Know Thine Enemy

In 2020 the University of Mary published From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age, which I reviewed in the October 2022 NOR. That brief book provided a profound diagnosis of what is wrong with the Catholic Church’s approach to the contemporary world and what she needs to do to fix it. In a nutshell, the problem is that she fails to understand the nature of the times and thus responds wrongly. The authors in that earlier collection of essays identified two modes by which the Church approaches the world: Christendom mode, for when she is a dominant or significant force in society, and Apostolic mode, for when she is not. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other — both have their strengths and weaknesses — but using the wrong approach at the wrong time can be catastrophic. This is precisely what is happening now: The Church is in Christendom mode when she needs to be in Apostolic mode. For all its brilliance, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission left plenty of room for elaboration, which is now presented in its sequel, The Religion of the Day.

Does the sequel stack up to its predecessor? It does. In form, The Religion of the Day is also slim, well-organized, approachable, and easy to read, while still being profound and insightful. Like its predecessor, it is a group effort by a number of scholars at the University of Mary, a Benedictine institution in Bismarck, North Dakota, with the single coordinating editor left unnamed. (Msgr. James P. Shea was the lead editor of the first volume.) It also contents itself with diagnosing the problem rather than providing a cure, because there is not — indeed, there cannot be — one single blueprint for success. Solutions ultimately must come from the actions of the Holy Spirit and the myriad charisms He will provide to the many reformers He will raise up. “It is possible to do many Catholic things, and yet not have a Catholic mind.” These words open The Religion of the Day and ably summarize its aim: the recovery of a Catholic worldview.

If the Church needs to switch to Apostolic mode and develop a new “imaginative vision” in order to combat what St. John Henry Newman called the “religion of the day,” then we need to know what that is. Contrary to the contemporary view that we are living in a non-religious or post-religious age, the book maintains that “we in the West are living in a highly religious age.” Unfortunately, that religion is not Christianity but what the book defines as “Modern Neo-Gnostic Progressive Utopian Religion,” or, more simply, “Progressive religion” — a Weltanschauung that is a religion despite its adherents’ denial of that fact. The good news is that Christianity faces just the latest iteration of something it has faced many times before: Gnosticism, that spiritual parasite which predates Christianity and is one of its first great rivals. The bad news is that, by virtue of its persistence, Gnosticism is difficult to eradicate. Its amorphousness calls to mind attempting to pin Jell-O to a wall with a fencing foil.

Where The Religion of the Day truly shines is in its identification of the features of modern neo-Gnosticism, six of which it examines in detail. First, Progressive religion can often look superficially Christian because it steals elements and ideals of Christianity but presents them in non-Christian ways. For example, it sees human beings as suffering and in need of salvation, but it sees salvation as accessible only through human action. It is hostile to God and any social order based on Him, and it rejects the Christian idea that we must be patient and rely on Him.

Second, Progressive religion holds that evil is not found in sin or in the individual but in “oppressive” external elements of human existence, however defined. This view denies the Fall, has nothing but hatred for the world as it is, and is driven by pride.

Third, Progressive religion believes it, and only it, can overcome contemporary human problems, such as alienation and lack of personal fulfillment. Some dismiss Progressive religion as a kind of paganism, which is very much a mistake, as pagan societies were often marked not by human alienation but by harmony with nature — and all the attendant suffering and cruelty that go along with such “harmony.”

Fourth, Progressive religion holds that the salvation it provides can only come from destruction of the “oppressive” external elements of contemporary human existence. As such, it hates the past, worships “progress,” and, for all its talk of “tolerance,” is incapable of respect for — or dialogue with — any other group. Instead, its adherents are impatient, angry, and obsessed with revolution as the only means to bring about change.

Fifth, Progressive religion believes destruction of the contemporary order will ultimately lead to new freedoms and to the creation of an entirely new type of human being. As a result, it is closeminded, intensely tribal (often given to irrational displays of group loyalty, such as “virtue-signaling”), prone to demonizing others, and driven to violence and killing.

Sixth, Progressive religion’s leaders believe they possess a special kind of technical knowledge, gained through their own efforts, by which they can effect their proposed societal changes. This imparts a simplistic “silver bullet” attitude toward problem-solving, yoked to a technocratic lust for power that is more characteristic of medieval sorcery than it is of modern science.

