The silent majority is a fairly ubiquitous rhetorical device. Often enough, we like to imagine ourselves a part of it. Even if the silent majority isn’t being falsely invoked in some cause – it prefers to be left alone – it certainly is real. At some point you realize in life that people are more likely to tell you what you want to hear than to tell you what they really think. Anonymous surveying has cleared up some of this, but even that isn’t always reliable. For example, a survey is taken every Thanksgiving asking people how much they plan to spend on Christmas gifts over the Thanksgiving Day weekend. When the results are compared to retail receipts, we find the data is near worthless. Compounding this issue is that people have a terrible tendency to change their minds and don’t really plan near as much as they think they do. Think of the story of the college aged boy who tells his roommates that he has had it and is finally going to break up with his girlfriend. Later we find out that instead he bought her dinner and a movie. The relevant information often isn’t before us.
In the post election wrap up, one commentator termed many of the ensuing debates as if the [whatever] party were more like us and less like them, we would have won. (I believe it was Ross Douthat who coined this, but I can’t find the citation at the moment.) In the 2008 case, it was opposing sides of the fusionist compromise in the Republican Party. At its root, it is a form of data mining. It generally follows the path of picking a handful of issues, declaring them the essence of an ideology, and then claiming a constituency. One of the issues this was done with was immigration. In Arizona, a number of candidates ran on little more than restricting immigration. Generic support for restricting immigration in Arizona is high. The candidates lost, and what we learned was that it was not enough to be ‘right’, as in with the people, on just one issue in order to be elected. Here in Wisconsin, we saw a similar thing with cutting taxes. The Republicans were very successful twenty years ago primarily running on cutting taxes. They saw diminishing returns each year they ran on it once they started cutting taxes.
In the church, you’ll see similar debates. If you were just paying attention to the Internet, you’d swear the greatest challenges the Catholic Church faces today are too many priests committing crimes, too many bishops covering them up, not ordaining women, not enough places offering the extraordinary rite, the wrong kind of music, not enough Latin, or some variation. While to varying degrees different interest groups are represented in the above, none of them are going to move many people either way. The biggest problem in the church right now is incredibly simple. For a while the model has been for people to leave the church when they are 18 to 20 and come back when they are ready to get married or have their children baptized. No, this approach wasn’t ever formally endorsed, but knowing that the kids eventually were coming back kept people from being apocalyptic. There is a reason after all why the topic of annulments is so front and center: they provide relief for people trying to re-enter the church, and a lot of folks need them. Well, children stopped coming back to their hometown when they were ready to settle down. Lacking any social pressure to be in the church, they started not coming back. The Old Line Protestants saw it first. Now we and the evangelicals are seeing it. (Evangelicals are retaining about 5% of their youth.) Before it became apparent that the conservative churches were emptying, it was proffered that we were dealing with an orthodoxy vs heterodoxy issue or a conservative vs liberal issue. Now it appears to be more a case that a trend emerged in a wealthier class before moving downward.
For those hoping for an easy solution to this easy problem, I’m afraid I’m not going to be much of a help. The bishops are of course aware of the issue. Theology on Tap is one program that is trying to help retain people through the transition period. Life Teen masses were designed to get youths accustomed to going to church on their own in the hope that they would continue to do so once they had left the nest. Additionally, it has the purpose of helping to induce a social network of like minded peers that will hopefully persist once the kids go to college. I’m not here to rip on the programs, because I don’t really have any better ideas at the moment. The convert model is pretty much out of the question: there are no longer enough converts or immigrants to keep up with the youth lost due to the fact that Catholicism has a high degree of market penetration presently. The Orthodox in this country have already moved that way in some of their jurisdictions, and the rest will likely see enormous pressure to do so, but they are starting at a significantly lower base. What I do know is that the items in my preceding paragraph won’t really effect this trend at all. And if there is a lesson to be had in all this, I suppose that will have to be it: silent majorities are hard to hear.
Update: It turns out it was Michael Brendan Dougherty, not Ross Douthat. MBD also has a new blog here. Here is the Dougherty Doctrine:
At the end of the day, the arguments all seem to boil down to something similar: If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you.
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