In the wake of same-sex marriage being legalized across the board in the United States, the community of religious conservatives is ruefully contemplating its collective navel. A particularly regretful screed comes from Rod Dreher, who supplied a distinctly bitter article for the June 26 issue of Time. Here’s the critical paragraph:
…we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist. To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.
This is the new normal. And it’s going to become more and more normal as time goes by. Traditional Protestant Christianity has been on the retreat for generations and is not about to surge back. This just isn’t a lily-white, church-going Protestant nation any more. Not that it ever really was. That’s why the First Amendment reads as it does.
Consider how long it has been since Sunday mornings were set aside for church attendance. In the late 1950s, Rodgers & Hammerstein spoke of Sunday bliss in their musical Flower Drum Song:
Sunday, sweet Sunday,
With nothing to do
Lazy, and lovely,
My one day with you.Hazy, and happy,
We’ll drift through the day.
Dreaming the hours away.While all the funny papers
Lie and fly around the place
I will plant my kisses on
Your funny face!Dozing, then waking,
On Sundays you’ll see,
Only … me.
Hmmm … nothing there whatsoever about going to the local church. No services. No Sunday school for the kiddies. No church social afterwards. As far as I know nobody picketed the St. James Theater in protest of the blasphemy implied in those lyrics—i.e., that Sunday was dedicated to snuggly lovemaking rather than attendance to matters ghostly. Yet those lyrics were written for a character who is a thoroughly Americanized Chinese woman. Flower Drum Song is all about assimilation into American culture, but nowhere does it utter a peep about church-going as a component of that process. There’s plenty about playing baseball and dancing the cha-cha and going to nightclubs and listening to Perry Como sing La Paloma. No church. By the late 1950s church didn’t matter all that much. You could assimilate just fine without it.
Flower Drum Song is only a musical comedy, and a pretty threadbare one at that, but it does point in the direction the wind was blowing even as long ago as the Eisenhower administration. Getting dressed up and going to church isn’t obsolete by any means, but it is increasingly a quaint custom, and not only amongst the educated elites.
Somewhere along the past decades America crested through one last fling with Protestant triumphalism—think Jerry Falwell—and then rapidly lost interest. In a country that has become progressively more pluralist and inclusivist, those old-timey Protestants seem like cultural dinosaurs, grimly hanging on to Brylcream and braids and Buster Brown shoes. I am fully aware of how utterly unreasonable and unfair such a view actually is. Protestants are, in and of themselves, every bit as pluralist as the rest of America. It isn’t that they necessarily are such ostrich-brained reactionaries. It’s just that they’re perceived as such, and by clutching to their notion of a mythical Christianized America, they reinforce rather counter the stereotype.
Which suggests that they really need to get over the whole sexuality issue, get their noses out of people’s lives, and start concentrating on actually being Christians—i.e., generous, compassionate, intellectually engaged, concerned with the beam in their own eyes rather than the mote in their neighbors’. That’s asking a lot, given Christianity’s doleful history of persecution, repression, and bigotry. Dreher’s article is most emphatically not a step towards détente. In fact, he describes “orthodox” Christians as exiles in their own country. I’m not altogether sure what he means by “orthodox” but I’m guessing that his definition includes neither Episcopalians nor Catholics. He calls for an insular, monastic approach—i.e., for his brand of Christians to huddle together in defense against the depredations of the secular world all around them.
I rather like the thought of a little orthodox Christian community tucked in a corner of the city, bound by certain streets, with its own markets and community centers. Dreher tells us that:
It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue, the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray, as an example for us. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”
…Last fall, I spoke with the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Nursia, and told him about the Benedict Option. So many Christians, he told me, have no clue how far things have decayed in our aggressively secularizing world. The future for Christians will be within the Benedict Option, the monk said, or it won’t be at all.
Hmmm. “Benedict Option” sounds quite lofty and fine. But English already has a fine word that describes a population that is insulated from the larger society by its own walled neighborhood.
The word is ghetto.
Consider another fine English word that is equally appropriate to the situation at hand.
That word is karma.
And one more word.
Irony.