by Os Guinness
American religion has always been known for its sacramental materialism, but with television and the arrival of the megachurches, it has tools of which Tetzel never dreamed and profits to make even Chaucer’s Pardoner blush. Today, what is to be escaped is poverty, not purgatory, and what is for sale is indulgence of another kind. With miracle prayer cloths now sent out by mass mailing and by Protestants, the wheel has come full circle. The co-opting of the Reformation is well advanced. Little wonder that the market in retail religion is bullish. Spiritual renewal means business is booming for the brokers of consumer religion.
Closed Religion
America’s refusal to have a state Church and her extraordinary wealth make her uniquely open to the seductive powers of civil religion and consumer religion. This, as I said, is offensively plain to outsiders, though only because they do not happen to share the same conditions. Watch almost any European program on American religion (on the megachurches, for instance, or on the religious Right), and you’ll see how superior outsiders can be. Much of this is sheer hypocrisy. Superiority born of a cultural accident is hardly a moral achievement, though Propaganda and Disinformation are always able to use the caricatures it creates.
Therefore, as a third example of our counterfeits, let me take a phenomenon that is found in almost all modern countries and which only happens to be more advanced in the U.S. because the U.S. is more advanced. This is closed religion, by which I mean religion is shaped by the priorities and demands of the social order. The issues behind closed religion and civil religion are similar, but with closed religion the focus is not on society, it is on the interests of the individual. The issue at stake in this case is: What is the source of an individual’s meaning and belonging, and how is this formed under the conditions of modern mobility, freedom and change?
Nothing is more characteristic of the modern world than the restless, sometimes desperate, search for meaning and belonging—the “shopping for selves” in modern consumer society. Sense of some kind, stability of some sort—these are prerequisites for a tolerable human life, keeping the specter of irrationality and absurdity at bay. Yet for many modern people, both meaning and belonging are in short supply because of the high degree of disintegration in advanced societies.
This lack gives rise to a simple dynamic that is natural for us to harness: when social chaos, then religious cults. This is not new. You can see it in the lively religion of the frontier days in nineteenth-century America, or further back in the long succession of extreme millenarian movements in Europe. The principle is the same. Periods of rapid change and social disruption create powerful needs that seek answers in new sectarian groups.
Do you know the so-called hemline indicator of economics? It is the idea that the stock market rises and falls with the hemline, looser financial controls meaning freer and more revealing clothes (and vice versa). Closed religion can be charted even more reliably than that. It was no accident, for instance, that expressions of closed religion mushroomed in the ’70s as a direct reaction to the ’60s. “Freedom!” was the cry of the 1960s—freedom from tradition, custom, routine, morals, authority and all that inhibited the spontaneous expression of the autonomous individual in the unbounded moment. That, as we know, led to some ridiculous things. But its value for us was that it created a vacuum that in turn built up a consuming hunger for the very things that had been discarded.
Predictably, there was a rebound from such unrestrained freedom—from openness to closure, from virtual anarchy to authoritarianism, from a tolerance of ambiguity to an intolerance of anything but buttoned-down certainty, from a make-it-up-as-you-go-along freedom to a prepack-aged form. The liberated generation suddenly woke up and found itself the fatherless generation; and in the ensuing scramble for authority, community, family and home, it showed itself decidedly unparticular.
This is the context of the ’70s-style surge of closed religion, which reached its twisted climax in Jonestown. But the People’s Temple was not the deranged exception many people thought. It was only following to a logical extreme what a whole decade showed in milder ways—and not least the churches.
I said to you earlier that we were using two weapons to counter the potential danger of the charismatic movement. Privatization was the first, and here (in closed religion) is the second. You may have noticed the sudden somersaults of some of the fringe charismatic groups, for example. One moment they were all for freedom, and could be heard noisily rejecting “one-man ministry,” “hide-bound liturgies” and “patriarchal domination”). Then hey presto, and a thousand mini-popes were strutting around telling their followers what to believe, how to behave, whom to marry, with whom not to associate, and so on.
Such swings toward micro-totalitarianism were dressed up properly, of course, sailing under the flags of respectable notions such as authority, discipleship, accountability and “shepherding.” But unquestionably they were closed religion. Under the chaotic conditions of modern freedom, mobility, choice and change, the Christian faith is reaction-formation prone—vulnerable to being sucked into the black hole of today’s vacuum of meaning and belonging. Few disillusionments with faith are more hurtful and harder to overcome than an experience of closed religion. Many of our most notable renegades from the Adversary’s side were produced this way.
These three—civil religion, consumer religion, closed religion—are only samples of the different counterfeits on which we are working. I could mention others, such as common religion (religion shaped by the priorities and demands of populist opinions and feelings) or clan religion (religion shaped by the tribal groupings, such as the characteristic “fiefdoms” of Evangelicalism, each following its own mini-pope).
