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.
Almost three decades later, Joseph Bottum published An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America. While Neuhaus called for the Catholic Church to step into the role left vacant by the collapsing Protestant establishment, Bottum surveyed the social and political consequences of that collapse after the fact. Bottum describes those he dubs “poster children”—today they would be called “woke”—as the heirs of Mainline Protestantism. Bottum then turns to the fate of the Catholic Church in America, arguing that the church’s intellectuals succeeded in injecting the vocabulary of natural law into the public square, but failed at entering into the vacant religious space left by the Mainline. Nor could Catholics do so in their cooperative efforts with evangelicals.
Why this failure? This question was put to Bottum in an interview by Mark Tooley, a Methodist thinker and the president of The Institute on Religion & Democracy. Bottum offered several answers, among them the sexual-abuse scandal that degraded the Church at a time when it needed to be a pillar of rectitude. But most importantly he contended that Catholicism is an alien religion to America, an inherently Protestant nation. Fundamentally, he said, it could not do what the Protestant Mainline did, which was to “constrain social and political demons.” I will return to this point below.
Here I want to offer two additional answers to the question Tooley posed, both of which complement, rather than contradict, the arguments put forth by Neuhaus and Bottum. First, there was never a vacuum; the moral, cultural, and social space is still held by the Mainliners, only now they have abandoned the orthodox tenets of Christianity. Nature abhors a vacuum; as the Mainline Protestants were secularizing, as they absorbed the “social gospel” movement (Cohen and Silver call it the Hebraic inversion) and shifted from a theocentric to an anthropocentric worldview, they were just as quickly filling the public square with their new religion: progressive universalism. The heirs of the Mainline Protestants still have their money, their positions in academia, and their entrenchment in the elite and the media, but they now preach the gospel of woke. Neither Catholics nor evangelicals, even when they cooperated, could fill the vacuum because there was never any vacuum to fill.
My second argument is that because America has a strong conception of the fallenness of man baked into the very founding by Madison, Adams, et al., Catholicism’s theology of the Fall does not fit the hardwiring of America. It’s not that the Catholic Church does not teach about Adam’s sin and the consequences that came thereafter—the Augustinian doctrine is there; it’s that, in practice, Catholics tend to focus on the goodness of man and emphasize his higher nature, whereas the Protestants are ever mindful of man’s innate tendency to sin. It’s true that Catholicism’s intellectual teachings have had a profound effect on the moral vocabulary of the public square (e.g. Baptists and evangelicals, who historically de-emphasized man’s reason in favor of faith, have adopted some of the social and moral arguments of the Catholic Church), but the Catholic faith does not have a strong enough emphasis on the fallenness of man to be the spiritually leading denomination in America—a nation whose founders were keenly aware of human corruptibility and who set up an entire government with that as their primary concern.
One need not go to the extremes of John Calvin’s doctrine of “total depravity”—that the will of man is in bondage, enslaved to evil impulses—or of the teachings of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards to have a more pessimistic vision of man’s corrupted nature. But one cannot lead America by praising man to the heavens—as Pope Leo does in Magnifica Humanitas, and as so many Catholics do—while treating sin almost exclusively as a personal spiritual failing in need of absolution, neglecting its real practical effects on neighbors and society. To the extent that today’s Catholics address the social dimensions of sin, it is too often in a way that reverses causality: blaming individual sins on systems and the surrounding environment. (See the Catholic bishops’ stances on illegal immigration, and their softness on criminal behavior.) This approach is antithetical to a nation whose founding ideas and system of government are built around the belief that man tends toward sin, and therefore emphasizes what can be done to check this tendency—hence checks, balances, and many other structures—up and down the ladders of power.
The heirs of the old Protestant elite, the progressive universalists—even in their apostasy—carry within them an unshakeable faith in man’s inherent, indelible sinfulness. The forbearance of sin, bordering sometimes on laxity, exhibited by the Catholic Church in the public square stands in stark contrast to the progressive zeal for searching out the depravity hiding in men’s souls.
And so in America today, the tension between two fundamentally different Christian visions of the human person underlies our anthropological troubles, giving rise to the social and cultural tumult that leaves us in such dire need of spiritual leadership. One claims that although man sins, although his heart is darkened and his will is weak, he is essentially good; the second that although man attempts to do good, the Fall darkened him in such a way that he inexorably gravitates toward sin. These seemingly similar descriptions, each of which contain truth, result in vastly different anthropologies in practice, and these underlying assumptions manifest themselves in a myriad of ways across our social, cultural, and political life.
