Rather than modern Europe I think a better future model for the United States might be pagan Rome or Imperial China.

So you want Americans to worship George Bush as a a living god?

So you want Americans to worship George Bush as a a living god?

hey asshole, i said better model in a non-normative sense (did you get the impression here that i moved beyond description and prediction to prescription?). if you didn't mean to be an asshole, be more explicit.

also, the chinese didn't worship their emperors as gods, and most of the roman emperors were explicitly deified after their death. oh, but details, can't have that, can we? just what we watched in sword in sandal movies when we were 15.

wow, i'm starting to think about shutting down comments, moron:normal ratio is getting worse and worse....

Catholic traditions, including folk traditions, evolve over time and in response to local conditions and concerns. They do not need to be founded in New Testament references. Nor are they uniform in their expression across ethnic groups. Their precise form cannot be fixed.

I am uncomfortable with the concept of "American Catholic norms". Roman norms would have to apply, and Rome would probably support a custom that was "hallowed by time" and not purely superstitious.

Julian

I am uncomfortable with the concept of "American Catholic norms".

the 'americanist heresy' and the muffling of john courtney murray are past episodes where rome reigned in the american catholic 'heterodoxy' (most would argue that murray's views became dominant at vatican ii). but i don't think that matters right now, i have been reviewing the social science literature recently, and it seems that aside from a small traditionalist catholic, so to speak, Roman Catholic following, the majority of Roman Catholics are becoming progressively more protestantized. if you want me to bet, i suspect people like garry wills (who, granted is an outlier on the liberal edge) who are tied to the church through sentiment and personal history will eventually give way to post-catholics in name as well as deed.

steve suggested that the catholic church might gravitate toward a 'megachurch' model in the future. but that would be catholicism in name only...and in the past the roman higher ups were firm about not allowing congregationalism to go too far...but megachurches are that writ large.

more later.

As an Australian, I cannot be sure, but my impression is that the American Catholic Church is more at variance with Rome than the Australian Catholic Church. I was very interested by your reference to Bishop Carroll, which reminds me that Americanism has a long history.

John Paul II was tolerant to a fault in some respects (and not at all the conservative the media portrayed, at least by historical standards). He bent many disciplinary rules to accomodate local pressures (in Europe as well as America) - altar girls being a good example. He was terrified of schism and let the American Church have its head (one could have a long debate about whether this facilitated the clerical sexual abuse scandal).

I think that Americanism is likely to have peaked, given the stricter line to be expected from Benedict XVI and the reality that there are few concessions left that Rome can make to American Catholics and remain in any sense Catholic.

I doubt your suggestion that charismatic Catholics are abandoning the structures of the church. They are young and noisy, but generally surprisingly orthodox.

Julian

I don't quite see where your problem is, Razib. Of course, total freedom of religion is impossible (as is total freedom on a personal level) - the old Aztec religion wouldn't be acceptable, for example. This just represents a hierarchy of values, freedom of religion being one of them, but not quite the most important. Of course, the edges are blurry and what trumps what sometimes needs to be clarified in court, but this is a normal straightforward process.

Within the formal religions a similar process is at work. You mention the variation permitted within the institution of the Catholic Church. Some variations are permitted, others are not. Judaism has an explicit notion of sanctifying tradition (metzitza, for example, is one tradition not followed by most observant Jews) - which doesn't mean that it will sanctify all traditions, i.e. some values trump the tradition value. With a little effort we can specify exactly (or approximately) which values trump which. Seems like a pretty well-defined, stable system to me.

I doubt your suggestion that charismatic Catholics are abandoning the structures of the church. They are young and noisy, but generally surprisingly orthodox.

i agree they are orthodox. but i am skeptical that multiple generations of charismatic catholics will remain within the church instead of being absorbed by the non-denominational evangelical milieu. it is the "no third generation reform" issue in judaism, once you start to absorb forms of another faith over time a transition of state to that faith becomes more likely.

