Online Resources for Religious Studies: A Prayer for America, and Amish Experience in America

JPII Catholics, the Dumbing Down of the Church, and Gay-Bashing: Making the Connections

I wrote earlier today about the dumbing down that has been taking place following the imposition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church as a doctrinal playbook in the Catholic church, a Catholic answer book intended to quell questions (and suppress thought), to provide mind-numbing answers to every question one might ever possibly entertain.

If you’d like to see the effects of that process close up, I’d direct you once again to the thread that Fr. Jim Martin recently began on the America blog to discuss what gay Catholics are to do today, given Rome’s (and bishops’) unremittingly negative approach to the humanity and lives of gay believers. I’ve linked two previous postings to that discussion.

Since more replies poured into the thread up to the point at which it was removed to America’s archives, I want to encourage readers of Bilgrimage to check the thread again. I’m struck, in particular, by the dismal lack of theological education—let’s face it, by the plain lack of education in general—of many of those who logged in to remind us who are gay that we’re the foulest of sinners. But that they love us, of course. And intend to pray for us, as they admonish us since the Catechism's list of spiritual works of mercy tells them that they're doing a noble thing when they admonish sinners.

(Never mind that it also requires us to instruct the ignorant, which may have been among Fr. Martin’s intents in opening a conversation space in which these oh-so-certain but oh-so-woefully-ill-informed JPII Catholics might hear, for the first time, what it’s like to live inside gay skin. Little of that dialogic exchange, in which the ignorant are instructed, took place on the thread, unfortunately. It can’t take place when those intent on doing the instructing and admonishing already know the answers, and have not a scrap of respect for the humanity and experience of the “sinners” they’re admonishing.)

What might not be evident to some readers of this thread, but is obvious to me, is that the large majority of the zealots logging in to remind us who are gay that we are dire sinners, in case we’ve forgotten that, are young Catholics. They’re JPII Catholics. They have come of age in the papal reigns of John Paul II and Benedict. They are, in the flesh, what JPII and Benedict and their minions in episcopal palaces have wrought in the church. They are the church that JPII, Benedict, and their minions want for the future.

They have cut their teeth on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, these JPII Catholics. They have, many of them, been home-schooled (in many cases, because their parents see any other form of education, including parochial school, as corrupting and as less than orthodox). They have, many of them, attended the handful of Catholic colleges and universities in the United States that the Cardinal Newman Society declares to be the only authentically Catholic universities left in the country.

And they’re abysmally educated. In just about any area to which you can point. Their grasp of the tradition they claim to defend in exemplary ways, of church history and the process of doctrinal development, is so tenuous that they don’t know, for instance, that the Catholic church taught for centuries that usury is a mortal sin, and changed its mind about this issue only as important medieval theologians began to question this teaching when capitalist economies developed in that period.

I’m particularly interested in the responses of several zealous young JPII Catholics on the America thread who wanted to convince me that Jesus wasn’t about healing at all. He was about correcting sin. Sin’s what it’s all about—sin and souls. Not healing and bodies. Not this world. Jesus was all about the next world. He was all about correcting sinners so that they could save their souls, avoid hell and attain heaven.

I hardly know where to begin with this misrepresentation of Catholic teaching, which verges on heresy. So much good theological and biblical work has been done in recent decades on this topic, and the church has said so much about it in key documents in the period of Vatican II and afterwards, that I’m amazed at what a hold the pre-Vatican II understanding of the life and ministry of Jesus (and the mission of the church that follows Jesus) has on the minds of young Catholics of this generation, despite Vatican II and despite the hope for more cogent and effective religious education that that council opened for many of us.

I'm amazed at the grip that this biblically and theologically inadequate understanding of the life and teaching of Jesus and the mission of the church that flows from that life and teaching now has on the minds of the self-professed guardians of orthodoxy in the church today. Of graduates of Catholic schools that tout themselves as more orthodox than any other Catholic schools.

