The Do-It-Yourself Doctrine
WASHINGTON — Call it Christianity Lite. It's the assertion -- no, the insistence -- that you can be a Christian in good standing though you reject all or significant parts of the brand of Christianity to which you formally adhere. Even Jesus Christ -- and who he was -- is negotiable, not to mention traditional teachings on sex, abortion and divorce. Who's to tell you what to think and do as a Christian -- or to judge you wanting? It's a heresy nowadays to accuse someone of heresy.
Consider these phenomena:
* John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is campaigning as a Catholic candidate. His website declares that he "was raised in the Catholic faith and continues to be an active member of the Catholic Church." Kerry is also campaigning as the candidate of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the abortion-industry advocacy group, whose endorsement he won with an absolutist stance on abortion rights, which is anathema to the Catholic Church. Several U.S. Catholic bishops recently have stated that Catholics in public life who support abortion rights are not in good standing with the church and should not receive the Eucharist, the church's most sacred sacrament, at Mass. Kerry's response -- besides scrambling to find individual Catholic churches liberal enough to allow him into their communion lines -- has been to declare that the church has no business "instructing politicians" on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.
* Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" claims that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, fathered a child by her and installed her as the head of his new religion centered on goddess worship ("the sacred feminine," in Brown's words). None of this is in the Gospels, but that's because, says Brown, the all-male hierarchy of bishops conspired during the 4th century to squelch rival gospels and other Christian texts that granted power to women. The bishops also forced their flocks to adhere to the Nicene Creed, which declares there is but a single, male deity whose son, also divine, was Jesus (in Brown's view, the real Jesus was just a wise human teacher of feminist leanings). In short, Brown contends, what we know as traditional Christianity is simply the result of a long-ago political struggle.
