III. Here Come the Nones! Pluralism and Evangelization after Denominationalism and Americanism
No More Catholic Culture
Back in 1967, a group of scholars based at The Catholic University in Washington produced the first edition of the multivolume New Catholic Encyclopedia. Footnote 47 The Second Vatican Council's collective effervescence still bubbled in America. Grandchildren of immigrants filled convents, rectories, and seminaries. The encyclical Humanae Vitae was a year away. Produced in a relatively thick and confident subculture, the New Catholic Encyclopedia had no entry on “evangelization.”
Less than a decade later, Pope Paul VI's Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975) introduced “evangelization” as a thematic emphasis in contemporary Catholic discourse.Footnote 48 What happened between 1967 and 1975 to bring evangelization to the fore? A simple and inevitably oversimplified answer is the postwar dissolution of Catholic subcultures in many Western countries. During these years, for example, “decolumnization” in the Netherlands and the fate of Bavarian Catholicism in Germany gave context to the theologies of Edward Schillebeeckx and Karl Rahner, respectively. In the United States, at this time, Catholics became demographically indistinguishable from other Americans. Their immigrant subculture had done its work well and began to dissolve into American pluralism.
From Evangelii Nuntiandi to the present, Catholic literature on evangelization is at one in pointing to the challenge of the separation of gospel and culture. Catholic culture locates the church in real places and embodies it in shared daily practices. Culture gives rise to what was once a signature Catholic sense that the church is always there before you get there. Contemporary pluralism makes the church more voluntary than it has ever been since the Hellenistic age. It problematizes the very Catholic idea of the church and makes it unmistakably clear that, in the words of Evangelii Nuntiandi, the church exists to preach the gospel. In 1967, the New Catholic Encyclopedia still had culture. We instead have pluralism, voluntarism, and evangelization. This article is divided into three necessarily brief parts focused on the following: (1) an immigrant subculture, how it came about and then dissolved, (2) the demography of disaffiliation and possible interpretations of it, and (3) some pastoral and theological reflections, followed by concluding thoughts.
History
The story of Catholics in the United States can be told in four parts. Each contributes something central to understanding the present.
I. Colonial and Republican Catholics (1521–1820)
In the new republic, the transnational Catholic Church met for the first time the seemingly benign face of modern politics. “When I signed the Declaration of Independence,” wrote Charles Carroll of Carrollton, “I had a view [sic] not only our independence of England but the toleration of all sects, professing the Christian religion, and communicating to them all great rights.” His cousin John Carroll, named first bishop of Baltimore in 1789, claimed that with American independence he had experienced a religious revolution greater than the political one. He credited the United States with having “banished intolerance from their system of government.”Footnote 49
The toleration the Carrolls celebrated makes “religious affiliation,” regardless of its theological valence, legally voluntary. Over time this tends to lead to increasing religious pluralism. Historians ordinarily identify voluntarism and pluralism as the salient characteristics of American “religion.” After the Revolution, Baptists and Methodists on the frontier exploited these characteristic features of modern politics to forge an anti-institutional religious ethos in which people believed that one became a Christian through personal conversion to Jesus Christ rather than through the traditional inheritance of a culture.
We might call this ethos “evangelical” and regard it as the form of Christianity best suited to the freedoms of modern politics. It is fascinating to speculate about what might have happened to the small body of English Catholics and their descendants in such a religious environment. But a new variable intervened and postponed for more than a century a full-blown encounter between Catholics and the voluntary and pluralistic religious forms bred by the Revolution. That variable was the 33.6 million immigrants who came to the United States from Europe between 1820 and 1920.
