True Scotsmen of Christ: Religion vs Faith, and the Special Pleading of Progressive Catholicism
Note: For clarity's sake, I will define Evangelicals here as a self-identified interdenominational Protestant group who lean towards conservative politics, biblical literalism, a belief in spiritual entities acting on the physical world, the ability to invoke the divine to influence material outcome, and grace through faith alone. The details are variable, with something like the prosperity theology proposing earthly reward for faith being a specific expression of the broader belief in invoking the divine. Renewalists (such as those in the Neo-Charismatic movement) are contained in that group, but engage in more blatant superstitious practices like speaking in tongues. I’m also including the .docx file, because it has sources for some information, but I can’t quite figure out how to do proper footnotes on this website.
I’ve been seeing a sentiment become popular recently that conservative Evangelicals are not “real Christians”. It may be true that their interpretations are dubious, often justified with bad history and egregious cherry picking. But Christianity beyond the individual level is more than faith, it is a series of collaborative and competitive institutions that hold considerable social, financial, and political influence. It is not just a collection of beliefs, it is an organized religion with formal institutions that have the power to shape earthly life. If people are able to claim its mantle, participate in its institutions, position themselves as inheritors of its traditions and history, and use it to gain significant amounts of followers and enormous power both within the religion and in societies that tolerate it, how can you honestly call them separate from the religion? And Evangelicals are arguably the primary shapers of American Christianity at this point. Plenty of congregations oppose them, but they are a force that everyone must contend with. Megachurches gobble up in-person attendance while smaller churches fold, looking for new footholds in places where other churches have already seen flocks dwindle. They use their wealth to create their own apparatus of ideological reproduction through devotionals, study guides, and entertainment in ways smaller individual churches and looser coalitions/denominations struggle to match. And they are wise enough to make room for “pipelines”; less blatantly reactionary worship centers and materials that attract laypeople while also sowing the seeds of right wing interpretation which can be used to progressively turn adherents against progress. “He Gets Us” is a campaign that creates advertisements around shows of humility and inclusion of the downtrodden that is ultimately being heavily supported by anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion organizations, for example. They present the image of openness, but the backers are using it as part of an exclusionary, impositional influence machine. It’s a typically clever ploy, and one clergy who oppose it have to be—or at least should be—looking out for. It is the sheepdog capture of disgruntlement with churches that have become disconnected from their communities, presenting a down to earth face that still shepards people toward views that divide communities. Inoffensive fronts for offensive, in every meaning of the word, aims. Even denominations that are generally against movements like the Neo-Charismatics find themselves fracturing over questions of tolerance. Reactionary Christian groups are in position of considerable political influence, with pushes through legislation and court challenges to make themselves super-citizens that have veto power over the accessibility of ideas they find personally distasteful. They want to give themselves a heckler’s veto on what can be taught in public schools and get public money for private, religious schools and charter school projects that do not have the same duty of accessibility in enrollment, acts which expose public schools to additional budgetary challenges when these other institutions are also demanding tax-payer money. The Arizona school vouchers program cost for 2024 fiscal year was 738 million in subsidies—with expectations of a year over year increase if it continues—and was most heavily used by upper middle class families already in private education giving themselves something of a lifestyle upgrade rather than by poor families or families that had children in public schools previously, despite the fact that it was sold in—in part— on the promise that academic achievers stuck in subpar mediocre schools would have new levels of access to quality education. These vouchers are also used to subsidize homeschooling, its own strange wilderness of under-regulation. Here the religious right has already found a way to feed itself from the public trough, a useful tool even if individual federal goals face obstacles. While there were churches that supported marriage equality, they were part of a push that involved other religions and—most significantly—secular groups, whereas Evangelicals have cultivated numbers and power enough to make a more unilateral push for social control, making alliances with conservative Catholics, Mormons, and other intra-faith groups. I suppose Jehovah's Witnesses' resistance to voting doesn’t make them the best political allies, but they do encourage similar social reactionary trends. These groups may have points of contention with Evangelicals, and are smaller, but are still cumulatively significant. And they serve Evangelical’s goals well enough. Amy Coney Barrett helped unwind abortion protections, after all, and we haven’t seen some great influx of support for families since. That aforementioned, maligned group—the Neo-Charismatics—are the fastest growing sect in America. Renewlist groups like Pentecostals are growing globally, and are markedly superstitious even in their more progressive forms. If Evangelical Christianity is the giant casting a long shadow over Christianity in general—not only a powerful group, but the largest self-identifying block by raw numbers —it doesn’t seem unreasonable to argue that they are the face of Christianity in America, the earthly institutions and religion that exist beyond mere articles of faith and individual belief. Especially when they can be rather free with breaking the polite pulpit/political barrier to advocate that their membership support specific politicians and political projects if they want to really live their faith.
