The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change
I appreciate Father Halík’s response to my review of his book. Let me reiterate that it’s an impressive work replete with valuable insights and many nuggets of wisdom and sanity. Despite the criticisms that I offered, his and my analysis of contemporary Christianity/Catholicism overlap considerably.
In wondering whether forces extrinsic to the church have caused disaffection toward Christianity, I certainly did not intend to let the church off the hook. Its blunders, not least the clergy sex abuse crisis, have massively and tragically hamstrung its mission. Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:6 come to mind: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”1 The point I sought to make was one of historical causality: that large, complex processes such as “contemporary secularization” often have multiple points of origin—some tied closely to the church’s comportment, to be sure, but others perhaps less so.
What is more, I share Halík’s view that Donald Trump is “an immature, narcissistic personality with obvious pathological traits.” I could even say much more in this vein, but the editors would probably have to delete it to protect family values! At the same time, I think that Trump’s rise in the United States along with the rise of other populist parties and leaders in Europe should occasion not only denunciation in a prophetic register but also soul-searching among holders of power and prestige in our globalized, meritocratic world; healthy democracies where most people feel secure and heard, one would like to think, would not be susceptible to such inflammatory demagoguery and scapegoating. But this has obviously not been the case. So, what went wrong? Is this a passing phenomenon or does it suggest a deeper crisis of liberalism, as some have argued? Put succinctly, denunciation alone does not exhaust all that needs to be said about Trumpism and international populism.
Finally, there is the delicate question of the gravitation of African and other post-colonial countries toward more traditionalist theological and moral views and other sensibilities. Glossing this simply as the “childhood disease of conservatism,” I’m afraid, comes up short for me, echoing—certainly inadvertently—a colonialist language of paternalism. As Christianity grows in the Global South, we Westerners have a special duty to listen carefully, even if we do not always fully agree or understand. I worry that dismissing their views out of hand as an adolescent disorder might preempt difficult but necessary conversations before they occur. For these conversations, let me suggest that all sides adopt the adage attributed to the character of the clerk in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.”
On this note, with respect to The Afternoon of Christianity, I, criticisms notwithstanding, have mostly and gratefully been a learner.
