A new blog site, Ethika Politika, has published my essay exploring American individualism in light of the ascetical tradition of the Orthodox Church. Here’s the conclusion:
American individualism is not intrinsically immoral nor is it an anthropological heresy. For all America’s real faults and sins, it is founded on — and until recently preserved by — an ascetical intuition that helped Americans avoid the excessive of both the radical individualism of the Enlightenment and of pre-Modern aristocratic authority. The Puritan work ethic, the US Constitution’s separation of powers, our Bourgeois virtues, and commitment to Civil Rights all reflect that aspect of the American character that takes seriously the need to correct what is worse in us so that what is best in us can shine forth. Americans are not by any stretch of the imagination monks, but we are, in our way and when we are our best selves, an ascetical people nonetheless.
According to the Becket Fund, there are currently 44 active cases against the Obama administration’s HHS mandate requiring employers to include abortion, sterilization and abortifacients as “health care”. There have been 14 for-profit companies that have filed suit; 11 of those have received temporary injunctions against implementing the mandate.
And this brings me back to where I began, the mystery of friendship transformed.
Just as in the Liturgy bread and wine, “the fruit of the vine and work of human hands,” are transformed to become the Body and Blood of Christ, human friendships can also be transformed by God's grace into something of eternal beauty and importance. But, and again as with bread and wine, these friendships must be properly formed. They must be real and healthy friendships just as the Eucharist must begin as real bread and real wine. At it best priestly ministry grows out of life long friendships transformed by grace. So to, I would argue, with the internal life of the Church and our Christian witness in the public square. Anything less then ministry, and ecclesiastical life and evangelistic outreach ground in wholesome friendships slowly transformed by divine grace is unworthy of Christ and of the humanity He shares with us.
I have seen my own relationship with Christ and my friends transformed by their ordinations and my own.
If we do not love each other, how can the world believe we love it? And if we do not love the world for whom Christ suffered and died, how can we say that we are love Him or our true to ourselves?
But the real question now is this, how will we proceed?
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory
Unfortunately the reciprocity that I mentioned yesterday is often been lacking in our witness. At times its absence has been embodied in our preference for a merely, or at least largely, ethnic parishes that is self-consciously closed to any who would are not Greek or Russian or at least are unwilling to be Hellenized or Russified.
More troubling to me however is a more recent phenomenon.
Largely as a result of an influx of converts to the Orthodox Church, we have seen clergy and parishes that are markedly sectarian and anti-intellectual. In this second case, for all that the community might be a buzz of liturgical activity (in English of course!) and adult education classes and sermons that quote (often out of context) the Father, we see people working zealously to exclude (and condemn) anything “Western.”
In both cases the kenotic character of out witness is sacrificed in order that we might preserve our “special” quality of being Greek or Russian or somehow above or outside the cultural currents and debates that afflict our Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical and non-Christian fellow citizens. At the risk of offending, no matter how we are told by Old World hierarchs or monastic elders that it is so, no matter how many quotes we marshal from patristic or monastic authors “Turn on, tune out and drop in,” is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ and Him crucified and risen from the dead.
His Beatitude's words about the episcopal ministry are, I think, applicable as well to Christians and even the American people as a whole. He says,
No bishop of the Orthodox Church works alone; each is sustained and aided by a structure, developed over centuries, and implemented in any given place in accordance with the realities of the life which God gives us. This structure has to be capable of existing in a very wide range of different circumstances, as evidenced by the history of the Church. There have been times of plenty and times of famine, times during which political systems have been friendly and supportive, and others when they have been downright hostile and injurious to everything for which the Light of the Gospel eternally shines. As these changes have occurred, the Church has found the need to make laws and rulings, to protect the integrity of the life of Church under all circumstances. These rulings, or Canons, are a treasure-house of experience, which enlivens and enlightens each new situation which the Church, in Her life, faces in every age.
