Interesting reflection by Rod Dreher

Here's an excerpt:

I remember once being in mass at my Catholic parish in Dallas, wondering how many people around me (the church was full) really believed what the Church taught. If our congregation was representative of the US Catholic population as a whole, the answer was not encouraging. Which in one sense is fine, or at least not my business. But in another sense, it’s hugely important because if people believe that the Church’s teaching is optional, that what makes one a Catholic is one’s choice to attend a Catholic church, what is there to bind one to the faith, if not for mere custom and habit? Custom and habit were enough in ages past to maintain the spiritual community. They aren’t today — nearly half of all Americans today have changed their religion/church. (I am among them.) This was hardly thinkable by most people in ages past. Now it is a normal part of our condition. It is good in some ways, bad in others, but it cannot be gotten around.

Now, could you not simply say that the way to find out what one must do is to rationally weigh the claims of the various churches, and make a rational decision? Yes, you could, and some do. One big reason I became a Catholic is because the Catholic claim for its own authority made overwhelmingly more sense to me than the Protestant claim. I never considered the Orthodox claim until many years later. But it’s also the case that none of us chooses with pure disinterest. We go by a mixture of intuition, emotion, social context, and reason. We are finite creatures. We are subjects. Before I had my own crisis of faith in Catholicism, I truly believed that one should rationally weigh the competing arguments among the churches, and decide that way. I’ve written before about my telling a friend in the 1990s that as he decided whether or not to become Orthodox or Catholic, he should not think about the worship environment in which he would raise his children, but rather simply evaluate the arguments each church makes for its own authority. When I had kids of my own, I saw how wrong-headed that was. It’s easy for theologians, intellectuals, and mere bloggers to argue these things out on paper. When you have the moral lives and the souls of your children at stake, it matters at a different level. My friend could not separate his thinking about which church he and his family should join (they were leaving the Episcopal Church, and their only choices, they believed, were Rome and Constantinople). He said that catechesis was a disaster in much of the US Catholic church, and he worried if his kids would grow up to hold the faith at all if they grew up in Catholic parishes.

I bring this up not to argue about Catholicism vs. Orthodoxy, but to illuminate how subjective considerations inevitably affect the choices we make. If you are reading this in a small town in Nevada, the mother of three children and without a spiritual home, and the nearest Orthodox church is 500 miles away, I would question whether or not you should even investigate Eastern Orthodoxy. I say that because I truly and deeply believe that to be redeemed is not to hold the correct ideas, but to submit to the Holy Spirit, and to be changed from within, to become more Christ-like. It’s hard to do that alone, and even harder to help your kids do that alone. What does it avail you to unite with the truest form of Christianity (as I believe Orthodoxy to be) if you will be all alone in the practice of it? You may be called to do this, but I would wonder if your growth in holiness would proceed more within the Baptist church (if a good one was close to you) or within the Orthodox church, which does not exist in a manifest form near you? As I see it, it’s better to know Jesus imperfectly than to not know Him at all. How you unite yourself to a Baptist (or Catholic, or Presbyterian) church when you believe that the Orthodox Church contains the fullness of truth is a difficult problem.

Anyway, this is what I was trying to get at with the “subjectivity” of religious truth — and why I am a lot more open to the view that religion is what people do, not the ideas in their head. Again, I deny that it’s an “either/or” — it’s really a “both/and”. My point is simply that religious claims belong to an order of truth that can only be truly known not by being affirmed in one’s mind, but also must be inwardly appropriated with enough passion to make them change one’s life.