I could also mention other valuable side effects. Counterfeit religion is an easy way, for instance, of increasing prejudice against the Christian faith around the world. If American Christians cannot distinguish between the Christian faith and Americanism, how can others be expected to do so? But our aim in them all is the same: to ensure that the Church is shaped rather than shaping, reverting to the pattern of its culture rather than renewing its culture after the pattern of the Adversary.
The old, “brooding Dane” saw this beginning more than a century ago. “In every way it has come to this,” Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “that what one now calls Christianity is precisely what Christ came to abolish. This has happened especially in Protestantism.”15 The only surprising thing about our success is how open and obvious the result has been. “He who travels in the barque of St. Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room,” Ronald Knox warned earlier.16 Our success with her Protestant sister ship is now so total that engine-room affairs have taken over the bridge and spilled out onto the decks.
This concludes my review of the strategy through which we have followed up the advantages of the three main pressures of modernization. Having seen the pressures operating full force, and our own campaigns to confuse and counterfeit going well, we can turn next time to survey the damage.
P.S. I was telling someone from the Archives Department about the holy hardware (Jesus baby bibs, Christian tea bags, fortune cookies with Scripture texts inside, Frisbees with the legend “The rapture is the only way to fly,” and so on). Admittedly he is a little thick, but he simply could not believe it. Would you send him an assortment of the stuff the next time you are over? It would be useful for the archives anyway. In 50 years’ time no one will believe it without seeing it.
MEMORANDUM 7
Damage to Enemy Institutions
FROM: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL SECURITY COUNCIL
TO: DIRECTOR DESIGNATE, LOS ANGELES BUREAU
CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA SECRET
During my time in the Paris bureau, I used to dine regularly with a colonel in the French Secret Service who was famous for two things: his passion for Châteauneuf-du-Pape wines and his cold realism. In terms of the latter, he used to tell a story from World War II to make his point. When the German U-boat menace was
at its height, the U.S. Defense Department was making every effort to find an effective solution. Among the dozens of suggestions considered, one was from a scientist who recommended boiling the Atlantic until the submarines rose to the surface and exploded. Highly skeptical, a Defense Department official asked the scientist how he proposed to do this.
“I’m paid to have the ideas,” the scientist retorted. “You’re paid to implement them.”
All their proposals, the Colonel warned his staff, had to be practicable. The impractical, however imaginative, were not wanted.
Sweet realism. Would that it were branded on the tiny minds of all our Bureau directors. Intelligence work recognizes only one final law: results. I shudder when I think of the time and energy wasted on harebrained schemes with almost no return. Your former division of counter-apologetics has not been guiltless here. Even your predecessor at Oxford was ridiculously profligate in his efforts to foster a once-forall, knock-down argument against the Christian faith.
He never achieved it, of course. There isn’t one and there never will be, though doubtless he would still be trying to find it if we had not sent you to replace him. But his real folly was this: Even if he had managed to contrive the conclusive argument, it still would not have been conclusive for many people. Most people, many atheists included, are not argued out of faith any more than they were argued into it in the first place.
Operation Gravedigger takes this into account and has no such drawbacks. Let us therefore turn from examining the pressures brought to bear on the Christian faith and look at the problems they have created for the Church. I will begin by outlining the damage to Christian institutions. In later memoranda, I will look at the damage to Christian ideas and to Christian involvement in the world.
Two Reminders
As we shift our focus to the specific problems created for the Church, keep in mind two important points.
First, remember that these problems are not unique to the Christian Church. Other religions have also been affected insofar as they have been modernized too. Take the case of a movement that was so appealing to the Beatles a few years ago—Transcendental Meditation, led by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. What the West saw was a streamlined, export model of Hinduism, designed especially for the Western market and even masquerading as a nonreligious “science.”
The numbers of Americans who practice TM are minuscule compared with those attending weekly Bible studies, so its coverage was always due to its novelty. It does sell reasonably well in the present spiritual climate, but what many of its Western clientele did not realize was the extent of the modernizing done on it, a cosmetic facelift that simultaneously disguises its worst features and abandons some of its better (not least that in India its teaching was traditionally free of charge).
What is true of the damage to other religions is true also of other institutions, ranging from the family to the state. Above all, it is true of countless millions of modern individuals (in the compounding of loneliness in modern cities, for example). The advanced modern world has indiscriminately left its mark on all sides. Almost no one and nothing is immune from its shaping power at some point.
If we can conceal this fact from Christians, they will have a picture that is both distorted and discouraging—distorted because they do not see the damage to other religions, and discouraging because they think the damage to their faith is due to its inherent weakness. The Christian faith has certainly been among the hardest hit, although not for the reasons some think. The blow seems worse to the Church, partly because she was so strong and central before, and partly because she was so influential in creating the modern world. “Those hit first are hit worst,” as it is said. That, in a sense, is the closest thing to a eulogy the Christian faith will get in the modern world. But not knowing the background, some Christians think that the damage to their faith must be due to an inherent weakness in the faith itself.
