A turn in the right direction? Across Catholic and Protestant churches, "orthodoxy movements" have sprung up to hold on to and defend what they see as the one true way of their particular tradition.

When John and Carolyn Green got married, they made all the decisions that any couple makes, like who they invite to the wedding, where they would live, and who would do the cooking. They also had a theological debate about a very personal--issue whether or not to use birth control.

John, a lifelong Catholic who was ordained a deacon last year, was uncomfortable with the idea because of the church's official teaching. For Carolyn, whose father was a Baptist minister, using birth control seemed perfectly normal. They decided to use birth control despite the teaching.

But a few years later the couple had what they call a "conversion experience" that changed their thinking. It started when another couple at their parish, St. Thomas of Canterbury in Chicago, took them aside and asked them about birth control and Natural Family Planning (NFP).

"They said, `You really need to examine this issue--you can't just do your own thing,'" says John. "As we read and looked at the issue more closely, we realized that the church is right and that we need to conform our lives to that truth. That's the real question for us: Do we lives to the truth, or do we try and conform the truth to fit our lives?"

Like the Greens, many of the parishioners at St. Thomas have chosen to be "intentionally orthodox"--embracing official Catholic teaching on a whole range of issues, including NFP. Not because the pope says they have to, or out of nostalgia for a pre-Vatican II past, but because they genuinely believe the church's teaching is "the truth."

In doing so, the Greens and their fellow parishioners are part of a larger movement among American Christians--Catholic and Protestant alike--who are concerned about issues of orthodoxy. In some cases, it is an individual parish like St. Thomas; in others, "orthodoxy movements" have sprung up to push for a return to official church teaching.

A growing movement

In the Catholic Church, members of groups like Catholics United for the Faith, Regnum Christi, Opus Del, and others push for orthodoxy in following their interpretation of the teachings of the Vatican.

Among Protestants, one of the largest orthodoxy groups is the Confessing Church Movement in the Presbyterian Church (USA), named for its commitment to three confessions: 1. Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation; 2. scripture as the church's only infallible rule of faith and life; and 3. The marriage between a man and a woman as the only relationship within which sexual activity is appropriate. The movement claims to have the support of 1,289 churches with more than 400,000 members, or nearly 20 percent of the 2.5 million-member denomination.

In the Episcopal Church, groups like Episcopalians United and Forward in Faith have opposed the ordination of women, the ordination of gay priests, and the views of liberal clergy such as retired Archbishop John Shelby Spong, who has challenged the Virgin birth, the Incarnation, Jesus' physical Resurrection, and other Christian doctrines.

Within the largest Protestant denomination, the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), a movement advocating strict adherence to orthodoxy has been the most successful. The so-called "conservative takeover" of the SBC began in 1979, when fundamentalist Baptists decided that the church had strayed too far from biblical inerrancy--a cornerstone of orthodox Southern Baptist theology. To correct that, the new leadership required all denominational staff, seminary professors, and missionaries to sign a "Baptist Faith and Message" statement. Yet dissent among moderates continues within the SBC.

There is even a confessing movement of sorts in the Unitarian Church--the American Unitarian Conference--which claims that the Unitarian Universalist Association has gone too far and has no room for God.

Church historian Martin E. Marty says these confessing or orthodoxy groups fill a need for stability in an uncertain world.

"There is a strong sense among people that everything is unmoored--we are in a sea of relativism," Marty says. "The old landmarks are gone, the old boundary markers are gone, and we are adrift, lost without a map."

In the past, Marty says, churches gave their members clear definitions of faith and doctrine. "If you were a Presbyterian, you would look things up in the Westminster Confession and you knew what you were supposed to believe," says Marty. Now, he says, that's no longer the case. Intermarriage, mobility, and freedom of choice in religion have eroded that sense of denominational identity.

There's also a theological motivation for these orthodoxy groups, says Marty. They believe that as churches compromise their beliefs, something essential is being lost. The question that motivates these groups, he says, is: "Can God's truth be relativized so much that it's not truth anymore, and what can we do about it?"

Kris Livovich, whose parents were Protestant missionaries in Mexico, began attending St. Thomas of Canterbury when she moved to Chicago with her husband three years ago. She worries that many churches have lost the core beliefs--about the Bible, the Trinity, the Resurrection among others--that shaped their identity.

"Unfortunately," she says, "you can't walk, into churches nowadays and know what they are going to believe because their name is Catholic, Baptist, or whatever."

For Livovich, orthodoxy means embracing the truth, no matter what your feelings about an issue are. "I grew up with my dad saying, `It doesn't matter what you feel, what does the Bible say?'" she explains. "I have heard Father Simon say the same thing: `It doesn't matter what you feel--what matters is the truth.'"

