The best class I took at Mundelein was called “Theological Foundations for Preaching the New Evangelization.” It was an elective, and over the course of one semester ten seminarians and our priest-prof got together to write and workshop homilies and talks on various topics and feasts throughout the liturgical year. If you’ve ever been to a wedding or funeral where I’ve preached, those sermons started in that classroom.
The textbook, Preaching to a Post-Everything World, was written by a young pastor and is one of the textbooks on my “short shelf”, those books that I find myself reaching for again and again.
In one class session, we were having a discussion about social media and the Church. Back then (and now, somewhat) I believed that social media could serve a tremendous good for the Church and the world; I bought in very early to the idea that social media and the digital age more broadly could foster what Mark Zuckerberg and others have described as a “digital town square”, where people can meet and share ideas freely and openly.
Our professor made a comment that at the time seemed hyperbolic, but after nearly a decade in ministry I am realizing it was actually prophetic.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “social media will lead to divisions far greater than we can imagine. Even now people are locking themselves inside ghettos of thought.”
Our professor explained that while previous regimes would take dissenters and lock them away in camps, or wall up neighborhoods and whole cities to keep those who disagreed at bay, in our own day these ghettos would still exist but in a completely different way. Today it isn’t some antagonistic regime that threatens to lock a person away from the rest of the world, but it is the person himself. There are no bars and chains, and yet so many are held captive.
CANCELED
What my professor was ultimately seeing in its earliest stages is what today we are calling “cancel culture.” How does a person form their own digital ghetto of thought? It started by deleting people on Facebook whose opinions we found repugnant, so that every time we logged in we knew we would only be exposed to ideas and people that are pleasing and agreeable to us. Then this began to happen in every area of our lives: relatives with different political views are non grata; supporters of the opposite political candidate are, without exception, misguided bigots or tyrants in the making; we don’t like what our pastor said or what our child’s teacher has hanging up in her classroom and we move parishes or abandon our faith, we switch schools and move our homes.
The brain isn’t a muscle, but it is still at significant risk of atrophy if it goes unused. The human person is capable of rationality far beyond anything else living on planet earth, and yet as humanity retreats further and further into its self-made ghettos of petty divisions and cancellations something profound is happening. Like angry lions in the African Savannah or the Orangutans in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, those on both the so-called left and right are behaving like ravenous beasts. Instead of thinking, pondering, questioning, proposing the monster we face is content only to climb to the heights of the moral high ground and scream.
THE MONSTER WE FACE
Like its animal counterpart, the Suburban Social Media Monster lurks in the shadows, comforted only by the dim monitor light and sounds of self-righteous keyboard strokes. The monster lives in the dark, willing to say anything to anyone as long as the anonymity of the digital world protects them, but he retreats far away as soon as he is held accountable for the anonymous utterances.
I’m the one being hyperbolic now. While the Suburban Social Media Monster can be a formidable foe, especially if they choose to take up residence in your email inbox, they live a sad life, believing they are taking up the mantle as The Warrior for Everyman’s Rights and Truths, but in reality they have given up so much autonomy and cognition in exchange for the intoxicating gasses emitted from the real contagion at the heart of our problem: ideology.
CORRUPTION OF THE ABSOLUTE
In The Religious Sense, Fr. Giussani defines ideology as “a preconception that takes up one dimension of reality, one facet of truth, and deforms it into an absolute.” When the “absolute” (what others might call “first principles”) is corrupted then everything from purpose and intention to method is corrupted. It’s the old “house on sand” thing; take away the foundations, and the whole house - no matter how spectacular - crumbles.
Obviously, ideology qua ideology isn’t bad. We’re all motivated by certain worldviews which inform our ideas and how we act. The Christian proposal is, papal plane interviews notwithstanding, “a moral absolutist ideology.” But when ideology deforms the absolute, it morphs and subjects to itself all the other values that formed the foundation of the rest of the thing.
When I was Head of School at Chesterton, a parent was upset with me about something I wrote in a newsletter regarding Catholic Social Teaching, many aspects of which don’t perfectly square with certain aspects of conservative political tenets. When I explained that, as a Catholic school, the teachings of the Church would be the foundation for what we say and do he replied with a very concise sentence which ended up being the only time I ever heard from him: “We picked this school because it is conservative.”
Another example, related to education. I am familiar with a large parish school in the suburbs who is partnering with a certain Catholic university to present a series of three, 30 minute presentations this school year on topics pertaining to social-emotional awareness. The school hosted an online zoom meeting for parents to meet the facilitators from The University and review the curriculum; 12 parents attended. However, the school principal has received upwards of 50 individual messages from parents who found the facilitator’s X profile, where she writes about Kamala Harris and features a dog wearing a rainbow bandana. Based on these observations, the school is now being accused of pandering to the leftist social agenda, implementing Woke DEI curriculum, and disrupting the parents’ trust in and expectations of the private school they’d chosen. Some parents have suggested the school stay in its lane and focus on math, science, reading, and religion while the parents handle all conversations about feelings and emotions.
But upon review of the curriculum itself, one will find nothing of the sort of things the parents are concerned about. There are quotations from the Scriptures (the RSV, no less, which some refer to as a more “conservative translation”) as well as references to the Catechism and other Catholic Social documents.
So the question I would want to ask here is this: what is the absolute? Helping students understand themselves, each other, and the weirdness of the world in way that’s age appropriate and faithful to Catholic teaching or forfeiting the adventure because it doesn’t smell conservative enough for me and the others locked in my ghetto?
A POST-EVERYTHING WORLD
The world is indeed post-everything, where nothing is true or reasonable if I don’t want it to be.
The Ideology Monster feeds on fear. The parents in the scenario I mentioned aren’t malicious swamp creatures, they’re just nervous. We’re all nervous. The world as we know it is passing away. Recently I buried a woman who lived to be 101, and her family remarked how sad it made her to watch the whole world she once knew pass away. The pillars and institutions that we depended on for order and meaning are crumbling before our very eyes, and this is a time of tremendous cultural upheaval.
The anger of those lost in ideology stems precisely from the belief that where they’d settled was safe from all this crumbling. Anger is almost never the primary emotion; anger is one of the most common reactions before a person finally sees and admits his sadness, grief over expectations, or fear.
It’s hard to know what to think, how to think it, and where to express it. That’s why it’s more important now than ever for Christians to recommit themselves to thinking and to learning what Jesus proposes to the world. The time is coming when ideologies, political rhetoric, and the ghettos of thought will be exposed for the sham and waste that they are and the world will be left looking for something totalizing and reasonable.
Thank you! I always appreciate your sharing your experiences and perspective in a way that brings people together. You have a gift!