II. Immigrant Catholics (1820–1920)
Irish and Germans were followed by Italians and Eastern Europeans. By 1850 they made Catholics “the largest single body of churchgoers in the nation.”Footnote 50 Nativism peaked simultaneously. Immigrants built the railroads and bridges of America's urban centers. The music, art, and architecture of devotional Catholicism, not always the best, fed their souls and shaped their imaginations and affections. The end of the nineteenth century saw hyperassimilationist Catholics or Americanists pitted against their separatist counterparts in a series of controversies over whether the United States was a benign or hostile place for Catholics. Separatists were suspicious of a de facto Protestant culture that put a premium on individual autonomy and achievement. Americanists proclaimed a providential fit, based on natural law, between “America” and Catholicism. Not only would America be good for Catholics, but Catholics would save America and help it reach its promise. In 1899 Leo XIII's censure of “Americanism,” the introduction of a false sense of liberty into the church in imitation of modern states, put a temporary halt to this assimilationist project, but, as a central aspect of immigrant Catholic experience, the Americanist impulse continued to take on new forms well into the twentieth century.
III. The Building and Dissolution of an Immigrant Catholic Subculture (1920–68)
With the end of the Great War, the subsequent closing of US borders to new immigrants, and a secular culture beginning to overwhelm the native Protestant one, generations of “brick and mortar” bishops used the proudly given voluntary contributions of the laity to build an impressive immigrant subculture. A far from airtight network of parishes, schools, hospitals, and social service agencies (all staffed largely by religious Sisters), along with fraternal and professional organizations like the Knights of Columbus, protected many Catholics from nativism, simultaneously socialized them as Americans, and set them on the road to economic prosperity. At the same time, the subculture buffered most Catholics from having to face the long-term corrosive effects that religious pluralism and voluntarism tend to have on traditional forms of faith.
By the end of World War II in 1945, immigration had been closed for two decades. The GI Bill opened the doors to higher education for many ethnic Catholic returning veterans. In 1960 Americans narrowly elected John F. Kennedy president. Descended from Boston Irish, Kennedy had been to Harvard and served with distinction in World War II. By the end of the 1960s, there were many more Catholics like Kennedy. According to such measures as education and income level, they soon became statistically indistinguishable from other Americans. Though many of its institutions still remain, this demographic point signaled the end of the immigrant Catholic subculture. It coincided with the turbulence of the 1960s and the implementation of the Second Vatican Council.
Democracy American style emerged from World War II having banished from the moral high ground its competitors on both left and right. At Vatican II, the World War II generation put an end to the Church's conflicts with modern states in Europe and solemnly affirmed religious liberty—a positive form of the tolerance the Carrolls had celebrated. The Council's Decree on Religious Liberty coincides with and marks the shift of European American Catholics from a faith primarily inherited from generations of immigrants to a faith known in the midst of pluralism as personally embraced. The conditions for an evangelical form of Catholicism were now in place.
IV. Catholics and the Dynamics of Pluralism (1968–present)
Though they could be porous, the immigrant Catholic subculture had clear boundaries. The authentic theology of Vatican II tended to blur those boundaries in three important areas: (1) between Christians and members of the faith traditions of the world, (2) between Catholics and those now recognized as “separated” fellow Christians, (3) between clergy and religious and laity. The full effects of voluntarism and pluralism began to kick in. What it meant to be a Catholic was not as clear as it used to be. We started to worry about “Catholic identity.”
As American Catholics moved up the sociological escalator, their subculture was dissolving into a landscape of choice. What we now call the identity and mission of its remaining institutions need to be renegotiated for a voluntary demographic. At the same time that period of singular social and political turbulence known as the “60s” was under way. I studied graduate theology between 1968 and 1979—an exhilarating time, but also a uniquely unsettled time. Many of my peers not only left the field but also left the Church. Confusion extended to the highest levels. The Temptations called the whole thing a “Ball of Confusion.”
Enter Pope John Paul II. Say what you will about him—there is much to say. Here's a start: “The redeemer of humanity, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe of history.” This was the first line of his first encyclical in 1979.Footnote 51 In the midst of the “ball of confusion,” he reaffirmed the centrality of Christ. For the sake of the church's mission to the world, and to the consternation of many, he stabilized its internal boundaries and redrew them around a Christological center. At a time when many still expected fully formed Catholics to keep sliding down the subculture's educational chutes, he knew that living churches must evangelize or die. Anxiety about identity did not paralyze him. Instead he became the world's premier evangelist. He introduced the “new evangelization” and wrote much on it, but nothing better than Pope Paul VI's 1975 Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi. If the phrase “new evangelization” is confusing, read Evangelii Nuntiandi.
