In today’s America, as in other countries like it, people of
faith are facing a question of critical importance: How should they respond to
a dominant secular culture that’s not just hostile to their beliefs but bent on
forcing them to conform to its values and, not incidentally, winning the
allegiance of their children?
Fresh attention to this question has lately been stimulated by
the publication of three much-discussed books: Strangers
in a Strange Land by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia (Henry
Holt), The Benedict Option by conservative writer
Rod Dreher (Sentinel), and Out of the Ashes by
Providence College professor Anthony Esolen (Regnery).
In fact, the problem has been waiting to explode for years.
As far back as 1870, ornery Orestes Brownson, the leading
American Catholic public intellectual of the 19th century, grumbled
prophetically: “Instead of regarding the church as having advantages here (in
America) which she has nowhere else ... I think the Church has never
encountered a social & political order so hostile to her.”
Time passed, and as change set in, other farsighted individuals
began to share Brownson’s dark vision. Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray saw
the problem taking shape in his 1960 classic We Hold
These Truths. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre dissected it at length in
his seminal volume After Virtue, first published
in 1981. Since then others, the present writer among them, have discussed it
many times.
Now, it seems, recognition of the problem has become all but
unavoidable. Hence the note of urgency in the Chaput, Dreher and Esolen books.
Particularly alarming has been the fallout from the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, which came as a belated wakeup
call alerting people of faith to the precariousness of their situation.
It’s not just that in Obergefell
the court redefined marriage while legalizing same-sex marriage. Even worse, a
majority of Americans appeared to welcome the arrival of gay marriage, even as
the secular state demonstrated its determination to quash dissent, starting
with wedding cake bakers and florists but in time likely moving on to the rest
of us.
Next on the agenda are transgender rights, now being promoted by
media such as The New York Times and Washington Post with the same ideological fervor they
brought to selling gay marriage before Obergefell.
All this is happening, furthermore, at a time when religious
practice and church affiliation are in decline in America. As of last September,
23 percent of U.S. adults called themselves atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in
particular” in religious terms, double the number in the 1980s.
Confronted with this state of affairs, religious Americans have
limited options. One of these is cultural assimilation: abandoning the fight
and adopting the secular world view. Large numbers of Catholics, to speak only
of them, have done that and others are moving in the same direction. That
unhappily includes many young people.
The positive options are overlapping and must be pursued
simultaneously. Continuing to fight the culture war is one, since this is a war
that must be fought as a matter of principle. Creating a new subculture
grounded in religious values and organized around faith-based institutions is
another, and this already can be seen happening here and there. The third
option is to make the new subculture a source and setting for a serious effort
to form the faithful for the evangelization of secular culture by the witness
of their lives.
Archbishop Chaput writes, “That work belongs to all of us
equally: clergy, laity, and religious.” So it does. It’s the Christian
vocation.
Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and author of American Church: The
Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America.