Prayer as a Political Problem

I can feel the paradigm shift beneath me. It started with Trump’s ’16 victory and was accelerated by the appearance of a muscular Christianity in politics as made famous by Sohrab Ahmari. Last December he wrote this eye-opener in First Things: 

“The work of rebuilding must include evangelization and conversion of political power, without fretting so much about mass culture. This is the lesson of French Jesuit Cardinal Danielou and his pathbreaking 1967 book, “Prayer as a Political Problem”, namely that Christianity remained an elite phenomenon, inaccessible to the great multitudes, until the Constantinian conversion, after which the Christian share of the Roman Empire skyrocketed. 

In other words, only after Christianity was enshrined as a legal religion, and then the official religion, in the Empire was the Church able to attract the great masses of ordinary men and women. By converting power and enmeshing it with a great civilization, the Christian religion became “more fully itself,” as Danielou put it: a religion of the masses, a Church of the poor (the material poor as well as the spiritual). I don’t see why a similar dynamic shouldn’t bear fruit for the Church today. 

That makes much sense. The pre-Constantine Christians were often enough elite spiritual athletes who were willing to put their lives on the line. After Constantine, the rest of us cowardly schmucks could join the party. 

The same issues the tend to plague the suburban Republican Party these days - “I’ve got mine, so who cares about the MAGA riffraff?” - likewise plagues those of us pleased to have found Jesus in the Church but now are like “I’ve got mine, so who cares about the masses in this pagan culture?” 

The paradigm shift continues with Christian author Lance Wallnau who quotes the Old Testament book of Haggai - a book which feels like it could be written today. The backstory is the Jews were kicked out of Jerusalem, their temple destroyed, all they worked for gone....finally, after 70 years they are allowed to return and all they find is rubble. Out of pure discouragement they begin living outside Jerusalem and try to make a living instead of rebuilding the Temple!

Basically it’s exactly our story from 1950 to 2020, during which our beautiful Church has been pretty much destroyed and we have to begin anew. 

The prophet Haggai writes of the Temple and of our Catholic Church now: 

“Is there anyone left among you who beheld this house in its former glory? How does it appear to you now? Does it not seem to you as though it were not even there? But now take courage...take courage all you people of the land, says the Lord. Begin the work, for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts.”

And an even greater temple would be built, the one that Jesus would enter when he was a child, after which came an even greater Temple (Jesus himself).