American Spirituality?

There’s a summertime exhibit on display at the Library of Congress right now. It’s called “88 Books That Shaped America.” It includes everything from Tom Paine’s Common Sense (with its famous line “These are the times that try men’s souls”) to Dr Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. It’s an intriguing list as much as for what it excludes as what it includes.

Missing from the list are any books about faith or religion.

In a country where religion has played a pivotal role, where Puritans and Anglicans carried their English rivalry into the New World, where the fundamentalist movement with all its oddities was born and Mormonism was invented, the librarians of the Library of Congress don’t see religion as an essential part of American history and culture.

Roberta Shaffer, the Librarian in charge of the exhibit, did an interview explaining how they decided which 88 books they chose. During the course of the interview she was asked about why there were no religious books included. “A lot of the books we chose have a moralistic or ‘do-good’ tone to them, and that is more representative of America and our values. That is the spiritual ‘persona’ of America rather than religion per se.”

She went on to say that books like Ida Tarbell’s The History of Standard Oil and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle expressed American spirituality more profoundly than books on religion.

We’ve moved a long way from the Founding Fathers’ refusal to establish any particular religion to our modern excision of religion and faith from our history and culture. We’re cutting religion out of our past, which cuts it out of our present. We have such an anemic understanding of “spirituality” that The History of Standard Oil is being touted by the most prestigious library in the country as an American spiritual classic.

Is this an indictment of the LOC as a liberal pawn? That’s to misunderstand what’s going on in our society, and how our view of spirituality is being fundamentally re-shaped.

It’s not liberalism but secularism which poses the great threat to the Church. We are at war with “the devil, the world and the flesh” as the Baptismal Office in the Prayer Book tells us. Secularism replaces God with “the world and the flesh.” The secularist won’t discover till it’s too late that the devil (who he’s too smart to believe in) was hiding in the world and the flesh all along, and the hook has been swallowed with the lure.

Christians are at war with the world. We always have been and always will be. The temptations of the devil, the world and the flesh will attack us as long as we live here on earth (and that, as the matter of fact, is what spirituality is really about).

Roberta Shaffer and the Library of Congress aren’t enemies of God; they’re simply secularists. What they believe to be spirituality is a kind of spirituality; it’s just not very deep and doesn’t answer the real spiritual needs of men and women. But it’s the coming thing in our increasingly secular society and we as Christians must be aware of it. In our personal spiritual lives, we need to be constantly on guard. The devil, the world and the flesh are the enemies of God, and they’re our enemies, too. We are at war—it can be a joyful, exhilarating warfare—but if we forget that basic spiritual reality, if we forget our High Calling to be “Christ’s faithful soldier” (as the Baptismal Office names us), we just become a sad part of the problem.

God has made you for much more than the world promises you can be. The “spirituality” of the world, with its “moralistic and ‘do-good’ tone,” ends with the world. God has made you for eternity.—Fr Gregory Wilcox

Why Common Prayer? Part the Second

We began Part the First of our inquiry asking why Anglicanism doesn’t have the popular appeal of Joel Olsteen’s Lakewood Church or the Worldwide Ministry of John Hagee (I admit it—I had to look these fellas up). We ended quoting a Syrian first-century bishop, St Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius tells us the Church is the saving presence of God in His creation. In order to fulfill her high calling, the Church must continually live her Catholicity. What does Common Prayer have to do with that?

When we say the Creed, we say we believe in the One Catholic and Apostolic Church. While the Creeds are one of the great treasures of the Church, there lies in them (or perhaps, in the “idea” of them) a danger: they may become something intellectual, like a set of geometry theorems, a set of “religious” ideas we accept. The Creeds weren’t made to be intellectual straitjackets. They’re intended not to constrain us but to set us free. They are to open our souls to see things which otherwise we wouldn’t be able to grasp.

When we say we believe in the Catholic Church, we’re saying we believe that God has revealed Himself to us in certain ways. Fundamental to that is that He reveals Himself to us in Jesus Christ. He doesn’t do this, Mormon-like, in direct revelations to us, with the Lord Jesus or an angel personally visiting each and every one of us to instruct us in the truths of the Faith. We receive and live out the Gospel in the Church. We learn its truths through her Scriptures and come to understand them by her instruction. God made us less to understand Him, though, than to live with Him. We come into God’s presence and share in His life in many ways, but most profoundly in worship.

The Anglican understanding of Common Prayer is forever bound to our Anglican understanding of Catholicism. It’s the same understanding St Ignatius had and many generations of those who’ve followed him in the Faith. Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1945 until 1961, put it most happily: “Wherever we go throughout our Communion, we find ourselves at home in a worship Scriptural, Catholic and congregational. The Book of Common Prayer knits us together and lies at the root of our fellowship.”

It’s not the words of the Prayer Book that knit us together—after all, even before the influenza of liturgical change gave the Church a bad cold, Anglicans in different countries have used different Prayer Books. The American 1928 Book isn’t the same as the 1662 Book which still remains the official Prayer Book of the Church of England. There is much they have in common, but each Prayer Book—English, Irish, Scottish, American, South African, Canadian, Welsh, Mexican, Japanese, Australian, to name but some of them—is distinctive. What Archbishop Fisher meant is not that the Prayer Book is everywhere the same, but that Common Prayer is a profound expression of our common and Catholic Faith, Catholic Worship and Catholic Life.

The Catholic Faith of our Anglicanism tradition grows from Common Prayer.

Essential to that tradition is common life. When Archbishop Fisher says “our worship is Catholic and congregational,” he touches on an easily-overlooked but necessary notion. Our Prayer Book worship traces back to the earliest centuries of the Church’s life. We didn’t invent it, we received it. We learn how to worship God by using it. The Prayer Book isn’t perfect and from time-to-time needs adjusting; but because the Prayer Book is Catholic in its scope, any revision must be approached “reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God.”

At the same time, as the Archbishop says, our worship is also “congregational.” That means that every parish embodies our tradition of worship. The Prayer Book comes to life when it guides and forms the individual parish. The Prayer Book works wonderfully well used in the setting of a soaring Gothic cathedral, but it was designed for use in a parish church. There, in a community of people living the Christian life together, the Prayer Book does what it was made to do. It centers the life of the people in God.—Fr Gregory Wilcox