Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…In relation to your upcoming book, obviously, there’s been many Christian denominations, like Eastern Orthodox, certain conservative Protestant groups, that have a less strict line on the divorce question without entirely succumbing to the cultural liberalism that’s undermined a lot of Christianity in the West. So in light of that my question to you is, is your objection to the pope’s potential shift so much due to his actual proposals, or more the therapeutic language itself making the case that you find problematic? No, I think it’s the proposal itself. There’s a sort of “sociology of religion” argument that conservative Christians tend to get into that you’re referencing on these questions where you say, “stricter churches do better at weathering the storms of modernity than more lax churches,” and “there’s value in having a church that is explicitly pushing back against cultural trends,” and so on. I think all of those arguments are in some cases plausible; I think they would be plausible in this case. I think a therapeutic shift on divorce would have negative practical effects on the everyday lives of Catholics. But the reason the issue is particularly important to me, and the reason I’ve written about it so much, is that I think the church is risking betraying its connection to Jesus. And that’s . . . The sociological stuff is important, but it’s secondary. To me, one of . . . I referenced the essential radicalism of Christianity, and obviously Catholicism has not been, in political practice, a radical force at every moment in human history. But one of the great things about the Catholic Church and one of the things that makes me think the probabilistic game that Tyler somehow induced me to play online, one reason I give it a high probability of being the one true church is that there are these core, very strange and radical things that Jesus says and does that are sustained in the life of the church in ways that they haven’t been in other Christian denominations and churches and one of those is the Eucharist, the idea of transubstantiation, the idea that you are literally consuming the body and blood of Christ. Another of them is this . . . another thing I referenced earlier: this persistence of priestly, religious, monastic vocations, this idea of Christianity as a counterculture to the point where it is actively turning its back on family life in certain ways and retaining this space for a radical core, a radical witness. And another of them is the teaching on marriage and divorce, which in the context of the New Testament is clearly presented as a kind of radicalization of Jewish law on marriage and divorce, and the church has maintained that radical perspective. And I think it’s done so in fidelity to the man that we think was the Son of God, and I would prefer it to continue to maintain that fidelity rather than softly give it up. Next question.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.