What we think is the right road
I believe that God exists and that He wants me to be nice, and that life is about being happy and feeling good. I pray to God when I need help, and I believe that good people go right to heaven when they die.
But it’s the wrong road
Occasionally, a book appears which challenges our frequently complacent thinking. So it is with Rod Dreher’s new book, “The Benedict Option.” Because that book has been widely reviewed, I will not repeat here the commendations and criticisms in those reviews. Instead, I would like to focus on what Dreher and others call “MTD: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
MTD is so, well, drenching that it has infused itself into almost all we read and hear and watch. A sociologist at Notre Dame, Christian Smith, has written that in the view of most Americans today, the only thing that society amounts to “apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”
Dreher writes, “Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.” MTD, he contends, “is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying biblical Christianity from within, and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is ‘only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.’”
Many people are quasi-believers, subscribing to a kind of religious creed which is prominent among Catholics and Protestants alike. MTD, at its core, holds that it is not necessary to be “religious”; being “spiritual” is all that is necessary to be a believer. Being “spiritual” has the added benefit of not requiring a person to be judgmental, for the world tells us that there is hardly anything worse than that. There is no room in modernist spirituality for “admonishing the sinner” (refer to Ps 141:5, 2 Tim 3:16).
“We live in a culture,” Dreher writes, “in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.” Add to that the pace and power of recent moral “progress,” and too many of us find comfort in retreating into “spirituality.” Religion, after all, binds or obligates us (the word come from the Latin “religare,” “to bind”). The Catholic faith, by virtue of our baptism, calls us to be witnesses, even – maybe especially – at times and places when doing so isn’t at all convenient.
When there is no absolute, objective and universal truth, it is easy, and maybe necessary, to slip into an ethics which says, “if it feels good, do it” or “what’s right for you may not be right for me.” MTD is permissive, for it holds that what is right is determined by pleasure, and it’s relative, for it holds that what is true depends upon time, place and personal taste.
MTD is hedonism by another name, and it worships the false god of euphoria. “Authentic Christianity has been taken over by ... (the heretical belief) that God blesses whatever makes (people) happy.”
Being “nice” to people therefore means accepting what others may regard as gratifying, even though it may make us complicit in the intellectual error and moral sin of our time.
Dreher quotes sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has warned us against “liquid modernity,” by which he means social circumstances in which change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify. In the past, Dreher tells us, we looked beyond ourselves to find meaning, direction and fulfillment. When we dismiss religion and transcendent virtue, however, we look instead only into ourselves. We become our own gods.
There is a reason that the first commandment is first. Commandments may appear out of fashion, and it may not be “spiritual” to remind ourselves and others of Our Lord’s charge: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15; 1 John 3:18). Although the Bible tells us that God wants no one to be lost (2 Pt 3:8), we are free to ignore the commandments. Thus did St. Paul, in tears, remind us that such people’s actions “make them enemies of Christ’s death on the cross. They are going to end up in hell, because their god is their bodily desires” (Phil 3:18-19 GNB).
Too rarely do we read or hear that “the goal of your faith (is) the salvation of your souls” (1 Pt 1:9). “Too many of our churches function as secular entertainment centers,” contends Dreher. We must “commit ourselves more deeply to our faith, and we will need to do that in ways that seem odd to contemporary eyes.”
Dreher offers thoughts about the liturgy, Christian education, bioethics and many other concepts. One hopes that the themes of the book will find their way into many homilies and many parish and school reading programs – and into our lives.
Deacon James H. Toner serves at Our Lady of Grace Church in Greensboro.