The Smiling Face of Erasure 

I was recently interviewed on CTV, Canada’s national broadcaster, about Pope Leo’s start in the papacy. The interviewer asked a question that I have been asked in scores of interviews about the papacy of either Leo or Francis: “Will he finally modernise the Church?”

When interviewers ask this question, they are not asking whether the Church will use the latest smartphones, AI, or avail itself of TikTok for evangelizing. They do not mean modernising in a technological sense. Nor do they mean modernising in an organizational sense, tapping into the latest ideas about leadership or management efficiency.

No, what they mean, and indeed what they have meant when asking about modernising for well over 150 years, is simply this: “Will the Church start looking more like us, adopting our values and principles?”

The word “us” is important here. Because the people who ask this question—be they state broadcasters, academics, or journalists—are committed to core values and principles that they share. These are the core values, they believe, of the modern West. Inclusion is good; exclusion is bad. The past is suspect because the past excluded groups, and these groups, be they women or people who like to have sexual intercourse with those of the same sex, must now be included. Tradition, then, is suspect because it is a dusty reliquary of this repressive age. Democracy, all right-thinking people know, is good; and the fact that all nominal Catholics don’t vote on their leaders is undemocratic, and therefore bad.

I could go on, but we all know what these values are. They are totemic in university courses, cheesy movies, TV shows, advertising, and newspaper articles. They are the values of liberalism, if you want to be pedantic, or simply “good values” if you are so immersed in the West that you don’t know they are unnuanced or contestable. They are presented not as one option among many, but as the neutral, inevitable endpoint of history.

Thus, the question about the Church “modernising,” in the nineteenth century as much as today, is a question about the Church being absorbed into “modernity” or liberalism. When Pope Pius IX was pressured to reconcile with “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization” in the 1860s, he was being asked to do exactly what pundits demand of the Pope today. The demand is constant because the project of modernity is totalizing.

The story of the modern West is a story about institution after institution, group after group, merging with this ethos. From monarchies to governments, to nations, to sporting bodies, to universities, to media, to businesses, to all people, modernity is the process of erasing difference and specificity in the name of “progress.” It is an inexorable process where all are converted to these principles. The media and universities serve as the evangelists and clergy; they are the frontline missionaries.

Crucially, they don’t believe they are colonising; they simply believe they are working for progress, justice, or the good. They are faithful clerics, devoid of doubt. They are seeking to erase the identity of others for the good of justice, progress, and even for the good of those they are seeking to convert. This is not the violent imperialism of the gunboat, but the soft imperialism of the HR department, the grant committee, and the broadcasting standard. It conquers not by destroying the body, but by rewriting the soul.

When I am asked, then, about the Church modernising, I am being asked about whether the Church is willing to be colonised. Is the Church ready to accept reality and bend the knee to the dominant ideology, or to fight on, like a crazed Japanese soldier on an island in the Pacific who has not realised that the war has long ended?

While this language of colonization and combat may seem rhetorical, it is important to know that groups that “modernise” are not simply groups who get a makeover. They do not just look like they are part of the same “brand” as modern liberalism while retaining their nature and identity. Yes, sporting bodies are still in the business of sport while acting as evangelists for the dominant ideology by flying rainbow flags and wearing rainbow laces. Apple can still sell iPhones, and Disney can still make movies while evangelizing with their wallpaper or content.

When they modernise, they can still retain their core focus to a significant extent. Just like colonised countries could keep the vast majority of their revenue, only kicking up a small amount of taxes to the Empire, they could fight their own battles most of the time and only needed to send their soldiers to help the colonising country occasionally. Colonization does not always mean complete erasure of function; often, it just means a realignment of allegiance.

But the Church’s focus is on thought and action, faith and works. It centers on how to live, what to believe, and which goods and truths we need to relate to in order to be conformed to this good and truth. Whether in media, business, or academia, the modern ideology that binds them also focuses on what to believe (about inclusion and exclusion), which goods and truths to cohere to (about freedom and liberation), and how to live (even down to the accepted ways to have and not to have sex).

Therefore, for the Church, colonisation by the ideology of the modern West would not be partial; it would be total. The Church does not sell a product that can be packaged in a Pride flag; the Church is a way of life that claims total allegiance. While a Muslim accountant could convert to Christianity and still be an accountant, a Muslim Imam could not convert while remaining an Imam. Microsoft can still sell software, as long as users can select “Pride” colour schemes in Outlook, while becoming one with the truth of the modern West. But Churches cannot.

The moment a Church agrees that the highest good is “inclusion” rather than “holiness,” or “autonomy” rather than “obedience,” it has ceased to be a Church and has become a spiritual NGO for the liberal state.

Churches that try to do so quickly become the evangelical vanguard of modern liberal values. They cease to be preachers of the Gospel and instead become preachers of modern liberal values. We see this in the mainline Protestant denominations that have embraced every tenet of the sexual revolution; their pews are empty, but their press releases are impeccably orthodox by the standards of the New York Times. They preach the values that define “us” as modern secular Westerners with religious zeal.

There is a specific psychology at work here. If Paul were only a tentmaker, he could have converted from Judaism to Christianity and still made tents. But Paul, the zealous preacher, was a zealous preacher for Christianity. Churches that “modernise” become zealous evangelists for liberalism. Often, the convert is more fanatical than the person born into the faith. The “modernised” Christian is frequently more desperate to prove their loyalty to the new regime than the secularist who takes it for granted. They become the inquisitors of the new order, hunting down the “backward” elements of their own tradition to offer them up as sacrifices to the new gods of progress.

We have seen this process before. The paganism that once flourished in the ancient world became modernised by Christianity. Eagle-eyed scholars can still see the remnants of it in some Christian practices today, but that is all that remains now. So too with the rise of Islam. Christians in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean modernised over a period of centuries, adopting in many cases a synthesis between their Christian faith and the new faith starting to be called Islam. Within a few centuries, they were erased entirely. Some cranks like John of Damascus, a theologian and monk from the late seventh and early eighth century, still called them Christian heretics, but the vestiges of their Christianity were increasingly hard to find beneath the new ideology that they had modernised into. They thought they were adapting to survive; in reality, they were adapting themselves out of existence.

The interviewer who asked me this question, like previous interviewers who asked me similar questions, was a nice man. He may even be a Christian of some kind, or more likely, his parents or grandparents were. And I understand why he asked the question. He is a representative of a dominant world ideology, and he wants the Catholic Church to join them and become part of them; to stop being the strange thing we have been for 2,000 years and, instead, to dissolve into the glorious world he lives within.

He does not ask out of malice. He asks out of confusion as to why we would choose to remain outside the warmth of the consensus. But only if we Catholics realise that this question is a question of colonisation, of annihilation by a dominant ideology, can we fully understand what is at stake when it is asked. It is the smiling face of erasure expressing the hope that we cease to be.

Read original article