On this Easter Sunday morning, our priest referred to the new issue of Newsweek, the one with “Forget the Church. Follow Jesus.” on its cover. He even had a copy of the magazine with him on the pulpit. It would not be accurate to say that he preached a sermon condemning the article. What he did was simply to defend, gently but pointedly, a few tenets of the Catholic faith, such as the sacraments and the Eucharist. It wouldn’t be possible to refute the article, anyway—not to an audience who hadn’t read it. But, curious about what might rouse him to the extent that it did, I went home and looked it up online. 

 

As it turns out, the article by Andrew Sullivan, is actually entitled “Christianity in Crisis.” The cover, with its giant bold-face “Forget the Church….” is not atypical for sensation-loving media, but that’s not to say that Sullivan does not roundly condemn organized Christianity while promoting its founder.

 

He takes a political route, venerating Thomas Jefferson. He speaks reverently of a copy of a Bible that belonged to Jefferson currently on display at the National Museum of American History, from which the sayings of Jesus have been carefully removed from the text with a razor. Adopting what he believes was Jefferson’s point of view, Sullivan condemns “followers” of Christ (we call them Apostles) who, according to Jefferson, imposed their own superstitious beliefs on Christ, and copied copies of texts not written until decades after the Crucifixion—so, presumably, they’re not trustworthy—in order to gain political power. (How else would a political lens read their motivation?)

 

Okay, now wait. You revere the words of Christ, but deny the veracity of those who heard the words and wrote them down? Don’t you—if you believe a message—have to believe in the veracity of the messenger? Don’t you have to believe those who had the words in their possession—from the beginning—long before you ever heard or read them? How else do you think you even have those words you cut out?

 

Andrew Sullivan believes that organized Christianity is responsible for all manner of evil because he knows no history of the Church, and therefore, what he knows of secular history is fragmented. Because he himself sees everything from a political perspective (e.g., Jefferson’s beliefs) he sees the Church through the lenses of his political beliefs—which he thinks are apolitical. That is why he is able to praise St. Francis of Assisi for being apolitical even while he condemns the Church for being political—the same Church that made St. Francis a saint. The irrationality of that incongruity escapes him. He has no notion that it was secular states (politics) that caused nearly all the litany of griefs he cites. Beyond prohibition of “the pill” and the “international conspiracy to sexually abuse and rape countless youths and children,” he knows apparently nothing about the Church.

 

But it’s hard to believe the words of Christ and disbelieve their source—just as it’s hard to venerate St. Francis while you disbelieve those who told you about him. The intellectual conflict must be agonizing—somebody has to be blamed for that. Ignorance becomes amazingly powerful when it’s self-imposed because it must necessarily beget itself over and over. It has to, because truth is even more dangerous than reason.