What is needed is a vigorous and massive effort
to mobilize loyal Catholics
in a battle to shape American culture.

Open or closed religion?

By David R. Carlin

Should the leadership of the American Catholic Church, i.e., its priests and bishops, oppose enactment of legislation that would legalize gay marriage (including under this rubric its “domestic partnership” equivalent)?  Yes, and for two reasons. 

One is that such legislation would tend to delegitimize the traditional institution of marriage; and since the primary social utility of the institution is to provide growing children with a good upbringing, such delegitimization puts children at grave and multiple risk. Of course marriage has already been massively delegitimized during the past thirty years. No-fault divorce, tolerance of teenage sex, the widespread practice of unmarried cohabitation, acceptance of out-of-wedlock births—these relatively recent developments, and others besides, all of them functions of the so-called sexual revolution, have contributed to the delegitimization of marriage; hence they have contributed to putting young children at financial, emotional, educational, and moral risk.

It might be argued on the other hand that, the process of destroying marriage having already advanced so far, gay marriage at this point hardly makes a difference. Marriage having been weakened and trivialized, what difference does it make at this late hour if society permits gays and lesbians to marry? The camel’s back is already broken, so adding one more straw won’t matter.

Though I have some sympathy with the view expressed in the last paragraph, my own opinion is that gay marriage is still worth opposing: not as an end in itself, however, but as a first step toward rolling back the progressive delegitimization of marriage that has occurred in the past few decades. If we are not interested in attempting this rollback, we might as well permit gays and lesbians to marry.

Let me turn to the second reason — the one I am more concerned with today. And to begin with, let’s notice a distinction between two kinds of religion: closed and open. By a “closed religion” I have in mind religions like those of the Amish and the Hasidic Jews, religions that successfully isolate their members from the surrounding secular culture. They in effect build a wall of separation between themselves and the outside world. Their intercourse with the secular world and its culture is pretty much confined to commercial transactions. Otherwise they live in a social-cultural ghetto, avoiding the world’s practices, avoiding the world’s education for their children, avoiding the world’s cultural propaganda machines, i.e., the mass media. 

By an “open religion” I mean religions of the opposite kind, religions that make no effort to cut their members off from full participation in the life of the secular world; indeed they encourage such participation. The mainline Protestant denominations are examples of such religions; and so is the Catholic Church.

It should be noted, of course, that purely open and closed religions are extreme points on a continuum. From which it follows that there may be yet other religions that fall somewhere between these polar points. These would be religions having a mixture of closed and open elements. Some would be mostly closed but with a few elements of openness; others would be mostly open but with a few closed elements; still others would be about fifty-fifty. In pre-Vatican II days, the American Catholic Church was far less of an open religion than it is today; that’s what we mean when we say that in those days there was a “Catholic ghetto.” Of course it wasn’t a true ghetto; if you want to see a true “ghetto” religion, you have to look at such examples as the Amish and the Hasidim. Even in those pre-Vatican II days American Catholicism was mainly an open religion, but it contained a lot of closed religion elements.

When the surrounding secular world embraces beliefs and values contrary to those of a particular religion, this makes little difference when the religion in question is a closed religion. Religion XYZ (a closed religion) has so effectively isolated its people from the larger culture that the world’s newly adopted false belief or corrupt value is very unlikely to spill over and taint anyone inside the religion. XYZ won’t be losing members as a result; nor will its members lose their religious intensity; nor will the members contribute less to the religious community in terms of money and other resources. 

If anything, the new and perverse cultural developments may have the effect of strengthening XYZ. One of the constant themes of closed religions, a theme the clerical leadership keeps harping on, is the folly and corruption of the outside world. A bright line is drawn between XYZ and the world of outer darkness. Inside XYZ there is goodness and light, there is closeness to God. Outside everything is just the opposite. When the outside world embraces some new abomination — abortion, let’s say, or homosexuality — this is only further proof of what XYZ has been teaching all along, namely, that the outer world is a God-forsaken place and that God will only be found inside the boundaries of our own faith.

But everything is different when the religion in question is an open one. If the surrounding secular culture adopts beliefs and values contrary to those of religion ABC (an open religion), ABC will have scant capacity for protecting its people from the influence of these new beliefs and values. If the world decides, for instance, that abortion is morally quite permissible and that homosexuality is morally quite normal, members of ABC are bound to be influenced by these new opinions; many of them will share them or at least partially share them. If the clerical leadership continues its traditional teaching that abortion and homosexuality are morally wrong, many of ABC’s rank and file will question the wisdom and authority of the leadership; some will drift away from the religion; others, while remaining nominally attached to the faith, will lose much of their religious intensity; contributions in money and other resources will drop.

At this point the leadership of an open religion like ABC has two roads open to it. On the one hand, it can accommodate to the secular culture and to those of its members who have been strongly influenced by new developments in this culture. It can say in effect: “We have prayed, we have read the Scriptures, we have re-examined our traditional moral theology, we have listened to the voice of our people, we have even read a few textbooks in psychology and sociology; and as a result of this process of discernment, and with the guidance of the Holy Spirit (who bloweth where he listeth), we have decided that abortion and homosexuality aren’t so bad after all. The prohibition of the former is unjust to women, while prohibition of the latter is unjust to persons whom a loving God has sent into the world with a same-sex orientation.”

