Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

CHAPTER 1

RESIDENT ALIENS

We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, this world, where God has placed us, is our place of holiness.

—MADELEINE DELBRÊL

Christians have many good reasons for hope. Optimism is another matter. Optimism assumes that, sooner or later, things will naturally turn out for the better. Hope has no such illusions.

That sounds like an oddly nervous way to start a book about our life as Catholic Christians. After all, the Gospel is supposed to be good news, a message of joy. And so it clearly is. The Christian faith is expanding rapidly across the Southern Hemisphere. In Africa, 9 million converts enter the Catholic Church each year. By 2030, if current trends hold, China may have the largest Christian population in the world.¹

Even in France, once the eldest daughter of the Church and now the secular heart of an aging continent, signs of a living Church persist—small, implausible, but real. And in the United States, while many parishes are struggling to survive in the nation’s Rust Belt and eastern cities, many others in the South and West are thriving. The Church in America has an impressive number of movements and new communities energetically alive, and some extraordinary young leaders, both clergy and lay.

In other words, outside Europe, Christianity is very much alive and growing. And it’s not a passive faith. Jesus left us with a mandate to transform creation.

But doing that, of course, is easier said than done, even—or maybe especially—in a nation like the United States.

My goal when I wrote Living the Catholic Faith (2001) was simple. I wanted to help Catholics recover the basics of their faith so they could live it more fully. In Render Unto Caesar (2008, 2012) I wanted to help readers apply their religious and moral convictions more vigorously in the public square as good citizens. Looking back, I think much in both books remains useful. But if that’s so, why do a new book?

The reason is time. Time passes. Times change. Watersheds happen. In June 2015, in its Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states must license same-sex marriages and recognize similar marriages when lawfully performed out of state. The Court struck down the nation’s traditional understanding of marriage. That much was obvious. But in its effect, the Court actually went much further. It changed the meaning of family by wiping away the need for the natural relationships—husband and wife, mother and father—at the heart of these institutions.

With Obergefell, marriage and family no longer precede and limit the state as humanity’s basic social units grounded in nature. Instead, they now mean what the state says they mean. And that suggests deeper problems, because in redefining marriage and the family, the state implicitly claims the authority to define what is and isn’t properly human.

Buried in Obergefell is the premise that who we are, how we mate, and with whom we mate are purely matters of personal choice and social contract. Biology is raw material. Gender is fluid. Both are free of any larger truth that might limit our actions. And the consequences of that premise will impact every aspect of our shared political, economic, and social life.

Why so? Benedict XVI explained it simply and well: [The] question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself—about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human … When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child—essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.²

Obviously Obergefell is only one of many issues creating today’s sea change in American public life. But it confirmed in a uniquely forceful way that we live in a country very different from that of the past. The special voice that biblical belief once had in our public square is now absent. People who hold a classic understanding of sexuality, marriage, and family have gone in just twenty years from pillars of mainstream conviction to the media equivalent of racists and bigots.

So what do we do now?

Patriotism, rightly understood, is part of a genuinely Christian life. We’re creatures of place. The soil under our feet matters. Home matters. Communities matter. The sound and smell and taste of the world we know, and the beauty of it all, matter. As G. K. Chesterton would say, there’s something cheap and unworthy—and inhuman—in a heart that has no roots, that feels no love of country.

Thus, believers don’t have the luxury of despair. And the idea that we can retire to the safety of some modern version of a cave in the hills isn’t practical. Our task as Christians is to be healthy cells in society. We need to work as long as we can, in whatever way we can, to nourish the good in our country and to encourage the seeds of a renewal that can enliven our young people.

Americans learn from an early age that democracy is the gold standard of human governance. And its advantages are obvious. Every citizen has (in theory) an equal voice in the course of our nation’s affairs. But if America is (or was) exceptional, something unique in history, it’s not because this country is a New Jerusalem, or a redeemer nation, or has a messianic mission. Those things are vanities and delusions. When John Winthrop wrote his famous homily for Puritan colonists nearly four hundred years ago, the city upon a hill he imagined building in the New World was something genuinely new. It was the hope of a common life that had its foundations in humility, justice, mutual support, and the love of God.

That biblical vision has always helped shape the American story. The very idea of the person has religious origins. Even the concept of the individual—the building block of Western political life—has its early seeds in biblical faith.³ America has always been a mixed marriage of biblical and Enlightenment ideas.

