Jeffrey Rickman and I took up our ongoing conversation again last week on culture, religion, ritual, and Catholicism. The first part of our discussion focused on the recent death of Pope Francis and his legacy for the Catholic Church and for civilization generally. For the remainder, we tackled the ever-recurring struggle between different versions of Christianity: those that are big on ritual, and those that aren’t. The iconoclastic impulse is most obvious in low-church Protestantism (no rituals! No icons! White walls!), but the Pope Francis papacy and a lot of post-1960s Catholicism have indulged in anti-ritualism too. Jeffrey and I delved into why ritual may or may not be a good thing, and why Protestants (and some popes) aren’t big fans of it.
The most compelling part of the conversation comes toward the end. Earlier on, Jeffrey expressed the hope for a hardline conservative Catholic pope who’ll preach fire and brimstone about why Protestants are all destined for hell. As a Protestant, he wants Catholics to be super-Catholic and Protestants to be super-Protestant. Then we won’t be walking on eggshells. Our arguments might actually get somewhere.
Well, the next pope won’t tell Protestants they’re all going to hell, because that’s not Catholic doctrine. But, inspired by Jeffrey’s desire for raw debate, I say something in the latter part of our conversation that I’ve been convinced of for a long time: Protestantism can’t anchor a culture. Not for the long term.
Really. It just can’t.
Protestantism is the paradigmatic anti-ritual movement. It rejected Catholic rituals from the get-go (to varying extents, depending on the sect), instead emphasizing the Scriptures, divine grace, and personal salvation by faith alone. All versions of Protestantism denigrated outward works while elevating inner holiness (or piety, or sanctity, or faith, or something similar, depending on which Reformer you’re reading). In many parts of Europe, zealous Reformers destroyed Catholic statues and art, which seemed idolatrous and played a central role in ritualistic Catholic worship.
In the centuries since then, the Protestant faith has always taken a form that you might call inside-out. It teaches that actions come from inside, animated by the state of one’s private interior. There’s good scriptural warrant for this: in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus dismisses quibbles about whether to eat kosher, assuring his disciples that what goes into the body from outside can’t make it impure; rather, it’s the inner thoughts, the heart itself, that make us pure or impure.
This passage is an important warning not to overemphasize the letter of the religious law. Jesus wants us to know that religious rituals and rules are here to serve us, not the other way around. But Protestantism has taken that warning to an extreme that has, frankly, upended civilization itself and led us to the threshold of cultural meltdown.
If you tell everyone that rituals don’t matter, that all we need is to welcome Jesus into our hearts, you get a lot of things. Maybe saved souls is one of them. But what you don’t get is culture. In fact, as the centuries grind on and the logic of anti-ritualism works itself out, you inevitably secularize and arrive at what Philip Rieff called an anti-culture.
Why? Well, what makes a culture? Imagine one of those cultural festivals in a big city. Different immigrant groups perform their ancestral dances on stages, sell authentic food and art in stalls. You go to the Balinese tent to see the beautiful Balinese cultural dances — almost all of which were originally linked to temple worship and Hindu myths. The entrance to the Indian tent is guarded by a statue of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god. In the Mexican tent, amidst the carts selling excellent street tacos, you find a candle shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Ukrainian tent sells beautiful, delicate handmade Easter eggs. And the whole thing takes place near city hall, whose facade boasts fluted columns whose original function in ancient Greece was religious worship.
Culture is anchored in ritual. Nearly everything delightful or impressive we associate with any particular culture — all the interesting dances and costumes we trot out for multicultural UN celebrations and other goody-goody festivals — sprang originally from its rituals. The very word “culture” contains the word “cult,” after all.
But ritual means doing impractical and formalized things — performing actions, uttering words, singing songs, placing candles in front of statues — just because you’re supposed to. Not necessarily because you feel like it, not because doing so expresses some true, authentic inner self. No, you do them just because it’s normative for your culture or family or faith, because it’s the appropriate day or time, because your priest or some other authority told you to.
In the liberated West, we value authenticity. We insist that people should only do the things they genuinely feel like doing, or, failing that, the things they must do for their jobs. We’re happy to do useless things like rock climbing or board games, but only if they’re for recreation. There’s not much room for impractical, useless activities that are nevertheless obligatory, which we didn’t individualistically choose or invent, that are imposed on us from outside.
Well, that’s the logic of Protestantism taken to its natural conclusion. If you’re always looking inward, assuming that your personality works from the inside out, you’ll eventually question all the stuff that makes up the very fabric of any culture. The Balinese dances? Idolatry. The Ukrainian Easter eggs? Unnecessary. The candle in front of the Virgin? Idle superstition.
You’ll finally converge on what we have now: an anti-culture, a society that runs solely on market principles and science, whose featureless, monolithic architecture is the natural outgrowth of the blank walls and stripped altars of the Reformation. A society from which, I might add, real humans are slowly and surely being banished as backward, inefficient relics of biology.
How long will it take to get from there to here? From the dissolution of the monasteries to the aesthetics of nowhere? From the advent of sola scriptura to the technological Singularity?
Simple: about 500 years.
I mean it. We’re standing at the end of the culture that Protestantism created. It was called the modern era. Protestantism unleashed tremendous energies, but it was always inherently unstable. It was destined to burn itself out, to exhaust its fuels faster than it could replace them. Its ethos is inside-out, but the human animal is built to work outside-in: to look to culture to shape us.
This doesn’t mean Protestantism has no virtues. Plenty of Latin American former Catholics tell stories about how converting to Evangelicalism helped them to finally put their lives together, to stop drinking, to get serious about work. Protestantism can help straighten out individuals.
And Protestantism is the source code for the Lutheran Scandinavian countries, Anglican England, Calvinist Scotland, the Reformed Netherlands. These countries helped create modernity and, on the whole, have been notable for working pretty well, for good governance, for technological prowess.
But Protestantism can’t anchor a culture for the long term. It was always time-limited.
And I think the time is up.
Watch the video to enjoy the whole conversation.
Watch the first part of our discussion here:
Live with Jeffrey Rickman: The Return of Hierarchy?
Jeffrey Rickman and I recorded a Live conversation yesterday about my February post on the return of hierarchy as a source of meaning. Jeffrey and I were seminarians and friends at the Boston University School of Theology together, entering grad school right as the Great Recession hit. He got his M.Div. and skedaddled, while I stuck around BU for a PhD …
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