Randall Smith recently posted a surprising article (surprising from a Christian point of view) in The Catholic Thing. Generally, I find the contributors to The Catholic Thing to be worth reading, by which I mean they bring nuggets of insight that I hadn't already happened on myself. But the latest piece by Smith, titled "Our (Incoherent) Post-Modern Condition," seems to me to be a big miss.
The overall arch of his article seems to be that the contemporary (post-modern) pre-occupation with metanarratives, coupled with a proclivity for seeing the world in terms of binaries, is itself a source of incoherence in our current culture. I think nothing could be further from the truth, and I think it's precisely the abandonment of a specific binary-laden metanarrative that has cause the Church to become so confused and ineffective, even incoherent.
But I'll come back to that.
In the article, Smith recounts being interviewed by a television reporter after a shooting incident at a Christian church. Here is the account in his words:
I was once interviewed by a television news reporter the day after a shooting at a Christian church by some crazy guy. I suspected she would ask me whether Christians were being targeted, and I was ready to say, “Look, it’s early. We don’t know his motivations. Let’s wait and see.”
But her first question was: “Is there something about Christians that brings about this sort of violence?” Huh? This seemed to me like asking: “Is there something about women that brings about rape?” But I couldn’t say that. I’ve survived three hurricanes in Houston unscathed, but nothing would have saved me from the angry winds that would have blown if they had put that on the news. The other comment that came into my head was, “Are you out of your dammed mind?” But that didn’t seem entirely diplomatic either.
Well, what of Smith's question—the one that, in his mind, would highlight how stupid the reporter was being? Is there something about women that brings about rape? The obvious answer (without getting into the whole "rape is about power, not sex" thing) is "Yes: Women are attractive." But that's only half an answer: The missing piece is "and men are fallen and therefore selfish."
When I first read the question from the reporter, I honestly thought that was going to be the thrust of Smith's article: Yes, there is something about Christians. That "something" is that they have the Truth! Jesus Himself said that the world hates Him because He does not belong to the world, and that it would therefore hate us because we, like Him, do not belong to the world.
Instead, Smith segued into a discussion of metanarratives, accusing the modern mind (well, post-modern mind) of being overly prone to viewing history in metanarrative terms.
But on that point, too, Smith seems to have got it backward. The problem with the modern mind—especially the modern mind of the Church—isn't that it's overly drawn to metanarratives; it's that it's lost sight of the great metanarrative of Christianity itself. And this metanarrative is most definitely one grafted into a binary. Not a binary of sex, economic class, race, or goegraphy, but a binary of creed.
The true metanarrative of history is that Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, became a man to die and thus redeem His bride, the Church. It's that He continually draws her into Himself by giving Himself to her in the sacrament of the Eucharist, so that when the Father looks at her, He sees the Son. It's that the enemy, the devil, out of hatred for God is ever seeking, in every way he's capable and within whatever parameters God allows him to act, to offend God by drawing men away from the Church and by attacking the Church herself. And that he, the devil, is the prince of this world, which is why the world hates Christians.
But this metanarrative also contains a binary of the utmost importance: It's that Christ is the Truth and there is no other. No one comes to the Father except through Jesus. There are the elect, who are in Christ and therefore bound for the Kingdom, and those who are not and are therefore bound for perdition. Within the drama of an individual person's life, this is a binary of choice: Either submit to Jesus or don't. But in the world of ideas and beliefs within which men must live out their lives, the binary is one of creed: Christianity is true and, as a belief, is capable of saving. Everything that is not Christianity is false and is incapable of saving.
To sum up, I have to disagree with Smith completely. The problem with the post-modern mind (especially in the Church) is not an affinity for metanarratives, but rather the abandonment of the one metanarrative that's true and that has guided the Church for most of her history. This abandonment of that metanarrative strips the Church of urgency and mission. It robs her of a coherent answer to the question "Why should I be Christian?"