Christians of every variety — from Anglicans to Methodists — know the story from bitter experience: A faction arises within their church which finds some tenets of orthodox Christianity expendable. In fact, it turns out that these particular doctrines are obnoxious, extraneous, backward and alienating. Suddenly it’s widely understood that it is these doctrines alone which are causing all that church’s problems:

• Alienating young people, and driving them into secularism;
• Distracting believers from the “core” elements of the faith;
• Reducing financial support from “mainstream” believers for the church’s crucial charitable missions;
• Condemning that church to a long, ugly “culture war” where its leaders are forced to side with society’s angry reactionaries;
• Betraying the liberating spirit of Jesus Himself, and casting churchmen in the role of the nit-picking Pharisees;
• Needlessly embarrassing highly educated members of the church in the company of their sophisticated friends and colleagues, and thus limiting their effectiveness there.

To this long list of ills these enlightened believers have a solution: We can more carefully “discern” the contents of our church’s historic doctrinal statements, and sift out which elements seem to us inessential, historically determined, and otherwise the fruit of worldly interference on the part of “dead white males” in the benighted past. Happily, we are wiser, kinder and more enlightened than our oppressive ancestors with their powdered wigs and rotting teeth. So now we can right their wrongs, and reap the credit.

To be sure, most churches have had some teachings which really do fit such a description — from the Southern Baptists’ embrace of slavery to Catholics’ support for the Inquisition. That fact makes the process of modernization by modernists seem palatable, even laudable: We are acting like William Wilberforce, they tell us, when he confronted his lazy, compromised fellow Christians with the evils of the slave trade. We can also cite the Bible, casting ourselves in the role of the heroes: We are the Father welcoming the Prodigal Son over the muttering of his envious older brother. In fact, we are even like Jesus, dining with needy sinners to the sneers of the scribes and hypocrites.

So, modernists claim that the doctrines which embarrass them today around their secularized friends are just like those old, authentically evil practices, such as witch-burning and slave-owning. We will purge them from our church, they say, then throw open the doors to the waiting throngs who will fill up the pews of the new, improved and purified Christianity 2.0. (Curiously, something very different happened when Episcopalians tried this, but never mind.) The road there isn’t an easy one.  The first step is to identify and sideline internal opponents: those hidebound, self-righteous obstructionists who insist, for instance, that the sanctity of marriage and Christian sexual ethics are essential to the Gospel.

They claim that modernists are compromising the faith, tossing out the Baby Jesus with His bathwater, and turning the church into a secular social welfare agency. Many ordinary believers are likely to give such claims credence, since those simple people haven’t been to divinity school, or mastered the subtle intricacies of contemporary scholarship. So these undereducated reactionaries must be marginalized, discredited and shuffled from every position of influence or authority. If need be, turn off their microphones when they attempt to speak.

The Liberal Inquisitors

It would be easy to dismiss such a description as paranoia, except that this describes not some imagined future but how liberal elements have risen to dominance in one mainline Protestant church after another. And I can say from decades of bitter personal experience that it is how modernist Catholics have gained control over one power center in the church after another.

I remember from childhood how the lone faithful nun in our parish who clung to the Rule and the habit that came with her solemn vows was persecuted by her pant-suited, feminist colleagues until she fled the convent, sobbing. I remember the religion teachers — disaffected ex-seminarians and disgruntled leftist nuns — who inculcated us with heresies, denying the physical resurrection of Christ and the virgin birth, for example, in the school which my dad had helped to build by collecting coins door to door in a coffee can. Once when I countered my teacher’s statement diluting Christian morality with a quote from Our Lord, he smiled snarkily and answered, “Jesus didn’t have a Master’s degree in theology. I do.” My complaints about these heresies got me hauled up before the principal and threatened with expulsion — to which I responded with an attorney’s business card and a detailed letter to the Vatican.

But it isn’t just the little people, the isolated nuns and blue collar 10^th graders the modernists target for punishment. I know of an orthodox bishop who was hounded to his grave by liberal priests when he tried to restore traditional Catholic teachings and practice to his diocese. I’ve had seminarian friends who were turned away from the priesthood because they were faithful Roman Catholics who wouldn’t conform to the program of some radicalized, lavender seminary. The modernists, who know how powerful worldly respectability can be in swaying opinion, are practiced in humiliating and marginalizing their enemies — then mocking them because they are lowly and on the margins.

And now the Modernists in the Catholic church are trying it again, turning their guns on Ross Douthat, a learned conservative columnist at The New York Times. Last month, a roster of high-powered Catholic academic theologians, all but one of whom work at colleges that are only nominally Catholic, drafted an open letter essentially calling on the Times to fire Douthat. His journalistic crime? They accused him of practicing theology without a license. Though he lacked an advanced degree in that subject from an approved academy, Douthat had analyzed proposed radical changes to Catholic moral teaching, and written about them for the general public. Now these men, certified by the academy as experts who could safely handle the dangerous, secret information that is Christian doctrine, were asking the journalism experts to silence him. As a matter of professional courtesy.

Douthat had warned that the current battle over divorce and remarriage holds the danger of smashing the Catholic church into pieces. Douthat accurately pointed out that a previous infallible teaching by the landmark Council of Trent had spelled out the indissolubility of marriage in no uncertain terms. A pope who overturned such a teaching, by letting sexually active, divorced and remarried couples receive Holy Communion, risked discrediting his own papal authority, and sending conservative bishops into schism — which they would have to choose, in preference to heresy.

This is the kind of logical inference that liberal academics hate, which they must dismiss as “simplistic,” “fundamentalist” and “naive.” They do that because many of their own beliefs have no more structure than squid, and can only be defended through obscuring clouds of ink. Ross Douthat has had the courage to issue his warning in good faith, knowing full well it would gain him only fresh enemies in that citadel of modernism where he bravely works. For his efforts a cabal of tenured modernists have tried to destroy him professionally. I pray they fail. Douthat doesn’t seem too worried. For him as for me and a billion other Catholics, there are much higher things at stake than a job at a liberal newspaper.