On two or three occasions I have introduced a Prayer of Confession into the liturgy of churches that hadn’t previously been using one. Why they hadn’t is a whole other post.
In any event, more than once I was told that such a move was “too Catholic,” a charge leveled not infrequently by diehard New England Congregationalists, generally when dismissing any idea deemed unattractive.
At one time a hot button issue, the doctrine of “papal infallibility” used to be one of the defining issues in the sometimes contentious squabble between Catholics and Protestants. It was a popular cudgel Protestants might use to establish Catholicism as non-biblical and heretical. (In actual fact, the doctrine of papal infallibility is far more nuanced and sophisticated than generally assumed – but that is also another post.)
Which is why I find the current debate about the coronavirus in our mainline churches so illuminating. While eschewing papal infallibility as intellectually indefensible, they confer, with no apparent irony, the same unchallengeable powers of infallibility to our scientific and governmental authorities. Such “experts” are obeyed and revered with much the same unquestioned fervor as it’s assumed their “gullible” and “easily led” Catholic friends do the Vicar of Christ.
Recent emails from various local pastors betray a dutiful genuflecting toward their secular masters. Responding to the recommendation by the state bureaucracy of my denomination that churches remain closed at least through summer(!), one pastor boldly declares that he’s waiting for further direction from these same risk-averse bureaucrats and the CDC.
Another likewise defers unconditionally to the governor and the state, helpfully attaching its “safety guidelines” outlining “mandatory safety standards.”
What’s also striking about these emails is how the pastors seem uniformly relieved that church members aren’t pushing for a reopening of worship services.
“I have not had any pressure to start before the fall,” writes one grateful pastor. He then adds, somewhat dismissively, “But I believe a lot of folks expect us to open soon and everything will return to the way it was.” How uncouth!
Another pastor agrees: “I’m not getting any push back (sic) re: staying closed longer, but one of our team already thinks the guidelines are problematic and perhaps a bit overcautious.” The very thought!
A third pastor reports: “At this point, I am sensing NO pressure to re-open our doors quickly.” Whew!
Summing things up, this same pastor clarifies the matter: “Ultimately,” he assures, “it is the virus that will decide what we should do.” Case closed.
At no time, by the way, did I read anything having to do with the gospel. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Just crickets.
I personally find it distressing that so many within the mainline churches, both clergy and lay, appear to have no problem with shutting the church’s doors until at least September. This at a time when other churches nationwide, presumably filled with those ‘icky’ kinds of Christians, cry foul, cite civil liberties, appeal to the distinctive spiritual and theological claims, demands, and traditions of Christian faith, and file lawsuits in court – in a few cases successfully.
These churches question why parking lots at Target and Walmart are filled with shoppers. Why liquor stores have been open from the start (deemed by government authorities as “essential services”) while our churches remain dark and under the threat of legal action. I read in the local paper this morning of a nearby pot shop that plans to reopen soon. But churches? God forbid! Why, it’s unthinkable!
Are Christians really too stupid to figure out how to organize worship using commonsense guidelines, such as one might find at Home Depot or CVS? And are church members, especially those most vulnerable to the virus, too dumb to decide for themselves whether they should attend a service or not? The paternalism is as arrogant as it is unwitting.
Or are our mainline churches just too lazy and absent of devotion to at least raise a voice?
Meanwhile, the public is watching. And what they see, I fear, is a timid, wholly ineffectual church, its pastors behaving not as inspired faith leaders but meek “middle managers,” as British writer Tom Holland recently called church leaders there.
Where, in other words, is the power and relevance of Christianity on display? For a closed church sends the clear message that our churches don’t really believe they have much to offer. They’re too busy deferring in bovine fashion to the dictates of our infallible high priests, i.e. the secular ruling class.
Alas, crises create moments of decision that reveal what we really think and whom it is we truly worship. It appears we may have been relying on the wrong gods.
In an article entitled Phobos and Deimos (Greek for “fear” and “panic”), Christian writer R.R. Reno argues that part of the problem has to do with a larger, overarching cultural phenomenon he calls the “Belmont consensus.”
Belmont is the fictional town (a composite based loosely on the real Boston suburb), that sociologist Charles Murray used to identify those within society’s top 20 percent, i.e. the ruling managerial elite.
This gated, hermetically sealed class prides itself on being well informed. And trusts implicitly the authority of science. Since it is itself largely composed of professionals, it defers naturally to the “experts” within a variety of professions. When the Imperial College issued its (now discredited) prediction that 2.2 million Americans could die in the pandemic, “Belmont shuddered.”
Theodore Dalrymple helps explain. He once said that wealthy, positioned people tend to be attracted to worst-case scenarios because they have known security all their lives and thus have a great deal to lose if things go south. The phrase “better safe than sorry,” in other words, has special urgency when you’re at the top.
