What allegedly ‘transgressive,’ trendy types don’t understand about the Catholic pose many of them have embraced.
What allegedly ‘transgressive,’ trendy types don’t understand about the Catholic pose many of them have embraced.
B y now, you’ve probably heard of the new, allegedly “transgressive” Catholic subculture affiliated with the ever-nebulous so-called New Right. It’s everywhere — at least according to all the profiles we get every couple months, such as a fawning piece that just appeared in the New York Times. Perhaps this is an indication that the whole thing is now lame and passé, and that we can stop talking about it soon.
But not yet. After all, First Things senior editor Julia Yost sees something in it. “Defiance of liberal pieties.” “This contrarian aesthetic.” Yes, the Church is a sign of contradiction to a world the New Right dislikes. And there’s the beauty, the tradition, the intellectual resources, and much more. All those things are good. But none of them are at the heart of Catholicism. How Catholicism’s new fans feel about that heart is harder to say.
A couple of years ago, Dasha Nekrasova, one of the hosts of the New Right–aligned podcast Red Scare, said that “what’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?” Forgive me for thinking that the aim was to believe true things and not false things. Nekrasova apparently sees it differently. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or false. Turn your brain off, no reason required. Believe it because it makes you feel good. She and those like her ignore Paul’s bracing claim that “if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain. . . . We are of all men most miserable.” He didn’t see his faith as some kind of empty status symbol. Neither should we.
Yost also reports that “Anna Kachiyan, Ms. Nekrasova’s non-Catholic co-host on ‘Red Scare,’ has defended traditional religion on the grounds that ‘it’s supposed to introduce constraint into people’s lives.’” What is “traditional religion”? I’ve never encountered any house of worship devoted to “traditional religion.” Does it matter which religion, so long as it’s traditional? Apparently not. This is a stunning indifference to the truth about claims concerning the divine. An indifference, also, to the strictures of faith. They are apparently not for serving and pleasing the divine and fulfilling our humanity. The rules themselves are the point.
Nekrasova herself claims to be a sedevacantist (one who believes that the current pope is not legitimate). Sedevacantism is not Catholicism, of course, but jumping from one to the other shows that the whole thing is a bit of a put-on. The point is not complaining about the new rite of the Mass, or various documents from Vatican II, or anything else that has happened in the Church since the ’60s, on the grounds that they have betrayed the Catholic faith. Complaining about them is part of a general expression of disgust with the modern world (and maybe with the pope having leftist inclinations now) in which the specifics hardly matter. Indeed, I suspect that this is more of an aesthetic pose than an actual belief, much as her initial interest in Catholicism was. Does she really have detailed arguments about, say, why the rite of ordination post–Vatican II is flawed?
No. Rather, Nekrasova was led here, if her tweets are any indication, in response to attempts to restrict the Tridentine Mass. But it’s foolish to conflate this complaint with overall papal legitimacy. The Church before the transition to the new Mass was not as strong as it appeared. Its liturgies were full of abuses. But none of that matters when your main form of historical analysis is vibes. (I myself prefer the Latin Mass and attend it whenever possible. It is too beautiful and too important to be left completely to unserious aesthetes and people with monstrous political views.)
Whether it’s a pose or a belief, it indicates another problem with “Vibes” Catholicism — it is mediated almost entirely through spending time online (a recurring problem for the New Right). If you’re becoming a sedevacantist in 2022, you encountered the ideas online, not in a sedevacantist parish somewhere. New York Times profiles of the most Twitter-visible Catholics may make you think that Catholicism is the religion of an intellectual elite. It’s not. It’s the religion of about 1.3 billion people, most of whom are neither intellectual nor elite. And that’s fine. Really, this kind of media treatment almost makes me miss the days when Catholicism was the religion of illiterate peasants, kept in darkness and superstition by their priests.
The same goes for Catholicism being a literary religion, one dedicated to the creation of beauty. It is. But it’s also the religion of a plethora of terrible art and kitsch. And it’s even not true that embracing the kitsch automatically makes one Catholic. These days, wearing rosary beads is likely to signify a Lana Del Rey fan. Biz Sherbert, writing about the broader trend in fashion for Catholic kitsch, sees it as part of “a sideways yearning for a divine order that makes sense of a world that is casually cruel and unpredictable.” Ditto here.