It seems not to occur to several of those who instructed me in these matters on the America thread that, in denying that Jesus healed the sick, they’re actually combating what the gospels themselves say. In scorning the term “therapeutic” and denying that the church inherits from Jesus a therapeutic mission, these brightest and best young American Catholics seem to have not a clue that the term “therapeutic” harks back to a Greek root that means “to heal,” and that it’s impossible to follow in the footsteps of Jesus without intending to heal.

In reducing Jesus’s life and significance to a decidedly non-therapeutic paradigm of admonishing sinners and saving souls, these brightest and best young American Catholics make the gospels meaningless. They ignore something that is central to Jesus's teaching and ministry: namely, the insistence that we love people in their bodies, in their hunger, thirst, sickness, indigence, or we don't love at all.

It's deeply sad that many JPII Catholics cling to a false, spiritualized notion of Jesus's ministry and the church's mission primarily because it is so important to them to score points against their brothers and sisters who happen to be gay. All to retain the right, so essential to these young Catholics and their understanding of what it means to be Catholic, to keep informing their gay brothers and sisters that we’re defective, headed for hell.

When Jesus healed. And when Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality.

The church’s guardians of orthodoxy today have ended up in a strange place—a place akin to heresy—in their intent to reserve to themselves the right to demean their brothers and sisters who happen to be gay. The divorce of body from spirit, the claim that one can reject the God-given embodied existences of those who are gay, even to the point of denying fundamental rights like the right to a job or health care coverage, to those who are gay, while one claims that one is acting out of love, is profoundly false. And profoundly disingenuous.

The claim of those who are making the bodily existence of their gay brothers and sisters a living hell in order to save these brothers' and sisters's souls is downright wicked. This claim departs from what the gospels say and would have us do every bit as much as did the claim of the Inquisitors of the Middle Ages that, in burning the bodies of heretics and witches, the church was saving these sinners’ souls. And acting out of love for those they tortured and then burned.

We haven't come very far down the road in some religious groups in recent years, have we? Unfortunately, I look for us to keep heading backwards rather than forwards in the foreseeable future, in the Catholic church, at least—and in the political process, insofar as the Catholic church continues its alliance with the religious right around key issues, and bolsters the religious right's ugly influence in our political process. More on that later.

Educating for Civic Awareness in the Millennial Generation

At the risk of sounding like the old grouch I truly am, I’d like to add a brief gloss to my post earlier today, reflecting on why we Americans are sitting ducks for disinformation campaigns, and suggesting some ways to counteract our tendency to be manipulated.

And this is where the grouch factor comes in: we Americans are often just plain stupid. Willfully stupid. It’s not that we lack access to information. It’s that we are too lazy to seek it out.

And those counting on us to be swayed by disinformation know they can count on our stupidity and moral-spiritual laziness. (Moral-spiritual laziness because not taking the trouble to inform ourselves is a moral issue; conscience is a form of consciousness, and consciousness “works” only when we inform our hearts, minds, and souls.)

I’ve noted before that the level of religious consciousness of many Americans is about at the grade-school mark. For many of us, informing ourselves about complex religious issues stops once we leave primary school. We remain stuck in pre-adolescence when it comes to thinking about and making decisions about religious issues and religious information.

The media—the mainstream media—pander to this stupidity. Recent studies show that when the media want “the” religious viewpoint on an issue, they will almost always select a spokesperson from the religious right. That segment of the American population is hardly the most educated and informed about religious matters. Allowing this segment to represent itself as “the” voice of American religious knowledge and awareness does not rectify the stupidity of the American voting public about issues in which religion and politics intersect. It reinforces that stupidity.

In a nation with the soul of a church where, whether we like it or not, religion and politics do intersect, the voting public’s stupidity about religious issues plays right into the hands of those who want to control the political process and public conversation. We desperately need to find ways around this roadblock of stupidity. The internet offers manifold possibilities for us to inform ourselves about religious issues and to engage in adult-level conversations about these issues—as long as we are critically aware that there is also a huge amount of plain garbage on the internet, when it comes to religious “information.”

