I don’t normally read recent scholarship in sociology (nor even in theology for that matter — most of my theological reading is restricted to the works of the long-deceased) but I was referred to William Portier’s Here Come the Evangelical Catholics by a good friend from college, and when she posted it on her blog I thought I’d take a look. Portier teaches theology at the University of Dayton, and was the dissertation advisor to my friend’s husband. I knew from her description that his article concerns Catholic culture in America, and particularly the culture of younger generations of Catholics who grew up after Vatican II. I also had the general impression that Portier was using the term ‘evangelical Catholic’ in a fairly positive sense, which was confusing; why in the world would a group of serious Catholics want to be named for evangelicals? To me it sounds like a taunt or a jab. However, I know my friend and her husband to be serious and well-educated Catholics, so I figured I’d better take a look.

The very first thing I should say about Portier’s article is this: it was obvious that I was reading a piece addressed primarily to an academic community of which I am not a part. Though the general topic is of interest to me, I had that scattered feeling that one gets when reading a piece of a discussion whose mores and assumptions are largely unfamiliar. This was confirmed particularly in those spots where Portier seems to be battling a foe I never knew existed; for example, in one place he gives a little spiel about how the word ’sectarian’ shouldn’t have such negative connotations, and shouldn’t be used so often to dismiss arguments out of hand. Well, that word doesn’t get thrown around very much in the circles that I frequent, and if it did get attached to me it wouldn’t really sting. In another place the acronym ‘ERC’ is thrown out without explanation as though it were something I should recognize; only by the end of the paragraph had I surmised that an “ERC” is a convert from evangelical Protestantism. I mention this preemptively just to make clear that, if Portier’s article sometimes seemed vague and disjointed to me, lack of context probably has something to do with that.

For that same reason, I’m almost reluctant to summarize the article, but for the sake of our readers I’ll do my best. Ultimately Portier wants to make some claims about the character of “serious” young Catholics in America today, but he reaches that point through a discussion of recent Catholic history. Looking specifically at the United States, he suggests we bypass the “tired” story about Vatican II as the turning point in Catholic culture. Without exactly denying that Vatican II had any cultural impact, he nonetheless suggests that much more will be revealed through an alternative account wherein the dissolution of Catholic subculture was the critical event that transformed American Catholicism from what it was in the early 20th century to what it is today.

By Catholic subculture, he is of course referring to that semi-segregated society, largely focused around immigrant communities, that used to exist in this country, supported not only by strong and vibrant Catholic parishes, but also by Catholic schools, hospitals, universities and so forth. As American Catholics gradually gained greater acceptance in society at large (fueled especially by the “era of good feeling” following the second World War), adult Catholics began to look back on the Catholic “ghettos” in which they were raised with a certain amount of disdain. They were tired of feeling like second-class citizens. They wanted to be full-fledged Americans. And the culture was ready to receive them. But this acceptance came at a price, and as the bonds that tied Catholics to their particular subcultures dissolved, Catholic identity likewise began to weaken. The next generation of Catholics were left, in Portier’s words, “in a kind of church without walls where they finally feel the full weight of religious voluntarism.”

From this soil spring those young people that Portier labels the “evangelical Catholics.” One frustrating thing about the article is that it never explains with much precision what what makes an “evangelical Catholic.” Historically, as I’ve explained, they arise in reaction to the pluralist culture in which they have been raised, and unlike their disillusioned elders, they are proud to be Catholic, and eager to establish their identity as such. But Portier also speaks of evangelical Catholics as wanting to express their faith in an “evangelical style.” He is quick to point out that this is not to be identified exclusively with the praise-and-worship style typical of the so-called “Charismatic Catholics” such as are found in numbers at Steubenville (though these may be a subset). Rather, evangelical Catholics are responding to a pluralist culture in a way reminiscent of the evangelical Protestants. They adopt their faith as kind of deliberate identity, often wearing it on their sleeves. They have a sense for how to “sell” the faith, and they tend to rally deliberately around particular chosen cultural beacons (the pope, Eucharistic adoration, World Youth Day, the pro-life movement). Also, though, Portier mentions such figures as Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day as iconic for the evangelical Catholics, and he mentions as particularly significant their commitment to social justice and to condemning political conflicts like the Iraq war. It seems important to him that evangelical Catholics want to be politically relevant, though not in a way that fits neatly into the categories of “conservative” and “liberal” that are used for the American political spectrum at large.

