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MARY EBERSTADT is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a contributing writer to First Things. She has an incredible knack for writing incisive commentary on Church issues. This piece was written a year and a half ago and deserves a reread. While it purports to be reportage on the rise of the phenomena of “Christianity Lite,” you will find it truly deals with a phenomena first recorded some eighty years ago by Ronald Knox, “The Decline of Dogma and the Decline of Church Membership.” It turns out the good Monsignor knew all along about the power of a strong moral code and the simple calculus that those who cannot obey in difficult matters really don’t obey in easier ones either.
“The more decadent the age, the more does the forceful insistence that there is a right and wrong about matters of sex exert a gravitational pull all its own. The failure to recognize that power — one experienced by converts from St. Paul, to St. Augustine, to some of the Anglicans studying the Catechism today — may be one final and under-appreciated factor that has led to Christianity Lite’s undoing.” Long after the Churches of Christianity Lite have morphed into reading rooms, shelters, mosques, nightclubs and concert halls the Catholic Church will draw God’s People to its magnificent structures. Bet on it.
Reading selections from the essay here.
dj
MARY EBERSTADT is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a contributing writer to First Things. She has an incredible knack for writing incisive commentary on Church issues. This piece was written a year and a half ago and deserves a reread. While it purports to be reportage on the rise of the phenomena of “Christianity Lite,” you will find it truly deals with a phenomena first recorded some eighty years ago by Ronald Knox, “The Decline of Dogma and the Decline of Church Membership.” It turns out the good Monsignor knew all along about the power of a strong moral code and the simple calculus that those who cannot obey in difficult matters really don’t obey in easier ones either.
“The more decadent the age, the more does the forceful insistence that there is a right and wrong about matters of sex exert a gravitational pull all its own. The failure to recognize that power — one experienced by converts from St. Paul, to St. Augustine, to some of the Anglicans studying the Catechism today — may be one final and under-appreciated factor that has led to Christianity Lite’s undoing.” Long after the Churches of Christianity Lite have morphed into reading rooms, shelters, mosques, nightclubs and concert halls the Catholic Church will draw God’s People to its magnificent structures. Bet on it.
Reading selections from the essay here.
dj