Religion / Claptrap Christians

...My memories, t h e r e f o r e , will be largely Catholic, and although Episcopalians or Methodists or Lutherans or P r e s b y t e r i a n s will have their own stories to tell, t h e r e is enough common ground for reasonable generalization...

...Their subject matter was the Trinity or the Incarnation or the Redemption or the Communion of Saints...

...Sexual ethics were drastically revamped, church-going dropped precipitously, and the pluralism of tolerant b e l i e v e r s changed into an " I ' m OK, You're OK" relativism...

...Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy have yielded to the Bible, but a Bible presented in one of its most unlovely translations...

...Though there's probably no more sex than in the past, t h e r e ' s much greater flexibility about who can live openly with whom...

...But many of the post-Vatican II contributions seemed to give the lie to that old chestnut of Augustine, AGENDA '83 The Reagan administration -\~ had one year of success and one ~ ,~,~,~ year of frustration...

...Most Americans today appear to support tough laws against pollution and strict safeguards on nuclear power, even if it means a slight drop in economic growth...

...I could talk about the behavior of religious orders like the 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 Jesuits...

...I could run through parish book racks...

...economic and social policy interest groups, disdaining collaboration with the gravely weakened party organizations, play an ever larger role in both primary and general elections...

...I know one church well, from the inside, and that is the Catholic Church...

...Ellen Wilson is a contributing editor of the Human Life Review and author o f An Even Dozen (Human Life Press...

...Enough to say t h a t , although exceptions to these horrors abound, and resistance lurks in many breasts, lay and clerical, the sixties and seventies have left a t e r r i b l e legacy...

...Prior to that, prospects must often have seemed bleak, and it is in such bleak times that prophets .must usually ply their trade...

...And those m i s s a l e t t e s , monthly service booklets-that replaced missals in the early post-Vatican II period of almost weekly liturgical changes...

...Those majoring in s p i r i t u a l i t y looked East instead of West, testing this or that exotic sect of Eastern mysticism, seeking crash courses in e n l i g h t e n m e n t . Meanwhile, the p r e s s - - f r o m the newsweeklies to Sunday sections in newspapers to picture magazines like Life or Look--wrote obituaries of the family and marriage-as-we-know-it and organized religion and the rest of the baggage of traditional American life...

...We now read, for exanpie, that Jesus "approved the insight of his answer," and that he "toured Galilee"--in a Greyhound bus, no doubt...

...They offer suggestions for reforming social service programs and list the business subsidies which can and should be abolished...

...The only thing that comes easily to a guitarist is rhythm...

...This is what organized religion has begun to do, in more or less organized fashion, and of course the results have begun to spill over into public life...

...Unread copies of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice pile up in used book stores...

...In the heyday of liturgical experimentation, in the mid-to-late sixties, one could wander into grape-juiceand-ritz-cracker Masses "celebrated" by denimed priests ad-libbing throughout...

...Even parts of the late 1960s c o u n t e r c u l t u r e have been assimilated, though minus the politics...

...One opinion was as good as the next, and the only b e l i e f s dangerous to a pluralist society were "fanatical" ones, i.e., absolutes...

...These were presented on the watershed religious occasions: First Communion, Confirmation, or wedding...

...In this study, some of the top names in conservative circles set the priorities by listing what the administration should accomplish if it is to leave a legacy of conservative reform...

...The sixties and seventies were a bleak time for religious prophets as well, particularly those from traditional, "mainstream" Christian churches...

...hence it believed in the fundamental goodness of man, evil as an aberration, suffering as arbitrary ("Christ without the crucifixion is liberalism," said Whittaker Chambers), and orthodoxy as "stifling...

...And accompanying this, the music...

...here and t h e r e , it has even begun to c o u n t e r a t t a c k . Like the branch in the beak of Noah's dove, John Paul l I ' s accession to the papacy has revived religious spirits, not only among Catholics, but among Protestants and Orthodox as well...

...So, too, with environmentalism...

...On the other hand, the Luddite technology-haters who want to do away with cars, p e s t i c i d e s , and indeed the whole modern world have disappeared with the Medfly...

...The call to repentance and salvation in Christ--central to the meaning and purpose of Christianity--was largely replaced by sermons on collective guilt, and environmental explanations for individual faults and wrongdoing...

...The craze in house plants and gardening, while drawing on American t r a d i t i o n s , ctwes something to the back-to-nature spirit of counterculture communes...

...Those modern church buildings!--all awkward angles and exposed joints, like an adolescent suffering growing pains...

...After years of use, the leather cover would be worn, the gilt edges fading, the pages distended with holy cards and memorials of the dead...

...We'll rush it to you as soon as it's off the presses...

...All of which suggests that, whatever the contours of our political landscape by the end of the century, the familiar American party system is not likely to be a prominent feature in it...

...And this is to betray not only t h e i r own congregations, but also the World, which has need of the otherworldly...

...Other movements these last fifteen years have left a more lasting imprint, both on the intelligentsia and on the culture at large...

...How sadly t h e i r cheap paper and flimsy, dog-eared covers contrasted with an earlier generation's missals...

