Ideology, Religion, and the End of Pod Christianity

On the other hand, since my politics are simply Catholic, I wish the Church would 'give full-throated approval to [my] political beliefs'. Unfortunately, it seldom does.

From Catholic Stand

By Anthony S. Layne

Postmodern America’s true religion is ideology. By that, I mean we expect our churches to either give full-throated approval to our political beliefs or remain silent. The Catholic commentariat often attacks magisterial documents and pronouncements on ideological rather than doctrinal grounds. The left wing has essentially given up on the hierarchy as hopelessly regressive, while the right wing believes the hierarchy is surrendering to the pinko Democrats. It seemingly doesn’t occur to enough people that both parties are defective from the perspective of Catholic social doctrine. Or that their ideologies may have philosophical commitments the Catholic tradition can’t support.

Giving Up on the Church

“I’ve given up on [the] RC church,” a woman tweeted. “… [They] are supporting the influx of illegals via Catholic charities.” To which I replied, “Your politics should follow from your religion, not vice versa.” It’s something I’ve said several different ways, though never in a way that’s succeeded in going viral. A couple of people liked it. However, given that one of them had “MAGA” in his(?) Twitter name, they may have thought I was writing in support rather than admonishment. This is just as well. I’d as soon say it to a progressive as to a populist.

The mistake is understandable. For as long as I’ve been a Catholic writer, the Catholic Blogisterium has often spoken as if progressivism were the only liberal political ideology drawing people away from the true faith. And there’s indeed a statistical correlation between religiosity and the left-right political spectrum. But that’s religiosity, which is not the same thing as fidelity to Church doctrine. Throughout the Church’s history, there have always been people who went to Mass daily, said prayers frequently, and participated in numerous devotions but whose words and actions showed they didn’t “get” the gospel message.

In theory, politics should follow from religion because religion sets the metaphysical, ethical, and anthropological contexts for ordering the human community. In reality, however, it’s not so clear-cut. Our natural world experience, which includes our understanding of other people and community, influences our cosmological, ethical, and anthropological assumptions. The degree to which the weather outside reflects the weather inside (and vice versa) differs from person to person. Catholics enculturating within a non-Catholic society risk absorbing non-Catholic attitudes, values, and behaviors, losing those which differentiate us and exclude us from the mainstream.

The Catholic Charities Conundrum

Nevertheless, letting a secular political ideology drive one’s religion is a mistake. Ideologies, whether they lean left or right, act much like the “pods” in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers: They slowly strangle authentic religiosity, replacing it with a substitute that imperfectly mimics the accidents while masking an alien essence. They do this because they embed fundamental philosophical assumptions at odds with orthodox Christianity, some even hostile to all religion. Under the influence of ideology, we become liberals (in the broad sense) and anarchists in essence, distinguishable as Catholics only by accidence.

Let’s take as our example Catholic Charities: Giving food to the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, and welcoming the stranger are four of the corporal works of mercy derived from the Judgment of the Nations passage in Matthew 25:31-46. No one “deserves” or “merits” mercy because, in the Catholic understanding, mercy takes no account of merit or desert. Mercy is the gift of a generous, compassionate heart, an act of love. To ask whether someone “deserves” to be poor or sick is to assume a position of moral superiority to which we aren’t entitled (Matthew 7:1-5).

So if some of the people Catholic Charities helps happen to be undocumented immigrants, what of it? That’s ICE’s problem. It’s our duty as Catholics to obey the law, so far as obeying it does not cause us to do evil or forsake Christ. It’s our duty to avoid rash judgment by assuming bad intentions on CC’s part. However, it’s not our duty to enforce the law unless we work for the appropriate government agencies tasked to do so. And it’s not our job to punish people for border-jumping by depriving them of life’s necessities.

Respondeo

Keep in mind that I haven’t said anything about America’s immigration policies. I haven’t demanded open borders. I haven’t defended the southern border wall. I’ve neither praised nor damned ICE, DHS, or any other agency tasked with enforcing our immigration laws. I simply point out that giving food, clothing, and shelter to undocumented workers is an act of charity and mercy that neither violates federal law nor runs afoul of Catholic doctrine. I highly doubt that it drives illegal immigration to any significant extent. We can’t call it formal or proximate cooperation without committing the sin of rash judgment.

