Back to Christendom

In Commonweal, William D. Wood criticizes recent comments by Cardinal Francis George that suggested the Cardinal's embrace of a rejuvenated Christendom:

Like Pope Benedict XVI, George believes that contemporary democratic societies are awash in relativism. Indeed, George seems to believe that secularism is the same thing as relativism, and that all secular, relativist societies will inevitably meet the same end as the totalitarian societies of the Soviet bloc. For example, he likened the present pope’s coming fight against secularism to the previous pope’s fight against communism. The lesson of both, said George, is that “you can’t deliver a stable society if, in order to protect personal freedom, you sacrifice objective truth and, particularly, moral truth. It’s a fault line, and it will destabilize our societies and bring them down...as certainly as the fault line in communism effected its demise.” This is an unfortunate confusion. Secularism isn’t the same thing as relativism, and neither is tantamount to state-enforced atheism. Convenient though it may be to think so, it simply is not the case that critics of the church are committed to the denial of all objective truth. Nor are they committed to the proposition that all is permitted and nothing is immoral. The conflation of secularism with relativism is an unfortunate mistake because it misrepresents the real pastoral context in which the church finds itself. The church must find a way to engage secular and religious people who embrace alternative moral codes and values that are genuinely compelling, though they are not the codes and values of the church. This is rather harder than thundering against imaginary relativists. As Alasdair Mac- Intyre said at the beginning of the conference: “In the entire universe, there are absolutely no relativists who are not American undergraduates!” The church hierarchy would do well to take those words to heart.

More to the point, I doubt that it makes much sense, either rhetorically or substantively, to deploy “Christendom” as the category with which the church opposes secularization. As Charles Taylor emphasized in his presentation, the church, at its best, has always realized that it must express itself in different ways to different cultures and civilizations in order to be heard. I can hardly imagine a worse way to evangelize Europe than by appealing to the virtues of a politically reconstituted Christendom.

Even if treating secularism as a political problem were rhetorically effective, it is a bad idea. To address the spiritual problem of secularism, the church must deploy spiritual tools: it must present the gospel as surpassingly beautiful and worthy of love. Sometimes, I think, the church even needs to get out of the way, and let the gospel present itself as surpassingly beautiful and worthy of love. But the church never needs to promote the gospel with the tools of the state. The tools of the state are gross and coercive. The love they elicit is, by definition, disordered. It is indeed wrong-as a certain kind of Catholic is fond of pointing out-to suppose that the authority of the church flows from the political order, but it is equally wrong to suppose that challenges to that authority are best countered with the tools of the political order.

Rob