Culturally Catholic

I’ve heard it asked many times why people continue to identify as Catholic if they don’t believe the Pope is infallible, don’t agree with all the church’s teachings, don’t go to church or give money, and reject the church’s cover-up of child abuse. Honestly, it’s a good question, but the insistence from non-Catholics that you’re not a “true” Catholic is a little hurtful since they don’t seem to bother to try to actually find out the answer to this question. So here’s my take.

For people and families from certain cultures, Catholicism has been hugely influential on the history and traditions of those cultures. Even if you don’t believe in the teachings or find aspects silly, even if you recognize the terrible things done by the church and by people in it, it also positively shaped your cultural identity. It is a direct connection to your history and ancestry. It shaped the foods you grew up with, the values you have (even if they disagree with the actual religious teachings), the traditions you celebrate, who your family is and what they experienced.

I can’t appreciate Italian Renaissance art without recognizing the immense influence the religion had on it, and more than that, that is part of how I identify with it. For good or bad, that is MY culture. I appreciated Asian art – I love Japanese textiles and fabrics – I appreciate Shinto and Buddhist influences on traditional patterns and artistic ideas, but that is not my culture. Understanding a religion is a way to understand the culture in influenced, but I cannot personally identify with a culture through means I have not experienced.

I’ve heard it said that perhaps we need new secular traditions to replace the religious ones to make it easier for people who don’t actually believe in Catholic teaching to stop identifying with it. That is reasonable. But any new traditions will not have the connection to an individual’s personal history, or really, anyone’s history. People like to point out holiday traditions such as those associated with Easter or Christmas that are not really Christian as evidence that traditions can be adapted. But those traditions are still part of that same cultural history, evolving over centuries. Christmas may not have the intended religious meaning to a former Catholic who is now atheist, but they can still celebrate in the same ways just as their ancestors continued to celebrate with pagan traditions despite no longer believing those. Those traditions mattered and continued culturally, even if no longer religiously. Catholicism, I think, is like that.

Eventually, yes, I think people who no longer really believe in the Catholic form of Christianity will stop identifying it with. But that’s something that takes time – generations even – because religion is so closely linked to the cultures in which it exists and itself evolved.

In Defense of Political Correctness

It seems a lot of people object to it, but I see nothing wrong with trying to be politically correct. Communication is about sharing ideas and meaning. Words mean things and carry connotations. If I’m not trying to offend, then I’m not going to say something I know someone finds offensive because that conveys a message I didn’t intend. The meaning of words may change over time, but I can’t just decide a word means something it doesn’t or doesn’t mean something it does. When communicating effectively, how the audience perceives those words matters just as much as what those words mean to the speaker.

Unless you don’t care what others think. But if you don’t care, then why are you trying to communicate?

Extreme Right-Wing Christianity or Normal Evangelical?

I grew up Catholic, and my familiarity with Christianity was strongly influenced by that religious perspective. In fact, I’m not aware of even knowing any Protestant Christians until moving to North Carolina in middle school. And so, when I look at mainstream Christianity in the US, when I listen to what people from the most common denominations say, I feel as though it’s both familiar and alien; the words are the same, yet the messages seem different, unsettling even. And as my understanding of Christianity in the US grows, so does my awareness of those differences, and how little my experience of religion seems to match that of many people I know.

I began following the blog Love Joy Feminism last year. She writes about her experiences growing up in an extreme form of Christianity that emphasizes strict patriarchy and gender roles, isolation from anyone who is different, a literal understanding of the bible, and a goal of spreading their message to create (in their world-view, recreate) a theocracy in America. Libby Anne’s most recent post about homeschooling clearly lays out much of what I find frightening and harmful about this religious view. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2013/03/homeschooling-under-the-influence.html

Although I have likely not met anyone who is Quiverfull since they are, as far as I know, not a large group, I realized very quickly that I’m not unfamiliar with their ideology (and not because of the Duggars…I only found out about their reality show much later). I knew high school homeschoolers through Girls Scouts who talked about people (like me and another friend) actually being demons. I remember being uncomfortable with what I inferred as a good friend’s family’s apparent patriarchy and their (to me) odd values about marriage, sex, and reproduction. I was aware of the existence of purity rings. I observed the parental focus on "obedience" and authority, and the outright anger at anyone suggesting spanking was not necessary. I had and knew of public middle school and high school “science” teachers who taught creationism instead, and the one who didn’t was too afraid to teach evolution, so he didn’t. I even personally painted over praying hands in a mural I helped work on in my public high school cafeteria (Thankfully no one questioned me). I noticed many people’s complete lack of perspective on cultures and religions outside of their immediate one; their lack of awareness of the specifics of their culture as *theirs* and not as a universal default. Being white, I felt I was treated as “one of them,” part of some privileged in-group, and yet I knew I was really the “other” they despised. Sometimes they would remember and apologize for hateful things said around me, but usually I passed unnoticed. When they thought no “other” was listening, I even heard occasional whispers of slavery as a positive thing, of the Confederacy as the “true,” Christian America, destroyed by the anti-Christian “North” which used abolition as a cover, of Catholics as simply misguided, but Unitarians as actually evil and causing the Civil War.

Yet as I said, I knew no one who explicitly followed the ideology Libby Anne writes about. I lived in a small city, although there is lots of rural farmland around it. The people I knew and encountered were often, though not always, various forms of mainstream Protestant, although some seemed unaware that there was a larger category above such denominations as Baptist and Presbyterian. Many others were simply “Christian,” but no one came from families with dozens of children or dressed in specific ways. They obviously found Girl Scouts acceptable (something apparently too "feminist" and secular for more fundamentalist Christians, espcially shocking since I felt it was too traditional and religious!); some, most went to public school; most had interests outside of their religion; much of what I heard was not even commonly said or (probably) believed, just thoughts, assumptions, and information in the background of day-to-day life.

So that has left me wondering, has Quiverfull, Christian Patriarchy, the Christian homeschool movement, etc. influenced mainstream Christianity that much, or has it simply distilled what Evangelical Christianity really is about? Are these terribly traits really a part of the larger religion, or have they been absorbed from other sources? Or am I seeing patterns that aren't really there? I used to wonder if these problems were artifacts of pre-Civil War southern culture, but I hear similar things from politicians and public figures from other parts of the US. I don’t really know what to make of it all, but it’s frightening.