Barack Obama’s victory has crushed conservatism, ended the Republic, and ushered in a thousand years of darkness. Or such was the mood last week among many political conservatives, who saw this election’s results as the sign of the death of our free republic, the people surrendering the risks and rewards of liberty for the certain thin gruel of a dole. And many traditional Christians spoke about the reelection of our American President in even darker, apocalyptic tones, as if the man were Nero redivivus.
My advice to my conservative Christian friends’ weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth was to sleep well, wake rested, and continue to bear witness to the Gospel, to do what Christians are supposed to do day in and day out, whether the Gospel finds itself in season or out of season.
I was reminded of the ancient Taoist story of an old farmer who experienced a sequence of what seemed to many as great losses and great blessings. When something good happened, his neighbors remarked on his good fortune. “May be,” he replied. When something bad happened, his neighbors noted his misfortune. “May be,” he replied.
The point of the story: In the moment one does not know the ultimate significance of some event. On Good Friday, none of Jesus’ disciples envisioned Easter Sunday. Having forgotten Jesus’ predictions of his passion and resurrection and remaining ignorant of the true witness of the Scriptures of Israel to those events, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24 had their world fall apart. But the risen Jesus rescues them from their despair by proclaiming the truth to them and feeding them with the Eucharist.
We Americans, supposedly possessed by the philosophy of pragmatism, can speak Hegel’s German all too easily when it suits us. We who eschew metaphysics suddenly surrender to the Absolute as it supposedly suffuses itself in our story, forcing us Forward! to some inexorable sterile utopia progressives hail and conservatives bewail. But Hegel is dead, while Christ is alive. Our human history moves in fits and starts, and while it may not turn on a dime, it does often rotate on a quarter. But for us Christians, we confess that history culminates in Christ at its end, whatever path it takes on the way to the Eschaton.
This is not to say that the present political moment does not present profound challenges. The current administration is pursuing policies that do really threaten First Amendment freedoms, particularly freedom of religion and assembly as well as speech as its promotion of the culture of death in service of state-sponsored pelvic liberation proceeds apace. In a speech at Notre Dame, Pope Benedict’s nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, spoke of a concrete “menace” to religious liberty, calling out “a platform being assumed by a major political party, having intrinsic evils among its basic principles, and Catholic faithful publicly supporting it,” in which the nuncio sees “a divisive strategy at work here, an intentional dividing of the Church” by which “the Church is weakened, and thus . . . more easily persecuted.”
In a time such as this we are presented with profound opportunities to grow in faith and fidelity. We ought always be chary towards claims that God is doing something specific in our own time and place, but it may just be that God is using the present political challenges to encourage us Christians to get our houses in order since we have largely failed to do so in recent decades, tolerating all manner of sin and indiscipline. Perhaps, as St. Peter writes in his First Epistle, it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God. Perhaps, in God’s providence, we are being offered an opportunity for purification, to have nonessentials and distractions pruned from us as we cleave ever more closely to Christ. Pope Benedict predicted this moment over forty years ago when he wrote:
The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning . . . As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . . It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy . . . But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church . . . And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.
In short, we are now becoming the “creative minority” Benedict prophesied as the political class and culture turns ever more against us, and we should perceive these times as a severe mercy, respond in penitence and faith, and act always with divine charity as our Lord would have us act, enduring suffering for his sake, praying for those who persecute us, and returning good for evil. Pruned, we grow.
Leroy Huizenga is Chair of the Department of Theology and Director of the Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota. His personal website is LeroyHuizenga.com. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
RESOURCES
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, “Religious Freedom, Persecution of the Church, and Martyrdom”
Comments:
The "Catholic" faithful publicly supporting a party "having intrinsic evils among its basic principles" *need* to be divided from the Church visibly as they have long been divided from it spiritually. A "divisive strategy" indeed -- one that it is easy to see is in God's providence. A small, orthodox, united Catholic Church can powerfully bear witness to the Truth in the world. A large Catholic Church whose members confuse the world by advocating positions contrary to orthodoxy and to each other ends up being converted to the world's ways, instead of evangelizing it.
Get your own house in order, indeed.
What followed was the cross, but ultimately resurrection.
If we are loyal to the gospel, and proclaim the teachings of the Church in our parishes and communities, many will leave us, there will be much suffering, but the glory of God's power will undoubtedly prevail. Let's stay strong in the faith, and let the chips fall where they may!
And as an imperfect follower, who "saw, then believed", I would point out that not the majority, but each and every one is a sinner and at the point of sinning ignores a Church teaching. It's an interesting thing too pervasiveness is then supposed to cause us to revisit things like contraception, but not things gossiping, which I'll bet is just as pervasive (among Catholics as well as others). Are you suggesting that conduct matters and Luther's reported injunction to sin and sin boldy is a bad idea?
"Get your own house in order, indeed."
You expect what? The Church is a hospital for sinners. Many come but refuse to follow the doctor's advice (and this isn't just in spiritual matters-know any diabetics that won't cut out the carbs? Smokers who won't or can't quit?)
If there was some way to "get your own house in order", in the way you suggest, then it would have been done in Germany in 1517 and England shortly thereafter.
