Man and Community
In recent years, I’ve been dealing a lot with the issue of man’s true nature, as an individual and as a community member. There has been a lot of groundwork to do before I make an effort to provide a more `scientific’ or more `exact’ description of human moral narratives including those which form mere gatherings of human beings into communities; that effort has actually already begun but is so far no more than a first-year graduate student’s knowledge of the relevant mathematics—which is probably sufficient—as well as some vague ideas which are starting to take on life in my mind to the extent that they are influencing my dreams. In any case, I’ll give only a scattered sampling of this work of the preliminary work I’ve made public.
What are the parts which best and most completely describe a human being? I’ve endorsed the traditional Judaic view, not unknown in other traditions, of mind and heart and hands: see Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?. In Man, Society, and the Body of Christ, I discussed how such a creature could become part of a community such as the Body of Christ. I also provide a way of talking intelligently and morally about that Body.
There are a number of other essays in my writings on this topic of human nature in its individual and communal aspects. When I update the collected edition of my weblog writings, many of these essays will appear the first time in that collection as they were written in 2012. My goal in this essay is limited to the presentation of preliminary, indeed—sketchy, ideas on the ways in which the Christian churches will have to change. When it’s necessary to be more specific, I’ll speak in terms, mostly, of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. I certainly don’t claim to know what that Church and those churches will have to become, only to have some serious speculations about what they can start to do and what they can no longer pretend to be. Mostly, I’m dealing with public issues, political and economic and moral aspects of our various communities.
The Christian Church: Organ of the Body of Christ?
There is a question mark ending the title of this section, but I’ll take the answer to be yes without more discussion than can be found in the next paragraph about the nature of the Body of Christ or in more detailed statements to be found in my weblog essays, those I refer to above and several others. The Christian Church is the most important organ in that Body but not its entirety nor does it have the competence or authority to control that Body even in its pilgrim form in this mortal realm.
I’ve speculated and now believe fairly strongly that all that is worthwhile in human civilization will be found in the Body of Christ rather than only what Christians do on Sundays or Jews on Saturdays. On the other hand, it’s true that such human activities as musical composition in Heaven would be a form of worship. The point is that the Body of Christ doesn’t include only what the Church is properly responsible for, not only what is supervised by bishops and carried out by priests with some assistance from the laity.
In what could be called the end of Medieval Era or the early phase of the Modern Era, the Church, the Catholic churches and all other Christian churches, started the painful process of backing down from Christendom’s triumphalistic phase in the late Medieval period. She admitted that She has not the competence or the authority to govern nations or economies. Yet, the lesson hasn’t truly been fully learned. Having taken up, at least sporadically if not usually with any competence, their task of teaching the faith and guiding moral development, Christian churchmen repeatedly jump from general moral truths to specific policies as if the Church was only kidding in Her confession that She had not been given by God the power or the competence to run nations or economies.
I would recommend that the Catholic Church take seriously what was proclaimed by the Vatican II Fathers: the laity have their own competence and their own important roles. I would add that the bishops have neither the competence nor the authority to screen those laity, by coincidence sharing the bishop’s ignorance on politics and history and economics and science, who will be sanctioned by the ecclesiastical hierarchy as being the true spokesmen of the Catholic (or other) Christian laity.
To be sure, there have been Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant clergymen who were not only competent in fields such as political theory and political practice; they were downright brilliant. This doesn’t justify the American Catholic bishops dominating, or suppressing, a process which should be a Christian witness to, for example, a nation supporting wars which have proven to be unjustified in retrospect. In general, while muttering some appropriately radical words about what might be called `the preference for peace’, the bishops and other Christian leaders generally go on to support the next war even as our country is bankrupt and is suffering the sort of collapse into moral disorder you’d expect in a country where the citizens are being trained to support a government resembling some weird combination of the Roman imperial bureaucracy and the Mafia. Even such strong and faithful Catholics, such as Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran, were ignored when they tried to publicly discuss the moral problems in the American wars, especially in Asia and the Balkans, over the past two decades or so.
