We
are preparing to send our first-born off to his freshman year of college in the
fall, for which reason a thoughtful friend has lent us a book called DisOrientation:
The 13 “isms” That Will Send You To Intellectual “La-La Land”. It is a collection of essays edited by John
Zmirak with contributions by such luminaries as Jimmy Akin, Robert Spencer, and
Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (a.k.a. “Fr. Z”), among others. Its purpose is to prepare prospective college
students for the various intellectual traps that await them, such as
Relativism, Hedonism, Utilitarianism, etc.
One of my favorite essays in the collection is Peter Kreeft’s
contribution on Progressivism. He starts
out by clearly delineating what it is to be a “progressive”:
The
opposite of Progressivism is conservatism or traditionalism. A conservative, by
definition, is a happy person, one who is happy with what is. It is only for that reason he wants to
conserve it. A progressivist, on the
other hand, is by definition an unhappy person, one who is unhappy with what
is. It is only for that reason he wants
to change it . . . Adam and Eve were conservatives until the Devil made them
into progressives. For the Devil himself
was the first progressivist. The other
angels were happy with God and His will, but the Devil wanted to progress to
something better.
Now, Kreeft may be having a bit of mischievious fun
with his argumentum ad Satanam, but his point is nonetheless valid. Satan’s chief sin was Pride, a belief that he
knew better, and isn’t the belief that one’s self knows better than the
unenlightened rubes of the past and the ignorant and/or evil-minded boobs of
the present the driving force of progressivism?
Kreeft
notes various “justifications” for the assumptions of Progressivism: evolution,
technological progress, etc., and he uses the term “chronological snobbery” to sum
up the attitude that something is undesirable simply because it is not
new. The progressive’s dislike of “what
is” is not the result of any actual qualities of what is, but is based solely on when what happens to be ising. That’s why the progressives
rely on “justifications”: they need to persuade others who are actually
interested in the situation on the ground. While Kreeft doesn’t put it quite
this way, a consequence of all this is that the positions and policy
prescriptions of progressives very often are not rooted in reality but in the
felt need to be “progressing” to . . . well . . . who knows?
Progress? I think not . . . |
The
progressive tendency is not simply a political view, it is a mindset that finds
expression in politics, in culture, and in the Church. It is particularly
problematical in the Church, because the Church is founded on the unchanging
revelation of an eternal God. While there is a place for “progress”, here
progress consists in faithfully applying the eternal principles to new
situations (development), in making the Church more fully what it has
always been, rather than “progressing” to something new. We should keep this
combination of principle and practice in mind.
Despite its Divine source, there’s something very down-to-earth and
human about Catholic Doctrine: Christians have found it not only possible to
live by that teaching, but have flourished through it: “I came that they might
have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
That’s
why I find it odd that those who advocate “progressing” beyond the magisterial
teaching of the Church claim that they are drawing on the “lived experience” of
Christians. That’s nonsense, of course, because as we saw above Church teaching has always been the lived
experience of Christians. In its place they would put things that have never
been, such as homosexual marriage, or things that have been tried and failed,
such as the panoply of ecclesial innovations that can be found in the rapidly
declining “mainstream” Protestant denominations.
In the
end, “Christian Progressivism” is an oxymoron, and a double-irony. First, progressives advocate moving away from any
signs of the Transcendent (Eucharistic Adoration, Ad Orientem worship,
incense and bells, etc), and from Biblical and magisterial moral teaching; for
a Christian, however, progress means precisely moving closer to the
transcendent God. Not only that, they
fail even on their own terms: they reject the 2,000 years of human experience
embodied in Sacred Tradition, all the while claiming to align themselves more
closely with experience. Progressivism
is problematic in any context, but in the Church it is impossible. Instead, we should follow St. Paul’s advice: “So
then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by
us” (2
Thessalonians 2:15).
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