With Max Kintner
The Agnostic Cultural Catholic
Welcome to the Religion corner of my website, in which I explore
churches and religion from varous scientific and humanistic perspectives.
As the introductory essay below explains, my own religious identification is “Agnostic Cultural Catholic.” That perhaps is not a very transparent designation. But in short, it means I don't know if I believe in god, and don't worry much about it. And while I am not observant and do not participate in Catholic liturgical or sacramental life, I pretty deeply appreciate some aspects of Catholicism.
I simply have a long history of looking at religion through a filter of my own spiritual quest for human significance, such as it is, and through the analytical lens of various social science and humanties disciplines. This webpage is my vehicle for recording and sharing my own intellectual meanderings. I hope you will join me on this journey.
Please feel free to make any respectful comments or arguments on this or any of the posts linked to this page … with the understanding that even vehement disagreements are welcome as long as they are not rude or aggressive.
I told Aunt Grace I didn’t believe in God when I was nine.
Grace, my father’s sister but more importantly my most significant mentor and my foster mother for about six years, was initially horrified. But she quickly got over it, not least because her own view of “god” consisted of an undefined belief in the divine origin of the universe and an equally undefined sacred “universal order” and purpose. She was distinctly unimpressed by dogma or doctrinal certainty. And while she did buy into a vague sort of mysticism and some sort of life after death, she rejected out of hand the mythological images of heaven and hell that characterize much Christian doctrine and tradition. We talked often about religion and faith over the next four years while I lived with her. Then, after I recovered from a tumultuous adolescence and early adulthood, we reconnected and almost seamlessly renewed the conversation. She was never judgmental, but at every point encouraged me not to reject religious inspiration or revelation if it came my way.
I learned through various stories she told me over the years that her own touchstone of meaningful religious experience was in the late 1920s. She was living on her own by then, working as a live-in domestic for a wealthy woman in a large home near the majestic Catholic Cathedral in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her employer, an elegant woman whom Grace deeply admired and credited with teaching her much about life, was Catholic, and apparently believed in a merciful and forgiving god.
That was likely a change of pace for Grace. Born in 1909, the second oldest of 8 siblings, she had been raised in rural Wisconsin. Her father was an austere and, in Grace’s mind, unforgivably flawed man with a Quaker background of some sort. Her mom was a German immigrant woman who came to the US in 1884 as a 6 year-old child with her Lutheran family. Neither were particularly religious, although the family sometimes attended Church. In St. Paul, however, Grace started going to mass frequently, perhaps accompanied or encouraged by her wealthy patron. But what became most meaningful to her were afternoon visits to the cathedral, when she would sit alone in the quiet sanctuary to pray and meditate. She said during this period she began to feel blessed by a calmness and an inner happiness that she remembered as a profound experience for the rest of her life. The feeling of sacred inner peace and contentment slipped away as her work and living situation changed, and she never recovered that feeling. But she lamented the loss and admonished me to work hard to hang onto that state of grace if I should ever find it.
Despite my early reticence and lifelong inability to fully believe in god, it has been easy to honor my Aunt Grace’s admonition to keep an open mind. Since my childhood, I, too, have had a few short interludes of what felt like an inner mystical glow and feeling of attachment to some sort of spiritual anchor – not strong enough to keep me from drifting away or even to make me lament losing it, but still strong enough to understand the sensation. I never became in any way religiously observant until about 40 years ago when I recognized that of all the churches and Christian faiths open to me, I was most drawn to Catholicism.
There were specific reasons for my attraction … with two of them being intellectual, and the other, paradoxically, based on the distinctively ‘superstitious’ and ‘magical’ nature of Catholic legendry and liturgy.
First was my discovery of Latin American ‘Liberation Theology,’ with its predominantly Catholic origin and manifestation. I was drawn to that religious worldview based on its advocacy of justice, compassion, and identification with the poor. Second, was Catholicism’s very long and robust scholarly and reason-based philosophical tradition. And finally, on a more subjective level, I also enjoyed the “mystical tradition” of Catholicism, with its frank recognition of miracles, pantheon of heroic saints, sacred incantations and liturgies, and frank – albeit symbolic blood sacrifice and cannibalism. I didn’t officially convert to Catholicism until shortly before I married my wife, Mary, in 1986. But I remain very comfortable saying that I have been Catholic for most, if not all my life, and continue to be so.
But here’s the thing: notwithstanding my self-identification as “Catholic” and my occasional episodes of a mild self-conscious feeling of “grace,” I’ve never believed in a capital-G “God” in a way that would make sense to most other Christians. And probably more importantly, I’ve never grasped or found it necessary to buy into the central myth of Christianity, vis-á-vis, the redemption of human souls through the death of Christ. Quite simply, I never understood how that could work. The idea of God? Sure. Like Aunt Grace, I could engage in suspended disbelief and grasp some notion of an omniscient sacred energy that got everything rolling at the beginning of time and created a universe that behaved according to natural laws. And I could buy into the possibility of “supernatural” realities beyond those that humans can detect in which miracles or a state of grace could exist. But a demigod who, by allowing himself to be brutally executed, could somehow selectively save humans across the ages from eternal death or, worse, a hideous punishment of eternal damnation?