It’s good to oppose them, but it shows a certain ignorance of the secular reality of religions to try and neatly separate them as “not us” despite all the influence and reach. They may be bad Christians and deceivers, but their proliferation makes them a plank in more progressive Christianity’s eye, not an independent phenomenon. Especially when we consider cherry picking and dubious interpretation has a long history within Christianity before the nation of The United States even existed. They did not invent the tools they use, but merely refined them for modern times. They are not the first—or only ones—to turn blind eyes to abuses of those who should have higher expectations of behavior, not less. Or to exert undue influence on the matters of state. Every concession to reality that has helped spread the faith—even ones that move it towards openness—are an exercise in picking and choosing from a complicated and many authored across different periods of time primary text that says its way is demanding and narrow.
I think back often of a sticky detail in debates over homosexuality in Leviticus, wherein one of the more inclusive readings offered by scholars like Renato Lings is that is a prohibition against incest specifically, except the sentence for such a violation—even in this more heterodox context—is death for both parties. That is troubling all by itself without elaboration, as incest can often be facilitated with deception and coercion—which in turn can also lead to troublingly complex dynamics that require both correction and empathy in which underage, by modern definition, victims are also assailants replicating, unknowingly or not, thier own abuse by older family members on younger peers—and there is no moderation of the punishment acknowledging such circumstances in those passages. This is a similar complication with the reading of it as anti-sodomy law rather than general prohibition, the punishment is still incredibly punitive and intrusive at the individual level. This is a problem with those happiest, shiniest, most inclusive interpretations of the Bible. Even if homosexuality may not have been considered fundamentally sexually immoral, the punishments for sexual immorality are still harsh—and still intrusive depending on interpretation—and inconsistent in delineation of victim vs perpetrator in matters of sexual violence. God may not have wanted homosexuals at large killed, but seems to have made violent proscriptions in ways that could easily roll up victims of sexual impropriety in their application, if we take the Old Testament law as canon and reflective of God’s will. I suppose it is possible—if the incest interpretation is correct—that the application of the law was situational, but that is not indicated in Leviticus 20 itself. And I am not sure there is as much nuance around male-on-male rape in the Bible, whereas the rape of women does have direct, non-exegetical conditional modifiers such as whether she was an unbetrothed virgin or not. That is not to say it is not patriarchal and unfair, merely that we have clear proof of limited situationality without having to do interpretation or look at historical documents outside of the Bible. Christians may not be bound by those old laws, but it still raises questions about the vindictiveness and fairness of God— and thus the totality of his lovingness—even if the parameters are adjusted to be less exclusionary.
Saying that there is not a blanket prohibition against homosexuality does not necessarily indicate that God is all that more tolerant than those interpretations that forbid it in totality, if the enforcement of the actual taboo is still applied inconsiderately. God is universally accepting and God accepts homesexuality are not necessarily the same argument, despite being treated as such by debaters on both sides of the issue. It should also be noted that while there is an argument against the homosexuality interpretation, that interpretation has been accepted by major institutions and shaped law. I don’t think many people would argue that all those who came before and operated under that assumption were “not Christians” in the way the way modern Evangelicals are—given that the ability to debate the specifics of modern language with experienced scholars is much easier to facilitate with the technology of today—but this grace around temporality also creates a type of fallibility around the Bible, which has been a problem for both reactionary and progressive denominations that have biblical infallibility as part of their doctrine. It is true, but also its truth is not at all readily transferable across barriers of time and language. Evangelicals are not ignoring the Bible in any special way here though—if that is what they are doing—they are engaging in a standing tradition of interpretation, and they are far from the only group who resist updating interpretation with contemporary knowledge. Stick a pin in that. However, if we take the position of biblical fallibility, it becomes much harder to paint other groups as “not real Christians” without other established doctrine and dogma to lean on. I see this problem often where biblical discussions by progressive Protestants and non-denominationals are left in an odd space of wanting to deny authenticity to conservative Evangelicals, while also not wanting to be tied to any particular authoritative interpretation that would give the denouncement specificity. That is an obstacle worth considering. Authoritative interpretation has its own issues, but if one admits that there is no authoritative interpretation, how does one consistently establish what wrong interpretation is?
