Dummy-ing the Faith: Apologetic “Christendom” vs. the Inconvenient Christ

Barron Mind: A Series of Grievances

When you enter the rectory garage of San Sebastian Church in Guatemala City, you immediately encounter a mural depicting the life and witness of Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera. The first panel, located to your left, shows Bishop Gerardi (as he’s commonly known) advocating for and alongside the indigenous Guatemalans who’d been persecuted during the country’s thirty-six-year internal war. Rounding the corner, a second wall recounts the bishop’s post-war investigative activity as head of the archdiocesan Human Rights Office. Opposite this, a block window partition leads you towards a nondescript pillar. It was at its foot, on April 26, 1998, that Bishop Gerardi’s body was discovered, bludgeoned to death with a slab of concrete. Two days prior, he’d released Guatemala: Nunca Más!, a four volume exposé of indigenous persecution and genocide. In the mural’s third and final scene, he is joined at the altar by fellow martyrs of the era.

I still remember my first visit to Guatemala: playing ping pong with children on the top floor of a Catholic Worker House; listening in the adjoining chapel as Honduran and Guatemalan young adults recounted how they boldly decided to continue this ministry following the untimely death of their priest founder and proxy benefactor; walking the surrounding Guatemala City neighborhood, where inhabitants had affixed plastic bags to roof gutters after the local government rerouted their tap water to a wealthier development. I remember the bus ride to Esquipulas, home of El Christo Negro—the Shrine of the Black Christ. Watching a woman trek uphill alongside the road, hunched beneath the massive sheaf of branches slung over her back. Like Jesus bearing his cross.

In a recent streetside interview at World Youth Day in Lisbon, Bishop Robert Barron posits to EWTN correspondent Colm Flynn that “evangelization is the task of the Church in every time and every age.” It’s a familiar refrain, one which, for Barron, takes on even greater urgency today—a sort of rallying cry and raison d’etre against the erosive tides of “secularization.” It doesn’t take long to notice, however, that whatever he and his fellow proponents of Catholic apologia are calling “evangelization,” it has little to do with its own subject and ostensible author: Jesus Christ. At least, not the Christ of Gerardi and Guatemala (let alone history and Scripture), who is at best irrelevant and often inconvenient to the true objective: reclaiming a romanticized, revisionist and wholly reactionary ideal of so-called “Christendom.” Which makes me wonder: does the Christian Right actually know Christ at all?

Secular Rage
As reported by NPR, the answer, increasingly, is quite literally “no.” Specifically, Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore cites an alarmingly common experience among evangelical pastors: being accused of deploying “liberal talking points” by congregants whilst referencing namby-pamby Gospel mandates like “turn the other cheek.” Moreover, per Moore, “when the pastor would say, ‘I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak.” 

As we all know, Bishop Barron and his nominally famous friends share this American evangelical distaste for the “feminized” (Barron’s word, not mine) Jesus. Yet for all the articulated distress in contemporary Catholic discourse over faith’s waning influence on “secularized” youth, I recall how the Risen Christ made such an indelible impact on my own faith as a young adult in Guatemala (not so many years ago). There is, undoubtedly, a dehumanizing western Christian impulse to fetishize suffering, particularly the suffering of perceived “others.” But the Christian God is, fundamentally, the God of Incarnation—who, indeed, did suffer and whom the Gospel professes does so today. Not (as the voluble zealots contend) at the hands of unbelievers and secularists, but in the hands and backs and souls of those whose forced sacrifices amass wealth, comfort and influence for those at the center of global social and economic power. 

Matthew 25 and all that. But for our blathering bishops, acrid apologists and their conspiracy-minded confreres in the Christian commentariat, the aim is decidedly not bringing glad tidings to the poor or proclaiming liberty to the captives (Luke 4:18). They are not laborers in the vineyard, but crusaders for Christendom. It’s a kingdom nakedly divorced from the king for which it is named, bound inexorably and idolatrously to the structures of white, western, heteronormative imperialism which serve simultaneously as route map, destination and unholy grail in the quest to reverse the dial of human progress. And, as with the wider ideological battle against data, decency and democratic norms, it is taking aim at America’s tragically good-hearted youth—and the curriculum, specifically.

