The Myth of Consubstantiation

In 2009 I purchased a copy of Nathan Feldman’s Pocket Dictionary of Church History—overall, an impressive work that had an uncanny ability to cover a broad range of material to define terms concisely and accurately. More recently I purchased Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Exposing Myths about Christianity, which attempts to defend Christianity from its detractors without taking any one particular side in intramural discussions but offering arguments for all sides.

Both works, however, failed miserably in their discussion of the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. Feldman writes under the entry entitled “consubstantiation”: “Martin Luther developed the Eucharistic doctrine known as consubstantiation, which in time became closely identified with Lutheranism….Thus, for Luther there is a ‘real physical presence’ of Christ in, under, and around the Communion elements, but the bread and wine do not change in substance as in the Roman Catholic view of transubstantiation.” Russell makes the same error (p. 297): “Luther condemned transubstantiation and substituted the idea of ‘consubstantiation,’ in which the consecrated bread and wine are both bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ. Both interpretations depend on Aristotelian philosophy, so neither is a necessary way of defining how Christ is present.”

There are three major errors involved. The first is that “consubstantiation” is the term used to define the Lutheran doctrine. I have been a Lutheran for nearly half a century and that of the more confessionally attuned variety. (I’m a Missouri Synod Lutheran.) The term was never used in my confirmation instruction nor was it to be found in the Synodical Catechism, either of 1943 or 1986. In all my seminary education I may have heard the term once or twice, and then it was the sainted Dr. Robert Preus uttering the term with contempt and saying, “How can non-Lutherans say that we believe in consubstantiation? Don’t they read anything?”

Perhaps this was just an oddity of my experience. But if you look at the great Lutheran treatises on the Lord’s Supper written in the twentieth century, you would again and again notice the absence of the term. John Stephenson’s book on the Lord’s Supper in the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics series fails to mention it. So too does Hermann Sasse’s work, This is My Body, a serious examination of Luther’s thoughts on the sacrament. You will not find the term in Werner Elert’s The Structure of Lutheranism or Edmund Schlink’s Theology of the Lutheran Confessions, and other such surveys of Lutheran doctrine. Nor will you find it mentioned in Lutheran dogmatics (such as Francis Pieper’s Christian Dogmatics) or, if it does merit mention in passing, it is stated with disapproval. If consubstantiation is Lutheran doctrine, Lutherans have been keeping it a good secret.

Is the problem that modern Lutherans don’t know their history? Could it be that the term was used by earlier Lutheran dogmaticians and has since died in obscurity? An examination of Philip Melanchthon’s Loci or Martin Chemnitz’s Loci—two early Lutheran dogmatics—will prove that idea wrong. Nor will you find John Gerhard, the greatest Lutheran dogmatician of the age of orthodoxy, giving his imprimatur to the term. In fact, he heartily disapproves of it in his Harmony of the Gospels (chapter 171, leaf 784):

Quando veram, realem et substantialem corporis (et sanguinis) Christi praesentiam nos credere profitemur, nequaquam vel impanationem, vel incorporationem, vel consubstantiationem, vel physicam inclusionem, vel localem praesentiam, vel delitescentiam corpusculi sub pane, vel essentialem panis in corpus conversionem, vel durabilem corporis ad panem extra usum coenae affixionem, vel personalem panis et corporis unionem statuimus. (Emphasis in original)

When we confess that we believe in the true, real, and substantial presence of the body (and blood) of Christ, in no way do we imagine either an impanation or consubstantiation or a physical confinement or a local presence or the hiding of a particle underneath the bread or the conversion of the essence of the bread into the body or the permanent joining of the body to the bread outside the use of the supper or a personal union of the bread and the body. (My translation)

If any of the Lutheran dogmaticians of the seventeenth century were to use such quasi-Aristotelian terminology as consubstantiation, it would have been John Gerhard. But he explicitly rejects that term.

Well, then, neither modern Lutheranism nor the golden age of Lutheran orthodoxy used that term for their position. But surely this must be the doctrine taught by the Lutheran confessions (the Book of Concord), right? Again, you will not even find the term mentioned, although the Formula of Concord does reject some of the same things Gerhard does (such as impanation and local presence) that are frequently equated with consubstantiation. If we can find no other source, must we conclude that Luther is the author of consubstantiation? Again you can look at all of Luther’s works—and his substantial sacramental writings have all been translated into English—and you will find that there are only two mentions of consubstantiation in the American Edition of Luther’s Works, once in a footnote (footnote 152 on volume 40, page 196) and once in an introduction (for volume 37), and in each instance merely to disabuse the reader of the notion that Luther believed in consubstantiation.

