In the Catholic Church, a bad situation continues to get worse: The top papal advisor on the pedophilia scandal has recently been arrested for arranging sexual encounters with young boys and exchanging cocaine with drug dealers for sex. He was caught on tape allegedly saying: “I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues.”
Yet, sexual scandal is not exclusive to Catholicism: I received a message from a friend who shared a story of a pastor in a Baptist church would not marry her friends because one was Catholic and one was Baptist. He said there are three types of marriage that never work: different religion, race and classes. Shortly thereafter, he was removed from his position for stalking and pursuing a married woman.
It is no news flash that Christianity is replete with sexual shadow and its hypocrisy on matters of sexuality (birth control, homosexuality, women’s ordination, women and power) drives more young people from churches than most anything else. While tragic in its consequences, there is one bright spot: the potential for spiritual maturity.
One of the more crucial claims we are making in the Coming Home course is that in adult spiritual development, the location of authority shifts from outside of oneself to inside of oneself as an adult develops not only a capacity for wider perspective taking, but also deeper maturity and capacity for discernment.
There is a communal dimension of this unfolding: Scandals within authority structures often serve to awaken people in painful and surprising ways. More than anything else, the sexual scandals within Christian churches invite an evolving, more expanded view of spirituality for there comes a tipping point when one can no longer reframe and rationalize egregious behavior and hypocrisy among clergy and public figures.
Stages of Faith
In James Fowler’s book, Stages of Faith, he writes of a 3rd stage called Conventional/Loyalist. (70% of the population is Stage 3 or earlier). In this stage, identity is rooted in being a member of a group with shared history, traditions and values and they are deeply attached to the exterior forms of the religion: its doctrine, dogma, sacred texts. Little is challenged.
It often takes a remarkable or dramatic event to shift one into Stage 4: Reflective/Critical which is characterized by critical examination of what one had believed unquestionably. One struggles and de-mythologizes and questions whether everything they have been taught is true. Texts are re-contextualized and questioned while authority structures are challenged and often held to account.
This stage is marked by taking greater responsibility for spiritual unfoldment and there’s a shift from believing in the faith of others to making faith one’s own. In the past, it tended to begin in the 30s and early 40s, but access to technology, education, travel and news has accelerated this movement and we are seeing it unfold in teenagers and young adults.
While some sort of education or exposure to divergent thinking often invites such a shift, many people I speak with tell me that it was the sexual scandals that led them to hold the notion that perhaps, inside of themselves, their was an inner authority who could be trusted.
Each time I hear of a new scandal, I wonder when this incarnational religion that teaches the divine reveals its nature through humanity with all its gender complexity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual passion, tenderness and barbarity will ever be able to evolve or even recover from its rather weird and wacky history of sexual repression.
Grace loves chaos. We shall see.
