According to the results of a poll issued this week, Irish Catholics are losing their faith far quicker than those polled in the other countries. Mercifully Mary Kenny in The Guardian did not go the way of many commentators who stated that this was due to recent scandals in the Roman church.
Kenny wrote that, “Even before the clerical scandals broke into the public realm – in the 1990s – this intermingling of faith and fatherland was in decline. There was the effect of the 1960s. There was the effect of the pill, which, contrary to legend, was legal in Ireland. There was television. There was modernisation, which the Vatican advanced as aggiornamento. Around the time of Vatican II – 1962-65 – it could be said that in the hills of Connemara they spoke of little else.”
It would be wrong to look at the poll’s findings about Ireland in isolation. Last week in parallel to this finding, across the Atlantic there was another round taking place in an ongoing public debate. This particular round was triggered by a Roman Catholic columnist, Ross Douhat, in The New York Times, who was expounding the now rather tired theme that the numerical decline in the Episcopal Church was solely due to its liberalism in both theology and sexuality. The totem figures of this period and process being the liberalism of Bishop John Shelby Spong and the episcopal ordination of Gene Robinson.
Among the responses to Douhat’s position were those which stated that he was wrong in his cause and effect rationale in his claim that liberal Christianity had caused the decline. Yes, in the region of 200,000 had voted with their feet during this period. Some had done so in offence at the ordination of Robinson, but many had just drifted away. But that does not explain much of the decline, because the decline began after a Baby Boom peak in the 1950s, and it has a similar slope for all of the mainstream Protestant groups, not all of whom had accepted gay clergy or gay partnerships.
Explanations which looked beyond the statistics argue that the losses are NOT due to Christian liberalism. Rather, they are due to an epochal pivot in the social imaginary which happened in our lifetime – similar to that which followed Copernicus. One writer stated, “They are not caused by how we do Church. But they are an effect to which the mainstream Protestant churches have struggled to respond fruitfully.”
This decline of mainstream Protestantism in the USA coincides with what Charles Taylor has dubbed “the Age of Authenticity” and its accompanying “soft relativism” in which the prevailing Western ethos is to “let each person do their own thing; and we shouldn’t criticize each others’ values.” Taylor describes this age, which he particularly sees as reaching a turning point in the 1960s, in terms of the rise of “instrumental individualism, which is implicit in the idea that society is there for the good of individuals.” The “buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular.” Westerners “understand our lives as taking place within a self-sufficient immanent order,” an “immanent frame” in which individuals can “slough off the transcendent.” In other words, the last 50 years are characterized by the rise of subjectivity, distinct to the extent that the “social imaginary” of late modernity is radically more dominated by an interiority and immanent frame, with the individual at the centre of ethical reasoning.
Craig Uffman, an Episcopal priest, commented, “We are the first generation to live in world where belief in God is considered a lifestyle option. We are the first to live in a world in which many people admit the possibility of human flourishing without turning to God. Mainstream Protestant churches are losing people because we suddenly finding ourselves in competition with a flourishing new religion called nihilism, and nihilism allows you to watch ESPN on Sunday morning. Nihilism is an elitist religion, however. You have to be smart to prefer Nietzche. And that’s why the Protestant denominations who historically have been constituted by the most educated of our citizenry are suffering losses disproportionately. We are relatively more vulnerable to nihilism. If we want to fight this, we have to incarnate the antidote to nihilism.”
We really are one of the first (if not “the” first; I suspect this has been evolving for 30 years) generations to live in a world where a God-based social network is not a “given” in our shared life together. In Western Europe and the USA despite differences in wealth distribution, we are amongst the most affluent on a global scale. With a certain societal baseline of wealth comes a notion that there is a magic number or magic formula that allows a person to truly be self-sufficient, and free from fear or threat. What is clear, though, is the age old struggle between wants and needs is still with us, as is that old struggle with what makes us, as individuals, happy or content. Nihilism allows us to avoid being challenged by a hurting, broken world. Christianity forces us to look at it.
A side effect of nihilism can be anti-theism as opposed to a simple atheism or agnosticism. It becomes even more complicated when one realizes that some of the voices that challenge the shrinking numbers and the theology and the polity of the Episcopal Church, the ones who cry that it has lost its way and have strayed from the Bible–are in fact, voices with an undertone of nihilism disguised as theology… people who can present a case which says they are “in”, they are “right” and you or me are not.
We, as a culture, are so surrounded by nihilism, to even begin to extricate ourselves from it seems a near-impossible task–how do we even begin to incarnate its antidote? Perhaps the seeds of this antidote lie in the most uncomfortable stories of the Gospel and the maddening parables that seem to make no sense whatsoever to our modern sensibilities. What does it mean to constantly strive to get in a boat and long to go away to a deserted place, only to find that what we were trying to escape, beat us to our destination? What does it mean to take nothing for the journey but a staff–no bag, no bread, no money, and no extra change of clothes? What does it truly mean to save our lives by losing them? Perhaps the answer begins in sitting with these discomforting messages as a community, rather than alone–and perhaps that also means to find what is living and breathing within a community that the naysayers insist is dying.
For sure the findings of the poll in Ireland and elsewhere point to situations well beyond what is deemed to be scandalous behaviour, or what is described as liberal theology. God protect us from simplistic analyses and solutions. Nihilism is alive and prospering on both sides of the Atlantic.
Houston McKelvey