Ross’ column details Pope Benedict’s recent missive allowing what we might call a greased (or at least fairly frictionless) path for inclusion of Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church while keeping their Anglican heritage.  A kind of Anglican Rite within the Roman Catholic Church not unlike The Eastern Rites within the Catholic Church (except this is a Western Rite).  Benedict’s predecessor Pope John Paul II had written an encyclical in 1995 called “Ut Unum Sint” (That All May Be One, a direct quotation from the Gospel of John) which basically called for the exact structure that Benedict is now putting into place.

As personal disclosure, I should remind everyone of my religious affiliations here–I was raised Roman Catholic (actually from Southern German Bavarian stock like The Papa himself, though obviously in my case of immigrant US extraction).  I grew up in the city (as I recall) with the almost largest Oktoberfest outside of Germany in the world.  I spent four years with the Jesuit order, a religious order not exactly high on Pope Benedict’s (and formerly as Cardinal Ratzinger) favorites list.  I then left the Roman communion for the Anglican communion (colloquially described as swimming to Canterbury) about 5 years ago.  So I’m pretty well placed to know about Anglican-Roman Catholic exchanges.

So the formal idea of Ross’ op-ed is on the meaning and implications of the Pope’s decision.  But he goes from there towards the end into some more controversial waters:

But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.

Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan.

Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.

By contrast, the Church of England’s leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

Now I know Ross wants to dismiss the “parochial struggle between conservative and liberal believers” so he can get to the real juice (Islam), but the practical effect of Benedict’s announcement is very likely only going to have substance in basically England and Wales, with groups of disaffected very conservative Anglo-Catholics.  And, if personal experience and lifelong immersion in a sub-culture is any form of persuasive evidence, I can tell you that conservative Anglo-Catholicism–at the clerical level–is totally dominated by gay men.  Mostly repressed.  What used to be called when I was in seminary, the pink mafia.  And the thing that is the initial trigger for this decision is the upcoming very likely to happen decision to ordain women as bishops in the Church of England (there have already been women priests there for about 15 years or so).  Which has a certain irony in this case.  If these Anglo-Catholics join the Roman Communion they can join up with very conservative Roman Catholic groups like Regnum Christi and The Legionaries of Christ, also totally dominated by closeted gay fellows.  You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to see the awesome tragic humor in a bunch of non-wife having grown men wearing pink dresses (and in the Pope’s case super expensive fabulous Prada shoes!!!) telling everybody else they shouldn’t be gay.

But anyway onto Ross’ other arguments:

Regarding the European portion of this statement, Ross has made a number of mistakes (quite serious ones in my opinion).

The Muslim population of Europe can be said to be expanding, but this is at best a very unhelpful way of describing it.  And at worst plays into the myth of the coming Islamicization of Europe–aka Eurabia.  The kind of thing you would read about from Pat Buchanan and/or Mark Steyn about the end of Western Christian civilization.  Except that the demographics of immigrant Muslims in Europe within two generations (as is the usual case pretty much everywhere) are falling to basically the statistical norm.  Europe will continue to be a largely secular (including both those from formerly Christian and Muslim upbringings). [Read more →]

Douthat is considered a “reasonable conservative” in liberal circles, but this column is downright nutty. It’s frightening enough that someone who attended school in a city as international as Boston could endorse the idea of viewing Muslims worldwide as a “foe” of Christianity.  But consider the fact that there are probably a number of people in charge of making foreign policy decisions in the last administration, who saw Christianity and Islam as “foes” and acted or advised accordingly. In fact, the march to war in Iraq despite the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the false linkage of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and even the argument that the use of torture is justified against Muslims are easily explained by the worldview of a person who sees Christianity and Islam as being “foes,” particularly if one sees America as a “Christian Nation.”*

I mean, what? Other than his willful misinterpretation of the word “foe,” I challenge Serwer to identify anything at all in Douthat’s column that endorses religious conflict between Muslims and Christians.

It’s true that Catholicism and Islam compete for spiritual converts. But this isn’t Lepanto or the Siege of Jerusalem. It’s a straightforward case of religious pluralism, with both faiths striving to attract adherents through persuasion and institutional expansion. Are secularists like Serwer threatened by a robust public competition between Islam and Christianity? And if so, why?

The assumption that seems to undergird this line of thinking is that religious leaders should always avoid public agreement. This strikes me as both hopelessly naive and antithetical to the very idea of religious faith. Islam and Catholicism are spiritual cousins, but both faiths also have serious doctrinal differences. Denying these distinctions empties religion of any meaning other than some vague, Unitarian-lite belief in a higher power, which does serious violence to two venerable theological traditions.

*I also think Bush deserves some credit for distancing his (admittedly disastrous) foreign policy from any religious conflict.