If you read a variety of blogs, you may have heard the news last week that a prominent atheist blogger dropped the bombshell that she was beginning the conversion process to Christianity. And not just any branch of Christianity… Catholicism.
Dun Dun DAH!
The news was met by a series of reactions:
1. Yay and Welcome! (from Catholics and some Christians)
2. Wow. O_0. (from other Christians and some atheists)
3. WTF is wrong with you?! Are you sick in the head?! (from other atheists)
That second reaction could be subdivided into another group though:
2a. Wow. So, yeah, that’s cool, but why CATHOLICISM? (And then they’d go on to list the reasons why the Catholic Church is bad… from the Crusades to picking on the LCWR.)
Leah is doing a fine enough job explaining her position and change of heart on her blog and I welcome you to read about it there, but I want to talk a bit about why I think people take such an issue with Catholicism specifically.
For the commenters who were OK with her decision to convert, many of them asked her why she didn’t consider Unitariansim, or a Congregational Church or Judaism, or Buddism, or any other religion that was more welcoming, all encompassing, accepting, etc. In their eyes, Catholicism is the religion of NO:
-No women priests.
-No abortion.
-No birth control
-No divorce
-No sex w/o marriage
-No missing Mass
-No Same Sex Marriage (Leah self-identifies as bisexual and has admitted that this teaching is pretty challenging)
It basically comes down to this, in the eyes of some: Catholics are not nice, so why would an intelligent woman choose to become Catholic?
But, if you think about it… As Christians we are not called to be nice. We are called to be loving, but being loving is not the same as being nice. I love my kids more than anything, but they will tell you… there are times when mama and daddy are NOT nice.
Let’s look at it from a parenting point of view. Think about when you were a kid, usually everyone else’s parents were nicer than yours for some reason or another. And as a kid, nice usually means… permissive. The nice parents let their kids do more things than yours did, they bought their kids more stuff than yours did, the nice parents usually had fewer rules and were more laissez-faire, the nice parents were cool and well… nice.
We may want nice parents, but do we need nice parents?
Yes, the Catholic Church has rules but those rules allow us freedom. It sounds so contradictory (and maybe a little “1984″) but rules keep you safe. Speed Limits keep us safe on the freeways and streets, traffic lights keep us safe as pedestrians and drivers, laws keep us (relatively) safe from each other (and the government,) but when you boil it down… they are all forms of rules.
One of the reasons Leah cites for moving from atheism to theism was the concept of Moral Law and one of the things that Catholicism surely lacks is this idea of Moral Relativism… you know, the thought that everything is OK as long as it works for you, so why would it be so surprising to begin exploring true Catholicism and not media Catholicism?
God only knows what Leah will find on her journey toward Rome. I believe that God tailors each convert’s or revert’s or seeker’s journey to what they need to hear… not what they want to hear. The question is, will ears be opened to listening?
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What do you think? Are being loving and nice the same thing? Are Christians called to be nice? What does nice mean?
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Nice and loving are definitely not the same thing. I love your examples – my parents were down-right mean to me sometimes, Thank God! (Because looking back the times when I thought they were being “nice” was when I got in the most trouble!)
Do you read Leila @ Little Catholic Bubble? She did an awesome post on this very topic once
.
Funny how the Spirit works! I have read Leila’s work but I can’t say that I recall that particular post… I should just add her to my reader.
Thanks for commenting!
I believe that we are called “to love one another”. You can be a nice person without being spiritual or religious. In that, I interpret that to not hurt others. That doesn’t mean that I have to be a doormat or open my home to strangers, giving away my possessions. When I meet someone on the street, I am graceful and friendly. At church, I go up to the newcomer and welcome this person, maybe just by greeting. It involves kindness and compassion, not to mention a smidgen of good manners.
I think you make a great point when you say it’s not about being a doormat as well. Too often we teach our kids (especially girls) that being nice is paramount to everything else, but that translates to “let people walk all over you, and don’t forget to smile!” To me, being loving means equal parts compassion and authority… but I am an ESTJ!