Time Immortal

Rod Dreher provides a sample of Beckwith in fine form addressing the issue of liberal religiosity, and just why such a thing is as absurd as it is:

As someone who was a Protestant Evangelical (and a former president of the Evangelical Theological Society) who came out of Catholicism as a young teen and recently returned to the Church (May 2007), I think too much is made of anti-Catholicism that is borne of theological beliefs. It one thing to think that the Pope will take over America and bring his “medievel ideas” with him (as mid-20th century nativists believed), but is quite another to think that Catholicism is a mistaken theological point of view bested by the Protestant Reformation.

That is where people like Hagee are coming from. I think they are wrong, of course. But they are not bad people. They are people who take theology seriously. They actually believe that theological claims could be true and are worth disputing about. I think this is healthy and refreshing. It is much better than the namby-pamby “religion is private” mantra, the patronizing pablum offered to those to which elites love to condescend.

Because religion is thought by many to be no different than matters of taste and personal hobbies, it seems downright rude for anyone to suggest that another’s religious beliefs are mistaken. For such people, “intolerance” is equivalent to merely believing that one is correct on a theological topic. But, ironically, this is a form of intolerance, for it is saying that there is only one way to think of theology, namely, that it cannot in principle be true and it is on the same level of personal preferences such as tastes in food, sports, etc. This, it seems to me, is far worse than theologically-shaped anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism, since, in both cases, they implicitly respect their opposition by taking their theologies and their beliefs seriously.

In many ways, the typical Evangelical Protestant and conservative Catholic exhibits the virtue of tolerance in a much grander sense than the liberal religionist who thinks that no religions are true. For it is only when you believe that you are right and others wrong that the virtues of graciousness and respect become real, manly, virtues. The liberal religionist is like a man without genitals bragging of his chastity.

Now that is what I believe is called “vivid imagery”. But so true, no? What’s the point of even bothering to follow one religion, to the exclusion of all others, if one of your first deeply held beliefs about that religion (as opposed to all others) is that it is right (and the others, by extension, wrong).

Of course, being able to provide examples to justify your assertion is also useful (which is why I’m rather confident when I observe that the degree to which something can be said to be right is proportional to the degree to which said something is in harmony with Church teaching). But the point that Beckwith makes is that, right or wrong in any objective sense, no belief is worth holding which is not held earnestly and with confidence.

And I say that as a recovering liberal Catholic myself, who once did honestly believe that many different roads can lead a person to Christ…even though the Bible is chock-full of passages speaking of how narrow the way to the Lord truly is.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Mark Shea)