Serious non-Lutheran scholars also concur that Lutherans do not believe in consubstantiation. Richard A. Muller, himself a Reformed theologian and therefore without a Lutheran ax to grind, nevertheless writes these words about consubstantiation in his Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (pp. 80-81):

According to the theory of consubstantiation, the body and blood of Christ become substantially present together with the substance of the bread and wine, when the elements are consecrated. This theory is frequently confused with the Lutheran doctrine of real presence. Consubstantio indicates the presence of Christ’s body according to a unique sacramental mode of presence that is proper to Christ’s body as such, and is therefore a local presence (praesentia localis, q.v.); the Lutheran view, however, argues a real, but illocal presence of Christ’s body and blood that is grounded in the omnipresence of Christ’s person, and therefore a supernatural and sacramental, rather than a local, union with the invisible elements of the sacrament….Consubstantio implies only a presence and not a union of Christ and the sacramental elements; it was taught as a possibility by Duns Scotus, John of Jandun, and William of Occam.

Muller not only points out that the nomen (name) of consubstantiation does not apply to Lutherans (the real term for the Lutheran doctrine is “the real presence”), but neither does the res (substance). And here we come to the second misunderstanding. Feldman states that the Lutheran view is that “there is a ‘real physical presence’ of Christ in, under, and around the Communion elements.” Such a definition would fit the view held by Scotus and company, but it ill fits the view of Lutherans, who do not believe in a local or “physical” presence. Moreover, while a person may believe in either consubstantiation or transubstantiation without believing in the sacramental union, the sacramental union is at the heart of the Lutheran view of the matter.

The third error (one made by Russell) is that Luther was beholden to Aristotelian philosophy in this matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Already at the time of the Heidelberg Disputations (1518), Luther had rejected the use of philosophy in defining theology and stated that he was especially distrustful of Aristotelian metaphysics.

Well, if consubstantiation is not a Lutheran term and does not express the Lutheran doctrine, why do so many non-Lutheran books say that it is the Lutheran view? It began with John Calvin’s 1553 broadside against Lutheranism in which he accused the Lutherans of believing in consubstantiation. It was meant to be a polemical term, and in the years that followed it would often be accompanied by others such as “impanation,” “Capernaitic eating,” “artolatry,” and the like. But calling consubstantiation “the Lutheran view of the Lord’s supper” is as accurate as defining Pelagianism as “the Arminian view of salvation” or fatalism as “the Calvinist worldview.” While polemicists may speak in that manner, it is improper for those claiming to be impartial observers to describe a movement by using its enemy’s slurs and distortions.

The real doctrine that Lutherans teach about the Lord’s Supper can be described under three terms: sacramental union, oral eating, and eating of the ungodly. We speak of a sacramental union; the bread and wine are united with the body and blood of Christ, as Paul clearly teaches in 1 Cor. 10:16 and as our Lord’s words in instituting the sacrament state (“This is my body…This is the new testament in my blood”). The exact mode in which Christ can effect this sacramental union is never stated in Lutheran theology. We know that He is omnipotent and can be anywhere and everywhere He wants to be. He has more modes of presence than we can name or understand. (See Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration 102-103.) We also teach that one receives Christ’s body and blood through the eating of the bread and wine, not through ascending to heaven in a mystical experience. Because the body and blood of Christ come through the bread and wine, all who commune receive the body and blood of Christ, not just those who do so in faith. Thus, it is quite possible for the ungodly to eat and drink damnation upon themselves by receiving Christ’s body and blood without discernment, as Paul clearly warns in 1 Corinthians 11:27-30.

This is the Lutheran view in a nutshell. Don’t expect American evangelicals to grasp it—let alone explain it accurately—anytime soon.

Mind the Gap

We have all heard people complain about the biggest gap in Christianity, the gap that is allegedly responsible for all the evils among Christians, viz., the twelve inch gap between the head and the heart. In this analysis, the problem is that too many people have a “head knowledge” of the truths of Christianity, but they don’t have the “heart knowledge” that is necessary for a Christian to thrive. What is the implied solution? The church ought to focus more on the heart and less on the head—in other words, more on the emotions and less on the intellect.