These new “Vibes Catholics” also misunderstand the Church’s moral teaching. In a recent profile, James Pogue describes Wet Brain, a podcast co-hosted by Honor Levy, as “a window into a world of people who enjoy a mind-bendingly ironic thrill by tut-tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex.” I have heard any number of moral condemnations in my life. I have made some myself. None of them had the purpose of giving the person making them “a mind-bendingly ironic thrill.” In the case of premarital sex, I suspect, the motivation is to eat a cake and have it too — to enjoy the thrill of doing something illicit without actually having to believe that what they’re doing is wrong. This kind of Catholicism enables its practitioners to condemn the libs for their failure to abide by the Church’s moral teachings while they themselves also fail, and, for that matter, don’t really try.
It should go without saying that this is not the way people talk about things they actually think are wrong; it’s the way “libertines” (Levy’s word) talk about things they don’t. It is true that some of the teachings of Christianity are countercultural. It is not true that the main purpose of Christianity (or any religion) is to be countercultural and shock the libs. Some of these Catholics haven’t even gotten that far. Pogue quotes a friend: “It’s a good thing I have a girlfriend because casual sex is out.” Well, that’s good, but the Catholic sexual ethic, and Catholic ethics in general, extends beyond “don’t have casual sex.” I would say that of course a profile couldn’t resist dwelling on the sex stuff, but in this case the people being profiled can’t resist it either.
Another irony is that, around the time Pogue’s article came out, Wet Brain released an episode in which Walter Pearce, Levy’s co-host, holds an intervention. Levy “has fallen from Christ and his light.” In the podcast, almost in the very same minute, Levy says that a loving God would never send anyone to hell and that the Inquisition deserves hardly any bad press. The understanding of Catholicism displayed is entirely bound up in rules — “I have always believed in God, I just didn’t know there were all these rules and sh**,” she says. And, to an earlier point, the only specific sin she mentions in the entire episode is premarital sex.
This is all wrong, of course, but how she got there is interesting. Her Catholicism, she says, “was just so rooted in revolution and reaction,” to which she later adds, “when I first became Christian, I didn’t care about being good.” The attraction to Catholicism is entirely an attraction to its perceived reactionary nature. There’s just nothing there, save maybe the desire to shock the libs.
Maybe that’s all right, Yost says. After all, the Decadents (a late 19th-century aesthetic movement) intended to horrify with their own interest in Catholicism. And they were also perceived as insincere at first. One problem: Men like Wilde and Huysmans were great geniuses. Where is the comparable level of artistic achievement among this crowd? (Memes don’t count.) Early returns are not promising.
The most interesting claim Yost makes about sincerity is this: “The idea that it is a properly religious act to observe the forms of faith even in the absence of perfect belief most likely comes naturally to a generation raised on social media, where performance is a constant fact of life.” She’s correct that it is a properly religious act, but only when accompanied with the correct attitude: “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.” In her attempts to discredit the nonsense category of “authenticity,” however, she goes too far. What is necessary for this process to work is not performance but the formation of a habit.
Yost also claims that “‘authentic’ internal conversion is not a Catholic demand but a Protestant one.” Yes, the Church will take anyone — better to be a bad Catholic than a bad non-Catholic. And, because I am a good Catholic, I’ve never read the Bible. So I would have no idea if the prophets spend large portions of the Old Testament telling the Israelites that God is very upset with them because, despite performing all the religious rituals, they repeatedly fail to turn away from idolatry and injustice. I’m clueless as to whether the prophets reported God saying things like “I hate, I despise your feast days, . . . but let judgment run down as waters” and “this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me” and “for I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” And I’ll never know if Christ referenced some of those passages while teaching. I wonder where the phrase “whited sepulchre” comes from. Who can say?
Yost quotes one subject of her profile sounding the alarm: “I don’t think anybody downtown is in a state of grace.” I would let that be the last word, but there’s one final irony of the New Right interest in Catholicism.
A novel came out last year. I cannot recommend it as a novel; I will, however, as a work of ethnography about a certain class of person in society. In it, a man and a woman, after sleeping together the night before, attend Sunday Mass at his urging. The woman, who is so biblically illiterate that she doesn’t recognize the story of the woman washing Jesus’ feet with her hair, finds the Mass somehow moving despite her lack of belief. She wants it to be real. In an email she writes to a friend about the experience, she struggles to align her desire for it to mean something with her feeling that the claims of Christianity are pretty silly. Sound familiar? “Vibes Catholics” might think they’re superior to all the normie libs running around New York. But they still act like characters in a Sally Rooney novel.