Pastoring a UCC church in Hawaii years ago, Tony Robinson convened an “interfaith dialogue” that included representatives from several of the world’s major religions. He discovered that while the other participants had no trouble articulating what their respective faiths stood for, the UCCers were at a loss, unable to define what they believed about their own.
This led Robinson to conclude that mainline Protestant churches tend to know what they’re against, just not what they’re for!
Then again, as with so much of mainline Protestantism, the origins of this peculiar malady are rooted in secular, elite opinion. Of course.
In his eye-opening new book, Return of the Strong Gods, R.R. Reno lays blame for this and much of the West’s current cultural confusion on what he calls the “postwar consensus.”
After the violent convulsions of the first half of the 20th century, many among the intelligentsia concluded that it was strong beliefs, and the powerful passions and loyalties engendered by them, that had led to Auschwitz.
In other words, fascism and totalitarianism were rooted in rigid, homogeneous, “closed” societies. The postwar consensus, therefore, would create another kind of society, one that is dynamic, diverse, and “open.”
The idea was to weaken any belief that makes a strong claim on us, anything that garners our love and loyalty, especially religion, family, and political community. All truth claims, including faith claims, had to be relativized, dissolved, and rendered toothless.
This began what Reno calls the “relentless pursuit of openness, disenchantment, and weakening.” The objective was “to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalism.” Anti-everything, you might say.
This “fundamental judgment” has prevailed in the intervening years: “Whatever is strong – strong loves and strong truths – leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths.”
“In pursuit of these dreams,” he continues, “the postwar consensus seeks the ministry of weak gods, or better, the gods of weakening who open things up. Today, one of our leading imperatives is inclusion, a god who softens differences. Transgression is prized for breaking down boundaries – opening things up. Diversity and multiculturalism suggest no authoritative center. The free market promises spontaneous order, miraculously coordinating our free choices, also without an authoritative center.”
Thus, he argues, both the social-cultural Left and the capitalist libertarian Right are in on it.
Informed by the writings of the “Frankfurt School,” a group of Marxist refugees from Nazi Germany, the postwar years in the West were characterized by a growing fear that society might again dissolve into totalitarianism.
In his influential 1950 book, The Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno characterized middle-class America as suffering from “conventionality,” a closed society that serves as an impediment to “personal growth” and “authenticity.”
More generally, he argued, Western societies were full of “potential fascists,” people who have a propensity for “antidemocratic thought.” Such potential fascists are reared in “hierarchical family” structures that hold to clear ideas of right and wrong, and therefore where a “prejudiced outlook” is instilled, one that conforms to the “ethnocentrist” mentality of the closed society.
In addition to Adorno, there was a plethora of critical literature rejecting the “authoritarianism” of traditional morality in favor of a new quest for the liberated self. The dark, unhealthy repression imposed by Freud’s “superego” had to be both acknowledged and overcome.
Reflecting this emerging postwar consensus, in the spring of 1943, Harvard appointed the “University Committee on the Objectives of General Education in a Free Society.” Its final report concluded that the purpose of education was now to “uphold at the same time tradition and experimentation,” or as they put it elsewhere, “change within commitment.”
In other words, a new critical spirit was needed to re-evaluate Western tradition and to allow students to answer for themselves life’s big questions. The Western canon alone could not be trusted.
This required “a delicate balance between the authority of great books and the independence of critical questioning.”
But, alas, the genie was out of the bottle. For, as Reno observes, “the latter enjoyed the prestige of moral progress, and over time it predominated.”
Eventually, this led to a new “multicultural” vision of education in the ‘80s and ‘90s, one that would “expose students to cultural pluralism and awaken them to the persistent racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia supposedly encouraged by dominant strands of Western tradition.”
Indeed, “the race, class, and gender pedagogy was seen by the liberal educational establishment as the next stage of the ongoing effort to build an open society.” The goal was to promote “an educational culture of still greater critical questioning.”
