The Ochlophobist is a convert to Orthodoxy. He isn’t hesitant to criticize the Americanization of Orthodoxy. Here he addresses it with Catholicism, using as his foil Fr. Jay Scott Newman’s piece on Evangelical Catholicism. A brief tease:
The religious psychology behind the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” is among the most interesting religious phenomena in modernity. The notion of the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” asserts an unmediated personal relationship between the believer and Jesus, but as we have seen this relationship is in fact mediated via a host of rituals and ritual language. Yet, like the Quaker whose Quaker meetings follow a near exact routine 99.8% of the time, we have a religious psychology here which fervently expresses an intention to deny the role of any ritual in mediating the relationship between the believer and Jesus (in the case of Evangelical Catholicism and Byzantine Rite Evangelicalism the stress is put on the ritual only rightly existing for those who have this Evangelical approach to the faith, as we will see below, and the inference that the ritual cannot be approached rightly unless the ‘heart work’ is done first — there is some truth to this, of course; God save us from things that have some truth). In classic evangelicalism this anti-ritual intent is indeed ritually expressed, such as the mention, frequent and routine, in services of how one cannot be saved via rituals, and a whole sub-lingo of anti-ritualism, the repetitive use of which in religious services is itself ritualistic. In those cases where Evangelicalism has been imported into Catholicism or Orthodoxy there is not an overt anti-ritualism, but there remains either a soft assertion or a clear enough inference that the unmediated “Gospel” oriented “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” soteriologically precedes the role of ritual acts in mediating God to man. Beyond the anti-ritual aspects of this religious psychology, there is the positive assertion and/or intuition that to engage in these deemed non-ritual ritual acts of the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” is to actually engage directly with the Lord Jesus. Oftentimes this is sad yet humourous. So often when you listen to the prayers of a person who has a “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” you find that the content of those prayers consists mostly of assertions to (reminders to) Jesus of Who He is, which, of course, inevitably mimics the conceptualization of Jesus that the believer (and usually his community of believers) wants Jesus to be, and this form of prayer essentially serves to convince the believer that he or she has a “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” by means of the mental and emotional construction of a Jesus whom the believer “relates” to by way of those acts which construct said Jesus. Does this sound circular? It is.
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