As contemporary US Catholics face the challenge of how to be Catholic without a subculture, they must attend to evangelization and formation. For better or worse, the subculture did much of the work of forming Catholics and handing on the faith. Now young people rarely experience the givenness of Catholicism as an inheritance that surrounds them. In the dynamics of pluralism, they must receive it as something they personally embrace. In an overstocked religious marketplace, we can be confident that many young people will be initially attracted to Catholicism. The church has to offer them formation in Catholic patterns of worship, community, and service. That's why all the talk about evangelization. Evangelii Nuntiandi identifies Christ himself as the Good News and the first Herald of the Gospel. It calls evangelization the “Church's specific grace and calling and the activity most expressive of her real nature. The Church exists in order to evangelize” (EN 14).
Demography: Here Come the Nones
The most striking demographic trend in religious America is what Robert Putnam and David Campbell have called the “rise of the nones.”Footnote 52 The nones, or the religiously unaffiliated, first came to national attention with the widely publicized 2008 Pew Forum “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.”Footnote 53 Beneath the seemingly calm surface of American religion—50 percent Protestant, 25 percent Catholic, 25 percent other—the survey found significant instability in a notable trend to disaffiliation. In fact, the unaffiliated appeared as the fastest-growing “religious” group in the country. In 2008 the United States was barely hanging on as a Protestant nation at about 51 percent. Twenty-eight percent of Americans had left the faith of their birth. If we include movement among Protestant bodies, the figure jumps to 44 percent. Most striking in 2008, however, was that 16.1 percent of Americans reported no religious affiliation. By 2012, the Protestant majority had disappeared, and the nones had risen to nearly 20 percent.Footnote 54 The trend to disaffiliation is especially strong among millennials, or young people between ages seventeen and thirty. According to Putnam and Campbell, in 2011 “a third of Americans in their early 20s were without religion.”Footnote 55
The 2008 Pew Forum survey confirms that the face of Catholicism in the United States has changed dramatically over the previous forty years since the 1960s. We are once again a church of immigrants. Of the estimated 75 million American Catholics in 2010, many were descended from the European immigrants who came to the United States between 1820 and 1920. But this well-assimilated population is aging. In addition, one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church, making one in ten Americans in 2008 a former Catholic. And yet, over the past forty years, the percentage of Catholics in the US population has remained stable at about 25 percent. Only 2.6 percent of Americans in 2008 were converts to Catholicism. African American, Asian American, and American Indian Catholics together make up about 5 percent of the Catholic population.Footnote 56 Making up for the loss of European American members through death and disaffiliation are new immigrants from places such as Mexico, Central and South America, Vietnam, African countries, and the Philippines. They tend to live in the West and Southwest rather than the Northeast and Midwest. By 2012 more than half (52 percent) of all immigrants to the United States were Catholic, and 30 percent of Catholics were born outside the United States.Footnote 57 Three-quarters of these immigrants are from Latin America and the Caribbean. The future of Catholicism in the United States has a Latino/a look. While one in three Catholics was Hispanic in 2008, nearly half or 45 percent of Catholics between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine identified themselves as Hispanic in 2011.