...These conservative authors have no sacred cows...

...In short, it is the COMPREHENSIVE CONSERVATIVE AGENDA FOR THE COMING YEAR...

...The survival of Folk Masses into the 1980s is one sign of the Church's distance from full recovery: like the persistence of a low-grade fever when other symptoms of illness are abating...

...The modern s u b s t i t u t e is cheap, impersonal, impermanent--a throwaway product of planned obsolescence...

...Plenty...

...What one more often finds is a halfway-house between the formality of a religious rite and the bonhomie of a block party...

...By contrast, even an amateur organist can tackle more sophisticated tunes with more uplifting results, for it is the melody that comes easily to an organist...

...Both parties suffered under this arrangement, because both were performing unnatural functions, duties for which they are not fitted...

...Though conditions have improved since the 1968:70 lowpoint when progressive Christians exercised their vocal chords almost exclusively on antiwar songs, this has been a negative improvement...

...Still, musical parishes were there for those lucky or persistent enough to hunt them out...

...Most of the n a t i o n ' s y o u t h - - t h e headline-grabbing segments of it, at l e a s t - - b e t r a y e d little i n t e r e s t in Christianity...

...For if the salt loses its savor, with what shall it be salted...

...Now, traditionalists have been guilty of a certain amount of revisionist sentimentality in reconstructing great liturgical moments of the past...

...Catholic congregations (and there are analogues in other churches as well) are generally shy about singing, and many an Irish pastor ran a pretty Low Church parish...

...The readings would be from contemporary saints like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy...

...self-sacrifice to seekers of comfort and self-fulfillment...

...Richard Allen, Norman Ture, Bob Woodson, Fred Singer, Bill Sullivan, Bob Weintraub, and others not only tell what should be done, they explain how and - most importantly -- why each initiative is important...

...RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW...

...But it has more consistently fulfilled the prophet's true function, which is to point out where the world is going wrong and suggest "alternative modes of b e h a v i o r . " How attentively the political world has listened is another matter, although the 1980 presidential election was a heartwarming episode for any conservative prophet...

...This picture is inaccurate...

...But what does all this mean to American society in general...

...They offer no-nonsense suggestions for reform of the defense establishment and list the tough choices which must be made if Social Security is to be saved...

...America seemed to be rejecting large portions of traditional Christian teaching in both faith and morals...

...some heaped contempt on its adherents...

...I will begin with what may seem t r i v i a l , with style and matters of form...

...Andy Warhol, among those who still remember him, is considered a crashing bore...

...I could describe the inanity of many religion classes, or the reductionism of "progressive" theology...

...To obtain your copy - of The Heritage Foundation's department-by-department, agency-by-agency roadmap to reform, including the all new chapters on agencies not covered in the original "Mandate" study, just fill out and send in the coupon below...

...In the sixties and seventies, institutional churches should have been preaching orthodoxy to pluralists...

...Here is a man matured in a country only God, it seems, would not despair of...

...Those stick-figure, stylized religious drawings mass-produced for Good News paperback Bibles, Sunday-school books, church walls, felt-decorated banners, and monthly missalettes...

...Ecumenism foundered on the inability of large numbers of liberal Christians to discover what they really believed...

...The full litany of horrors would run much longer...

...bitterly divisive issues replace party identification as the principal voting cues for increasing numbers of us...

...Here is a good man, confident in his faith, unpoisoned by the pseudo-"existential" self-doubt which has sapped the spirits of so many twentieth-century men, religious and secular...

...THIS BOOK PULLS NO PUNCHES...

...in an unfortunate role reversal, the churches became students, and the age--the silly, spoilt, adolescent age of the sixties and early seventies --became teacher (something similar of course was happening in the classrooms...

...It is perhaps a little hard for us to remember how bad things really were--how strong the back-againstthe-wall feeling got for the true believer, how insidiously the relentless doom-saying led one to doubt, almost to despair...

...indeed the identification of the Equal Rights Amendment with such groups probably contributed more than anything else to its demise...

...During the past fifteen years The American Spectator has been hard at work performing the role of political prophet...

...Vaginal politics is out...

...These sixties and seventies b e l i e f s spawned a War on Poverty, the Peace Corps, sociological i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s of crime, the politics of compassion...

...Agenda '83 was compiled by the same team which brought you Mandate for Leadership, the book that was a roadmap for the administration's first year in office...

...And what has this to do with the believer, who still has to love his God, love his neighbor, and give witness to the world...

...to the extent that the established churches swallowed such beliefs, they b e t r a y e d their prophetic function...

...Within the i n t e l l i g e n t s i a , t h e r e THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 37...

...Only now can we begin to glimpse the outlines of the old system's replacement: at its comeliest, something like the multi-party system of the French Third Republic...

...at its ugliest, a constantly shifting coalition of "warlords and ayatollahs...

...ties as men is now almost universally observed in principle, if not always in p r a c t i c e . But the more radical branches of feminism, which were perceived as assaulting the family and distinctions between the sexes, achieved almost no influence beyond Manhattan literary salons...