Scant practical evidence for the truth or feasibility of these elements of Progressive religion, and much strong evidence against it, matters not to its adherents, who cling to its “truths” with all the blind fideism of which they accuse their religious-minded opponents. As such, in the end, Progressive religion always runs afoul of reality. Always. The revolution it engineers will invariably fail to deliver on its impossible promises and will wind up making things worse rather than better. When adherents of Progressive religion inevitably step on the rake of reality, they prove remarkably incapable of self-reflection. Instead, they either fall into deep cynicism or begin chasing the next variation of Progressive religion, hoping that this time it will deliver, restarting the cycle once again. The luckiest manage to attain the degree of self-reflection necessary to break out of the cycle, abandoning the false faith for the true one, Christianity, but they are usually the exceptions.

One reason the Church has always opposed Gnosticism so strongly is because it is, in practice, dangerous and difficult to detect. One reason Gnosticism opposes Christianity is because of the separation Christianity draws between the secular and the sacred, a separation that prevents elevating politics to the be-all and end-all of society — a god, really — the way Progressive religion does.

Recent history has seen different versions of Progressive religion fight for dominance (e.g., feminism vs. transgenderism), and we are all the poorer for it. A weak mainstream religion — these days, a comfort-seeking and this-worldly deviation of Christianity called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” — offers little help in resisting the evils of Progressive religion. The only solution is real religion, Christianity, with its light yokes, hard teachings, and liberating truths.

Were The Religion of the Day to confine its focus to an examination of the elements of Progressive religion, it would be valuable enough and appeal to any serious Christian, from readers of the NOR to Not the Bee. But the book provides two more surprises. One is an extended metaphor entitled “Catching All the Diseases of the World,” which will interest all who find themselves wondering, “What is happening to the Church these days?” The answer is that any problems that affect the world affect the Church, too. This is, in fact, good, however unpleasant it might be to endure. As a body must get sick to develop antibodies for resisting future illness, so, too, the Church must experience all the evils of the world so as to learn how to resist them.

As Gnosticism is a particularly virulent and protean “disease,” it is small wonder the Church must be “infected” by it time and again, in order to be able to continue to fight it. We Catholics grow discouraged when all we see is the sickness rather than the cure that one day will come from it. Consider the example The Religion of the Day presents from the Old Testament: Much of the sufferings of the Jewish people — and the events of salvation history — were driven by God’s attempt to pound the First Commandment into them. So much drama to grasp the most basic truth that there is only one God! But grasp it the Jews eventually did, such that when Jesus finally walked in the flesh among them, idolatry was not one of the problems He had to worry about. Moreover, in our focus on the bad, we sometimes overlook what is not immediately visible. God’s Kingdom is made up of His saints first and foremost, and it is not always obvious who they are. And no matter what problems the Church has, and how often she fails, there are still some things she provides that never fail. The sacraments always work, everywhere, everywhen, 100 percent of the time.

The final section of The Religion of the Day drops the matter right into the laps of the faithful. Faced with all the problems of the Church and a foe like neo-Gnosticism, what are we to do? As the ancient Jews had to learn to resist the temptations of the false gods all around them, so we Catholics must resist the false tactics of Progressive religion, which color every aspect of contemporary society. Consciously rejecting the things that are bad but seem “normal” merely because they are contemporary is no simple thing, but it is necessary. We must remember that there is more to the world than mere politics, which is a means, not an end. And we must also remember that, for us Christians, our true end is elsewhere. Similarly, there is no such thing as a single “silver bullet” solution to any problem, and we must employ a variety of approaches, as the Holy Spirit prompts us. We must resist secular thinking, utopian thinking, and the dualistic thinking that goes along with them. Christ promised us salvation in Heaven, not perfection in the world. Furthermore, we cannot use the enemy’s weapons and tactics to win the Lord’s battles; pride, for example, is always and everywhere a sin, and a grievous one at that. Most importantly, we must always remember the Fall and its consequences. We cannot save ourselves. Only Christ can save us, and a new and better kind of man comes about via His actions, not ours. All we can do is cooperate with His efforts, through the long, slow, difficult process of cultivating virtue and following Him.

The final marching orders provided by The Religion of the Day consist of an admonition of only one word drawn from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians (6:10-17). What must we do? Stand! That is what is most important. Stand. We must hold fast to the truth. We must refuse to be moved from our ground. The book concludes with a reminder of the iron law of spiritual warfare: The Devil cannot defeat Christians by making their lives miserable, by persecuting them, or even by slaughtering them. The only way he wins is by convincing us to abandon the truth or to give up the good fight. As long as we do not do these things, we win. And when we win, we provide better witness of the Christian faith and thus make more converts. This is the Church’s most important tactic, as we move from Christendom to an Apostolic age, and it behooves us not to forget it.

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