Our Politicized Relgious Landscape

 

Continuing the national debate about the present condition and future prospects for American Christianity, that debate has been greatly enriched by Southern Illinois University Professor of Religion and Politics and American Baptist Church Pastor Ryan P. Burge's new book, The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us (Brazos Press, 2026). 

Burge offers a clear portrayal (backed up by lots of social science numbers) of what has happened in and to American religion over the course of the past half century. As the book's subtitle suggests, one of his major claims is that the onetime moderate middle of American Christianity - notably "mainline Protestantism" - has largely disappeared, with all the social costs that entails in terms of decreased exposure to and interaction with people one might be different from or disagree with and reducing eh American religious landscape to increasingly conservative Republican churches and non-religion with little in between.  

The tipping point for Burge seems to have been the 1990s. (That decade increasingly seems to emerge as having been politically and culturally critical. Think of John Ganz, When the Clock Broke). Politics changed decisively with the Newt Gingrich revolution, and that polarizing period also saw the consolidation of the religious right and the official declaration of religious culture war by Pat Buchanan. Combine that with the end of the Cold War, which had importantly been a common conflict against godless communism, and the development of the internet, with its radical reshaping of community and identity.

Burge's social science research highlights how Americans increasingly experience religion as coded conservative, such that those who do not identify with conservative cultural or political positions feel decreasingly at home in religion and more at home with liberal non-religion.  According to Burge, "Americans are increasingly understanding religion in a very clear-cut way: as a tribal marker for politics. Thus, to call oneself a Christian (or even more specifically, an evangelical) is to make a statement about one's political worldview, not really about one's local church or spiritual walk." 

Burge recognizes that "Catholicism has withstood the urge to divide and purify more than any large religious organization in the United States." That said, he doubts the Church can "resist the fragmentation and division that have become so deeply ingrained in American society over the last several years." He notes "that the only reason the Catholic Church has not declined more rapidly is because it has drawn a large number of nonwhite members" at a time when "race is one of the primary cleavages in the American political landscape." 

Hitherto, "white Catholicism was politically heterogeneous." Sunday Mass may have been "the only opportunity that exists for people from diverse backgrounds to meet in a social space on a regular basis. However, with the political sorting happening among white Catholics, this space is transitioning from a place of tremendous diversity to a place that is less and less welcoming to those who find themselves on the left side of the political spectrum."

Meanwhile, Catholic Mass attendance has declined since the 1970s, a trend Catholicism shares with the even more declining mainline Protestant churches.

Back to the larger picture, Burge believes "the average American increasingly understands religion through the lens of tribalism. It's a way to say which political team one plays for, whom they find common cause with, and how they line up during an election season." That said, he examines the persistent debate over whether polarization is primarily an elite phenomenon or has penetrated among more ordinary Americans. He sees a certain disconnect. White evangelicals and Catholics are increasingly moving right; the nonreligious increasingly moving left. Yet, there is data that suggests average Americans tend "to be fairly moderate, nuanced, and pragmatic in how they view some of the most talked about and divisive issues in modern society." At the same time, however, those average Americans are "becoming more and more convinced that they should at least feign support for the most strident voices in their tribe." It appears as if many "listen to the thought leaders of their respective tribes and just can't believe everything they are hearing. However, they do agree that the other side is clearly wrong and deserves to be ridiculed for belonging to a different tribe."

Having presented his disconcerting data, Burge still wants to make the case for traditional, inclusive (what he would call moderate) American religion. "People gathering under one roof to sing together, pray together, and work in common cause to create a better community and a better society will certainly move us closer to the ideals that were set forth by the Founding Fathers of our country. There's nothing simpler and more consequential than people getting up on a Sunday morning, getting dressed, and making their way to a local house of worship. The fate and future of American democracy may be at stake."

Orestes Brownson

 

Orestes Brownson (September 14, 1803 - April 17, 1876), who died 150 years ago today, was perhaps the most intellectually noteworthy lay American Catholic convert of the 19th century. His contemporary (and fellow convert), Paulist Fathers' founder, Servant of God Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) later recalled: “He [Brownson] was the master, I the disciple. God alone knows how much I am indebted to him.” [“Dr. Brownson and Catholicity,” Catholic World, 45 (1887), p. 235.] According to one of Brownson's more recent biographers, Patrick W. Carey, Hecker “was interested in ideas and enjoyed extended discussions with Brownson,” while the older, more intellectual Brownson, although somewhat wary of Hecker’s mystical tendencies, “was drawn to what he criticized in Hecker and knew, instinctively, that Hecker possessed something that he did not.” [Orestes A, Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (Eerdmans,2004), p. 138.] Importantly, Carey highlights how Brownson also “always had an emphasis on the social dimension of Christianity, an emphasis that evolved into his stress upon the church" [p.135].  