Behind this explanation is the current western way of looking at people. A human being has an intellectual center (commonly called the “head”) and an emotional center (commonly called the “heart”). Granted, nobody actually thinks that the cardiac organ is the seat or origin of emotions, but it is a convenient metonymy to differentiate between two aspects of the human mind that in our estimation have little or nothing to do with each other. We speak similarly of courage as “guts,” even though nobody thinks that our courage resides in our intestines.

The real problem comes about when we think that this modern way of dividing the components of a human being is actually the biblical way of viewing humanity. Compounding the problem is the fact that the Scriptures urge people to have a change of heart, and we tend to read “heart” with our culture’s eyes rather than with biblical eyes. And thus we see the Bible’s call to a new heart as an invitation to rework our emotions and to stop our intellectual growth as unnecessary at best and counterproductive at worst.

But the Bible doesn’t distinguish between head knowledge and heart knowledge. In fact, it doesn’t use the word “head” to refer to the intellectual aspect of mankind. Instead, it uses the word “heart” to do so. It is the heart that thinks and verbalizes ideas (Genesis 6:5; Deuteronomy 9:4). It is the heart that remembers (Deuteronomy 4:9). It is the heart that meditates and contemplates (Psalm 16:7; 19:14). Most importantly, it is the heart that possesses the will (Exodus 4:21) and makes ethical decisions (Deuteronomy 9:5; Psalm 7:10). To be sure, the emotions are also found in the heart (Exodus 4:14; Deuteronomy 28:65). But the Scriptures do not separate what we in the West do. It knows that the will, the intellect, and the emotions cannot be isolated from one another, but work together to form a common mind. Thus, when we read such phrases as Deuteronomy 4:29, that command us to seek after God with our whole heart, we cannot see this as an exercise purely of the emotions, but also of the intellect, the memory, and especially the will. When Deuteronomy 10:16 tells us to circumcise our hearts, it clarifies exactly what it means: we are not to be stubborn. In other words, it is a command to exercise the will (not just the emotions) more appropriately.

But are we denying that hypocrisy can be a problem with Christians? No, we are just reframing the question. The current received wisdom is that Christians become hypocrites when they aren’t emotionally in tune enough or when they try to acquire intellectual knowledge instead of practical knowledge. And yet the Scriptures have a different analysis of the problem. As the prophet Isaiah says (29:13): “This people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me.” Our Lord confirms the same sentiment in Matthew 15:8. The problem isn’t that they have a high spiritual IQ and a low spiritual EQ. The problem is that they have neither, even though they mouth the words. In other words, they say the right words, but don’t understand what they are saying, let alone assent to them.

It is for that reason that the psalmist prays (19:14), “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.” The process of spiritual growth begins with the mouth and the lips, but it cannot end there. He wants his words to be orthodox and the meditation—there’s that thinking again!—of the heart that follows to be proper and in full accord with what his lips are uttering. The psalmist knows that God placed His Word very near us so that it could be on our mouth and in our hearts (Deuteronomy 30:14). We learn God’s Word by speaking it often, but it cannot be something that stays only on our lips but must be apprehended by our entire mind—will, intellect, and emotions.

As the passages mentioned above indicate, the Scriptures know that learning starts with the mouth, but must settle into the heart if it is to succeed. Thus, the Scriptures have a more nuanced attitude toward rote learning than we in the contemporary West do, which universally rejects it. As we have already noted, the Bible recognizes that people can recite certain truths without understanding, let alone believing them. It knows that mouthing the words is not the same as knowing or believing them. But at the same time the Scriptures do not eschew rote learning and memorization. They know full well that the first step in learning something is to say what one does not fully understand. Consequently, the Scriptures are full of admonitions to repeat God’s words as a way to get that Word into the heart of each generation. Deuteronomy 6:6-9 outlines such a procedure: God’s Word is meant to be stored in the heart; consequently, children are to be taught these words at fixed times during the day and these words are to be as visible as one’s head and hands and doorposts. Of course, this is only the first step, with the next step being for children to understand what they have been saying. The problem arises because children (and, for that matter, learners of all ages) can resist these words and only embrace them with their lips. But the problem isn’t with the repetition of the words of the Scriptures, but with the stubborn heart that refuses to learn.

Thus, there is still a gap that faithful Christians have to address. It’s just not the emotional-intellectual gap most Christians in America assume it is.

All Bible quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).