Similar critiques can be made in pro-life efforts, economic and political reform efforts, general moral reform efforts, and more. This isn’t the place to make those critiques but rather to make the claim that there is a great deal of expertise, of moral strength, of wisdom, to be found in Christians excluded from many of the processes of Christian witness and action on many important issues. Conservatives and libertarians, but also non-mainstream liberals and leftists, are the most likely to be excluded unless they play by the rules and within the constraints set by clerical and lay do-gooders of a herd-like cast of mind.
The Church has the responsibility and duty to teach the truths of the faith, theological doctrines which do have great implications for our political and economic and technological decisions and moral doctrines which have more direct implications. She doesn’t have the competence nor the authority to produce an understanding of the underlying subject matter, political or economic or social or other. She doesn’t have the competence nor the authority to propose possible solutions to problems or to identify problems which might emerge or to even define the possible ways in which we can move toward a better political or economic system or how we can better raise children or how we should distribute ourselves over the earth’s surface. It’s most certainly the case they have just set out on the immigration issue with the goal of feeling good about themselves rather than learning about a very complex issue, without seeing the great damage they did to those already resident in this country and (often no longer) sitting in the pews. For one possible problem with the bishop’s theory that we are morally required to admit all immigrants and treat them as if members of our communities, see one of my early essays, Networks of Public Spaces Rather Than One Square, which discusses the discovery of Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor of political science that:
[T]he greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. [From an article no longer on the website of International Herald Tribune.]
The point is that there is an awful lot which lies outside the experience or knowledge of Christian clergymen or mainstream Christian activists, though members of either of those groups could, in principle, be knowledgeable. At the same time, I’d guess that they wouldn’t be invited to future meetings or elected to responsible positions in groups dealing with various issues.
The bishops, and hosts of invincibly ignorant Catholics in general, have made the mistake described by Kenneth Minogue:
[I]t is characteristic of liberalism to make politicians of us all… Indeed, to be liberal is to accept an obligation to be concerned with matters beyond our direct responsibilities. [page 109, The Liberal Mind, Liberty Fund, 2000, reprint of book published in the early 1960s. Those not acquainted with Professor Minogue’s thought should be aware that, like many other historians and political-scientists and philosophers, he defines liberalism to include all ideologies which exaggerate our individualistic aspects. This includes classical liberals as well as collectivist liberals, Rush Limbaugh as well as Barack Obama.]
We like to stray “beyond our direct responsibilities” but we are also concerned with matters beyond our competence and we don’t like to get anyone else involved unless they already believe what we believe, act as we act, feel as we feel, share our ways of discussing political and economic and moral problems. And we should be wary of expanding the public square in a society of diverse political, economic, and moral beliefs, as I discussed earlier this year in an essay, Through the Looking-glass: Religious Liberty and Religious Toleration, where I wrote “We shouldn’t become dependent upon power-centers which might one day call upon us to act against our principles. In fact, I’ll claim that religious neutrality on the part of governments is possible only if religious conflicts deal with issues not really important, at least not in our public life. In that case, religious freedom has no particular value and religion itself becomes the purely private affair advocated by extreme liberals of the modern era.”
If they are to live up to their real responsibilities, rather than the false responsibilities of dictating the shape of various sorts of human systems, Christian leaders including Catholic bishops should learn how to live in a more open process of discussion of problems and possible solutions, of problems and opportunities which might arise some time in the future. As that discussion proceeds and as Christians or others begin to propose solutions or to form groups to implement some plan of Christian witness perhaps tied to specific policy proposals, Christian leaders should begin to provide moral guidance which will only be possible if those leaders manage to regain the respect they lost generations ago. Perhaps it’s most important to note that this sort of a process would work best, and may have started somewhat spontaneously, if Christian leaders and educators had done their job of educating (do not read `indoctrinating’) those in their care and evangelizing others.