One succinct definition of orthodoxy is “An authorized or generally accepted theory, doctrine, or practice.” Within the Catholic faith, orthodox belief is considered to be adherence to the deposit of faith that has come down to us from Jesus Christ through his Church. Much of the internal struggle within the Church today, as in the past, has been about what constitutes orthodox belief. Or else distinguishing between orthodox belief and religious practices that are the norm in certain eras or nations.
In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton wrote eloquently about orthodoxy in relation to religion. While Chesterton was a staunch defender of orthodox Christian faith because he was convinced it proceeded from, and was sustained by, God himself, he was also a fervent critic of what might be called the orthodoxy of the age. In Chesterton’s age, the emerging orthodoxy was a God-less materialism in which everything proceeded from mindless immutable forces throughout the universe and within each person. This orthodoxy reduced Truth, Beauty, and the Good to mere preferences, or to social and cultural norms.
Chesterton criticized the materialist skeptic who claims to have a corner on rational thought and a program for a new materialist worldview:
… As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time… will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts… In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men.
C. S. Lewis, in the essay titled “The Rival Conceptions of God,” said much the same thing about human knowledge in a God-less materialistic universe:
… atheism [one could substitute materialism] turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.
The materialistic worldview is now dominant rather than emerging as it was in Chesterton’s time. Thus, the Christian (and the Church at large) must beware of allowing orthodoxy in relation to the deposit of faith to become muddled with orthodoxies of the age—political and economic systems in opposition to truth and human flourishing.
For instance, while most Christians care deeply about the natural environment and try to act on this concern, there is a vocal and powerful environmentalist dogma that rejects human-centered environmentalism, and thereby opposes energy from fossil fuels, strategic infrastructure, and manufacturing that might ameliorate the suffering and want of millions of people. Those who promote this ideology are quick to label dissenting voices as “anti-science” or “irresponsible”, forgetting or ignoring that as late as the late nineteenth-century the scientific world was comfortable in the knowledge that Newtonian laws of motion, magnetism, and the atom explained everything—until they didn’t.
In fact, as never before, we have the means and know-how to foster human-centered environmentalism with manageable impacts on the environment. Examples of such a balance between human needs and the environment abound in America and around the world.
You could say that human-centered environmentalism was eloquently depicted by C. S. Lewis in his Narnia chronicles. Narnia is a magical and beautiful place. Yet, there is a more beautiful and higher place in comparison with which Narnia is only a shadowland, a higher place to which Lewis’s faithful characters travel at the end of the chronicles. Thus, Lewis’s characters are the purpose for Narnia, not mere physical phenomena in that world.
While most Christians care deeply about social justice and social welfare and act on these concerns, there is a vocal and powerful ideology that wishes to impose virtually unchecked state control of economies and social welfare, with corresponding massive bureaucracies, insisting that only state-directed economies, health care, and public welfare can share the world’s bounty equitably. Those who promote this ideology are quick to label dissenting voices as rapacious or unjust. Yet, as never before, we experience how such massive state programs produce bureaucratic behemoths with few checks on power, along with creeping restrictions on human liberty.
In contrast, the outcomes, if not the ethos, of authentic free markets are checks on power via innovation, customer choices, the demise of sclerotic companies, and the laws of the state. In fact, twenty-first-century free market economies have a better environmental record than command and control nations, and are more accountable to societies.
These modern age orthodoxies: dogmatic environmentalism and state-directed economies and societies have seeped into the Church to one degree or another. In some quarters of the Church, secular orthodoxies receive favorable pronouncements by religious leaders, while contrarian perspectives receive criticism. Among some ostensibly Christian denominations, secular orthodoxies inform practically everything.
Furthermore, secular orthodoxies are now piped into our brains—the brains of religious leaders as well—via the internet, TV, and social media, and by people close to us who are informed by all of the above. There’s no escaping it. The mind-forming influence of J. R. R. Tolkien’s far-seeing stones (Palantiri) was small potatoes in comparison to what we face today.
Needless to say, human-centered environmentalism, the subsidiarity of the bureaucratic state to local authority and independent institutions, and free markets were also subject to historical abuses: robber barons, localities that vigorously persecuted racial and ethnic minorities, environmental irresponsibility. That’s why robust debates about political and economic systems that include credible and articulate champions of different perspectives should be encouraged within the Vatican and the Church around the world. Such spotlighted debates could also be a light to a world that is increasingly being fed orthodoxies that don’t deliver what they promise.
Evaluating competing political and economic systems to achieve social justice, human welfare, and care for the natural world has traditionally relied on prudential judgment. Considering how often orthodoxies of the age change, perhaps prudential reserve is an even better perspective, where we don’t give ourselves wholeheartedly to any particular approach.
Chesterton and Lewis, for their part, understood the one orthodoxy that always delivers what it promises.
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