Religion and the Urbanized Continuum

...It is hard to say, of course, who promotes the secularization of America: the public leaders or the private person...

...The will of our people cannot be mobilized unless the President, every official of the Executive Branch, every member of Congress, and every citizen addresses these issues with words and deeds adequate to their gravity...

...I think I can claim to be the only bureaucrat who ever went up and down the country making official speeches to the effect that our most important foreign policy problem was to resolve the Jungian tension between our collective unconscious and the facts of life...

...This can be a shocking and bewildering experience for those who count themselves as reasonably good Christians...

...Society (th replica) renders the universe intelligibl and propitiates the forces which other wise would crush its members...

...Religion seems to say: "The world is an order of things and relationships, not the best, to be sure, but it allows these things and relationships to fall into shape, to become accepted, to change only when necessary...

...He sees every day a legion of technicians—of body and mind—rushing to remedy, smoothen, satisfy, and invent the most eccentric need, the slightest anticipated blocage, the least incipient desire...

...As early as the second century, while Christians were subjected to periodic persecution, the anonymous author of the "Letter to Diognetes" pointed out that Christians behave as better citizens than their pagan fellows: they are disciplined soldiers, conscientious workers, pious housewives, and well-liked teachers...

...Protestants of course reject Tradition and the Apostolic Succession as practiced by the early Church...

...We have here a strange new and exactly invertec version of primitive societies where ever) social act is ritualized, i.e...

...test the spirits, to see whether they are from God, for among those who have gone out into the world there are many prophets falsely inspired" (1 John 4:1, New English Bible...

...Let us note in passing that the Congressional decision coincided with the Roman Church's calendar reform, the removal of saints without "credentials"—an eminently rationalistic step...

...On that basis, we could hope to move with conviction to restore the confident solidarity of our alliance relations, and sobriety, shall we say, in our relations with the Soviet Union...

...Perhaps the time is near when all of us, together, start singing the De Profundis...

...For example, when all national holidays were re-dated Mondays, was it done (by Congress) under pressure from workers tohave more and longer weekends—or was it done by a desacralized political body following the logic of a merciless demythization...

...The questions that this brief analysis sets out to answer are: What, in our urbanized milieu, are the causes of religious erosion...

...It is said that ours is a complex, plural istic society about which generalization: should not be made...

...Region, far from being the fare of the intelctually backward or of the isolated cystic, is a mental and spiritual stimlant, as is shown by the presence of 'any brilliant theologians and churchlen in the Western tradition and by the ersistent and ubiquitous discourse on od in the works of philosophers, novel;ts, poets...

...This is the contemporary form of caesaropapism, Caesar's implicit rule over the spiritual power...

...To accomplish this goal will require a great national and international effort—in the first instance, an effort of thought, a debate, and then a series of votes on defense, and aid, and other hard subjects...

...What should be of concern to these churches, however, are those politicized Christians who mimic the prophetic mode, announce new and unprecedented revelations about the will of God, and try The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 13...

...History has never yet wi nessed such an autarchy...

...Religion is a corporate, not a private, enterprise, not even a group-affair...

...Usually these utterances are very personal and conventionally orthodox, hence of no immediate concern to the orthodox churches...

...It is useless to ask him to mend their growing deficiencies, that is, e.g., to make sure that schools teach substantive material, courts punish criminals, the media inform impartially, churches preach morality and salvation...

...The majority, however, does not perceive things this way...

...Christians are in a state of confusion, Judaic loyalties are addressed less to Yahweh than to Israel, the minorities celebrate their search for political identity, and the intelligentsia worships the Absolute Absurd...

...World politics will degenerate into conflict after conflict until we and other nations react, as we did four times in this century, when we felt threatened by hostile forces that would become overpowering unless we struck out against them...

...Such an argument, however, would be blind to the similar state of Roman society when the Letter to Diognetes was written...

...Without this belief in things higher, which are not simply 'values' but objects of worship and reverence, society risks becoming the Great Beast of Plato, an idolatrous tribe blocking its own spiritual safety valves...

...We are the only people on earth who can arrest that process in time to prevent war, by pro, a.o.0 z-,L,aully the pattern of firmness and conciliation which has characterized our foreign policy since President Truman's time...

...Like Rome, which became with the empire religiously pluralistic, our pluralistic society too faces great difficulties in its religious restoration...

...It seems, however, that we have now exhausted the possibilities of this equilibrium between the public and the private: a more rural America, not yet joined in an urbanized continuum, could afford to be religious while it was also vigilant that the public sphere remained secular...

...Among these networks the one conveying the religious message is by far the most important in the long run, precisely because it supports all the others and, as a worldview of transcendence, explains them...

