Blog:Visions of Modernism Part 2: How'd we get here?

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Empty pews (wikicommons)

In my post, Visions of Modernism Part 1: Fátima & sins of the flesh, I reviewed how, when Our Lady of Fatima warned Jacinta, one of the three shepherd children,

The sins which cause most souls to go to hell are the sins of the flesh.[1]

As discussed in the post, the difference between the sinful state of 1917 and today is one of scale not kind, with that scale created by the levers of technology that today dispenses "scandal" with neither limits nor cessation. Bombs are now nuclear. Pornography is now virtual.

While of a kind, albeit on a vast scale, we have also changed the degree of sin. Contraception makes even conjugial sex sinful. Pornography entices, then numbs its viewers to the despicable and cruel. Advertising leverages our concupiscence, targeting even "the little ones." We carry instruments of sin in our pockets, and our educators, politicians, and professionals are "scandalous" not from the public outrage they may or ought to cause, as the modern world defines it, but from the sin they lead others to.[2]

Sin has always been the rule and not the exception, but within my lifetime it has gone from the unspoken to the entirely public.

Where are we now?

I heard an interesting statistic, that the percentage of professed atheists of 1970 in America, 3%, is now up to 4%. You'd think it'd be far higher, until you realize that most of the other 96%, who, to some extent profess belief in a higher power, or "spirituality," don't believe in the living God.

The sociological paper, "Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference," attributes the decline in denominational faith to decline in trust in institutions, both secular and religious[3] and to growth in "personal autonomy" in recent generations.[4] The reference to "personal autonomy is closer to the truth, but only as an observation and not a causal explanation:

"how valuing personal autonomy generally and autonomy in the sphere of sex and drugs specifically explain generational differences..."[5]

According to the authors, changes in "attitudes regarding sex and drugs" resulting from the1960s "culture shock" has led to divergent political identification, left and right, which then impacts religious affiliation.[6] The authors present data that show that since 1990, self-identified liberals and moderates have increasingly stated "no religious preference," while degrees of self-identified conservatives have shown moderate increases in that identification. Political "moderates" demonstrate the highest divergence, trending similarly with "slightly conservative" to a strong divergence upward starting in the 1990s.[7]

There are a number of problems with aligning political and religious preferences, and the authors get into rather impressive statistical analysis to accommodate political preference change over time. Still, "moderate" in 1972 is vastly different from whatever that may mean today.[8] The label carries no particular meaning other than political ambiguity, which regularly swings left and right. To quote Lynyrd Skynryd, "Watergate does not bother me." Nor did it when, in the 1970s I identified as a liberal Democrat.

But the author's real aim is to show that "political affiliation" and not "secularization" has led to the significant increase in the "nones" category of those professing no religious affiliation. Consistent with the statistic I heard regarding unchanging percentages of self-proclaimed atheists, most of these "nones" cling to some degree of spirituality.

The authors' point is that longstanding sociological explanations of growing non-religiosity as the result of "secularization," itself the result of "modernization," cannot explain the growing numbers of "nones" who still believe in some kind of god. The argument is, literally, academic:

Secularization may have once been a rather specific set of hypotheses, but over time its meaning has defused to the point where almost any downtrend in a religious indicator counts as evidence of it. We take a rather textbook slant on it here, stipulating that for secularization to explain the rise of the “nones,” the sequence must accord with the original theory. First, modernization induces people to lose faith in God and religion. Then, as religion is no longer meaningful, they stop identifying with it. [9]

They state that the "classic version" of the secularization hypothesis is that "modernization, reason, and science would banish traditional explanations of the material world," thereby replacing religion.[10] In their view, that the "nones" maintain religiosity negates the hypothesis. The authors explain away the decline in liberal church attendance to "alienation and not action,"[11] i.e., people just aren't interested in going to church (alienation) but still maintain their religious beliefs (no action). In their conclusion, however, the authors fully reveal themselves,

If some churches were to diversify their message, appealing to issues beyond sexual politics, perhaps the alienated liberals might think about church again.[12]

Well, the authors don't consult Scripture. If they did, they would understand that belief in sexual "autonomy" is entirely inconsistent with God's instruction, so churches that "appeal to issues beyond sexual politics" -- i.e, churches that embrace abortion, homosexuality -- necessarily preach only parts of the Gospel, or reinterpret its inconvenient parts to suit their politics.

No wonder these churches have empty pews.

"Empty" pews

When pews are filled, they are filled with sinners. Every empty pew is a marker for an unrepentant sinner. If they maintain belief in God, they find "spiritual" solace elsewhere, say in the "spirituality" section of the book store (with its flurry of books on Gnosticism), healing crystals, TV shows on witches, and meditation fads.