Is it better to be in a house where the rules are clear and the children are constantly misbehaving, or where the kids get together and rewrite the rules because other neighbors kids are staying up late, eating Twinkies for breakfast and refuse to eat broccoli?
Nowhere is the power and glory of the Catholic Magisterium revealed better than in questions of Faith and Morals. For example, in faithfulness to Christ's unequivocal teaching (Mark 10:11-12) , the Catholic Church gloriously preaches that remarriage after Divorce is adultery. I am sure there must be some protestant who also echoes Christ's teaching on Divorce, but his/their teaching is drowned out by the cacophony of the legion of Protestant voices that allow for remarriage after divorce without so much as an inquiry into the dissolution of the prior marriage and without even a serious examination of the Matthaean porneia exception. That is why the institution of marriage has decayed so much in the very protestant American nation.
And christians conservative or otherwise will need to heed your advice even more assuredly going forward.
What Catholics and other religious believers are experiencing, and which is not limited simply to the re-election of the current President, however uncomfortable the results of that process may have been for conservatives, there is a larger and more momentous trend in play here. It is the societal transition to a post-Christian era, the inexorable movement of progress that commenced at the Enlightenment in the 17thC and is quickening as we speak, particularly within the first-world countries. The greater the opportunity for work, adequate housing, improved access to health services, education and family security, the less need for a placebo.
Equally, the rise in religiosity in the southern hemisphere is not a testament to the truth of the gospels, rather it is the placebo effect of a belief system that serves as a salve against the worst measures of the human condition all too-well known to us; poverty, hunger, no education, no shelter, endemic disease and unsanitary living conditions. Wherever poverty is the norm there too does religion reside. Religion thrives in an environment in which existential uncertainty is greatest. And has been demonstrated repeatedly, remove those concerns and religion wanes. The rise of religious expression in the southern hemisphere is symptomatic of the parlous state of the prevailing social conditions.
And you are right, and as a commenter here précised, ".. Benedict's small, reduced, and thereby purified Church ...", Benedict did insightfully note the decline in religious affairs in the public square, all those years ago. Whether this change will result in a more streamlined and more focussed and meaty catholic institution is very much a matter for open debate. I cite the trends in Britain, the European Union, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan etc that have experienced significant lessening of the religious perspective in the public policy forum of these countries.
It is not a matter of decay, or a thousand year darkness. Rather, it is the slow and irrevocable diminution of religious influence and political power and the questionable nature of the value of the largely fractious religious perspective in contemporary society.
"The point is, in America, Christianity doesn't work. It's broke and, despite all kinds of ideas from all over the place, no one can fix it. "
The hostility of America towards Christianity is no greater than the hostility it faced in the First through Fourth Century Roman Empire, and the prevailing morality here is no more inhospitable to Christianity than that of the Roman Empire. Yet Christianity ended up working there. I should think it will continue to work here too.
As Macaulay (no friend of Catholicism) has admitted: "She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's."
"Equally, the rise in religiosity in the southern hemisphere is not a testament to the truth of the gospels, rather it is the placebo effect of a belief system that serves as a salve against the worst measures of the human condition all too-well known to us; poverty, hunger, no education, no shelter, endemic disease and unsanitary living conditions....As has been demonstrated repeatedly, remove those concerns and religion wanes."
Could this be a restatement of the old "opiate of the masses" argument of Marx? It's true that many impoverished people in the world are ardently religious. I lived and worked in the slums of Casablanca with crippled children and families who lived ten to a room with no electricity or running water, and they were generally very devout muslims.
However, this "rule" has broken down in our country. America is still fervently religious, despite being such a beacon of progressive, scientific, capitalistic modernism. All the Wall Street financial institutions, world-leading research universities, marvelous science fiction instrument packages landed on Mars, and social safety nets have failed to dim our passion for religion. Why? Europeans, aware of our peculiar proclivity for faith, look at us with a sort of bemused wonder. They also ask, "Why?" We are the one monumental exception that proves your universal principle false.
Yet, in the following years, the French church produced philosophers of the calibre of Blondel and Maritain and theologians like Bremond, Maréchal, Chenu, de Lubac, Congar, Daniélou and Bouyer.
Add to these contemporary philosophers, like René Girard, Pierre Manent, Jean-Luc Marion, Rémy Brague, Chantal Delsol, along with the writers Michel Tournier, Jean Raspail, Jean D’Ormesson, Max Gallo, and Denis Tillinac.
How is that for a "creative minority?" Perhaps, we over-estimate the value of endowments and institutions.
If Religion is salve for the underdeveloped world, what is the salve for fully Westernized countries that are now under the enormous stress of economic, and perhaps, moral bankruptcy?
Collectivism? Fascism? A perverse return to some sort of Theocracy (likely Muslim)?
I'm sure someone will develop a benign fully functional Atheocracy. Previous experiments have been so successful.
Thank you so much for a most excellent encouragement! It almost has me asking for another reading list but I am still working on Hays, and Butler and Adam, etc., etc.,
Kamilla
P.S. Mr. Baum, judging from today's news, they won't be eating Twinkies very much longer.
