By Anthony Esolen
The Department of Defense recently stirred controversy by removing Mormons from the “Christian” category, in order to distinguish more clearly between chaplains and military personnel regarding who could best assist them in matters of faith and customs. The label appears to have been intended as a generic marker, since the department also proceeded to separate Catholics, Lutherans, and Pentecostals from that category, granting each a distinct status.
The decision caused an uproar and many hurt feelings among Mormons, who insist that they are Christians and that they regard Jesus as their Lord and Savior. I am willing to credit their sincerity, although what their church teaches about the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, angels, and other planets strikes me as a jungle of nineteenth-century American mysticism and utopianism.
It is as if the religious sensibility of the northern United States had come to a fork in the road, and the Unitarians had gone in one direction, toward exchanging faith for social improvement, conventionality, and vague inner feelings; while Joseph Smith went in the other, toward the creation of myths and the building of a society from its foundations. Which of them prevailed seems obvious. Where is the Unitarian Tabernacle Choir?
The real question for Catholics is not whether Mormons are Christians, but whether all of us Catholics are Catholics, or Christians, in reality. What is the minimum standard that separates the Christian from the non-Christian?
It must be found in the answer to the question: “Who is Christ?”.
We have that question answered for us in Scripture. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” says Peter. (Matthew 16:16) “He is the image of the invisible God,” says Paul. (Colossians 1:15) He is the Word, who in the beginning was with God, and who is God, says John. (John 1:1)
Only as such can He be our Savior, rather than a merely great man whom we should emulate; although for a long time, the Unitarians and their cousins the Quakers earnestly desired in their hearts to honor Christ as Lord, even though their doctrines had degraded Him. And now, it seems, they no longer even bother. Jesus might as well be Buddha, or Buddha be Jesus.
One wonders what answers might be obtained from Catholics whose Mass attendance is irregular. They will surely vary from one nation to another. I would very much like to believe that in Italy, the land of my ancestors, the Son of God has not been stripped of His throne beside the Father, united to Him in the bosom of the Holy Spirit from all eternity. But perhaps I am underestimating the corrosion that sets in with the creed of humanitarian and technological progress, which must relegate even Jesus to a mere stage along the way.
Suppose we go further and, among Catholics who agree that Jesus is the Son of God, coeternal with the Father, we ask them about His full and real presence in the Eucharist.
I am told that Martin Luther, frustrated with Ulrich Zwingli’s sacramental anti-visualism, took a knife from his pocket and carved the words Hoc est corpus meum into the table where they were seated, asking him: “Which of these words do you not understand?”.
Is the American Catholic less sacramental than Luther? Or rather, in which churches will one find such Catholics who do not embrace this teaching with full assent and joy? Either they pay no attention to what they say, or they surround it with reservations, or they say it with an uneasy conscience when they pray: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.”
A central element of all Catholic teaching on the social life of man is marriage, inscribed in the bodily nature of man and woman, instituted by God in the beginning before the Fall, confirmed by Jesus and raised to the dignity of an indissoluble sacrament. Without marriage and the family, there is no real society to which social teachings can be applied, just as medicine is not applicable to a body torn to pieces.
What we see in its place among us is a specter, a simulacrum of the social. Loot all the goods of the rich and distribute them everywhere, and still you will not have a society, not when children are few, marriages are fragile, and the people are not a people but an aggregate, united by no common worship, and no longer even by a common culture; nothing more than what the mass media have to offer.
And yet we encounter Catholics who pride themselves on rejecting the Church’s teachings that apply to marriage and family life, using her economic and political teachings as cover, which is like handing deodorant and makeup to someone dying of gangrene.
I do not judge any soul here. How close an individual Mormon may be to Christ, I cannot know. Only God can know. The same holds for the Catholic who is a tangle of intellectual and even moral confusion. I could say, judging by his beliefs, that he is a bad Catholic, or that he is not a Catholic at all, perhaps not even a Christian.
But it is no novelty in the world that there may be bad Christians and virtuous pagans, insofar as things appear to our eyes. The danger does not lie in how others look at us, but in how we look at ourselves, since man’s capacity for self-deception is unlimited.
If no one should say: “I am a good Catholic because I believe everything the Church teaches,” then much less should anyone say: “I am a good Catholic even though I do not believe everything the Church teaches.” Much less: “I am a good Catholic because I do not believe what the Church teaches for now,” presuming to know what she is going to teach in its place, as if she could contradict herself without destroying her very essence and her right to teach anything.
There, and not in what the Department of Defense did, lies the real problem.
About the author
Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and, most recently, The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is a distinguished professor at Thales College. Be sure to visit his new website, Word and Song.