Lex Credendi: Liturgy is Not Enough

Last month, I wrote about the identity-bearing narratives used by white nationalists, especially co-opting certain elements of Romanticism, to build up a mythology of white male superiority. I suggested that the Church has a better narrative and better rituals which expose the violent lies of white nationalism:

The Church has better rituals than the racists. Ours are Good, True, and Beautiful. Our rituals are means of grace, by which God is present in our midst. The Holy Spirit hovers over the water in our baptismal font. Our Risen Lord meets us on the Altar Table. 

When the Church celebrates the Divine Service of the Holy Eucharist, we re-tell the grand narrative that God created the world and has redeemed humanity from our own demonic actions. We re-live our forgiveness and reconciliation, we greet each other as equals with a sign of God's peace, and we are re-membered into the one everlasting Body of Christ. And then we are sent forth in peace to serve the Lord.

I stand by what I said. The Sacraments, and the liturgy by which we celebrate them, are means of grace, and through them, God is continuing to redeem the cosmos.

Upon further reflection, though, I feel I must concede an ugly truth: racism lives on, even in liturgical traditions. The most pressing example is Dylan Roof, the terrorist who martyred nine black Christians in Charleston, SC. Roof was raised in a Lutheran (ELCA) congregation -- and one just a few miles from Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary.

More broadly, the Roman Catholic Church still has its dark corners. During the 2016 campaign, a leaked e-mail from a Democratic operative claimed that many GOP members were Catholics because they were "attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations" and the Roman Church is "the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion." And while I know too many progressive faithful Catholics to believe that the Catholic Church is "politically conservative" (rather, like the entire Church, Catholicism defies human political binaries), there is a disturbing truth to the leaked letter.

Consider Rudy Giulliani and Newt Gingrich, Catholics who treat the Church as a useful political tool but seem to be unconcerned with any of the Church's teachings on fidelity in marriage, the death penalty, or care for the poor.

More to the point, though, consider Milo Yiannopolous, a leading voice against women's rights and Islam. (To the point of my previous post, he took on the name of the German composer Wagner.) Yiannopolous claims to be a practicing Catholic.

More terrifying examples abound on the fringes of Rome, in movements that have been excommunicated. Antisemitism runs rampant in the "traditionalist" Latin-only organizations like the Society of Saint Pius X and its own break-away group, the Society of Saint Pius V.

Things get even weirder when you look at some of the Facebook pages dedicated to Eastern Orthodoxy. Mixed in with the videos of the Divine Liturgy and pictures of monks are dire warnings about the scourge of Islam, praises of Putin and the new Russian nationalism, and other troubling signs of European ethnic supremacy.

Certain groups embrace Catholicism and Orthodoxy not only because they are "socially acceptable" but because they play into the mythos of white nationalism. A small faction co-opts the beauty of the liturgical tradition and the violent medieval and Renaissance history of Rome and Constantinople.

Crusaders Entering Constantinople
Gustave Dore, 19th cent.

We've seen this before: 19th century British Romanticism saw both a recovery of the Catholic liturgy alongside a glorification of images of crusading knights, both as ways of bolstering British colonial attitudes. Neo-gothic parishes and cathedrals soared alongside stylized depictions of King Richard the Lionheart. Crusade language is not uncommon. They play up the imagery of Constantinople -- and Kiev and Moscow -- as the last lines of defense against the "Turks." They play up the imagery of a Holy Roman Empire fighting a holy war against invaders -- from Eastern Europe, from North Africa, from the Levant.

In short, there is a terrifying move to use the beautiful solemnity of the liturgy as a veneer for racism, to radicalize young men in the Church.

I have long been an advocate for the phrase lex orandi, lex credendi -- the law of prayer, the law of belief. What we say and do during the Mass shapes our faith. I still hold to this. But it is not enough -- or, more correctly, we need to follow through with the second half of the saying.

All too often, we settle for aesthetic liturgy devoid of any sense of orthodoxy. We leave our praxis at in the pews and at the Altar, rather than going out to live in the world as the Body of Christ.

To expose the powers and principalities that would corrupt the Church and its liturgy, we must be clear in our theology. We must be willing to label sin and evil, to point them out. We must be able to point to the Creeds and Scripture, do a doctrine of Creation, that dismantles racism. We must be able to explain what it means when we continually quote the First Epistle of Saint John, that "God is love." Those of us with the unenviable task of climbing into the pulpit must be willing to address the horror of sin, evil, and death -- not as obstacles to holistic living, but as forces that oppose God. Teachers must be catechists, willing to dissect what it means to "renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God" and to "put your whole trust in [Christ's] grace and love."

And then, we must be willing to actually go in peace and serve the Lord. The dismissal is not some polite suggestion. It's part of what makes us an apostolic Church: that we are sent out to prepare the way of the Lord. It's not vain repetition -- unless we fail to heed the commandment.

If we fail to believe what we do, we risk treating the Divine Service like a facade, a hollow structure used to hide the ugliness underneath. God has given us the Sacraments as means of grace to transform that ugliness, not hide it.