Robert Barron is the auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, which exists to draw people into or back to the Catholic faith. An effective communicator and eloquent speaker, Bishop Barron has already reached millions of people through his podcasts, lectures, books, and Twitter account. With his reach becoming wider and his followers growing in number, Bishop Barron is becoming an increasingly prominent figure, and is positioned to become one of the country’s foremost religious leaders. Daniel Ross Goodman recently spoke with Bishop Barron over email about religion, politics, and culture, the diminishing number of Americans who now identify as religious, and why even nonreligious people should be concerned about the state of religion in America. The following is a transcript of the exchange, which has been lightly edited for clarity.
Daniel Ross Goodman: Last year, the percentage of Americans who attend religious services fell below 50% for the first time in our country’s history. Why do you think this is? Do you think this trend is reversible? And if so, what do you think can (and should) be done to try to bring more Americans back to houses of worship?
Bishop Robert Barron: There are many factors that have contributed to the decline in church attendance. The most important is the secularism that now dominates much of Western culture. Charles Taylor’s “buffered self,” which is to say, an ego isolated from any contact with the transcendent, is now taken for granted by many. Another reason for the decline is the remarkably bad catechesis and religious formation that have been offered by the mainstream denominations for the past 50 years or so. We believers haven’t communicated our traditions in an intellectually or aesthetically appealing way. Yes, I do think the trend is reversible. The churches have survived lots of ups and downs over the centuries. Cultures come and go, but the churches remain, for they speak to what is deepest in us. What we have to do is battle the secularist ideology any way we can and present our own convictions winningly and boldly.
DG: You’re an ordained priest (and now a bishop) with a Ph.D. in Catholic theology. I’m an ordained rabbi with a Ph.D. in Jewish theology. We obviously care about these things. But an increasingly growing percentage of Americans are no longer religious. For instance, 21% of Americans now identify as having “no religious preference,” up from 8% from the year 2000. Why should nonreligious Americans care about this apparent decline of religion in America?
RB: The decline in religious practice should concern everyone in this country, for our political ideals of equality, freedom, and individual rights are grounded, whether we acknowledge it or not, in certain, very definite religious convictions. Thomas Jefferson correctly stated that all men are created equal, implying that the only real equality that obtains among us is our equality as children of God. If we take God out of the equation, then our obvious inequalities of strength, beauty, intelligence, energy, etc. come to the fore. The same is true in regard to human rights. Once again, Jefferson insisted that these come not from the state but from the Creator (“endowed by their Creator”) and are, for that very reason, inalienable. If God is removed from consideration, as he is in both classical political thought and modern totalitarianism, then human rights quickly evanesce or become the exclusive prerogative of the powerful.
DG: One area of American life in which religion does not appear to be declining is politics. Politicians invoke God and allude to the Bible now more than ever, and nearly 90% of members of Congress identify as Christian (in contrast to about 65% of the general population). What do you think the role of religion should be in American politics?
RB: I stand with Tocqueville in saying that religion provides a moral and spiritual ballast to a democratic society. Without religious instruction, catechesis, Bible reading, good preaching, religiously affiliated mediating institutions, and so on, a society based upon freedom can devolve rapidly into materialism, self-interest, and violence. Therefore, religion ought to be informing the thinking and action of our political class.
DG: It could be argued that the arts fulfill a religious function for nonreligious people — that culture, as Matthew Arnold thought would happen, has replaced scripture. But there are many who still believe in the holiness of scripture and also value the arts and culture. What do you think people of faith, people who do not view culture as a replacement for scripture, have to gain from film, literature, art, and music? And what do you think nonreligious Americans can learn, if anything, about religion and the life of faith from secular art and culture?
RB: I will speak here as a Catholic bishop. The Catholic tradition has consistently embraced and used the arts as vehicles of evangelization, for we see finite beauty as a route of access to the source of Beauty. Hence, Byzantine icons, the mosaics at Ravenna, the Sainte Chapelle and Chartres Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the poetry of Dante and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the music of Mozart all ultimately lead the soul to a contemplation of God. Whatever is truly beautiful, therefore, in the secular culture, art, architecture, literature, painting, dance, does indeed implicitly convey some truth about God.
DG: We are conducting this interview in the wake of the act of terror committed upon an American Jewish community, wherein a gunman took four people hostage in a synagogue near the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. This is the latest in a series of terrorist acts perpetrated upon American Jews since the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018. While Jewish-Christian relations are at an all-time high, American Jews are increasingly feeling as if only we, and not other communities of faith, are living in fear due to our religious identities. As Deborah Lipstadt wrote recently in the New York Times, being Jewish today means attending synagogues with armed guards in front of the buildings and training for active shooters. What message would you, as an American Christian leader, send to the American Jewish community during this time in which, to paraphrase the opening of Philip Roth’s Plot Against America, fear, a growing fear, presides over the American Jewish community?
RB: I deplore the situation you are quite accurately describing. St. John Paul II referred to the Jews as our “elder brothers in the faith.” It is deeply incoherent for a Christian to harbor any hatred for Jews, and therefore, we must stand in utter solidarity with those who are threatened. Moreover, religious liberty, which is guaranteed in our Constitution, is recognized in the Catholic tradition as the first and most fundamental of human rights. So, my message to my Jewish friends is, we love you, we stand with you, and we will fight to defend you.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Salzburg. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema, the novel A Single Life, and Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America (forthcoming, University of Alabama Press).