I suppose I am thinking in this vein because I have had the mother of all summer colds lately, and as a way of distracting myself as I hack my lungs out, have been watching online a television series my brother has recommended to me. My work schedule in recent years rarely permitted me to follow any series with much intensity. Now that previous episodes are online in some cases, I use sick days to try to catch up.

The series is ABC’s “Lost.” "Lost" is a fine series, an engrossing one. I want to keep watching, if only to figure out what’s really going on with these folks stranded on a tropical island. I also enjoy the microcosm focus on a small self-contained community as a way of commenting on larger human communities, and the occasional exploration of topics like the reintroduction of torture in “humane” societies that had previously considered torture as an interrogation technique unthinkably savage.

As I watch, I notice, however, an irritating tendency in the series to misunderstand and misrepresent religious ideas. For instance, not long after the crash, as bodies of those who didn’t survive rot inside the shell of the plane, there’s an intense discussion of whether the plane and bodies should be burned.

This centers, of course, on questions about how various world religions choose to deal with human remains, and on taboos in some religions about cremation. The discussion is overstated, as though burning bodies of plane survivors—an extreme case in which extreme measures would almost always be morally permissible even in religious traditions that forbid cremation under normal circumstances—is well-nigh impossible to justify.

And yet, almost immediately after this discussion, the starving survivors go on a hunt for boar . . . . And no one raises any objections at all to supplementing their diet of fruit and other plant materials with pork, though one of the main characters is Islamic.

My point is that the issue seems not to be raised because the writers and producers of the show count on the majority of Americans not to know or think about the prohibition of pork in the Islamic diet. (There are no Jewish survivors that I’ve “met” up to the point in the series I’ve reached in my current watching of it.) And one suspects that the cremation discussion reflects some decision somewhere that at least some viewers would have qualms about cremation, based on their religious worldviews.

The series also uses the term “immaculate conception” as if it is synonymous with “virgin birth”—a not-uncommon slip in our religiously undereducated populace . . . .

We can do better. We need to do better. Gay marriage is only one of a number of hot-button issues in which the woeful lack of accurate scientific, legal, and religious education among the American public creates havoc politically. As the furor surrounding the decision of Terri Schiavo’s husband to withhold hydration long after she was brain-dead indicates, we are all too easily manipulated by those who want to use our ignorance of religious matters for ugly political ends.

These observations feed into a discussion of one of the articles I cited at the end of my previous posting—Courtney Martin’s “Fanning the Flames of Youth Civic Engagement.” Ms. Martin’s article argues persuasively that we are witnessing in the current election cycle a significant phenomenon: the intense involvement of younger voters, who had often previously been turned off by the political process.

She asks how we can assure that this civic engagement continues beyond the election itself. Her suggestions interest me as an educator.

In my view, no education is authentic if it does not seek intentionally to involve young people in civic engagement. What youth learn by doing, by involving themselves in a hands-on way in social action and political causes, crucially changes their outlook on life. Civic engagement educates youth in a way that classroom education cannot do.

Ms. Martin notes the tremendous importance of both universities and religious institutions in fostering civic engagement. She calls for specific and intentional efforts on the part of both groups to involve young people in the political process—and to assure that the political choices youth make are informed.

She also notes that religious groups need to help young people see that civic engagement is an expression of spirituality. As she observes, that awareness has been strongly planted in the minds of youth of the religious right, but has not been developed so strongly among those of a more progressive religious and political bent.

Recent studies of non-profit life in the U.S. show that the leaders of the non-profit movement are graying, and no one is being prepared to take their place. Baby boomers have dominated the non-profit life of the nation for a generation or more. With the graying of the boomer generation, there needs to be a careful transition to new leadership in non-profit movements.

Universities and churches—and, above all, universities sponsored by churches—have a vital role to play in the future of participatory democracy, by emphasizing education that fosters civic engagement and that encourages youth to make vocational choices based on a desire to serve. It will be interesting to see how the current election affects the choices of American institutions of higher learning—whether the excitement of young voters today translates into a renewed emphasis in our colleges and universities on civic engagement, and on the interplay of religion, spirituality, and politics in our public life.