...For the orthodox Christian, then, the authentic source of revelation is the Bible as understood by the tradition of his church or denomination...

...What made the Peloponnesian War inevitable, Thucydides wrote, "was the growth of Athenian power, and the fear which this caused in Sparta...

...I am not interested in discussing the merits of the Chinese revolution, Martin Luther King, or the ACLU...

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...Unless we take our share of responsibility for the process of peace, there will be no peace...

...A single established church may become petrified...

...This order requires an upward pull, a belief, which society cannot supply by itself...

...He begins to worship it because he admires it and depends on it...

...It is undeniable, on the other hand, cat our urban life corrodes religion and 'uses it to deviate toward distorted irms: esoteric sects, pseudomystic gath-ings, curiosity for and commercializaon of the occult, the rush for Orientaltechniques, the cult of gurus, the popularity of neo-gnostics like Heidegger and Hesse...

...Mirce Eliade remarks that primitive man con ceives his society (tribe) as a small replic of the cosmos...

...The individual qua citizen is a member of many intersecting networks, and he is able to function only when the networks are solid...

...Value," however, is always an inflated currency, unable to buy what the gold coin of truth can buy on the moral market...

...Not so...

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...it does not re enact the cosmogonic myth, only the rules of conformism...

...Amery's words helped to precipitate a new state of resolve in Britain, and throughout the free world...

...But I am convinced that our men of the cloth who stylethemselves modern prophets have no greater insight into the politics of God than I do, or you do...

...We can be certain, after Vietnam, that the Soviets will soon move again—in the Middle East . or the Persian Gulf, in Portugal, or in some area we are not particularly worried about at the moment: South Korea, for example, whose independence is essential to the security of Japan, or China itself, or Western Europe...

...That turn will not come in time to prevent war unless we face the issues directly and soberly, without partisanship, in the spirit of civic responsibility which is the genius of our democratic society...

...on the contrary, it believes that all problems left "to God" in the past can now be solved by powerful men through the magic wand of expertise and science...

...For every one of us who speaks, or writes, or votes on issues of American foreign policy today, the only rule should be "Speak for America.- ^ • Thomas Molnar Religion and the Urbanized Continuum • There is no reason why religion should le incompatible with life in cities...

...And what means should we use to carry it out...

...In reality, the social mechanism operating in this land seek to extend th...

...made secure by reference to a higher cosmic order...

...That is more or less where we are: society has become a church and the Church is absorbed by society...

...The latter has curbed its mission to the exclusive service of the former, not because it is compelled to do so as in the good old days of conflict between spiritual and temporal, but because the Church now actually believes in society as the ultimate verity...

...And such hubris...

...And, finally, is it proper to speak of an "urban milieu," or should we speak rather of an undifferentiated and vague "society," even of a "public," an open society closed on itself, self-sufficient, autarchic...

...As Sir Robert Thompson suggested in his bitter and passionate article in the New York Times, the events in Indochina will convince many people that the Soviet Union is a more reliable ally than the United States...

...The best diplomatic signal we could give, in the face of these events, would be a sharp increase in our defense budget, particularly for the Navy, for our ready forces, and for research and development...

...unless they are tribal, thus voluntarily limited in their appeal, religions are capable of stirring up large masses of people and of carrying their message to all categories...

...The trahison des pretres is an even more serious sociointellectual act than that of the clercs...

...Robinson argued the irrelevance of transcendence, and recommended a reorientation of churches to social concerns: conditions in prisons, the problem of divorce, sewage systems in poor neighborhoods, etc...

...This is on, more verbal tribute paid to the "horizon tal...

...The dangers before us demand a sharp and dramatic turn in the -direction of our policy...

...Thu universe and society, both inhabited b man, are inseparable, they explain eac other...

...The nineteenth century is over...

...Speak for America" Our foreign policy agenda is formidable in every field, from monetary and energy problems to those of nuclear weapons, alliance relations, and food...

...The need for such an authority was expressed in the New Testament itself: "But do not trust any and every spirit...

...it is an auxiliary to other horizontally concerned social mechanisms and agencies...

...It is not my purpose here to determine what "orthodox Christianity" is in its every detail, but only to indicate one example of what orthodox Christianity cannot be...

...Speak for England," he shouted...

...Soon the centurions and the senators followed...

...A society possesses a great deal of resilience and its so-called moral fiber can outlast the decadence of its institutions...

...Christians are good citizens, the author added, because they are in society but not of it...

...Christianity, the faith which has shaped the worldview of the majority of Americans, has from its beginning displayed a wise mixture of other-worldly and this-worldly, or, as we might put it, of vertical and horizontal elements...

