The Religion of the Last Man
September 24, 2019
St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Manhattan
IN May, 2000, the writer Lawrence Auster wrote a letter to the pastor of St. Thomas Church, the Anglo-Catholic parish on Fifth Avenue in New York where Mr. Auster was then a parishioner. Mr. Auster, who was raised Jewish, was baptized in 1998 and converted to Catholicism shortly before he died in 2013, made some important observations in this letter. They apply not just to Episcopalianism but also to the Vatican II religion that has taken over Catholic churches. This is an excerpt from the letter:
Dear Fr. Mead:
If you were wondering what I was talking about with Bishop Sisk in the narthex after Sunday services, this is what I said to him: “Where in the Bible does it saw that we discover the meaning of Christ’s resurrection by ’embracing our particularity?'”
He replied, “That’s my interpretation.”
When I objected to his interpretation, he clarified that he did not mean that it’s about all of us just going off in our own direction (which had been my impression), but that we live “in Christ.”
I was glad he said this. Combined with his evident sincerity of manner, it mollified me somewhat. However, that’s not what he said in his sermon. In his sermon, he said nothing about living in Christ. In his sermon he threw out an endless series of rhetorical and sophomoric-sounding questions (there must have been about twenty of them), such as “How do we know what the meaning of the Resurrection is?,” “How can we tell that Christ is risen?” and so on and on. They were questions that led nowhere, questions that to my mind betokened a lack of genuine engagement with the Gospels. They were posed not in the spirit of a man who is looking for truth, but in the spirit of a man who is saying that there isn’t any truth.
If that suspicion seems extreme and unfair, it was confirmed at the end of his sermon, when he said — yes, he actually said this — that there is no answer, that each of us must find the answer for ourselves, by living our lives, meeting the diversity of life, being kind to people, blah blah blah. (I’m not quoting him exactly but this is very close to what he said.) Finally, he said that by living in this way, by “embracing our particularity,” we would understand that Jesus was risen and with us.
This was not quite as bad as Bishop Griswold’s remark in his 1998 Christmas Eve sermon, that we come to know the truth of Christianity by realizing that it’s ok to be “fat and sloppy,” since Christ loves us any way we are. But it was in the same ballpark.
This is not only man-centered teaching, but it represents an exceptionally low level of man. At least the old liberal humanism had some sense of universality and higher ideals that was being offered as a replacement for religion. By contrast, the teaching of Sisk and Griswold is a species of postmodernism, in which there is no truth at all, just impulses, personal inadequacies, and compassion for everybody’s dysfunctions.
In other words, the teaching of the current leaders of the Episcopal Church doesn’t even rise to the level of the religion of man. It is the religion of the Last Man.
In either case, it has nothing to do with divine truth. It is in fundamental respects indistinguishable from the secular liberal belief that what religion is about is “being a good person,” believing in social justice and not harming anyone, or, alternatively, that it’s about “realizing yourself,” “getting in touch with your feelings.” To put the best possible construction on it, these modern Episcopalians believe that secular experience and the embrace of diversity is the vehicle through which Christ is realized. Even under that more charitable interpretation, however, they still seem to have little or no conception of Christianity as something fundamentally beyond the human, beyond our little selves and our relationships and all the rest of it. Christian experience comes from beyond our particularities, it comes from God. It is what shows us the true meaning of our particularities and helps us to relate to them in a true, God-centered way. It is the key to right living in this world because it comes from beyond this world.