Add to this that Belmont tends to take seriously the idea that the worst aspects of life can be largely avoided. Consider Belmont’s obsessive focus on health, including, but not limited to, strict “dietary manias” that promise to make us “attractively slim, as well as healthy and long-lived.” Exercise, diet, yoga, meditation is pursued with religious fervor in its “long-standing war against aging and death.”
Back in the 90s, Christopher Lasch characterized this same group as “young professionals” who pursue an arduous schedule of exercise and diet in order to “maintain themselves in a state of permanent youthfulness, eternally attractive and remarriageable.”
Along these same lines, a utopian fantasy has emerged in Belmont that entertains the possibility that, through the proper application of science and technology, death can somehow be shunted, that it is but the result of human failure rather than an unavoidable fact of life.
All told, an especially pernicious consequence of this general take on life, Reno warns, is that Belmont has come to disdain the “settled cultural habits and social norms” of the bottom 80 percent.
“This project of self-management,” he writes, “stands in contrast to the working-class recognition that there are inherent limits on human control over the course of social development, over nature and the body, over the tragic elements in life and history.”
And because, over the last few generations, Belmont has taken “firm control of public life,” it sees its role increasingly as “managing” and “disciplining” those deemed incapable of taking care of themselves.
Since Belmont brings its own peculiar set of anxieties and assumptions to the table, not least the expectation that science can solve death’s inevitabilities, they have asserted their paternalistic privilege with relish. The lockdown shall not to be questioned!
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan argues that the current battle over reopening society is basically between the “overclass” (Belmont) and “regular people.”
Members of the overclass, she writes, echoing Reno, “are highly educated and exert outsize influence as managers and leaders of important institutions – hospitals, companies, statehouses.”
The regular people, on the other hand, “aren’t connected through professional or social lines to power structures, and they have regular jobs – service worker, small-business owner.”
“Since the pandemic began,” she continues, “the overclass has been in charge – scientists, doctors, political figures, consultants – calling the shots for the average people.”
“But personally, they have less skin in the game. The National Institutes of Health scientist won’t lose his livelihood over what’s happened. Neither will the midday anchor.”
In essence, the current battle pits “the protected versus the unprotected.”
The protected class says, “Wait three months before we’re safe.” The unprotected class replies, “There’s no such thing as safe.”
For the unprotected class, the shutdown may mean not just bankruptcies, foreclosures, unemployment, and financial ruin, but increased incidences of mental health issues, substance abuse, and suicide. For them, the pandemic crisis is “loss either way but one loss is worse than the other.”
“The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate,” she writes. “They haven’t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder.”
So they think: “You have no idea what tough is. And if you don’t know, why should you have so much say?”
This is to say nothing of just how wrong the “experts” have been throughout this entire crisis. First we were told that the coronavirus is not transmittable from human-to-human. Then, in late January, Dr. Fauci told us there’s no reason to worry, that this virus would be no worse than the seasonal flu. Until it was, that is.
As late as early March, we were told to go out and enjoy the outdoors. Then we were told that this was the worst thing we could do. Shelter in place! Statistics now suggest that perhaps New Yorkers might have been better off being outside than cooped up in their apartments (where the virus may have spread more easily).
Then we were told that wearing masks was unnecessary, only later to be told that not only is it essential but mandatory.
Then there are the goalposts that keep moving. At first the idea was to “flatten the curve” to avoid overwhelming our hospitals. After that was achieved, we were told we had to “crush the curve.” Then we were told that maybe “we cannot return to normal without a vaccine.” The mayor of Los Angeles, in fact, actually said that the lockdown can’t end until a “cure” is found. Some now tell us “to get used to the new normal” of privation, random restrictions, and arbitrary lockdowns.
About the CDC, Dr. Birx recently was quoted as saying, “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust.” Besides, “trusting in science” denies the fact that there is no uniform agreement among the various scientists and epidemiologists who have studied the virus.
Some initially argued that “herd immunity” was the way to go. Others countered and told us that, no, we needed to shelter in place. Now some scientists are saying that we’ve only delayed the effect of the virus by self-isolating. Who is right?
Yet despite all this uncertainty and confusion, our mainline churches and their pastors persist in their unthinking obedience to the “experts” and “governmental authorities.” They act more like trained poodles than effective leaders to whom the faithful can turn.
Years ago, I heard a local pastor on closed circuit TV say, referencing the 1920s Modernist-Fundamentalist split over the Social Gospel: “The problem with the mainline church is that it sought to befriend secular culture and in the process became secular culture.”
Sadly, though I’m hardly a fundamentalist, I’ve seen little coming out of the mainline churches having to do with the current health crisis that would dissuade me from admitting the truth of this rather discomfiting assessment.