The Times They Are A-Changin’
The words we use to describe our politics and parties – liberal, conservative, etc. – don’t always translate very well into ecclesial life. They don’t always translate, but they sometimes do, or nearly do, which makes their application to the Church tantalizing, even as it leads to problems and confusion along the way. “Liberal” and “conservative” are convenient handles for describing, say, certain prominent modes of interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. But they are also, usually, relative terms that require context: Liberal in what regard? Conservative compared to what?
My EPPC colleague, Brad Littlejohn, recently made an interesting point along these same lines. “For the more than five decades since,” he writes, “conservatives have continued to appeal to what they felt sure was that silent majority, a median-voter demographic that didn’t like abortion, didn’t like same-sex marriage, and was ready to join them in opposing the ‘woke elites.’”
Where, Littlejohn asks, did that silent majority go?
Observing that half of Americans alive today were born after 1985, Littlejohn makes the following observation:
Americans are still conservative in a sense, but it is now radical individualism and materialism that many want to conserve. For decades they’ve soaked in that worldview, from influences as different as Supreme Court decisions and Seinfeld episodes. The median voter, then, will still go to the ballot to protest runaway immigration, for that is a disruption of the world he knows, but he will not go to the ballot to protest abortion, for that is the world he knows.
The successive (and seemingly accelerating) pace of cultural change means that each generation comes of age with a sense of what is normal which is very different from the previous generation. Which means that to “conserve” the familiar values and norms on which one was raised changes meaning dramatically from one generation to the next.
This would also seem to explain, at least in part, why our contemporary culture can be both paralyzed by nostalgia and, at the same time, incapable of transmitting basic social norms and traditions from one generation to the next. The notion that history repeats itself isn’t exactly a new one, but the cycles of repetition come so rapidly these days that they cause a sort of cultural accordion effect.
The renewal of a culture worth conserving – the building of a kind of “conservatism” that is more than just an instinctive defense of “the world I grew up with”– requires the long and arduous work of helping people to, as Littlejohn concludes, “recognize that there is a world more real and more true than the increasingly unreal one that has been presented to them.”
Which brings us back to the Church and to an article from the Associated Press that ran this week under the headline, “‘A step back in time’: America’s Catholic Church sees an immense shift toward the old ways.”
“Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II,” the article declares, “are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.”