Liturgy and Spiritual Awakening, Part Three

Before reading this blog, the reader should look at the previous two blogs, especially the last one, which is a synopsis of Bishop Bo Giertz’s argument on the relationship between liturgy and spiritual awakening. Once we are familiar with Bishop Giertz’s argument, we can ask whether these words from mid-20th century Sweden have any relevance for us today.

We have to note the differences. Nearly every Swede of Giertz’s generation had been baptized and was a member of the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden, although many Swedes had but tenuous ties with the church. Giertz himself had been baptized as a child, even though both of his parents were atheists and he was raised in a largely secular environment. Thus, one of the major purposes of awakening movements in Sweden was to reconnect youth and adults with the church of their baptism that they knew little about. Now it still happens in the United States that children are baptized and then their spiritual growth is entirely neglected. But that is not as often the case here as in Sweden, since there is not the same social pressure to have children brought to baptism and made to belong to the one church that is integrated with the entire social fabric of the country. As the Church of Sweden has lost its standing in its society, there is a growing percentage of unbaptized Swedes. One can expect that future awakenings in Sweden (May God grant them!) will not be exclusively a re-conversion of the baptized, but also in large measure a conversion of the heathen.

In addition, awakening movements in Sweden had often been connected, sometimes rather tenuously and not altogether harmoniously, with the Church of Sweden. But in the United States, each awakening movement has turned its back on established churches and founded new ones. Revivalism itself has become an institution—and one spiritually impoverished by its substitution of new forms and a “new liturgy,” as well as its open hostility to creeds and liturgy. Consequently, each awakening movement is unable to pass on the faith to the next generation and the movement burns itself out—just as Giertz had so insightfully seen and warned.

Thus, we in the United States live in a situation where awakening and liturgy are not just rivals living in tension with each other, but where they have become bitter foes. We have evidence of where this leads, and it is just as Bishop Giertz had predicted. “Liturgy without awakening” has indeed become “the most dangerous of all church programs” (p. 28), as is evident in the Episcopal Church and in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), as well as many other mainline denominations. Churches that had never had lectionaries have adopted them. Liturgical worship has become more common in mainline churches, and there is a fascination with ritual. But at the same time orthodoxy and traditional Christian morality have never been so marginalized in those church bodies. The fascination with ritual has led not only to a recovery of ancient Christian rites, but also to the adoption of bizarre, half-pagan rites (such as labyrinth walks).

Meanwhile, American Evangelicalism has demonstrated the truth of Giertz’s contention that wherever the traditional liturgy has been discarded, “the new forms that grow up…are usually less attractive and more profane than the ancient liturgy” (pp. 17-18). Moreover, “they contain less of God’s Word, they pray and speak without Scriptural direction, they are not so much concerned about expressing the whole content of Scripture, but are satisfied with one thing or another that seems to be especially attractive or popular” (p. 18). Anyone who knows the history of American Evangelicalism knows how it has latched onto a particular idea in any given generation to the exclusion of the full counsel of God and how it has tended to be driven from one fad to another until finally the substantial theology of a Gresham Machen or a Carl F.H. Henry is replaced by that of a Robert Bell.

Where does that leave confessional Lutheranism, especially in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod? There have been several forces at work in the last decades. There was a liberal liturgical movement (much akin to what predominates in the ELCA now), but it failed to take over the synod and is largely a spent force now. But those who opposed the liberal liturgical movement were not all united as to how to move the synod forward, especially as it became apparent that the synod had stagnated in the late 1960’s and entered a stage of mild decline in the decades that followed. Some argued that the church needed an awakening to stem both liberalism and a decline in membership. These people saw American Evangelicalism as the antidote and embraced its trends—the charismatic craze, spiritual gifts inventories, the church growth movement, the seeker church paradigm, the megachurch phenomenon, contemporary Christian music, the house church trend, and the emergent church, to name a few. Granted, the Missouri Synod participants have tried to “Lutheranize” these movements, but (as their critics have rightly noted) they have tended to follow Evangelicalism as slavishly as the liberals followed mainline theology.

Others returned to the Lutheran confessions, which they saw as the antidote to the serious theological flaws of both liberalism and Evangelicalism. They tended to be mildly liturgical in the sense that they followed the Divine Service as printed in the hymnal but without any real interest in liturgical matters. But as the 1980’s and 1990’s unfolded, robust interest in theology was coupled with a robust interest in the riches of the liturgy. Unlike the liberal liturgical movement, where the rich liturgical language masked the unbelief of the celebrant, this conservative liturgical movement used the liturgy to express the fullness of its faith. And thus the most avowedly confessional people in the synod (those who can say what Solid Declaration Article III is about without having to look it up) are also the most likely to be very liturgically conscious. For them, those who have followed contemporary Evangelical trends are minimalists not only in worship, but in confessional commitment. But those who have followed more of Evangelicalism’s trends look at the confessional liturgical movement as aloof and unable to reach out to the lost who so desperately need the message of the gospel.