Likewise, and within our own areas of concern, as Orthodox Christians and American citizens, we are all of us sustained social structures both ecclesiastical and cultural, and by personal, economic and political relationships, that have developed over centuries. We are none of us is alone not matter what the reigning ideology of radical individualism might say or what, because of our own emotional and spiritual wounds we might believe about ourselves. In one sense at least, we are all of us cultural and ecclesiastical free riders, and thank God for it since who among us could recreate centuries of human creativity?
It is always tempting to reduce the proclamation of the Gospel to an exercise of power—spiritual, moral, social or political. More easily then I prefer to acknowledge, I find myself thinking that because what I am proclaiming is of lasting, even eternal, significance, I can be indifferent, and if need be hostile, to what is of only transitory or of passing value. After all, “The good,” as some have said, “is the enemy of the perfect.”
Well, no it isn't—the good is just that, good and just as we ought not to sacrifice what is best in our pursuit of a lesser good so too we ought not to sacrifice a lesser good in pursuit of a greater. When we do this—and this happens frequently in ways great and small—we commit an act of violence. The violence that afflicts the human soul and divides the human community arise precisely out of my willingness to sacrifice one good for another.
In the public square we often see this in the debates about abortion. A woman's freedom, her physical or emotional health are often allowed to trump her unborn child's right to life. All are good, but we justify an act of violence by our willingness to accept the sacrifice of some goods in the pursuit of others.
Or, to take another example, think about the pursuit of material progress. Yes, many of us are better off materially then any time in human history. And while there still are people in wretched poverty, as a whole humanity is better off. We have more to eat and we live longer and while these are both good things to be sure, they are good things that often come by our willingness to sacrifice other goods such as community or even the Gospel.
Christianity in the public square must, I think, proceed by way kenosis, a self-emptying witness patterned after the incarnation of the Son of God (see Philippians 2). His Beatitude place this kenotic witness at the heart of the vocation of the Orthodox Church of America. He goes on to argue that it is this self-emptying witness that is the way not only toward Orthodox unity in America, but also at the center of the Church's evangelistic witness and engagement of America and her people. In his own words: “It is the task of the Church in this country not only to offer the life of the Orthodox Church to the American people, but also to bring to the practice of Orthodoxy all that is best, all that is valiant, all that is most noble, in our American life.” As I have suggested before, at the heart of our witness to Christ and the Gospel is a reciprocity in which we embraces not only each other but the surrounding culture.
But this raises for me a question: How has our witness be characterized by kenotic reciprocity?
Over the years any number of my classmates, acquaintances or friends (and now SHOCKINGLY! former students) be ordained as deacons, priests and (in two cases) bishops (one Catholic, one Orthodox). Often men I have known since we were together in college are now serving as clergy and it always catches me a bit of guard when I see them vested and standing before God the Father at Christ's Holy Altar.
The Gospel brought with it a great innovation, if I may use that word, in humanity's religious nature. Religion, the spiritual life, was transformed “downward” from something extraordinary to something ordinary. In Greece and other titular Orthodox countries, it was not uncommon to see the village priest at work during the week as a cobbler or at some other trade. His daily labor was not a political statement as was the “worker-priest” movement among Catholic priests in France during the 1950's. It was not, as with the worker-priests, at attempt to reconnect the daily life of the faithful with the Church, but rather simply a playing out of the life of the Church. While not universal, there is still an intimacy between clergy and faithful in the Orthodox Church that a Catholic friend of mine describes (appreciatively) as almost medieval.
The joy of the Church in America is that because of our relatively small numbers and poverty, we have retained, or maybe recaptured, that intimacy. Our parishes tend to be small and our clergy married. While small congregations are common in the Protestant world (both Mainline and Evangelical), these are by and large non-sacramental communities and they have (or so I imagine based on my conversations with my Protestant friends) a different ethos, or feel, about them.
