Q&A: Catholicism and Protestantism
Catholicism and Protestantism
Question
I just saw an interesting statistic according to which six of the justices on the Supreme Court are Catholics, of whom only one is liberal. Another two are Jewish, and only one is Protestant.
Is there some correlation between Protestantism and liberalism that causes American conservatism, in the long run (at least among its educated strata), to become more and more Catholic, as part of the correlation the Rabbi drew between the right and synthetic thinking?
If the Rabbi knows anything about this, I’d be happy to hear an answer.
Answer
I’m not knowledgeable enough about this, but it seems to me that the distribution of Supreme Court justices in the US doesn’t teach us very much. They are selected through a political mechanism that picks whoever suits it. That is far from being a representative sample, both because of its size and because of the way they are chosen.
As for the matter itself, Protestantism has two faces that seem contradictory. On the one hand, its whole essence is conservatism, against innovative Catholicism. Catholics think that the pope and the institutions of the Church have the authority to change the dogmas and principles, and the protest of Luther and Calvin was directed precisely against that. Protestants aspire to return to the sources of the past, without the innovations that were added afterward. But precisely because of this, Protestants are more diverse than Catholics. Since nobody really knows what the past was like—each person paints the past as he sees fit and then clings to it—and since we do not cling to what is accepted in the present because it has no binding force, many sects arise with all sorts of strange and varied shades. So this happens דווקא in the “conservative” Protestant world. By contrast, Catholicism is more uniform, since it is run by centralist institutions in Rome. Therefore the most extreme and darkest phenomena appear דווקא in the Protestant world (the Bible Belt and Christian fundamentalism, the KKK, and the like).
Incidentally, a similar difference exists in Islam between Shiism and Sunnism. Shiism is Catholicism, and Sunnism is Protestantism. And notice that there too the more extreme elements are the Sunnis, like the Protestants in Christianity.
Incidentally, among us too this is the case. The Hilltop Youth, the women in shawls, and other extreme phenomena are in fact calling for conservatism and a return to the past—to shepherd flocks, disconnect from technology, and wear clothing from the tenth century BCE—but because they have no governing institutions and they reject contemporary authorities, they are more extreme and in many ways also more diverse. Conservatism and a return to the past create diversity, not uniformity. Even Haredism, about which many have written that it is a new phenomenon (and in that sense not conservative), is perceived today as conservative because it is painted in a relatively uniform color and does not allow much diversity. That was the situation at least as long as there was a clear leader in the capital. In recent years this has been changing, because there too a phenomenon of protest and lack of agreed leadership is emerging. And of course there too Protestantism only makes them more extreme.
Discussion on Answer
In the United States and Western Europe, actually, the Catholics are the liberals. Sometimes they even go against the pope’s position. Most of the liberal voices within the Church itself are liberals, and one can see an ongoing shift in direction within the Church over the last several decades.
The conservative faction among Catholics comes mainly from Africa and South America.
By contrast, among Protestants there are conservative factions that do not budge from the written word. In fact, Protestants sanctify Scripture alone (sola scriptura) and reject the magisterium in its accepted sense (the pope, the patriarch). According to them, every person is permitted and required to interpret Scripture according to his own understanding and live by it.
Because of this, there are several ways to understand everything. Some understand the general direction of the New Testament, meaning progressive morality, a high moral standard, and even liberalism, while others sanctify the written word exactly as it is.
It should be noted that several times in the New Testament, Jesus attacks both the Sadducees and the Pharisees for sanctifying the written word over the general idea. According to some scholars, some of the Pharisees also held a view similar to that of Jesus, and one can even see such tendencies in the Apocryphal literature, the Mishnah, and the Talmud.
In any case, you can’t look at Protestants as one block, and you can’t compare the liberal Lutherans to the Baptists. Or the Huguenots (among them the Amish sect) to the Episcopalians. In fact, even between churches within the same stream there are major disagreements. The English Anglicans even threatened to expel the American and Australian Episcopalians from the Anglican Communion—a move that did not succeed.
Also, many young Protestants have views that differ from the official position of the Church. This phenomenon also exists among Catholics and even among Orthodox Jews, but because of the freedom of interpretation among Protestants, the gap is much larger.