School of Naught
That’s precisely the case in the Archdiocese of Portland, where “at the direction of Archbishop Sample,” Christ the King School is “thrilled to be partnering” with the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE).” This axis of feeble, in their words, seeks to “shift our philosophy of education…from the typical secular standards'' (which they condemn as “susceptible to indoctrination”) and place “God at the center of all knowledge.” It doesn’t take much to read between the lines here. ICLE’s website is chalk(board) full of the sort of transphobic, anti-”woke” dog whistles favored by the likes of Barron and his Nutty (no longer?) Professor Matt Petrusek. “Catholic liberal education” (which they take pains to make clear is not of the political bent but from “liber” in Latin, the least “woke” of all the languages) is “ordered to the Truth” and rooted in “a clear conviction about the nature and purpose of reality, of the human person, and of God — all of which are undermined by secular progressive education and its industrialized methods.”

Clearly, phrases like “ordered to the Truth” and “nature and purpose of reality” are intended to signify adherence to the Catechism's “intrinsically disordered” dismissal of homosexuality and insipid gender complementarianism. Which, though stupid, is more appropriate to a course on John Paul II’s rickety Theology of the Body than, say, the foundational fucking philosophy of your curriculum. Obviously, this isn’t really an education at all, it’s a diatribe. They even regurgitate sophistic Petrusekisms about the “atheistic, utilitarian philosophy” of “post-Christian culture,” which “rejects the very notion that Truth exists.” These folks aren’t actually concerned about young people being indoctrinated. Quite the opposite: like those Trump voters who sulk and seethe when their grandchildren (astutely) call them racist, they’re simply upset that they haven’t been indoctrinated well enough or in the right direction. 

To be fair, so personally affronted are conservatives by any curricular effort which engages reality (be it historical, scientific and sociological, etc.) with the slightest degree of intellectual honesty that they likely view this all as mere culture war tit for tat. After all, right wing “Defenders of Truth” will also put counter-historical Frederick Douglass fanfiction in schools because they think progressives exaggerated the horrors of slavery to make white Floridians feel bad. In the QAnon-addled psyche of ICLE, secular education is irredeemably “fragmented.” It “emphasizes information” (won’t be ordering that with our Catholic “intellectual” tradition) and “ignores the moral imagination.” You could argue that Sample, what with his escalating, doctrinally suspect harm offensive on transgender existence, lacks a fair amount of that “moral imagination” himself. But “morals,” “knowledge,” “God,” it’s all just words, right?

Cruciformless
From a Christological standpoint, what’s most revelatory is how ICLE fails to address its own self-posed FAQ question: “How does this vision evangelize?” In short, it doesn’t—at least if you take evangelization to mean anything like sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I’m not even nitpicking here, this is their answer in its entirety:

“Through the recovery of the Church’s own tradition, Catholic schools can offer both Catholic and non-Catholic students the kind of learning that will free them from the constraints of secularism, which rejects the very notion that Truth exists. Authentic Catholic education is an engine of evangelization for the Church and the culture; it nourishes the soul in truth, goodness, and beauty, defying the dictatorship of relativism that oppresses our age.”

Holy bullshit. Look, I know this hippie-dippie Jesus crap is increasingly passé for your run of the mill right wing Christian, but you’d think an organization angling for influence in the institutional Church would at least pay lip service to the dude (without a Y chromosome). Especially since the US Bishops themselves characterize evangelization as “the force of the Gospel itself,” the thing that happens “when the word of Jesus speaks to people's hearts and minds.” I’d venture the simping shepherd of Portland isn’t holding it against them, though. And while Barron at least mentions Jesus in his own defense (re: low-key manifesto) of Catholic education published back in January, to him the “most important” marker of said education is not an invitation to know, love and follow Christ, but rather “the integration of faith and reason.” (Naturally, he provides a link to a variety of WOF “faith and reason” content.)

