Hva kommer til å skje med kristendommens “lett-versjon”?

Dette skriver Mary Eberstadt om i februar-nummeret av First Things, i en artikkel hun kaller Christianity Light. Hun åpner artikkelen med å neskrive hvordan pave benedikt på en svært generøs måte ønsker konservative/ tradisjonelle anglikanere velkommen til Den katolske Kirke, og fortsetetr med å beskrive hvordan anglikanerne (de mest liberale, i alle) har mer og mer problemer, både med sin tro, og med antallet medlemmer. Hun er svært usikker på hva som vil skje med disse anglikanske/ episkopale kirkesamfunnene, men ikke bare med disse, også med andre protestanter av den liberale/ ‘lette’ typen:

… … we may well begin to wonder something else. That is, whether what we are witnessing now is not only the beginning of the end of the Anglican Communion but indeed the end of something even larger: the phenomenon of Christianity Lite itself.

By this I mean the multifaceted institutional experiment, beginning but not ending with the Anglican Communion, of attempting to preserve Christianity while simultaneously jettisoning certain of its traditional teachings—specifically, those regarding sexual morality. Surveying the record to date of what has happened to the churches dedicated to this long-running modern religious experiment, a large historical question now appears: whether the various exercises in this specific kind of dissent from traditional teaching turn out to contain the seeds of their own destruction. The evidence—preliminary but already abundant—suggests that the answer is yes.

If this is so, then the implications for the future of Christianity itself are likely to be profound. If it is Christianity Lite, rather than Christianity proper, that is fatally flawed and ultimately unable to sustain itself, then a rewriting of much of contemporary thought, religious and secular, appears in order. It means that secularization itself may be fundamentally misunderstood. It means that the most unwanted and unfashionable traditional teaching of Christianity, its sexual moral code, demands of the modern mind a new and respectful look. As a strategic matter, it also means that the current battle within the Catholic Church between traditionalists and dissenters must go to the traditionalists, lest the dissenters or cafeteria Catholics take the same path that the churches of Christianity Lite have followed: down, down, down.

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