Liberals and Conservatives in the Church

Liberal and conservative trends in the Church often have a yin/yang relationship. One can give rise to the other.

Some liberal communities have a tendency to dissipate. The freedom to experiment is at first wonderful. People search for an authentic interaction rather than something scripted. But soon enough, things lose meaning. People go separate ways down undefined paths and end up just floating along. What are we about? People get mad at repressive policies in their church, so they leave and end up going to no church whatsoever. The baby can get thrown out with the bathwater.

Conservatives have a tendency to hyper-focus. Put a bunch of conservatives together and suddenly you have 10 pages of rules and a cult-like atmosphere. There is a need to breathe. God is bigger than your little rules. There's a lot of ugliness mixed in to the message, but at least there is a message, and the wonderful Good News of the Gospel can be passed along to the next generation, perhaps even unbeknownst to the messenger, in the most clumsy way possible.

There are all sorts of ways of finding God. Some seek God through the amazing freedom and radical justice promised in Scripture. Others seek God in stability, the Rock, the Cornerstone you can build on, also promised in Scripture. Our large Church can hold all of this together.

It is my belief that as long as liberals lose focus and throw the baby out with the bathwater, we will be continually cursed with subsequent generations of conservatives to bring the baby back, along with all the toxic bathwater.

Chesterton argued that Medieval Europe was not ready for the nature-loving Francis until it had deeply purged the essence of paganism from its psyche. Once people got the right relationship of God and nature, then the beautiful love of Creation could flower. We weren't worshipping nature, we were seeing the Revelation of God in and through nature, which is also wonderful and praiseworthy but it's not the same thing as actually worshipping nature. You can't go around talking about "brother sun and sister moon" until you know what you mean by that. The problem is that in order to establish this, Europe paid a hefty price. It wasn't a pretty sight re-orienting once-pagan Europe, and people did some very un-Christian-like things to encourage this to happen. A lot of good things got repressed in order to get this one idea across. I'm not sure why they couldn't have found a better method.

Some liberal theologians, activists and leaders may be ready to move the Church along. Some, however, think they are ready, but they aren't. In any case, the rank and file congregants may not be ready, and so we have to wait. The Catholic Church has a strong intellectual tradition, but we are not a church solely of intellectuals. We are a whole people, which is one of our most attractive features.

Liberals have in some ways let the Church down. Granted, conservatives have made it unquestioningly difficult for them. But at the end of the day, you can't blame someone else for why you have no faith. It's not good to have an answer for no reason. But it's not very attractive to just have questions, either.

I don't think liberal Christianity (of any denomination) has a message right now, which is why out-dated fundamentalism is so strong--when the choice is between having a clumsy, out-dated fundamentalism or having no faith at all, many choose the former. Perhaps they intuitively understand that it is better to have a faith with some very rough edges than to have no faith at all. For lack of a better term, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. (Or maybe it's a question of frying pan vs. fire, but that's not a better metaphor, either!)

I do think Vatican II-era Catholicism was still in the sweet spot, but it perhaps broke down too many walls without giving enough clues as to what the alternatives can be. As Raymond Brown argued, you can give all sorts of well-founded reasons why some Bible stories may not be literally true, but if you don't offer at least some morsel of direction as to how you can still have faith in light of that, you will be doing a disservice to your audience. Something like that unintentionally happened in the fallout from Vatican II. However, I do think if the Church just kept the conversation going we would have gotten there.

Everything has a history. You can't understand the experiments of the 60s and 70s (beer and pizza Mass) without knowing the stagnant repression that it came in response to. And you can't understand the tightening of the reigns of modern times without admitting that in some important ways the experiments may be at risk for losing the baby with the bathwater. And so the powers that be clamp down--this is an exercise in fear, but maybe it is more than just fear? Maybe it is just an amazingly clumsy way of addressing the fact that something deep and important is at risk. I would like to think there were a better way of addressing this risk, but for whatever reason this seems to be what happens.

The logical, intellectual mind can move faster than the heart. You can intellectualize your way out of your faith before the rest of you has time to catch up. Whenever the Church as a whole does this, we run the risk of being smacked back two steps to try again.

If the pendulum swings too far one way, we can expect it to swing back eventually in the opposite direction. Perhaps this should be a warning to both liberals and conservatives.

Vatican II is to us what Francis was to Medieval Europe: The doors and windows swung open with a tremendous breath of fresh air. We recovered something important that we had previously lost. But if we can't move forward without unraveling something important, some people will come along (such as the modern young conservatives) to tighten up the clamps once again until we get it right.