The trouble is that liberal democratic states also have a less visible, internal dynamic. In a democracy, political legitimacy comes from the will of sovereign individuals. Their will is expressed through elected representatives. Anything that interferes with their will, anything that places inherited or unchosen obligations on the individual—except for the government itself, which embodies the will of the majority of individuals—becomes the target of suspicion.

To protect the sovereignty of individuals, democracy separates them from one another. And to achieve that, the state sooner or later seeks to break down any relationship or entity that stands in its way. That includes every kind of mediating institution, from fraternal organizations, to synagogues and churches, to the family itself. This is why Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French observer of early American life, said that despotism, which is dangerous at all times, [is] particularly to be feared in democratic centuries.⁴

Tocqueville saw that the strength of American society, the force that kept the tyrannical logic of democracy in creative check, was the prevalence and intensity of religious belief. Religion is to democracy as a bridle is to a horse. Religion moderates democracy because it appeals to an authority higher than democracy itself.⁵

But religion only works its influence on democracy if people really believe what it teaches. Nobody believes in God just because it’s socially useful. To put it in Catholic terms, Christianity is worthless as a leaven in society unless people actually believe in Jesus Christ, follow the Gospel, love the Church, and act like real disciples. If they don’t, then religion is just another form of self-medication. And unfortunately, that’s how many of us live out our Baptism.

Until recent decades, American culture was largely Protestant. That was part of the country’s genius. But it also meant that Catholics and other minorities lived through long periods of exclusion and prejudice. The effect of being outsiders has always fueled a Catholic passion to fit in, to find a way into the mainstream, to excel by the standards of the people who disdain us. Over time, we Catholics have succeeded very well—evidently too well. And that very success has weakened any chance the Church had to seize a Catholic moment when Catholics might fill the moral hole in our culture created by the collapse of a Protestant consensus.

As a result, Tocqueville’s fear about democracy without religious constraints—what he called its power to kill souls and prepare citizens for servitude⁶—is arguably where we find ourselves today.

Many factors have added to the problem, things we can’t easily control. To cite just one example: The political impact of new technologies has been massive. They shape the nature of our reasoning and our discourse. They’ve moved us away from a public square tempered by logic, debate, and reflection based on the printed word, to a visual and sensory one, emotionally charged and spontaneous. And given the nature of our culture—as we’ll see later in these pages—technology’s influence will continue to grow.

The credibility of a liberal democracy depends on its power to give people security and freedom—with freedom measured largely by the number of choices within each person’s private control. The goal of modern technology is to expand those choices by subduing the natural world; to put nature at the service of society in general, and individual consumers in particular. As a result, modern democracy isn’t just open to modern technology; it now depends on it. The two can’t be separated.

Their cooperation leads in unforeseen directions. As the progress of democracy and technology go hand in hand, the political influence of polling, focus groups, behavioral experts, and market research grows. The state gradually takes on elements of a market model that requires the growth of government as a service provider. The short-term needs and wants of voters begin to displace long-term purpose and planning.

In effect, democracy becomes an expression of consumer preference shaped and led by a technology-competent managerial class. It has plenty of room for personal values. But it has very little space for appeals to higher moral authority or shared meaning.⁷ For the state, this is convenient. Private belief—unlike communities of faith—can fit very comfortably in a consumer-based, technocratically guided democracy. Private beliefs make no public demands; and if they do, those demands can easily be ignored or pushed to the margins.

Where does that lead?

Judges 2:6–15 is the story of what happens after the Exodus and after Joshua wins the Promised Land for God’s people. Verse 10 says that Joshua and all that generation also were gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation after them, who did not know the Lord or the work which he had done for Israel.

It’s a Bible passage worth pondering. Every generation leaves a legacy of achievement and failure. In my lifetime, many good men and women have made the world better by the gift of their lives to others. But the biggest failure of so many people of my (baby boomer) generation, including parents, teachers, and leaders in the Church, has been our failure to pass along our faith in a compelling way to the generation now taking our place.

The reason the Christian faith doesn’t matter to so many of our young people is that—too often—it didn’t really matter to us. Not enough to shape our lives. Not enough for us to suffer for it. As Catholic Christians, we may have come to a point today where we feel like foreigners in our own country—strangers in a strange land, in the beautiful English of the King James Bible (Ex 2:22). But the deeper problem in America isn’t that we believers are foreigners. It’s that our children and grandchildren aren’t.