Bishop Giertz’s herdabrev may offer a fruitful proposal for dialogue between these two groups in our synod. He suggested that the liturgy of the common Divine Service held on Sundays and other festivals should be kept intact, but he allowed greater freedom for other, more informal gatherings of the church. The Divine Service is the common heritage for all Christians and is rich in biblical quotations and symbolism that give real sustenance to the mature. It should not be abandoned or drastically changed. But the church also needs to “speak to the children of the age in the language of the age about those things which have been forgotten but need to be heard again” (p. 14). This will take place outside of the Divine Service, in informal Bible studies and prayer groups and other activities that bring the unchurched, the de-churched, and the unbeliever into contact with God’s Word.

Bishop Giertz’s herdabrev will not end the worship wars, but it may serve as the basis for discussion that could lead to a just and lasting peace.

Liturgy and Spiritual Awakening, Part Two

In the comments below, I am quoting from Clifford Ansgar Nelson’s translation of Bishop Bo Giertz’s herdabrev, “Liturgy and Spiritual Awakening,” published by Augustana Book Concern in 1950.

Bishop Giertz begins his discussion of these matters by positing that “The Word of God creates the church” (p. 10). That Word appeared in two different forms—those “which seem to be more or less improvised and spontaneous and those which appear fixed and unchangeable”—or “awakening” and “liturgy,” as they are commonly called (p. 10).

Liturgy has deep roots in the apostolic age: “The altar is today the only place in our modern life where, with unbroken tradition, the vestments are still used which were worn by people in that olden day. Within the walls of the church one can still hear musical settings that preserve something of the very tones of that hymn of praise which our Lord and His disciples sang when they ate the paschal meal” (p. 12). And yet it is not the antiquity of the service that most commends itself, but “the fact that it is a form which the Spirit Himself has created to preserve and deepen the life which He has awakened in the church” (p. 13).

Awakening also has apostolic roots. But its language is different. “The instrument of awakening is the spoken Word, a word with prophetic authority, powerful to crush the hard rock of a soul and also appealing with all the inward warmth of the gospel. The language of awakening is often akin to everyday speech….Therefore, the words of awakening do not employ such phrases as, for the example, the Root of Jesse, or the Key of David. Rather do they speak to the children of the age in the language of the age about those things which have been forgotten but need to be heard again,” while liturgy “uses all the richness of the Scriptures, all the meaningful symbols and prefigurements of Christ in the Old Testament” (p. 14).

Both are necessary. “Awakening is always needed…because there is always the need for awakening even among the most faithful members of the church….The old Adam in each one of us is prone to fall asleep, to make the Christian life a dead routine, to use liturgical form to cloak his self-complacency and impenitence” (p. 16). “Liturgy is just as needful. There can be no normal church life without liturgy. Sacraments need form; the order of worship must have some definite pattern. It is possible to live for a short time on improvisations” but “in circles where people seek to live without any forms, new forms are nevertheless constantly taking shape….But it would not be wrong to say that the new forms that grow up in this way are usually less attractive and more profane than the ancient liturgy….The new liturgy that grows in this manner is poorer, less Biblical, and less nourishing to the soul than the discarded ancient order” (pp. 17-18).

Giertz notes that liturgy has many enemies, including “sluggish, dead passivity” (p. 19). But liturgy’s most formidable enemy is awakening, because few worldly sluggards count themselves as more spiritual than liturgy, but the awakened are tempted to count liturgy as an improper form of worship (p. 19). But as Giertz perceptively notes, “there is often a goodly portion of self-righteousness and egocentricity in [awakening’s] judgment. The old Adam is an unequalled opportunist” (p. 21). Awakening dismisses the liturgy because a person was not awakened in the liturgy but in some other manner and therefore, this manner “must be the proper way” or even “the only right way” (p. 21).

