On the Amazon Document and the Questions Behind the Question

First off, I want to thank everyone who has written to me in the last couple of weeks and months, wanting to know if everything is OK and wondering if I will be writing again.  When I started this blog six or so years ago, I did so with the expectation that no one would read it, and the fact that people did, and do, read it has been a wonderful surprise.  I am deeply grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read what I have written and engage with it.

My reduced output on these pages has been a product of a couple of things, but mostly the fact that in the last six months or so I haven't felt like I have much to say.  I don't want to be flogging the same horses over and over, and so when I don't feel moved to write something in particular, I just don't.  I would not be surprised if the pendulum swings back in the near future, but as long as I don't really feel like I have particular ideas to put out, it is probably going to continue to be quiet.

In fact, I really hesitated about writing on this particular topic.  I have written very extensively about Pope Francis in these pages, and if you were to click on the "Pope Francis" tag, you would get a pretty clear account of my personal arc from hope to disappointment to resignation.  So, I worry about that whole "flogging the horse" thing.  Also, I am well aware that I am speaking about a faith community of which I am no longer a part, and I feel uncomfortable doing so.  I have made my choice, and having made it I feel like I have lost the right to comment on what is happening.  No one likes the guy who walks out the door and then lofts bombs back into the room.  Finally, I think it is unhealthy to focus on what is behind you, because it has a tendency to take over what is in front of you.

So, to avoid these problems as best as I can, I want to pull out the camera a bit.  While the Amazon document and the resulting kerfuffle is primarily about the Roman Catholic Church, it is also a manifestation of a phenomenon that is applicable to Christianity more broadly (and likely other religious traditions as well, but I'm not competent to speak to them).  In other words, the particularities are specific to Roman Catholicism, but the underlying dynamics are universal, and it is these dynamics I want to focus on here.

But, first, let's lay out the particularities.  A few months ago, the Vatican had a synod on the Amazon.  Many topics were discussed, including the possibility of married priests and/or women deacons.  People hoped/feared that Pope Francis would approve and authorize these changes.  Conservatives mounted a campaign of sorts to push back on the possibility of these changes, including a set of baroque machinations involving a book that may or may not have been co-written by former Pope Benedict.  This week, Pope Francis came out with the official document on the Amazon, which did not in fact implement any of those changes, and specifically with regard to the women deacons thing appears to have explicitly thrown cold water on the idea.

There we are.  What does this mean, especially for those of us who are not Roman Catholic?  I would identify three big questions that are implicated here, and are universally applicable across Christianity.  The first question is "What is Christianity for?"  See, for a very long time (basically since Constantine), everyone understood that Christianity was supposed to provide the religious and spiritual backbone for the culture in which it was situated.  At least in theory, it was supposed to form and shape the individuals who made up a society according to its values, and then those people would go out and act in their own spheres in a manner consistent with those values.  While the mechanics of the relationship between the institution of the church and the other institutions of society varied from place to place and time to time, all of those scenarios were predicated on the idea that Christianity was supposed to define the ways in which the people in society operated and lived their lives.  Christianity was supposed to set the agenda, and society was supposed to follow.

A good portion of the Christian world is operating under the supposition that this is still the job of Christianity writ large.  Indeed, the Amazon document is explicitly predicated on this idea.  The backlash-to-the-backlash regarding the Amazon document has generally taken the form of "while you are focused on the married priests/women stuff, you are missing the really important stuff about the Amazon and how it is being destroyed and our obligation to protect it."  Such a sentiment assumes that the job of the Roman Catholic Church is to make statements about big issues.  I presume that the goal, if unstated, of something like the Amazon document (and the prior Laudato Si, and all of the statements about abortion, etc.) is for someone to read it, and then have their behavior altered as a result--stop cutting down trees in the Amazon, vote out the Bolsonaro government in Brazil, ditch your Mustang for a Prius, etc.

But does any one really pay attention to any of these documents?  Or, more precisely, does anyone listen to these documents who is not already pre-committed either to the principles set forth in the document (in which case you are not forming people, but simply providing them talking points)?  I think there is a strong, and maybe overwhelming, case to be made that the answer is "no."  I mean, churches (including but not limited to the Roman Catholic Church) can't even get their own people to abide by the tenets of these types of documents; what chance is there of affecting the broader world?  Note that this observation has nothing really to do with the standard left/right political and religious dichotomy.  In the context of the Amazon document, the folks who are positioned to ignore it are on the right, but it's not like those on the left paid or pay any more attention to church proclamations on abortion or LGBT issues.

This suggests to me a couple of things.  First, Christianity as a whole radically overestimated its own persuasive power and radically underestimated the degree to which its privileged relationship with the societies in which it was embedded powered the outcomes in "the good old days."  If "church discipline" collapses the moment you remove the coercive power of the broader society supporting the church, then it probably never really was "church discipline" in the first place.  And second, this means particular expressions of Christianity basically have to make a binary choice--either you have to develop a new, much more internally-focused mission statement, or you have to find some way of reintegrating yourself into the power structure of a society.  The current approach of assuming Christianity has power and influence that it seems pretty clear it doesn't have and then acting accordingly seems to me to be, literally, shouting into the wind.