Modernity has, in places, moderated laws around sexual impropriety in general to be less harsh and more readily cohesive to the layperson in outlining minimal standards for questions of consent, and so the judgments of the faithful have moderated over time too, even if there are those always ready to roll particular elements of moderation back. I do not think as many people would readily indulge arguments over whether or not period sex is grounds for legally enforced communal expulsion/shunning as particularly important now—or when anti-sodomy laws were enforced in the recent past—despite that also being covered in Leviticus 20. Most mainstream denominations moved toward “it was a different time” to explain this detail and that of the Bible, even ones that cling to “this is unchanging truth.” I grew up in denominations—including a Lutheran church which, along with its synod, has ostensibly numerous problems with the performative “born again” and prosperity types—that cringed away from certain prohibitions of the Old Testament while embracing others to try and make a broadly palatable and cozy, but stably right-wing reading of the Bible. This raises the question of what infallibility means when “times change” is an answer to some questions but not others, and that type of unsatisfying ambiguity is perfect for literalists and prescriptive interpreters to exploit. Contradiction becomes much simpler to resolve when you claim to be a modern prophet through which the Holy Spirit literally speaks. Then things are what you say they are. But this ambiguity is something that Christianity as a religion will always have to contend with. The boundaries of fallibility will most likely never be majoritively sketched out. Importantly, it is an issue contained in religion. The devil is not whispering in our ears to make things unclear, there is a lack of clarity. There are passages that elude popular consensus on the question of translation, much less deeper meaning. And all the softening of demands on the faithful that make adherence easier render the meaning of it all more ambiguous. If there is no Christian way to act, how important can it be to act like a Christian? If you are not expected to be all that charitable as an individual, how much of a virtue is charity, really?
This moderation is hardly a unique feature of Christianity, but it still breeds selective reading. There’s been scorn for committed pacifists and asceticism throughout Christianity’s history, and I have no doubt that the faith would not be as sizable as it is if that’s how most Christians were, but they are at least engaging in consistency. And while Christians are encouraged to spread the faith, if we are to start looking at this group and that and proclaim they are outside of the boundaries of the religion, what would make softer versions that still de-emphasize personal sacrifice any more real? The fencing in of the religion is itself not unprecedented, of course. The question of Jesus’ fundamental nature used to be more contested, but eventually things like Arianism were pushed out of popular consideration as “Christian”. Jesus as all man or entity independent of God is, for most denominations, still non-Christianity— despite how many other once fundamental, violent differences have become mostly buried hatchets in modernity. But are Evangelicals and Charismatics really something like Arians—making a contrasting claim about a cornerstone belief with multitudinous downstream implications—or are they extending tendencies already present in American Protestantism; indulgers and abusers of worldly power in ways similar to factions of the Catholic Church have been throughout history? A logical —if malicious —evolution of all those acceptable exceptions. Is it really a surprising development when a religion that has been wedded to colonial projects like mass forced labor in the past produces adherents who are intolerant and persistently obtruding in the present? Is it really so surprising that the acceptance of wealth and self-indulgence grew into the adoration of it? Could it not be that those seemingly reasonable concessions to reality about how maybe individual members of the faith didn’t need to be so generous as to ever risk discomfort is where that acceptance of the accumulation and maintenance of wealth—as long as you didn’t appear too obviously to be putting money first—came from in the first place? There have been dalliances with “faith produces material reward” ideas long before there was the prosperity gospel. Even the elements of American Exceptionalism have roots in mainstream culture older than particular movements like Christian Dominionism. At this point, the Christian religion has a long enough history of change and adaptation that there is no reasonable way to easily define a singular true faith from which the odious have strayed, and it would be better if the members of the religion took responsibility for its trouble children rather than trying to dismiss them as some outside interlopers. And there has not been a singular, true interpretation during its history as a major religion. Maybe early days, but with growth came conflict. Even within the same denominations, there are major disagreements in doctrine. There have been people teaching universal reconciliation throughout history, and people arguing that there is a literal and permanent hell, even if it's not actually full of lakes of fire. Maybe these current reactionary denominations can be eventually marginalized, pushed out of the gates and beyond the walls of power and popular conception of what Christianity is, but that’ll be hard to do if members of the faith cannot honestly assess how they came into being, and what parts these “more authentic” groups played in making them.
The easy thing to do is portray American Evangelism as an idiosyncratically crude movement. Luckily, the combination of the recent Conclave to appoint a new Pope and the state of Washington’s challenge to clergy-penitent exemptions on mandatory reporting has been doing a bang up job demonstrating that the underlying intellectual rot extends well beyond Christianity’s loudest Protestant members. I don’t want this to become a call-out of particular activists I’ve followed in the past, but I want to make it clear that these sentiments are not inventions based on rhetorical trends, I am responding to specific statements made on public spaces by specific people. If you’ve ever read one of those patronizing presenting-themselves-as-progressive Christian “gay couples are fine as long they don’t have sex” arguments, the weaseliness will be familiar.