It’s quite a lot to cover in one article, which is why, as I say, I’d be somewhat interested to know which parts of this little story would be deemed “controversial” by Portier’s peers. An ex-Mormon Traditional Catholic trained in analytic philosophy might not take exception at quite the same places. Nonetheless, here is my reaction such as it is.

I think Portier is certainly right that the dissolution of Catholic subcultures is tremendously important for explaining the changes in American Catholicism. What I don’t quite understand is why this should be seen as a “rival account” to the one that makes Vatican II a central event. They’re part of the same story. The conditions that led to the dissolution of Catholic subcultures in America were not unrelated to the factors that precipitated Vatican II… and, even more importantly, the second Vatican Council itself surely did more than any other event to complete that cultural destruction. There surely isn’t anything very novel in observing that Catholic subcultures in America have radically declined, and that this has meant considerable change in the way young Catholics receive and regard their faith. What would be novel would be the suggestion that Vatican II played only a marginal role in causing that change. Portier doesn’t exactly say that (and he certainly doesn’t argue for it), but he implies it in the way he sets up the narrative, and this seemed rather odd to me.

I certainly have no quibble with Portier’s criticisms of pluralism — actually, he devotes a good section of the paper to critiquing pluralism, but for this audience it didn’t seem necessary to say much about it since most of it would be taken as assumed already. When it comes to his assessment of evangelical Catholics, it’s difficult to know what to say since I have so much difficulty figuring out who, exactly, they are. On the one hand he seems to be making an argument somewhat reminiscent of Joseph Bottom’s (which occasioned a serious debate once among the contributors to this blog) that young Catholics, having been deprived of a real Catholic culture, are cobbling together what they can in an effort to rebuild their Catholic identity. As I said in my post on Bottom’s article a year and a half ago, I think this is basically true. However much it may sadden us, the fact is that the American Catholic culture of the 1950’s and before has been destroyed. Time moves forward, and there’s nothing for us to do but move forward with it; we can’t simply set the clock back five or six decades. (And even if we could, would we want to return to a culture that could be so speedily destroyed? Whatever its attractions, there must have been some grave defects in the American Church immediately prior to Vatican II, or it could not have decayed so grossly in such a short period of time.) Rebuilding is the task at hand. But obviously the insane heresy and liturgical craziness of the 1970’s and 1980’s are not the thing to use as a starting point. We’ve got to find a way to reestablish orthodoxy and orthopraxy; in short, we want to be faithful Catholics again. Insofar as our immediate forbears have forgotten how, younger generations will have to take charge of the rebuilding.

If every young person who agrees with this counts as an evangelical Catholic, then I guess I know quite a lot of those. I guess I am one of those. I kind of fall off the bandwagon once we start talking about Dorothy Day and John Paul II t-shirts and protesting Wall Street and the Iraq war. In itself, that’s not a criticism of the article. I really don’t know what percentage of orthodox young Catholics love Dorothy Day and hate the war — it isn’t a large percentage of the ones I know, but my acquaintances may well be atypical. I do become a little suspicious when I detect strong vibes of sympathy from Portier himself with what he identifies as the evangelical Catholic agenda. An obvious example comes at the end of the article when he mentions opposition to the Iraq war as an evangelical Catholic viewpoint that needed to be heard as a corrective to larger global problems. Were a majority of young, orthodox Catholics opposed to the war? Perhaps so, but in my experience this was a topic on which orthodox Catholics of all ages were very much divided. Do Portier’s words apply only to a subset of the young and orthodox, or is he optimistically reading his own views onto a larger group of people than actually share them? It’s never very clear, since Portier never concretely defines what an “evangelical Catholic” is, but I certainly hope that political issues like this aren’t at the heart of the revitalization of the Church.

