In light of today's gospel text and some recent political news, I'd like to offer a brief reflection.
This past Tuesday, Kansas State Legislature passed a bill concerning religious freedom and marriage. On the face, the bill seems to be aimed at protecting religious individuals' and groups' sensibilities. What it actually does is allow anti-gay segregation. Slate has an informative, and clearly biased, report on the bill found here.
When Christians talk about enculturation, they often mean going against the current of a secular society to propagate the values, morals, and worldviews on the secular culture. This has been done throughout the history of the Church. Constantine made Christianity legal and publicly supported the Church with funds and buildings. Slowly, Christian values and culture became the societal norm. Again, the Germanic tribes slowly adopted the Roman Christian culture throughout the early middle ages. Sometimes, it was done to allow the process of evangelization and conversion to be swifter and easier. For example, Pope Gregory the Great instructs Augustine of Canterbury to leave the pagan temples, only removing the false idols and re-purposing building as a worship space for the one true God. This happened throughout the history of the Church, sometimes successfully, sometimes without full conversion - a la Central and South American Catholic superstitions.
Texts on the New Evangelization often highlight the need to engrain Christian identity into cultures to more effectively transmit and reflect the reality of the Kingdom of God. I posit, however, that this can be a dangerous game. When done without the spirit of love and a desire for conversion, the ideals of a Christian society can become arrogant, restrictive, and hurtful. This is not to undermine the offensive nature of the Gospel, but to highlight the need for positive witness.
Today's Gospel reading was the middle of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. The text reads from verse 17, "Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them," and concludes with verse 37, "Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil." This is the same portion of scripture where Jesus tells us that lust is as bad as adultery and hate is as heinous as murder. To summarize, Jesus communicates that it is the spirit of our action that demonstrates our satisfaction of the law.
What does this say about evangelization and enculturation? Our witness and our effect on culture must carry the spirit of love, not just with concern for how we communicate, but also with how our communications are received. This is not to say that we should be soft on our expectation, or overly tolerant of what some would term deviant behavior; I am simply saying that we need to be conscious of how we speak and how we are heard in a rapidly secularizing society and culture. Where religion and intelligence are not valued, we must avoid the tendency to entrench ourselves in fights that are about nuances in a disciple's life, not conversion. This leads to a response like that of the state of Kansas: a response to the culture out of fear, not out of love; out of resistance, and not courage.
Need I comment on what love entails? St. Paul reminds us in his first letter to the Corinthians, "Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right." (13:4-6)
In dealing with the obnoxious divisions between Christian and secular cultures, we must not be afraid, but we must also not be rash or overly offended by the manner in which life is lived apart from Christ. How can we expect our own values, which can only be rationalized with revelation through conversion by way of an experience with the person of Christ, to fit a non-Christian culture?
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, spoke in 2011 regarding the cultural shift that we continue to encounter today.
"The current crisis brings with it traces of the exclusion of God from people’s lives, from a generalized indifference towards the Christian faith to an attempt to marginalize it from public life. In the past decades, it was still possible to find a general Christian sensibility which unified the common experience of entire generations raised in the shadow of the faith which had shaped culture. Today, unfortunately, we are witnessing a drama of fragmentation which no longer acknowledges a unifying reference point; moreover, it often occurs that people wish to belong to the Church, but they are strongly shaped by a vision of life which is in contrast with the faith.
Proclaiming Jesus Christ the only Saviour of the World, today is more complex than in the past; but our task remains identical to that at the dawn of our history. The mission has not changed.... The Holy Spirit which prompted [the Apostles] ... is the same Spirit which today moves the Church to a renewed proclamation of hope for the people of our time."
The virtue most closely tied to hope is patience. Patience is also a quality of love. It is not a quality that is passive, but is enduring. Let us act patiently out of love and with respect to our hope, not divisively or hatefully. Christians need not cease to be reeds shaking in the wind in order to effectively be kind and generous witnesses to the love that God lavishes us with. It is that witness that enables appropriate and effective evangelization and cultural changes. Let us not forget, the only offensive aspect of the whole armour of God is "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God" (Ephesians 6:17). Everything else is defensive. The Word alone can act, everything else sustains, maintains, and defends the Christian against the devil, who is our adversary, not our neighbor.
* 2/19/14 - It has been brought to my attention that perhaps the intention of this law was to allow religious individuals to have authority over their goods and service in such a way that they would not be used to expressly support activities and ideals that are opposed to their religious sensibilities. I have no qualms with such a legislative measure, which would effectively maintain both individual and religious liberty. This bill, which the Kansas Senate has blocked, would not have preserved liberty, but in fact indicted all LGBTQ individuals to potential discrimination and segregation.
On a separate note, I would like to point out that while there is no such thing as a truly victimless crime (legal) or sin (religious), there are those which offend/harm others physically and those which only do harm the acting individual - either physically, emotionally, or spiritually. In a landscape with growing secularism, regardless of a waning Christian culture, it is an affront on the personal dignity and freedom of an individual to say, "You are not welcome," especially when the first saving action of our Lord (apart from the incarnation) is to say, "You are welcome" to every person. This is the first grace that allows us to say, "I will allow myself to be welcomed." As Christians, we have the obligation to welcome all, as Christ did, regardless of any person's or group's morality, ethic, religion, or attitude. Clearly, there is also an imperative to also be excellent and to call other's to that excellence, which only comes by way of welcome (witness) and word (proclamation) so that all might believe and be changed fundamentally and ontologically, not merely in their moral choices and attitudes. This highlights my point that only real conversion will change anything, culturally or salvifically. Entrenchment in ideals is not Christian when it ceases the welcoming witness after the Christ's own model, which is a grace conferred through the sacraments and life in the Church.
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