In 2011 the National Catholic Reporter published the most recent installment of its five-year surveys of American Catholics begun in 1987.Footnote 58 Both text and title (“Persistence and Change”) of the twenty-eight-page digest of the survey results emphasize the stability of American Catholics over the twenty-five-year history of the survey. This looks like a push back against the Pew Forum results of 2008, which emphasize fluidity. For example, the text emphasizes the stability of “highly committed” Catholics over the twenty-five years. But the numbers show that between 1987 and 2011, the “highly committed” decreased from 27 percent to 19 percent (14a). Among eighteen to twenty-nine year olds or millennials, the number of “highly committed” is only 16 percent (14a).Footnote 59
Two of the most striking new aspects of the 2011 poll are the comparisons of “Hispanics” and “Others” among millennials, and the inclusion of questions on “important reasons” why young people report that they do or do not go to weekly Mass. Mass attendance actually rose among millennials from 15 percent in 2005 to 23 percent in 2011. But this turns out to be a mixed blessing when we consider that this 8-percent increase “may be attributed to the fact that 26% of Hispanic millennials said they go to Mass every week, compared to 20% of non-Hispanic millennials” (6a).
Millennials have the lowest reported Mass attendance of all the generations. The survey rightly emphasizes the economic struggles of new Hispanic immigrants in this population. But the data also show that significantly greater levels of Hispanic religious commitment raise the overall religious profile of the millennial generation and mask the effects of the trend toward disaffiliation on the 55 percent of millennials who are non-Hispanic. This masking effect comes into clearer focus when we look at the reasons respondents cite for not going to weekly Mass. “I'm just not a religious person” is cited as an important reason by 40 percent of Catholics across generations. Only 29 percent of millennials cite this reason, with “family responsibilities” understandably leading the way at 48 percent. But 42 percent of non-Hispanic millennials cite “I'm just not a religious person” as their most important reason for not going to weekly Mass (24a). Factor out the infusion of religious commitment from the 45 percent of millennials who are Hispanic, and it is clear that the trend toward disaffiliation has eaten deeply into the youngest generation of European American Catholics.Footnote 60 Nor is it clear that future generations of Hispanic Catholics will resist the trend to disaffiliation any more effectively than their European American predecessors have.
Evangelical Catholics
The national trend toward religious disaffiliation has had a significant impact on the generation of Catholic millennials. But there is more. Among the 16 to 20 million Catholics at Mass on a given Sunday in the United States are the 16 percent of “highly committed” millennials identified by the 2011 National Catholic Review survey. Buried without comment in the data tables of this survey are 25 percent of non-Hispanic millennials who find the “the Papacy” as “very meaningful” (even when pollsters describe it as “a feature of the institutional church”) and who report “devotions such as Eucharistic adoration and the rosary” as “very important” to their identity as Catholics. These numbers do not surprise me. Such responses look like they come from “evangelical Catholics.” But we won't know for sure until sociologists decide that these religious outliers are important enough to study.Footnote 61 The 2011 research team is clearly not interested in them.
In his 2009 book, The Future of the Church, John Allen identifies “Evangelical Catholicism” as the second of ten trends he thinks are revolutionizing the worldwide Catholic Church. He is careful not to rank the trends, but he does list “Evangelical Catholicism” second and makes extensive interpretive use of it. He describes the evangelical Catholic impulse as in part a “thrust toward revival of traditional markers of Catholic thought, speech, and practice.” If it has a “conservative feel,” he cautions that “evangelical Catholicism is every bit as creative a response to modernity as liberal Catholicism.”Footnote 62 Evangelical Catholics are young people whose high commitment to the church comes through the voluntary dynamics of pluralism. Their occupational hazards are religious consumerism and individualism. They need to be more deeply formed as Catholics, ideally by people who have lived long and wisely in the faith. Evangelical Catholics are relatively few but ubiquitous. From their ranks come many, if not most, undergraduate theology majors, parish youth ministers, and graduate students in theology and ministry. Though they lie outside the trends sociologists study, they are disproportionately significant for the future of the church. More than their fellow millennials who are trending toward disaffiliation, they are potential leaders and change agents in the church.
Interpreting Disaffiliation
What are we to make of this strong trend to disaffiliation among college-age Catholics and the simultaneous presence of a small but significant number of what one commentator has called intentional or “distilled Catholics”?Footnote 63 In American Grace, Putnam and Campbell interpret the “nones” politically in terms of what they call a “shock and two after-shocks” that rocked religious America. The shock of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” in the 1960s was followed by a first aftershock: the rise of religious conservatism in the 1980s. The second aftershock, “youth disaffection from religion,” began in the 1990s.