Brownson himself recounted his long journey to Catholicism in 1857 in The Convert, which acknowledged how difficult a move it was to become Catholic and how ineffective he considered the Catholic apologetics of the time - "dry, feeble, and unattractive."

Bronson was born and raised in the intense religious atmosphere of the Second Great Awakening. He learned his Bible as a child. He became a Presbyterian, then a Universalist, then a Unitarian, none of which he found fully satisfactory. He was attracted to the 19th-century movements we now remember as "utopian socialism." In the 1830s, he was active in the New York Workingmen's Party, motivated by his "deep sympathy with the poorer and more numerous classes."

When Isaac Hecker first heard him lecture in New York in early 1841, Brownson was a prominent Unitarian minister, journalist, and active social reformer. Later that year, thanks to the initiative of the Hecker brothers, Brownson was back in New York to give more lectures and stayed with them at their home. At the time, besides being an intellectual influence, Brownson also became a personal friend and a help to Isaac and his family as they struggled to come to terms with the increasing intensity of Isaac Hecker's spiritual experience. Although both men moved on to more explicitly religious preoccupations and Brownson's faith in American democracy diminished over time, his early political program never completely lost its salience for Hecker.“The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present moment,” Hecker wrote in 1887, “plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and such as was then within the easy reach of State and national authority, would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of public order. [“Dr. Brownson and the Workingman’s Party Fifty Years Ago,” Catholic World 45 (1887), pp. 205-208.] 

In the 1840s, Brownson concluded that "progress depends on the objective element of life ... on living in communion with God." In 1844, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Boston's Archbishop Fitzpatrick. Brownson's Quarterly Review, which he had founded in 1838, added to his prominence as the best known Catholic convert and apologist of his era, who also enjoyed a large non-Catholic audience.

He remained friends with Hecker for the rest of his life, visiting and corresponding with him, and contributing to Hecker's Catholic World, although theological and editorial disagreements  would eventually cause him to cease writing for the Paulist publication.

Those disagreements were anticipated in Brownson's review of Hecker's second book, Aspirations of Nature. in Brownson's Quarterly Review (October 1857). While praising Hecker and his goal of converting Americans to Catholicism by appealing to "the earnest seeker after truth, who is revolted by the depreciation of reason and. nature by Calvinism," Brownson rejected Hecker's tendency to to treat New England Transcendentalism "as an index of the direction likely to be taken by the American mind." Brownson had a better appreciation of American Protestantism's prospect of renewing and revitalizing itself, producing "more conservative forms of Protestantism." Indeed, Brownson suggested, "the American people are more Evangelical to-day than they were fifteen or twenty years ago." Hecker, Brownson acknowledged, was writing "to the popular mind, in a popular style, and seldom aims at technical precision." He appreciated how Hecker's purpose "led him to dwell on the goods retained after the Fall rather than on those lost by it." That said, however, he faulted Hecker "for not taking sufficient pains to guard his readers against confounding what reason and nature have the power to do with what they actually accomplish." With remarkable prescience, Brownson worried whether, in appealing to "Rationalists or Transcendentalists, we are more likely to be regarded as converting the Church to them, than we are to convert them to the Church." Of particular relevance to the contemporary American situation, Brownson insisted on the empirical fact that there never has been an actual state of pure nature. Hecker's "Earnest Seeker," Brownson observed "has been born and trained in a Christian atmosphere, under direct or indirect Christian influences, for no man absolutely ignorant of revelation and grace could propose his problems in the form he proposes them."

Americans can be converted, Brownson argued, "by addressing that in them which is common to all men, their reason, their heart, and their conscience, not what is peculiar to them, or what is their local or temporary interest or passion." He feared subordinating "the Church to American nationality" and warned that mixing the Church "with a radical party or a conservative party would be to compromise her Catholicity." That last warning, in particular, seems an especially apt one for us all to ponder today.

Photo: Orestes Brownson, Portrait by G.P.A. Healy (1863).

Encountering Augustine in Annaba

President Trump's denunciations notwithstanding, Pope Leo today is in Algeria and has availed himself of this opportunity to visit Annaba, the site of the ancient Roman North African port city of Hippo, once the see of the great Father and Doctor of the Church Saint Augustine (354-430), to whom the Latin Church in general and Pope Leo's religious order in particular are so indebted. Algeria is the first stop in a four-nation African tour. This 10-day trip will also take him to Cameroun, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea, countries with significant Catholic populations.