My point here is not to compare Orthodox parochial life to Protestant, but rather is meant as an introduction to my thoughts about an address recently given by His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah, Primate of the Orthodox Church in America. Given the title, “The 1917 Council and Tomos: St Tikhon’s Vision Then and Now,” it is forgivable if American Christians (including I dare say, many Orthodox Christians) might dismiss His Beatitude's address as having little any application to their own situation.
But as is often the case in our spiritual life, on another, deeper level, I think there is much to in the talk not only for Orthodox Christians (who are after all the His Beatitude's audience) but also Christians in other traditions and indeed for women and men of good will who are interested in the place of religion in the public square.
We will tomorrow look at that talk and see what, if anything, it might say for the Church's life and witness.
Some recent posts here have been devoted to my own thoughts about the American Experiment in relationship to the tradition of the Orthodox Church. I thought the following two videos might be of some use.
The first is from Congressman Randy Forbes (R-VA-4th District) talking on the floor of the US House of Representatives about America's Judeo-Christian heritage. The second is country music singer Rodney Atkins' song "It's America."
In For the Life of the World Even Schmemann argues that when looked from the point of view phenomenology of religion (Religionswissenschaft), the world is sacramental in character—a means not simply of knowledge about God, but the place of a real encounter with God. For Schmemann, as for the Fathers and the Scriptures, the world points beyond itself to God Who is both the Creator and Goal of creation (including human beings). For this reason, even understood broadly, worship, to the degree that it is true worship, reveals to us God, creation and humanity. The key here is the adjective true in true worship. It is not simply any worship, but only worship that is—whatever its other differences—in fundamental agreement with Christian worship's "the intuition and experience of the world as an 'epiphany' of God." (p. 120) And so, a few pages later he writes: "It is indeed extremely important for us to remember that the uniqueness, the newness of Christian worship is not that it has no continuity with worship 'in general,' . . . but that in Christ this very continuity is fulfilled, receives its ultimate and truly new significance so as to truly bring all 'natural' worship to an end." (p. 122)
There is then for Schmemann (as there is for the Fathers and the Scriptures) a notion of "natural law." Not a natural law that is divorced from faith—a law known by naked reason divorced from faith—but one which can nevertheless be grasped (to return to Murray) by "the careful inquires" those men and women who, even if they are not Christians, are people of good will and who live lives that are "wise and honest." (p. 118) The argument that Schmemann makes against secularism is very much a "natural law" argument. Secularism, to repeat what I quoted in the previous post, "emphatically negates . . . the sacramentality" of humanity and the world and substitutes in place of the givenness of a sacramentality world, a view of the Christian worship that sees worship as an expression of human desire/need and as such subject to human manipulation.
Returning to the question of government, as part of the creation, there is a sacramental character to the human person. The tripartite character of the American experiment, "a free people under a limited government, guided by law and ultimately under the sovereignty of God," is I think a humble acknowledgement of the sacramentality of the human person. This is not to suggest that democracy is the only form of government that respects the inherent dignity of the human. Indeed, it is not to suggest that democracy in general, or American democracy in particular, does so flawlessly. Returning to Murray: " The American Proposition ["that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights"] is at once doctrinal and practical, a theorem and a problem. It is an affirmation and also an intention. It presents itself as a coherent structure of thought that lays claim to intellectual assent; it also present itself as an organized political project that aims at historical success. Our Fathers asserted it and most ably argued it; they also undertook to "work it out," and they signally succeeded." (p. xi)
That being said, Murray reminds us that the practical, "historical success" of the tripartite character of the American experiment "is never to be taken for granted, nor can it come to some absolute term; and any given measure of success demands enlargement of penalty of instant decline." (p. xi) Giving Orthodox critics here and abroad their due, does America seems to be flirting with the penalty of instant decline. American failure does not invalidate the truthfulness of the tripartite anthropology at the heart of the American experiment.
