The Catholic Church Must Learn to Speak to America’s Hebraic Spirit

As an Iraqi Christian immigrant to the United States, I journeyed through several Western Christian denominations in my attempt to answer two questions that have plagued me since the first night my feet touched American soil. What does it mean to be an American? And what does it mean to be a Christian? I have spent the years since that night ruminating on them, and early on I realized that the two questions are tethered to one another.

Eric Cohen and Jonathan Silver’s prophetic call to covenantal renewal, set forth in their masterful essay “America’s Hebraic Awakening,” faces two near-insurmountable obstacles as applied to American Christianity. The first is the de-Hellenization of Christianity since the Protestant Reformation, and its fallout; the second is the doctrine of the Fall of man. Both of these are connected to what my friend Joshua Mitchell calls “Hebraic Christianity,” and it is these two points of contention that cause so much dysfunction in our religious, cultural, and political life as a society. While the Hebraic awakening and renewal Cohen and Silver call for requires working past both stumbling blocks, in what follows I will focus on the second.

The starting point for any serious discussion of these issues must be the dramatic collapse of the Mainline Protestant denominations since the 1970s, and the cultural wreckage that came in its wake. In 1987, Richard John Neuhaus published The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. It was a call to the Catholic Church, with its intellectual rigor and persevering moral stance on social issues like contraception and abortion, to step into the void created in American public life by the collapse of the Protestant Mainline. Thanks in large part to Neuhaus’s efforts, Catholicism’s intellectual strength has indeed contributed much to the moral and social vocabulary of the public realm—so much so that one is often taken aback to hear a Baptist use the language of the Catholic Church to make political or cultural arguments. But that “Catholic moment” never materialized.