Sit with that for a moment: for this supposed “modern evangelist,” encountering the Good News of Jesus Christ is, at best, an ancillary benefit of a Catholic education. And really, not even that. Because Barron’s notion of Incarnation isn’t about encountering the love of God; it’s all about “the Logos, the mind or reason of God, made flesh.” For him, Sample and their ICLE ilk, that mind is made visible in the Church’s most intransigent socio-political postures and a deified construction of “the Western Tradition,” which together serve as stand-ins for the messiah they half-heartedly proclaim. It’s a “Logos” which is decidedly illogical and irascible, less like the merciful, nonviolent Jesus than that “debate me, bro” incel college freshman who keeps shouting about Kierkegaard over your Black, female philosophy professor. (cue single tear) “What a beautiful Tradition…”

Wayward Truth
Which is what makes that Lisbon interview so maddening. Barron begins by trying to hit all the right, white moderate uncle notes: it’s so lovely to see all these young people gathered together from “Africa, Asia, etc.” (I haven’t been to “etcetera” in ages!) “Everyone’s hungry for God,” he says (a hunger he can presumably satiate for just $19.99, plus shipping), “so when there’s an opportunity to come together, to seek God, to praise God, young people respond.” True enough (at least for the unrepresentative sample at World Youth Day), never mind that Barron himself has made a mission of dividing the faithful along political and ideological lines.

With the pleasantries and platitudes out of the way, Barron soon gets back to the christofascist business at hand. Young people today, he claims, “don’t want an uncertain trumpet, they don’t want a vacillating message, they want something clear.” Putting aside the familiar shades of macho militarism, Barron immediately proceeds to undercut his own thesis. Per his reading of the (uncited) research, most people leave the faith because “I never got my questions answered, religion seems stupid, it’s out of line with science, etc., etc.” So, naturally, Barron, ICLE and the like offer a Catholicism which dismisses their questions (e.g.: about structural racism/misogyny) as “woke” nonsense and explorations of sexual/gender identity as “disordered” to God’s intelligent design. Anyone who’s ever met a teen knows they’d recoil at Barron’s blaring Boomer “trumpet” of pseudo-intellectual arrogance. In terms of their actual qualms with faith and the Church (which, mind you, shouldn’t be conflated), they seek simply the honest, discerning and necessarily fraught conversations that the episcopate perniciously shuts down faster than a preferred pronoun. To the extent that they do want unwavering conviction, it’s in defense of ideals such as LGBTQ+ rights, gender equity and racial and environmental justice.

And that’s the barefaced misdirect at the heart of this entire apoplectic apologetic. In that WYD interview, Barron laments (again, without evidence) how his generation “dumbed down Catholicism,” yet promotes a Catholicity which is anti-scientific, wildly ahistorical and inconsistent with its own social doctrines. To reach these young minds (but not hearts), we apparently must avoid the temptation to “dumb down the faith” and instead just make it all exceedingly dumb. As Peter Shamishiri observes in a recent episode of his If Books Could Kill podcast (good stuff, by the way!), though conservatives often “complain about being left out of academia…they have no real interest in academics.” That’s certainly the case for both Barron and ICLE’s propagandist pedagogy. It all sounds very high-minded—a maundering, professorial posturing which whitewashes, proof-texts and obfuscates the objective societal, political and ecological degradation which young people experience each and every day in this dystopia of late-stage capitalism. 

Christ on a Cracker (and a Cracker Alone)
Worse, Barron is not only fully aware of how devastatingly young people suffer under the contemporary paradigm, he leans in. He acknowledges, for instance, that “it’s tougher being a young person now,” correctly pointing out spiking rates of “anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies,” yet in his diagnosis flatly omits the majority of causes (such as sexual and domestic violence, academic pressures, social isolation, and bigotry). For him, it all boils down to social media, which, he assures our despondent adolescents, is “not the real world,” which is “the world of the worship of God, service to the poor, communion with one another.”

Except that this is empirically and brazenly not the monarchal, stratified world Barron himself actually toils to build. He professes a desire for young people to “come away [from WYD] with a sense of Jesus, who loves them, who walks with them, and wants to be the Lord of their life in a liberating way,” but the loving, liberative Jesus of the Gospel is nowhere within sight of his socio-political praxis. For instance, it was he himself who spearheaded USCCB advocacy against transgender student athletes—a tiny minority of youth which experience disproportionately high rates of suicidal behavior and ideation. In terms of social media itself, Barron may occasionally decry its acrimonious impulses, but more often he eagerly promulgates snarky racial and religious grievance clickbait. When people like Barron decry the left-leaning diminishment of Jesus to “one interesting teacher among many,” they are also saying they don’t consider Jesus a teacher at all. No love of neighbor/enemy here; theirs is a worship not so much of Christ, but of the cross to which our Lord is nailed.

