Of Baptists, Montanists, and Nancy Pelosi

In a previous post I discussed (and dissed) a hypothetical thing that I sarcastically called “The People’s Catholic Church.” I conjectured that modernist, dissenting Catholics who refuse to obey their bishops and who reject Church doctrine, yet continue to claim that they’re Catholic (namely, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Joe Biden, etc.)  must therefore think that Catholicism is something different from the faith as handed on by the successors to the apostles. You can read the whole post here, but if you want my one-word summary of “The People’s Catholic Church,” here it is: “Garbage.”

In that post, I made the following statement: “This idea of cutting out all the intervening stuff in order to get back to the REAL Church, well, there’s a name for people who believe that: “Baptists.” (Not slamming my Baptist friends here. If you want to be Baptist, fine, be the best Baptists you can. I hope and expect for a great many Baptists to go to heaven, while I fear for the souls of a great many Catholics. My qualm here is with Baptists who insist on passing themselves off as Roman Catholics, because I think they’re intellectual frauds who are misleading people by their fraudulence.)”

Since I know of at least one Baptist who (I hope) is reading my blog, I’ve been ruminating over that statement for the last day or two, and I’ve decided that it’s possible that that statement could be taken the wrong way, doing a disservice to Baptists and being entirely too complimentary to Pelosi et al. (I thought about re-casting my argument, likening Pelosi et al. to Montanism, but I then decided that that that would be unfair even to Montanists.)  So there’s nothing to do for it but to elaborate on my previous statement about Baptists in this post.

Despite all of the differences between Catholics and Protestants—everything from the Real Presence and Mary on the one hand to incense and music on the other—there’s only one truly crucial difference, because from this one point all of the other differences come. Protestants believe that the Catholic Church added things to the faith handed down from the apostles, thus screwing that faith up. Catholics believe that Protestants took away things from the faith handed down from the apostles, thus screwing that faith up. (It follows that in the eyes of each tradition, the other is heretical.)

Beyond this, it’s hard to make a general statement about what Protestants believe, because Protestantism is so fragmented and those beliefs are so varied. I imagine the only thing that all Protestants at least theoretically agree on is that the Catholic Church has officially taught doctrinal error. The pronouncements of its leaders, therefore, cannot and must not be accepted because they have been shown to be both actually erroneous and capable of error.

When I put it this way, you can see why I likened Pelosi et al. to Protestants (particularly, Baptists, though I know that some Baptists wouldn’t describe themselves as Protestants). The commonality between Pelosi et al. and Protestants—and the point of my earlier statement—is the argument/belief that leaders of the Catholic Church are wrong when it comes to the doctrines they teach (in the case of Pelosi et al., the doctrines in question, among others, relate to birth control and abortion). The reason I chose Baptists is because they have no apostolic structure, unlike Episcopalians and Methodists; they have no doctrinal statements of faith such as Presbyterians; and they’re a Protestant tradition that I understand relatively well, compared to, say, Pentecostalism.

But here’s the disservice, or at least the disservice that some Baptists might perceive, in the parallel that I drew between Baptists and Pelosi et al. In the case of Baptists—at least serious Baptists, ones who aren’t casual about their faith in the same way so many Catholics are casual about theirs—they are genuinely trying to adhere to what they perceive is the Christian faith as handed down by the apostles. (Catholics disagree that they’re getting it right, but that’s at least what they’re trying to do.) But Pelosi et al. don’t seem at all to me to be doing that, and this is how they differ from serious Baptists, and even from Montanists. Rather, Pelosi et al. seem to be opportunists who use Christianity (when they mention it at all) to further their own agendas, which are shaped by influences that are largely secular (as in worldly, non-Christian), not really caring what the apostles taught except when that teaching can be used to further their own program.

Now, I can’t prove that Pelosi et al. are actually doing this. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I suppose that they want peace, justice, and truth to prevail, which genuine Christians probably want as well. At any rate I will not presume that I know the state of Nancy Pelosi’s soul, because only she and God know that. We are not ever to judge the state of someone’s soul, because we aren’t God. We can and must, however, judge someone’s actions, and what I do know is that if Pelosi believes that killing an unborn child who has neither actual nor legal remedy nor defense is just, then her understanding of Christianity—if that’s where she’s coming from at all--is terribly perverted and sick. In a word, it’s wrong.

I won’t here rehash all of the voluminous pro-life arguments, which appeal from everything from the Natural Law to 2000 years of Christian teaching. If you want two of the best sources, I would refer you to the Protestant Randy Alcorn’s Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments as well as to the Catholic Peter Kreeft’s The Unaborted Socrates. And to those Christians among you who think that you’re doing an unborn child a favor by killing him because he’s got Downs’ Syndrome or would be a crack baby or would be damaged by the poverty or other circumstances he’d be born into, I’ll 1) accuse you of sinning against the virtue of hope, 2) refer you to a phrase that I’ll leave you to look up: Lebensunwertes Leben; and, when you get teed off with me for doing those two things, I’ll 3) quote you both Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, who both note that tenderness and sentiment lead to the gas chamber. I’ll then invite you to take a good, hard look at your views on mercy killing (and that’s the most charitable way of putting it) in light of your professed Christianity.

    So, at any rate, Baptists, by definition, take the same jaundiced view of Episcopal authority that Pelosi et al. do. In that regard I stand by my statement, and it’s in that context that you should understand it. But are Pelosi et al. Christian in the way that serious Baptists are? Not that I can tell.