A letter from an editor at blogs4God.com recently responded to
a piece by me in these cyber pages on Andrew Sullivan’s eclectic
Catholicism. This coincided nicely with a stunning
post on Sullivan’s very own celebrity website, which admitted
that his type of faith (“post-Vatican II Catholicism”; note the
“post”) may be doomed in this next century. The global South —
Africa, Latin America and Asia — is likely to become the center
of Christianity, which will reintroduce a kind of folk
traditionalism in piety and social mores which Sullivan finds hard
to swallow.
I don’t want to get into Andrew Sullivan bashing mode here or to
paint myself as more righteous than he. I’m not and Sullivan seems
like a nice enough guy with whom I agree about a great number of
things. But in reading his alarmed response to the future of his
religion, certain words and word clusters stuck out:
“fundamentalist,” “arch-conservative,” “orthodox and severe rump,”
“highly traditional.” These were all seen as bad and menacing,
especially, in Sullivan’s telling, to women and homosexuals.
On the first, he’s dead wrong. Christianity, on balance, has
tended to carve out a large place in society for women, and to
invest them with a moral status that isn’t matched by any other
world religion. (The possible exception is Judaism, but that is a
tricky case which I haven’t the room to go into here.) This may not
be equality, in the strictest, most legalistic sense, but the
advance of Christianity is unlikely to be a tragedy for the fairer
sex.
Homosexuality is a tougher issue. In my experience, many
Christians (along with plenty of the non-pious) tend to
dislike and be sickened by gays, and gays usually return the favor.
In interviews, I’ve asked several Christian leaders about this
dynamic and been met either with a resounding silence or with
shoot-from-the-hip speculations. They either don’t know or don’t
care.
I think it boils down to an issue of recognition, in a Hegellian
sense. Historic Christianity — firmly rooted in the Old and New
Testaments and the Church fathers — has said that the impulses
that gays organize their lives around are sinful and disordered and
should therefore, at the very least, not be encouraged by
governments. Gays are understandably put off by this, and, drawing
on past experience, not just a little bit worried about possible
ramifications. Consequently, they tend to overstate the cunning and
sinister motivations of such groups as the Christian Coalition and
Opus Dei. In his recent attack on U.S. foreign policy, Gore Vidal
spent a whole chapter arguing that, by boycotting Disney, the
Southern Baptists were veering dangerously close to the Salem witch
trials.
Then you have the quandary of gay Catholics like Andrew
Sullivan. If he were a Protestant in the U.S., the future
conservative drift of Christianity literally wouldn’t be a problem.
We Protestants — and that may be the one and only time I use that
particular phrase — are schismatics to our very bones. Sullivan
would have no difficulty finding a niche or a cubby hole in the
myriad of mutations that continue to spew forth from the revolution
that Luther and Calvin started and would no doubt be aghast at. You
want to handle snakes? No problem. Bark for Jesus? Hey, make a
joyful noise unto the Lord. You swing both ways? Well, there is
this really happening church downtown…
However, Sullivan doesn’t want to be a Protestant. The
fact that Catholicism is the religion of his birth plays a part in
this but he is not, I think, merely a genetic Catholic. Sullivan
believes — and, if I have read him correctly, believes with some
intensity — that his church is the church — the one that
Jesus started, complete with sacraments, smells and bells, holy
orders, and with a Scripture and Tradition that, in the Catechism’s
words, form “a single deposit of faith.”
But he’s also gay and therein lies a huge problem. His church
has said that this constitutes a “disorder” and is supported in
this by Scripture and by thousands of years of unbending Tradition.
Rome regards gay sex as a sin and a life ordered around such
activity as something approaching a sin against the Holy Ghost —
that is, while the church might not take the trouble to actually
excommunicate gays, there is an understanding that they are living
in something approaching mortal sin. In the dust-up over the priest
sex abuse cover-ups, it is instructive to note that the response of
many conservative Catholics, including several in the Vatican, has
been to say that homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to take holy
orders.
And so Sullivan responds by lashing out at Rome, by charging the
Catholic Church with “institutional” sins including sexism (he just
noticed?) and other Very Bad Things, and with one of the most
blinkered ahistoric readings of the Bible possible. He wants his
church to change to accommodate him rather than the other way
around.
But that isn’t likely to happen and, as I said previously, his
is a very Protestant — or liberal Protestant — approach. I think
he recognizes this. It will be interesting to watch what happens as
the two pegs of Sullivan’s identity are stretched further and
further apart.