Our understanding of the Fall of man sets up our understanding of the human condition in general, and that in turn informs our views of political and civil society. This is how America as a nation ended up being the world’s policeman—not out of a belief that the world is just a few steps away from a liberal democratic utopia, but out of an innate sense that man is fallen and that if we are going to have any shot at tranquility, our domestic and foreign policies must restrain his sinful impulses.
In short, there is a collision of ideas. The first claims that man’s primary duty after loving God is to rein in evil in order for the good to flourish. The second claims either that one must do good and let God punish evil, or that doing enough good, at some point, will simply cause evil to recede. I belong to the former camp, and believe evil must be actively restrained, in ourselves and in society.
Catholics keep missing their so-called Catholic moment because, although they can lead America intellectually, this disconnect about man’s fallen nature and his propensity to sin means they cannot lead spiritually—or more accurately, that America will not follow. Only a robust theology of the Fall can constrain evil, and at the heart of the American project is a keen awareness of evil, around which the entire American enterprise was built. Contemporary Catholicism in America will not “constrain social and political demons” so long as its messages about sin and justice do not include constraining individual demons through secular means (e.g. supporting tough-on-crime measures, not shielding illegal aliens from consequences, etc.).
Catholics also face an additional challenge, one very close to the heart of Cohen and Silver’s argument: a general lack of knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, what we Christians call the Old Testament. I am here talking about the average Catholic, not the theologians. In the Catholic Church, at every Mass there is an Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading, a responsorial Psalm, and a reading from the Gospels. Catholics rightly point out that the Bible is read at church—it is. But what Catholics do not have is systematic exegetical preaching from the Bible, in contrast, for example, to Reformed churches. So when it comes to a holistic understanding of the world of the Old Testament, of Hebraic culture, of the chronological history the Old Testament covers; a verse-by-verse explanation not only of the “stories” of the Old Testament, but of their typology and the multi-layered message of prophecy and fulfillment; or a real theological understanding of the old covenant—the average Catholic parish lacks what its Protestant neighbor might have.
The majority of Catholics, if they’re lucky, get a homily centered on the Gospel reading. I’ve been attending Mass for twelve years and I’ve been a Roman Catholic for ten of those; I honestly cannot remember a homily based on the Old Testament reading. This tendency not only skews Catholics’ understanding of the Jewish people and the Old Covenant; it directly shapes their understanding of the Fall of man and his propensity to sin. In a set of lectures Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) gave many years ago, published as The Divine Project: Reflections on Creation and the Church, he recounts a scene from a meeting of bishops about issues in the Church that needed addressing. Ratzinger writes that a bishop from a non-European continent “said something that really moved me, something that has stayed with me since then, etched into my memory.” Commenting on the first chapter of Mark—in which Jesus proclaims to the people of Galilee, “Repent and believe the good news!”—the bishop suggested that too many Christians focus solely on the second half of that message.
We love to talk a lot about evangelization, about the Good News, in order to make Christianity attractive to people, and that is a good thing. But in the process, we are leaving a part of it out, he said. Too many people these days lack the courage to profess the prophetic message “Repent!” in all its seriousness; that is, the part that comes before the words “believe the Gospel.” Almost no one, he said, is truly willing to proclaim this elementary call of the Gospel to our age, this call by which the Lord wants to make us recognize that each one of us is a sinner, that each one of us is guilty, that we need to repent and to acknowledge that we need to become someone else, that we must begin to change the world starting with ourselves.
Then with the characteristic vigor that comes more naturally to non-European people than to us, so wrapped up as we are in the abstract, the bishop added that all too often, the way we preach the Christian message today sounds like a recording of a symphony where the opening bars and the first major theme have been cut out, leaving the whole symphony amputated, its inner progression unintelligible.
We are reaping the consequences of this lack of the call to “Repent!” It’s one that can be found in either Testament, but can’t be missed in the Old. Neither awakening nor renewal can happen without that call.
Catholics have a role to play, alongside their Protestant and Jewish brethren, in sounding that call. Like Jews, they are outsiders to America’s core religious tradition, who also have something particular and critical to contribute to an American renewal. Jews, as Cohen and Silver argue, are uniquely positioned to return their compatriots to the Hebraic tradition. Catholics, with their rich theological and philosophical tradition, are uniquely positioned to show their brethren how faith and reason together are needed to resolve what ails our society, and to demonstrate how without Christianity our democratic republic will not survive. But to succeed, Catholics must stop talking past the American spirit, else they will keep missing the moment.
Christians of all stripes need to breathe with both lungs: with faith and with reason, with both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. I hope our Jewish brethren can help us get there.