*   *   *

SOME YEARS AGO, the singer Bobby McFerrin had a hit tune called Don’t Worry, Be Happy. The lyrics were less than complex. Basically he just sang the words Don’t worry, be happy more than thirty times in the space of four minutes. But the song was fun and innocent, and it made people smile. So it was very popular.

That was in 1988. Before the First Iraq War. Before 9/11. Before Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, the Second Iraq War, the 2008 economic meltdown, the Benghazi fiasco, the Syria fiasco, the IRS scandal, the HHS mandate, Obergefell, refugee crises, Boko Haram, ISIS, and the 2015 and 2016 attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Orlando, and elsewhere.

And yet, in a way he never intended, McFerrin had it right. Despite all the conflicts in the world and in our own nation, Christians shouldn’t worry. We should be happy. John Paul II, in the first moments of his pontificate, urged us to be not afraid. This from a man who lived through the Second World War and the two worst murder regimes in history. And when Pope Francis called us back to the joy of the Gospel—as he did in his first apostolic exhortation—he, too, reminded us that, as Christians, we have every reason to hope. We have no excuse to look as though we’ve just come back from a funeral.⁸

Given the turmoil in the world, this stubborn faith in the goodness of life can seem naive. Skeptics tend to think of religion as either organized sentimentality or a kind of mental illness. But Christian faith rightly lived has never been an escape from reality, an emotional crutch, or a weapon for hurting others. It’s true that people can and do misuse religion to do terrible things. We see that happening in the Middle East and elsewhere today. If and when we Christians do that, though, we betray the Gospel we claim to serve.

More than fifty years after Vatican II, the world is a bloody and fractured place. Some of those fractures reach deeply into the Church herself.

But this isn’t news. It’s always been so. Scripture is a record of the same story told again and again, in different ways but always with the same theme, for more than three thousand years. God loves man. Man betrays God. Then God calls man back to his friendship. Sometimes that call involves some very painful suffering, and for good reason. God respects our freedom. But he will not interfere with our choices or their consequences, no matter how unpleasant. As a result, the struggle in the human heart between good and evil—a struggle that seems burned into our chromosomes—projects itself onto the world, to ennoble or deform it. The beauty and the barbarism we inflict on one another leave their mark on creation.

But still God loves us, and his love endures forever.

It’s worth rereading paragraphs 84–86 in Evangelii Gaudium because in it, Pope Francis forcefully warns us against the kind of pessimism about the world that can turn the hearts of good people into slabs of stone. Nobody can go off to battle, Francis writes, unless he is fully convinced of victory beforehand. If we start without confidence, [we’ve] already lost half the battle … Christian triumph is always a cross, yet a cross which is at the same time a victorious banner borne with aggressive tenderness against the assaults of evil. The evil spirit of defeatism is brother to the temptation to separate, before its time, the wheat from the weeds; it is the fruit of an anxious and self-centered lack of trust.⁹

There are no unhappy saints, and joy and hope are constant themes in the work of Pope Francis. Like Saint Paul, he sees the source of Christian joy in the act of preaching the Gospel, in a passion for living the Good News and actively sharing the person of Jesus Christ with others. This is why he has such urgent words for tepid Christians. This is why he can seem so impatient with believers who let their hearts grow numb. If we don’t share our faith, we lose it. Without a well-grounded faith, we can’t experience hope, because we have no reason to trust in the future. And without hope, we turn more and more inward and lose the capacity to love.

People typically see Jorge Bergoglio as a man formed by the example of Ignatius Loyola and Francis of Assisi. And of course that’s true. His spirituality is clearly Jesuit, and his desire for a pure and simple Church close to the poor is clearly Franciscan. But his hunger for God also has other sources.

In a 2013 homily to the general chapter of the Order of Saint Augustine, Francis asked the delegates to look into your hearts and ask yourself if you have a heart that wants great things or a heart that is asleep. Has your heart maintained [Augustine’s] restlessness or has it been suffocated by things?¹⁰ The passion and restlessness in this Pope’s own heart mirror the great Augustine who saw that our hearts can never rest until they rest in God—the God whom Augustine longed for as life’s sovereign joy.

It might seem odd to link Pope Francis and Augustine. Between them runs a canyon of imagined differences in personality and style. For the mass media, Francis is the sunny reformer dragging an ancient institution into the light of the twenty-first century, while Augustine is the grim Christian polemicist from a dark and barbarous past. But appearances can be deceiving. We should ask ourselves: What really constitutes barbarism? And which moment in history is really the one with more light? There’s a paradox about Francis that reporters tend to gloss over. The Pope who smiles so often, speaks so kindly, and holds joy in such high regard also has the awkward habit of talking about the devil.