I would go further. There is a fundamental computability ("continuity" to use Schmemman's term) between Orthodox theological anthropology and American political anthropology. I would argue that it is the vocation of Orthodox Christians in America to articulate a critical and appreciative response to American political anthropology. Part of this means developing practically a style of Church governance and pastoral care that reflects the providential convergence of our theological vision of the person and the American experiment.
For example, I trust people to live their lives. I trust the people in my parish live their lives and administer the parish with minimal interference or direction from me. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, or their invitation, I trust people not only in "in fear and trembling" but also mutual love, respect and affection, to meet the demands made on them by of their vocations. Unless there is some compelling reason—a clear indication that someone has rejected the sovereignty of God or they ask me a question—I stay out of their lives.
The genius of the American experiment is practical. its offers us a balanced, humble vision for the use of authority. Yes, in its inception, that vision of authority's use was political; it just as applicable to the exercise of pastoral and administrative authority in the Church.
The question is not monarchy or democracy, but between the humble service and protection of human freedom and dignity, on the one hand, or the exploitation and degradation of the human on the other. As a theoretical matter, I can imagine a king or tsar defending the inherent dignity of all people, even as I can imagine a democracy, a priest, a bishop or a parish council failing to do so. In all cases it seems to me the key is the theoretical, practical and joyful acceptance the freedom of all men and women. Further this must be embodied by the willingness on those in authority to exercise self-restraint in the authority of their office and to submit themselves to the demands of natural law.
The question now becomes for me as an Orthodox Christian, am I willing to take up the challenge laid at my feet by the American experiment?
So, based on the number and quality of the comments, it seems that there is great interest (here at least) in the social teaching of the Church. Thank you all for your comments and observations. I find them very helpful in clarifying my own thinking on the issue we are addressing. Let me offer some reflections
A common thread in most discussion about the relationship between church and state is the tacit--and at times not so tacit--assumption that the American experiment is a secular, anti-religious, and even anti-Christian movement. While certainly this was, and in many ways still is, the case in the French system of government it is not the case in America.
Yes, there is a strong strain of secularism in American culture—but an argument could be made that this represents a deviation from the founding principles. No, America was not founded on the Gospel—and certainly we are not an "Orthodox" nation—but strictly speak no government is, or for that matter needs to be so founded. Nations are called Orthodox or Christian only by analogy or as a reflection of an openness to the Gospel or (most crudely) because of the majority (or at least a plurality) of its citizens are Christian of one sort or another.
For Orthodox, the idea of America and American culture as secular (in a pejorative sense), that it is anti-Christian and harmful to our Christian faith, is something popularized but Fr Alexander Schmemann. He argues, quite eloquently and convincingly, that secularism "is above all a negation of worship. I stress: --not of God's existence, not of some kind of transcendence and therefore some kind of religion. If secularism in theological terms in a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is a negation of man as a worshiping being, as homo adorans: the one for whom worship is the essential act which both 'posits' his humanity and fulfills it. It is the rejection as ontologically and epistemologically 'decisive,' of the words which 'always, everywhere and for all' were the true 'epiphany' of man's relation to God, to the world and to himself." (For the Life of the World, p. 118)
For Schmemann, secularism an anthropological heresy (remembering that heresy always implies a choice). At its core it denies that the worship of the Triune God is the act that both reveals and fulfillshuman nature (i.e., worship is both an act of ontological & epistemological self-revelation and self-realization). Further, it is a rejection of the idea that worship is the privileged means (again both ontological and epistemological) by which the communion of God, creation and humanity are realized. Implicit within this view of secularism is a rejection of the position of those, "quite numerous today, who consciously or unconsciously reduce Christianity to either intellectual ('future of belief') or socio-ethical ('Christian service to the world') categories and who therefore think it must be possible to find not only some kind of accommodation, but even a deeper harmony between our 'secular age' on the one hand and worship in the other hand." (pp. 118-119)
While his description of secularism is insightful, as often happens with his work, his use of the concept as a lens through which to see American culture is heavy handed. Yes, secularism is a central theme in American culture but, as the work of Fr John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, suggests secularism as Schmemann uses the term is not an inherent part of that ensemble of founding truths that "command the structure and the courses of the political-economic system of the United State." (p. 106) Commenting on Murray's work in the forward to We Hold These Truths, Walter J Burghardt, S.J., writes that "Reduced to its skeleton," the American model affirms as foundational the importance of "a free people under a limited government, guided by law and ultimately under the sovereignty of God." (pp. vii-viii)
If, as Schmemann and Murray each in his own way suggests, we have become fragmented as a society, it is because (as Murray points out) it is because we have lost that founding consensus. So, to take but one example, "the American university [has] long since bade a quiet goodbye to the whole notion of an American consensus, as implying that there are truths that we hold in common, and a natural law that makes known to all of us the structure of the moral universe in such wise that all of us are bound by it to a common obedience." (p. 40) In this, I fear, many Orthodox Christian—having read, but misunderstood—not only Schmemann's criticisms of America, but also the Father and indeed the Scriptures themselves, argue rather on the side of disintegration.