The problem facing our leftist evangelicals is that in today's world there is nothing left to give to God. Caesar has it all. Why bother going to church to hear about homosexuality and abortion when it is affirmed everywhere else? Our friends in the academy miss that "Holy" means "set apart," and when a church merely regurgitates the rest of society, there is nothing holy in it.

It's a kind of mass cognitive dissonance, an attempt to affirm belief without actually believing, or, at a minimum, not aligning choices and behaviors to that belief. The easy way out of cognitive dissonance is to simply ignore the more difficult source of dissonance, which releases the contradiction. If the Church considers homosexuality a sin, it is far easier to affirm one's homosexuality, or, say, that of one's children, by denying the Church's teaching on it.

However, as our academic observers encountered, people don't easily walk away from faith. As the Catechism states,

In many ways, throughout history down to the present day, men have given expression to their quest for God in their religious beliefs and behavior: in their prayers, sacrifices, rituals, meditations, and so forth. These forms of religious expression, despite the ambiguities they often bring with them, are so universal that one may well call man a religious being (CCC 28)

Here we see why atheism is flat while non-denominational belief in God has doubled over the last thirty years.

How did we get here?

Outside the reference to "1960s cultural shock," none of the above, our academic friends nor my criticism, explains how we got here.

Go watch an edgy 1950s movie, and you will see the seeds of the supposed cultural shock that followed the next decade. Popular culture was well into sex, drugs and anti-establishmentarianism before the hippies. I'd argue that hippie culture had little impact upon suburban white morals, and, like other radical movements, the mundane ever trumps the radical. When Sinclair Lewis published "The Jungle," he expected a socialist rebellion against capitalism and privilege, and all he got was a new Federal Law. ""I aimed at the public's heart," he lamented, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."[13] As for my childhood, all the hippies gave me was the Partridge Family and bell-bottoms.

But radicalism dilutes culture and muddies the waters. By the early 1980s when I went to college, the radicals had taken over the academy. Society was well-overrun by sexuality, and anyone who pointed it out was pariah.

Still, it doesn't explain how this happened. Judeo-Christian morality yet runs our legal system, and to love one another is, apparently, the highest form of personal attainment. Only, now we get to ignore the plank in the eye.

Something else happened, and it's not cultural or political. The triggers of politics and culture are mechanical. The American Revolution followed and did not create pamphleteering. God chose the Roman period to evangelize the world for its connectedness in roads, language, rule, and law.

In 1930, the Anglican Church approved use of birth control for married couples.[14] The declaration wasn't so much a sanction as a surrender to the new industrial product, latex, which allowed for mass-production of condoms. Following World War II, condom use skyrocketed and the "rubber" became a cultural artifact. By 1960, when the "birth control pill" was unleashed commercially, the idea of "birth control" was firmly entrenched in science, politics, and industry. Let's just say that if these technologies had failed, we'd have an entirely different world today.

As discussed in the introduction to this post, birth control did not invent sins of the flesh: it escalated them in both scale and degree. Isolating the sexual act from reproduction allowed popular culture to embrace sexual imagery and the norms of adultery.

Next

In Blog:Visions of Modernism Part 3: Prophesies & warnings: -- we will review how some of the greatest figures in Catholic history, Saint Anthony Mary Claret, Pius IX and Saint Pius X, saw the coming "modernism" and its destructive force.



Sept 21, 2024 by Michael

St. Joseph, pray for us!


Here to go back to Blog roll

Sources

  1. ↑ The warning came two years later in Lisbon. See Lucia's Memoirs, p 127
  2. ↑ Scandal, as we reviewed in isions of Modernism Part 1: #Scandal,_1917, is "an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil" (CCC 2284)
  3. ↑ Why Millennials are less religious than older Americans | Pew Research Center
  4. ↑ Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Political Backlash and Generational Succession, 1987-2012 (sociologicalscience.com) (Destination page has link to full article.)
  5. ↑ Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference The thesis is that the 1990s growth in conservative religious groups caused a more general weaker personal [relgious] identification" (p. 423)
  6. ↑ p. 424. Also, "The increased tendency to answer no religious affiliation coincided with the polarization of American politics." (p. 425)
  7. ↑ In 1972, 4% of moderates, slightly conservative and conservatives stated no religious preference; by 2012 it was about 8% of conservatives, 10% of slightly conservatives and about 18% of moderates (figures estimated from the chart here: "Figure 2: No Religious Preference (percent) by Year and Political Views: Adults, United States, 1974–2012," p. 427 and from text p. 443.)
  8. ↑ Or, today's libertarians qualify as "conservative."
  9. ↑ p. 428
  10. ↑ p. 424
  11. ↑ p. 444
  12. ↑ p. 444
  13. ↑ From The Jungle - Wikipedia The original quotation was published in Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1906.
  14. ↑ Lambeth on Contraceptives, 1930
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