What Data Cannot Quantify

We love statistics.

When, this spring, a surprisingly high number of adults entered the Catholic Church (or when, more recently, news stories like this one reported on a record number of priests being ordained in one American diocese), lots of folks have been ready to take these numbers and run. Talk has grown of a “Catholic renewal.” Another “Great Awakening.” A stemming of the tide of secularization.

But, this First Things piece suggests, we shouldn’t be so quick to jump to conclusions. The whole statistical picture is actually a bit bleaker. Compared to the early 2000s, the last couple of years have seen half as many Catholic weddings, half as many infant baptisms, and almost half as many children in Catholic schools across the US. In light of those figures, “talk of a Catholic revival,” the article notes, “is misplaced.”

The title of the piece is “Our Strange Catholic Moment,” and it highlights the ways Catholicism in America is at an odd crossroads: the sheer number of Catholics is waning, but, at the same time, Catholic influence seems to be growing. The piece waves at phenomena like the large number of adult conversions or priestly ordinations to suggest the point, and it also discusses the ways Catholic-inflected theological terms like “just war theory” have been invoked on all sides of the political aisle to debate the validity of something like the war in Iran, despite the fact that fewer and fewer people seem to be adhering to the faith they’re referencing. All this data seems to be at odds with itself. How are we to interpret it? And where does Catholic life really stand, in our culture?

Well, the article suggests, it’s hard to say. “If more Americans are entering the Church, if Catholic terms are increasingly central to public debates, then that may be a sign that God still has plans for the United States,” the article notes. “Those tempted to a worldly triumphalism, however, should recall that while certain things are looking up, the trend lines continue to point down.”

This idea of “worldly triumphalism” might be a good one to consider, on this question. It’s useful in part because “worldly triumph” hasn’t always worked out so well for us Christians. Part of the steep decline in Catholic baptisms and weddings is the result of a latent reality becoming a much more apparent one: lots of people who have been Christian in American culture in the past several decades have been so in name only, without a real conversion to the faith. Our loss of a kind of “cultural Christianity” over the past few years, then, has resulted in a loss of those kinds of Christians, such that the numbers are just catching up to what had probably already been true. Such Christians weren’t necessarily deeply committed to their creed, and weren’t quite “Christian” in the truest sense of the word.

But that’s not the only reason we should be wary of worldly triumphalism. We may be tempted to think that the invoking of Catholic theology in policy debate, the rise of Catholic politicians in American government, and so on, is the more significant bit of data, and good cause to think that this could be our “Catholic moment,” after all. Indeed if we’re finding ourselves in a more devoted Church for the loss of nominal believers, then perhaps it’s all the better. Or so the thinking goes.

But we probably shouldn’t be too quick to jump to that conclusion, either. For while it could be our “Catholic moment,” it won’t be if Christianity is mainly being looked to because it provides theoretical support and useful language for pursuing certain political ends, social effects, or cultural victories. In other words, it’s no secret that there’s been a turn to social conservatism that has converged with the turn to religious conservatism. Different groups and thinkers, in reacting against liberal and progressive ideas, have seen the value of maintaining a certain spiritual ideal for social stability and development – an ideal that can solidify and even hallow the way a strong conservative may want to think about marriage, life issues, questions of freedom, the role of federal versus local government, even economic systems. And thus certain spiritual ideals have seemed to reappear, in political discourse, in a way that feels like a renewed triumph of religious zeal, and that may actually be only apparently helpful.

…apparently helpful because Christianity isn’t, ultimately, a political or social system or a kind of cultural help. Christianity is an invitation into an encounter with a Person who initiates a conversion of mind and heart that becomes the great adventure of one’s life. And that adventure may bear political or social fruit, sure, but that fruit is not the immediate end of that encounter, nor can such fruit be counted on. Where Christianity is treated as anything other than what it is, then – where it’s treated as a useful means for buttressing certain political or cultural goals – our hopes for its “triumph” are probably founded on wobbly grounds. The only real measure of its influence, its impact, its place in our society, is on terms that statistics can’t quantify: the measure of human souls’ conversion, of their rich encounter with Christ, of their coming to know and believe that attaining life with him is the only real human triumph.