Specific points of politics, though, may not be very important to the article’s central argument. What interests me more is the move from the diagnostic to the prescriptive. That is to say: I think we can all agree that the basic phenomenon Portier identifies, wherein young Catholics rebel against the rebellion of their parents and return to orthodoxy, is real. And actually, though he talks about how “understudied” this group is, it seems to me that the young and serious have been getting more and more attention within the Church. We could discuss the various trends exhibited by the members of that group, and people do. But a more significant question is: what is the trajectory of that movement? And, perhaps even more importantly, what should it be?

I admitted at the beginning of this review that I was initially puzzled by the name “evangelical Catholics.” It sounded like an insult to me, and it still does. But I can see now how there might be a certain appropriateness to it. Two of the most defining features of evangelical Protestants are their burning zeal for the faith, and their shallowness. Evangelicals fit right into a pluralist culture because they have both a will and a way to sell themselves; they have plenty of energy, and because they are not beholden to tradition in any significant sense, they are almost endlessly adaptable. They understand that the inhabitants of a choice-laden, media-drenched culture like ours have a voracious appetite for direction and identity, and within their communities these things are virtually thrust upon the members. Their movement has done much to fill the void in the lives of so many modern Americans. On the minus side, however, it is itself a somewhat ad hoc, artificial creation, often tailored to the demands of its followers more than to the truth.

To a substantial degree, young Catholics may be cut from the same mold. Like the Protestant evangelicals, they’re developing a burning enthusiasm for the faith, but, also like the Protestants, they’re somewhat rootless. This is mostly not their fault. The root structure that should have been theirs was destroyed by others before them; they’re adapting not as a rebellion but as a survival tactic. And they are in a better position than the Protestants to undertake such a rebuilding, because they are still Catholics and have at their disposal all the treasures of the Catholic faith. Even so, they share a number of the deficiencies of Protestant evangelicals. Their sensibilities are not well trained. Their instincts are shaped more by the modernist culture in which they were raised and less by the sacred liturgy. They are, in a word, shallow. As products of a pluralist culture, they are better prepared than many before them to insert themselves into that culture, tailoring their message to the needs of their listeners, evangelizing. But they’re selling something that they themselves grasp in a highly imperfect way. They didn’t inherit their Catholicity in a full, rich, lived way from their immediate forebears. Rather, they cobbled it together from such fragments as they’ve managed to find, and we shouldn’t be surprised to find that there are a number of significant holes and defects in their faith. In the end, then, I’m somewhat inclined to agree with Portier’s favored terminology. Evangelical may actually be a good adjective for describing today’s young Catholics, or at least a good portion of them.

I guess it’s probably pretty clear at this point that, as I understand things, evangelical Catholicism is a seriously defective manifestation of the faith. It doesn’t necessarily follow from this that we should be discouraged by its appearance. Orthodoxy in an evangelical style is certainly a good step forward from heresy and blatant disobedience, and it may be that these sorts of partially-formed efforts at Catholic life are all that we have available to us in the present climate. I certainly agree with Portier that we have to accept as reality that Catholics will have to make their way in a pluralist world, and this calls for a somewhat different sort of formation than would have been appropriate for Catholics living in an almost-entirely-Catholic society. Catechesis, for example, becomes extremely important in this climate, and needs to be more extensive than would probably have been necessary in other periods of history. Young Catholics need to be given an explicit understanding of what the Church is, what modernism is, and why they must strive to be countercultural, in but not of the world. Of course we should do what we can to recover the devotions and liturgical forms that instilled the faith in Catholics of old. Unlike the evangelical Protestants, it should be our fervent desire to try to be beholden to a tradition inherited from Catholics of past centuries. But traditions of this kind can be fully lived only in communities, and there is a need for a certain about of filtering to determine which of the myriad of different traditional practices are most fitting in our particular time. Developing a full and thriving Catholic culture once more will not happen overnight, and in the meantime, we at least need to give our children the tools they need to survive without it. Some of those tools may indeed look very much like those employed by the evangelical Protestants.

