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LESSON ONE TRANSCRIPTThe Problem of Religious Indifference

Written by Matt Nelson

One day, the great jack-of-all-literary-trades G.K. Chesterton was walking along with one of his publishers when his publisher remarked about one of their mutual acquaintances. He said something to the likes of, “That man will do well for himself because he believes in himself.” Chesterton immediately countered, “It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin. Complete self-confidence is a weakness.” His publisher then asked, “Well, if man is not to believe in himself, then what is he to believe in?” To this, Chesterton promised to write a book in response, and he did just that. He called it Orthodoxy, which would become one of the great classics of Christian apologetics of modern times.

Ever since the beginning, there has been no belief more self-destructive for man than belief in his own self-sufficiency. Ironically, it has always been one of his most acute temptations. We often desire to be our own master. Chesterton lived in the early twentieth century. Consequently, he and his contemporaries didn’t have the pleasure of living with smart technology, which could give them a false sense of self-sufficiency and a false sense of being all-powerful. The trade-off was that since they didn’t have smart technology, they had to be smart themselves.

Unlike Chesterton and his contemporaries, however, we live in an age where intellectual laziness and irreverence for truth has become too easy. We have been equipped for a sort of

REACHING THE INDIFFERENT

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radical self-dependency. Think about it for a second. We can deposit a check at the snap of a smartphone. Who needs a bank teller anymore? Edit an essay with autocorrect. Who needs grammar? Carry Google right in our pocket. Who needs a memory anymore? I mean, we can even choose our own gender, the culture tells us. Who needs biology?

We depend less on the talents and authority of others than ever before. We have become the masters of our own world. Our hyper-technologized, over-individualized culture has put us on the brink of omnipotence—or so it might seem. “Man no longer wishes to reflect on his relationship to God because he himself intends to become God,” writes Robert Cardinal Sarah.

But a world where we are masters is not the real world. There is an order of being in creation, and the great majority of humanity has always believed this. Indeed, the human consensus throughout past eras has been that our place on the hierarchy of being is not at the top. Modern men, however, seem not to agree. By and large, they have rejected what Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead” and adopted the opinion that we, here and now, are at the top, and are therefore the measure of all things, drawing their wisdom—or so-called wisdom—from Protagoras, the father of relativism. At a time when we can do and decide so much for ourselves, when the power to do all things seems at our fingertips, we may be tempted to wonder: Who needs God when we can be like gods? This attitude has its roots right back in the Garden of Eden.

I was raised in a loving Catholic family. My Dad, raised a Lutheran, joined the Church when he married my mother, a cradle Catholic. As we grew up, both made a genuine effort to pass on the faith to me and my four younger siblings. But as I grew older, I became negative and critical toward the Catholic Church. It came down to this: I wanted to live one way, and the Catholic Church wanted me to live another. So I chose to go my own way, focusing on realizing my worldly ambitions. Inevitably, Catholicism drifted right off my radar. By the time I had completed university, I no longer accepted the traditional Christian morality and beliefs I had been taught, and I harbored a growing skepticism, particularly about the divinity of Christ and the personal nature of God. These doubts rendered all organized forms of religion, Catholicism included, increasingly irrelevant to me.

Eventually, tempted by agnosticism, I found myself absorbed in a pagan way of life, and my doubts about Catholicism continued to increase. I was not a vocal opponent of the Catholic Church, nor can I say that I was intellectually engaged in discovering whether God existed

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or not, or anything about his nature, if he did exist. I was (for lack of better phrase) following my feelings, which were drawing me towards an Epicurean way of life—that is, a godless one, focused on pleasure and convenience.

Yet despite my disengagement from organized religion and my growing skepticism toward the God of monotheism, I could not altogether shake my sense that there had to be more to reality than just what I could see, touch, and hear. I retained a stubborn sense of spirituality, although I was not altogether sure of what exactly I believed in. On some days, I found deism or the belief in an impersonal God most attractive. On other days, I was more inclined towards a pantheistic New Age spirituality. On most days, I lived as though I was an atheist. But intellectually, none of these inclinations ever transformed into convictions deep enough to affect any significant commitment. At best, I could describe myself as spiritual but not religious.

