Boomer Religion
by Barbara Nauer - October 28, 2009
Reprinted with permission.
For anyone who strongly identifies with traditional Christianity, the October 6-9 series on Fox News's Hannity, with Sean Hannity interviewing Michael Moore, was rich in irony and vaguely distressing. The occasion was Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story.
Two bright, likable, and deeply sincere married men of middle age passionately argued the positions of the liberal Democrats or progressives (Moore) and the conservative Republicans (Hannity). What generated some irony was that both celebrity worldlings revealed themselves to be regular Sunday mass-goers. They viewed their years in Catholic schools warmly and with pride, and readily associated some of their viewpoints with the teachings of Jesus. Their faith witness was impressive.
Both men view peace – understood as the absence of military conflict – as an absolute value. Moore is a thoroughgoing pacifist. His views resemble those of the 1960s hippies and the anarchist mobs that now assault World Trade meetings. Hannity is for peace, too, but "peace through strength," through deterrence. He wants a win in Afghanistan.
On other topics, the differences were even sharper. The pair's diametrically opposed attitudes toward socialism – Moore was pro, Hannity con – colored everything they said about the economy, taxes, poverty, and health care. Both were mindful of the "preferential option for the poor" that is part of contemporary Catholic theology.
Just as in his film, Moore railed against capitalism's excesses in the way of all leftists. He had good things to say about health care in Cuba, Canada, and other nations where socialistic approaches are in force. Naturally, Moore welcomes Obama's public-option health plan.
Hannity, though strongly committed to capitalism and free trade, admitted that the capitalist way of organizing societies invites a rise in human greed, selfishness, and reckless ambition. But he seemed in virtual agreement with Moore, who summarized unhappily at one point, "I am not against capitalism so much as against what capitalism has become." They argued hotly about taxation rates and share-the-wealth redistribution programs. Each accused the other of maintaining a household shrine – candles, picture, etc. – of some public figure (Obama for Moore, Reagan for Hannity.)
But watching all of this, I noticed an interesting similarity: Like members of the baby-boomer generation in general, these two earnest men reflect a strikingly narrow religious worldview. Their combined biblical knowledge seems limited to the four Gospels as described in religion classes and read aloud at Sunday mass.
So disposed, the two seem to be less the products of Roman Catholicism than of two virulent heresies that washed through U.S. religious education at all levels beginning in the 1950s: Modernism and Marxism. Theirs is boomer religion.
Modernism was the first to crash in on the faithful. It came as a hardy transplant from some seminaries in Northern Europe during the late 1890s, reflecting the efforts of theologians to square traditional Christian beliefs with the Enlightenment's scientific rationalism and evolutionary biology.
At modernism's heart was "form criticism,"a novel method of interpreting the Bible naturalistically. This approach kept the historical Christ but dismissed most of Scripture's supernatural elements – divine revelations, atonement, miracles, angels, demons – as largely mythic. Two academic priests, the French Rev. Alfred Loisy and an Irish Jesuit Rev. George Tyrrell, promoted the heresy among Catholics, while German Lutheran Rudolf Karl Bultmann set Protestant theology on fire with it. The writings of these men and their followers spread the heterodox ideas worldwide.
Two popes, Pius IX and St. Pius X, tried to correct modernism's errors with formal writings (the Syllabus of Errors and Pascendi Dominici Gregis), but to little lasting effect. As a result, most of the Old Testament and the New Testament epistles of St. Paul and others rapidly lost their claim to any serious theological relevance among contemporary Catholics. By the mid 1960s, modernist theological experts, both clergy and lay persons, were a dominant force everywhere in U.S. religious education.
The Catholic updaters of the Faith made a special project of banning the use in schools of the older Catholic catechisms, such as the Baltimore Catechism, whose content reflected the Council of Trent, the launch pad for the Counter-Reformation. These catechisms were teaching tools whose texts were designed for ease of memorization by children and converts. The inexpensive booklets presented careful statements of the truths and teachings of both Testaments of the Bible and Sacred Tradition – that is, the non-written understandings and worship practices handed down by the Apostles.
The new breed of clerics also set out to revise and "update" the Church's liturgical texts and to write and produce improved religion textbooks. Incredibly, in a surprisingly short period, they accomplished this and more. As Ralph Wiltgen described in The Rhine Flows into the Tiber, the updaters also manipulated the English-language press releases from the Second Vatican Council. They managed to make older scholastic theology, long treasured by the Church, seem obsolete for today's Catholics.
As a result of these projects, and although few Catholic parents knew it at the time, most children attending parish schools during the 1960s and 1970s were tragically shortchanged in their religious education. The Catholicism they received was largely supernatural religion denatured. Children were exposed not to the Bible's original texts but to Bible stories about Moses, David, and other major heroes.
And then came the tsunami's second wave. "Marxism" is our contemporary nickname for the atheistic political and economic system that Russia's 1917 revolution unleashed on the world. Variously called socialism or communism, it puts a twist on the dialectical idealism of Friedrich Hegel.
Communism spreads its errors into new societies with a three-phase movement. First, its covert agents use anti-government and anti-Church propaganda to spread social discontent in the targeted nation or population. The agents aim to promote anti-government revolution, either violent or non-violent, which makes possible their ultimate goal: the complete communist takeover of governmental power.
Needless to say, Christian believers who embraced the materialism introduced by theological modernists had little resistance to Marxist influence. For them, the supernatural order had vanished entirely or become uncertain. And just as with modernism, forceful and clear papal writings (such as Pius XI's Divini Redemptoris) failed to reverse the error.
In the United States prior to the 1960s, Christian churches and their schools had acted as a bulwark against communist infiltration of education and mass media. But that quickly changed: By 1968 the Marxist neighborhood organizer Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals, was a favored celebrity of many U.S. priests and bishops. He was one of the featured speakers at a nationwide gathering of priests in Chicago in 1968, held to protest formally Pope Paul VI's anti-birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae.
Of course, Christian sexual morality took the hardest hit from the tsunami of errors that swept through all the churches from the late 1950s onward. Returning to Moore and Hannity, products of this revolution, the attitude of both men toward homosexuality is illustrative. They are scrupulously politically correct: While straight themselves, they have "no objection to what other people do in their bedrooms."
When combined with a belief in a non-judgmental Jesus, this breezy attitude toward sex is the position of all fully modernized Catholics, including a good many who are older than Moore and Hannity. (Think of the pro-abortion Catholics in Congress, of Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews.) But it is not the traditional Catholic view. That older position, rightly called fundamentalist, took very seriously the Old Testament and the New Testament writings of Sts. Peter, Paul, James, and others. So should we all.
Barbara Nauer is a freelance writer from Peoria, Illinois, where she manages an editing and graphic arts service. She has taught English at Catholic and secular colleges in St. Louis, Chicago, and New Orleans.
