Now, there is some truth here. Ultimately, there is a faction of the Church that has come to value works over faith (and this is often how Pelagianism is portrayed). You can—to sketch a caricature—have your guitar mass with felt banners, organize a parish trip to Appalachia, and consider yourself saved. Quite often, these Neo-Pelagians are the ones who, it is said, ought to “leave the Church,” the ones about whom Archbishop Chaput was supposedly speaking.
But Pelagianism has another aspect, one that actually applies more fully not to the liberal wing of the American Church, but to its conservative one. The Pelagians were obsessed with purity. Pelagius himself exhorted all Christians to life without blemish:
Surely it is not true that the Law of Christian behaviour has not been given to everyone who is called Christian […] Do you think that the fires of Hell will burn any less hotly for men licensed (as governors) to give vent to their sadism, and will be made hotter only for those whose professional duty it is to be pious […] There can be no double-standard in one and the same people.
There is obviously much good here, but, as Peter Brown writes in his biography of St. Augustine, “Pelagius wanted every Christian to be a monk.” His church had no room for the struggling, for the impure, the dependent; he envisioned a world made perfect through Christian striving, through a commitment to the Law. This is why his theology came to be associated with works: it put an immense weight on the human person to act ethically, to strive for total perfection liberated from worldly temptations. Again Brown:
For the Pelagians, man had no excuse for his own sins, nor for the evils around him. If human nature was essentially free and well-created, and not dogged by some mysterious inner weakness, the reason for the general misery of men must be somehow external to their true selves; it must lie, in part, in the constricting force of the social habits of a pagan past.
Brown is also helpful in indicating how Augustine emphasizes the image of the baby, of the dependent, of he who always needs God, as an infant at its mother’s breast. Pelagius, by contrast, is much fonder of the image of a son, a young adult liberated from his father’s watchful eye. Brown sums it up: “‘To be a son’ was to become an entire separate person, no longer dependent on one’s father, but capable of following out by one’s own power, the good deeds that he had commanded.”
It becomes very easy from this position to demand a purity of culture, to idolize positions that do not actually constitute the truths of the faith (such as having to vote for Trump). And this, dare I say, is often as much the playing field of the Catholic conservative of America as it is of the liberal. Tim Kaine is pro-choice; Paul Ryan idolizes American freedom and equality. Both are lukewarm in their own way.
But that’s just it. To be on fire with Christ’s love is also to be willing to journey with those who are not yet fully formed, those who struggle. In short, it is to pray for, and walk with, precisely those people Pelagians would condemn to Hell. As Archbishop Chaput reminds us, this accompanying cannot be false; it must be rooted in a love for God, but to be a purist, to deny the Church to those who can still feel the force of conversion in their hearts is, ironically enough, to be lukewarm; to accept any ideology over and above the Faith—whether nebulous or purist—is to be spat out.
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