Our tweeter’s claim that the Church “supports” illegal immigration through CC is specious and absurd. If CC were violating immigration or border security laws in some manner—say, by knowingly hiring the undocumented or smuggling them across the border—that would provide a legitimate Christian ground for criticism: our duty to obey secular laws. But her assertion draws a factitious moral equivalence between giving the undocumented food and giving them fake work permits. She implicitly claims that the need to discourage illegal immigration trumps basic human decency. Not only is this not a Christian criticism, but it’s also neither reasonable nor humane.

More to the point, our tweeter’s objection to the Church is motivated not by religious concerns but rather by political considerations. It matters less to her whether CC’s work enacts the gospel message’s emphasis on mercy and charity appropriately than whether it reflects her right-wing hostility toward illegal immigrants. Nor is such criticism unique to her tribe. The Church suffers many attacks from the left wing because her teaching doesn’t reflect progressive activists’ inconsistent, opportunistic treatment of sexual biology, which is either irrelevant or irresistible depending on whose interests are at stake.

Pushing Back Against Ideology

Modern political ideologies developed without reference to Catholic social teaching, some in deliberate opposition to Christian beliefs. So we can expect that an institution whose works faithfully reflect the Church’s teachings will eventually come into conflict with them. We can expect that individual Catholics living the faith in spirit and truth will occasionally do or say things that one political tribe or another will find suspicious, even offensive. We can even expect non-Catholic ideologues and politicians to demand that we change our beliefs to suit their agendas. (Didn’t Hillary Clinton do just that a few years ago?)

However, we Americans expect our religious leaders to echo our parties’ platforms. When they don’t, we reflexively accuse them of siding with the enemy tribe. In this much, we can find both Republicans and Democrats in the Catholic cafeteria line. Trying to reconcile Church teaching with secular ideology always carries the danger of accepting assumptions and imperatives contrary to the Church’s anthropology. Using the ideologue’s language runs the risk of absorbing the ideologue’s biases and prejudices. We’re immersed in secular ideologies practically from birth. As a result, we often don’t resist their intrusion into our religion.

Nevertheless, we must resist. We must not allow Caesar to dictate to Peter the content and meaning of the revelation. Caesar has his own ends, and they’re not necessarily bad ends. But Caesar’s concerns and goals are not Peter’s. Caesar’s plans are entirely temporal and material, while Peter’s are spiritual and eternal. Better, more just communities is a potential consequence of the gospel message but not its telos, its reason for being. Eternal friendship and union with God aren’t even on secular ideology’s radar.

Which is more critical—the heavenly city or the earthly Utopia? If the latter, why be religious at all, let alone be a Catholic?

Getting Our Priorities Right

Don’t get me wrong; as Catholics, we’re obliged to participate in the election and legislative processes to the extent we’re capable. We’re also obliged to contribute to building a more just community and nation. But in the natural, logical order of priorities, we belong to God before we belong to any country, so our religion ought to inform our politics, not politics our religion. And I firmly believe we contribute more to building a just community and nation by “walking our talk” than by running the government and writing the laws.

Progressives are right when they say our beliefs have political implications. Thus, we have a body of social doctrine developed over the last century and a quarter. But there isn’t an ideology sprung from the liberal tradition—including both progressivism and conservatism—that doesn’t have flawed, un-Christian assumptions about people and society. Decades of structural rigging may have put the Republicrat duopoly in control. But we need not support the duopoly. Neither do we need to refrain from challenging and trying to change the two parties. And neither party is entitled to dictate how we live out our faith.

Conclusion

For many Americans for many decades, “pod Christianity” has been a shell of pious conventions lending public respectability to more worldly concerns. Now, the shell is imploding. The same people discover that we no longer need religion to get applause for smug, self-righteous virtue-signaling. Politics—especially social media slacktivism—will do just fine. Thus, we find more people changing parishes, changing communions, and abandoning religion altogether as their politics dictate. The Church fails to persuade postmodern Americans that we offer Something they can’t get from their political tribes. That that Something is worth leaving those tribes.

Or being kicked out.

The clock is running out on “pod Christianity.” Religiosity is losing its respectability. In the foreseeable future, neither of the major parties will accept us unless we compromise our faith. Eventually, we have to address the questions, “What does Catholicism offer that secular politics can’t, and why would we need it?” (1 Peter 3:14-17). The answers are already with us, in the gospel story and the Evangelium. We need to rediscover the answers and convince ourselves of them before we can hope to turn America away from the false gods and false promises of ideology.