Putnam and Campbell argue that young people tend strongly to identify religion and “conservatism” in its “theological, social, moral, and political forms.” The authors cite Barna Research data that identify four words (actually five) with which young Americans tend to associate “religion.” Church leaders and educators would do well to pay close attention to these words: “judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical, and too political.” In generational terms, since 2000, “cohorts of whom barely 5% say they have no religious affiliation are being replaced by cohorts of whom roughly 25% say they have no religion, massively increasing the nationwide incidence of nones.”Footnote 64
Putnam and Campbell's emphasis on the political aspect of disaffiliation may be overstated. Broad cultural attitudes, economics, and gender are also involved. Trust in social institutions is declining across the board among the young. In terms of trust, government and big business fare less well than churches. Only the military is faring well. The massive shifts in religious affiliation (44 percent in 2008) combined with the trend to disaffiliation and the fact that only 6 percent of the unaffiliated identify as atheists and agnostics indicate a “relative decline of institutional religion.” The denominational differences among churches appear to be increasingly meaningless. This could be seen as a “decline of belonging in general.”Footnote 65
Putnam and Campbell observe that “religious polarization has increasingly aligned Americans' religious affiliation with their political inclinations.”Footnote 66 It is true that 70 percent of nones voted Democratic in 2012. Nones make up 24 percent of the Democratic Party.Footnote 67 Putnam and Campbell may be correct, but the 2011 “Catholics in America” survey shows that there is also a striking alignment between party affiliation and income level (25a, table 15). It is well known that marriage also correlates well with income level. Nones are disproportionately young, unmarried white men. Perhaps there is an important economic component in the rise of the nones to which American analysts would be typically blind and to which church leaders and educators would do well to pay attention and explore further. Forty percent of those raised unaffiliated backslide into some form of religious affiliation. It would be interesting to investigate the possible economic aspects of this phenomenon and its connection to the decline of belonging.
The reference to young, unmarried white men draws attention to the strikingly gendered character of disaffiliation among millennial Catholics. Two times the number of Catholic women as men are currently members of religious communities. Across generations, women are less likely to be nones by 19 percent to 12 percent. But among Catholic millennials, women are slightly more inclined than men not to attend Mass. Though Protestant women do move among denominations, there is no similar decline in church attendance among them. This is a uniquely Catholic phenomenon. Given the traditional role of women in passing on the faith and the fact that 80 percent of lay ecclesial ministers in the church are women, the gendered nature of disaffiliation among millennial Catholics is ominous.Footnote 68
What has been said so far suggests that the trend to disaffiliation among millennials is complex, subject to analysis from a variety of perspectives, and perhaps not as “hard” as it might at first appear. A recent “Millennial Values Survey” tends to confirm this suspicion. Seventy-six percent of college-age millennials in 2012 agreed that modern-day Christianity has good values and principles. Sixty-three percent agree that it consistently shows love for other people.Footnote 69 But then there is the strong anti-institutional bias among millennials, with Putnam and Campbell's four words (most notably homophobic and judgmental) conspicuous among their responses. Fifty-nine percent of college-age millennials support gay marriage, and only 37 percent oppose it. But 44 percent think it is wrong, and only 48 percent think it is morally acceptable. Sixty-four percent of college-age millennials perceive churches as antigay, and 62 percent perceive them as judgmental. Among Christian affiliated college-age millennials 58 percent perceive the churches as antigay. For the disaffiliated, the figure is 79 percent. The terms anti-gay and judgmental suggest that when college-age millennials think about the issue of gay marriage, they are not thinking ideologically in abstract notional terms of religious liberty, the definition of marriage, or the created nature of human sexuality. Rather they are thinking of the specific gay people they know, relatives and friends perhaps, and their desire to be treated as ordinary human beings.