The Conclave and that law may seem like two distinct issues beyond having to do with the Catholic Church, but they intertwine in an interesting and aggravating way. If you haven’t seen the news about it, there was some concern that the new pope had been involved in covering for abusive priests ,and had also affirmed the belief that living as a homosexual was living in sin. Now the arguments trying to salve concern and assure people that Leo was still one of the best options I saw were essentially that there wasn’t anyone who was a cardinal that hadn’t got their hands a little dirty, so it was a wash among serious candidates, and that as much as his backwardness on the gay issue was disappointing, that the pope must be a pope for all Catholics, so it’s expected that he was probably going to stick to a mostly traditional stance on an issue that could cause great internal strife. On the issue of priests having to report child abuse confessions, the arguments were not much more than it was a really complicated issue of faith the church could be better about, but maybe confessional did its job in helping sinners correct themselves, and making priests mandatory reporters will scare them away. So it’s just so darn hard to say what should be done.
My view is that these sentiments rolled up together are essentially an elaborate form of special pleading that touches on the dueling ideas of the Catholic church at tension in the minds of many of its progressive adherents. It’s at one time a reformed, worldly institution willing to change with the times and listen to science rather than stubbornly stand against it when inconvenient. It is also an ancient spiritual institution that stands above and apart from the modern noise of things like national interest. The latter may sound aspirational, but the problem is that it is treated as worldly and spiritual at the same time, being more of whichever is most convenient at the time. Not to mention the conflict within some of the same arguments themselves.
Let’s start with the argument that confessional may help prevent abuse. There’s only a small problem with this, confession’s private nature makes this a non-falsifiable assertion. Which really flies in the face of being hip with science. The question of life after death is at least truly outside the realm of scientific testing as we can imagine it. We could hypothetically study if confession reduces abuse, except we can’t collect any data beyond personal anecdotes, and priests’ words can’t count for much here because they aren’t going to give information specific enough to be verified. Unstick that pin here. And there are reasons to be concerned if confession would help more than it harms.
Confession does not have worldly enforcement mechanisms—which is mostly good—beyond religious ceremony. Priests can withhold absolution if they feel the individual is not showing sufficient contrition. This is where you get into the hypothetical “a priest could tell a person that penance would include handing themselves over to the police.” Which, sure, but how can we know how often this happens when someone confesses to something like the exploitation of children? We can’t because that information is sealed. What if that’s not what happens? And part of privacy and not having enforcement mechanisms is that if someone is just looking to feel less guilty, how do you stop them from trying to find it from a more lenient source of reconciliation? It might be something like gaming the system to shop for priests or bounce around when one delivers an answer you don’t want to hear— not in the spirit of confession—but we know that people who abuse children can be quite good at self-justification and manipulation. We also know—using that handy science the Church is up to date on— that getting things off your chest can have a psychologically ameliorative effect without behavior changes. What if confession can become a mechanism to feel better while continuing abuse rather than a means to stop it?
How can priests know if the behavior has truly changed? They can’t exactly directly ask a victim if confessed acts are ongoing, and a victim could be coached and threatened into denying continued abuse if they sense fishing or are asked less direct questions. They can only speak entirely plainly with the abuser. Similarly, if the person hasn’t yet offended, but was thinking about it, what actions can be recommended that are as easily observable as being followed through on as someone going to prison? You could do something like have them quite a job with children—you could verify if they had done that easily enough— but that only removes them from some potentially harmful situations. Ones in their private lives will be closed to this kind of legal, easy observation. You could ask them to be forthright about their problem with others in their lives, but how do you make sure they have, especially how do you know whether or not they told people that you don't interact with through church? What if someone confesses abuse, does not follow through on any recommendations, and simply does not go back to church after that; what do you do with proof of a serious crime when the spiritual threat does not compel better behavior? Nothing in their solution, despite our modern knowledge of how likely reoffense can be.
