Moralistic, therapeutic deism is running on the fumes of authentic red-blooded historic Christianity. When it finally sputters to a halt, what will take its place? The Christian faith in the second half of the twenty-first century will be mystical, mythological, and miraculous, or it will be nothing at all.
A graph posted by Stephen Bulllivant, author of Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America Since Vatican II, illustrates the alarming decline in the Catholic Church since 1960. Over the last sixty years baptisms, marriages, ordinations, and conversions have all plunged downward like the Titanic.
It is a common complaint among traditionalist Catholics to blame the Second Vatican Council for the disaster, but correlations are not always causes. While the abuses that have come about by the advocates of “the Spirit of Vatican II” are rife, it is hard to ascribe the free-fall of Catholicism only to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
On my blog beginning September 15, I’ll be teaching a six-week course which explores the roots of Catholicism’s wrestling match with modernity. The Second Vatican Council was the culmination of a more-than-five-hundred-year struggle with a new worldview—one which overturned the classical understanding of reality. The decline of Christianity in the West is the result of various revolutionary forces—philosophical, political, economic, theological, technological, and cultural. To put the crisis of the barque of Peter down to the iceberg of the Second Vatican Council is to ignore the coal fire in the engine rooms that had been weakening the hull for centuries.
Christianity in the West—and by extension the Christian culture of the West—is reaching the end point predicted by Nietzsche. He saw clearly how the theories of Darwinism and the advance of theological modernism had brought about the “death of God,” and he lambasted his contemporaries for refusing to follow their own theories to their logical end. We are now at the end point, and apart from the fundamentalist Protestants and traditionalist Catholics, the triumph of religion without God is nearly complete.
“Religion without God” is a harsh term for what others have named “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” The modernist theologians of Nietzsche’s time like David Strauss wished to retain the sublime teachings of Jesus while rejecting his divinity. Their descendants have de-clawed the lion of Judah even further by reducing the Christian religion to Rules for Respectability combined with self-help bromides and a vague notion of spirituality. The problem with this religion is that it is not really religion at all. Religion, in every age and for every people in every place down through the ages, has always been a tremendous and terrible encounter with the divine. Religion has always been an approach to the edge of the unknown—Rudolph Ott’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
We know there is very little gas in the tank of this counterfeit Christianity. Moralistic, therapeutic deism is running on the fumes of authentic red-blooded historic Christianity. When it finally sputters to a halt, what will take its place? Taking refuge in a worn-out Biblical fundamentalism won’t do, and although I am sympathetic, I doubt whether the full-blown Baroque fantasy offered by Catholic traditionalism will really do the trick. Instead a refreshed form of Christianity will need to emerge—one that looks to the future while grounded firmly in the legacy of the historic faith.
This will require not just tinkering with the liturgical externals or hunkering down in a bunker of fundamentalist anti-modernism. A return to authentic religion will be required.
The Christian faith in the second half of the twenty-first century will be mystical, mythological, and miraculous, or it will be nothing at all. It will be mystical inasmuch as it is metaphysical. In other words, it will reject the narrow-minded dictatorship of materialism and be open once more to the reality of the unseen world. This Christianity will be unapologetic in its embrace of the supernatural dimension. Those of us who believe the unseen world is more real, not less real, than the physical realm will be unembarrassed by a form of practical mysticism that encourages prayer and expects results from the sacraments which are our interaction with the spiritual realm.
This return to the historic faith will also be “mythological”—understanding “myth” not as “a silly untrue fairy tale” but “myth” in its true definition as story or sacred narrative. A religion that is mythological embraces the need for faith stories—which are real historical witnesses to the interaction between God and man. This mythological faith will reject the destructive elements of modernist Biblical criticism while endorsing the positive findings of scholarship. Its embrace of “myth” will include the lives of the saints—both historical and contemporary and will use stories to proclaim the gospel through preaching, but also through literature, film, podcasting, and every modern means of storytelling.
Finally, this faith for a post-post-modern world will be miraculous. The miracles may be astonishing as they were at Fatima and Lourdes, or they may be much more down to earth, as ordinary people come alive again to the reality of God’s working in their lives. How will this miraculous element of the faith return? The answer is simple: As the dead wood in the Christian church falls away (the dead wood being the lapsed, the lukewarm, the cynical, and the merely respectable), those who truly believe in the mystical, the mythological, and the miraculous will remain, and as they practice their full-blooded faith, more miracles will be experienced.
This is the kind of Christian faith that first took the world by storm, and it is the sort of faith we see across Africa and in parts of Asia and Latin America. To witness that faith already on the upsurge in the global South is also to realize that this kind of faith is the religion of the poor, the powerless, and the persecuted. Whether or not Christians in the affluent and jaded West wish to accept this other, more austere aspect to the historic faith—or whether we choose to remain dozy in our affluent cocoons—will be the real test in the decades to come.
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The featured image is a detail from “The Triumph Of Christianity Over Paganism” (1868) by Gustave Doré (1832–1883) and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It has been brightened slightly for clarity.
Vintage Fr. Longenecker: “ I doubt whether the full-blown Baroque fantasy offered by Catholic traditionalism will really do the trick,” with a reference to “hunkering down in a bunker of fundamentalist anti-modernism” thrown in. I don’t know when Father converted, but as a lifelong Catholic I remember the – I don’t know how else to put it – creepy days of the 70s, when supposedly catchy ideas like forming a “mystical, mythological and miraculous” religion were all the rage. I was just a kid, and had picked up the idea that “trads” were reactionaries to be avoided, but I had a strong sense that something was very wrong with what we were being given.
