Diversity, church and community

This comment is mostly derived from something I left in the comboxes on the "What Kids Don't Want From Church" thread, but I thought it would be worth breaking out into a discussion on its own. That previous thread was about youth ministry; if you want to discuss youth ministry, please go there. I want to talk about something else here.

On the other thread regular commentator M_David wrote the following:

I've never understood "youth" ministry.

I have always believed, and still do, that it is a wild attempt to save the youth so the adults can remain corrupt and lackluster.

In the same way, I always thought the JPII cult of youth was the same deal - he had given up on the parents generation and so focused on the kids. I never agreed with it, still don't.

Same deal in institutional school, designed to break the kids away from the community. For example, I have one kid in First Communion class (2nd grade), and it is so outrageously infantile I can't bear it. I've sat in on all the classes, and it is so condenscending I'm going to save my kid pulling him out. It's like at the K level. My kid, who is very independent and wants to get on to the cool stuff is like, huh, this is religion? We spend our time going around the class trying to get kids who can barely read to read soft touchy-feely-be nice-to-animals crap. Makes the teachers feel good, that's about it.

The same deal with youth ministry. These are adults! Why can't they experience a rich religious community of all ages, like they have their entire life? We all know the reason: there is no such community.

The Catholic M_David's commentary brought to mind the material I've been blogging from Alan Ehrenhalt, in which he discusses the decline of (secular) community in neighborhoods, and Robert Putnam's recent research on how diversity reduces social trust in neighborhoods. Here is Dr. Putnam's original paper on the topic. Here is an excerpt:

Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations’ or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. Note that this pattern encompasses attitudes and behavior, bridging and bonding social capital, public and private connections. Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us.

What Putnam and Ehrenhalt seem to both be hitting on is that when you live in a diverse community -- and by "diverse," I mean not only (or not even) racial and ethnic diversity, but people (who may be all the same race) but who come from such different backgrounds that you can't be sure what they believe -- you have a lower level of social trust. That's common-sensical, isn't it? Now, apply that to a church community. I will have to write about Catholicism because that's where my experience is. It may well be true of Orthodoxy, and some forms of Protestantism -- though I think most Protestants, especially Evangelicals and Pentecostals, avoid this because their ecclesial model encourages mobility from churches where one doesn't share the values of the majority.

The word "community" is real big in institutional Catholic circles. Some churches have even changed their names to "St. N.'s Catholic Community." But in my experience, the sense of community is not that strong, and for sociological reasons. Ehrenhalt points out that the social authority that kept neighborhoods bound together in pre-1960s America has largely evaporated. In some ways that's good, in other ways bad, but the point is, it has happened. I would contend that the same thing has happened to many churches in America, and for largely the same reason: the exaltation of individual conscience and liberty, as well as the rise in mobility that means many Americans move frequently, and tend not to remain in one place.

A church is a community that in theory exists for a particular mission, and a particularly moral mission. A parish is not only about instructing the faithful in morality, but it is, properly understood, at least that. Ideally -- on the old Catholic model, at least, and in Putnam's research, the new Evangelical model -- real community can exist amid ethnic diversity because people share the same faith. In terms of social authority, the Church could exercise it effectively because even if individuals didn't believe everything the Church taught, it wouldn't have occurred to them that they had the right to be their own Pope. Personally, I don't believe one has to be in total peace in one's mind about every single aspect of Church teaching to show up at the door; but the proper disposition toward authoritative Church teaching is, "I may not understand this, but I believe that it has been authoritatively proclaimed, and my role is to study and pray more, and come to understand better why the Church teaches this, and how I can come to terms with it. Lord, I believe; help my unbelief."

In my years of worshiping in Catholic parishes in various parts of the country, I have encountered a community that is not united, except in the most formal way, in a shared faith. You have progressive Catholics on this side, you have orthodox Catholics on the other, and you have the great non-aligned middle -- non-aligned mostly because they don't have much interest in the differences. I've found most priests thoroughly reticent to proclaim Church teaching clearly, and my guess is that they don't want to divide the parish. If you preach in vague, sentimental generalities, you may not inspire anybody, but you probably aren't going to offend them either. And few contemporary Americans are willing to yield to the teaching authority of the Church.

So: you have these entities called parish communities, where in many cases -- though not all -- there is little moral or theological consensus on the specifics of what we believe, aside from a sort of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Catholics who believe what the Church teaches -- orthodox Catholics -- are often dissatisfied with the parish, because they can't trust the authorities there to teach the Catholic faith to their children, and they feel marginalized because their belief in Catholic doctrine is treated by the priest or other institutional Catholic authorities as "divisive." I would say that most of the orthodox Catholic families I know have little or no trust in their parish to do anything more than administer valid sacraments. They see the parish structure as necessary in a formal sense, but if not superfluous, then actively harmful in the moral and religious formation of their children's lives.

The reason I bring this up is not to debate the pros and cons of contemporary Catholicism in the US. The point is to explore why church community is so hard to build when there's not a shared moral and theological vision, and a concomitant sense of mission. When our diversity has less to do with race and ethnicity, and more to do with our core ideas, church community in all but the most superficial sense becomes possible only if there is an agreement, tacit or explicit, that the ideas at the core of the religious tradition don't really matter.

I have a buddy who is a churchgoing Catholic, and with whom I used to often argue about Church teaching when I was a Catholic. Now that I am no longer a Catholic, I'm still quick to defend the Pope and Catholic teaching when we talk about this stuff. I think he's a good man and I like him a lot, but our competing visions of Catholicism are profoundly different, in large part because we have profoundly different understandings of religious authority. He believes that he's Catholic because he's Catholic, and that picking and choosing what he wants to believe is perfectly fine. I believe that being Catholic obliges you to profess certain things that are non-negotiable. My friend and I share enough in common that we'd probably make good neighbors if we lived on the same block. But we are so far apart in our vision of what Catholicism is for, and what religion itself is for, that I see no way we could live in meaningful religious community. The religious instruction he'd want his children to receive and the instruction I'd want my children to receive are far apart.

Thoughts? I should mention that Putnam finds a high level of ethnic diversity and social solidarity among Evangelical churches, and the US military. That's easy to explain, I think: in both instances, they have a unity of vision and a common dedication to mission.