"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." (Matt. 6:21)
cat~e~chize - fr. Gk katechein to teach, lit. to din into, fr. kata + echein to resound. (Merriam Webster's College Dictionary)
I have been reading an article entitled "The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart," by Peter Wehner, a self-described Christian. It is a rather devastating critique of the Evangelical Christian churches in North America and their heavy politicization, especially in the last year and-a-half or so. It sounds quite convincing, as the author has compiled his critique from very diverse sources, most of them from within the Evangelical churches, primarily from dispirited pastors. In fact, Wehner reports that "the Christian polling firm Barna Group found that 29 percent of pastors said that they had given "real, serious consideration to quitting being in full-time ministry within the last year." The following passage from his article can serve as an example of what Wehner is claiming about the effect of "politics" on various Evangelical churches:
The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nourished, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it's having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.
Wehner summarizes the analysis of an evangelical pastor, Scott Dudley, as follows:
He’s heard of many congregants leaving their church because it didn’t match their politics, he told me, but has never heard once of someone changing their politics because it didn’t match their church teaching.
However, within this article, Wehner also raises the issue of what he terms "cultural catechism." He contends that Christians are being endlessly "catechized" through a seemingly vast network of social media. Catechized here means being subjected to a steady drone of provocative opinions that encompasses the "cultural wars" and social and political positions, many of which are characterized by fear-mongering, anger and rancor.
I would like to share just a few key passages from this article, because though directed to the Evangelical churches, we as Orthodox face the same challenges and temptations, as we are just as much a part of mainstream America. I am less interested in the more openly political issues that Wehner raises - and these are intense and divisive - but rather I want to briefly explore what he means by "cultural catechism."
At one point in the article, Wehner writes that according to James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books:
What we're seeing is a massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure. The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.
He then writes that according to Alan Jacobs, distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University: "Culture catechizes."
Wehner goes on to summarize what Jacob means, by saying:
Culture teaches us what matters and what views we should take about what matters. Our current political culture, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing - television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be connected to their political tribe - the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side - subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour.
On the flip side, many churches aren't interested in catechesis at all. They focus instead on entertainment, because entertainment is what keeps people in their seats and coins in the offering plate. But as Jacob points out, even those pastors who really are committed to catechesis get to spend, on average, less than an hour a week teaching their people. Sermons are short. Only some churchgoers attend adult-education classes, and even fewer attend Bible Study and small groups. Cable news, however, is always on. So if people are getting one kind of catechesis for half an hour per week, and another for dozens of hours per week, which one do you think will win out?
This is true of both the Christian left and the Christian right," Jacobs said. "People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consumes them. The churches have barely better than a snowball's chance in hell of shaping people's lives.
At one point, Wehner quotes the distinguished Evangelical historian Mark Noll. This historian warns that, “…the broader evangelical population has increasingly heeded populist leaders who dismiss the results of modern learning from whatever source."
And Wehner summarizes this in the following manner:
What we're dealing with - not in all cases, of course, but in far too many - is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as Christianity.
Orthodoxy is about a lifetime of ongoing catechesis, which in turn imparts a worldview grounded in the Christ-centered vision of life that we call Gospel or "Good News." Our Orthodox Church is supremely equipped to provide the very ecclesial catechesis that Peter Wehner is desperately advocating for. The question then, is this: In a post-Christian world are we being catechized by the culture or by the Church?
As Christ said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." (Matt. 6:18)
To be continued:
What the Church offers (on a parish level) as genuine Christian catechesis and how we can avail ourselves of it.
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