A Priest ABCCould Love
Stump, Christopher
A Priest ABC Could Love The Emersonian Spirit on TV's Nothing Sacred By Christopher Stump Mindful of popular demand for television shows featuring religious themes, the networks this season have...
...In Emerson's mind, as in Father Ray's, the freedom to be yourself—to believe and act apart from the crowd—keeps company with the freedom to know God "at first hand," wholly apart from church or creed...
...the freedom to be yourself becomes one and the same as the freedom to be by yourself...
...To the contrary: The fervid spiritual individualism of Emerson echoed by Nothing Sacred's priests in fact leads to conformity...
...The Sage of Concord advises us to rely only on "what is true for you in your private heart...
...If only its departure could doom the claim that nothing, but nothing, is sacred but the puny self...
...Knowledge of the self in solitude begets knowledge of God...
...It is a legacy that disposes us to hear the voice of God in a self that believes it can speak of God by speaking of humanity in a loud voice...
...A Priest ABC Could Love The Emersonian Spirit on TV's Nothing Sacred By Christopher Stump Mindful of popular demand for television shows featuring religious themes, the networks this season have fully obliged us...
...Actually, those words are from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the apostle of "self-reliance," but the message of Nothing Sacred is much the same— and thus nothing new...
...Or it collapses into the arms of hustlers who promise to guide it back toward being . . . itself...
...When a woman seeks him out for advice on abortion, he says, "You're an adult, with your own conscience...
...In Emerson's terms, the crowd, by urging conformity, prevents you from being yourself...
...When a parishioner cries to Father Leo, a friend and colleague of Father Ray, "I want to know...
...I have nothing to hold on to!," he responds, "Nothing but you and God—that is as good a definition of pure faith as I've ever heard...
...I can't tell you what to do...
...Emerson sidelines formal religion insofar as it subtracts from a pure, unmediated acquaintance with divine inspiration...
...Emerson defines true religion as "a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man," and it is a faith to which Father Ray gives splendid testimony...
...Father Ray preaches Emerson Lite, the gospel of American spiritual individualism, the summons to heed the promptings of your deepest self...
...Says Emerson, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind...
...Consider Father Ray, the priest on ABC's new offering Nothing Sacred...
...For ABC, nothing is at last sacred but the ratings...
...Whatever that may be...
...He believes God urges nothing on us, save that we urge nothing on others...
...He is nearly drawn from the priesthood by Christopher Stump is a reporter at The Weekly Standard...
...He appears neither Catholic nor Protestant— indeed, barely Christian...
...Emerson permits this American self to be as boundless in potential as the unexploited wilderness...
...Freighted with dogma and tradition long obsolete, the church stifles the self, smothers its inspiration, and detracts from its independence...
...Henry James delivered the classic response to this type when, exasperated with Emerson, he exclaimed, "O you man without a handle...
...The church, by stifling the spirit, prevents you from knowing God...
...What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions," Emerson asks, "if I live wholly from within...
...what is important ultimately is the "God in you...
...The priesthood seems to him an afterthought, for he has little use for prayer, and only grudging respect for the duties of his vocation...
...Emerson's legacy may be discerned in the legions who are averse to organized religion, in whom churchless "spirituality," in all its solitude, flourishes...
...This response reflects the Emersonian yearning to recover the divine by striking out on one's own, free of church or crowd—as alone as the pioneer who lit out across America's abyss of space with nothing but God and himself...
...His sermons, full of sneers and breezy complaints, are the bleakest of fare...
...belief is a matter of "affirmations of the soul...
...He freely philosophizes from his pulpit, along the following lines: Christianity today consists of "creeds that would take us back to the chimpanzee...
...Nothing Sacred gladly drinks from this legacy...
...As Emerson sees it, one's self or "conscience" holds fast against organized religion...
...Father Ray is by most measures a poor custodian of belief...
...The self, having discarded tradition and authority, has little to fall back on but the opinions of others...
...Thus Nothing Sacred is likely doomed...
...And Father Ray...
...He urges each of us to enthrone a sacred Me—itself part of God—whose potential is as vast as the prairies, but whose power has been sapped by organized religion...
...It could be that more people have heard of him than have watched the show, because he has provoked devout Christians, particularly devout Catholics, who feel he mocks their faith...
...Indeed, Father Ray's is a peculiar sort of religion...
...It is evident in those who shop and hop from church to church, captive to the self's every whim, in search of a religion built to their specifications...
...the lure of a former lover...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 7