That level of supernatural narrative is too much unbridled magic for me, and I think the whole premise of life on earth being a trial by fire to enter heaven just seems wrong. I just can’t wrap my head around a “faith” that requires me to completely redefine reality to accommodate whimsical and incomprehensible supernatural rules as the required ticket of admission for eternal “salvation.” Nor am I willing or able to accept the concept of an all-powerful self-described anthropomorphic deity who is so insecure as to want humans to spend their lives offering it praise and begging forgiveness for largely undefined transgressions. Such a vainglorious God, in my view, simply doesn’t merit even admiration, much less worship, and there’s utterly no reason to believe that the universe was constructed by, and around, this flawed and ugly relationship between a whimsical god and its errant human playthings.
Anyone who can look at mythological narratives of the Western World objectively can easily see that it’s a short jump from one cosmology of old to the next – from Babylonian to Greek to Roman to Hebrew to the birth of Jesus in the Eastern Mediterranean. All share the same narratives of human creation, the genesis of a tribe or state by means of a divine favored nation designation, and of whimsical godliness, miracles, and divine destruction for lapses of righteousness, etc., etc. Of course, the origination of sacred mythological narratives was not limited to Europe and the Middle East. Asia and the Americas generated their own stories of nature and creation to explain and validate human existence, as did cultures around the world, from the carving up of Ymir’s body in Norse mythology, to the very similar carving up of Marduk’s body in Babylonian mythology, to the ‘Dream Time’ creation of the world in Australian myths that have a thematic similarity to “The Word” in Christian mythology. Nor are such mythologies only a product of ancient times, as the 19th Century formation of the Mormon and Baha’i faiths make clear.
It’s true that the overarching tone and texture of religions are different not only from one faith to another, but from one region and one historical period to another. It’s also true that highly literate cultures tend to institutionalize their own myths to create an exclusive hierarchical structure with a priestly elite that frequently leans toward repression of other faiths or even other expressions of the same faith that don’t comply with prevailing orthodoxy. Cultures that rely on oral traditions, meanwhile, tend not to institutionalize mythologies by creating a fixed storyline or liturgy, and to embrace a greater diversity of religious expressions. But in virtually all cases, religions and religious cosmologies have similar heroes and villains who personify very similar human virtues and weaknesses to explain similar themes about humans and the cosmos. Or in other words, the themes and most of the lessons to be learned from the Bible and other sacred texts all share common elements. The storylines, on the other hand, are not so similar and reflect the geographic and cultural realities of the individual nations and peoples who created them.
By the time I officially became a Catholic in 1986, I already understood that the themes rather than the narrative particulars were the most essential part of scripture and Christian teaching. I didn’t give it much thought, though, in part because in most respects I felt at home in my parish and ‘in communion with the Church’ at that time. But probably more importantly is that I always assumed other Catholics felt the same way. It took another decade or so to come to the realization that other folks, even extremely smart people whose intellects I very much admired and who were in no sense ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘fanatic,’ took the “historical” accuracy of the Bible and the logical mechanics of “salvation” a lot more literally than I did.
What I couldn’t yet do was to clearly conceptualize the mythological nature of Christianity in general and Catholicity in particular. It took me more than another decade of study and experience to finally arrive at an articulation of what I always intuitively believed. Some of my studies were of an informal nature, consisting of a driving interest in Catholic theology, politics, and institutional life, and participation for several years in a progressive Catholic community. I also undertook formal university studies as a multidisciplinary graduate student of history, anthropology, and ethnic studies, where I often focused on Latin American Catholic history and Mesoamerican belief systems. Probably most importantly, as part of my formal studies and as a real passion, I did on-the-ground research of religious beliefs in Guatemala, participating as much as my ‘outsider-ness’ permitted in the ceremonial life of Maya religious expression and maintaining a close relationship with various Catholic congregations and communities. And finally, suddenly, I was able to describe my own subscription to what I think of nowadays as ‘Committed Cultural Catholicism and Agnosticism.’
So what does it mean to be an Agnostic Cultural Catholic?
To address the “agnostic” part of my equation first, it means that I am comfortably resigned to maintaining open-minded skepticism about the existence of god or an underlying supernatural (read: incomprehensible to humans) ordering of the universe. Indeed, in my own view, there’s a certain intellectual arrogance inherent in claims of devout ‘atheism’ that has the ring of religious conviction to it. Of course it may be true that atheists have the advantage of relying on “negative evidence” of existence, which is always easier than positive proof. Nevertheless, at least to my mind it’s still a way of saying “my knowledge’ and ‘my reality’ is more valid than yours. I believe we must be very careful in cases like this to understand that absence of evidence does not necessarily mean evidence of absence. Meanwhile, I prefer the humility of latching onto an “I just don’t know” position, in part because if one believes, as I do, that virtue is signified and reified by actions and not by beliefs, it really doesn’t matter except to the extent that it affects other people.