Beyond Barron and ICLE, this knee-jerk tendency to whittle and weaponize Jesus is typified in the ongoing obsession with Eucharistic prohibitions. Most recently, conservative critics cried irreverent foul over some masses at World Youth Day, following the circulation online of images featuring hosts being carried in cellophane-wrapped IKEA bowls (with, gasp!, the tags still on them) and lay women serving as Eucharistic Ministers. It’s worth noting that, liturgically and sacramentally, Christ is fully present within the people gathered and the proclamation of the Word, not merely the Eucharistic species and the ordained minister celebrating the sacrament. But the folks complaining about how some otherized “they” are treating our Lord aren’t concerned for the Incarnate, suffering Christ whom they themselves incessantly seek to exclude from his own table. No, for them, Christ is found in the Eucharist alone, and even then it is little more than a courtly symbol, a regal herald which can only be “real” or “special” if invoked through dead language incantations and enthroned upon gold-lined ciboria.

Children of a Lesser God
I don’t want to wax poetic, but what these apologists and pontificators and keyboard crusaders fail to grasp is that the instinct towards something like God was never grounded, at least not solely, in the logic of nature’s design or the appeal of exaltation. We suppose humans are fashioned in some divine image because we acknowledge humans themselves as sacred, alongside with the entirety of creation. We believe we are “made in God’s image” because a true and loving God must resemble something like the beauty and dignity and majesty we encounter in others. So for all their protestations over the “secularization” of social thought, it’s actually their own, right wing economic, technological and, yes, even religious societal dialogic and ethic which rob us of the experiences which help us truly know Christ.

Put simply, we are increasingly alone—in cities and towns with no communal, non-commercial spaces or customs; in cars which race past neighbors in heed of the monetized mandate to produce, purchase and repeat; behind cell phones and computer screens, muffling and muting the vital ambience of our surrounding world as we consume fatuous corporate “content.” We are alone in the racism, xenophobia and queer panic which sends us grasping for our firearms as a stranger approaches our front porch. We are alone and exceedingly lonely in our hatred of knowledge and literature and honest readings of history, severing ourselves and our stories from the eternal story of humankind and creation.

The Christian apologist, this egoist exarch and revanchist revivalist, upholds these systems of isolation as God’s manifest destiny, a divine impulse to colonize and extract and commodify not only the earth, but every mind, body and soul which inhabits it—defying and defiling the innate human desire to connect, commune and create beyond the bounds of commerce. They will say we no longer know God, but we know all too well their God of malicious indifference—we meet him daily in our desperation, our longing for a fraternal now and an existent future; we see his sneering face reflected back to us in his post-Christ, partisan disciples, who revel in watching our world burn. 

Veiled Threats
Jesus, of course, ultimately rejects his oppressors and their presumption to violence. In Resurrection, he reclaims his “right to life,” just as the residents of that Guatemala City neighborhood accepted from the earth what was denied them by the state (and protested their local water district until the pipes flowed once again). The true God affirms our right to live, and do so abundantly, in a world which would have it otherwise. To the Barrons and ICLE’s of this world, however, Christ is a mere construct, a sword and shield to lord over your perceived enemies in perpetual self-justification. For Barron, that construct is explicitly historical, though not the history of Gerardi and Romero or any of our other sisters and brothers in the struggle against imperial subjugation. It is, rather, a narrative “climax” which demands we shift our emphasis away from “the great revolutions in science and politics” (to varying degrees the bogeymen and blunt objects of the apologetic didactic) and towards his decidedly Westernized reading of the Christendom’s legacy and purported destiny.

In none of this will you find any authentic proposal or pathway to encounter God in the Incarnate Word—the Christ who became our brother, dying and rising again so that we might live free of our oppressors and their threats of death (you know, evangelization). Anyone who claims, as that advert for Christ the King School does, “to bring students and families into a personal encounter with Christ,” must embrace and proclaim the sociological and political implications of Incarnation and Resurrection. Otherwise, they offer a “faith” just as cheap, disposable and manufactured as those Lisbon IKEA bowls. 

The Very Smart Faith offered by Bishop Barron is not only equally vapid, it’s also tinged with malice. “We’ve got something good,” he promises, but only for those for whom the editorialized message of his hollow evangelism “comes through.” We can easily infer what he’s “got” for those who don’t submit to the perverse, authoritarian agenda he carts behind that cardboard Christ. After all, as the Trump-era bon mots aptly surmises, for today’s conservatives, “the cruelty is the point.”

G. Fault