By his own account, Francis has read Lord of the World—Robert Hugh Benson’s novel about the Antichrist and the end of the world—three or four times. And when he speaks about the devil, which he does with some frequency, he doesn’t mean a symbol of evil or a metaphor about man’s appetite for destruction. Francis means exactly what the Church has always taught. Satan is a real personal being, a supremely intelligent spirit, a rebel against God, and an enemy of everything human.¹¹

Lord of the World was published in 1907, at the start of a young and hopeful twentieth century. It was a time when the new power of science seemed sure to bear fruit in an age of reason, peace, human dignity, and progress, without the primitive baggage of God or superstition. If the modern era had a high point of confidence in humanity’s independence and possibilities, Lord of the World captured its pride perfectly. And yet within ten years, every shred of that confidence and an entire way of life had been annihilated by the First World War. The twentieth century, despite its accomplishments, became the bloodiest, most irrationally fanatic and destructive in history. It’s hard to imagine anyone not believing in the existence of the devil after the Holocaust, the Gulag, or Pol Pot.

So again, what constitutes barbarism? And which moment in time is really the darker—the world of the fifth-century bishop of Hippo, or the world of today’s bishop of Rome?

The irony of the present moment is that the same tools we use to pick apart and understand the natural world, we now use against ourselves. We’re the specimens of our own tinkering, the objects of our social and physical sciences. In the process, we’ve lost two things. We’ve lost our ability to see anything sacred or unique in what it means to be human. And we’ve lost our capacity to believe in anything that we can’t measure with our tools. As a result, we’re haunted by the worry that none of our actions really has any larger purpose.

The post-Christian developed world runs not on beliefs but on pragmatism and desire. In effect—for too many people—the appetite for comfort and security has replaced conviction. In the United States, our political institutions haven’t changed. Nor have the words we use to talk about rights, laws, and ideals. But they no longer have the same content. We’re a culture of self-absorbed consumers who use noise and distractions to manage our lack of shared meaning. What that produces in us is a drugged heart—a heart neither restless for God nor able to love and empathize with others.

There’s a passage from Augustine’s City of God that’s worth remembering. In describing the Romans of the Late Empire he wrote:

This is [their] concern: that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living [so] that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquility; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependents, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, let no impurity be forbidden … [In] his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will … [and let] there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for everyone who wishes to use them, but especially for those who are too poor to keep one for private use.¹²

Sound familiar? True, prostitutes for the poor may seem like an odd government entitlement. But surely it’s no more odd than presidents and lawmakers today who help poor people kill their own children with abortions at low or no cost—not only in this country but around the globe.

Augustine began writing City of God in AD 413. He wanted to defend the empire’s Christian community against pagans who blamed Christianity for the decline of Rome and the breakdown of the world they knew. But over the years, he built the text into what Thomas Merton called a monumental theology of history and an autobiography of the Catholic Church, both timeless and universal. Despite its great size, the book’s key ideas are fairly simple.

Augustine argues that when Adam sinned against God, creation fell with him. Nature, including human nature, is now crippled by evil. Sin infects all human endeavors. Man by his own efforts can’t be perfected. For Augustine, Rome is a new Babylon and the symbol of earthly power for every generation. But Rome is merely the material face of another, deeper reality. In the mind of Augustine, every inhabitant of our world actually belongs to one of two invisible cities that will commingle until the end of time—the City of Man, consisting of the distracted, the confused, the indifferent, and the wicked, and the City of God, made up of God’s pilgrim people on earth. In Augustine’s words, The two cities have been formed by two loves; the earthly city by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience.¹³

Sinners hide among the saints, and saints among the sinners. Only God knows the truth of each person. And only he can winnow the wheat from the chaff at the end of time. Meanwhile, the two cities interpenetrate and overlap. That leaves Christians with the task of seeking to live their faith well in a fallen world. And it brings us finally to what Augustine says to us today.

Can an African bishop dead for nearly sixteen hundred years offer anything useful to American Christians who live in a very different world?

Augustine might answer this way:

First, he would say that we don’t in fact live in such a different world. Many of the details of daily life have changed—our tools, memories, and expectations; our frames of thought and our command of nature. But the human condition is the same. We’re born; we grow; we die. We ask what our lives mean. We wonder whether any larger purpose guides the world, and why the people we love age and weaken and then pass on.