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 li