The City and the City

The Anglican Continuum blog asks about evangelism in a Continuing Anglican context:

I would personally love to see a discussion on evangelism, specifically, on how we, who are so devoted to traditional Anglicanism, can articulate our faith to the great unwashed, as well as unchurched Christians, who know little or nothing about the Anglican Way, to open their eyes and their hearts to the Lord and to bring them closer to the Lord.

We all believe that traditional Anglicanism is the best way to achieve these ends, but how exactly, how best, do we go about it?

The first thing to say is that traditional Anglicans can and should do evangelism in all the ordinary ways. But what I wanted to comment on was what difference the “traditional Anglican” makes to this*.

I don’t think it’s a positive one. As soon as the prospective convert starts asking any questions about what traditional Anglicanism is, what are you going to tell them? “Well, we were part of the Catholic Church, but then we split off for mumble, mumble, mumble … and then there was this renewal movement within the largely Protestant Church of England, but then the Episcopal Church ordained women, so we broke off, and then there were the Deerfield Beach consecrations, and then we split again, and now there’s a few tens of thousands of us left in the US” (but “we all believe that traditional Anglicanism is the best way” bring them closer to the Lord!). To attempt to explain Continuing Anglicanism is to place the scandal of Christian division right up front and center (and to send most people running).

This is part of why I think the remnant of the Anglo-Catholic movement (which is now largely in the Continuum) has to conceive of itself precisely as a movement with an end point in unity with Rome or Orthodoxy (or some with one and some with the other), a movement of return out of the anomalous situation of Anglicanism which brings along that tradition’s gifts to the wider Church. As soon as Anglo-Catholicism sees itself instead as an independent and autonomous Church on par with the other two and seeks unity on that basis, it becomes a rather ridiculous thing which cannot coherently or attractively narrate its own history.

So - don’t preach traditional Anglicanism. Preach the Catholic faith. When the inquirer ask more about what traditional Anglicanism is, tell them about a movement for unity, rather than giving them justifications for division.

* which takes it pretty far afield from the main concerns of their conversation, and is mostly an opportunity to state my basic position on Anglo-Catholicism, as the AC co-author of the blog.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about “liberal guilt” (Ross Douhat’s comments are especially useful). One things worth mentioning is the difference between actions arising from guilt and actions arising from charity. It is the nature of love and its resulting actions to be centered on its object. But actions arising from guilt are more variable, and they run the risk of being more focused on the guilty person than the one offended against, leading to either token actions (or verbal posturings) which soothe the conscience without providing real help or, worse, to actions which actually cause harm.

UPDATE: Here’s a good example.

The California same-sex marriage decision gives me another opportunity to urge people to read David S. Crawford’s Communio article “Liberal Androgyny: Gay Marriage and the Meaning of Sexuality in Our Time”, which does the best job I’ve seen of answering the question “How does gay marriage harm ‘heterosexual’ marriages?”:

As we have seen, the liberal model effectively shifts the
ground of society away from the sexual correspondence of man and
woman (and all that their sexual difference implies) and toward a
system of “alternative orientations.” But the anthropological dualism
implied by this shift, as well as the reduction of “sexual orientation”
to indifferent alternatives, belies the fact that the liberal model entails
a basically “gay” (and disintegrative) anthropology. It merely grafts
the possibility for “heterosexuality” onto this anthropology as one of
its variations. Thus, the anthropologically fundamental starting point
of the sexual otherness of man and woman is in fact no longer
available; it is replaced by one of the possible “orientations”—so-
called “heterosexual marriage” or “opposite-sex marriage,” which
has at its core the very amorphous concept of “emotional commit-
ment.”

The liberal movement for an extension of the right to marry
to “same-sex partners” is therefore a tacit step toward the anthropo-
logical nullification of sexuality and gender altogether. Whatever the
new right to marriage would be, the one thing it cannot be is a mere
extension of the same right. Thus, the liberal model is inherently
unstable because it contains an internal contradiction: first, it asks for
assimilation into the existing institution of civil marriage, but,
second, its basic anthropology radically subverts or evacuates the
meaning of that institution.

Sexual relations are thereby abstracted in principle from their
deepest meaning and significance, and the human person is consid-
ered essentially androgynous. Because the implied anthropology is
androgynous, it does not encompass the intrinsic otherness of sexual
difference. Hence, all relations—including the man-woman
relationship—are in fact at the deepest level homosexual. They all
become in this sense essentially “gay.”

If radicals criticize current society as institutionalizing a
“compulsory heterosexuality,” the vision of society proposed as its
replacement may therefore be characterized just as accurately as a
form of “compulsory homosexuality.”

Will Saletan a while back in Slate had an article on the sources of popular opposition to gay marriage (which unfortunately I cannot find) which hit on this same insight: outside of elite circles, most men as men love their wives as women (and vice versa). They do not, as androgynous persons love their wives as androgynous persons, and they understand, even if they can’t articulate it, that these are two very different things.

I ran across a wonderful quote from Alasdair Macintyre in a footnote in Stanley Hauerwas’s The State of the University, which seems especially apt for the university I attend, from my experience of its undergraduates (half of which seem to enter their freshman year with dreams of private equity dancing in their heads):

There is a widespread conception among our students that to learn … is to acquire means to implement desires and goals which the student had already, which the student brings to his or her education from outside it. Sometimes students are asked by their parents or their advisors “What do you want to do?” And when they have produced some kind of stumbling answer to this, they are then advised as to what they should learn to achieve what it is they want…. Against this, I want to suggest that what education should be about is the transformation of students’ conceptions of their goals. The desires, the needs, the goals that people bring to their education are in general going to be as corrupt as the culture that produced them. So they are going to have to be transformed as persons. Aristotle pointed out that what pleases and pains the virtuous person is very different from what pleases and pains the vicious person, and both again are different from what pleases the merely immature person. Morality is thus in a very important way educative of desire. ~ in “Values and Distinctive Characteristics of Teaching and Learning in Church-Related Colleges”

“You heard him say it? ‘Pain’s the only evil I know about.’ You heard that?”

The monk nodded solemnly.

“And that society is the only thing which determines whether an act is wrong or not? That too?”

“Yes.”

“Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. ‘The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.’ Brother Pat, you’d better get out of here, or I’ll start raving”

–Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

While moving last week, I took the time to finally read Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which turned out to be the best combination of the themes of religion and science fiction I have read. I was momentarily made wary by an introduction by Mary Doria Russell, author of the overrated The Sparrow, thinking I had got myself into another disappointment. There was nothing of the sort.

Science fiction, all too often, merely makes a fetish of progress. Star Trek is a definite example of this, though Deep Space Nine–an incarnation which pushed back much of that future golden age mythology–is the one that routinely shows up as a favorite today. Robert A. Heinlein walked the line between that and political and social realism (of an idealistic sort). Frank Herbert roundly rejected it in Dune and its sequels. Miller, informed by both pessimism and Catholicism, rejects progress. This gives his post-apocalyptic tale a much grimmer feel than most, but also one with a chance of redemption.

Miller manages to do what science fiction does at its best–provide a window into human society and psychology by distancing itself from present and history–while additionally broaching real topics of theological import: Church and State, science and faith, euthanasia, gender in religion, original sin.

I would be happy to discuss the novel in the comments field in greater detail, but I’d rather not write more here, lest I ruin it for those who–like me until a few days ago–have not yet read it.