Giertz adds that there is another reason many oppose the liturgy, “humanly understandable but no more valid: There are people who find it difficult to feel at home in the liturgical forms” (p. 22). In other words, some people find liturgical forms “very natural, so that they immediately feel at home in them, while other people find it hard to become accustomed to them” (p. 23). A solution might be to abandon the liturgy in part or in total, but Giertz will have none of that: “All liturgy demands the submerging of self” (p. 22). A Christian “who will not subordinate himself in such fellowship is no Christian, because one cannot be a Christian by one’s self” (p. 23). “When revival piety in the church is unwilling to live in the framework of the liturgy in the common service of worship, it has placed itself outside the fellowship of the church and can no longer be counted as a living movement of the church of Christ” (p. 25).

Lest this seem too big of a burden for the non-liturgically oriented to bear, Giertz adds, “Outside the common worship service there must be freedom….There must be full freedom also for all those forms of worship which truly serve for edification; they may be services of prayer, inner circles of fellowship, liturgical orders of devotion, and many another type of worship” (p. 25). The only stipulation is that these worship forms “shall never displace or be a substitute for the great fellowship of the Sunday common service.”

Having spoken against awakening’s interference with the liturgy, Giertz warns about a false liturgy, which can “become an almost impregnable armor for the old Adam” (p. 26). He asks (p. 26), “What can the Holy Spirit do with a person who goes to Communion more faithfully than anyone else in the congregation, who for an hour a day prays beautiful prayers from the Psalter or from the classic prayer books of Christendom…but who through all these exercises only becomes more and more convinced that he is a better kind of person, a person…who loves no one except himself and his holy ceremonies?” Thus, “liturgy without awakening is probably the most dangerous of all church programs. It is possible to enrich and beautify the worship service, to add vestments and choirs, to plan lovely vespers, and even to arrange for more frequent communions, without a single person in earnestness asking himself, ‘How shall I, a sinner, be saved?’” (p. 28).

Giertz adds that “awakening needs liturgy” (p. 30), if it is going to be sound enough to pass on its heritage from one generation to the next. But “awakening, or revival, can also serve liturgy. When men are wakened, there is new life in the old forms of devotion….Ancient, beautiful custom becomes more than custom. It becomes an expression for the life which is born again” (p. 31).

Giertz concludes by positing that “the need for awakening will one day cease. It belongs to this world, where men still sleep the sleep of death….But liturgy will remain….a never ending thanksgiving to the Creator and Father of all things” (pp. 31-32).

But What is Religious Freedom?

I have read many articles and letters to the editor about the Health and Human Services (HHS) rules mandating that religious institutions (other than houses of worship) cover birth control. It seems as if the various sides have made their points, some arguing that it is a women’s health matter and others that it is a religious freedom matter. Commentators have weighed in on both sides of the issue and pollsters have explained how Americans of various viewpoints look at the matter. But I have never come across anyone trying to explain the poll numbers.

I am less interested in the poll numbers that reflect the political divide. One would expect Democrats to support the president’s policy and Republicans to oppose it, especially in the highly partisan environment that now exists. But the numbers I find most interesting is how various religious groups view the matter: as of a few weeks ago (when I last came across the statistics), 55% of mainline Protestants believe that the HHS policy does not impinge on religious freedom, while 68% of evangelical Protestants think it does. Roman Catholics are split, with slightly more (48%) saying it does step over the line than not (46%). Why are mainline Protestants okay with the rule, but evangelicals aren’t? Why are Roman Catholics split nearly evenly when it will be their institutions most affected by the policy?

The short answer is that a person’s view of religious freedom depends on what he or she thinks religion is. One of the difficulties in any dialogue among or about various faiths is that people tend to think that other religions function in a manner very similar to their own. Thus, Christians often mistakenly assume that other religions are all about teaching how one can get into heaven or some equivalent. While they acknowledge that the answers may differ among religions, they assume that this is the task of all religions. But it is not, as anyone who has done a serious study of the world’s religions knows. In the same way, each religion has a different idea of what its scope is and therefore of what freedom it needs to operate fully. Moreover, every religion comes with a defining narrative, which often includes the quest for a particular type of religious freedom as an integral part of that narrative. But since different religions have different histories, their narratives about the quest for religious freedom are not identical or even always compatible.