My detachment from so-called “organized religion” was not the result of any sort of strict intellectual groundwork. I had not contended with arguments against Christianity or specifically Catholic Christianity or against any other religion and lost. I had just drifted away from commitment to Christ and his Church and grown indifferent to religious matters. Life was busy and much too stimulating to bother with such things.

My story illustrates the central psychological problem of the modern era: whereas man is by nature a creature made for both heaven and earth, he no longer knows it. He no longer cares. It is hard to say which came first, the ignorance or the indifference. It is not difficult to conclude, nonetheless, that both have arrived. Thus, for the sake of his present happiness and his future glory, man must be woken up. The urgency here is real, for as the great twentieth-century martyr Saint Maximilian Kolbe assessed, “The most deadly poison of our times is indifference.”

What is religious indifference? In the broadest sense, it is the failure to take religious questions

seriously, and as a result, the failure to give to God what is his due. So there is both an intellectual and a practical arm of religious indifference. But over the coming lessons, we will focus more narrowly on three specific subtypes of religious indifferentism, all of which you have likely encountered in some form.

The first type is called closed religious indifference, which involves closed-mindedness—a radical closed-mindedness—towards religion. Closed indifferentists reject all religions. But although they believe all religions are untrue, closed indifferentists are not necessarily

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unfriendly towards religion. As the atheist philosopher Julian Baggini writes in his Atheism: A

Very Short Introduction, “Atheists can be indifferent rather than hostile to religious belief. They can be more sensitive to aesthetic experience, more moral, and more attuned to natural beauty than most theists.”

Maybe you’ve encountered the atheist who couldn’t care less about religion or the deist whose god “pushed the first domino,” as it were, to set time and matter into motion, but like a deadbeat father turned his back on his creation ever since. Perhaps you have met people who think of God more as an impersonal “Force” than a loving Father. It should be no surprise then that such non-theists as these—these people who reject God altogether or reject the existence of a personal God seeking a relationship and looking to be active in their lives—see religion as insignificant. Where the problem lies for the closed indifferentist is in his failure to reckon seriously with arguments for and against the existence of a personal God. When it comes to closed indifferentists, then, a Christian’s primary evangelistic goal should be to show them that there are good reasons to believe in the existence of a personal God. And we’re going to talk more about that in the coming lectures.

The second type of religious indifference is open indifference. Whereas closed indifference involved a total closed-mindedness to religion, open indifference is characterized by an extreme open-mindedness toward all religion. You’ll recall Chesterton’s line where he said the open mind is like the open mouth: it’s meant to close down on something solid. Well, open indifferentists never really close the mind. They keep their minds so radically open that they end up accepting contradictory truths. Open indifferentists generally hold that all religions and religious founders are equal. By doing so, they reduce Jesus to a non-savior or one savior among many. This is a common feature of New Age spirituality. New Age Guru Deepak Chopra, for example, writes, “I want to offer the possibility that Jesus was truly, as he claimed, a savior. Not the savior, not the one and only son of God. Rather, Jesus embodied the highest level of enlightenment.” Essentially what he’s saying there is that Jesus was just a great wise man or sage. That’s open indifferentism.

Maybe you’ve interacted with, say, a spiritual but not religious college student who praises the teachings of Jesus while putting Gautama Buddha or the Dalai Lama on the same pedestal, as if all spiritualities lead equally to the same God, or as if all spiritual leaders or great spiritual personalities in the past have made all the same claims. But in fact, as we might choose to point out to open indifferentists, Jesus is the only founder who claimed that he was God himself. And we’ll talk more about that in the coming lectures as well. So underneath such notions as what we find in open indifferentism, we find an aversion to organized religion. To open indifferentists,

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there is no one religion that is truer than another. Thus, when it comes to open indifferentists, a Christian’s primary evangelistic goal should be to show them that Jesus was who he claimed to be: Jesus was the one God of heaven and earth.

