Baptists? Who, us?

Here's an interesting question submitted to an advice column in a newsmagazine for Texas Baptists:

Our church is talking seriously about sponsoring a new congregation in our area. But we seem headed for a meltdown. Several folks insist “Baptist” must be kept out of the name of the new church. Surely there are moral grounds for requiring a Baptist church to include “Baptist” in its name.

The pastor gives a wise answer, a part of which is here:

However, there are some ethical issues connected with a church’s name and its denominational identity. First, it is unethical to have “Baptist” in your name and not really be a Baptist church. Of course, there are many issues about which Baptists disagree. However, there are some issues that are non-negotiable. You cannot claim to be a Baptist and not believe in and practice these fundamental Baptist tenets.

I completely agree with the pastor, but he does seem to be swimming against the tide of popular Christianity. In the world of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (the contemporary American religion), doctrine matters little, and therefore so do differences among various Christian churches. Drawing dividing lines is Bad. Growth is good, and you get growth by making people feel nothing but good (as Joel Osteen, whose slap-happy congregation includes non-Christians there for the uplift, surely knows). It's all about emotion.

This didn't just happen yesterday. When I started taking Christianity seriously as a young adult, I told my father I was going to leave the Methodist Church, in which I was raised. He didn't take it well, but could offer no theological reasons for me to stay. In fact, he couldn't say what made Methodist teaching any different from Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic, or any other Christian confession's. Now, my dad isn't theologically inclined, but to be fair to him, our church was not one to teach doctrine. It was a nice place to go to church, where you got a basic message that God loves you, and wants you to be happy and to be kind to others. That's about it. Nothing wrong with that message, of course, but it was merely therapeutic, and it certainly offered no one steeped in it any reason to stay committed to a particular tradition. The only argument my dad could make was that the Drehers "have always been Methodist." For him, the Methodist church was where Christians who were Methodist prayed, just as the Catholic Church was where Christians who were Catholic prayed. And so forth.

I think that's a pretty common phenomenon, and it goes across churches. As a Catholic, I constantly ran into Catholics my age who knew very little about the content of Catholic faith, and why it was important to believe this thing and not that thing. Cardinal Egan once told me in an interview that bad catechesis (teaching), or rather, the failure to teach the young, was an enormous problem facing the postconciliar church in this country. In 1999, Cardinal George of Chicago wrote a piece in Commonweal in which he made the following statement:

We are at a turning point in the life of the church in this country. Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project. Essentially a critique, even a necessary critique at one point in our history, it is now parasitical on a substance that no longer exists. It has shown itself unable to pass on the faith in its integrity and inadequate, therefore, in fostering the joyful self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, in consecrated life, in ordained priesthood. It no longer gives life.

Now, before my liberal readers get their hackles raised, I advise them to read the entire essay by the cardinal. He clearly says that reactionary conservatism is no answer either. His point relates to this post, though, in that it highlights how any religion that sees doctrinal questions as basically inconsequential to its mission will dissolve into meaninglessness. Which is not the same thing as saying it won't be popular, at least for a while. But it cannot be prophetic, because it does not speak with authority. It doesn't say "this is the truth by which we will be judged, and around which we should conform our lives." This kind of thing is usually called "liberal," but I guarantee you most of the people at Osteen's megachurch would identify themselves as more or less morally conservative. But what is their belief in moral tradition anchored to? If not to doctrine, and doctrinal distinctiveness, it's as light as a cloud.

Whenever I see churches that don't identify themselves as part of a distinct tradition (or, in the Catholic world, churches that don't call themselves churches, but rather "community," e.g., St. Joseph Catholic Community), I assume that what's on offer there is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Perhaps that's unfair.

Now, Cardinal George is absolutely right to identify false hope in the rigid conservative reaction to MTD. Doctrine itself cannot save anybody. Human beings are not exclusively cerebral. Yes, we have brains, but we also have hearts. The challenge to the church -- every church -- in each generation is to figure out how to apply orthodox doctrine to the changing realities across cultures. It's a difficult thing to do, and I don't know that any church does it particularly well. If the doctrine officially proclaimed by the church is not in turn taught in the parish, and if there is no expectation among the people that they (we) should strive to live out that doctrine in our lives ... well, the doctrine is as good as dead. If there is no culture of orthopraxy, you can't expect orthodoxy to thrive.

To be sure, I'm glad to live in a time in which Christians focus more on what unites us than what divides us. But surely this is a mixed blessing, because it seems to me that this semblance of unity has been purchased at the cost of jettisoning the idea of orthodoxy (small-o) and doctrinal distinctiveness. It's not just that many Christians can't tell you what people who identify with their religious tradition believe; it's that they don't understand why any of that matters.

This is why I am not discouraged to hear about fundamentalists or some other kind of Christian saying that such-and-such a Christian is wrong about basic points of theology, and that they're endangering their souls by their error. Even if I think the person making the charge is in error, or the charge is uncharitable, or imprudent, something in me is comforted by evidence that at least some Christians still believe doctrine matters. Which is to say, some Christians still take the intellectual content of the faith seriously.

UPDATE: A reader sends in this Fr. Jape feuilleton about Baptists who are embarrassed to be called Baptists, and their fellow travelers among Evangelicals. Jape says that Evangelicals who have an "anarchic ecclesiology" (e.g., the "church" is whatever we say it is, for whatever reason strikes us as valid right here, right now) don't understand the risks and negative consequences of their premises:

They are in the position of a married man, legally separated from his wife, who has fallen victim to amnesia. He cannot recall ever having been married. From his own standpoint, this man’s marital problems are “solved.” He has no immediate or pressing difficulty with the woman who was his wife because he does not know her. From the standpoint of the wife and others, the man’s situation is tragic and perverse.