Algeria is, on the other hand, an overwhelmingly Muslim country; but the Pope's visit there  includes celebrating Mass today in Annaba's 19th-century French colonial Basilica of Saint Augustine, which overlooks the site of ancient Hippo and what are presumed to be the remains of Saint Augustine's actual original basilica. (In 1842, a piece of the relic of Saint Augustine's right arm was brought from Saint Augustine's burial place in Pavia, Italy, and inserted into the arm of a marble statue of Saint Augustine in the modern basilica.) 

By beginning his journey with a day-long visit to the ancient site of Hippo, where Saint Augustine lived in community, preached, and wrote, Pope Leo is highlighting his own debt to Saint Augustine, as an Augustinian friar rooting his papacy in Augustine's vision of the unity of the Church. It will be remembered that on the day of his election last year, Pope Leo described himself as a "son of St. Augustine," and he quoted the ancient North-African saint who famously said, "With you I am a Christian, and for you I am a bishop." The Pope's Augustinianism is evident with his frequently quoting of Augustine in his addresses.

Saint Augustine also wrote a Rule, which has historically been adopted and adapted as a basis for the common life of many Catholic religious communities. Augustine had created his first quasi-religious community in his hometown of Tagaste (Souk Ahras, Algeria) in 388, only a year after his baptism. He did the same in Hippo in 391 after his relocation there as a presbyter, and then a few years later, after being ordained bishop, he set up a similar community for fellow clergy in his house. There, around 397, he wrote the Rule that bears his name. The text, reflecting some of the earliest experiences of cenobitic religious life in the Latin Church, is relatively short, biblically based, and inspired by Luke's image of the Jerusalem community in Acts. Its first precept, therefore is live together in harmony, being of one mind and one heart on the way to God (cf. Psalm 68:7; Acts 4:32). The Rule emphasizes a simple and common life. The simpler a way of life, the better it is suited to servants of God. And the degree to which you are concerned for the interests of the community rather than for your own, is the criterion by which you can judge how much progress you have made.

Augustine is rightly known as the Doctor gratiae ("Doctor of Grace"), because of his emphasis on our fundamental need for God's gratuitous grace - in opposition to the heresy of Pelagius. He could also be called a Doctor of Unity because of his tireless advocacy of the unity of the Church (and the objectivity of the sacraments) against the schismatic African Donatist church. This aspect of Augustine's pastoral ministry particularly resonates with the challenges facing this Augustinian Pope in today's politically polarized and fractured Church and world, in which the Gospel is increasingly overshadowed and disfigured by partisan identifications.

We entreat you, brothers, Augustine implores us as he did his contemporaries, as earnestly as we are able, to have charity, not only for one another, but also for those who are outside the Church. Of these some are still pagans, who have not yet made an act of faith in Christ. Others are separated, insofar as they are joined with us in professing faith in Christ, our head, but are yet divided from the unity of his body. My friends, we must grieve over these as over our brothers; and they will only cease to be so when they no longer say our Father. (Commentary on Psalm 32, 29).

Celebrating a Votive Mass of Saint Augustine in the Augustinian Basilica at Annaba today, preaching in French on Acts' account of the Jerusalem apostolic community and the Gospel's story of Nicodemus, the Pope said: "We can be born anew from above by the grace of God. We should do so then according to his loving will which desires to renew humanity by calling us to a communion of life that begins with faith." We quoted Saint Augustines's famous prayer, Give what you command, Lord, and command what you will, to highlight how Christ gives us the strength to renew our lives completely, no matter how weighed down we are. Referencing the Jerusalem apostolic community, he spoke of "the lifestyle that characterizes humanity when it has been renewed by the Holy Spirit." Recalling that there, "Saint Augustine loved his flock fervently seeking the truth and serving Christ with ardent faith," he invited his hearers today to "be heirs to this tradition."

Photo: Annaba's Basilica of Saint Augustine viewed from the ruins of Hippo.

Quotations from Augustine's Rule are from The Rule of Saint Augustine, tr. Raymond Canning, OSA (Doubleday Image, 1986).

Peace Be With You

 

Today’s annually repeated gospel [John 20:19-31] captures the novelty and uniqueness of the resurrection in its account of the disciples’ two encounters (one week apart) with the Risen Christ. No one witnessed Jesus’ actual resurrection. What was witnessed initially was just an empty tomb – an important condition for the resurrection to be believed, but insufficient evidence in itself. Something more had to happen, and something more did happen – in the form of a series of encounters in which the Risen Lord demonstrated to his disciples that he was the same Jesus who had lived and died (hence the wounds in his hands and side), now alive again in a unexpectedly new and wonderful way (hence his presence among them, although the doors were locked.)

