A Spiritual Awakening : Part 5

Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God with Politics and Losing Their Way
by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

(Page 5 of 7)

Religion has also become privatized in its message: Today the moral lessons we hear - and the moral values we pursue in our politics - have everything to do with personal behavior. Living the moral life has come to mean something like: Don't have too much sex, gay sex, extramarital sex, premarital sex; don't have abortions; don't look at porn; don't demean marriage. (Not that many of us follow all these rules; there are more than a million abortions in this country each year, the highest divorce rates are in the most conservative parts of the country, and plenty of people of faith, including clergy, use pornography.)

Privatizing is a central theme of our times. Every day we hear public policy proposals for privatizing education through school vouchers and initiatives for privatizing Social Security, health care, and public lands and forests. Even "public" utilities such as water are being widely privatized. And our religious institutions have jumped on board, promoting a kind of privatized ambition and morality that works against the sense of communal good. The message seems to be, If it's good enough for me - or my family, or my tax bracket - then it's good enough.

My own Catholic Church has allowed its social agenda to be trumped by an all-consuming focus on contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem cell research - none of which are mentioned in the Gospels. Mainline Protestant churches have been losing members and power, and no longer serve as the voice for radical change - fighting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War - that they did only a generation ago. And evangelical Protestants - who have been fabulously successful in recruiting members - have focused their attention primarily on private matters: who has sex with whom, where, and how.

The Catholic Church of my youth dealt with issues at the core of the Gospel - suffering, injustice, sickness, and poverty. It provided me with a loving welcome when my father was killed. Its rituals, songs, stories of saints, and the Rosary led me out of my despair - just as they have helped countless others for two thousand years. My Church created a sense of community for family and friends that stretched back in time. The nuns who taught me had also taught my mother and the mothers of my friends and shared with us stories from times when they were as young as we. In many churches parishioners met regularly over bingo games, Sons of Italy dinners, and Christmas collections for the needy of the parish. The Church gave shape to our lives. It taught us how we should act at home, school, and work. And it taught us that how we acted locally was all part of God's larger plan for alleviating the suffering of humanity globally.

The very fact that the Church has endured for millennia across continents and cultures, under a variety of political systems, indicates that it has touched on something profound in the human spirit. This strength endures. Yet today, sadly, my Church seems focused primarily on protecting itself from the fallout of the pederasty scandal and publicizing its involvement in abortion politics. The first is a shame from which the Church will take a long time recovering. The second is an indication of its narrowing concerns. Here you have a group of men making decisions to ban contraception, and then turning around to demand that women must not have an abortion. These decisions do not affect them directly - they simply do not suffer the personal consequences. At least not yet. But this male hierarchy will eventually suffer from a female following that resents its decisions. Similarly it will suffer from its decision to keep women out of the hierarchy, to reject gays and lesbians, and to abandon its historic mission to the greater good of humanity.

My Church is building walls to keep the evil world out. This is not how it should be. I want my Church to be the embracing place that healed our souls while insisting that we live courageously and meaningfully in a world in which people near and far need our help. I want to return to the loving, caring Church that focused on helping people make sense of their lives by making a contribution to their larger community. If it is going to serve as Christ's voice in the twenty-first century, its theology must be able to handle the issues of today, including contraception, family planning, and the role of laity and of women both in the Church and society. People in the United States and throughout the world are looking for spiritual renewal. I want the Catholic Church to play its part.

Similarly I want the mainline Protestant churches to be able to speak to their congregations out of their proud history of personal and social engagement. The First Great Awakening, in the eighteenth century, led to the American Revolution, and the Second Great Awakening to the abolition of slavery and the granting of women's suffrage. Throughout our history determined Protestant congregations have made their mark by outlawing dueling, by supporting the temperance movement, the nineteenth-century women's movement, and the civil rights movement, by working to end child labor and to create the forty-hour workweek, by recognizing labor unions, and by speaking out against the war in Vietnam.

The leaders of these churches suffered the consequences of their bravery. For their actions on behalf of civil rights for blacks, and against the Vietnam War, they began to lose members and money, and they became afraid and cautious. But caution has not helped them either. Today, mainline churches are still losing members and money, and their political voice at the national level is weak. Worse yet, they simply are not speaking to the spiritual hunger in the country today. These churches must be able to reach into their rich history, back to a time when they were able to connect a personal relation to God with their congregants' efforts to improve the communities and nation in which they live. The strong communities of belief that once existed need to be revived.

The evangelical churches in some ways have the opposite problem: They touch people personally so they are growing by leaps and bounds; they have helped many people turn their lives around; they have created communities where members feel a great sense of connectedness and spirituality, and where they are given help with real-life issues - child care, schooling, marital counseling, aid for addictive behavior, and a safe place to meet a mate. And yet they, too, are building up walls of fear, protecting these "sacred" communities from the more profane influences of modern-day America. The debate over the teaching of evolution in schools, for instance, reflects the understandable fear of some religious people that morality cannot survive without a belief in God. I suspect, however, that it is yet another example of the right's determination to change the subject away from a discussion of our religious obligation to correct the inequities of our society.

Copyright © 2007 by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

About the Author

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the eldest child of Robert F. Kennedy, worked in the U.S. Department of Justice before serving two terms as Maryland's lieutenant governor. She has taught at Georgetown University and the University of Pennsylvania, speaks regularly on political and religious issues, and is engaged in philanthropic work. She and her husband have raised four daughters and live in Baltimore.