Above all else, mainline Protestants prize individual conscience. They see history in general, as well as the history of the church (if properly understood), as tending toward greater freedom of the individual. The Reformation broke the back of papal tyranny; Roger Williams and his “soul liberty” freed Protestantism from Calvinist orthodoxy; and John Stuart Mill (and a host of other post-Enlightenment thinkers) gave the Anglo-American world freedom from society at large and all its institutions. Also by the end of the nineteenth century, mainline Protestantism had had its bouts with both revivalism and Deism—and accommodated both. When the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy broke out, mainliners were unwilling to banish adherents of a more avant-garde theology. It wasn’t that all mainliners were overwhelmingly liberal, but rather that they didn’t think that the boundaries needed to be drawn so narrowly. The last real mainline heresy trial was in the 19th century, and in the 20th century James Pike’s atheism did not prevent him from remaining an Episcopal bishop in good standing for many years.

Because mainliners emphasize the freedom of the individual conscience and do not emphasize a particular creed as normative, they make the church (and institutions in general) subservient to the individual’s needs. In addition, mainliners have always thought of themselves as cultural dominant (even when they have been declining in numbers) and are not particularly alarmed when one of their institutions gains a large measure of autonomy. They tend to believe that enlightened institutions will always accord well with the goals of Christianity, even if their formal ties with the church are attenuated or abrogated. Indeed, mainliners have a particularly rosy perspective that believes that both secular and Christian history is nothing but one step of progress after another, a few knuckle-draggers notwithstanding. Thus, few mainline Protestants are troubled when they see the schools and hospitals founded centuries earlier becoming generic private institutions since top-notch scholarship or medical care is ultimately what those places are all about. If such an attitude wouldn’t quite sit well with their Puritanical or more orthodox forebears who founded such institutions, that just goes to prove how much they have progressed from the days of their Neanderthal ancestors.

It is not surprising, then, that mainliners find Roman Catholicism particularly offensive. It is also quite easy to understand why mainliners tend to focus on two things when discussing the Roman Catholic Church: sex and dissent. They are galled to think that any prelate would dare to voice his opinion on such a personal matter as sex, but are delighted whenever they can find a hint of dissension. Mainliners don’t mind individual Roman Catholics adopting any particular dogma; if someone wants to eschew birth control or believe in the virgin birth of Christ, mainline folks have no objection, just as they are perfectly willing to welcome vegan New Agers and carnivorous Wall Street types as fellow congregants. What they object to is Rome’s insistence on teaching its dogmas and expecting a certain level of assent from its parishioners. In their mind Rome is one step away from the Spanish Inquisition whenever it behaves in this way.

If mainliners emphasize the individual in religion, evangelicals stress the personal. Though “individual” and “personal” are often used interchangeably in common parlance, there is a slightly different nuance here. Both evangelicals and their mainline cousins are loathe to countenance “priestcraft”—anything that could interfere with the relationship between the believer and God. But while mainliners would see such priestcraft as an unwarranted intrusion on the sanctity of conscience, evangelicals would say that it interferes with the direct, personal relationship between God and a believer. Many mainliners are content not to have had a direct, personal encounter with God, but no evangelical would be.

Given that both mainliners and evangelicals are somewhat anti-institutional and wary of creeds or anything else that might be too restrictive, why are evangelicals so worked up about the new HHS rules? In large measure it is because they know what it is like to be excluded institutionally and to be exiled from cultural influence. While mainliners are optimistic, evangelicals are not—as experience has taught both of them to be. While mainliners thought that their seminaries and other institutions were following a positive trend in embracing liberal theology in the late 19th and early 20th century, fundamentalists (the forebears of today’s evangelicals who were at the dawn of the 20th century the more conservative wing of mainline churches) saw it as nothing but apostasy. Even worse, fundamentalists saw that mainliners weren’t exactly as tolerant as they claimed to be, since they were quick to tolerate modernists but marginalized fundamentalists.

A good example is what happened among the Presbyterians in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Modernist theology held sway in the northern Presbyterians’ mission board and all of its seminaries except for Princeton. But even that was not good enough for the modernists. After forcing Gresham Machen and his colleagues out of Princeton, they continued to harass him when he founded Westminster Theological Seminary and an independent mission board, until finally he was drummed out of the denomination. Thus, evangelicals today are sensitive to the way that liberalizing and secularizing forces can take over institutions that evangelicals themselves have founded. Also, given their long public exile from the death of William Jennings Bryant until the election of Jimmy Carter, they are quite familiar with being cultural outsiders and people without any political voice. One would expect then that evangelicals would be wary of allowing government interference in their faith institutions, since they would see it as inherently weakening them.

An interesting group akin to evangelicals is the confessional churches. Pollsters usually don’t list them as a separate category, even though they have unique concerns. Like evangelicals, they know what it is like to be marginalized, in their case from the state church. Unlike evangelicals, they have never been a cultural force in this country and don’t want to be. For a variety of reasons (some theological and some sociological), confessionals have tended to stay out of politics.

