In a post-Christian world are we being catechized by the culture or by the Church?

 

Dear Parish Faithful,

"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.

 

The Christian Revolution

Dear Parish Faithful,

During the homily yesterday, I referred to a remarkable passage out of a remarkable book by the Orthodox philosopher/theologian David Bentley Hart.  He was explaining the over-all purpose of his  book Atheist Delusions - The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies and in the process produced a powerful paragraph about the revolutionary nature of the Christian Gospel as it pervaded the Graeco-Roman world of the first century A.D. and then beyond.  This is what we now refer to as late antiquity.  

Living in our own contemporary world, we can be unaware of the radical reassessment of reality offered by the Gospel. All I could do was offer a brief and inadequate summary of Bentley Hart's thesis yesterday.  So, I thought to share this part of the book's Introduction with this packed paragraph which, in its own way "speaks volumes."

The Christian “Revolution”

From Atheist Delusions – The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies

By David Bentley Hart

This book chiefly – or at least centrally – concerns the history of the early church, of roughly the first four centuries, and the story of how Christendom was born out of the culture of late antiquity. My chief ambition in writing is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting: 

how enormous a transformation Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral communities where none had existed before; and its elevation  of active charity above all other virtues. 

Stated in its most elementary and most buoyantly positive form, my argument is, first of all, that among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilization, whether convulsive or gradual, political or philosophical, social or scientific, material or spiritual, there has been only one – the triumph of Christianity – that can be called in the fullest sense a “revolution:” a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s  prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good. 

To my mind, I should add, it was an event immeasurably more impressive in its cultural creativity and more ennobling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, inspiration or accomplishment than any other movement in the history of the West.  And I am convinced that, given how radically at variance Christianity was with the culture it slowly and relentlessly displaced, its eventual victory was an event of such implausibility as to strain the very limits of our understanding of  historical causality.

Atheist Delusions, p. x-xi