Ross Douthat: "Is there a future for Christianity"?

Ross Douthat has a superb essay titled "Is there a future for Christianity? The shape of things to come."

Excerpt:

The story of Christianity has always featured unexpected resurrections. Eras of corruption give way to eras of reform; sinners and cynics cede the floor to a rush of idealists and saints; political and intellectual challenges emerge and then are gradually surmounted. 

There is no single form of Christian civilization, in the same sense that there is no stereotypical Christian life; across two millennia, the faith has found ways to make itself at home in the Roman court and the medieval monastery, the Renaissance city and the American suburb alike. 

In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton describes what he calls the "five deaths of the faith" - the moments in Western history when Christianity seemed doomed to either perish entirely or else fade to the margins of a post-Christian civilization. 

It would have been natural for the faith to decline and fall with the Roman Empire, or to disappear gradually after the armies of Islam conquered its ancient heartland in the Near East and North Africa was conquered by the armies of Islam. It would have been predictable if Christianity had dissolved along with feudalism when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, or if it had vanished with the anciens regimes of Europe amid the turmoil of the age of revolutions. And it would have been completely understandable if the faith had gradually waned away during the long nineteenth century, when it was dismissed by Marx, challenged by Darwin, denounced by Nietzsche, and explained away by Freud. 

But in each of these cases, an age of crisis was swiftly followed by an era of renewal, in which forces threatening the faith either receded or were discredited and Christianity itself revived. Time and again, Chesterton noted, "the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs." But each time, "it was the dog that died."

Douthat suggests that the future of Christianity lies more in the sanctity of its adherents than in the seminars of its theologians or the political prescriptions of its lobbyists:

[A] renewed Christianity should be oriented toward sanctity and beauty. In every crisis in the Christian past, it has been saints and artists - from Saint Francis down to John Wesley, Dante to Dostoevsky - who resurrected the faith from one of its many deaths. The example of a single extraordinary woman, Mother Teresa, did more for Christian witness in the twentieth century than every theology department and political action committee put together. 

The critic Alan Jacobs points out that remains of highbrow Christian culture in the United States is sustained, to a remarkable extent, by literary works rather than by institutions - by Wise Blood and Walker Percy, Auden's verse and The Chronicles of Narnia, Thomas Merton's memoirs and "The Four Quartets." As Joseph Ratzinger put it, shortly before becoming Benedict XVI: 

"The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb."...

The future of American religion depends on believers who can demonstrate, in word and deed alike, that the possibilities of the Christian life are not exhausted by TV preachers and self-help gurus, utopians and demagogues. It depends on public examples of holiness, and public demonstrations of what the imitation of Christ can mean for a fallen world. We are waiting, not for another political saviour or television personality but for a Dominic or a Francis, an Ignatius or a Wesley, a Wilberforce or a Newman, a Bonhoeffer or a Solzhenitsyn. 

Only sanctity can justify Christianity's existence; only sanctity can make the case for faith; only sanctity, or the hope thereof, can ultimately redeem the world.

There is much more in Douthat's essay. Please read the whole thing.

I agree with much of what he says. But I found three things oddly missing,

First, Douthat scolds liberals and conservatives alike, but bizarrely he makes only brief tangential mention of the central moral issue that divides our nation: abortion. Abortion is not merely one more political squabble among others on the Christian balance scale. There is no "Christian" perspective supportive of abortion, and liberals who align themselves with a Democratic Party whose platform endorses killing children in the womb are engaging in extraordinarily grave sin.

There is no issue parallel to abortion among conservatives. No Tea Party doctrine, even in the most liberal interpretation, deviates from Christian morality like abortion does.

Taxation policy and federal deficits are prudential judgements. Abortion is mortal sin.

Second, Douthat makes no reference to the manifest active hostility of the Democratic Party to Christianity. The contraception mandate is an organized (and rather clever) effort to force Christians from the public square, and the drive to establish gay "marriage" seems a prelude to assaulting Christians who by conscience cannot participate in nor condone gay nuptials with hate crime and discrimination prosecutions.

Republicans have consistently supported public participation and constitutional rights of Christians. The Democrats at their recent national convention booed God. The Christian position is not midway between the parties, for goodness sake.

Why would Douthat, in an otherwise thoughtful essay on morality and Christian politics, omit abortion and the active Democrat hostility to Christianity? I guess he needs to keep his job at the New York Times.

Third, Douthat makes no mention of the fact that sanctity is not really a code of ethics or the mere imitation of poverty or charity or chastity.

Sanctity is a personal encounter-- a relationship-- with Jesus Christ. It is in this relationship, which we call faith but by which we mean much more than passive trust, that we and our brothers and sisters are saved. In my view, it is the relationship with Christ that manifests itself to others as sanctity. I see it in our Christian ancestors-- St. Francis and Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer and Solzhenitsyn and John Paul II.

And I see it, with real clarity, in Pope Francis, who is calling each of us again to sanctity-- to know Christ personally, and to allow Him to work through us.

It is Christ-in-us, which is actual sanctity, that is the past, present, and future of Christianity.