The third type of religious indifference is denominational indifference. Denominational indifferentists claim that all Christian denominations are equal. The existing doctrinal contradictions between denominations is thereby underappreciated and waved aside as of little importance. The great Anglican convert Cardinal Newman identified this sort of indifference, already prevalent in the nineteenth century, when he wrote in An Essay on the Development of

Christian Doctrine, “The hypothesis indeed has met with wide reception in these latter times that Christianity does not fall within the province of history, that it is to each man what each man thinks it to be and nothing else.”

Perhaps you’ve met a self-described Christian who rejects the importance of doctrine and accordingly does not take disagreements among denominations seriously. Instead, perhaps, they assert that so long as Christians of different stripes worship the same Jesus Christ, then all is well, and we need not go any farther. So whether a person happens to be Roman Catholic or Southern Baptist, Greek Orthodox or Quaker, it doesn’t ultimately matter (they would argue), even when their doctrines clearly contradict each other. That is denominational indifference. And for these kinds of indifferentists, a Catholic’s primary evangelistic goal should be to show that there are good reasons to believe that the Catholic Church is the one Church founded by Christ as revealed in the New Testament.

So you can see that religious indifferentism is not easy to define in all its forms and complexities, and that it exists across a broad spectrum of religious attitudes ranging from “nothing goes” to “anything goes.”

Now let’s look a little deeper at the three types of religious indifference just outlined. Specifically, let’s consider their philosophical underpinnings. Closed indifference commonly results from an atheistic worldview, and we’ve already mentioned this; but it doesn’t always arise out of atheism. It may also arise from a deistic worldview. While deists believe in a supernatural creator of the universe, they reject the idea of a personal, loving God who is always present to his creation. So even though deists believe in a creator, deism still shares at least one key principle with atheists: there is no intelligent being, they would argue along with atheists, greater than ourselves at work in this world here and now. Though God is responsible for the birth, they would say, the “winding up” (as it were) of the universe, he is now long gone. So worshiping God, according to the atheistic and deistic world views, is therefore absurd

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because there’s either no God in existence at all or just no God present here and now to watch, listen, or respond.

Closed religious indifference would make sense if God either did not exist or was not personal, because the absence of an attending God in the world would rule out any possibility of any divinely-imposed beliefs or obligations. It would rule out the prospect of divine judgment. If God is not present to us in the world, why should he care whether we adore him or obey him? The question is, of course, whether there are good reasons to take the prospect of an existent, personal God seriously; and obviously, as Christians, we think there are.

But let’s move on and consider the fundamental philosophy underlying both the open and denominational types of indifferentism, which are probably the two most common forms of indifference today. Their underlying philosophy is—yes, you guessed it—relativism. Relativism is the rejection of objective, mind-independent truth in favor of one’s subjective personal opinion. Therefore, all matters of truth actually just come down to what is true “for you.” That’s relativism. Relativism rejects all dogma, yet it is itself dogmatic in its insistence that it is objectively true that there are no objective truths. See the problem? Relativism refutes itself; and yet this is the philosophy that drives much of the thinking and decision-making in our modern times. As a result, people are becoming less concerned about what is true than about what is convenient. The relativistic “just do it” mindset has sunk its numbing tentacles into the frontal lobe of modernity, and the result has been a kind of intellectual paralysis.

Our specific purpose in the lessons to come, then, is to explore the problem of indifference toward various core doctrines of the Catholic Church, as well as the price of rejecting those teachings. We will look specifically at closed, open, and denominational indifference, and explore ways that we might awaken people from their intellectual slumber. The point of this course is to equip you to show others that Catholicism is worth thinking seriously about. For if Catholicism is true, then it follows that the great spiritual problem of our day is not what many people think about Catholicism, but that many people don’t think about Catholicism seriously at all.