This article is pretty much what I’ve come to expect from the mainstream media these days. Nicholas Kristof travels to Brazil to report on the problems with the Catholic church there. He points out that conservative evangelical churches are growing and converting Catholics to their ranks. His solution? The Catholic church needs to become more liberal. At the risk of breaking my rule against sarcasm, I quote my daughter: “yeah, that’ll work.”
I lived in Brazil for four years, returning to the U.S. almost two years ago. I still travel and do business there. Brazil has about 130 million Catholics — the most of any country in the world. There are about 30 million Protestants, most of them evangelicals, and about 800,000 Mormons and a few million “others.”
The Protestant churches are growing the fastest, but we’re growing pretty well there as well. The fastest-growing churches have one thing in common: they are conservative in terms of moral values. They tell their members to abstain from premarital sex, to avoid gambling, prostitution, pornography, alcohol and drugs. Members are told to get their lives together, work hard, and stop blaming everybody else for their problems. One of the most popular evangelical bumper stickers is: “Yes, I own my car, but I worked hard for it, so don’t be jealous.” They speak out against homosexuality as a sin but say their members should love homosexuals individually (“hate the sin, not the sinner”). They don’t have condom hand-out sessions, for example, because they tell people not to have sex before they are married. And this is what church-going Brazilians, for the most part, like to hear. If they are going to go to a church, they want to go to one that teaches good old-fashioned morality. (It’s worth pointing out that many of the evangelical churches are corrupt in terms of how they handle tithing money, but that’s a sidetrack I won’t get into right now).
Of course, the Catholic church preaches good old-fashioned morality as well — sometimes. But of course Catholics are the people in Brazil who are least likely to be following the preaching of the Pope. The vast majority of Catholics go to Mass a few times a year. Just about every Catholic I’ve met (and I’ve met and talked to literally hundreds) is critical of their church, but primarily because Catholics are not strict enough and don’t practice what they preach. Many of them would like priests to be able to marry and they all agree that preaching against birth control is a waste of time. But nobody I have talked to says the church should be encouraging pre-marital sex by, for example, handing out condoms. It’s pretty clear that they believe that’s not what churches are for. In addition, they are scandalized by the thought that the church should support homosexual rights or any other of the New York Times’ favorite liberal causes. Most Catholics I’ve talked to say Catholics should become more like the evangelicals and the Mormons, which makes sense because those are the churches that are growing.
The same issues will inevitably come up within our Church over the coming years. Members will say we need to change with the times and “modernize.” (Example: “how can you be against SSM in this day and age?”) We see it in the bloggernacle all the time. But to the Mormon liberals’ credit, at least in the ‘nacle, they try to back up their arguments with doctrinal points. I happen not to agree with their points, but most Mormon liberals’ arguments are intelligent and well thought-out. The same can’t be said for New York liberals who don’t know much about religion. Their argument is: “conservative religions are growing, and you want to grow, so become more liberal.”