Faith > Progress

Christianity remains a democratic party

This post is part of a series on religion in our national life and its relationship to the American Dream. A final post on the subject will run next week.

Catholicism, like Protestantism, is a branch of Christianity that includes the Orthodox Church, which retains a notably vibrant presence in the United States among the heirs of Greek and Russian immigrants. But all branches of Christianity share a belief in the centrality of the life and death of Jesus Christ, even if they differ in their understanding of his divinity.

But the crucial point, the one that makes Christianity important in the history of religion generally, is the powerfully democratic essence of the faith. In Christianity, believers are not merely pawns of the Gods (actually, the thrill of the faith derives from God humbling himself to share in our humanity). Nor is the key issue whether or not they belong to a tribe of Chosen People. Instead, what matters is the unconditional love God confers on each and every soul, coupled with the free will to decide whether or not to give ourselves over to that love. This drama of the individual is at the center of Western civilization for the last two thousand years. Christendom didn’t necessarily invent that individualism, but took it to another level, and it’s an important dimension of what distinguishes it from other civilizations, past and present.

In an American context, what separates Protestantism and Catholicism is the degree of confidence each has that human design can improve the world. The original Protestant faiths saw a broken Catholic church, and acted on their belief they could do better by creating new earthly institutions, a sensibility that coursed through the places where the reformist Protestant spirit was strongest (notably New England and the upper Midwest) and continues to animate the life of such places long after they secularized. American Catholicism, by contrast, has tended to be more fatalistic. In the words of an old saying, the point of being Irish is knowing that the world will break your heart. Yes, the Reformation sparked the Counter-Reformation, in which the church did (partially) mend its ways, and new orders like the Jesuits demonstrated a kind of fervor and organizational savvy that resembled the Protestant sects at their most industrious. And both Catholics and Protestant faiths routinely asserted that salvation was to be found through faith, not works, because too much emphasis on the latter veers toward the very reason for the Reformation in the first place: the idea that you can transact your way into heaven. On the whole, however, American Catholics tend to believe that Protestants and their secular heirs are more likely to succumb to the sin of pride in their secret—or not-so-secret—confidence in their own capacities to discern and enact God’s will. And to become oppressive in their insistence that others follow their lead.

Or so this Catholic believes. It made a deep impression on me when, in a conversation with my parents early in my adolescence, I was warned to keep my distance from people with big ideas about changing the world. Such people, I was told, were often compensating for distortions or deficits in their personal lives by seeking meaning in ways that were likely to be disappointing to themselves and problematic for others. As I grew older, I was increasingly stuck by the conservatism of this perspective, so far from that of the people with whom I was now spending my time (and in many respects seeking to emulate). But with a big chunk of my life behind me now, I can’t say I think it’s entirely wrong, especially amid the reform fervor of the 2010s and early 2020s that has taken on distinctly religious overtones in its sometimes doctrinaire, censorious ethos. Whether or not it’s misplaced, my skepticism seems less like a choice than an attitude that’s been bred into me, even if it’s one I continue to question, and count on people like my wife to check.

I now regard my Catholicism as a hedge against my cultural homogenization in our national life. This isn’t entirely a matter of growing old; indeed, it reflects a larger tendency in identity politics in our time. The Civil Rights Movement was a landmark event in U.S. history in many ways, among them widening the possibility that blackness could be viewed by all Americans not as a stigma in our national life, but rather as a badge of honor, endowing anyone with an African American heritage with a legacy of resilience in the face of centuries of brutality.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that the 1970s were marked by a sociological development known as the Ethnic Revival, in which now-assimilated white ethnics reclaimed their cultural origins (typified, for example, by the new craze of genealogy and the success of The Godfather saga). Central to this new mythology was the adversity endured by earlier generations of immigrants, sometimes shading into a form of racial one-upmanship (you think your people had it bad? If we overcame our troubles, why can’t you get over yours?). Catholicism was a thread that ran through this subculture, even if there were always differences in emphasis—Italian Catholics as more expressive, shading into the profane (as in the movies of Martin Scorsese), while Poles were more silent in their Slavic stoicism (if sometimes stereotyped as stupid).

In short, by the end of the twentieth century, you couldn’t be a real American unless you could somehow lay claim to outsidership of one kind or another. In 1964 the University of Pennsylvania sociologist E. Digby Baltzell published his famous study The Protestant Establishment, in which he traced the dense cluster of institutions (schools, clubs, civic organizations) that created the American ruling class. Yet by the time I went to college, it had largely been dismantled, its WASP infrastructure replaced by Affirmative Action and financial aid policies that created an entirely new elite supposedly modeled on merit (one which I joined). To be sure, the ever-shrinking share of WASPs in American life were hardly suffering—old money dies slowly. But as a group they seemed oddly deracinated. And nowhere was their desiccation more evident in the decline of mainline Protestant churches such as Episcopalians and Presbyterians. Catholicism would have suffered, too. But it was slower to embrace the liberal changes of the 1960s that made any kind of institutional commitment seem confining. More importantly, it was revitalized by a new wave of new immigrants, notably Latinos, who injected fresh blood into the Church. To a great degree, it has remained segregated, its older “Anglo” population (Anglo! To think the Irish could be referred to in such shorthand!) gradually renovated in shades of brown and yellow. Here too I borrow outsiders’ cultural cache.

But deep down, I want my faith to be—I believe my faith to be—more than an ethnic affectation. The life of the spirit knows no color.