Editor’s note: “The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.,” is a new podcast from America Media that focuses on how people experience God in their prayer and their daily lives. To accompany each episode, Father Martin will reflect on the experience and offer practical advice on a few spiritual themes. You can listen to all episodes of “The Spiritual Life” here.
Anthea Butler is one of the most popular public intellectuals today, and maintains an especially active presence on social media, which is where I first encountered her. A few months later, we were guests together on a cable TV news program discussing the Catholic Church and, as they say, we “hit it off.” She’s a warm, engaging and articulate person.
It didn’t hurt my appreciation for her work that she is also chair of the Department of Religious Studies at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. Each time we see each other, we are at some point bound to say, “Go Quakers!” (I always found it amusing that Penn’s teams are the Fighting Quakers, given the nonviolent history of the Society of Friends.)
Despite my admiration of Professor Butler’s work, especially her book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, I was unprepared for the depth of our wide-ranging, fascinating and educational (in the best sense) conversation on “The Spiritual Life.” This often happens when I come to know scholars or thinkers as friends and then engage them on their chosen topics. It’s one thing to know a person as a friend; it’s quite another to be dazzled by their scholarly expertise.
One of the most compelling answers Anthea gave comes at the beginning of our conversation when I asked her about her religious background. I had known the outlines of her personal religious history: She was born into a Catholic family but then spent time in the evangelical tradition, going so far as to study in a seminary, but was drawn back to Catholicism in part for its intellectual rigor. “There’s a Catholicism of practice,” she told me. “But there’s the Catholicism of intellect, and the Catholicism that some of us need is a Catholicism that is a huge tradition of scholars and intellects.”
During our conversation, it dawned on me that here was someone whom I could ask about my own questions about the evangelical tradition. During my graduate studies in theology, I read the excellent survey Religion in America, by Winthrop S. Hudson and John Corrigan, which outlined the evangelical and Pentecostal strains in American Christianity (and where I also learned about the Society of Friends in Pennsylvania.) But I rarely had the chance to speak with someone, like Anthea, who had spent time in the evangelical world.
Chief among my questions was the appeal of what is called the “prosperity gospel.” Loosely put (and widely believed), this is the idea that if you believe in God (or if you “do the right things”) then you will be rewarded with worldly success and earthly riches. It’s an attractive proposition, which you can even see traces of in Catholic settings (“If you say this many prayers or rosaries, God will do this or that for you.”). Anthea’s take on this was subtle and nuanced but also straightforward. When I asked why people may believe in this, she said, “They don’t want to suffer.”
Who does? And yet, as we say in our discussion, the great danger of this strain of Christianity is not only that it takes away God’s agency (God is, in a sense, “forced” to do something once we have fulfilled our part of the bargain) but that it reduces the relationship between God and the person to a transaction. After all, Jesus says to his disciples that he calls them “friends,” not business partners.
The prosperity gospel also ignores the simple fact that even good people—often the holiest, the most religious, the most devout—suffer. Occasionally, when Catholics seem to be moving in this direction, I’ll ask them about people like St. John Paul II, who suffered for several years from Parkinson's disease, or St. Teresa of Calcutta, who suffered from decades of interior darkness. Did they somehow “pray wrong”?
What does this have to do with our spiritual lives?
Simply put, if we imagine ourselves as satisfying a God who will “give us” things only if we do the “right things” (not to mention the corresponding belief that God will withhold blessings, or even punish us, if we don’t do the “right things”) then our relationship with God becomes less a friendship and more a chore. We end up “checking the boxes” not out of any desire to do God’s will, much less to follow his Son, but to obtain prizes from an exacting God: fame, health, financial success. And when we don’t receive those things, we can be tempted to wonder, “What did I do wrong?” Likewise, when someone else is not flourishing financially, we can be tempted to wonder, “What did they do wrong?” But, in fact, as the old book title said, bad things sometimes do happen to good people.
In my eyes, the prosperity gospel, a feature of some evangelical churches today, can pose a real threat to a healthy and realistic spiritual life.
Anthea Butler’s insights into the prosperity gospel and the larger evangelical tradition were tremendously helpful for me. As was her perspective about what it means to be Black and Catholic, and what it means to remain in a church that is holy and peopled with saints but still deeply flawed—and living with the legacy of racism, misogyny and sexual abuse. “I choose to stay, not because I condone that, but I choose to stay because I want to fight that,” she said. “And I want to fight for people who have been abused and downtrodden. And that to me is where my spirituality is.”
I hope you enjoy our conversation with this remarkable Catholic.