Putnam and Campbell warn that it would be unwise to think of the nones in ideological terms as “a symptom of ineluctable secularization.”Footnote 70 The trend to disaffiliation is real, but in a hyperpluralistic environment with a decline of belonging in general, it is not unique to churches. In a culture of choice, whether it is a political party, a product, or a basketball team, we know we have to scramble to keep our market share, our niche, or whatever we call it. Everyone must, in a sense, evangelize or die. It sounds crass, but Putnam and Campbell put it this way: “In a religious cafeteria in which rapidly growing numbers of young Americans are manifestly unhappy with a menu that is too political or hypocritical for their taste, religious entrepreneurs have a powerful incentive to concoct more palatable offerings. To these entrepreneurs the rapidly proliferating nones are an underserved niche, or in more appropriate language, souls to be saved.”Footnote 71
Pastoral and Theological Reflections
The chief pastoral challenge the Church in the United States faces is how to hand on the faith to the next generations of young Catholics trending toward disaffiliation and who are inclined to describe religious institutions as “judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical, and too political.” A temporary European American Catholic majority has the task of responding in a positive way to the new immigrants among us, and especially to the increasing Latino/a face of a church normed in the past by East Coast and Midwest immigrant Catholics of a distinctively Irish cast.
We can no longer assume that “Catholics” refers to a recognizable group that shares an identity as a people. The human side of the Church reflects the hyperpluralism and consumerism of our wider culture. Church often looks like it aligns with our economic and political divisions. We have differences of sensibility in worship, theology, and spiritual practices, some legitimate, some not. Even in the Roman liturgy itself, we now have a choice between ordinary and extraordinary forms. We have Vatican II Catholics and John Paul II Catholics. Among the younger generation, we have millennials who are self-described “just not very religious” people alongside on-fire evangelical Catholics. In our institutions, we struggle, sometimes clumsily, to draw boundaries and articulate a truly Catholic shape. Pastors have the challenge of holding it all together in something like the catholicity of the Creed.
Catholicism is at a distinct disadvantage in the contemporary religious landscape. It is an historically-given culture in an intentional landscape where people tend to view culture as self-constructed. It is a sacramental church in a culture that has ever-diminishing trust in institutions and rites unless they belong to the military. You can't have Catholicism and its culture without priests. But we have an aging, diminishing, overworked clergy with Vatican II priests and John Paul II priests. We have lay ecclesial ministers and permanent deacons, but no ordained women deacons.
In an anti-institutional environment, the church as a visible public organization is in trouble. As I heard one bishop put it, the early church's Christological controversies about the relation of humanity and divinity in Jesus have migrated to ecclesiology. The human side of the church threatens to overwhelm and obscure the divine side from view. American Catholics don't appear to give the Church a lot of thought. When they do think about it, the scandal of clergy sexual abuse is the first thing that comes to mind. Around the time Pope Benedict XVI resigned in March 2013, researchers asked a small sample of Catholics (184) to say in their own words what they thought was the most important problem facing the church. Thirty-four percent of the sample made some reference to the scandal. No other response was higher than 9 percent.Footnote 72 According to the 2011 NCR survey, 83 percent of Catholics across the generations believe that the issue of sexual abuse of young people by priests hurts the credibility of church leaders when they speak out on political or social issues. Seventy-seven percent across generations agree that this issue has hurt the ability of priests to meet the spiritual and pastoral needs of their people (17a, table 4). These are serious numbers.Footnote 73 At the same time, Catholics have recently expressed high satisfaction with the general job the bishops are doing.
It is not clear that Americans in general give churches much thought. Recently my family attended a production of the musical Sister Act in Durham, North Carolina. The next morning we went to a Methodist Eucharist in the faux Gothic of the Duke University Chapel. The presider was a woman, and the guest preacher was a Catholic. At the end of Sister Act, the full crowd at the Durham Performing Arts Center gave the cast a long standing ovation. The liturgy in Duke Chapel was conducted reverently and solemnly in keeping with the traditional rites of the church going back to the first millennium, including the words of institution and communion under both kinds. The woman in front of us made a thanksgiving after Communion as devout as any I've ever seen in a Catholic church. Ever since, I have been pondering the question of what the people at the play and in the chapel were seeing on the stage and at the altar.
