionment?

The obvious response is romanticism: in some distant time or place, things are or will be re-enchanted. Today, that impulse usually takes the form of a theology of liberation that idealizes the marginalized. They are the true protagonists of the Gospel, their liberation the meaning of salvation.

But that solution will also lead to disillusionment. Marginalized people—whatever good qualities and even sanctity some display—are usually no more holy than the rest of us, and there is nothing especially romantic about their lives and struggles. Also, the most effective way to reduce acute poverty, the greatest source of marginalization, has been globalization, which means global disenchantment through the reproduction of the current Western economic model everywhere.

Beyond that, comprehensive attempts to end marginalization under ever-expanding concepts of “equal rights” have involved suppression of the standards that define it through comprehensive bureaucratic regulation. But the attempt to replace social and cultural standards like those relating to sex (even if they sometimes lead to abuses) with bureaucratic ones is dehumanizing. Normal human relations cannot survive, for example, constant policing of “microaggressions” that include suggestions that men and women are different.

We should treat people as well as we can, and when possible, help them. But these are very practical matters that often involve serious difficulties. After all, people live their own lives in their own way, with whatever consequences may follow. And general attempts to eliminate those consequences—for example, by eliminating punishment for crime—disrupt the normal and legitimate ways society functions.

The difficulties become especially great when we do not know or understand the people and situations in question. Intervention may sometimes seem necessary, but caution is needed, and most people should stick to what they know or can readily find out about rather than putting what is far away at the center of their moral concerns.

The question then remains: how should we live as Catholics here and now among the people with whom we find ourselves?

A good question! Christ says, “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

So we are enjoined to give away everything and then do whatever following Christ may demand.

But as Christ noted, “which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion?” Most people, who don’t feel up to vows of poverty, devote themselves mainly to the ordinary affairs of life. And that seems necessary: without ordinary people doing ordinary things for ordinary reasons, the human world would fall apart.

Hence, the need for a universal call to holiness that also applies to people leading everyday lives. But it is very difficult to answer or even hear that call in a society that insistently inculcates ideals that point away from it. We can try to change those ideals, but it’s slow going, and in the meantime, we’re surrounded and affected by them. That’s why many Christians escape into dreams of faraway people and places.

But Christ also tells us that “all things are possible for God.” The context makes it clear that he means to include the salvation of unheroic people. Zacchaeus, who did a great deal by usual standards but evidently remained a rich man, may provide an example. But, as always, salvation is a mystery.

Christ asked: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” We don’t know whether He will, so it seems we cannot rely on our own faith any more than our actions.

We should do whatever good we can manage, but whatever we do will inevitably fall short. Our hope must always be in God’s mercy.