Notes on Tribalism

Evangelizing for a Team

spiritdaily.com

I am reading a non-fiction book that tells the recent history of a group of Super Catholics / Evangelicals-with-Rosaries, written by a member of this same tribe. Throughout the book, there’s a blithe, supercilious, unthinking assumption not only that Revivalist Catholicism is correct, but that by being a member of this tribe, both the author and his fellow tribalists, whom he praises to the heavens, are superior and more virtuous than the rest of humanity.

Occasionally, mention will be made of the desire to “bring people to Christ” or to “evangelize / spread the gospel”, though no member of the tribe ever really does this, even though the book covers an eighty-year historical period.  

Meanwhile, throughout the book, the other tribe (secularists / liberal Catholics) is excoriated.  Yet the only differences between the two tribes seem to be that one of them is pro-fetus and the other isn’t; one of them is authoritarian and unhappy with democracy and the other isn’t; one of them believes that all important truth has been found, categorized and is external to our souls and the other doesn’t.  

But both tribes are very similar in their contempt for one another, in their suppression of doubt about their own positions, and in their unwillingness to be open to anything outside of their own ideologies.

What difference, then, would “bringing people to Christ” make, if that phrase means nothing more than making someone a member of your particular tribe, a tribe which has no intellectual, spiritual or behavioral advantages over the other tribe?  Membership in the Super Catholic tribe evidently doesn’t make one more loving, that’s for sure.

George Orwell calls such tribalists “nationalists”, even when they don’t belong to separate nations.  He says of them …

What he [the tribalist / nationalist] wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connexion with the physical world.

Eric Voegelin calls these folks “tribalists” and says …

The idea of being in substance a member of a masse totale can only appeal to a man who has not much substance of his own. His personality must be sufficiently underdeveloped, that is to say he must be deficient in spiritual organization and balance to such a degree, that the anxiety of existence cannot be controlled and absorbed by the normal processes of the mature, meditative life. As a consequence he will be plagued by insecurities, frustrations, fears, aggressiveness, paranoic obsessions and uncontrollable hatreds. The great escape for the man who cannot extricate himself from this state through the personal solution has always been, and will always be, to submerge himself in a collective, which he either will find ready at hand in his environment, or which he can evoke for the occasion.  Tribalism is the answer to immaturity because it permits man to remain immature with the sanction of his group.

This turns out to be a much better description of the Super Catholics - and even some of the Super Liberals - than other descriptions I have heard.

Oh, and one other thing.  Ideological tribes are incredibly gullible, and easily believe the most ridiculous things, being, as they are, out of “connexion with the physical world”.

For instance, Hans Urs von Balthazar and his soulmate, Adrienne von Speyr, had an unusual relationship.  

Balthazar left the Jesuits and moved in with Speyr and her husband (compare the love triangle between theologian Karl Barth, his wife, and Barth’s live-in lover and creative muse).  

Strange as this domestic set-up sounds, it gets stranger. 

Speyr claimed to communicate on a regular basis as a kind of medium with various saints.  Ralph Martin reports this odd incident …

Among the truly touching attentions [the Virgin] Mary has towards Hans Urs von Balthasar, there is the story about the roll of bandaging material. Adrienne is bandaging her bleeding hand while Mary holds the bandaging roll. At the completion of her work, Adrienne suddenly knows that she has to give Hans Urs von Balthasar the remaining bandaging material. She does so, telling him that Mary had it in her hand and that he should treat it respectfully and consider this gift as a pledge and obligation. And ever since, von Balthasar carries the bandaging roll in a small holder knit especially for him by Adrienne as a tangible sign of his commitment to the common mission.

Reactions to spiritual vulgarities like this, along with roughly sixty volumes of Speyr’s writings, are split, depending on which tribe you’re in.  Super Catholics defend Balthazar-Speyr in a knee-jerk way, while Traditionalists tend to be very wary and openly critical - though many hedge their bets, saying things like, “I suppose it’s true she could be communicating with dead people on a regular basis, and receiving physical objects from the Virgin Mary, and passing on the advice she gets from the other side to Balathazar, but …”

In addition, normal people would be puzzled to discover that most Catholic critiques of the duo center not on the lurid Spirit Daily-type weirdness, but on details of Balthazar and Speyr’s writings that violate the doxa of the tribe.  Both Balthazar and Speyr say things that are not as kosher as they should be (the True Believers claim), offending the set-in-stone beliefs of these same True Believers - and this, not the table-tappling Ouija board sort of stuff, is what offends the Traditionalist Catholic critics, who are then soundly shut down by the Super Catholic enthusiasts, who believe that Speyr, at least, is a saint.  This arguing from within an insulated Second Reality, this petty disputing over the givens of a dubious system, this refusal to deal with the patently obvious is what I’ve elsewhere called the Kryptonite Conundrum.

What is the Kryptonite Conundrum?  Well, there are die-hard fans of Superman or Spiderman or Star Wars and similar series of movies or novels or comic books who freak out if there appears to be an internal inconsistency in the extended mythology.  For instance, if White Kryptonite turns Superman into a frog in Action Comics #101, but then turns him into a Salamander in Actions Comics #112, fans go ballistic!  Back in the 70s, they would write letters to the editor of Action Comics, and the editor would reply with some sort of contrived patch to fix things: “Well, it’s true that White Kryptonite turns Superman into a frog, but Off-White Kryptonite turns him into a salamander!” 

Problem solved!

But not in real life.

So, if anything, such tribalism shows us that members of a defensive tribe (even ostentatious Christians) are not only as bad as the normal people that surround them, but often much worse - as January 6th and the years to come will prove.

Such, then, is the scope of the Super Catholics’ “evangelization”.

And they wonder why no one seems eager to join their tribe.