...Today, variations on these can still be found, but they are usually confined to college campuses...

...Quite simply, what every insider must know...

...Agenda '83 is an early look at the policy debates which will lead into the 1984 elections...

...Feminism, for instance, has succeeded in implanting its most important idea into American public opinion: The goal of giving women the same educational and job opportuniAdam Meyerson, formerly managing editor o f The American Spectator, writes editorials for the Wall Street Journal...

...Perhaps it was the debasement of religious style that most confused the unbeliever, and most insidiously demoralized the believer...

...As yet the impetus for such reform comes mostly from the rank and f i l e - - t h e laity, or here and t h e r e a parish priest, a nun, a minister...

...There is the emergence of the Moral Majority, the coalitions of Catholics and evangelical Protestants against abortion, the growth of alternative religious schools, and the opposition to "neutral" sex education classes, which not only " n e u - trally" advise youngsters on the use and procurement of contraceptives, but " n e u t r a l l y " describe acts of bestiality and incest...

...Agenda '83 from The Heritage Foundation...

...A Christianity in lock-step with the fads and current assumptions of the World is incapable of teaching the World anything...

...obedience to free spirits...

...Congregations had their staple set of hymns, all of which sounded properly reverential and hymnlike, and faithfully expressed orthodox teaching...

...Their descriptions sometimes seem to imply that every pre-sixties parish duplicated the liturgical achievement of a Benedictine monastery, complete with chant and incense and full-throated, tuneful participation by the congregation...

...He who sings prays twice...

...And Ralph Nader reminds one of those street-corner evangelists who shout from soapboxes while the uninterested world walks on to its more productive business...

...Today, halfway without realizing it, Christianity is regaining some of the lost ground...

...Norman Mailer today is a universal laughingstock...

...Time, said a Baltimore curmudgeon, wounds all heels...

...All" too often, the Vietnam protest songs were replaced with psalm texts "updated" to fit current needs, or with unctuous injunctions to love-thy-neighbor (who, in these lyrics, is always black...

...Today's lady is perfectly willing to have doors opened for her on her way toward more money and a better job...

...Instead, the liberal churchmen have concentrated on "how much others have to teach us" and how "we have no monopoly on the truth" and how "we must change to meet new c i r c u m s t a n c e s . " But of course they are really talking about surrendering to circumstances, r a t h e r than meeting them as challenges...

...It is must reading for everyone who follows the public policy process...

...Agenda '83 answers the critical question: where will the administration go next...

...Good Folk Masses--profound, reverential, religiously moving Folk Masses--are almost impossible, musically speaking...

...One of the most exhilarating spectacles during the fifteen years since The American Spectator was founded has been watching how humbugs, charlatans, and public nuisances who once were darlings of the intelligentsia have fallen from grace or been completely forgotten...

...The typical 14- to 16-year-old Church guitarist knows perhaps a half-dozen chords and traverses the distance between them uneasily...

...Having babies is in, even among the most driven c a r e e r women...

...But this is where compromise with the age first made i t s e l f felt to the worshipper in the pew, and where, even now, it continues to make itself felt...

...And I fail to convey the deadening mediocrity of the music, the thudding monotony of the tunes, as far removed from the inspired simplicity of Gregorian chant as saccharine is from sugar...

...Older or less trendy priests, or those exhausted by the wars, try only to get through with the least possible damage...

...do not use that word in the crystal ball-gazing sense: This magazine's predictions, like most, have been sometimes right, more often wrong...

...And this is understandable, for in the midto-late sixties, when the churches in America faced t h e i r g r e a t secular challenge, it was the leadership m progressive priests and ministers, some bishops actively, others pass i v e l y m t h a t caved in...

...They defend the concept of an Environmental Protection Agency but set reasonable goals for evaluating EPA's efforts in terms other than the number of suits filed...

...In neither case will it be conducive to the selfgoverning of a free people...

...More important, it gives answers on a department-bydepartment, agency-by-agency, ~91 and policy-by-policy basis...

...Chesterton writes somewhere that the Church is the promoter in each age of the unpopular virtue--the one that does.not come "naturally" to it...

...But it was made to last a lifetime--as was one's faith...

...After the flood there is the cleaning up to do--the shoveling of mud and carting away of debris and raising of roofs...

...The age to which the churches submitted themselves was liberal...

...The basic ideas have been accepted or at least assimilated, while the more radical and confrontational fringes have been rejected...

...Dope-smoking dropouts have become coke-snorting real-estate brokers, but now they do it out of hedonism, not to make a political statement...

...Priests wear vestments, but adjust the wording of the prayers to make them sound more "natural," more just-folks...

...In the main, the movement has won...

...But he has not despaired--and we, it turns out, have not despaired either...

...The consensus is for more material possessions in cleaner, safer surroundings...

...Liberalism siphoned off the churches' sense of spiritual identity and transcendental mission, short-circuited their appeals to sacrifice and claims to obedient service, preyed on their congregations' sense of being a holy people...

...What is it to them if Christian music, literat u r e , art, and a r c h i t e c t u r e have declined in t a s t e f u l n e s s or intelligence or simple faith...