The second question has to do with Christianity's relationship to its past.  All Christian traditions, not simply the "high church" or "catholic" ones, have the same basic problem.  On the one hand, they define their legitimacy in reference to a continuity with teachings originating from the past.  At the same time, there is lots of stuff in Christianity's past that seems to many people to be pretty terrible.  Thus, the more you acknowledge the bad stuff in the past, the less legitimacy Christianity seems to have; on the flip side, the more solidly you state your legitimacy, the more you have to take on board a bunch of things that, at a minimum, lots of people are going to find abhorrent.  Threading the needle between these two poles is extremely difficult and not at all clearly marked out.

We live in a world in which attitudes toward gender and sexuality which were considered mainstream even 100 years ago are now considered incredibly reactionary.  As anyone who has read my stuff will know, I think this is all to the good--I have in the past talked about a "Copernican Revolution" with regard to gender, and without Copernicus, we would have never traveled to the moon or much of modern science.  So, it is not at all surprising that gender and sexuality are the flashpoint for all discussions of tradition.  A Christianity that chucks out the bulk of what it has said for 2000 years about who men and women are and how they relate to one another is going to raise very serious questions about the degree to which it is in any sort of continuity with its past; a Christianity that holds on to those old ideas is going to be seen as utterly monstrous by large swaths of its membership and potential membership.  Here, once again, is a binary choice--do you hold on more loosely to the account of your own legitimacy in order to fix what you see as broken in Christianity, or do you double down on legitimacy at the cost of shrinking your scope of persuasion?  Roman Catholicism, I think, has clearly decided on the later course in the main; other traditions, including my own Episcopal Church, are trying to pursue the former, at least as it relates to gender and sexuality issues (while, at least in the part of the pool I swim, opting in the main for tradition as to other questions).

The point, I think, is that there are no obvious solutions, or solutions without cost.  It would be helpful to everyone, I think, to be more honest about what we are doing and what we stand for.  People who believe it is appropriate for women to enter ordained ministry believe this because they view women as equal to men in every dimension that matters for purposes of ordination, not because of some vague shadow tradition in which they were ordained in the 2nd Century gives you license for it.  Likewise, excluding women from ordained ministry means that, in at least this dimension, you don't think they are the equal of men (and no, separate-but-equal "complementarianism" doesn't magically make inequality into equality).  Equality is what is at issue here, and the degree to which equality is or is not more important than the tradition, and nothing else.  Let's all cut the crap.

Finally, there is a the phenomenon of the visible versus invisible loss.  Much discussion was had in the lead up to the release of the Amazon document about the potential for schism, and the duty of religious authorities to prevent schism.  These discussions, in my view, are systemically distorted by virtue of the fact that they will always focus on organized public groups at the expense of individual action.  If a church has 100 members, and ten of them say that making decision X will cause them to walk out right now, but not making decision X will cause 20 people to leave on an individual basis over a period of five years, making decision X will always be framed as "avoiding schism," and will receive applause from a certain kind of centrist religious commentator.  The 20 people that leave as a result of the decision are basically invisible, and to the extent their absence is noted, it will always be framed in reference to vague or idiosyncratic processes (i.e. "the rise of the Nones," etc.).  On the flip side, the group that refuses to make decision X will be accused of being "divisive" and "uncharitable," notwithstanding the fact that the group that refuses to make decision X will, or at least might, in the end keep more people in fold than the first group.

Take, for example, the Rubicon that was the birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae.  Let's say Pope Paul VI had followed the recommendations of the Papal Commission and said artificial birth control was OK.  Would a segment, maybe a significant segment, of Roman Catholics have left in a very public way, and would the SSPX likely be a much larger force today than they are?  Probably.  Would Pope Paul have been creating, or at least allowing, schism?  Again, probably.  Would the Roman Catholic Church have more people in the pews today, notwithstanding those departures?  It is impossible to really analyze a counterfactual like this, but I think the answer is probably yes.  We know for a fact that, at least in the United States, that former Roman Catholics are one of the largest "religious" groups, and a growing segment of them are women.  It is not that much of a stretch to say that some of those folks would have stayed in the fold if the Roman Catholic Church had adopted what they would likely see as more pro-woman policies.

On the flip side, lots of people like to wring their hands regarding the "divisive" way that the Episcopal Church handled the basket of Gene Robinson/the ACNA split/LGBT issues generally.  Yes, there were decisions the Episcopal Church could have made that would likely have kept the ACNA folks in the fold.  Such decisions also would have resulted in lots of people exiting the Episcopal Church, and losing the folks who have joined the Episcopal Church explicitly because of the positions it staked out regarding LGBT people.

The point is that if your job as a religious leader is conceptualized as "avoiding schism," then certain people matter more than other people, and thus you will end up keeping those people around and wondering where the other people went.  My view is that this, more than anything else (except, perhaps, that it seems like Pope Francis is kinda misogynist), explains the decision regarding married priests and women deacons.  If Pope Francis sees his job as avoiding schism, Cardinal Burke matters and the woman sitting in the pews in a Philly suburb who decides she has had it with being told she is "less than" doesn't, separate and apart from the power imbalance between Burke and our hypothetical Philly lady.  And, because of this, decisions that seem one-sided under this framing have consequences that are both utterly predictable and not at all accounted for in the decision-making framework.  Pope Francis probably did his job as he sees it with this document, and in so doing there will be consequences for the Roman Catholic Church that will probably be significant.  Maybe avoiding schism isn't, or shouldn't be, the end-all, be-all of the job of a religious leader.