As I say, some degree of self-conscious identity-construction may be necessary given the present state of the Church. But evangelical Catholicism will certainly be an unhealthy development unless it is viewed as a means to a better end. Catholicism should be lived within a culture. Tradition should be inherited from our fathers and passed down to our children. The artificiality of evangelical Catholic life can be tolerated for awhile, but if the evangelical Catholics come to relish too much their adaptability, their sense of individuality, or their affinity with their evangelical Protestant cousins, then a day will soon come when the two can no longer be distinguished. Perhaps the most alarming thing about Portier’s article is that he doesn’t seem very worried about this. He mentions in passing that there is some risk of this group descending into “consumerist individualism” (more terms that aren’t used much in my circles but I think I get the gist), but he satisfies himself on this point with a brief section on how a recognition of Church authority and the witness of converts should hold them on track. Most significantly, he gives no indication of thinking or hoping that the evangelical Catholics might move beyond evangelical Catholicism to re-form a new Catholic culture. Quite the contrary, Portier seems to regard evangelical Catholicism as the most natural and appropriate expression of the faith in a culture like ours.

In a way this is rather strange, because, as his discussion of pluralism shows, Portier is not unaware of the tension between a democratic, pluralist, voluntarist society, and the Church. He acknowledges at least that Catholic ecclesiology does not leave room for a view of the Church is “just one denomination among many.” Evidently, though, he thinks the problem can be adequately solved with “identity reinforcers” such as World Youth Day, the pope, and the witness of converts and noteworthy figures like Day. He ends the paper with a rather curious section recommending the “re-theologizing” of Catholic thought. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what he meant by this, but the basic idea seems to be that theologians should 1) work to recover and re-articulate aspects of Catholic thought that have been somewhat neglected in recent decades, and 2) try to apply this thought to issues of contemporary interest. (Again, he uses the example of John Paul II and the invasion of Iraq, which doesn’t strike me as particularly helpful, but the general idea is fairly clear.) The same pluralism that has been so destructive to Catholic culture frees us to rediscover orthodoxy, and Portier seems to envision a future in which evangelical Catholics continue to “help overcome the pernicious effects on the Church of the modern distinction between public and private.”

His tone is optimistic, but don’t miss the dire assumption! The bottom line seems to be that Portier neither foresees nor recommends the rebuilding of a distinctively Catholic culture in the West. Rather, he recommends that we continue in the present vein, enmeshed fully in a pluralist culture and relying on a small group of voluntary “Catholic enthusiasts” to keep the distinctive elements of our faith from being entirely forgotten. Even among this group of self-consciously orthodox, he seems most excited about the recovery of the Church’s intellectual tradition, and especially excited about those aspects of theology that have political implications.

Of course, Portier is a theologian, so you can’t blame him for looking particularly to the health of his own discipline. But one can’t help but feel that he is missing, or at any rate seriously undervaluing, an important piece of the puzzle. Orthodoxy can, to some degree, be self-consciously recovered. But orthopraxy must be woven into a person’s life in a much more organic way, and this can only really develop within a supportive cultural context. Of course, neither can remain strong without the other. Our intellectual explorations will be in vain unless we are sustained by truly Catholic sensibilities, such as can only be formed through the liturgy and through community example… and that kind of formation, in turn, will only be found within communities already steeped in Catholicism. Evangelical Catholics, by their very nature, have never had those kinds of communities, and even their lovable enthusiasm shows many of the marks of a faith that is juvenile, shallow, and stunted by an inhospitable climate. They have the kind of toughness that might be seen in trees growing high in the mountains near the tree line — durable and determined, but gnarled, misshapen and small. I join Portier in rejoicing that at least the Church has some willing hands who are eager to do what they can to reclaim our Catholic heritage for the Church in America. I sincerely hope, though, that this movement will be taken, not as an end of itself, but as a stage in a process by which more hospitable pastures might be cultivated so that future generations can enjoy a richness and completeness in their Catholic life that for us is the stuff of dreams.