On Silent Majorities
The silent majority is a fairly ubiquitous rhetorical device. Often enough, we like to imagine ourselves a part of it. Even if the silent majority isn’t being falsely invoked in some cause – it prefers to be left alone – it certainly is real. At some point you realize in life that people are more likely to tell you what you want to hear than to tell you what they really think. Anonymous surveying has cleared up some of this, but even that isn’t always reliable. For example, a survey is taken every Thanksgiving asking people how much they plan to spend on Christmas gifts over the Thanksgiving Day weekend. When the results are compared to retail receipts, we find the data is near worthless. Compounding this issue is that people have a terrible tendency to change their minds and don’t really plan near as much as they think they do. Think of the story of the college aged boy who tells his roommates that he has had it and is finally going to break up with his girlfriend. Later we find out that instead he bought her dinner and a movie. The relevant information often isn’t before us.
In the post election wrap up, one commentator termed many of the ensuing debates as if the [whatever] party were more like us and less like them, we would have won. (I believe it was Ross Douthat who coined this, but I can’t find the citation at the moment.) In the 2008 case, it was opposing sides of the fusionist compromise in the Republican Party. At its root, it is a form of data mining. It generally follows the path of picking a handful of issues, declaring them the essence of an ideology, and then claiming a constituency. One of the issues this was done with was immigration. In Arizona, a number of candidates ran on little more than restricting immigration. Generic support for restricting immigration in Arizona is high. The candidates lost, and what we learned was that it was not enough to be ‘right’, as in with the people, on just one issue in order to be elected. Here in Wisconsin, we saw a similar thing with cutting taxes. The Republicans were very successful twenty years ago primarily running on cutting taxes. They saw diminishing returns each year they ran on it once they started cutting taxes.
In the church, you’ll see similar debates. If you were just paying attention to the Internet, you’d swear the greatest challenges the Catholic Church faces today are too many priests committing crimes, too many bishops covering them up, not ordaining women, not enough places offering the extraordinary rite, the wrong kind of music, not enough Latin, or some variation. While to varying degrees different interest groups are represented in the above, none of them are going to move many people either way. The biggest problem in the church right now is incredibly simple. For a while the model has been for people to leave the church when they are 18 to 20 and come back when they are ready to get married or have their children baptized. No, this approach wasn’t ever formally endorsed, but knowing that the kids eventually were coming back kept people from being apocalyptic. There is a reason after all why the topic of annulments is so front and center: they provide relief for people trying to re-enter the church, and a lot of folks need them. Well, children stopped coming back to their hometown when they were ready to settle down. Lacking any social pressure to be in the church, they started not coming back. The Old Line Protestants saw it first. Now we and the evangelicals are seeing it. (Evangelicals are retaining about 5% of their youth.) Before it became apparent that the conservative churches were emptying, it was proffered that we were dealing with an orthodoxy vs heterodoxy issue or a conservative vs liberal issue. Now it appears to be more a case that a trend emerged in a wealthier class before moving downward.
For those hoping for an easy solution to this easy problem, I’m afraid I’m not going to be much of a help. The bishops are of course aware of the issue. Theology on Tap is one program that is trying to help retain people through the transition period. Life Teen masses were designed to get youths accustomed to going to church on their own in the hope that they would continue to do so once they had left the nest. Additionally, it has the purpose of helping to induce a social network of like minded peers that will hopefully persist once the kids go to college. I’m not here to rip on the programs, because I don’t really have any better ideas at the moment. The convert model is pretty much out of the question: there are no longer enough converts or immigrants to keep up with the youth lost due to the fact that Catholicism has a high degree of market penetration presently. The Orthodox in this country have already moved that way in some of their jurisdictions, and the rest will likely see enormous pressure to do so, but they are starting at a significantly lower base. What I do know is that the items in my preceding paragraph won’t really effect this trend at all. And if there is a lesson to be had in all this, I suppose that will have to be it: silent majorities are hard to hear.
Update: It turns out it was Michael Brendan Dougherty, not Ross Douthat. MBD also has a new blog here. Here is the Dougherty Doctrine:
At the end of the day, the arguments all seem to boil down to something similar: If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you.
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I think the post keeps it real on many levels. Many of the pet liturgical or theological causes that I have advocated in the past are just so many smoke and mirrors. Between the whole “people really want tradition” to the whole “people really want a faith that is relevant”, maybe people are missing the point. Maybe what we really need is warm bodies in pews. It’s hard to have a faithful of any kind if there are no actual faithful involved.
A lot of the Church bureaucracy, from the Pope to the RCIA director are complicit in the idea of making a “smaller church”. They will accept only people who are just like them or have no one at all. I know for a fact, from involvement in the traditionalist movement, that many of their kids don’t keep the faith, and all of them have “good Catholic upbringings”. “But what did I do wrong?” the parents ask. The priests guilt trip the parents into thinking that they were too worldly, not prayerful enough, and so forth. But that is just a bunch of baloney.
In Catholicism, individual committment and community go hand in hand. Your personal relationship with Jesus has everything to do with a concrete grouping of people with a historical past and a common present. Maybe we are getting too bogged down in ideology, where we give the whole “my way or the highway” spiel to the vast majority of the rest of the Church. As a friend of mine says, the better is often the enemy of the good. Perhaps we need to accept the “good enough” Church.
Annulments are a disgrace. They are agood reason to NOT RETURN to the Catholic Church.
Even when one cannot be purchased or fabricated into existence (because of truthful opposition of the faithful Catholic maliciously abandoned spouse’s efforts) the Catholic Church openly and scandalously welcomes adulterous “couples” back into the Church, making the lack an annulment a mere “inconvenience”.
The Church is effectively cooperating in hastening the murder/death of an innocent spouse, but this is STEADFASTLY REFUSED as a reality, not unlike the denials of child abuse, in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise. The Church is contented to wait until the broken and demoralized faithful spouse dies or ends their life in despair at being “ignored out of existance” by the Catholic Hierarchy. Then the “real couple” can be married in the Catholic Church and the “painful period” will be over.
UNTIL GOD HAS HIS SAY!
This Church is THE SAME CHURCH that supported child abuse. Gods speed to its reduction to a faithful remnant.
Benedict is a cowardly reprobate.
A Former Catholic, maliciously abandoned at the request of the Catholic clergy in order to cooperate in the destruction of a valid, sacramental marriage.
Many of the pet liturgical or theological causes that I have advocated in the past are just so many smoke and mirrors.
I’ve been there too.
I know for a fact, from involvement in the traditionalist movement, that many of their kids don’t keep the faith, and all of them have “good Catholic upbringings”. “But what did I do wrong?” the parents ask. The priests guilt trip the parents into thinking that they were too worldly, not prayerful enough, and so forth.
The priests’ argument would be more supportable if the ones that did stick around were the more orthodox and less worldly, etc. My experience is that it is pretty close to random who stays around. Among those that stayed, there are so many poorly formed people. And then there are the ones that could quote Augustine that didn’t stay.
Your personal relationship with Jesus has everything to do with a concrete grouping of people with a historical past and a common present.
We already know that people have thrown out the past part. Increasingly they are throwing out the present. People have a tripartite division of friends: people they work with, people they drink with and have play dates with, and people they go to church with. Very rarely do the groups mix.
Well I drink with the people I go to church with. We even get together so the kids can play while we make beer.
I just shared a cold one with my pastor on Teusday evening.