Anthony Esolen has spilled no small amount of ink challenging the doctrinal and other issues that plague contemporary Catholic hymnody. Demonstrating how today’s “Catholic” ditties upend the traditional liturgical principle lex orandi, lex credendi (how we pray expresses what we believe) has almost become a cottage industry online.

Recently, Trent Horn wrote an incisive takedown of Marty Haugen’s popular hymn “All Are Welcome” (see here). He specifically took issue with the verse:

Let us build a house
Where love can dwell
And all can safely live
A place where Saints and children tell
How hearts learn to forgive
Built of hopes and dreams and visions
Rock of faith and vault of grace
Here the love of Christ shall end divisions.

The core theological problem with this claptrap is the suggestion that the Church is fundamentally a human construct (“Let us build a house…”). Last time I checked Matt 16:18, Christ — not the congregation — was the ecclesial builder who “will build” the Church. But theology’s not my issue today. That’s not to deny the warped “theology” here isn’t bad. But in reading those lines, I was struck that a deeper problem lies elsewhere. Even when we disagree with something, we often tend to situate the disagreement within more broadly shared categories. Making that assumption can be dangerously misleading.

What am I getting at? Reading Haugen’s text as a theological problem assumes a Catholic context of faith and reason. St. Thomas’s “Tantum ergo sacramentum” can be theologically analyzed; “All Are Welcome” lacks the depth to try. If theology ought to be faith seeking understanding, then we cavil about how to fit Haugen’s lyrics coherently into our larger faith and dogmatic commitments. We find that task difficult, if not impossible. But how is this explained away? By making us oblivious to what Thomas Kuhn once called the “paradigm shift” (or, arguably, the paradigm shell game) taking place under our very noses.

To read those lyrics without presuming they have to fit within a bigger picture of Catholic faith and reason reveals a whole other problem that a primary focus on faith and reason obscures: There’s a lot of people who just don’t care how those words fit within faith and reason. For them, the sentiments, the ethos, the “feelings” of what Haugen croons is what matters. They’d say I’m trying to read lyric poetry as if it were narrative prose!

For a certain kind of Catholic today, those lines are the quintessence of “modern” Catholicism. Love and unity and overcome divisions, forgiveness and all-being-together, accompanying each other’s “hopes and dreams and visions” — and none of those downer words like repentance, conversion, metanoia, or judgment. We proclaim “forgiveness” but can’t say clearly what needs to be forgiven. Maybe “who,” yes; but “what” founders on “who am I to judge” shoals.

“Hymns” like these are intended to provide warm fuzzies, a Linus-like security blankie that makes us feel young and good. Like at that campfire when we were nine and singing “Kumbaya” while Sr. Renewella was softly strumming her guitar.

For lots of people — especially as they reflect on the meaning of the Francis pontificate — Haugen’s dribble is precisely the “Christ-like vision” of the Church they think has been recovered in recent years. It’s precisely a “feel good” Catholicism that does not require the labor of too much thinking because there’s nothing there to think about. (Call it “pastoral” instead.) No, let’s recognize what beyond the insipid rhyme really is at stake here: a trade-in of a Catholicism built on faith and reason for one of emotions independent of faith or reason but comfy and snuggly. That effect may be more pernicious than the dubious lyrics. Catholics are being tempted to trade their birthright of reason informed by faith for the pottage of maudlin sentiment. For Protestants, it’s where they’ve long been.

Immanuel Kant tried to de-dogmatize religion by making it into a morality of duty (eventually leading to the do-gooder focus of Gospel social work arguably incarnate in the Protestant “Social Gospel” movement and in Catholic “liberation theology”). Friedrich Schleiermacher then decided that turning religion into an ethic was not the way to go. Schleiermacher preferred making religion into an aesthetic, an ethos, a “feeling.” And why not? From both Lutheran and Tudor times forward, “Reformers” found people could be more readily convinced to jettison the hard content of faith and doctrine if allowed to keep some smells and bells (or whatever the aesthetic of a given era preferred). It’s a lot easier to feel than to think. The effort to run a presidential campaign on vibes fell short last fall, but maybe we can run a Church that way?

Haugen’s lyrics (and the Catholic Lite that likes them) is really just the Catholic variant of H. Richard Niebuhr’s warning about counterfeit Christianity. Ersatz Christianity may be easier, but cannot have a real Church where “[a] God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”

If you try that — if the Church flees the task of hard thinking about its faith — you usually wind up in some form of fideism or in a “spirituality” unmoored to religion. The Church ceases to be a community of a shared faith and instead becomes one of shared feelings. In that sense, today’s “nones” are honest enough to recognize that if it’s all a “safe space” beneath a giant “spiritual security blanket,” then that space might — but doesn’t have to — include a church, especially one with a confession of faith.

That’s the challenge to faith the Church must address and avoid lest, otherwise, we sacrifice our spiritual patrimony on the altar of evanescent experience and fickle feelings.