Eunomia

My experience inclines me to agree with Amy. I agree with your assessment of this very American Evangelical ignorance, but I don't think it is so utterly invinceable. History does wake some of us up. In many cases, regrettably, you may be right--history has no purchase on some minds who know it well enough. You might go a bit further to explaining why this is so. Your basic intuition seems to be that there is a default low-church protestant (and perhaps simply popular American) disregard for large, messy, powerful organizations. Yes--but why?

It struck me this afternoon that a lot of ahistorical protestants and even those who start their Christian history about 500 years ago have the sort of minds that simply cannot fathom how rulers in the time of Henry VIII could be sincerely believing Catholics (or very Catholic Protestants) and such flagrant sinners as well. A typical way out is to say these sorry old sinners were cynical religious frauds, not real believers. Catholics are still commonly dismissed by ignorogelicals in this way; it's an old set piece of a reaction. The interesting thing to watch in these reflexes is the motive--why can't this kind of mind cope with the possibility of a severe and chronically sinning Christian?

The more radical and populist elements in Protestantism have always had this kind of outrage at "hypocrisy," or rather big sins committed by big people on a big stage that allow small people with small sins on a small stage to look and feel pretty good about themselves and righteously displeased with the rich and powerful. So you get the moral perfectionism of a lot of protestantism, though it is denied in principle. The greatest contrast between "the old religion" and the new is the pentitential ethos, and its absence. Show me an educated Evangelical who is still fundamentally the a-historical sort, and I'll show you an ace at the false humility of self-deprecation and passive-aggressive approaches to conflict. If he sees the big old church as stuffed to the gills with sin and therefore rejectable, he is not fit to comport himself well with his own small sins, which have ways of growing.

This spirit, in my reading of it, has clearly spread on from the pushiest Reformation-era Puritans to modern leftist resentniks, and you can see the fusion of the two in buffoonishly earnest Bono and Jim Wallis-loving "progressive" evangelicals. I've also perceived it in some evangelical converts to Orthodoxy who became rather more anti-Catholic in the process. (Byzantine politics and the toady-of-the-state role the eastern churches often assumed--their dirty laundry--is less disseminated, so if one is looking for "purity," it might be easier to imagine finding it in the east.) They started to like the conventional protestant arguments about Constantinianism and lauded the East as pure and mystical, the way the country cousin tells himself the city folk have a worse life. Pop protestantism is a bunch of country cousins, but they have become rather rich and powerful and do not want to be elmer gantries. They are in a quandary.

At any rate, that is the phenomena and an interpretation of it: being a-historical means being politically naive and somewhat delusional about human nature, institutions, power, and political reality. The tendency toward division and keeping one's whole church body 'familiar,' 'pure,' and under control through 'smallness' is bound to result in small political power and small cultural achievement. Those who want to break out of this ghetto are naturally drawn toward "the great hierarchical churches" as allies and on some level as models. I am not sure, however, how well evangelical purity and anti-hypocrisy complexes will fare as they are increasingly forced to embrace the necessary duplicity and dirty pool of power politics in large organizations and inter/national affairs. Even their great arts of denial will be taxed.

Thanks for your comments. Of course, my anecdotal experience with a relative handful of Protestants can hardly be representative, and I'd be pleased to be wrong on this. I am actually very pleased to hear that church history can be an effective means of drawing people, in my case, to Orthodoxy. It somehow makes my patristics and Byzantine interests potentially more worthwhile than being nothing other than a pursuit of my own proclivities.

I have also tended to meet evangelicals in the context of academia, so they are not necessarily representative of their fellows in their interests or inclinations, either. But when I have met them, whether they are inclined to convert to Catholicism or Orthodoxy or not, the thing that brings them around tends to be the greater coherence of doctrine that has emerged out of church history rather than the example of the unbroken Tradition in time itself. Of course, there are occasionally those, such as one man I knew in college, whose conversion to Catholicism was facilitated greatly by his readings of John of the Cross.

Though I grew up a "lapsed Protestant" if you will, my approach to Orthodoxy was intellectual and principally doctrinal, though augmented by some actual mystical theology. This high theological approach probably appeals to the potentially bibliolatrous tendencies in Protestant thought, but probably only to a relative few.

