Anglican Mainstream

By Gary L’Hommedieu, VirtueonLine

I guess I’m just not that interested in the Church Wars these days. Observing Lambeth was like spending three weeks watching paint dry and then at the end wondering if it had. The conference, blessedly, had a distinct end. One was left wondering about the paint.

GAFCON is an exciting development. But is it a movement of the Spirit or a spiritually charged moment — the next chapter in the unfolding Reformation drama or the latest evidence of the Reformation schism?

It will take a long time for that paint to dry.

Not much surprises me about the Episcopal Church. When I was ordained by Paul Moore in 1979, the TEC trajectory was clear. The contrived glass ceilings that have punctuated the Church’s life since then have not revealed anything new. Maybe things have gone hi-TEC since 2003, but since the 60s the Episcopal Church has been relevant mainly as a study in the evolving consciousness of the wider American culture.

The American liberal denominations, along with every American (and perhaps every Western) institution, have become utterly politicized. I don’t just mean institutions have become "too political", devoting too much time and resources to influencing the political process. I mean the people themselves have become self-conscious about the political implications of the most mundane human interactions to the point that they have, in effect, become politicians.

This development of a pathological self-conscious is implied by the term "politically correct". Human spontaneity is replaced by a paralyzing vigilance and self-protection. Like politicians people have learned to measure every word and gesture according to how it will be judged by a rigid code of orthodoxy. A class of self-appointed inquisitors has arisen to challenge the composure of the common people, keeping them perpetually on the defensive in order to advance an unstated political agenda.

This is what happened in secular politics in the second half of the last century. The mainline churches jumped on the bandwagon like drunken camp followers, reclaiming their former privileged status through anointing themselves as prophets of the new order. As the nuances of the political realm developed, so did the utterances of the new prophets.

The leopard may be unable to change its spots, but the god of political correctness is a social chameleon.

There is a staggering irony connected with the political Great Awakening of the last century. Americans, churched and unchurched, are on crusade to save themselves from the demons of a radicalized conscience through methods that are utterly religious — through mysticism, atonement, and sacrament. These religious intentions are unacknowledged and thus the only spontaneous acts of the new consciousness. They are religious and sacramental, having the outward and visible form of political action but the inward motivation of old time religion: what must I do to be saved?

While the tired Judeo-Christian culture has traded their religious heritage for a pottage of political correctness, they have been reduced to groveling before a god whose "gospel" is manipulation and guilt, the god of Liberation. This god cannot mediate redemption and forgiveness because it is a god that empowers only through resentment and unforgiveness. Forgiveness, you recall, means the cancellation of debts and the prospect of a new birth, the one Kingdom the demons of guilt and shame cannot manipulate.

Under the present dispensation, when we are not frothing with rage toward those who have wronged us, we are looking nervously from side to side, waiting to be denounced for some injustice du jour which we may not have been careful enough to anticipate. Welcome to Hate Week in Orwell’s 1984.

Dear reader, liberal or conservative, as you react to this rambling critique, are your reactions genuine and spontaneous, or have they been filtered through a psychology long geared to justifying itself as morally (that is, politically) acceptable? Are your thoughts even your own, or are they the ones you now instinctively throw up to deflect criticism and incrimination? Can you distinguish a personal flight of fancy from the dark undergrowth of nervous reaction?

We have all become politicians, even in our most solitary moments. We are all running for something, even if it’s the next moment’s approval by an imaginary accuser.

A hundred and fifty years ago Karl Marx demythologized human consciousness, reducing social interaction to power relations. In prior centuries people had been politically naïve, permitting social narratives to assume an Edenic innocence. What followed the Marxian fall from grace was an acute sense of shame and nakedness, revealing the adversarial character of all human interaction and the self-serving illusions of "meaning". Social intercourse had been reduced to the harsh reality of tooth and claw.

While liberal churches clamor to play at this new game, a self-conscious society rushes into the political arena yearning to be saved — not from social dilemmas hailed by snake-handling politicians, but from the new mark of Cain, the brand of "oppressor" on the forehead of the Western conscience.

Strange. The Marxian analysis has demonstrated that all classes are powerless to serve any interest but those predetermined by their class. And yet only the middle classes bear a moral stigma which makes them vulnerable to manipulation. If they changed places with the classes they now dominated, they would become the exploited and the new middle class the exploiters. In the reductionist universe of pure politics "morality" has become meaningless except as a political weapon.

What has arisen in the bourgeois classes is a new moral self-consciousness based upon the feeling of shame. As in all cultures, shame translates into the sense of uncleanness before a Power whose being is presumed to be pure, whose presence is inescapable — the shattering awareness of the Holy. The consciousness of one’s moral being, politically informed or not, is the threshold of religion.

A new orthodoxy has emerged surrounding a doctrinaire approach to "issues", not with an eye to solving practical problems or achieving long-term goals but to certifying oneself among the Elect — or rather, the Correct. Small practical successes are rarely celebrated. Rather they become fodder for renewed bitterness and outrage. An entrepreneurial class of malcontents has discovered a niche in the spiraling chaos of the public square. Present imperfections are measured not against previous imperfections but against a Platonic perfection that exists in mythology — Marx’s primeval Commune. Activists cultivate the pretense of indignation in the face of a utopian entitlement. Meanwhile citizens passively align themselves according to the latest approved slogans. Their desire is not so much to reform society as to cultivate their own invisibility.

Those who practice this ritual, whether actively or passively, can expect at least for the moment to feel "right" according to the powers that be — what the New Testament calls "justification". If the release of endorphins is the neurological equivalent to happiness, then the feeling of self-righteous indignation is, for all intents and purposes, righteousness and salvation.

In the today’s public square politics is the opiate of the masses.

What politicians serve the people is politics as sacrament — the opportunity to position oneself politically as righteous relative to "the issues". The accidental "matter" is platitudes, gestures, glass ceilings and other symbolic paraphernalia. Thus are the people saved in a society of hollow souls still hounded by dogs of conscience. Conscience is ritually appeased, even if lives are not materially improved.

Sounds like the Marxist critique of the old religion.

—The Rev. Canon J. Gary L’Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida, and a regular columnist for VirtueOnline
 

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