The American Spectator

Special Report

SAN DIEGO -- My friend Stacey Warde, an Army veteran and sometime window washer, also edits a print-only literary journal published from a tool shed in Cayucos, California. His partner in media is a moonlighting taxi driver, and the two men call their joint effort "The Rogue Voice." It's the kind of publication whose masthead calls executive staff "outlaws" and contributing writers "agitators." In the February issue of "Rogue Voice," Warde started a series of articles on religious life in America by explaining why he quit going to church.

The Episcopalians with whom Warde formerly spent Sunday mornings were, he says, "mostly regular folk who read the Bible, prayed often, [and] believed in God." Moreover -- and to their credit -- "They were highly educated, well-read individuals, capable of [having] an intelligent conversation without mentioning Jesus or saying 'praise the Lord' every other breath."

Good on them. But not good enough, apparently, because "Tradition, Scripture, and Reason," that three-legged stool borrowed from Catholicism by theologians who sided with Henry VIII in his dispute with the pope, was not strong enough to prevent Warde's unhappy realization that "organized religion tends to exacerbate rather than staunch our proclivity for meanness."

That was the line that told me I'd be writing a response to Warde's essay. His crossword puzzle vocabulary had perfect table manners, but the assertion behind it threw overcooked spaghetti against one of my favorite walls, adding a meatball or two when it was later rephrased as, "For whatever reason, church of any kind seems often to bring out the worst in people."

Drawing from personal experience with a small-minded bishop and some fellow churchgoers, Warde slammed skis into the guideposts of faith like Bode Miller flattening course markers on a slalom run in the Italian Alps. "Organized religion, and Christianity in particular, never could tolerate independent seekers, people whose faith can't be squeezed into an orthodox box, where it can be controlled and manipulated," Warde wrote.

That may be the received wisdom in certain self-consciously edgy and unfailingly honest publications, but it's unadulterated horsepucky. As I wrote directly to my friend, "Dude! You're not an atheist trying to kid yourself through a sleepless night for having refused Pascal's Wager. You might want to rethink that assertion, if only because Jesus went to the cross because the faith He preached couldn't be squeezed into an orthodox box, and nearly every saint in the Christian canon since could be called an eccentric."

Consider Augustine, the third-century bishop, who wrote that "No sensible person will go contrary to reason, no Christian will contradict the Scriptures, no lover of peace will go against the Church." He wrote that while the Roman Empire was falling down around his ears, in the conviction that the church could not be separated from its founder. Even then, this was not an original thought, just an echo of what Paul had written to Timothy not long after Jesus died and rose again. Paul called the church "the ground of truth." We still have that letter.

Sure, a few Renaissance popes could have taught Machiavelli a thing or two about political infighting, and the melding of state and spiritual power that Henry VIII did his best to rationalize was neither the first nor the last of its kind, but those who take the long view recognize that Christianity is inherently counter-cultural. Even the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition were relatively tame compared to what politicians of the time were doing: When they had a choice, the accused preferred to be tried in church courts rather than in state courts, because the church was more merciful.

My own shamelessly Catholic view sees organized religion endorsed by the big man Himself, in verses ranging from "feed my sheep" to "do this in memory of Me."

BUT WHAT OF THE RELATIONSHIP between Christianity and independent thought? Abuse heaped on heretics and apostates by those who disagree with them would seem to argue for the existence of a repressive creed, would it not?

Well, buy me a beer, and I'll ask you to consider why it's no coincidence, as Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett say in their book, Christianity on Trial, that the town meeting, "that quintessential local expression of American democracy, hails primarily from [Puritan] New England."

Picking up the same theme, James Webb's chronicle of Scots-Irish influence in America, Born Fighting, observes that a majority of the colonials who fought on the rebel side in the Revolution were Presbyterians. Ever see a diary entry from one of them complaining about how conflicting it was to fight for freedom while being a willing slave to Jesus? Of course not.

More home truths: it was the church that brought agriculture to California, which is why Fray Junipero Serra's likeness adorns one of two statues allotted to the Golden State in Washington, D.C. And forget any talk of how missionary influence has been, on balance, a burden to indigenous peoples. In fact, many Christian missionaries formed alliances with native people against those who wanted to exploit them (even Hollywood sometimes gets that right, as witness Robert De Niro's performance in The Mission). Catholic priests like Antonio de Montesinos were preaching against the mistreatment of American Indians by European colonists as early as 1511. Some colonists sought to punish the man for speaking truth to power, but he had the support of his bishop, so score another one for church.

Look a little further right on the timeline of history, and only one generation after Charles Dickens wrote memorably about the plight of children in Victorian England and the wisdom of avoiding men with names like Uriah Heep, Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, his influential friend-of-the-workingman encyclical on capital and labor.

In our own day, the KGB maintained a file on the late Pope John Paul II from the late fifties until his death in 2005 because they recognized him and the church of which he was part as champions of liberty, which in both the Russian and Chinese dialects of Communist speech made them "extremely dangerous ideological enemies."

topics:
Religion, Catholicism, Hollywood, Law, Russia