In part, this is due to the fact that the government (not other members in their churches) has been the main source of their oppression. The king of Saxony allowed my forebears to worship as they pleased and to think whatever they wanted, but wouldn’t allow them to meet with their pastor at any other time than on Sunday morning—not even to study their faith more deeply. It was worse to the north in Prussia, where the king allowed pastors to preach and people to believe whatever they wanted—as long as Lutherans embraced an institutional union with the Reformed that undercut whatever Lutheran beliefs they had. (The Prussian king thought of himself as liberal and open-minded; he was no Grand Inquisitor probing into people’s beliefs. But he did insist that institutions conform to his specifications.) But my forebears understood that freedom of religion is meaningless if a church cannot develop its own institutions to practice and to pass on the faith.

Even in this country confessionals have endured government opposition. Upon their arrival, they saw that the public schools were firmly in the hands of people who sought to turn all nonconformists into good Reformed Protestants. In response, confessionals established their own schools, much as Roman Catholics did for much the same reasons. And from time to time (such as in the 1920’s) state governments have responded by trying to shut down all parochial schools and make all students attend the public schools.

Thus, in recent weeks confessionals have been alarmed by the prospect of a government telling religious institutions what they may or may not do. They see it as 1830 all over again, with Prussian jackboots marching toward confessionals to force them to stay within the confines of their own minds, while the Kaiser takes over their institutions at bayonet point. This has forced confessionals out of their natural reluctance to enter the public realm and has compelled them to protest the new HHS rules.

But why are Roman Catholics split, with a slight plurality in line with their bishops in opposition to the HHS rules? The simple answer is that the social dimensions of the faith are far more important to Roman Catholics than to their Protestant neighbors. Whereas some Protestants can imagine themselves as being perfectly good Christians without having any connection with other believers, such a notion is utterly foreign to Roman Catholicism. Even if a Catholic has no more connection to their church other than baptism, it is enough to make him or her part of the community.

This appreciation of the importance of belonging cuts two ways. On the one hand, this view can be used to emphasize the need for an authoritative magisterium and for the obedience of the faithful in order to maintain a cohesive identity as the church. On the other hand, belonging can become more important than believing, with the result that people with very limited ties to the church still count themselves as Catholic, whereas Protestants who have wandered from the church of their youth wouldn’t be as likely to still call themselves Methodists or Presbyterians. That explains why the most devout Catholics, even those of liberal bent, are upset that someone is interfering with their bishops’ work. And it also explains why many Catholics for whom Catholicism is a cultural or ethnic identity rather than a belief structure oppose their bishops. How dare those bishops hint that they aren’t part of the group!

In addition, the last couple of centuries have been rather painful for the Roman Catholic Church, especially in those countries where it had been the only church of any note. Over the centuries it had developed schools, universities, hospitals, orphanages, and other institutions, which it saw as an integral part of its mission. But beginning with the French Revolution, Rome saw itself shorn of its institutions, which were then placed in the hands of the state. What institutions it retained were often placed under tight governmental control. For example, in the days of the Paris Commune (1871), the government took possession of the church buildings, but permitted congregants to worship there as long as they would open their doors in the evening for community gatherings. Even to this day, the French government retains an extraordinary power in the appointment of bishops in their country. This was the process of laïcité; from the perspective of the French government it was a movement to wrest control of society from clerical dominance (and many of its advocates still considered themselves good Catholics, just anti-clerical), but from Rome’s perspective it was nothing short of an attempt to abolish Christianity. A similar development occurred in Latin American countries, and Germany’s Kulturkampf between Bismarck and the Roman Church is well known to most readers. Rome does have a point when it argues that Europe’s present secularism is due less to natural developments in modern society than to calculated attempts by governments to suppress religion.

By this point it should be clear to the reader why the polls have tracked the way that they did. Far from being just about the HHS rules, the attitudes reflected in the polls reveal different ways of understanding not only what religion is but what religious freedom means. Mainliners and cultural Catholics see religious freedom essentially as the freedom of individuals to believe whatever they want to believe and to reject conformity with society, government, or even one’s own church. Evangelicals, confessionals, and active Catholics believe that the freedom of the individual to believe means nothing without the ability of like-minded individuals to work together to build strong institutions that will foster and carry out those beliefs. These different visions of religious freedom account for the impasse today.