As for my continued allegiance to “Catholic” identity, this is in large part a statement of my preference for the social and political environments of historical Catholic communities over that of protestant communities. The strength of my preference correlates closely to how restrictive I perceive the prevailing religious doctrine of a given community to be. For example, I can and do solidly denounce the Catholic institution for its powerful and in my estimation completely unacceptable lobbying efforts by clerics and some strident groups within the Church to block access to abortion and contraceptive care. But while their leaders are fanatic in their obsession about reproductive choices and problems, most Catholics are not, and don’t pay any more attention to their leaders’ strident moralizing about women’s reproductive options than do most other Americans. So clearly, Catholic identity is not defined either by acceptance or denial of reproductive rights, or more generally by compliance with dictates of the church hierarchy.
Meanwhile, in other more mundane respects, the Catholic Church has historically been more tolerant of human inclinations toward unrestrained enjoyment of life, with acceptance of drinking and promotion of community celebrations. In short, there’s more partying and less sanctimoniousness in Catholic communities. The joie de vivre expressed in traditionally Catholic cities and towns may have its downside in terms of discouraging ‘progress,’ hard work, and innovation. Max Weber seemed to think so, as he wrote in a mostly flattering way about the “Protestant Ethic” (1930) and how it led to flourishing economies and upward mobility by encouraging what was essentially economic liberalism. Max Kintner, on the other hand, with the advantage of a hundred more years of history by which to judge, is not at all convinced that economic liberalism, steadfast individualism, and prosperity theology worked out so well … which is a topic for another conversation in another post and time.
As a historian and anthropologist, I find Catholicism, with all its horrendous faults and tremendous conflicts, vastly more interesting than Protestantism. Of course, there’s so much more Catholic history than protestant history to think about and choose from, by at least 1,400 years and maybe much more, depending on how you count.
That’s not only true for the history of the institutional Church itself, but the countries and cities identified as more or less historically Catholic. Virtually by definition they’re much older than protestant cities, even if you count the early Reformation protestant faiths like Anglican and Lutheran which were built on the bones of the Catholic Church and adopted liturgies and beliefs that look like those of Catholicism. But more than just being older, the Catholic Church is also much bigger, with a sprawling bureaucracy and monumental levels of pluralism and an international reach that exceeded most of the governments it controlled or competed with. Such a deep history and rich organizational and theological complexity will inevitably be more problematic, as made crystal clear by the seemingly endless revelations of horrendous sexual abuse and the failure – it's accurate to call it refusal – of the church hierarchy to deal with it. On the other hand, the size and scope of the Catholic Church also enabled it for hundreds or thousands of years to be the largest – pretty much the only – provider of charity and education.
All of which make the Catholic Church more interesting, in my view, than any one of the relatively small Calvinist and/or evangelical protestant sects. I must admit that recent doctrinal squabbles in the Southern Baptist Convention have become more interesting in the last few years. And clearly the suicidal alignment of a large majority of US evangelical churches with reactionary populism is ‘interesting,’ albeit frightening. But as an institution, the Catholic Church remains intrinsically more interesting.
And finally, as already noted earlier in this essay, I remain enchanted by the blatant performative magic of Catholic rituals. The incantations of the mass, the ritual prayers, the orchestrated responses, the designation and recognition of t ssaints, the ‘transubstantiation’ of a wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ, are significant to me as an underlying mystical apprehension of reality. While I might deny the ritual and symbolism at the intellectual level, I nevertheless feel the artistic and human truth of it when I sit in the pews of an old church and ponder the history, or watch the performative beauty of a well-conducted liturgy, or admire the technical mastery and grandeur of Catholic architecture. There quite simply is no protestant equivalent to the great old Catholic cathedrals and chapels in Europe or the Americas, not to mention the transcendentally sublime example of modern Catholic art that is Gaudi’s Basilica of the Holy Family in Barcelona.
So … this corner of my personal website is to indulge my own fascination with the Catholic Church specifically and religion in general. The plan is to share articles and publications, and occasionally publish my own thoughts and observations from a multidisciplinary social science and humanities perspective. My hope is that my viewpoints, when expressed in brief caption-like comments and introductions to articles from periodicals, or in longer essays that I write myself, will present ideas that are sensible and novel. I can honestly say that I have never heard anybody discuss religion as a mix of history, social science, and mythological studies quite the way I do. And I’m convinced that even people who write off religion or the Church as hotbeds of superstition, ignorance, and corruption (as most of my friends and family do) can be drawn into philosophical conversations about the normative value of religious belief and practice in the world today, and the appropriate necessity and/or role of organized religion in human society.
In truth, I have never gotten over enjoying those late-into-the-night discussions with friends about the meaning of life I had as an adolescent. Such conversations about morality and purpose and existential significance still evoke in me a sense of emotional gravity. Now, fifty-plus years on, I have neither the desire to stay up late into the night, nor friends who are willing to stay up past 10 pm with me to talk about … well, anything, other than how it’s past bedtime. But I still enjoy those conversations, when I can have them, and hope to inspire one or another version of that kind of dialogue with this webpage.
I hope you will join me. Please feel free to share your own thoughts about anything said or discussed in this page, or in any other page of this website.