A 180-degree turn

Orthodoxy was not always a pressing issue at St. Thomas. In the late 1980s, the church was considered a progressive parish, known for inclusive liturgy and a creative approach to worship. It was a pretty "unorthodox place," remembers Stephen Soucy, a former parishioner who now lives near Bar Harbor, Maine. "A lot of folks who really felt they didn't fit into the Catholic Church were welcome."

During the 9 a.m. Sunday Mass, the celebrant, who was unvested, sat in the congregation and laypeople were involved as concelebrants of the Eucharist. To avoid using gender-exclusive language for God, parishioners often made the sign of the cross "in the name of the Creator, the Sailor, and the Holy Spirit," and children were sometimes baptized with the same formula.

Things began to change at St. Thomas when Father Richard Simon was appointed pastor in 1986. There was "a bit of trouble," as one parishioner put it, when Simon and the lay leadership didn't see eye-to-eye. During a meeting with the liturgy committee Simon says he laid out his concerns.

"`Above all,' I said, `Do not change the words of the sacraments, especially Baptism,'" he recalls. "`You may be right that it is wrong to use the word Father because it's oppressive, but I must sign a certificate that this child was baptized by the rite of the Roman Catholic Church, which means, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.'"

When a parish staff member had her child baptized by another priest in the modified rite, Simon reported it to the archdiocese. At first, says Simon, "they said all those Baptisms are invalid--they must be redone."

While the Baptisms were eventually determined to be valid, that incident brought the crisis at St. Thomas to a head. Most of the English-speaking congregation left the parish. St. Thomas, located in Chicago's ethnically diverse Uptown neighborhood, holds Masses in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, as well as a Coptic rite in Geez for Eritreans once a month.

Simon remained and began attracting a congregation that wanted what he calls "orthodox preaching and liturgy by the book." The English Mass now attracts about 300 people each Sunday, followed by a Spanish-language Mass of about 400.

A watershed moment in the parish's journey toward orthodoxy came in July 1997, when the church's tabernacle was returned to the middle of the sanctuary. A few weeks before the move, Simon wrote a letter to the parish--now posted on several Web sites devoted to Catholic orthodoxy--explaining his decision.

"In many churches, including our own," he wrote, "the tabernacle was moved from the center of the church to add emphasis to the Mass and the presence of the Lord in the reception of Holy Communion. The experiment, however, has failed. We have lost the sense of the sacred that formerly was the hallmark of Catholic worship."

That loss of the sacred, wrote Simon, was also seen in a decline in belief among Catholics in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He cited a much-debated 1993 Gallup poll in which only 30 percent of Catholics said they held that belief. "If we don't believe in the Real Presence," he wrote, "we might as well close the church."

Knowing the mind of God

Father Paul Hansen, C.Ss.R., rector of the Redemptorist Provincial House in Toronto, says he has heard similar concerns about the "loss of mystery and the transcendent" from a number of the young priests and seminarians he has met. Hansen, who was ordained a priest in 1969, says these younger priests believe "the Second Vatican Council has been badly misinterpreted."

Some of those new seminarians are "to the right of Attila the Hun," says Hansen. "They believe they have been ordained to undo what my generation has done."

Hansen, like Marty, argues that the focus on orthodoxy is a reaction to the uncertain times we live in. Economic difficulties, high divorce rates, and a sense of information overload have made people anxious for black-and-white answers. "There is a lot of insecurity, and they want the cocoon," he says.

"I am convinced that fundamentalism, or looking to orthodoxy, has nothing to do with faith," he says. "It has to do with fear. In an age of insecurity, people grab on to the tradition to tell them what to believe."

The danger in orthodoxy comes when we claim to know the exact details of theological truth, argues Hansen. He acknowledges the importance of affirming the beliefs of the Catholic faith, like the Real Presence in the Eucharist or the Resurrection. But knowing precisely what those beliefs mean is another matter.

"This crowd knows the mind of God," he says. "There is a revelation--there is a direct line to God, and [they] have it."

Scratching an itch

An orthodoxy movement usually gets started, says Marty, when an event or a charismatic leader rises up and "defines an itch that people didn't know they quite had and helps them scratch it. Somebody has to read a widespread measure of discontent and give it terminology."

"We have seen this in the world of studying the family;" Marty says. "Everybody regretted the breakup of the family. Some said, `Let's just celebrate the breakup and find all the alternatives.' Then others came along and said, `No, we will, Dobson-style, focus on the family--we will give hard definitions.'"

Patricia Miller, executive director of the United Methodist Confessing Movement, says that her organization pushes for hard definitions because the church's leadership refuses to do so. Miller joined the movement--a group of about 1,200 churches with some 600,000 members--because of concerns with the "liberal direction" she saw the denomination taking: clergy who no longer taught the basics of Christianity, like the Resurrection or that faith in Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven, and churches that celebrated marriage or "holy union" services for gays and lesbians.

