There is a Vatican report devoted to New Age phenomenon that, for the most part, applies to most of these new religious forms, whether it’s Neo-Paganism, Gnosticism, and even the occult. Entitled Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life, it acknowledges that these things are all popular expressions of “the unquenchable longing of the human spirit for transcendence and religious meaning.” But the million-dollar question is why people feel that Christianity is lacking as a source of religious meaning and transcendence. We might be tempted to think they are motivated by malice, but the scandal here is not that people dismiss Christianity, but that Christianity today often makes it easy for people to look elsewhere.
“It should be recognized,” according to Bearer of the Water of Life, that “the attraction that New Age religiosity has for some Christians may be due in part to the lack of serious attention in their own communities for themes which are actually part of the Catholic synthesis.” This lack of seriousness is a serious problem. With Joseph Ratzinger we could call this facile sort of Christianity “bourgeois” to indicate a Christianity that is compromised and comfortable; or we could borrow C.S. Lewis’s term and call it Christianity-and-water to express the tendency to dilute the power of the Gospel. George Weigel coined the term Catholic-lite which brings to mind a church that lacks substance. In any case we are talking about a Christianity that avoids being a scandal, doesn’t want to be the rejected cornerstone or a sign of contradiction, and takes Paul’s message of not being conformed to this age and turns it on its head.
This Christian-lite church is good at living the zeitgeist, of sleeping the sleep of secular man; but when a person wakes up and is hungry for real meat and thirsty for real drink, Christian-lite doesn’t satisfy, it doesn’t even know what hunger or thirst is. “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?” Which of you, we might add, if his son asks to search the depths of the sea, will give him a shallow pool? Or if he lifts his eyes to the heavens and asks for the stars, will give him sand? The Church of Shallows would because it does not take the nature of religious man seriously. Its superficiality is an insult to the nobility of his spirit and his infinite desire for God, its frivolity is repulsive to the mortal seriousness with which he responds to the beckoning God. It is a sad irony that a Christian church that once converted the pagan world is now perceived as being so boring and banal that it could lose ground to a resurgent paganism.
To use the language of economics, Christian-lite can’t compete in a religious market where other religious movements appear to take man more seriously. All of the new alternatives to Christianity are really old competitors that gave way to a religion that was deeper than they. So Christianity should lack none of those elements that attract people to alternatives, but those elements are lacking in Christian-lite. Themes such as “the importance of man's spiritual dimension and its integration with the whole of life, the search for life's meaning, the link between human beings and the rest of creation, the desire for personal and social transformation, and the rejection of a rationalistic and materialistic view of humanity,” are some of them.
Bearer of the Water of Life gives the following warning:
If the Church is not to be accused of being deaf to people's longings, her members need to do two things: to root themselves ever more firmly in the fundamentals of their faith, and to understand the often-silent cry in people's hearts, which leads them elsewhere if they are not satisfied by the Church.
That is the scandal of Christian-lite, that it should fail to give what it has the capability to give to those that know intuitively that the true religion must at least be as deep and serious as the bottomless depths of their restless spirits. Men will take the Church seriously again, only when the Church takes man seriously.
Brian Killian is a freelance writer and a columnist for the Atlantic Catholic. He writes from Nova Scotia and enjoys receiving feedback at noumena1@hotmail.com.
This article previously appeared in the Atlantic Catholic and is used by permission of the author.