What do I mean?
I will in my next post, return to Schmemann's For the Life of the World to answer the question I've just posed.
An interesting post from The Ochlophobist in which he reflects on the difficulties of embodying the Orthodox faith in American culture. He offers five comments that are worth reflecting on:
1. What authentic human culture existed in American locals in prior generations is now dead, even if it remains in caricature form. Thus Orthodoxy is not to "incarnate" into American culture, or to save or baptize American culture. There is no authentic American culture anymore. Orthodoxy in America must seek to create an American culture. There are certain local cultural "ingredients" which might be used, but what needs to be sought is a new cultural creation.
2. This can only be done by coming to terms with the secularism that rules American life and disabuses what would otherwise be authentic American cultural forms. Until we acknowledge the pervasiveness of secularism and its dreadful hold on virtually all aspects of our lives, we are simply playing the games of boutique religion.
3. The fundamental problem - if one seeks for Orthodoxy to become fully fleshed and blooded in America, completely embedded in the existential ethos of this place and people, how does one go about it in a pluralist society in which all things are sought (usually with success) to be commodified and delegated to a percentage of market share? How does one avoid, on the one hand, becoming a particularly placed fleshed and blooded micro-culture that is separationist (the Amish), or, on the other hand, how does one avoid becoming a religious movement which fully collaborates with secular materialist culture (Evangelicalism)? Assuming that we do not want to run to the hills, how do we fully confront and transform an ever morphing ethereal pluralist materialist übercommodified anti-culture?
4. Should we even be seeking the transformation of America at large? America is colossal, too big in any number of ways. Would it not be more modest, and might it not be more appropriate with regard to discernable human culture, to seek rather a Delta Orthodoxy, an Upper-Midwestern Orthodoxy, a New England Orthodoxy, an Appalachian Orthodoxy, a Pacific Northwestern Orthodoxy, a Canadian plains Orthodoxy, and so forth?
5. There must be no agenda. As soon as we have as our agenda to “win America for Christ” Orthodoxy style, we have become one agenda competing in a saturated market of agendas, and we have then condemned ourselves to petty market share. The American Orthodoxy of mission statements and evangelism strategies is simply more of the Evangelicalish-materialist banality. If there is to be a full existentially realized Orthodox culture in America, it must come to be because this is what Orthodoxy is, how she realizes herself in a place. There is a charismatic and fragile human element to this. Such will not be brought about because Orthodoxy has been marketed well. Ironically, those most concerned with religious market success doom Orthodoxy to cultural failure, precisely because they do not understand their own commitments to secularist materialism, and the fact that there can be no Orthodox-secularist culture that is truly a culture. Not to mention the pragmatically obvious – that in a pluralist-materialist setting, Orthodoxy will never rise above the fray of constant competition (a competition which assumes and implicitly teaches a fundamental relativism among competing truth claims) and the trite mechanisms associated with such an environment.