Miller blames the move away from orthodox teaching for the decline in membership of the United Methodist Church. From 1965 to 2000, the church dropped from more than 11 million members to just over 8 million, a loss of more than 30 percent. At the same time, the population of the United States grew by 44 percent, from 198 million in 1965 to 287 million in 2002. Instead of leaving the church, Miller says she is working to "oppose those things that would destroy the church."

Just the fundamentals, ma'am

Members of orthodoxy groups are often referred to as "fundamentalists," a label most of them reject. The term comes from a movement among Protestants in the early 1900s and refers to a series of pamphlets called The Fundamentals, published by two California oilmen, Sheldon and Lyman Stewart, between 1910 and 1915.

The pamphlets, written by conservative church leaders, defended beliefs such as the virgin birth, the Resurrection, and Christ's miracles, which the Stewarts felt were being undermined by theological liberals. They also argued for biblical inerrancy--that the Bible had been dictated by God and was completely true, a belief that German biblical criticism and Darwin's theory of evolution called into question.

By 1920, a new movement had sprung up, ready to "do battle royal" for the Lord against the liberals. Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Watchman-Examiner, called followers of this movement "fundamentalists." These "fundamentals" were non-negotiable--those who rejected them were the enemy.

Fundamentalism began to lose its public popularity in the years following the 1925 "Monkey Trial," in which science teacher John Scopes was convicted in Dayton, Tennessee of illegally teaching evolution. But the questions raised by the movement remain to this day: What parts of Christianity are fundamental or non-negotiable, and what parts are flexible and can change with the culture.

It's a conflict as old as the church itself, says William Dinges, associate professor of religion at Catholic University of America. Jesus told his followers to be "in the world, but not of the world," and ever since then Christians have tried to figure out what that means.

What was happening among U.S. Protestants in the 20th century, Dinges says, was an attempt to "tune up the faith" to be compatible with the world. That caused a reaction from those who wanted to preserve traditional Christian teaching.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, attempts to "tune up" Catholic teaching met with similar resistance. In 1864, Pope Pius IX issued his "Syllabus of Errors," which condemned religious liberty, the separation of church and state, along with "errors having reference to modern liberalism."

For Pope Pius X (1903-1914) modernism was "the summation of all heresies." He was hostile to democracy and ordered all clergy, religious, and seminary professors to take an "oath against modernism." Theologians were silenced and excommunicated, and societies of vigilance were set up to report any instances of modernist heresies.

That kind of attempt to "get rid of undesirables," says Dinges, comes from a sense that the faith is being subverted or polluted from within.

"These more fundamentalist or radical conservative Christian movements are not simply a reaction against the world, nor are they driven solely by external events," Dinges says. "They are very much driven by a perception that the faith tradition is being subverted from within. In the Catholic version of this, you hear concerns about the `virus of modernity'--that the body is being subverted from within."

While modern orthodoxy groups show a similar concern for "fundamentals," says Marty, for the most part "they are not as ornery or mean as the fundamentalists of the 1920 were perceived to be." The key difference. Many of the creeds and confessions that shape orthodox Christianity have "loose ends," Marty says. For true fundamentalists, "there are no loose ends anywhere."

Marty, who in the 1970s during a bitter dispute over orthodoxy left the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in which he had been raised, says he sympathizes with those who want to put boundaries on a church's belief and practice.

"Things can be so broad and ill-defined that they become like pouring water on sand," says Marty, now a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. "The big difference is: denominational or confessional definitions proceed vitally under persuasion and badly under coercion. I am a Lutheran, and the Lutheran confessions don't say, `This you have got to believe.' Rather, they say, `This we believe.'

"It is very hard to move from one to the other," he adds. "Pope John Paul II has found the same kind of thing. It's very hard to coerce assent. You can silence some people, but it is very hard to put them out. There haven't been many heretics removed from the Catholic Church in recent years--I am not saying they should never make the move, but you find that it's important to keep persuading the faithful as to what the truth or the aspiration of truth is."

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

When he looks back on his time at St. Thomas, former parishioner Stephen Soucy says it was the place where he first experienced a real sense of Christian community.

Soucy, who lived at the Catholic Worker house down the street from St. Thomas, says that one of his heroes is Dorothy Day, who was able to balance radical social action with orthodox Catholic teaching. That's not something he has been able to do. He says he has an affinity for progressive Catholics like those who used to be part of St. Thomas. When he thinks about his own beliefs about orthodoxy, he sometimes feels he has to choose between being a disciple of Jesus and being a Catholic.

