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Sunday, September 22, 2019

The gingerbread house-part 1

1. I'll be doing a series of posts commenting on Robert George & R. J. Snell, eds., Mind, Heart, and Soul: Intellectuals and the Path to Rome (2018). This is another book in the genre of conversion testimonies about men and women who swim the Tiber. The book's selling-point is that unlike so many books of the same genre, these are testimonies by "public intellectuals". That's supposed to make it more impressive than your average convert. 

And that, in turn, raises expectations. When "public intellectuals" convert to Catholicism, are the reasons they give an improvement over the usual reasons you encounter from converts who are not "public intellectuals"? Many of the stories have a personal interest appeal, but most contributors offer only the thinest arguments for Catholicism, and nothing original at that. 

2. The way the book is billed is somewhat deceptive because some of the contributors have fancy credentials while others are just filler to pad out the volume. The editors didn't have enough public intellectuals to compile a whole book, so some contributors are basically fluff. In some instances the editors needed a token woman to provide balance.  


3. There's a certain irony in many Catholic conversion testimonies that's nicely captured by Rod Dreher:

I mostly read my way into Catholicism in the early 1990s, and was therefore truly shocked to discover that the church of John Paul II, so to speak, was hard to find outside of books and my favorite religious magazines. Real parish life was way more like what we see today in Pope Francis. 


So many Catholic conversion stories have a cerebral emphasis. In that regard they parallel deconversion stories by apostates. 

Why do I say it's ironic? The appeal of Catholicism is like the gingerbread house in Hansel & Gretel. It presents a startling contrast between what's on the outside and what's on the inside. There's the yummy exterior, which is the bait–but once inside, there's the cannibalistic witch. 

What's missing in the stereotypical Catholic conversion story is how they have it backwards. When was the last time you read a testimony that said "I converted to Catholicism after I began attended a Catholic church"? At least in the genre of published conversion stories, the convert reads himself into Catholicism. They convert to Catholicism before they experience Catholic parish life. Like the gingerbread house, this sets up a dichotomy between Catholicism on paper and the church on the ground. 

They aren't converted to Roman Catholicism in its concrete form but its abstract form. They adopt a disembodied theology. 

How often have you read Catholic apologists say things like "The Bible is the Church's book. So you can't grasp Scripture properly unless you read it in community"? Yet the process of conversion typically occurs in reverse. They don't convert to Catholicism by experiencing Catholicism as a living faith, but by reading Catholic apologists and the church fathers. By posing questions they don't think evangelicalism can answer. 

By comparison, there's nothing ironic about reading yourself into evangelicalism or Calvinism because, initially, the primary question is whether it's true. Protestant theology is separable from communal life in a what that is not supposed to be the case in reference to Catholicism. Catholic theology is inseparable from institutional religion and the community of faith. That's because the Catholic church is the source of dogma, and there's a one-to-one correspondence between Catholic theology and the denomination that sponsors it. 

In that regard, converts who read themselves into Catholicism are like a cessationist who converts to Pentecostalism by reading Gordon Fee and Craig Keener, and not because he has a charismatic experience. Only afterwards does he begin attending charismatic churches. But that's incongruous inasmuch as charismatic theology, if true, will have concrete manifestations. 

4. Another revealing feature of this particular book is the background of the converts. To begin with, some converts already had a background in liturgical churches (Lutheran, Anglican, Episcopalian). It comes as no surprise when they convert to Catholicism since their religious background predisposed them in that direction. 

5. On a related note, several converts had a background that was irreligious or nominally religious or nominally Protestant. Once again, it comes as no surprise that their background makes them susceptible to Catholicism inasmuch as they never had a strong, intellectually well-informed evangelical standard of comparison. That's another parallel with deconversion testimonies, where the apostate was typically raised in a fideistic, anti-intellectual church. To quote some examples from the book:

[Bishop Conley] I was brought up nominally Christian. My parents were both Christian, but for a large portion of my youth, we didn't go to church. Then for a few years we went to the Presbyterian church, only because my mother liked the preacher. But my sister and I didn't have any formal religious instruction growing up. My parents were Christian in their outlook and instilled in us Christian values, but we really didn't worship together as a family. We would go to church sometimes on Christmas and Easter. During junior high we went to Sunday school on and off (2).

[Thomas Joseph White] I grew up in southeast Georgia as the only child of a Jewish father and a Presbyterian mother. My parents were nominally or moderately religious. My father could be characterized as a somewhat secularized Jew and my mother was a modestly practicing Presbyterian (63). 

[Karin Oberg] I grew up in Sweden and my family still resides there. Like many Swedish families, my family was not very religious, but held on to many religious customs and morals. As a baby I was baptized in the Swedish Lutheran Church, the state church at the time, and later I went to weekly Christian pre-school. My only memory of the latter is the time when I rejected the image of God as male and consequently drew him as a woman. My father, a self-proclaimed atheist and stoic, was quite proud at this early sign of freethinking and questioning of religious authority. My mother identifies as a Christian but does not go to church. Apart from brief evening prays with her as a young child, I had little religious formation…I asked my Lutheran confirmation pastor whether I should be confirmed if I sort of believed in God and didn't believe in Jesus. She said it was okay, and I got confirmed (130-131; 133).

[Chad Pecknold] What he remembers of the religion in his childhood is–not much. Christmas was "a bid deal," as were Sunday dinners. But why why Sunday, why Christmas? These seem in retrospect to have been mere "residuals" of Christian life. His grandmother was a "very Catholic Quebecois" woman, and his grandfather, with a Church of Ireland background, agreed to raising their children Catholic. But as for the home his own parents made, "while we sometimes went to my mother's Presbyterian church for Easter, and I sometimes would go with evangelical neighbors to Vacation Bible School, Christian faith was not integral to our life as a family.  It was a "nice" thing but not a necessary thing. So while it was not an entirely secular upbringing, neither can I call it Christian (214).

[Douglas Beaumont] I was not raised in a religious environment. We did not attend church anywhere or read the Bible. I said nighttime prayers with my  mom and she would take me to Vacation Bible School some summers though…However, between that and my eighteenth year there was simply no "input" as far as faith went. So it was not a lack in Evangelicalism, it was that I was simply not part of it (233). 

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