Thinking about my own experience of the Orthodox Church both in the "rust belt" and the West Coast, I think Ochlophobist is on to something in point 4. The Orthodox Church on the West coast, and for that matter in much of the Pacific Northwest and old West, is relatively wealthy. Unlike the midwest and middle Atlantic regions, small economically and demographically struggling parishes are relatively (though of course not absolutely) unknown on the West coast (and the Pacific Northwest and Old West). Ethnic identity is also less intense in the western United States.
Point 5, the necessary of not having an agenda, is also on target, though I would prefer the notion of detachment to the phrase "no agenda." For better and worse, the large number of ex-Evangelical Christians has set the tone for Orthodox witness here in America. Again, while there has been some good from this, for exactly the reasons outlined by Ochlophobist, I would be hard press to say that this infusion of Evangelical Christian sensibilities is a good thing.
While yes, we must take Evangelical Christianity seriously as the religious language of American society, it often seems that it embodies a religious world view that as commodified as the wider American milieu. And then there is the toxic convergence of phyletism and Evangelical sectarianism that especially, though not exclusively, on the West coast takes the form of 19th century Russian peasant chic (i.e., let's all dress as we imagine the dressed and spoke in Holy Russian in the golden age of the 19th Century--think a rather distressing tendency of some converts to dress like Fundamentalist Later Day Saints.)
Where I might disagree (and his and your comments are welcome on this point) from the Ochlophobist is with his assessment of American culture--or rather the absence of an American culture. Here I think I would say that yes, on a popular level at least, American society is increasingly less humane--less humanistic in the best sense of the term. But there is underneath this popular culture, a deeper, more humane, more humanistic culture grounded not simply in the Enlightenment, but also in some of the best of western culture (in is hard for me to read Thomas Jefferson and NOT hear echoes of Aquinas). We see this deeper culture evident not simply in the classical works of American political philosophy (e.g., the Declaration of Independence and the supporting literature, but also the US Constitution and its apology in the The Federalist Papers, and before that the writings of de Tocqueville) and contemporary thinkers in that tradition (for example, John Courtney Murray). And then there is the range of American literature, novelists, short story writers and essays, as well as the arts, musicals and films to which we can appeal to as embodying the best of American culture as such.
All that said, I think Ochlophobist is on to something--we are not as a Church prepared to actually incarnate the faith in an American context. This is not, I hasten to add, primary a matter of a deficient theological education. No, it is not that we do not understand the Fathers (though there is much work that needs to be done there for sure), but that we do not understand the foundations of the very society in which we live.
As I have alluded to at other times, putting aside for the moment our interest in Orthodox theology, there is to my view of things, a very disturbing anti-Western, and really anti-intellectual, trend in the Church. As a quick example, more often than I care to recount, I have sat with Greek immigrants and Greek-Americans who were quite proud of the Greek language, but woefully ignorant of classical Greek philosophy and literature. More than once, I have found that I was the only one at the table who had read Aristotle or Homer.
What I'm getting at is this, to embody the faith in American means that we need to not only be well grounded in that faith, but also the deep cultural roots of America. Sadly, and this is significantly weaker a word that I would like to use, for many Orthodox Christians the point of being in the Church (and this includes not only "converts" but also "cradle" Orthodox) is to NOT have to wrestle with the culture.
In a word, for all our newly found evangelical enthusiasm, we remain sectarian. We are more interested in the "low hanging fruit" of unhappy Evangelical Christians, mainline Protestants and disappointed Catholic and Episcopalians then we are in really doing the work required to present ourselves as a credible alternative to secular culture. To use a phrase I heard recently, we are concerned more with "nickels and noses" than in doing the hard work of transfiguring American culture.
So thanks to the Ochlophobist for his usual insightful and provocative obsevations.
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