And we can’t assume that telling people to own up to the full legal consequences of their crimes is what priests do as the usual course of action. Again, it is unprovable without being able to collect objective data. When there are sex crime cover-ups within the church, how can we not ask if it is not also possible that those priests were pretty forgiving of sexual abuses by members of their congregations? Priests confess too, and it doesn’t seem like too many of them were told to go to the police by other clergy members, after all. That detail seems almost like evidence against the argument that it helps stop abuse or that hard measures are often taken. And if being told to face legal consequences was the standard modus operandi of priests—and that spiritual threat was a frequently successful one—what would be so different about making a report mandatory? If abusers felt like legal consequences were the extremely likely outcome already, why would the reporting change their behavior? And while there have been members of the clergy that do recommend this course of action, it is ultimately a matter of personal discretion by the priest conducting confession, because even if it was adopted as best practice, how do you know what priests are doing in actuality if you can’t collect specific, verifiable information? Confession resists study of efficacy by its design. But Catholics try to defend it as a spiritual matter that should not be imposed on by secular law. It is exempt from all those worldly concerns about that efficacy or potential to enable abuse. What if a priest just plainly doesn’t see sexual abuse as anymore of a concern than any more minor religious sexual misbehavior and lets people off with a slap on the wrist and a few Hail Marys rather than treat it with the appropriate gravity? What if they think other violence like domestic abuse is justifiable? How do you monitor for this? The Church embraces inquiry, just not here. We need to do better, just don’t demand we consider any of those analytical techniques we think are so neat elsewhere. As some unfun facts, one can be excommunicated for sharing details overheard during a confession as a fellow penitent, and I found a canon lawyer with an online following—Cathy Caridi—who claims that planned future acts are still covered by the seal. So at least some knowledgeable Catholics would go to bat defending not reporting willful intent to abuse a child even if some say that sort of thing isn’t covered.
And not to have a “the worst part is the hypocrisy” moment, but there is something particularly galling about seeing this so temporally close to minimizing covering of abuse as “that’s just the way it is, unfortunately.” It is appallingly two-faced to plead for the sanctity of confession—mixed with a dash of unverifiable speculation about how it might actually be helping so many people—while within the space of a couple of weeks also pulling the “we have to concede to the reality of the situation” card over serious violations of law and morality across the globe. Either there is a spiritual standard or a worldly standard the church is held too, it does not get to be the one institution that gets to be both to get out of trouble in either sphere. To ask that it be given that allowance—whether asked plainly or by implication—is to not respect pluralistic, secular society, no matter how much you give the thumbs up to the teaching of evolution. But we can’t hold the church to the spiritual standard. Taking too firm a stand for our moral beliefs—like the belief that homesexuality is not fundamentally evil— might schism the church, and God forbid we get too divisive about matters of faith as a preeminent institution of the “I have come to set a man against his father” religion. We can’t be too firm in our convictions and stand up for what we feel is right too strongly, or our precious worldly institution might stop being that stable, continuous entity we like to imagine we are part of and laugh at the rootless Protestants over. We get to have incremental, back room political maneuvering based change. No chasing out money lenders with a quickness here, on that subject, please don’t ask for too much immediate accountability about what our bank gets up to. And there is the sheer hypocrisy of saying the Pope must represent all Catholics in one part of the statement, and then covering his ass in another. What about all the people who have been alienated by the abuse and cover-ups? Who actually represents and stands for them if everyone’s hands are dirty and you are willing to live with that as long as your church gets to keep that capital C and one of your guys gets the big hat?
This is ultimately why I don’t trust people in progressive spaces who bemoan a lack of spirituality on the left or call for more appeals to the religious. There is a spiritual rot deep in American society, but spiritual leaders and religious institutions are one of the prime sources of it, and it has spread to all corners. People have not merely left churches, they have been made unwelcome for a number of reasons. The faiths can reform themselves or keep decaying and degrading. It is not the job of people who are not part of them to play nice while they spew poison and try to save them from themselves. In this I respect The Reverend William Barber II, who has put the flight from religion on the shoulders of religion. He is a man at least willing to try and thread progress with religion by speaking plainly about the failings of his peers, and has been arrested numerous times for his peaceful protests. That is a way forward, playing games of accountability and rejecting responsibility while waving a rainbow flag are not. It’s a harder path than so many on offer, and requires a willingness to sacrifice a little personal peace and comfort in risking confrontation. If you call yourself a Christian and that kind of trouble and reflection isn’t for you, well, maybe you’re not any better a Christian than the man who bangs on the pulpit for Trump, even if you’re not as bad a person.
Addendum: I didn’t want to turn this issue into a callout, but I will share who got my goat so badly on private request. I just didn’t think going in on any one person would be too constructive in trying to explain the general shape of the katamari ball arguments for accountability dodging that are sadly pretty common.
Furthermore, I consider Palestine to need to be freed.