The "hypocrisy" issue constantly comes up, and as most of the English-language church historians have been Protestants of one kind or another they have left this legacy to modern historiography, which makes working in church history or Byzantine history difficult for someone who believes, say, in Justinian's theological fidelity. Prokopios, of course, attaches the worst cynicism to Justinian, as if he would have actually wanted his wife to encourage heresy, and justifies a Protestant reader of Byzantine history in his conviction that the institutional church in the empire was nothing but a shoddy power structure used for imperial ambitions. (Killing and burying the myth of Caesaropapism is one of my goals.)

It is strange that evangelicals, who are presumably perfectly aware of the ubiquity of sin, would object to princely sinners or sinners of any kind in church history, since that is surely something that one could expect, whether associated with a high or low church institution. In my view, their objection to Catholicism or Orthodoxy comes less from the "dirty laundry" of church politics than from their basic, fundamental objection to the success stories, if we might call them that, of the saints and of monasticism in general. For many of these Protestants, I think the likelihood of saintliness in this world has been practically ruled out ahead of time, so the claims of being wholly purified and sanctified by grace strike them as claims born of pride and dishonesty. Deification in either tradition must strike them as simply lunatic. Monasticism and its ascetic means to this kind of perfection are ruled out categorically as a kind of self-absorption. So it may be the problem they have is not with the failures of institutional churches, but with what the institutional churches claim are their triumphs.

But one of the more clever apologetic moves (and also a correct one) that our theologians have taken over the years has been to highlight the "toadying," as you put it, of certain Eastern bishops in history as a way, on the one hand, to show the fallibility of any particular bishop or group of bishops (or even false ecumenical councils) while on the other pointing to the confessors who upheld Orthodoxy in spite of the entire official, institutional apparatus turning against them. That way, when Protestants do encounter the sometimes dismal state of the churches in the East in the imperial period they can see it in a better light. It is difficult to provide them the same perspective and encourage the same benefit of the doubt with Rome, as they have heard about the perfidy of popes in one form or another either at home or at school for their entire lives. The general ignorance of Byzantine and Russian history has been something of a blessing in disguise for the Orthodox, as it does not make Orthodoxy immediately seem unpalatable to a lot of Westerners.

But this is a mixed blessing--the ignorance of Byzantium usually goes hand in hand with the ignorance of the existence of the Orthodox Church. More than once, when I have identified myself to someone (who could be Catholic or Protestant--it doesn't matter) as Orthodox, that person will say, "I didn't realise you were Jewish!" Catholics cannot be mistaken for anything but Catholics, and in this they have an immense advantage of familiarity and a sense of being a spiritual and cultural heritage for Westerners coupled with the inherited prejudices against them. It is only through a rather elaborate process of imagination and historical interpretation that a Westerner can understand that the Orthodox Church is actually his original spiritual patrimony (whence the modern Orthodox enthusiasm for talking about English Orthodoxy before the coming of the Normans, or Orthodox monasticism being transmitted to Ireland via Lerins, etc.) before Gregory VII came along and ruined everything.

When Protestants convert to Orthodoxy, there is always the danger of it being associated with an ABRC (Anything But Roman Catholic) attitude (not that the distinction will mean anything to family members, for most of whom the Orthodox are just Catholics with funny hats, usually no instrumental music and different languages). I think there is something oddly easier about making the leap to the Orthodox from an almost entirely Protestant historical background (such as was the case for me) because it means that you can still look down on the medieval papacy and all that it represents, if I can put it that way, but for an entirely different set of reasons and maintain a very American sort of anti-Catholicism that meshes almost seamlessly with the prejudices of a Dostoevsky.

An unfortunate barrier for the Orthodox can appear with Protestants when they assume, without delving very deeply into things, that certain of the Catholic practises they rejected are also Orthodox practises (a very good friend of mine once brought up the sale of indulgences when talking about the Orthodox Church, which at first simply confused me). This is a case where some judge any and all ecclesiastical hierarchies by whatever they object to about one particular one.

I've seen lots of the ABRC attitude. My experience is that "Anglicanism" as an imaginary construct papered over the ecclesial reality is vastly prefereable to Rome for Evangelicals, especially those with a more liberal political orientation. Traditional Lutheranism is less known to evenagelicals and potentially less preferable to the more liberal variety when, as is sometime the case, Lutheranism comes with rather fundamentalist hermeneutics, creationism, and/or a culture of patriotism in the pews that is expressed as GOP loyalty. Orthodoxy, too, gets a default preference over Rome, even though it is as "catholic" and much more so (than Lutheranism and Anglicanism) on many points that gall evangelicals about Catholics. I can't explain that except in terms of a deep-seated, ingrained and irrational prejudice. It is probably many things--Latin is foreign and not a biblical language; Greek is respected and familiar. Marian devotion and any number of things touching on Purgatory give the western church an aspect that is more alien and more directly the image of what their beliefs and practices are in reaction to.

