Feel the Feeling: American Religion

John Wesley

I mentioned in my most recent posting that religion for many in American society  has deteriorated into little more than sentiment and that I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that.  I am hardly rigid about dogma and I think that our moral theology has been paralyzed by the magisterium’s total inadequacy of meeting the intellectual challenges produced by the explosion of knowledge in the reproductive, behavioral, and social sciences, but the last thing I want is the confusion of warm fuzzies for genuine faith or an emotional narcolepsy for sound spirituality.  We Catholics have a fine Tradition and while I don’t want to see it embalmed by the wing-nuts, neither do I want to see it cast off by those of silly and shallow intellectual ability.  It is a living Tradition and it must be nourished and encouraged to grow and develop but it also must be embraced and allowed to sink its roots into the community of the Catholic faithful.  Americans have a long tradition of our own, however, of confusing feelings for grace and opinion for Truth.
In 1735 Anglican priest (and later founder of Methodism), John Wesley sailed from England as a missionary to the American colony of Georgia.  On ship he encountered Moravian Brethren, a German pietist sect with its roots in Jan Hus’ fifteenth century reform movement. Wesley was deeply desirous of the emotional conviction of the Moravians but, being thoroughly English, was not by nature an emotive person.  In fact, Wesley was anything but emotive.   He was Oxford through and through, having been a student at Christchurch, and elected a fellow of Lincoln College.  As a student there he had been one of the first members of the “Holy Club”—a group of students who met regularly to discuss their spiritual life and who devised a regular schedule of prayer and devotion by which they shaped their Christian lives.  Methodism began as a pietist movement within the Anglican Church and spread to American Anglicans as a result of the preaching of the “First Great Awakening.”   
Wesley did not stay long in America.  An unhappy love affair which Wesley handled badly compromised his ability to serve in priestly ministry and he returned to England.  He never lost interest however in the American mission and after the American Revolution was very concerned that the Anglican Church was unable to consecrate bishops or ordain priests for the new nation as the canons of the Anglican Church at the time required of all ordinands an oath to the King.   Wesley, though not a bishop himself, ordained several men as ministers for those Anglican/Methodists.  He also ordained Thomas Coke, an Anglican priest, as “Superintendent” of the American Methodists.  Coke began using the title “Bishop” several years later.  Almost from the beginning, Methodism had encouraged lay preachers, but Wesley’s ordaining men to the ministry was a far more radical step.  This ordination of clergy by a priest (Wesley) rather than by a bishop forced a break between Wesley’s followers (Methodists) and Anglicans and in 1784 the American Methodists constituted themselves as the Methodist Church in America.   
English Methodists have preserved their ties to the Universities and while the preaching was often “evangelical” it was not theologically naïve.  In America the story was different.   The preachers sent by Wesley were University trained intellectuals who were men of deep personal piety.  But Methodism spread like wildfire in the new American nation—particularly on the frontier.  The movement known as the Second Great Awakening revitalized American religion and especially pushed the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian traditions.  While there were a handful of Methodist ministers who had been University trained in England, Methodism grew far faster than the ordained clergy could care for and lay preachers shaped the movement far more than ordained clergy.  These lay preachers most often had no formal theological training and preached not from sound doctrinal foundations but simply passed on the emotional style which had led to their own conversions.  Theology became irrelevant; feelings were the only sign of grace.  Methodist theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon relate the following incident in their book when Willimon was preaching in a Presbyterian Church:  

“Dr. Willimon, could you recommend a book that explains what Presbyterians believe?” he asked. “Why would I have such a book?” Will asked. “That’s the trouble with you Presbyterians you’re always reading some book, you ought to be like us Methodists and feel a warm tingle down you back.”

Bishop Willimon was obviously being sarcastic about the triumph of feeling over theology among Methodism when he related the incident, but the problem is not limited to Methodism.  When I read some of the neo-trad blogs about why women should wear veils in church or even about a preference for the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Mass, it comes down to what makes a person feel “religious.”  “Liberals” are often no better—every Mass has to be a “heavy, deep, and real” experience.  We need to move beyond the subjective—not to exclude the affective dimension but not to be limited by it—and develop liturgies, doctrinal formulations, and ecclesial structures that are rooted in our authentic Tradition but which can move beyond old forms to find new ways that resonate with contemporary society while preserving the essential features that have guided us from the times of the apostles.   