 

Fearful for their safety, the disciples had hidden behind locked doors. Perhaps, this was the same “upper room” where they had so recently eaten the Last Supper and where they would gather again after the ascension to await the coming of the Holy Spirit. If so, how appropriate! Since apostolic times (long before the invention of the modern weekend), Sunday, the first day of the week, has been the special day, the irreplaceably privileged day, when Christians assemble in their churches to encounter Christ, the Risen Lord, present through the power of his Holy Spirit in the sacramental celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist.

 

On that first day of the week, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” How we long to hear those words today in a world again at war. Not for nothing have the Church's bishops for centuries used these words of Jesus as an official greeting. Not for nothing did Pope Leo make those his first public words to the world on the day of his election almost a year ago. Surely, that was no mere wish on his part! Christ, the Risen Lord offers us his peace - not just some transient social or political peace, however, but the peace that conquers fear. It is clear enough from the locked doors just how fearful the disciples must have been.

 

Many of us in fact spend much of our lives behind locked doors – literally so in our modern urban way of life - a sensible practice perhaps, but one obviously rooted in fear.

 

There are also the many locked doors one doesn’t see, but which one feels, nonetheless. We may not all be afraid of exactly the same things the disciples were, but our fears are no less real, wounding us in all sorts of ways, wounds we carry within us, concealing them as best we can.

 

Yet, when Jesus came to his disciples that first day of the week, far from concealing, he showed them his hands and his side – and the disciples rejoiced. As the absent Thomas acutely appreciated, Jesus’ wounded hands and side reveal the continuity between the Jesus they had known and loved, who really and truly died on the cross, and the now-living Risen Christ, who commissions his Church to heal the world’s wounds and impart his forgiveness in the sacraments of his Church: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them.”

 

For the resurrection was not just some nice thing that happened to Jesus - and then leaves the rest of us and everything else in the world completely unchanged. It was – and is – the foundation of what the first letter of Peter, from which we just heard [1 Peter 1:3-9], calls an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading future inheritance to which, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, we already have access here and now in the present.

 

Like Thomas, none of us were there on that first day of the week, but we are here today - on this first day of this week. The first day of the week, the day on which God began the work of creation, has become our day of re-creation, the beginning not just of another week but of a whole new way of life, pointing us forward to the fullness of that new creation in which, living for ever with the Risen Christ, we will finally become most fully human.

Homily for the Second Sunday of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, April 12, 2026.

No Ordinary Fishing Trip

 

Modern pilgrims in Israel easily sense the contrast between the Judean desert (where Jerusalem is) and the relatively lush, green of Galilee (where today’s Gospel [John 21:1-14] story is set). Renewed annually by winter’s life-giving rains, the land around the large lake the Gospel calls the Sea of Tiberias (more commonly called the Sea of Galilee) is at its greenest in spring. It was to that place, at this season of the year, that Peter and six other disciples returned. It had been from those familiar shores that Jesus had originally called them to follow him. Now they’d come home – back to what they knew best. They went fishing.

But this was to be no normal fishing trip!

There’s a church on the shore that marks the supposed site of this event. In front of the altar is a rock, traditionally venerated as the stone on which the risen Lord served his disciples a breakfast of bread and fish. Staples of the Galilean diet, bread and fish seem to be staples of the Gospel story itself! Just a short walk away is another church, marking the site where, not so long before, Jesus had fed 5000+ people with five loaves and a few fish. Presumably, the disciples would have remembered that earlier meal. As surely we should as well, as we also assemble here at the table lovingly set for us by the risen Lord himself, who feeds us with food we would never have gotten on our own.

Typically, in these stories of the risen Lord’s appearances, while he is certainly the same Jesus the disciples had followed in life and who had died on the Cross, something about him is now different. Hence, the dramatic moment when Jesus is recognized, as when the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” But recognizing the risen Christ is but the beginning of a life lived following the risen Lord. So, even before being formally entrusted with his special mission, Peter leads the way, dressing up for the occasion, jumping into the sea and swimming to Jesus ahead of the others.

As his role requires, Peter here is already leading the Church, leading here by example. His example illustrates for the rest of us what it means, first, to recognize the risen Lord and, then, actually to follow him.

Homily for the Friday within the Octave of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, April 10, 2026.