I don't think you are exactly right to say there is a "basic, fundamental [evangelical] objection to the success stories, if we might call them that, of the saints and of monasticism in general." I would agree that is reflective of the attitude of evangelicals one or two generations ago. Since then, evangelicals have opened up to church history and even speak of it as some kind of resource or model for themselves in some respects. I think this is mostly superficial fad-speak and cafeteria christianity. What still offends, usually, is the alien reality of saints' lives told in full detail and most of all any claim that ascesis isn't something you can simply assimilate into your life on your own terms because you read a few pop books on saints, neomonasticism, and "intentional community." A lot of evangelicals want to appropriate these pre-reformation traditions in this way--as others of the Me and Me-Too generations have appropriated everything from Buddhism to Catholicism into a revisionist liberal a-theology of narcissistic self-development. They have a "basic, fundamental objection" to confession as it really was and is; they love "sharing," or "reconciliation," and other forms of group therapy where the main rules are, "we won't ask about it if you don't tell about it" and "I'm OK, you're OK." If one really must admit of serious moral and spiritual failure, it is much preferred to treat it primarily or exclusively with an extra-ecclesial specialist who, even if they do their work as a "Christian", will take a materialist, behaviorist psychobabble and biologistic approach to your maladies.

It is not really strange to me at all that "evangelicals, who are presumably perfectly aware of the ubiquity of sin, would object to princely sinners or sinners of any kind in church history, since that is surely something that one could expect, whether associated with a high or low church institution." The "lower" their churches, the more convinced they are of their purity, or the relative ease at which they can attain and sustain essential purity. Purity is increasingly not about piety and discipline; it is simply a function of ecclesial reductionism and a theory of spontaneous, relatively unstructured group self-organization.

Let me be clear about what kind of organizations I am talking about. In Evangelicalism, the trend has been overwhelmingly in favor of non-denominational independents (or the retrofitting of older denominations as virtual independents) where leadership and even ordination do not necessesarily require any set pattern of education, seminary training,doctrinal affirmation and so on. And what is actually done in services may vary radically from one church to the next, or within one church at different times of the day or week, or over the space of a few years. Constant innovation, creative destruction really, is the rule.

Now the interesting development here is that this mega/church growth movement has gotten so dominant that it has given indie evangelicalism a much larger, institutional cast and organized movement status. Still, like the prevailing belief in neoconservatism, it seems as long as you have leaders in place who can speak to the average person as a down-home peer and emphasize the importance of "small groups" or "smaller government," you can sell the myth. In a larger sense, hardly any American today is not part of massive institutions and hierarchies. On one level we all know this; on another level, we find ways to deny or diminish that. Big-tent evangelicalism offers a prettily packaged community experience for alienated (mostly sub/exurbanites) and the fantasy that they have an Acts/early church-like communality and smallness, while they also may wield financial and political power on a national and global scale. There is a cognitive dissonance at work there that has a long history in conservative populist Anglo-American protestantism, which has always been in a dilemma about the state and any centralized power. It has a heritage of overthrowing popes and kings and then disappearing into rugged frontier individualism or else developing communities that become too constraining and filled with collectivistic Irish and South or East European papists, socialists. Trying to be a new via media, the Yankee WASP establishment broke itself. Now the evangelicals have come out of the wilderness, partway, with their politically activated suburban mega-churches ringed by parking lots full of minivans and SUVs. Many want to believe the president is one of them and that he is not a liar or a dope led by others. They like Catholics on the supreme court--even more so than a nebulously evangelical aide of the nebulously evangelical president. They do and do not want to be players. The "innocence" of naivete is their purity, and they want its benefits without its negative side-effects.

Good luck.

PS--I think another main reason for evangelicals conversions to the RCC that you omitted is the eucharist. Allied with this may be a distaste for the making of sermons into a central pseudo-sacrament--sermons that are generally dull, ignorant, wrong, and either an intellectual, motivational, and/or entertainment affair. I have been in all kinds of protestant and evangelical churches all my life, and I have never, ever experienced or understood what others must experience and understand to justify centering services on sermons. As a kid they were boring; later they seemed childishly focused on pathos or intellectually immature. Even done well, rhetoric is limited to the pathetic and the logical. The historic liturgy of the church is beyond both.

