What Happened to Catechesis in American Christianity?

Correcting the universal intellectual emptying

Photo by Yosi Prihantoro on Unsplash (What I feel like a lot of catechesis for children has entirely been distilled into.)

I think the last time I got aggravated during a homily was on Trinity Sunday in the Roman Catholic Church in a diocese I won't name in a city I’m not from. I was not aggravated because the priest decided to abandon Catholic orthodoxy in favor of fashionable left-wing or, more subtle but no less dangerous, right-wing heterodoxy, but because the homily was stupid. It was long-winded and practically void of any content. I wondered if the priest was going to use his seminary education that supposedly came with a Master’s degree and potentially discuss the development of Trinitarian theology in Church councils, or possibly draw from the Trinitarian theology of the Church Fathers, maybe even allude to the Second Temple Jewish concept of two powers in Heaven. Instead, I got to cringe when the priest called the Trinity “illogical” in any other discipline but theology. Great, now he was teaching people our faith is illogical, and I suddenly wondered how this would affect other people’s faith.

I’m currently in grad school, and I have a professor who, a faithful Roman Catholic, claims to take every opportunity to make fun of Catholic catechesis in the 90’s, which he describes as nonexistent or harmful. It was not just the nineties. I came of age in the teens. Some of my friends and I will refer to CCD as Catechetical Chaos in your Diocese. As I’ve written before, I think the CCD at the parish in my hometown did more to push kids away from the faith than it did to get them to continue practicing. Let’s reduce the faith to a bunch of rules that don’t seem to fit with modernity without explaining why they’re necessary, forget the necessity of developing a relationship with Christ, and abandon the whole intellectual tradition.

Just as bad Catholic catechesis was not unique to the nineties, bad catechesis is not even unique to American Catholicism. I’ve pretty much done everything in white American Christianity. Due to my parents being a mixed marriage and our family being a military family, I was raised Presbyterian, Roman Catholic and Episcopalian. I attended a progressive RCA church camp in the summers in my teens. I did my undergrad at Wheaton College (IL), fully immersing myself in American Evangelical culture. While there, I attended an Anglican cathedral that was essentially trying to be Evangelical Protestant, Roman Catholic (though not actually), Reformed, and Charismatic all at the same time. I also did an internship with a Methodist organization the summer before my senior year. I converted to Byzantine (Ruthenian) Catholicism after graduating college, and I currently run around in both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox circles. Across the board, with the exception of churches in towns with Christian colleges, I have witnessed lots of bad catechesis.

I did not learn what Protestantism was as a Presbyterian or even what it meant to be Presbyterian (Although to be fair, I was eight, but at this point, I definitely know more about Calvinism than my Presbyterian mother). I did not learn much about liturgy, sacraments, or the Book of Common Prayer as an Episcopalian. As for Orthodoxy, one of my cradle Orthodox friends just assumed, unfortunately correctly, that because I was a convert to some form of Eastern Christianity, I’d know more about his faith than he did. And that’s not even the worst bit. When I was home over Christmas break during my junior year of college, my brother had one of his friends over. This friend happened to be cradle Greek Orthodox. Although at this point in my life I knew hardly anything about Eastern Christianity, this friend decided to ask me because I had taken some theology classes at Wheaton if the Orthodox Church held Christ to be fully God and fully man. Why had he never learned about the Incarnation? One of my cradle Catholic nun friends managed to make it until getting involved with FOCUS in college without knowing of the real presence in the Eucharist. Her being a nun now naturally means she has learned an exponential amount more.

Now, I will own the fact I am a, shall we say, “high information” Christian. I had a very gradual intellectual awakening while at Wheaton. Not everyone necessarily needs to be a “high information” Christian to live a faithful life. I was most certainly not an intellectual nor a “high information” Christian when I enrolled in Wheaton as an 18-year-old and had little inkling of ever being called to the intellectual life, but when I took a freshman level half-semester theology class, I remember my mind being blown. This was the first time I had ever encountered any sort of Christianity that had seriously been thought out. It had never occurred to me there was much of an intellectual side of the faith, and I found myself wondering why I had never learned what I was learning before. This was by no means high level material and easily something my less intelligent fourteen-year-old brain could have comprehended, but it was something seriously thought through. What had blown my mind was the knowledge that there was thoughtful theology in the fist place.

I often feel like American pastors, preachers, homilists, etc, strongly underestimate the intellectual capabilities of their parishioners. I have heard many homilies like the one I alluded to in the first paragraph, long-winded and devoid of any real content; however, a parish with doctors and lawyers, etc, in attendance has people who can understand deep theological concepts. People who are smart enough to go to medical school and law school are smart enough to hear from the writings of St. John Chrysostom and much, much more than that. Eastern Orthodox Christians and Byzantine Catholics do so every Pascha. Why not make it more than once a year? High schoolers who are smart enough to read Shakespeare and do trigonometry are smart enough to hear in homilies synopses of parts of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa. Even if undereducated, people are still intelligent enough to stomach deep theological concepts.

On The Lord of Spirits podcast, one of the hosts has twice now mentioned how when he was a Dutch Reformed pastor before becoming Orthodox and getting ordained, he got ahold of some of his church’s bulletins from the 1920’s. This church was also very blue collar, had a lot of people who spoke Dutch as a first language, and did not have lots of really educated college graduates; however, one of the bulletins still had a page detailing the difference between supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism. I would wager the only place that would probably be seen in a Reformed church today would be at a Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, MI with a surplus of Calvin University professors in attendance. If I were to ask my Presbyterian lawyer mother, who is a pastor’s kid, what the difference between supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism is, she would give me a look of clear incomprehension.

This catechetical emptying across American Christianity is not doing anyone any favors. Our culture is secularizing, and although converts tend to be well catechized, that is not the case for people raised in the faith. Many converts are aware before catechism classes of the faith’s intellectual tradition and go seek it out. Those raised in the faith do not seek it out because they do not know the intellectual tradition even exists. With being raised in the faith, many poorly catechized Christians will think they know all there is to know about the faith or that the faith has given them all the answers it can without ever being aware of any depth. They no longer see it as having any value in their lives.

Amending this needs to start with priest and pastors not underestimating their congregation’s intellects and actually use their seminary educations when they preach. I am not saying homilists should not attempt to make the texts read in the liturgy relevant to the people’s lives, but telling long-winded stories, making a homily entirely about a recent movie, or just blandly summarizing the text when the people already heard it for themselves won’t do anything. People can understand rich theological concepts. They can and should hear specific theological terms in homilies like “Incarnation”, and they will understand such terms when provided with explanations. What have the Church Fathers said about this gospel passage? How has the saint of the day lived the Christian life?

Regarding catechesis for children, I do not think children, who already get homework from school and are often involved in several extracurricular activities, should necessarily get homework from Sunday school, CCD, or whatever catechesis they are in, but they do need to be made to think. Teenagers can easily discuss excerpts from texts written by saints. Confirmation in the West (which, hot take, should be administered before first communion) is not a graduation. There is no graduation from learning more about the faith.

Lastly, I think what must be distilled the most is how faith is ultimately a relationship and way of life. Relevancy in sermons, homilies, and catechesis shouldn’t mean preaching about the latest Marvel movie or whatever, but teaching people how to live the Christian life and fostering a real encounter and relationship with Christ. This relationship requires we love Christ with all our mind, but also with our heart, soul, and strength. When one of the four is lacking, so will all the rest.