Cultural Christianity and civil religion By Mark Tooley, Op-ed contributor Christian Post
Several Catholic thinkers inclined towards integralism (Wikipedia definition: “Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society.”) wrote interestingly in defense of European style cultural Christianity. Many American Evangelical elites disparage this concept, whose USA Protestant approximate equivalent is civil religion, as an unacceptable dilution of authentic faith.
But these Catholic thinkers explain:
“The tradition of cultural Christianity recognizes — and embraces — key elements overlooked by liberalism’s transmutation of Christianity into global humanitarianism. As the French political philosopher Pierre Manent put it in describing his own country, we live in nations marked by Christianity — not to the exclusion of other religions, but stamped nonetheless by the Gospel and the Cross. Christian nations take care of the sick and the poor, preserve life from conception until natural death, incarnate their faith in holidays and festivals, and inspire public life with hope for eternity.”
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“Historic Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, is a mass, public religion, and it has ever sought to encompass civilization. From the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus of Nazareth was drawn to the company of the masses, to weddings and funerals and other scenes expressing the ordinary joys, aspirations, and sorrows of ordinary people. We must not forget that even as the crowds turned against him when his teaching got hard, and even as they voted to crucify him, it was precisely the masses he sought, and seeks, to save.”
To critics who complain that cultural Christianity is “insincere and hypocritical, tawdry and chauvinistic,” they respond:
“The critics’ charges are false, their claims utterly alien to the great commission of historic Christianity. Intending to safeguard the purity of sincere faith, they in fact propose an unpardonable abdication of responsibility that owes more to an individualized, privatized and modernized account of the faith than to anything in the tradition. Cultural Christianity has dominated the Western world for the better part of two millennia, and we believe it is very much worth defending once more.”
These Catholic writers are insightful in rejecting the privatization of faith often implicitly preferred by some USA Protestants, who prioritize a more exclusive focus on evangelism or church purity, and who believe civic faith is intrinsically corrupt. Sadly, these Catholic writers do not cite as exemplars of cultural Christianity the prayers at USA civic events or the Church of England’s bishops opposing assisted suicide. Instead, they cite mostly right-wing European nationalist leaders who cynically exploit symbols of Christianity, like Italy’s Matteo Salini waving a rosary at a political rally along with France’s Marion Maréchal and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Why not include Vladimir Putin, who is a tremendous patron of Russian Orthodoxy?
