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I tend to agree with you. We're here on The Motte, and it seems to me that in theory there's a very clear synthesis with parallel institutions serving as a motte from which believers can sally forth to evangelize and retreat to in times of hostility. Dreher chose the name Benedict because the Benedictines ended up preserving so much literature that was later extremely influential on changing the course of history (if memory serves).
I think that, just in general, parallel spaces serve a potentially valuable role in terms of providing vital back-ups or redundancy, as well as a bulwark against tyranny and disaster. A city with a firmly established religious benevolence network will do better caring for the needy if government services shut down than one without; if the government oversteps its bounds, a place with alternative or parallel means of communication, organizing, and moving money will be much better prepared to resist than a place where all logistical and ideological endeavor is essentially routed through the same small cluster of institutions that, fundamentally, rest on a few fragile datacenters that can easily be accessed, subverted, and denied by a powerful government.
Obviously religious groups and institutions are not the ONLY institutions that can provide this. But I think it's important to note this because a lot of times Christians building parallel institutions invites hostility, and I think it's helpful to note that these organizations can actually provide a real public good (even if they are to some degree motivated by a desire for insularity).
And this sort of comes back to the Motte itself, I think: the Motte was created, as I understand it, precisely due to the perceived need to create a parallel institution without having to worry about a way of
lifediscourse being strangled in its cradle by a hostile culture. The Motte is the Dreher Option in action, albeit not intended for religious conservatives (which to be clear I am not complaining about!)I hear this a lot from Catholic intellectuals, but empirically it seems to me that Catholicism is far worse at teaching proper catechesis than evangelicals. You can see this in polling that shows that Catholics are more likely to reject core Christian doctrines, or in polling that shows they are less likely to go to Mass than evangelicals are to go to service (even though as I understand it this is much more of a religious obligation in Catholicism than in evangelicalism), or in polling that shows that a majority of US Catholics support abortion (performing worse on a cornerstone Catholic issue than evangelicals!) and birth control, where in practice Catholics are nearly as likely to say it is morally acceptable as Protestants, or in personal anecdotes (for instance Dreher talks about a priest counseling him and his wife to use contraception!)
Part of this, of course, is that Catholics who are essentially secular will still identify as Catholic in surveys, whereas lapsed evangelicals, I think, often won't bother to pretend. However, I also think there's a broader lesson here about human nature. People like control, and are entranced with the idea that a clear, rigorous body of rules, disseminated through a hierarchical organization, can give them some measure of control. But the facts on the ground often play out differently.
Now to be clear, I don't think this is the end of the story for American Catholicism – I suspect it's going to essentially shed most of its non-serious members and end up smaller but with a more committed (and conservative) core that will continue to have an outsized impact on US culture – but I think it's important to realize that just because the Catholics have One Big Book with all the answers to doctrine written down and evangelicals don't (or, if you prefer, have 2,184 competing One Big Books), doesn't actually solve the problem of getting people to read the book, let alone convincing people that the book is correct.
This has been my experience with Catholics, for what it's worth - even just anecdotally, I have heard plenty of jokes along the lines of, "I'm a Catholic and that's why I don't give a fig what the pope says".
I think you're right that some of it is due to different ways of identifying church members, at least. If you are baptised Catholic, you are on Catholic church rolls forever (or at least until you formally make them take you off, which almost nobody bothers to do), which tends to inflate the number of on-paper Catholics, and there are a lot of people who are 'Catholic' in a woolly cultural way without ever going to mass. By contrast, I think being on an evangelical church roll, or simply identifying as evangelical, is more likely to correlate with actually going to church.
So you're right that culture, so to speak, is often more powerful than written doctrine. Most Catholics have not read the Catechism, and those who have usually consider themselves free to disagree with it. Highly committed Catholics are a tribe unto themselves. Evangelicals don't have a single book like that (or, well, they are committed to their single book being the Bible, and nothing else), but evangelicals seem to more consistently hold to a set of common practices.
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Oh, yeah.
But the other problem is a deeper one: Christianity is not about "let's all be charitable and help the needy", it's about "let us love, obey, and serve God" primarily. So we get the conflicts over "sorry, we won't foster children out to gay couples"/"okay you're losing your state funding" and the Little Sisters of the Poor case and the likes of that, and then people finger-wag over "but Jesus said be nice!" as if that was the whole of the Gospel.
So trying to build influence based on "But Christianity will be so nice for the social fabric" is going nowhere. There will be offensive doctrines and practices ("what do you mean you don't ordain women, you bigots?") and it will be either give in on these and be empty buildings kept up as historical and artistic show pieces, but nobody goes to church because spiritual not religious, dude or keep the doctrines and be out of step with the world and keep shedding membership.
Okay, sure. But. Really you do need both the “great commandments in the law”, Jesus was pretty darn clear about it:
Yes, duty to God comes before duty to your neighbor. That’s quite Biblical and Christian. But you can’t look at the actual collected words of Jesus and with a straight face and say it’s only “primarily” about serving God. You must have both. That they are ordered priorities does not grant leave to ignore the second on mere fear of being lazy on the first.
It seems you seem to be saying that overemphasizing love for your neighbor as a PR strategy will backfire by confusing Christians themselves about their own priorities? I don’t really buy that. It’s incredibly common for groups to have PR strategies slightly different than their own internal goals. Yes, bleedthrough can happen, but it doesn’t seem so existential to me.
While secular do-gooding doesn’t convert anyone, it is in a loose sense a prerequisite. Someone must think you’re a ‘good person’ before taking an interest in the more faith-oriented aspects. Any theory about Christianity making a comeback must acknowledge this, what to me seems a pretty fundamental fact.
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For me, the problems you describe make parallel institutions more appealing, because you are correct that Christianity is oriented towards serving God, which means that it will be treated with hostility by the world (Christian Scripture says this specifically!) As I said on a prior occasion, "you might as well be weird."
That doesn't mean, though, that you should tie one hand behind your back and not talk about the good that your religious group does. (And just as an empirical matter, nondenominational churches are actually growing in membership, even while most other denominations are shedding membership – so I am not 100% certain the choice for churches today is necessarily between quickly shrinking and slowly shrinking, as I think you are suggesting.)
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