Published in The American Spectator, September 1986, Vol. 19, No. 9, pp. 48-49. Copyright 1986 The Alternative Education Foundation.
CHURCHES ON THE WRONG ROAD
Edited by Stanley Atkins and Theodore McConnell
Regnery Gateway/$7.95 paper
Reviewed by T. John Jamieson
Roman Catholicism used to be the religion of dramatic conversions, like John Henry Newman's. To the young Protestant looking for a living, authoritative tradition and a piety rooted in dignified liturgy, Rome was the place to go. But Rome no longer stands, in many minds, for the Universal Faith; according to James Schall S.J., it's now widely perceived as standing for universal leftism. He hears that young fundamentalists and evangelicals, yearning for a reasoned faith and formal worship, are turning to Anglicanism, with C. S. Lewis and the Book of Common Prayer as their guides.
To Anglicanism maybe, but not to official modern Episcopalianism. The Episcopal Church elected a new primate last year, one who could be described as a classical McGovernite. The editors of Churches on the Wrong Road are High Church Episcopalians, sick of their communion's political manias; their book makes a clear, well-moderated attack on the political perversion of Christianity in all denominations.
A symposium with such standard conservative authors as Schall, Kirk, Niemeyer, Tonsor, and John Howard, and several less well-known Anglican authors, Churches on the Wrong Road makes a timeless, largely apolitical condemnation of political religion—that is, without referring specifically to topical heresies such as Sandinista worship, or typical partisans such as Bishop Gumbleton. Instead, it attacks the generic heresy of millennialism, well represented by William Blake's famous gnostic hymn:
I will not cease from Mental Fight
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Churches answers, like that old parody of the liberal Protestant hymn, "Stand Up, O Men of God":
Sit down, O men of God:
His Kingdom He will bring
Exactly when it pleases Him—
You cannot do a thing.
One of the two most remarkable essays is Father Schall's, which frankly asserts that radical leftism in the Church, and the blatant contempt of dogma that goes with it, are no longer mere aberrations. Radical leftism is not just a strain of humanitarian sympathy anymore; the rejection of supernatural doctrines such as the Resurrection is not just amateurish skepticism among self-indulgent biblical scholars. Radicalism and anti-supernaturalism are now one enterprise. Many clerics and theologians hide their atheism in a linguistic blind taken from German Idealism (Hegel), but the fact remains that they do not believe in a transcendent, real, personal God. That leaves only the socialist Utopia to believe in, and they are rewriting Christian dogma, to read as revolutionary allegory. "The whole corpus of Catholic doctrine is being refashioned'—and one sees the new doctrine, again and again, "at the very heart of the Church." "Orthodoxy is on the defensive throughout the Church."
Anyone who has looked at "liberation theology" knows it to be a theology without God about a liberation without freedom. Yet Schall doesn't single out "liberation theology," because the radical anti-orthodox enterprise is much bigger than the Brazilian school of Friar Boff. John Paul II is a voice crying in the wilderness: hierarchy and clergy in Europe and the Americas generally tolerate the antireligious left and fail to assert sound doctrine strikingly or effectively. The irony is that "basic Christian theses never seemed more intellectually valid. The trouble with the Church seems to be that there is no one about who can think about them." In fact, radical theologians desire the suppression of orthodox supernaturalism, because it distracts people from revolutionary "praxis." And, as Stephen Tonsor notes of the obsession with "praxis,"
It is odd indeed that 475 years after the
Reformation and the condemnation by
both Luther and the council of Trent of a
religion of works, that a religion of works
should reappear so strongly in Western
Christianity. Moreover, the works in this
new Pelagianism are not even the constructive
works of culture, of charity and
religion, but the works of violence, hatred,
class warfare and Promethean pride.
The other truly remarkable essay here is Gerhart Niemeyer's, which sums up the whole history and theory of Christian politics with Chestertonian speed and Voegelinian accuracy. Starting with the medieval contest between Pope and Emperor, he notes that both sides essentially agreed on the ends of Christian government: "During all those centuries of struggle . . . neither the nature of the order of human existence, nor the necessity of authority and power, nor the principles of justice were disputed." Both civil and ecclesiastical powers agreed to seek the best possible solution to inherently flawed conditions. What modern radicals rebel against is that very inherence—reality itself. Social distinctions of class, race, and sex have often given rise to social evils; but radicals dream of eradicating "difference." They do not work to reform individual men and women, as Christ did; they dream of reforming the cosmos—a cosmos within which the only abiding intelligence arises from the human mind.
According to this volume's conservative contributors, the Church performs the useful social function of maintaining contact with the transcendent realm of truth, particularly that of true justice. By giving itself over to revolutionary politics the Church transforms itself from a social resource to a mere ideological cadre among other cadres and leaves the soul and human society naked to their spiritual enemies.
Except for Niemeyer, however, the Anglican contributors are disinclined towards any comprehensive diagnosis of leftist alienation as a spiritual disease. They only lament the fact that political dogmas divide and distract us from being good Churchmen together. They exhibit a kind of bouncy optimism about a Church of political latitude—although this has less to do with the Anglican faith and more to do with the Anglo-Saxon temperament, its love of consensus, and its distrust of metaphysics. Nevertheless, while this book provides little evidence of one, there is a coherent Anglican orthodoxy— emerging from Hooker and the Caroline divines, and continuing through the Oxford Movement—by which to distinguish between healthy varieties of Christian politics, and the morbid and patently heretical ones.
Most of the essays are highly commendable. In one of them, Russell Kirk pungently describes the 1976 Catholic activist congress, "A Call to Action," which shall ever stand for all self-convened assemblies of sanctimonious church-mice, world without end. Like the Estates General of revolutionary France, such jamborees attempt to legislate the world's ills out of existence through pious resolutions. (I shall never forget the pious resolution brought before the Episcopal Church's 1985 General Convention, to better the wretched lot of left-handed persons in this world, by abolishing all liturgical references to the right hand of God. In a rare display of mature judgment, the bishops and deputies shoved this folly aside.)
Churches on the Wrong Road will not matter greatly to committed radicals; nor to conservatives who are well-read in the growing conservative literature on the modern Church, promoted by journals such as This World and the Religion and Society Report. But such conservatives ought to circulate this book on their own, especially among their pastors and Church councils. It would also serve extremely well in college and seminary courses on religion and social issues. It is a "conservative" work, not in any partisan sense, but rather in the more broadly benign sense of a normative attitude—conceding (1) that reality imposes certain limits on politics, and (2) that sanity imposes limits on political passion. This book could explain to the majority of sane, orthodox Christians why they should repudiate the ideological pirates in their Churches, and how they would succeed if they stood up together. [END]