The Origins of Radical Catholicism XXII: Fear strikes to the heart

Ok so we agree that it is not a good idea for the pope to reconcile himself to progress, liberalism and modern civilization—or at least we agree to that if we are faithful to the teachings of Pius IX and the syllabus of errors (published 1864).  It is interesting to see how in the nineteenth century the papacy grew very frightened of the world around it.  In the century since the French Revolution had destroyed the old alliance between Throne and Altar, a world in which the Church could no longer dictate its decrees to the populace and expect government and society to enforce them, the Church was like a child who had lost her mother in the mob and had no idea how to carry on for herself.  Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon use a wonderful image in one of their book comparing the Church (in their example Protestantism, but if fits for 19^th century Catholicism as well:  “Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless; house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.” (Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Nashville:Abingdon, 1989, p. 29)   Leo XII, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX—none of them seemed capable of realizing that the old order was over and a new day had dawned.  It was an age of the bourgeoisie, not the nobility; an age shaped by rational thought, not religious doctrine; an age of democracy not absolutism; an age of people thinking for themselves, not of being dictated to.  Catholicism was seen as a relic and few people thought it would outlast the secular power of the popes.  They were wrong, of course, but the Church survived by—despite the syllabus of errors—adapting itself to the modern world—maybe not fully and certainly not happily, but adapting none the less.  All that being said, Leo XIII who became pope in 1878 seemed to usher in a new era.  He was a man who was practical, yet wise.  Leo liked liberal thinkers—we have seen that with Gibbons and Newman. But the fact of the matter is that when he realized the implications of modern thought for the faith, he panicked and he put his views of Doctrine and Society in separate compartments—air and watertight.  Remaining a social liberal, he reacted strong to liberal theology affected by higher biblical criticism and the critical spirit of contemporary Protestant dogmatics.    Leo established the Pontifical Biblical Commission not to suppress higher biblical criticism completely but certainly to restrict its growth by establishing some strong limits to what conclusions biblical scholars could come to regarding Divine Inspiration of the Scriptures and Scriptura inerrancy. 

Leo’s successor Pius X, unlike Leo, was no liberal.  A man of deep personal piety (he would one day be canonized a saint) he was no intellectual and was frightened of new ideas.  He was more than frightened; he was actually paranoid of modernism and reacted precipitously at the slightest accusation of modernism, directed towards any theologian.  In 1907 he issued a list of 65 theological propositions he considered to be “modernist “and heretical.  Pius’ concern was to assert the authority of the Pope and Bishops over Scripture and theology so that the role of theology became not an understanding of the faith as found in Scripture and Tradition, but justifying the faith as defined by the magisterium.  The Catholic approach to understanding the scriptures were all but reduced to the most crass fundamentalism ignoring the insights of linguists and historians.  Like the Syllabus of Errors, this condemnation (contained in the papal brief,  Lamentabili Sane Exitu) shows just how frightened the Roman authorities were of authentic scholarship.

There were several agendas at work.  Fear was one—and a legitimate fear of people losing their faith if faith were subject the critique of reason.  Indeed, as many of the points that Pius X had condemned have found their way into Catholic audiences in mid-twentieth century, we have seen a grave decline in religious practice in Western Europe and—to a lesser but still dangerous extent—in North America.  I think there was also a sense of insecurity when popes and bishops, lacking the intellectual expertise of the scholar, cannot hold their weight as equal partners in the discussions, begin to claim a higher authority not subject to critique by scholars.  And I think even further that the Church itself—or rather the men at the helm—were just plain terrifiedthat the bark of Peter would come apart at its seams amidst the turbulent waves of late 19^th and 20^th century intellectualism. 

In the end modernism offered a threat to Church authority by empowering voices other than the pope and bishops to discuss doctrine and practice.  Modernism was not an issue in the United States—frankly the Americans were not sufficiently serious scholars to ask the deep and penetrating questions.  The American Church has always been a Church of businessmen and lawyers (bishoply businessmen and lawyers, but businessmen and lawyers nonetheless) rather than intellectuals and scholars.  Nevertheless to the men behind the desks in Rome—who were not intellectuals themselves, at least for the most part, the independent spirit of both the Americanists and the Modernists made them appear to be interrelated—that wasn’t good for the traditional degree of autonomy which the American Church enjoyed.    
The image today is Pope Saint Pius X