Francis, John Paul, and the Christ of Culture

When Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) died in 2005, the pastor of my parents’ conservative Southern Baptist church in Alabama said something to his congregation that at one time would probably have gotten him fired on the spot. He informed church members that for much of the world, the pope is the face of Christianity and that we should hope the next pope would be very much like the one who had just died. How did a pope win such praise from a conservative Protestant in the American South? The answer is that John Paul II commanded respect for his willingness to forge ahead in faithfulness despite the prevailing winds of culture. In so doing, he won the respect of orthodox Protestants who shared his determination to resist totalitarianism and materialism in the last decades of the 20th century.

In a time when political sages counseled diminishing differences with the Soviet Union, John Paul reminded the world that his native Poland was unfree under Communist domination. During an era when abortion rates exploded after Roe v. Wade and elites constantly emphasized overpopulation, John Paul prophetically stood for the sanctity of life. While the broader culture sought to erase differences between men and women, John Paul’s theology of the body emphasized the complementarity of the sexes. The man the Catholic Church now calls John Paul the Great had a strong moral and spiritual compass that still provides the standard by which successors will be compared for a long time to come.

One of those successors, Pope Francis (Jorge Bergoglio) has now passed after a papacy that was noteworthy for the ways in which it differed from the conservative doctrinal stance of John Paul and his immediate successor, Benedict (Joseph Ratzinger). The change is perhaps not surprising. Francis came from Latin America where liberation theology was born. That movement sought to integrate Marxist thought with Catholic doctrine. John Paul had been at pains to help liberation theologians to see that collectivism had failed, but Francis was more sympathetic to such beliefs.

Francis was the pope during the time in which the United States and other nations moved to legalize gay marriage. While John Paul stood against the epochal Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, Francis seemed to be drawn toward harmonizing Catholic belief with the Obergefell decision. In the years before his death, he contributed to doctrinal confusion by telling priests they could offer blessings to same sex couples and engaged in what appeared to be a kind of sophistry to avoid the obvious conflict with Scripture.

Whether the issue was economics, climate change, or human sexuality, Francis moved toward a kind of spiritual leadership that harmonized with the concerns of elites. That is not to say that elites are wrong by virtue of being elites, but rather that there is something concerning about the church when it shares the same agenda with the Davos crowd.

Pope Francis seems to have taken one of the paths Richard Niebuhr criticized in his landmark book Christ and Culture. Though Niebuhr was an academic and a measured writer, he had little use for the category he termed “Christ of Culture.” The part of the church that embraced this view aligned itself with the dominant culture in such a way as to simply give a stamp of approval to the views of the powerful. Gone is the challenge the church offers to the culture. It is replaced by an easy relationship where the mainstream culture is clearly the engine. In another book, Niebuhr criticized the doctrine of such churchmen by writing disdainfully that “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”

There is little to commend in the actions of a pastor who picks fights with the broader culture for the sheer sake of stimulating controversy and attracting attention, but it is perhaps even less desirable to avoid the conflicts that should and must be maintained. In other words, the battle is where the battle is. While Roe v. Wade was overturned, we continue to live in a world where famous women give abortion testimonies about how terminating their pregnancies enabled their freedom and success in life. It is also the case that we are living in the single greatest time of gender confusion in history as we know it. Pope Francis failed to bring clarity to those issues almost certainly because of his overwhelming orientation toward a left-leaning view of social justice.

Like that Alabama pastor of two decades ago, I find myself hoping that the next pope will be like the one whose first words in 1978 were, “Be not afraid!” He went on to show no fear in the face of the totalitarians and materialists.