...The hedonistic temptations were as great then as now, and loyalty to the State was hardly stronger: the Romans tried to avoid military service (hence the hiring of mercenaries, entire tribes of them) and the Christians ostensibly refused loyalty to Divus Caesar...

...Slowly America ceases to be the earthly paradise, a substitute for heaven, and, like Rome, the goal of all efforts...

...This degeneracy is especially alarming because almost all our institutional and private life is patterned after an implicitly recognized religious valuation...

...Increasingly also, people begin celebrating their own cults, imported or homemade...

...But it is quite another thing when he mounts his pulpit and announces that he is a successor to the Old Testament prophets and possesses privileged insight into God's providential will for the political arrangements of mankind...

...In words intended, suspect, for tourists, it is also said that ii the length and width of this vast countr myriad ways of life may be found, ever state, region, municipality, minority dif fering from all the others...

...In regard to churches in America today, the Anglican bishop John Robinson's little book, Honest to God, published a dozen years ago, comes to mind...

...their faith and virtue make for civic loyalty and constructive participation...

...Secularization" in its penultimate phase is not a rampaging immorality, but rather the citizen's strong conviction that society has its own absolute weight, it is self-propelled, it can last forever...

...But let us remember that in the eyes of Hebrews and Christians this view of society is totally false, because the world is not self-suffi-cient: it is precarious, porous, transparent...

...The citizen thus comes to conceive society as an enormous self-sufficient and self-sustaining entity, filling the universe, causa sua...

...but pluralism too has its dangers: it blocks religious dynamism, it fragments the spiritual aspiration, it erodes what is most universal in the religious message...

...How often have we heard that the Holy Spirit is our liberator and that therefore the Bill of Rights as interpreted by the American Civil Liberties Union constitutes a new gift of the Spirit...

...and painters...

...however, they came toan analogous principle, namely, that whatever contradicts or is not warranted by the Scriptures as interpreted by the Lutheran and/or Calvinist traditions (which appropriated much of the basis of the Apostolic Tradition) is falsely inspired...

...The condemnation of Montanism is endorsed by orthodox Protestantism as well as by the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican branches of Christendom which adhere to the Apostolic Succession and the Catholic Tradition...

...Can we expect a reversal of the trend...

...and life in the State and he Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 11 public institutie:fis has become SG distant, so impersonal, that participation can no longer assume concrete and satisfying forms...

...The United States should be the master, not the victim, of its fate...

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...but tolerance as well as the vastness of the continent has permitted private religiosity to coexist with public agnosticism...

...Is this degeneracy due to the urban character of society, to its cosmopolitan features...

...In my opinion, effective programs of action on all these subjects are within our reach, if, but only if, we soon come to a common and agreed answer to these fundamentalquestions: What is our foreign policy for...

...What we see, however, is churches which yield to the weight of society and become literally superfluous, even damaging...

...We must finally liberate ourselves from this dream...

...In this regard the spreading apocalyptic mood among the religious "remnant" is a desperate attempt of a few to see the world and society as being under God's providence—if only as the last act of punishment...

...This can be ascertained today when State, schools, churches, and courts beg the citizen to commit his "value" in defense of order, law, decency, and honesty in public life—failing to realize that when such responsibilities are left to the individual alone, even if he is a gentleman, the burden is entirely unbearable...

...The basic cause of war, as Thucydides pointed out many centuries ago, is fear...

...the medium can always be compelled to carry the message...

...Even its so-called self-doubts mere] reinforce its belief that it can engender new certainty...

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...It is not the city as such but the exclusively horizontal dimension of our civilization that has conquered us...

...Some of you will recall Leopold Amery's great outburst in the House of Commons in 1939, to a speaker who was dithering about Britain's response to the invasion of Poland...

...While religion has become implausible in our urbanized, leveled landscape, it has not become impossible: the message is not, never will be, the medium...

...In any case, the secularization is popularly accepted...

...It would be easy to argue that in our society (twentieth-century, industrial, mass, democratic, pluralistic) erosion of such civic virtue has set in at both ends: religious faith has slackened under the weight of hedonism and atomization (the "lethargic yet tumultuous society" anticipated by Tocqueville...

...Christianity in Rome first conquered the slaves, the households of high officials, and many intellectuals...

...True and False Prophecy The distinction between prophecy and false prophecy presupposes a conception of religious authority...

...In America, the separation of State and Church and the resulting secular society have been with us since independence...

...It decided that a false prophet was one whose illuminations either contradicted or were not warranted by the Scriptures as interpreted by the Tradition of the Apostolic Church, and who proceeded to regard his illuminations as normative for the whole Church...