Within the formal religions a similar process is at work.

i focused a bit on catholicism to show that "formal" religions are loosing their hold. catholicism has "church teaching" as a common reference, and yet even catholics show a wide range of opinion. in contrast, the fastest growing religions tend to be highly decentralized. judaism, to some extent, is an old school religion like catholicism with a textual tradition.

a different point, which sullivan focuses on, is that the normative protestantism of this nation was relatively iconoclastic, non-liturgical and biased toward orthodoxy (belief) as opposed to a strict set of practices for must of this nation's history. religious pluralism is adding another variable as muslims are arriving, and like orthodox jews, they have a set of laws which they must follow, but unlike orthodox jews they greet a culture that is relatively open to multicultural claims and rhetorically inclined to accommodation rather than demanding assimilation.

david, to be more explicit, in the day of catholic-protestant-jew "the edges are blurry and what trumps what sometimes needs to be clarified in court" i think the process was relatively straightforward. i don't think it is precisely because the character of american religion has changed a lot, become more diverse, less formalized and no longer even nominally beholden to elite-central standards quite often.

I had a bit to do with charismatic Catholics here in Australia for a while. My impression was that it is a form of Catholicism that appeals to the young (with a lively fringe of the mentally unbalanced). The congregation here in Canberra, Australia's capital, had adopted habits from the United States, from Pentecostalism I believe it is called. I remember the priest attempting to introduce a sort of "holy communal clap" at one stage, which seemed of obvious American provenance.

Nevertheless, Australians are not Americans, and Catholics are not Evangelicals. Catholicism has a long tradition of absorbing cultural elements from various sources, keeping what works, and moving on.

I know of one famous defection of an American Catholic charismatic priest to Protestantism [I think there was a woman involved], but I also know of people who have moved from charismatic Catholicism to much more traditional forms of Catholicism. I also feel that the conservatism that sets in after youth will limit the endurance of the charismatic movement.

Razib, is it possible that you over-reacted to Mark's teasing?

[perhaps mark wasn't a moron and he was teasing, but there are enough idiots on this weblog that it is important to keep the shit-filter high. if "mark" was a regular commenter who posted intelligent stuff all the time of course i wouldn't have reacted the same, but i have no fucking idea who he is so i can't give him the benefit of the doubt. if i offended mark and he never reads again, i don't care, why should i? of late is pretty clear i can't give the benefit of the doubt to the readership of this site, as it has expanded over the past few years.

p.s. note that i am much more likely to pay attention to readers if they have a weblog or homepage. i give other bloggers a bit of respect because i assume they've gone through having to deal with commenters who lecture them on how to run a blog.]

Edited By Siteowner

Just a small correction: (Yes, I know this post is a month old, but I just read it now due to Ross Douthat's link.) Fr. Piso remains the only Catholic to have been Senate chaplain, but since 2000, Fr. Daniel Coughlin has been chaplain of the House. He was a compromise choice after a different priest, Fr. Timothy O'Brien, was runner-up to a Protestant minister and loudly charged anti-Catholicism.

Your observations (and Sullivan's)about the difficulty of secular polities to respect "religious freedom" in the abstract are trenchant. But notwithstanding your lack of interest in the law per se, I must point out that in general the federal judiciary has decided not to "go there."

Sullivan wrote that the question of what constitutes authentic religion is central to both the particular case in which he participated and many like cases across the country. But the Supreme Court (SC) has not addressed the problem in those terms. Instead, the SC has established a three-part test that GOVERNMENT action must meet:

1. The law must be facially neutral with respesct to religion;

2. The law must not have as its primary effect either the promotion or inhibition of religion; and

3. The law must not create an excessive entanglement between religion and government.

I am not aware of the particulars of Sullivan's case other than what he wrote in the introduction you linked to, so I cannot offer an opinion about whether Boca Raton's cemetery regulations meet this standard. However, I will say that, as applied in the last ten years, the standard has done a fair job of protecting both the perogatives of the state and religious freedoms without entangling itself with the theological matters Sullivan writes about. In my opinion.

Thanks to Razib for operating such an excellent site and for providing such good commentary.