Still he understands those who are concerned about a loss of orthodox belief. "I have friends who really believe that tradition plays a critical role in their faith," Soucy says, "that these beliefs were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that we neglect them at our peril."

But what concerns him more is the lack of respect that people on both sides of the orthodoxy debate show to one another.

"That was probably the most disappointing thing about what happened with the progressive community at St. Thomas," he says. "This was an excellent chance to really put into practice the teaching of Jesus. To profess Jesus as God or as someone you should emulate means that you have to love your enemies. I hoped that they would have been able to rise above the differences, but that didn't really happen."

What's most important, Soucy believes, "is how you are treating your neighbor. It's the fruits of your life that's the test of what you really believe."

THE CATHOLIC ORTHODOXY MOVEMENT IN THE U.S.

Organizations devoted to promoting "Catholic orthodoxy" in the United States:

Catholics United for the Faith, a lay apostolate that aims "to support defend, and advance the efforts of the teaching church." Based in Steubenville, Ohio; 800-693-2484; www.cuf.org.

Opus Dei, the influential international personal prelature controversial for its secrecy and political entanglements. U.S. headquarters in New York City; 914-235-1201; www.opusdei.org.

Women for Faith and Family aims to "assist orthodox Catholic women in their effort to provide witness to their faith." Founded by antifeminist organizer Helen Hull Hitchcock. Based in St. Louis; 314-863-8385; www.wf-f.org.

Institute on Religious Life, founded to counter what its members perceive as the "secularization" of religious communities after Vatican II. Based in Chicago; 773-267-1195; www.religiouslife.com.

Catholic Answers is a publishing venture dedicated to Catholic apologetics, "bringing the fullness of Catholic truth to the world." Based in San Diego; 619-387-7200; www.catholic.com.

PetersNet the Web site of Trinity Communications, is a self-appointed watchdog for Catholic orthodoxy that rates Web sites according to the group's interpretation of their fidelity to church teachings. Based in Nokesville, Virginia; 703-791-2576; www.petersnet.net.

EWTN, the Eternal Word Television Network founded by the combative conservative Mother Angelica. Based in Irondale, Alabama; 205-271-2900; www.ewtn.com.

RELATED ARTICLE: The new orthodox?

It's the news many have been waiting a generation to hear: Young people are finally embracing Christian orthodoxy. They're eschewing premarital sex, rejecting relativism, and turning to traditional devotions such as the Latin Mass.

So says Colleen Carroll, a SL Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who spent a year interviewing about 600 young orthodox Christians for her book, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Loyola Press).

It almost sounds too good to be true.

It is.

Although Carroll provides an insightful, if sympathetic, peek into the world of orthodox young adults, her claim that this group represents a trend is most likely wishful thinking, as sociological surveys point in the opposite direction. Sociologist James B. Davidson of Purdue University says national studies of young adult Catholics, including his own, consistently show that the majority of young adults are not orthodox.

"The `new faithful' in Carroll's book are an important and highly organized subset of young adult Catholics, but they are not typical of their generation and, even though Carroll might like them to be, they are not part of an overall trend toward orthodoxy and conventional morality," Davidson writes in The Tidings, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

But that doesn't mean so-called Gen-X Catholics are carbon copies of their progressive Boomer parents. Nor is it easy to simply describe them as "liberal" or "conservative." Four researchers found plenty of seemingly conflicting findings in their four-year study of more than 800 Catholics ages 20-39 who had been confirmed.

As documented in their book, Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice (Notre Dame Press), the study found that many young adult Catholics were interested in orthodox Catholic beliefs and traditional devotional practices such as eucharistic adoration.

"It's almost that they are looking for some demonstrative expression of what it means to be Catholic, something that makes being Catholic different in this otherwise homogenized, faith-journey culture," says researcher William Dinges of the Catholic University of America.

But they also found support for expanded roles for women and laypeople, distancing from church authority and parish life, and widespread disagreement with church teachings on sexual issues. Only one in five attended church weekly.

The subjects of Carroll's book label themselves not as "conservative" but as "orthodox"--which one young adult defined as "being able to say the Apostles' Creed without crossing your fingers." Most of all, Carroll says, they want what they call "the hard gospel."

"They see the challenge of the gospel as being the best part of it," she says. "If Christianity tells them to do whatever they feel is right, to live just like anyone else, it's not appealing to them. These are people who have tried doing things the world's way--do whatever you like, sleep with whomever you like--and all that it left them was feeling empty.... Young people of every generation are idealists. If the gospel tells you to change your life, to take up your cross, to witness to your neighbor, then they are challenged to get out and do it."

--Bob Smietana and Heidi Schlumpf

BOB SMIETANA is the features editor of the Covenant Companion in Chicago.