This morning on Public Radio I heard someone quote a line that Mark Twain spoke when speaking to a group of teachers in New York City, way back in March 1901:
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, but your government only when it deserves it.
What a great line (and relevant today even more so than 124 years ago), but as I listened to it, I couldn’t help but think about it terms of how contemplatives relate to Christianity. Imagine this:
Mysticism is remaining devoted to spirituality all the time, but to institutional religion only when it deserves it.
I know plenty of people may want to argue about what it means for our religious institutions to “deserve” our support or devotion, and I recognize many of us may need to pay close attention to our own conscience to determine where the line is that separates institutional religion from being “deserving” of our allegiance — and not. More than once on this blog I’ve quoted these significant words of wisdom from Howard Thurman, from a talk he gave back in the 1930s:
The mystic seems always to be the foe of institutional religion… any careful reading of the testimony of the mystics convinces one that the church has no real friend in the mystic.
Strong words indeed, especially given when they were uttered: decades before concepts like “spiritual but not religious” became widespread.
Some of these ideas seem relevant in the light of a book I read recently: Catholic Fundamentalism in America by Mark S. Massa, SJ. Massa teaches theology at Boston College and is a historian of Catholicism in American public life, so he is well positioned to tell the story of Catholic extremism over the last 80 years. His survey begins by profiling a renegade chaplain at Harvard University, Leonard Feeney (also a Jesuit) who ran afoul with church authorities because of his single-minded insistence that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation: in other words, Feeney taught that no one who is not a faithful, practicing Catholic will go to heaven. No Jews, no Muslims, no Protestants or Buddhists or Hindus: no one. Openly defiant toward his bishop, Feeney caught the attention of the Vatican and when it became clear that he would not back down from this controversial teaching, he was excommunicated. But then, Feeney and a group of his followers carried on, insisting that they, and only they, were truly faithful to timeless Catholic doctrine, unlike the Catholic Church as a whole which they believed had gone astray. This idea (that only “we” have the truth) became a recurring theme among all the Catholic fundamentalists surveyed in this sobering book (Massa is well aware that fundamentalism is a term most properly applied to Protestant Biblical literalists, but he analyzes the characteristics and inconsistencies of Protestant fundamentalism as a template for explaining the nature of Catholic extremism as well.
The book chronicles the lives and teachings of a number of hard-line Catholics, most of whom paired their own extremist theology with an insistence that the church at large had lost its way, usually because of the influence of “liberals” or the “errors” of the Vatican II council in the 1960s — or, more recently, by attacking Pope Francis as a “heretic.” The target may have changed over time, but the basic message has stayed consistent: “We have the real truth, whereas the church at large can no longer be trusted. So trust in us instead.” From Mother Angelica’s ultra-conservative Catholic TV station, EWTN, to the toxic homophobia of the Church Militant website (now defunct, after it came to light that the founder of that organization was himself a closeted and apparently self-loathing gay man) along with various other firebrand individuals and organizations along the way, Catholic Fundamentalism in America offers a clear-eyed, and at times disturbing, assessment of how religious extremism has become a chronic aspect of the Catholic community — and while the book focuses on Catholicism in America, at least one of the organizations profiled in it (the Society of St. Pius X, or SSPX) is international in its scope, reminding us that fundamentalism is not constrained by political or cultural boundaries.
One of the most challenging aspects of reading this book, for me at least, was noticing again and again how much the mean-spirited rhetoric of the Catholic fundamentalists reminded of the divisive rhetoric of the MAGA movement. Massa shows, again and again, how religious fundamentalism tends to be allied with political conservative extremism as well. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that religious conservatives, at least among white Americans, have been so supportive of the MAGA movement, despite the many ways in which it fails to observe basic Christian teachings.
Which brings me back to Mark Twain. Now, I recognize that Catholic fundamentalism (or fundamentalism of any stripe) is not the same thing as institutional religion as a whole. Indeed, I remain convinced that religion can and should have a positive role to play in society at large and in supporting individuals in their spiritual lives. But I can’t help but wonder: does institutional religion enable fundamentalism? Yes, the Catholic hierarchy disciplined Fr. Feeney, and for many years the Vatican regarded SSPX as a renegade organization, and the American bishops even tried (unsuccessfully) to rein in Mother Angelica and EWTN. But given how well-funded many of these extremist groups have been over the years, I can’t help but speculate that the mainstream leaders of the institution tended to pull their punches when attacking or disciplining the hardliners, mainly because of not wanting to alienate major donors. I have no evidence for this, of course, but I can’t shake the feeling that there may be more of a connection here than even Fr. Massa wants to admit.
Twain points out that we should support our government only when it truly deserves that support. He is standing in a proud American tradition of free think and critical reflection, perhaps best exemplified by Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” The Project Gutenberg description for this essay notes that “Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule their consciences and moral beliefs.” If that is a proper way for us to relate to our civil auth0rities, perhaps it is just as true of how we relate to our spiritual (religious) authorities as well.
This, ultimately is why I think it is important to read books like Catholic Fundamentalism in America. It’s not going to change anyone’s mind; I doubt if the fundamentalists themselves would even bother to read a book like this, and those of us who are not fundamentalist already have an intuitive sense to stay far away from such rigid and illiberal expressions of religion. This book matters because it points out that fundamentalism has an ongoing and symbiotic relationship with institutional religion as a whole. The Protestant solution to this problem has been for churches to split — which can happen at the local level, when a congregation is torn apart by this or that controversial issue, or at the national level, such as how several mainline Protestant denominations have had many conservative congregations leave because of their fundamentalist understanding of human sexuality. In Catholicism, these kinds of splits seldom happen, but instead the institution plays softball with the extremists, which leads to the problem never going away, just taking on new forms generation after generation.
I write this blog primarily for people interested in contemplative and mystical spirituality; some of us foster that interest while participating in institutional religion, and others choose to remain apart from the institution, opting for being “spiritual but not religious.” I understand the logic of both these strategies; each has its benefits and its drawbacks. It is my on-going hope that the pro-religion folks will be honest in acknowledging the problems of the institution, and that the anti-religion folks can recognize that even with all its faults, religion can still serve the spiritual needs of individuals and communities. Either way, it seems to me that Mark Twain, Howard Thurman, and Mark S. Massa would all agree: we need to have a thoughtful, measured and critical understanding of institutional religion, no matter where we may personally stand in relation to it.
