Sneering at religion: yes, the 'New Yorker.'

Commonweal, March 12, 1999 by John Garvey

If I had no problems at all with Roman Catholic teaching I suppose I would be Catholic, and not a member of the Orthodox church. But I do recognize simple anti-Catholic bigotry when I see it. Two examples come from recent issues of the New Yorker, and this is a shame, because after the departure of Tina Brown, who took it so deeply into banality, David Remnick has been making the New Yorker once again into a magazine you want to read. But some forms of bigotry remain acceptable in any company. In an embarrassing piece about his mother's love life in the January 18 issue, Jay McInerny refers to what he calls "the bullshit of Catholicism." Then, in a February 8 article about the earthquakes in Umbria which damaged Assisi, the usually perceptive Jane Kramer writes,

Most people I asked about the Vatican's responsibilities to Assisi laughed, because the Vatican's responsibilities, as the Vatican sees them, are usually to its own survival, and have nothing to do with the little disruptions of the here and now. The Vatican spends its money and its craft on the institution of its own power - a policy set by Paul in the New Testament. And I think it's accurate to say that it is more interested in paying to discipline its dissident priests or to keep Catholics in the third world having babies than it is in restoring a damaged ceiling that somebody else will certainly pay to save.

I used to hear that last sort of line around people who belonged to a WASP country club in my midwestern home town where Jews, blacks, and Catholics were not welcome. The earlier part of the quote is really interesting, and I wonder where the allegedly razor-sharp New Yorker fact-checkers were. Saint Paul and the Vatican? Apart from the fact that Saint Paul had nothing to do with the then (and for many centuries more) nonexistent Vatican, Saint Paul's only marshalling of aid was undertaken for impoverished Christian communities, including the church in Jerusalem - proving the opposite of the point Kramer seems to want to make, if indeed point-making and not sneering is what she is about. About "craft" I don't know. Saint Paul never mentions it in any positive, pro-Vatican context I know of. It is, to say the least, a loaded and weird choice of words, the sort of thing extreme right-wingers accuse Masons and Jews of doing behind closed doors. Or anti-Catholics accuse Jesuits of doing. As Jane Kramer might say - given her already careless use of language and fact - whatever. And I love the phrase, "I think it is accurate to say" ...preceding this absurd statement. (For that matter, in sheer practical economic terms, it really doesn't cost much to discipline a dissident priest or to encourage babies; ceiling restoration is much more expensive.)

Some Catholics would say that only Catholicism comes in for this sort of abuse, that it would be unthinkable for someone to refer to "the bullshit of Judaism," for example, and there is some truth to this, but the point could be misleading. Evangelical Christians come in for much the same sort of ridicule, and so do Orthodox Jews. I feel almost hurt that Orthodox Christians aren't hit with it, but then Orthodoxy has been called the best-kept secret in America. We also oppose abortion, and urge a demanding (some would call it counter-cultural) approach to life. What is really involved here is the perplexity felt by secular people when they meet a way of life which makes demands that don't accord with a secular agenda.

This was revealed pretty clearly in an ad on the op-ed page of the New York Times on February 3. Above photographs of girls from every ethnic group the photographer could lay her hands on, a headline asks, or fairly roars, "CAN THEY EXPECT EQUALITY FROM CHURCH AND STATE?" In smaller, more sober type, the ad asks, "Will religion and politics be separate in our daughters' world?" The ad was taken out by the Center for Gender Equality, whose president is former Planned Parenthood head Faye Wattleton. Among other things, it worries that there has been an increase in the percentage of women who favor more restrictions on abortion, and places at the head of its alarms the fact that "the percentage of women who believe politicians should be guided by religious values has increased by more than 40 percent."

The Center for Gender Equality is happy that the news isn't all bad - the survey that worries them also reports "that the majority of women accept many of their denomination's religious teachings, but discard others that do not fit with their personal needs and experiences."

Here we get close to what makes secular people uncomfortable around Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, Evangelical Protestantism, or any other form of religion that makes demands. Religion, from this point of view, is appropriate so long as it is a simple consumer choice, with the chooser allowed to accept or reject those parts of the tradition that "do not fit with their personal needs and experiences." The idea that needs and experiences are inevitably formed by something outside, something larger and more mysterious than the individual is not only not a considered part of the question - to consider it would be profoundly threatening to our common culture.