ON RELIGION BY ITS CULTURED DESPISERS*

(*apologies to Schleiermacher for stealing title)
http://breadandwineculture.blogspot.com/

Why is a political perspective from the Religious Left ipso facto regarded as "sectarian"? It seems that there is a perverse idea in the various Christian communities that the special mission of the churches is to pour oil on troubled waters -- to reconcile the irreconcilable. Social theorists like Gregory Baum and the Liberation Theologians help remove the blinders with which we view our class-society. There may be individuals on the religious Left who sometimes descend to the level of the politically sectarian, but I think it is true much more often that the religious radical's outraged moral vision uncovers the depths of social sin. I think mourning is a more appropriate response to a renewed suspicion regarding our First World ideological distortion than becoming angry at those who are strident on behalf of Social Justice. Speaking now just of Christianity,
there has been a current of prophetic justice protest since the mother of Jesus proclaimed her Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) at the annunciation:

The Lord has shown might with His arm,
He has scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He has torn imperial powers from their thrones,
and has exalted the lowly.
He fills the starving with good things,
sends the rich away empty.
(Luke 1:46-55, NEB)

There is another kind of Left sectarianism with religion, it has shown itself in irreligious progressives who have a reflexive disdain for religion in general and Christianity in particular. For Bill Maher, and progressives like him, (people who have no study in religion(s) and a similar level of adult experience)-- US style Fundamentalism is the operative caricature. This prejudice is intellectually indefensible and politically divisive.

So both the pious and the impious progressives share a bourgeois spirit about religion.1 In the Reformation and then The Enlightenment certain stark and simplistic rationalistic ideas eclipsed the medieval synthesis of faith and reason. The bourgeois spirit is utilitarian to the core: situation ethics rule -- individual opinion about the usefulness of lives becomes the final arbiter of the Good. Not without reason has Rome spoken of the cultural anomie wrought by 'dictatorship' of ethical relativism.2

One of the great contributions of serious theology was "Moral Theology" or Religious Ethics. Western concepts of the dignity and ultimate value of the human person have their origin in acknowledgment of the transcendent mystery who is the gracious presupposition of our common life. The study of serious religion is a good thing for the pious and impious alike.
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1. See "The Bourgeois Spirit" by Virgil Michel, O.S.B./
2. As in the addresses of Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela