The Shockingly Big (To Me) Divide

My January 26th post was about the adversarial stance many Christians take against one another when discussing the age of the earth.

But hey, if I'm going to rattle about fustian frays within the faith, why stop there?

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It's no secret that at the beginning of Christianity, one church was founded: The one we now call the Catholic Church.

It's also no secret that (if you ignore its significant split into Roman and Eastern branches in the Great Schism of 1054) it was the world's only Christian church for some 15 centuries.

It's neither a secret nor a surprise that because it was run by humans and humans inevitably sin, it was beset by a number of scandals over that arc of time. The scandals obviously did not invalidate the church's teachings and good works, but they were a cumulative blot. Fallout from the scandals eventually resulted in the Protestant Reformation, whose beginning is generally dated to Martin Luther's publication of the Ninety-five Theses in 1517.

The Reformation led to large numbers of Christians leaving the Catholic Church and creating new ones centered around the Bible. A dizzying array of denominations sprang up -- Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Quaker, Amish, etc. -- that are now said to number more than forty thousand worldwide.

That's an awful lot of differentiation within a single religion whose core, salvational tenets boil down to "simply" attesting that Jesus was/is divine; that he was physically resurrected after suffering death by crucifixion; and that it is through his grace that our sins are forgiven and we gain entry to Heaven. You may think that's an oversimplification on my part, but there is no getting around the fact that the essence of Christianity is distilled in Paul's declaration from Romans 10: "If you declare with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved... there is no difference between Jew and Gentile -- the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, 'Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.'" (that last part, in quotation marks, is Paul quoting from Deuteronomy)

I am 50 years old and have been a believer all my life. Of course I have gone through periods of doubt and questioning, but those periods always shook out with my faith becoming stronger and more comprehending because I was forced to dig deeper and think harder.

Along the way I came to believe that most Christians look upon their fellow Christians as, well, fellow Christians -- as spiritual allies who differ on minor points but are all paddling their canoes down the same stream, in the same direction, with the same goal in mind.

My grandfather was a Baptist preacher and I have been a member of a Methodist congregation since 2007. Therefore, to give two examples, the Catholic notion of priests having authority to forgive sin sounds wrong to my ears and the Seventh-day Adventist insistence that Sabbath be observed on Saturday sounds wonky. But I'm not lying when I say it never would have dawned on me to think of those churches as being anything other than Christian, or of their members as being spiritually inferior to me. We all worship the same God and read the same gospels, do we not?

Recently, however, I have been surprised to learn that my thinking on this has been Pollyannaish.

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I already gave a thumbnail sketch of church history and don't want to ride my pony further down that arroyo today. The only other things I'll say about it for now are that: 1) prior to the Reformation the Bible consisted of 73 books, and to this day the "Catholic Bible" still does whereas "Protestant Bibles" have 66; but 2) this is only because in the wake of Luther Protestants decided to remove seven Old Testament books which had been sourced from the Greek Septuagint translation rather than the Hebrew Tanakh; and 3) in any event, the 66 books that the Catholic and Protestant Bibles have in common are the same, and nothing theology-busting happens in the "other seven."

I remember reading of anti-Catholic bias in history books when I was a kid, and hearing my elders talk about it having been a big deal before my time.

I remember my dad saying that during the run-up to JFK's election, some people talked about the prospect of a Catholic president almost as if it would be like having an alien president. But my dad was 12 when JFK got elected, and he did get elected after all, so I kind of discounted those stories even though I knew they weren't BS.

I remember my grandfather telling me that when he was a youngster in Depression-era North Carolina, his mother -- my Granny Stanton, who lived until I was 12! -- once pointed at a Catholic church in town and warned him that "if they ever get you in there, you'll never get out." But Granddaddy was a bit of a storyteller and he always told that one while laughing, so I was never convinced that it was, shall we say, entirely true. I discounted it as well.

Walking around living my life as a youth, I just didn't witness any anti-Catholic prejudice, and since I was abnormally observant for a youth -- reading newspapers and watching the news and eavesdropping on adult conversations wherever we went -- I think I would have noticed such prejudice.

To put things into perspective, I can tell you with certainty that when Doug Williams was the quarterback of my hometown Tampa Bay Buccaneers, lots of people questioned whether he could possibly be smart enough to play that position because he was, you know, black. Don't let any revisionists tell you that Williams's race was only an issue in the minds of one percent of the population, or that most of the doubt concerning him was because the Bucs had a bad O-line and he hadn't played Division I-A college ball. I was there, and yes I was young but I had eyes and ears and a brain, and I know the truth because I witnessed it.

Where was I? Oh yes, if there had been ubiquitous anti-Catholicism where I was when I was growing up in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I would have noticed it. But I didn't see any such thing, despite going to church and always being interested in church stuff and having a preacher for a grandfather.

A friend of mine, whose father came to America from Lebanon, was Catholic. They went to Mass every Sunday and even had a picture of the pope in their house. The only time I have ever attended a Mass was one Sunday morning after I spent the night at their house on Saturday, and nobody in my family minded me going. All the kneeling and heart-crossing seemed rote, but I listened to the priest and it registered that what he said was along the same lines as what I was used to hearing on Sunday mornings.

I did not make it to the age of 50 by living in a bubble. I have encountered people from all walks of faith -- Jews, Catholics, Presbyterians, Jehova's Witnesses, Muslims, Deists, Buddhists, atheists, etc. -- and for most of my life I rarely heard anybody speak with enmity about the totality of the Catholic Church.

Of course I've heard people question things like intercessory prayers... Of course I've heard some people question the propriety of using massive sums of money to build and maintain so many palatial cathedrals... I've met a few individuals who were raised Catholic complain about the use of guilt as a tool for religious rearing... Everybody who is decent gets outraged when clergy members sexually abuse minors, but it has always seemed to me that the people who react most angrily to such abuse in Catholic parishes are Catholics themselves, their anger flowing from love of the church, not loathing of it.

But feverish, consuming antipathy against the whole kit and kaboodle of Catholicism? Against its theology and practices and motivations and sincerity and structure and even against the brains of its followers? Pouring from seemingly every corner of the rest of Christendom? Nope, I don't recall witnessing that from 1971 through 2019, which is why I was stunned to encounter so much of it beginning in 2020.

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"Satanic cult"... "heresy"... "adds its own blasphemous texts"... "false doctrine plain and simple"... "changes the gift of grace into a man-made prison of impossible rules and a Rube Goldberg machine"... "says it has authority over God's word"... "negates the finished work of the cross"..."teaches that Mary was so holy her sex organs defined who she was."

These are a few of the things I have seen written about Catholicism over the past half-year or so, not by atheists or agnostics but by Christians.

It is extremely important for me to point out that remarks like those I included do NOT represent the majority of remarks I have seen from Protestants, and when I think about the way numbers can be skewed -- namely, that people are more likely to pipe up when they are feeling negative than when they are feeling positive -- I find myself realizing that these kinds of remarks probably come from an even tinier minority of Protestants than I first thought.

Still, they are jarringly numerous.

You are probably not surprised to learn that where I have seen them is in online comments sections. After all, comments sections are notorious for being where the lunatic fringe goes to vent its anger.

However I am not talking about "anybody on the planet can comment here" comments sections: Most of these are in closed-group, members-only forums (one in particular) whose memberships consist largely of people who are serious and sincere about "believing the Bible" and "following Christ."

I'm talking about people whose seriousness and sincerity are buttressed by religious knowledge that far exceeds that of the average person; and the groups I'm talking about are not denominational ones, they are Christian ones, groups whose members include both Protestants and Catholics.

In an added dose of irony, the "one in particular" group is designed for apologetics. In other words, its raison d'etre is not to stir the pot between believers, but to help believers make a rational defense of the faith to non-believers.

The whole point of apologetics is to: 1) show non-believers that Christianity has a logical and evidential foundation; 2) eventually persuade non-believers to accept the truth of Christianity; and 3) help Christians themselves to better grasp our faith's rational and empirical bases, in order to counter today's many anti-Christian slanders.

How successful do you think that endeavor will be when members of our faith passionately claim that its largest and most globally recognized church -- the one with more than a billion followers to its name -- is a cesspool of falsehood, deception, and conspiracy?

Even more to the point: How successful do you think the endeavor will be when the people making those accusations seem to be suggesting that their own churches are immune?

Oral Roberts was a United Methodist minister, not a Catholic bishop, when he claimed that God threatened to kill him if he didn't reach an $8 million fundraising goal (equivalent to $18.4 million today) in two months' time.

Jimmy Swaggart and Marvin Gorman were well-known Assemblies of God reverends, not Catholic priests, when Swaggart had Gorman defrocked for committing adultery -- only to have Gorman strike back by hiring his son and son-in-law to surreptitiously take photographs of Swaggart with a prostitute at a seedy motel.

Swaggart also tattled on another famous AOG reverend, the married Jim Bakker, who, it turned out, was having an affair with church secretary Jessica Hahn and using hundreds of thousands of church dollars to pay her off. Bakker was of course keeping two sets of books to conceal the hush money.

The late Jerry Falwell (Southern Baptist) described Bakker as "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history." I am happy that Falwell led a clean and honorable life -- but seeing as how I just mentioned that he was Southern Baptist, I think I should point out that in criminal proceedings between 2008 and 2020, more than 200 leaders and volunteers of Southern Baptist churches in the United States were found guilty of sexual misconduct.

Graham Capill, Presbyterian minister and founder of New Zealand's Christian Heritage Party, was sentenced to nine years in prison for "multiple sexual offenses against girls under 12 years of age."

And how can I possibly write this post, in this year, without achingly typing the words "Ravi" and "Zacharias"?

There is definitely nothing wrong with condemning a pedophile priest who takes advantage of altar boys in a Catholic congregation; or with criticizing a diocese for not taking sufficient steps to investigate that priest and protect those boys after allegations are made; or with demanding that the Vatican Bank be transparent to protect against it being used by criminal depositors to launder money. But if any of my fellow Protestants feel like turning their criticism of specific actions or inactions into an all-out broadside against the Catholic Church writ large, I hope they pause to remember that our own houses are made of glass. I hope they pause to consider that wrongdoings in church are a human failing, not an ecclesiastical one.

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I am not here to pick at the finer points of various doctrines. I think I've made it clear that although I believe Scripture gets things right: 1) we cannot always get Scripture right, because we are fallible and our ability to put ourselves in the minds of the original audiences who spoke the original languages is inherently limited; and 2) as long as we get the big things right (see Romans 10) we won't find ourselves condemned to eternal damnation for misunderstanding some of the smaller things.

However I still have to do some talking about doctrine because a common thread I've noticed in anti-Catholic comments is that people assume their perception of ____ is the reality of ____, and they then use that perception to justify pretty much any criticism of the Catholic Church, even if the criticism has nothing to do with ____.

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a Protestant claim that Catholics "worship" Mary, I would be retired and splitting my time between vacation homes in Hawaii, Tahoe, Blowing Rock, and Manhattan. But if my bank account consisted solely of money deposited whenever I've seen a Protestant bother to ask a Catholic if Catholics worship Mary, I would literally be penniless.

The Catholic Church teaches veneration of Jesus's mother, and for centuries it has used that word to describe its position. Modern dictionaries have blurred the distinction between the two words, but, historically speaking, to "venerate" a person or spirit is clearly not the same thing as to "worship" that person or spirit.

If you consult Catholic doctrine itself and hop a little further back in linguistic history, you will find that it explicitly defines how it regards Mary (versus other figures) using a Latin term plus two late middle English terms rooted in Greek.

Specifically, the highest honor is called latria and is "given to God alone" because he is "infinite" and "obviously He is our just judge." (emphasis mine, and please note that "judge" is singular)

Below latria is dulia, which is "honor given to all the good angels and to all the saints," while Mary is granted hyperdulia because she "is so highly blessed and endowed by God that she stands alone in her class." Although hyperdulia outranks dulia, it is indisputably less than latria. 

The level to which the Catholic Church institutionally recognizes Mary exceeds that of every Protestant denomination I know of. And yes, the iconography and open veneration of her can feel abnormal to us at times. But if we Protestants are being honest with ourselves, we know that Mary was indeed "highly blessed and endowed by God" in a way that no other mortal ever has been, and we are aware that our own pastors and deacons don't deny this. Mary was chosen by God himself, from among all the women who would ever live, to be the one to bear his human body in her womb and raise him in one of the most hostile cultural environments imaginable. How is that not worthy of unique veneration?

Another bone of contention I often see is Protestants claiming that Catholics believe in "works-based" salvation rather than salvation "by faith." These claims range from ignorant to disingenuous to outright dishonest, for they suggest that Catholicism ignores the role a person's faith plays in God's granting of salvation.

To the contrary, actual Catholic teaching is that faith and works are both integral. Meanwhile, many if not most Protestants teach the doctrine of sola fide, which means that salvation stems from "faith alone."

I hope I don't come across as being adversarial when I ask my fellow Protestants: Do you really, truly, in your heart of hearts, believe in sola fide?

If you take it to its logical conclusion, sola fide would mean you have a lifetime "get out of jail free card." It would mean you can live your whole life deliberately committing atrocious sins and no good deeds, and do so without repentance, yet feel secure that you will go to Heaven anyway simply because you "had faith" the whole time you lived that way.

I think there is a false dichotomy at play when people go down the road of "faith versus works." The reason I think so (and this is my opinion without consulting Scripture) is I believe that if a person has true faith, properly understood, he or she will perform good works. I believe an absence of good works proves an absence of true faith; hence, no good works equals no faith and thus there is no salvation.

In any event, nobody can accurately claim that the Catholic position is without scriptural basis. James 2:26 says: "For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead." Or you can read Matthew 25:31-46, which is very stark in its affirmation about who among us will receive "eternal punishment."

I could go on, but I won't. I have wracked my brain trying to think of any sensible reason that certain anti-Catholic claims continue to cling so stubbornly to existence when they are so easily refuted, and the only reason I can come up with is that lots of people are emotionally comfortable with their prejudices and refuse to rethink what they were told as kids.

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Brevity is not my strength, so how do I wrap up this sprawling post?

Let me start by saying that it is not only Protestants who are guilty of intra-faith sniping. Catholics pull triggers too. All of us who believe that Jesus is Lord must do better.

It's just that in my own observations it is usually Protestants who open fire first, and it is usually Protestants who post the comments that strike me as being the most prejudicial and least thought-out.

Let me also say that I am far from innocent. As long as I can remember I have loved to argue and debate, and it is hard to do that without projecting pride and arrogance. The fact that my most recent post was about the ongoing dust-up between Old Earth Creationism and Young Earth Creationism, and my current post is this one, shows that I enjoy sparring even while preaching against it.

When I peruse through the groups in question, I find myself drawn more to the contentious discussions than the peaceful ones. At least 90 percent of the times I comment I do so in "disagree mode," for even if I am saying that I agree with Person A, I am pointedly saying that I think Person B is wrong. I remind myself of the way George Custer was portrayed by Errol Flynn in the old movie They Died With Their Boots On, when, almost immediately after telling his men they must obey orders, he heard distant gunfire and seamlessly declared: "To the devil with the orders, we ride to the sound of the guns!"

Nevertheless, I think I enter the fray doing my best to get it right and to understand both sides and give them both a fair shake. I spent my previous post as an Old Earth Creationist mostly criticizing the Young Earth Creationist movement, and this one as a Protestant mostly criticizing Protestants. I have written nothing in either post that I do not genuinely believe, nor have I written anything without first thinking long and hard about it.

I hope and pray that I am operating in good faith, and that anyone who reads this will be able to see that.

I will close by basically repeating what I said in my last post: When we Christians attack each other tooth and nail, we dramatically impair our ability to carry out the Great Commission. People are watching us and many of them are the very people to whom we are supposed to be appealing, to whom we are supposed to be testifying about the forgiving and loving grace of Christ.

If we treat each other like enemies, why should anyone believe us when we turn around and call each other "brothers and sisters in Christ"? Why would anyone want to join our ranks?

Whether we are Protestant or Catholic, we are all Christians and we need to act like it. We need to operate in good faith and treat each other with kindness and respect. If we fail to do that, we are, in my opinion, crippling our faith.

Note: The definitions I quoted from when talking about latria, dulia, and hyperdulia came from here.