Needless to say, this intellectual project of criticism, skepticism, suspicion, relativism, and the overall deconstruction of societal norms and institutions has continued unabated, to the point where the “great books” of Western civilization aren’t even read, much less used as fodder for thoughtful critique.
In a sense, students no longer have anything left to rebel against. Rather, virtue demands they continually pursue an altruistic-sounding defiance against any and all standards and assumptions.
In 2007, to show how far things have come, Harvard issued an updated report on education (note the contrast with their 1943 statement): “The aim of a liberal education,” it read, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people.”
Thus, as Reno writes, “to be an educated person today means acquiring the virtue of disenchantment.”
Of course, this “imperative” didn’t stay behind the ivy-covered walls of academia, but has filtered out into the wider culture.
“Artists,” Reno observes, “need to cultivate transgression! Corporations must celebrate diversity! At every turn, strenuous effort is put into weakening consolidating institutions and convictions. Religious faith, patriotism, the marriage covenant – responsible, establishment people believe that their duty as citizens in an open society is to ‘problematize’ these traditional loyalties.”
“There is not,” he adds, “a single elite-certified political, cultural, or intellectual trend that does not move in the direction of weakening.” And that, unfortunately, goes for the mainline church as well.
Given this, Robinson’s otherwise mystifying observation that mainliners know what they’re against, just not what they’re for, begins to make sense. Rather than being merely clueless about their beliefs, the UCCers may actually see themselves as exhibiting a curious kind of virtue, given that, according to the postwar consensus, holding strong Christian beliefs is now somehow…unchristian!
Within this philosophical framework, holding to Christian doctrine might offend somebody.. All religions, therefore, must be the same. Any faith stance that goes against the cultural grain must be rejected or “re-imagined.” Otherwise, we risk becoming triumphalistic and/or bigoted, of becoming, in effect, a “closed” society.
“An educated person,” as so many UCC clergy like to think of themselves, “is an expert at unmasking pretentions to transcendent truth, exposing them as instruments of economic competition, class domination, patriarchy, and white privilege…”
Thus, “the gospel message of charity, re-envisioned as affirmation, inclusion, and acceptance, displaces the older religious morality based on strong truths.”
The great irony, however, as Reno notes, is that our problems today are the opposite of those faced by the generation that went to war to defeat Hitler. Rather than the threat of fascism, we are “imperiled by a spiritual vacuum and the apathy it brings.”
The problems we face are not those of “discrimination, exclusion, and conformism,” but “atomization, dissolving communal bonds, disintegrating family ties, and a nihilistic culture of limitless self-definition.”
The “we” of communal solidarity has given way to the lonely, self-absorbed “I”. At the same time, the loss of the sacred has left us with only the mundane quotidian demands of everyday secular life.
Having torn down virtually everything that at one time provided solace and succor, we flail about amid an ill-defined and disorienting landscape born of homelessness.
What then to do? Reno urges a return of the “strong gods.” Here he calls on the church’s ancient social teaching that has long sought to defend and harmonize the “three necessary societies” of church, family, and polity.
While the postwar consensus’ various ideologies may inspire powerful passions and loyalties, as we see in many of the sectarian “isms” and “identities” of our age, these are not strong gods. “For though they inspire enthusiasm,” Ryszard Legutko writes, “they cannot inspire love.”
Nor can they satisfy the primal human longing for the “we,” for genuine and intimate community, what the historic church has called “solidarity,” without which the human spirit simply shrivels up and dies.
The true ‘strong gods,’ Reno offers, are “whatever has the power to inspire love – love of the divine, love of truth, love of country, love of family.”
I would end with a comment found at the beginning of Reno’s book. It’s from a young Australian acquaintance who had written him a few years back. “When,’ he asked, “is the 20th century going to end?”
For while the postwar consensus might have seemed to make sense 70 years ago, it’s time has surely long since passed.