Second, remember that the damage we are talking of concerns the Church’s plausibility, not its credibility. It is all about whether the Christian faith seems true, not whether it is true. I do not need to tell you about the extent of the Church’s credibility crisis. You instigated part of it. But as I stressed earlier, our concern is to undermine Christian plausibility, to create such a gap between its spiritual rhetoric and its social reality that, whatever Christians may say, the Christian faith is bound to seem hypocritical or untrue.
Think of it from the angle of the Church itself. The Church, you remember, is the plausibility structure of the Christian faith. In their own words, it is the so-called “pillar and bulwark of the truth.” This means that subjective certainty in the Christian faith rises or falls, fluctuating according to the fortunes of the Church. When the Church is consistently and continuously strong, the Christian faith will seem true. When the Church is weak, any certainty anchored in the Church will weaken too, and the Christian faith will seem less true, even untrue.
In the early days of the Church, the issue of plausibility worked against us. The Christian faith in the Roman world grew from being a minority to a majority to a monopoly. As it did so, thousands jumped on the bandwagon, especially after the “conversion” of the Emperor Constantine in A.D. 312. The Christian faith seemed to be more true every day, or (to be more accurate) it seemed true to more people every day.
Now, however, plausibility is working for us. Once it was too easy to believe for the wrong reasons. Now, as Christendom has crumbled, the Church’s status in many countries has slipped from a monopoly to a majority to a minority—or as in America, to a despised majority that is treated as a minority. As a result it is easy to disbelieve for the wrong reasons. Whether or not the Christian faith is true is now irrelevant. All that matters is that to more and more people in the modern world it no longer seems true.
Another way to look at it is from the angle of the Church’s claims. However attractive or coherent they sound in theory, if these claims can be denied in practice, they will not seem true and neither will the Christian faith.
As I pointed out earlier, our focus in the nineteenth century was on the Church’s stand on intellectual freedom and social justice. The heart of our attack was not that the Christian faith was untrue, but that it was unfree and unjust. Marxism, in particular, represented a brilliant shift in tactical offense. It by-passed any attempt to pin the charge of intellectual falsity on the Christian faith, and concentrated instead on its failure in terms of social function. Regardless of whether the Christian faith was obscurantist for the philosophers (the old charge), it was an opiate for the masses and a mask of respectability for those who exploited the masses. In the early industrial era, with its new-found indignation against social inequities, this new charge of injustice was far more damaging than a hundred clever or “conclusive” arguments about truth.
In the same way, hypocrisy is the unanswerable charge against the Church in the age of “authenticity.” You can see how most of the damage caused to Christian institutions today comes from the glaring inconsistency between Christian principles and Christian practices, between the Church’s spiritual rhetoric and its social reality, between the claims Christians make and their failure to carry them through consistently. Above all, you can see how the Adversary’s rule (which they trumpet as “the lordship of Christ”), although supposed to be a dynamic ideal in principle, has become a dead letter in practice. The three great pressures of modernization have seen to that. They have opened a yawning chasm between Christian claims and their consequences, and so ushered in a plausibility crisis of historic proportions.
Hold in your mind, then, that if the Christian faith is to seem plausible, its claims would have to be practiced with reasonable consistency. Let us therefore look at the Church in the modern world and see how its institutions have fared, particularly in terms of the requirement to make the Adversary’s rule a reality.
Evacuation from the Public Sphere
It is a generalization, but a sound one, that the unquestioned tradi
tional place of the Christian faith in the public sphere has been called into question everywhere in the West. Sometimes this has happened because Christians themselves have retreated from the public square—as with Evangelical pietism and privatization earlier. Sometimes this has happened because different Christian traditions have become so controversial through their own failures and scandals. Think of how the Protestant mainline was sidelined by its over-identification with ’60s radicalism, how the Catholic Church was tarnished because of its pedophile crisis, or how Evangelicals have been dismissed because of their uncritical alliance with the religious Right. The net result, whatever the route, is the same: The Christian faith has been decisively disconnected, uncoupled or disengaged from the public world in the very civilization it helped to create.1 Even one of the enemy agents, a man who hotly disputes the extent of secularization, has been forced to admit: “Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, Big Military and Big Education are not directly influenced either by religion or by the Church.”2
This evacuation has rarely been the Church’s conscious choice, except for the voluntary separation of Church and state in the United States. The obvious reason for it is secularization, just as privatization is the reason why it was not noticed. Sector after sector has been successively freed from the influence of the Christian faith, so that for all practical purposes the heartland of modern society is thoroughly secular. The steely grip of the sacred-secular distinction is now a stranglehold.