This is the course that has been adopted by many more or less liberal Protestant denominations. They tried to hold on to their people by accommodating to the latest moral and intellectual fashions in the surrounding secular culture. Unhappily for them, this strategy has not worked well, and the membership of these denominations has gone into a precipitous decline in the last thirty years or so. This is understandable. After all, by accommodating, the leadership offended its traditional believers, who oppose accommodation. At the same time, it failed to win back the affection of most of its members whose first loyalty is to the world of secular culture; for how could it re-win their loyalty by offering a watered-down version of something these members can drink at full strength in the world of secular culture?

On the other hand, the clerical leadership of an open religion can stand and fight. It can say, “We have no intention of changing our doctrine in order to accommodate some fashionable moral or intellectual heresy; at the same time we have no intention of losing our members, of losing their contributions. We cannot become a ghetto religion, of course; but we do not propose to stand idly by as our people are seduced by false and corrupt elements in the culture of the secular world.”

But what does this mean in practice? It means that the leadership of such an open religion — the Catholic Church, for example — has to try to shape the secular culture so that the culture will not tend to have a corrupting influence on Catholics who are influenced by it. 

If the world says that abortion and homosexuality are morally OK, Catholics are bound to be influenced by these judgments. Vast numbers of Catholics will agree with the world. And since the pope and bishops are saying just the opposite, such Catholics will conclude that the pope and bishops, admirable though they may be in other ways, are mistaken; that they have failed to keep pace with the growing moral enlightenment of the age. Further, if the pope and bishops are mistaken on these issues, they are almost certainly mistaken on many other issues as well; nothing could be sillier than the notion that either the bishops collectively or the pope individually is infallible on matters of faith and morals. Again, if you belong to a church that is so often mistaken, that has so little sound moral guidance to offer to a truly modern man or woman, is there any need to go to church every Sunday? Does it make sense to volunteer at the local parish? Is it wise to make significant money contributions to such a foolish church?

If the leadership of the Catholic Church doesn’t want a substantial fraction of its people to think along these lines, it isn’t enough to deliver its own message to its people. It must try to prevent the surrounding culture from delivering an opposite message. In other words, it must try to shape that culture. 

With regard to the particular question this essay started out with — should the Catholic leadership oppose legislation authorizing gay marriage? — the answer is, Yes. For such legislation will legitimize homosexual conduct, and this legitimacy will tend to lead Catholics away from loyalty to Church teaching, to the teaching authorities, and to the Church itself. The Church can’t afford such losses.

It might be objected that my conclusion amounts to a recommendation that the barn door be closed long after the horse has run away. The battle against the de-Christianizing effects of American culture, it may be said, should have been fought decades ago, when proposals for such “reforms” as no-fault divorce and abortion on demand first appeared on the scene. Some resistance was offered at the time, true enough; but it was not very vigorous, and at all events it proved not to be very effective. As a result, American culture has institutionalized not only no-fault divorce and abortion on demand but a dozen other items on the agenda of the sexual revolution. The war is over, it will be said. Catholicism and other traditional religions have lost. American secular culture today is radically de-Christianized; and open religions, whether traditionalist or liberal, will just have to live with the fact that they will experience steady attrition, a generation-after-generation shrinkage in numbers and resources. Maybe someday, two or three centuries down the road perhaps, things will change. Perhaps some national disaster, either a sudden one or a gradually accumulating one, will persuade a future generation of Americans that they cannot afford a secularist culture. Maybe at that point there will be a return to religion, and we’ll restore something similar to the quasi-Protestant public culture that dominated American life until the 1960s. In the meantime, the best American Catholicism can hope for is to retain an ever-shrinking remnant of true believers. The legalization of gay marriage, though objectionable in itself, will hardly make a bad cultural situation any worse.

Maybe so. But this is a counsel of despair, and nothing will so surely guarantee our defeat as the conviction that we are bound to be defeated. A religion which recognizes hope as one of the three theological virtues, I submit, doesn’t have the right to indulge in despair, not even cultural despair.

The leadership of the Catholic Church in the United States, I suggest, has underestimated the importance of the struggle to shape American culture. I don’t mean it has been totally blind to the significance of that struggle. Certainly it has not been guilty of the folly characteristic of the leadership of many liberal Protestant denominations, which, so far from struggling against secularist elements of culture, have actually embraced them, attempting to incorporate them into a “modernized” version of Christianity. From time to time Catholic bishops, either individually or collectively, have issued statements denouncing certain bad things and recommending certain other desirable things. 

This is all to the good. But in view of the strength of the secularist foe, it is not much. It is like the horse cavalry charging against tanks. What has been needed, what is still needed, is a vigorous and massive effort to mobilize Catholic institutions (schools, universities, the press, etc.) and that section of the Catholic population still loyal to the Church in a battle to shape American culture. What is also needed is a search for allies in this struggle; and these are more likely to be found among conservative Protestants than among liberal Protestants. This means Catholics and conservative Protestants will have to get over their old mutual disdain for one another.

As for the struggle against gay marriage legislation, let me say something analogous to what I said earlier in this essay. If blocking this legislation is seen as an end in itself, then the game is probably not worth the candle. But if it is the first step in an attempt to roll back the radical secularization of American culture, then it is well worth the attempt.  

Dr. David R. Carlin is a professor of philosophy and sociology at the Community College of Rhode Island (Warwick). He was a member of the Rhode Island Senate for 12 years and Senate Majority Leader for two of those years (1989-90). Dr. Carlin is the author of many articles some of which have appeared in Commonweal, America, First Things, and Our Sunday Visitor. His first article appeared in the July, 2001 issue of HPR.