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December 29, 2003
Our National Creed
David Brooks sorts it out on the NYTimes op-ed page
George W. Bush was born into an Episcopal family and raised as a Presbyterian, but he is now a Methodist. Howard Dean was baptized Catholic, and raised as an Episcopalian. He left the church after it opposed a bike trail he was championing, and now he is a Congregationalist, though his kids consider themselves Jewish.Wesley Clark's father was Jewish. As a boy he was Methodist, then decided to become a Baptist. In adulthood he converted to Catholicism, but he recently told Beliefnet .com, "I'm a Catholic, but I go to a Presbyterian church."
What other country on earth would have three national political figures with such peripatetic religious backgrounds? In most of the world, faith-hopping of this sort is simply unheard of. Yet in the United States, we simply take it for granted that people will move through different phases in the course of their personal spiritual journeys, and we always have.
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Comments
As someone born and raised outside the United States, this aspect of American religiosity has always fascinated me. To some extent, it's still not something I fully understand, or rather can fully grasp except in disparaging consumerist terms as "shopping."
Our whole family lapsed upon emigration simply because here religion is not a form of given identity and constantly reinforced as such, as it is in Scotland. There, your birth religion is more like a tribal affiliation that even determines which football team you support; here, it's a private choice. After emigration, my mother apparently got quite angry with a co-worker who suggested that my sister and I could go to her Southern Baptist summer camp (or I think now, looking back, it might have been a vacation Bible school) because the co-worker was talking about helping us "be saved" and using theological language of conversion, which my mother heard in denominationalist "sheep-stealing" terms. When I regained my faith in my early 20s, the thought of joining a Protestant church, or even looking to see what I thought of them, quite literally never crossed my mind. If I was going to be a Christian at all, that meant Catholicism -- period. To this day, not counting friends' weddings, I have only gone to a Protestant church once in my life (a Free Evangelical church)
Posted by: Victor Morton at Dec 30, 2003 12:50:58 AM
So, the Democrats are runing two apostate Catholics. In 1944 they didn't DARE to run one for Vice-President.
I am not sure that we have progressed.
Posted by: AB at Dec 30, 2003 4:53:36 AM
By around age five, I started begging my parents to take me to church on Sunday (any church) and they always said "no." So one Sunday morning I just got up early and slipped out of the house in search of a church. I must have walked about a mile on the highway in each direction, and finding no church, went back home. I was determined to find a church.
Coming from a very poor family, I worried that I would never get to go to high school. Then one day I got the news that some organization called "United Way" would pay for me to go to a Baptist boarding school on a year-to-year basis. Room and board and tuition came to $35 per month, which they paid for the four years.
In high school, I "shopped" around for just the right church, first joining a Church of the Nazarene and then the Baptist church on campus which all students were required to attend every Sunday. Although I liked the Baptist church a lot, I eventually joined a Catholic church, where I have been a member for over 40 years.
I missed the beautiful music of the Baptist church, and agreed to be pianist in a Baptist church in 1988. Many of my friends say that I may well be the only Roman Catholic who is a pianist in a Baptist Church. Only the good Lord knows how many more years I will be there, but I have been truly blessed. So, in March of 2004, I start my 17th year there.
Posted by: Calvin Lane at Dec 30, 2003 5:12:16 AM
I don't think denomination-shopping is as prevalent among some ethnic groups within America. Among Italian-Americans, people seem more likely to either remain faithful Catholics, or become lapsed Catholics without converting to another religion. I know very few Italian Americans who have abandoned Catholicism entirely.
Catholicism has always been tightly entwined in Italian culture in a way that makes it difficult to abandon. It has deep roots in our ethnic identity.
Posted by: Jo at Dec 30, 2003 10:04:44 AM
Church hopping may be better than sticking with a birth church for purely cultural reasons. The first may be honest searching. The second is likely to be just tribalism or even superstition.
Posted by: Caroline at Dec 30, 2003 3:51:16 PM
The second MAY be tribalism or superstition, but I don't agree that it's LIKELY to be that.
Among my protestant inlaws, religious identity seems to be something they expect their children to choose. I'm perplexed because they don't seem to value their own faith enough to pass it on to their kids.
Among my Catholic family, our faith is something we value enough to pass on to our kids. To do anything less is to send them out into the world unarmed.
I think church hopping can be somewhat dangerous, and it is not something I would encourage in my own children. It allows people to pick doctrines that align with what they want to be true.
Don't discount the cultural ties. Sometimes, they are enough of a bond that they lead to a full reversion to the faith at some later point in life.