...We are living in the midst of a comparable process today...

...but when all live in a semipublic milieu, connected by a myriad of administrative and electronic umbilical cords to the common denominator, the individual citizen begins accepting the anonymous public decree...

...without the cosmos ther would be no society, and without the ref lica, the small cosmos, man could nc deal with the forces of nature and the sui rounding universe of spirits...

...yet it cannot survive for long—notwithstanding Hume, Max Weber, and others who believed that skeptical or socialist gentlemen could live comfortably in demythologized societies on the accumulated moral capital of scriptural verities, if only society would translate the discredited verities into decent values...

...In any case, religion is either dynamic and proselytizing or it is dead...

...This role is performed by the Church on condition that the Church itself remains, as the writer to Diognetes insisted, in but not of mundane society...

...The Church tackled this problem of authority early...

...This is why cynics and ideologues call it a "conservative" force—which it is...

...On the citizen's level, it seems obvious that the social, cultural, economic mechanisms—if suitably lubricated with individual initiative—provide existence with an immanent ultimate meaning...

...Our collective unconscious preserves a beautiful vision in our minds—the vision of nineteenth-century America, isolated and aloof, without entangling alliances, and entirely neutral in the various conflicts of world power politics...

...Although religion in its sui generis forms is not present in the nooks of everyday existence, it acts as an overall guarantor of moral and social equilibrium...

...Its vocation is to fill society by occupying its spiritual center and spreading to the peripheries...

...We must therefore go deeper to grasp the nature of religious erosion...

...This error, which was known as Montanism in the early Church, was officially condemned by the Church when Montanus was excommunicated in 177 A.D...

...Ir our society, where social acts are drainec of all transcendence, the ritual is a mere tribute to society itself...

...Let us use this concept in order t clarify the ultimate significance of our sc ciety: we find it no longer a replica of an) thing, it is simply (complicatedly) itsel satisfied with its being, immanent, ful without needs or regards cast outside i self...

...How often have we—that is, those of us who still listen—heard that the Chinese (or some other Third World) revolution was ordained by God as a punishment for the wicked ways of the white man...

...We are at a point where Amery's cry should be heeded again...

...Furthermore, given the historical standards of orthodox Christianity, our modern prophets are probably not prophets at all, but rather false prophets who dishonor the very cause of God they presume to serve...

...But, as said before, we no longer have balanced societies, only a kind of public continuum...

...ti.ii ItIluilh ''rJ 12 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 197 It is rightly questionable whether religion is possible in such a society, other than in its reformist-therapeutic variety: it is supposed to improve race relations, housing problems, wage-adjustments...

...At present, we are in the phase of disguised attacks and of mockery, as musicals like Candide and films like The Exorcist show...

...There are growing numbers of "pentecostal" Christians who make prophetic utterances on behalf of God...

...God is visible behind it...

...Remove the vertical, and everyday life will exert all its pull on man, filling his existence with the lead of routine, without providing the lift he needs in order to be a good citizen by being more than a citizen...

...Frankly, I do not know what God and/or the Holy Spirit think of these things, and I have no idea whether your attitudes on these issues are godly or ungodly...

...Thus in a society where religion is lively and strong, even the agnostic and the indifferent need (often unconsciously) the "vertical" to justify and stimulate the "horizontal...

...Any alleged prophecies, miracles, or actions of the Holy Spirit which occur in contemporary times must be tested for authenticity in terms of their conformity with authentic revelation...

...Religion re-rains an inseparable component of culire, debate, and the mind's search for ltimate things...

...How often have we heard that Martin Luther King was sent by God to save his people...

...It is one thing for a priest to say, "In my own humble opinion, such and such is an unwise and/or immoral policy...

...JerusatJn was the center of Judaism, and :hristianity conquered the urban centers )ng before it managed to permeate the ountryside, as the term "pagan" haganus, peasant) clearly indicates...

...The nations which maintained the general peace of the nineteenth century no longer have the power to do so...

...We are witnessing a rapid secularization of the clergy, even of the heretofore strict orders, and the transformation of religious institutions (seminaries, schools, universities) into hotbeds of revolution and immorality...

...horizontal, to make it exclusive, to turn i into the only system of reference...

...Dale Wee Prophecy, Providence, and Politics • • Undoubtedly many of you reading this essay have had your cherished political beliefs condemned as violations of the very will of God by some zealous priest, minister, or college chaplain...

...It was decades ago that our society reached a dangerous threshold of secularization, but at first this was apparent merely in the life of public institutions...

...In other Western societies the separation of State and Church was achieved officially, but the battle goes on, partly because the memory of the Church's historical participation in the State remains...