Yes, I can see how the Anglican via media loophole would be appealing to people who want traditional-looking churches, a slightly more high church experience than could be had at the warehouse or rec center church, but with less of the fuss of everything that goes with the high church and the clear conscience of not being one of "those Christians" who supposedly wants to tell everyone how to live.

Regarding Lutherans, it was my impression that their reflexive Republicanism had at least as much to do with being culturally German (and thus historically tied to the GOP) as it has to do with Lutheran "culture of patriotism," but I am hardly well versed in the happenings of the Missouri Synod.

I can appreciate that more modern evangelicals want to have knock-off monasticism in the same way they would like to have a sort of imitation Catholic mysticism or even imitation Orthodox mysticism of the heart, but where I think they draw the line is, as you suggested, in actually being willing to endorse or praise the real ascetics and monastics down through church history.

I'll take your word for it that people in low church institutions are convinced of the greater "purity" of their arrangements. I suppose I can understand that if by pure we mean "no frills" or, better yet, "no traditions." This "purity" comes at the cost of every service being at once indistinct and not particularly memorable (or so it seems to me from my few experiences in these sorts of service) yet also unrecognisable to someone who might have started coming to the church ten years before. That is the constant innovation you mentioned, and I have seen it firsthand. It is, well, just plain ugly.

Something about episcopal hierarchy, for instance, that should make its importance very obvious is its role in maintaining the continuity of practices and doctrines handed down from ancient times, but the focus seems to be always on the means (the episcopacy) and not on some of the many reasons why it exists.

I should not have neglected the importance of sacraments and rites in general to bringing evangelicals over to Catholicism and Orthodoxy alike. This really is a case of the starving man discovering an unexpected banquet. Besides fulfilling a basic, God-given need for structuring our time into rhythms of sacrality and providing the mystical means for binding the Body of Christ together, sacraments do have the psychological benefit of offering a way to make our faith concrete and visible, which must be one of the greatest gaps in evangelical experience.

I have seen low church and mainline communion services with their shot glasses of wine (the Eucharist thus takes on more of an aspect of drinking a toast than offering up thanksgiving and sacrifice, I suppose), which in some cases take place before most of the service in a completely backwards organisation of the sacred time. Instead of liturgy and worship as further preparation and introduction into the Mystery, which is the purpose of the Sunday worship in the first place, it is, as you noted, the talking (and the music) that takes pride of place. The talking, while it may be edifying and instructive, does not unite you to Christ and to one another as the sacraments do. Of course, if they have been reduced to "merely" commemorative acts (as if commemoration were somehow insubstantial and not evocative of reality) sacraments would not appear to be all that significant.

You are right about the German thing with the Misery Synod. But on the "purity" assumption in free-church, indie, DIY evangelicalism, it only works out to mean "no frills" or "no traditions" with respect to any larger history than their own, new organization. That is not their main intent. What I think is central to the evangelical mind on institutional purity is the idea that their anti-institutional institions and non-hierarchical hierarchies are purer or more self-correcting because they are egalitarian and simple, even though this is often an idealization at odds with reality. It is the reality that is experienced when the church starts as a small group in a gym. They create and identity and mythos based on that scale that persists when they have thousands in stadium seating.

As with the civic leadership, there is no special dress signifying rank in evangelicalism. This is the priesthood of all believers. Naturally leaders are in practice thought to be and wanted to be especially holy and good, but not because they are better or harder working at it. They are just blessed, and one shouldn't ask these sorts of questions. Priests and monks in special clothes who live totally different lives acting like spiritual jedi--that is a little attractive and enigmatic but also provocative of proletarian, roundhead bourgeois, and whig levelling resentments that are constitutive of much of American and low-church society. Liberal episcopalians and catholics seem to be able to tolerate and enjoy the finery and rank as high camp. Red-meat eating red-state evangelicals see men in dresses with silly hats who must be either homos, or guys who think they are better than everyone else, or both. (Which may well be the case.)

I can see how egalitarian sentiments of that kind would push evangelicals away from hierarchy. Receiving blessings from priests and referring to bishops as Master probably do not sit well with such folks. It's hardly democratic, now, is it?

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