Talk of religious illiteracy presumes some cultural standard of religious literacy that illiterates fail to meet. We don't seem to have such a standard. Most Americans, especially the young, simply do not know or do not care what the Reformation was about. The substantive theological differences among the various post-Reformation churches in the West, if they matter at all, are no longer decisive. The fact that 44 percent of Americans in 2008 changed religious affiliation indicates strongly that denominations in themselves don't matter much, and we are in fact in a postdenominational society.
Catholicism has historically been a culture. Cultures have shared embodied practices and material symbols that shape their boundaries. But free from post-Reformation identification with papist superstition, Catholic practices and material symbols, now detachable from the cultural matrix in which they make sense, and floating free in the mix, are at least as exotic as Hindu gods and Buddhist practices. What's more, they can signify the vague good values and principles, the love for other people, that even disaffiliating millennials associate with Christianity. This only works, I suspect, because our culture at least temporarily remains Christian in origin but not in consequence.
It would be foolish not to reckon with the trend to religious disaffiliation and the related issues raised here. But in the end, like bills and tax returns, cluttered in-boxes and Facebook walls, they are as ephemeral as the psalmist's grass and flowers. If Catholicism is no longer a working culture, we are thrown back on the one thing necessary, the one thing that matters. Only one thing lasts, and that is Jesus Christ, the center of the universe and of history.
Earlier, I made reference to the new evangelization, the split between gospel and culture, and the eloquence with which Evangelii Nuntiandi describes evangelization. It begins with Christ, the content of the gospel, and salvation in him. If disaffiliating millennials are not interested in Christ's salvation, we will have to show them what it is. Telling them will not cut it. Evangelii Nuntiandi goes on to say that “in the Church the witness given by a truly Christian life lived in close communion with God and fervent dedication to neighbor must be regarded as the basic means of evangelization.” In a teeming postdenominational religious marketplace, “people listen more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, or, if they listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (EN 40).
Evangelii Nuntiandi concludes with a ringing exhortation to authentic witness: “The world which, paradoxically, despite innumerable signs of the denial of God, is nevertheless searching for Him in unexpected ways and painfully experiencing the need of Him—the world is calling for evangelizers to speak to it of a God whom the evangelists themselves should know and be familiar with as if they could see the invisible (Heb 11:27). The world calls for and expects from us simplicity of life, the spirit of prayer, charity towards all, especially towards the lowly and the poor, obedience and humility, detachment and self-sacrifice. Without this mark of holiness, our word will have difficulty in touching the heart of modern man. It risks being vain and sterile” (EV 76). Pope Francis could have written this.
Perhaps we trust the rites and institutions of the military because we know that, over the past decade of war, soldiers have repeatedly staked their lives on them. We all know that martyr means “witness.” The Church can evangelize a disaffiliating generation only through the holy witness of its people. Whether it be Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day, people recognize holy witness when they see it. What they do not see or recognize are the culturally embedded practices of daily life such as the Eucharist that mediate the life of Jesus to people like Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa. When Nicholas Kristoff was writing his recent New York Times columns from Africa, he was rightly taken by the witness of the religious Sisters he met there, and took a certain delight in contrasting them with bishops and the “institutional church.” Every time I finished one of these columns, I wished I could ask Kristoff where he thought these holy women came from, and if he realized how they were formed by the practices of religious life in the church to be the people he admired.
Concluding Thoughts
1. In a postdenominational situation of deep pluralism, the church's presence has to be primarily evangelical and Christ-centered. Catholicism will always be a culture, but its culture must now be streamlined in the interest of forming holy witnesses. The boundaries might not be as sharp and clear as they were in an ecclesial atmosphere of post-Reformation controversy and overspecified confessional identities. Without the off-putting tone and partisan political agenda, I want to affirm George Weigel's plea in Evangelical Catholicism that institutional maintenance not overshadow the church's mission.Footnote 74 Evangelical witness in the world must take precedence over institutional maintenance.