Posted by: Jo at Dec 30, 2003 4:30:56 PM
The defacto established religion in the US is (or was) multi-denominational protestantism. I can't think of any other country of which this is true. So I think it has never been a shocking thing in this country to change denominations. The very word "denomination" suggests shopping around for the style of protestantism that suits you.
Catholics live in this general atmosphere but there has always been a sense in which Catholics have shopped around within the Church. The very richness of Catholic devotion, the varieties of Catholic art, the many different styles of spirituality Carmelite, Benedictine, Jesuit, Dominican permit this. Catholics shop around for spiritual advisors, saints, shines, relics, social action groups. In recent years, Catholics shop parishes, rites, masses within parishes etc.
Our faith seems infinitely rich in such possibilities.
In addition to this completely legitimate shopping around within the faith, there is the illegitimate form of shopping called cafeteria Catholicism.
.
Posted by: Charles R. Williams at Dec 30, 2003 5:30:00 PM
Calvin, what a wonderful story.
Posted by: Christopher Rake at Dec 30, 2003 9:54:44 PM
My mother started playing the organ for a Congregational church when she was twelve, and joined the church. When she told her mother what she had done her mother said,"You can't DO that; you are a Lutheran." (We're talking first generation Swedish immigrants here.) My mother said, sorry, first she'd heard of it and stuck with the Congregationals for about six or eight years. Then she went through a non-believing phase, married my father, promised to raise the kids Catholic, (1941 this is) and went to class to find out how to carry out her promise. Bingo! so to speak. She said she'd been looking all her life without realizing it and this was home.
Posted by: Jane M at Dec 30, 2003 10:12:54 PM
If George Bush and Howard Dean met each other on a political platform, they would fight and feud. If they met in a Bible study group and talked about their eternal souls, they'd probably embrace.
Well, I hope so, if both are sincere Christians. It may be difficult for the New York Times to believe, but there are some people for whom something is more important than politics. It may be wishful thinking to imagine that Mr. Bush and Dr. Dean are among them, but charity hopes all things. These politicians aside, one element that Mr. Brooks does not point out is that among Protestants (Lutherans excepted), denominational affiliation in the United States has tended to follow class lines more than issues of doctrine. Even though the very rich have gotten richer in recent years, the middle class has become larger in both directions and more socially homogeneous. This has led to the denominations becoming more and more similar. Even some Evangelicals--traditionally an affiliation for the lower class--have begun (as he points out) to enter the mainstream.
Posted by: Henry Dieterich at Dec 30, 2003 10:20:12 PM
Raised Baptist, and sincerely so, I chose to become Episcopalian in college, mostly due to the liturgy and friendships I found at the Canterbury Society (college ministry). I also made acquaintance with sacramental theology, which over the course of 16 years grew into the conviction that the Catholic Church was the only logical outcome of a sacramental worldview. Historical study further led me to the conviction that the Catholic Church was, in fact, the Church founded by Christ through the apostles, so I became Catholic. Maybe that makes me the kind of church shopper under discussion here. But another sixteen years have gone by and it becomes clearer that becoming Catholic was not a "choice". I came to believe, so what else was there to do? Recent events in my diocese challenged me to look at some other option - for me, there aren't any.
I read a lot about the Anglicans who are upset with their church over this or that (currently it's the gay issue) or Anglican groups in discussion with Rome about union as a separate rite. That's good. But in a recent comment, a guy indicated he was "choosing" Orthodoxy for some reason or another. I couldn't relate at all. I hope these folks who become Catholic don't chose it, as if from a menu. Better go with Orthodoxy or one of the Anglican continuing churches.
Posted by: Ken at Dec 30, 2003 11:20:13 PM
Happy New Year! (Well, almost.)
One of the differences I have run across between a "typical" serious, faithful protestant and a faithful, serious Catholic, is that the protestant does not believe that his denomination is necessarily the best, most faithful way to Christ for everybody.
Instead, they believe that all of the major christian churches have the major points right and so choosing a church-home that has the best music or the most inspiring preaching for YOU or your family is perfectly legitimate.
Sure, they love to argue about fine points of theology between the different groups, but most will say that it really does not matter which church you go to as long as you go to a "Bible-believing" church where you are "fed." Some will even grudgingly say that going to a Catholic Church is OK.
Indeed, my protestant friends find it quite annoying that the ROMAN catholics have such wild truth claims. Hmmm....
John
Posted by: John Weems at Dec 31, 2003 4:53:14 PM
When a Protestant talks about the religion he belongs to, it seems to just so happen to be the local church affiliated with a "national" church. So when a person goes from Baptist, to Presbyterian, to Methodist, they are saying the creeds of that Church isn't necessarily what is driving them. For Catholics it generally is the belief system that matters most.
Posted by: Jeanne Schmelzer at Jan 1, 2004 2:26:40 PM
