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Notes -
Love Thy Neighbor Unless They're in the Outgroup
I’m told the denomination my family has been a part of for generations is “Missionary Oriented.” We support and fund full-time professional missionaries. Anyone who’s been in it for a few generations seems to know someone - if not be related to - a missionary who served in Swazila - oops, sorry - Eswatini or more recently Papua New Guinea, or PNG as the missionary kids call it.
Twenty-odd years ago I took a world religions course that had a requirement to visit other religious services. One week we went to a Hindu temple. A few of us stood in the back and observed while the vast majority of my fellow students danced and chanted in front of literal idols. The next class, one of the students who had stood with me in the backs asked how we could not feel absolute sorrow for the Hindu children being led astray in that environment. The professor berated him for being closed-minded. The man stood up and walked out of class and never came back.
The other day I had dinner with a different man who came up a few years after me. He went to seminary, took a church in a small rural community, and the Red Tribe scalped him. If he still identifies as Christian it’s only nominally: “When my faith was strongest God abandoned me.”
Then there’s this story from NPR: A queer Methodist minister didn't feel safe at an Idaho hospital; their conference won't return to Boise next year. I have always judged the United Methodist Church as a Christian denomination, but I never felt real contempt for them until I saw this kind of cowardice. Mary Moffat Livingstone died of disease at 41. Damien De Veuster’s flesh literally rotted off his living body. Countless others suffered and died in pursuit of their faith. These United Methodist clergy will not go to Idaho because of microaggressions.
I have less contempt for the actual heresies of the progressive theologians inside my own denomination than I do for the cowardly Motte and Bailey they played for decades. They helped destroy the pastoral pipeline. Modernity did most of the grinding, but those worms didn’t help.
All these bleeding hearts with endless empathy for the “fargroup” cannot stand to be near their actual neighbor. My denomination trains people to go into some of the most culturally distant places on earth, yet it could not prepare a young man to minister in the culture of rural Nebraska.
This pattern has been covered before in the classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.
For the first time in my life I look forward to going to church. Per capita, it may have the most influential and connected congregation in the denomination, including several theologians and family members of people at the highest levels of the church hierarchy. The pastor is Blue Tribe, but that’s not surprising as that’s the pipeline. The leadership of the whole denomination is Blue Tribe. And it’s worked out very well for my pastor, as he probably also pastors one of the most Blue Tribe churches in the denomination.
My denomination does not seem lost to me. Despite being Blue Tribe and bamboozled for decades by the Mottes of the progressives, the church has now stripped multiple heretical theologians of their ordinations. As a true progressive in my congregation discusses if we really need Paul, my Blue Tribe pastor politely says, “Sorry, we settled that one a long time ago.”
So I sit here enjoying my pastor’s deep sermons and going to small group at the house of one of the denomination’s theologians in the cool part of town, and I wonder if I am a detestable cowardly worm. I have harbored plenty of ill will toward the progressives - what they have done to Christianity and to the church my family has been part of for generations. It has probably crossed into hatred. Still, I keep mulling a question: is there any more convenient mission field than the outgroup? Paul says not to associate with any so-called brother who is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler… “Remove the wicked man from among yourselves.” I’m not sure that applies to disagreements over refugees and welfare.
My denomination, like many, is shrinking in the developed world. I am sentimental, I do not want it to schism and die, or just fade away. Maybe I can at least slow the fading if I can help mend some of the tears.
The Culture War is so toxic because everyone is a theocrat. An old now defrocked classmate of mine rails to his hundreds of thousands of followers about the dangers “CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM!” while preaching the enforcement of his own version of Christian morality with the dog-whistle: "Jesus says love thy neighbor." By which he means state-enforced welfare and socialism.
War is violence; we tag “culture” onto “war” to differentiate it from literal war, but the reality is we’re still trying to wield violence at arm's length. What if they gave a culture war and no one came? You can love your neighbor by actually helping them yourself. You can persuade, organize, and gather as many people as you want to voluntarily sacrifice their own time and resources for the vulnerable.
But now I’m just preaching my own political philosophy as if it were the moral one… is it my idol?
This post motivated by me planning on grabbing coffee with my pastor and chatting with him as he is taking on a bigger roll in the church
Traditional Catholics attempt to grow throughout the entire world. If I ever travel to Saudi Arabia, I have the number to call to find out where the underground Latin mass is.
And there is an interesting pattern- in the western hemisphere(including Latin America) and Europe(less ultraconservative parts of Ukraine and the Balkans), we're clearly a separate- even if only slightly- stratum from standard average novus ordo practicing Catholics. This includes Italy and Poland, where services are offered more conservatively. In Africa and India, we're not. Very hostile bishops in the western hemisphere will struggle to articulate doctrinal criticisms, often falling into vagueness. Meanwhile charismatic bishops in Africa can see no difference, or Maronite bishops(who love their 70's guitar hymns). I suppose it can be described as a tribal difference- namely, the difference of valuing high fertility and being more socially conservative than is accepted in the contemporary west. This is, in practice, a bigger deal than difference in beliefs around orthopraxis.
This is especially striking because we're... not shrinking. That kind of growth within a stagnant broader denomination attracts self comparison. And Africans who think the same way about the role of women, or the church's attitude towards contraception, and yet openly defend dancing on the altar during mass, feel more kinship than Italians who find Humanae Vitae deeply embarrassing but have very similar ideas about how the Catholic religion should be practiced.
Now of course in the USA there are many other tribes of practicing Catholic, because the collapse of universal Catholic K-12 education splintered the practicing Catholic world and only the Knights of Columbus have managed to somehow avoid this.
I don't know how, exactly, this slots in with your broader exploration of tribal loyalties. Unlike in your case, there are both red and blue tribe conservatives among the traditional Catholics worshipping and socializing with each other- with both represented in the clergy. But overcoming tribal differences comes only to a point, I suppose.
Per Albion's Seed (see also multiple SlateStarCodex posts explaining the theory with explicit application to the US culture war) the Red and Blue tribes (as tribes - the political coalitions are broader) originated with different Protestant denominations. If you are a believing Catholic who takes the unProtestant bits (particularly Papal primacy, but arguably also the Catholic view of the sacraments) seriously then in my view you are not Red or Blue. Certainly you are a profoundly non-central example of Red or Blue. (The same applies to serious believers in any other non-Protestant religion, but not to secular/Conservative/Reform Jews or cafeteria Catholics who are assimilated into the surrounding post-Protestant secular culture).
American Catholics are so profoundly Protestant in attitudes even if they find beauty in the Catholic tradition.
I'll counter your generalization with a generalization - I don't necessarily agree. Many of my friends in college were jaded-ex-religious-turned-leftist types, and you could immediately tell who was raised Catholic. It depends on the area, of course, but I think Catholics have a stink about them that Protestants just don't. I think it has something to do with the papacy and how old the Church is compared to the many Protestant communities that are comparatively much younger.
American Catholics by and large are willing to take their own counsel on matters of key religious doctrine (eg abortion).
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