Father, the 70s have ended, mercifully. It’s time to move on. Warmed over projects like Renew have been tried and failed, contributing greatly to the sad results shown in your graph. I don’t know why you can’t see that Tradition *is* the Faith, a Faith that doesn’t need to be repackaged to make it palatable. Those of us who have been called back to Tradition have a sense that we’ve been robbed of the Faith our entire lives. We’re deeply grateful to have been given a chance to embrace the One True Faith, unwatered down, in spite of the prejudices against it that we were taught to have while growing up. I hope you can give up your animosity toward Tradition and join us some day.
Well said! Let’s take to heart the simplistic words Of Our Lord of becoming like “little children” to obtain Heaven.
I think you may misunderstand what I mean by “mystical, mythological and miraculous”. I mean nothing like the 1970s flaky religion, but a full blown, supernaturalism combined with authentic experience and traditional liturgy and morality. This article explains more of what I propose: https://www.crisismagazine.com/2020/its-time-to-re-mythologize-the-gospel
Bravo!! Well stated.
Reading this article was like reading my own mind. I have been saying and thinking the very same things for a very long time. Christianity must go back to its mediaeval, pre-Reformation form, or wither away. There is no religion without the supernatural. The remarks about the traditionalists are also right on. The ‘trads” usually don’t remember that the softening of the faith had begun before Vatican II. For example, it was Pope Pius XII who started the demolition of the Tenebrae, one of the most moving Holy Week services. And to the catalogue of ‘dead wood’ I would add the merely social, perhaps even at the first place. Thank you, Father!
I think the author mistakes causality. Christianity in the “West” will not be reinvigorated by believers, who will nonetheless keep the candle lit no matter how small the flame may become.
What will invigorate the church will be the near complete collapse of Western Civilization which then “wakes up” to the realization of its ideological bankruptcy. Assuming of course Christ doesn’t return first.
I believe his comments on the mythical is a bit vague. So when can mythical be also true? One primarily thinks of the Greek gods. Big problem.
Go to this article for more of my thoughts on religion being “mythological” https://www.crisismagazine.com/2020/its-time-to-re-mythologize-the-gospel
I am a revert who dropped out of the Church in the summer of 1970 and returned on Epiphany of 1980, thereby missing what I have been told was a dreadful period in the Church. I left what was to a certain extent the traditional church, and given that it took 4 years for me to be in a situation where I could actually stop going, even though I thought it was all a sham, the Church I left was the traditional church and the one I returned to was the Vatican II Church. I wasn’t shortchanged in my learning of the faith; I had the Baltimore Catechism memorized like everyone else at the time. The only thing I miss is having Passion Sunday the fifth week of Lent. But at any rate, if people who claim to be Catholic don’t show the supernatural love that Jesus had for everyone else, no one will be interested in becoming Catholic. We have to live what we say we believe, and that includes the miracles and the forgiveness of enemies that are the hardest parts of the faith for many people. The looking into ourselves to remove the beams in our eyes and getting out of the way so Jesus can work through us. I have every confidence it will happen.
Like Sharon, I was struck by the “baroque fantasy” comment in what was otherwise a stellar piece of writing. Father, you are so right on in your analysis that the bland therapeutic deism of the last decades was and is hollow. You are right that only people who really, actually, literally believe in the supernatural will carry Christianity (that is to say, Catholicism) forward. You are right that Christianity must be counter to the world.
And yet you dismiss the constant, unbroken, traditional worship and praxis of the Church. The pre-Vatican II liturgy, devotional life, and thought formed almost every single saint we now venerate, including John Paul, Padre Pio, Mother Teresa, Edith Stein, and Maximilian Kolbe. Do they qualify as having been raised in a “baroque fantasy”? It was less than one lifetime ago that that world existed and was very much alive. It’s almost like the “reformers” in England, in 1590, accusing the recusants of pining for Arthurian England, when in fact many actually remembered the Catholic life they’d led, and which was smashed in a matter of decades.
And so I ask in earnestness and with great respect to you, Father: how familiar are you, personally, with the Extraordinary Form? Not only the thing in itself, but as it is lived today? Because of your own service, you probably do not have the ability to attend a sung High Mass for several months, to immerse yourself in the life of a “traditional” parish.
If you ever did, though, you would find something different than an “anti-modern” bunker mentality among the majority of parishioners and priests who serve them. There is a healthiness and ordinariness in most of the people; the children are normal and happy. The girls go to college and the boys play football. The priests drink beer (most of them). We watch movies. We use cell phones. We all have a long list of relatives we’re hoping to bring back into the Church. We are often 2-income families and often have sinful pasts that we’re still dealing with. We’re just like other Catholics.
I myself, born in 1970, raised in the postconciliar Church, have no memory of and no nostalgia about the Catholicism of long ago. I was not glad to go the EF, but did because my husband wanted to. And against my will I eventually saw the beauty, the awesome power, the core of silent adoration, the absolute superiority of the old Mass over the new. It took about a year, but now I cringe to attend even a reverent Novus Ordo, not because I condemn the people there (or God forbid, good and holy priests like yourself) but because of objective criteria. I’ve come to believe that a return to the pre-conciliar Mass is in fact not a fantasy but a concrete goal to achieve, and that those whose faith IS mystical, supernatural, and mythological will come to it with a great sigh of relief and gratitude. Like returning to the Old Country and finding its beauties even more pronounced than they had been in memory.
Fr. Longenecker forgot to credit Karl Rahner, the Modernist Catholic par excellence, with the idea of Christianity of the future being “mystical or nothing at all.”
Thank you Father. I hope you are right. It is very difficult to study scripture in line with contemporary theologians. They seem to accept authority of academics without question, while rejecting the authority of the Church. The result is uninspired nonsense that only leads to despair.
The Apostles and their successors are the interpreters of scripture not atheistic academics
Least we forget….”It is also written, that truly I shall say to you, heaven and earth will pass away but my words shall never pass away….”