2. In such a church, it will be harder to be a liberal Catholic with a primary agenda of large-scale internal church reform on the model of Vatican II (see note 72 above). The boundaries that reformers are accustomed to push against are no longer as clear and secure as they might have been in a Catholic subculture. Internal reform will happen, but it will be more modest, in the direction of cleanup and simplicity. The tribe of liberal Catholics, at least if they are primarily advocates of institutional maintenance as internal church reform on a large scale, will likely grow smaller.
3. Those who perceive the boundaries most clearly (e.g., evangelical Catholics and especially converts to Catholicism who have theologically worked their way through post-Reformation controversy and concluded that the Catholics had the better of it) will be fearful of violating the boundaries and tempted to defend them stridently. This would be a mistake and draw attention away from the compassionate witness of “simplicity of life, prayerfulness, love for all, especially the lowly and the poor, obedience and humility, self-forgetfulness and renunciation” called for by Evangelii Nuntiandi.
4. The presence of Hispanic Catholic immigrants from more traditionally oriented cultures is a game changer that simply must be taken into account. The Latino/a presence has allowed researchers to pass over the deep changes among European American Catholics, especially among millennials. These two internally diverse populations require the church to work out different sets of pastoral responses.
5. Americanism is over. The belief that there is a providential fit between the political institutions of the United States and the Catholic natural law tradition is a remnant of an earlier immigrant church. If John Courtney Murray were writing now, he would have to end We Hold These Truths with the penultimate chapter entitled “The Doctrine is Dead.” How could he possibly write the final chapter, “The Doctrine Lives”?Footnote 75 Beginning with Griswold v. Connecticut, moving on through Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court's recent overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), American jurisprudence has consistently rejected inscribing into law key elements of natural law doctrine as the church has traditionally understood it. Catholics can no longer expect American culture to reflect Catholic natural law principles. The transhuman looms on the horizon. In its laws and shared public culture, if not in the souls of its people, the United States is more like the French Third Republic than Murray's postwar America. Catholics cannot save the United States. But this is our home, and we must shape our practical political judgments as post-Americanism requires. In our situation, the experience of the French theologians of the Third Republic, with their emphasis on drawing deeply from the tradition for the present, will become increasingly relevant.
6. “Catholic” cannot be a brand to be policed and protected. In the face of the characterizations “judgmental, hypocritical, homophobic, and too political,” evangelization based on compassionate witness must be primary, taking precedence over the protection of theological and legal boundaries. Compassionate holy witness comes first, with the shape of life that makes it possible coming later. This was the pattern of the Christians of the first three centuries, a period with uncanny similarities to our own. Even the appearance of cruelty and inhumane behavior to protect the brand cannot be a way to advance the cause of the gospel. In his conduct to date, Pope Francis offers a parable about how compassionate witness looks.
Evangelization and Theology
In postdenominational pluralism, the distinction between teaching theology and evangelization can be overstated. In teaching other faith traditions, we regularly take care to present Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam as lived religious paths and not simply lists of exotic beliefs. We are concerned to show how the Buddha functions for his Mahayana devout, Síva for his faithful, or the prophet Muhammad for the straight path of Islam. In Newman's terms, we want students to have both notional (intellectual) and real (in terms of imagination and affections) apprehensions of these traditions.
In a postdenominational society with fading Protestant and Catholic cultural residues, Christianity itself, always complicated depending on the strength of its residual cultural effects, is as potentially alien and exotic to our students as Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam. Sympathetic notional and real accounts of how Jesus works in Christian living have the same epistemological status as the examples in the previous paragraph. Given the prevailing distrust of institutions among the young and the concomitant incomprehensibility of denominational difference, we are thrown back on holy witnesses to introduce theology and make clear the difference that Jesus actually makes in peoples' lives. Saints and witnesses convey that Christianity is more than beliefs and rules, and raise questions about the shape of a life, formed in part by rules and beliefs, that makes holiness possible.
