Mindful of popular demand for television shows featuring religious themes, the networks this season have fully obliged us. Consider Father Ray, the priest on ABC's new offering Nothing Sacred. It could be that more people have heard of him than have watched the show, because he has provoked devout Christians, particularly devout Catholics, who feel he mocks their faith. Indeed, Father Ray's is a peculiar sort of religion.
He freely philosophizes from his pulpit, along the following lines: Christianity today consists of "creeds that would take us back to the chimpanzee"; belief is a matter of "affirmations of the soul"; what is important ultimately is the "God in you."
Actually, those words are from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the apostle of "self- reliance," but the message of Nothing Sacred is much the same -- and thus nothing new. Father Ray preaches Emerson Lite, the gospel of American spiritual individualism, the summons to heed the promptings of your deepest self. Henry James delivered the classic response to this type when, exasperated with Emerson, he exclaimed, "O you man without a handle!"
Father Ray is by most measures a poor custodian of belief. His sermons, full of sneers and breezy complaints, are the bleakest of fare. He is nearly drawn from the priesthood by the lure of a former lover. He believes God urges nothing on us, save that we urge nothing on others. The priesthood seems to him an afterthought, for he has little use for prayer, and only grudging respect for the duties of his vocation. He appears neither Catholic nor Protestant -- indeed, barely Christian. Emerson defines true religion as " a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man," and it is a faith to which Father Ray gives splendid testimony.
The Sage of Concord advises us to rely only on "what is true for you in your private heart." And Father Ray? When a woman seeks him out for advice on abortion, he says, "You're an adult, with your own conscience. I can't tell you what to do."
As Emerson sees it, one's self or "conscience" holds fast against organized religion. Freighted with dogma and tradition long obsolete, the church stifles the self, smothers its inspiration, and detracts from its independence. "What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions," Emerson asks, "if I live wholly from within?"
In Emerson's mind, as in Father Ray's, the freedom to be yourself -- to believe and act apart from the crowd -- keeps company with the freedom to know God "at first hand," wholly apart from church or creed. Emerson sidelines formal religion insofar as it subtracts from a pure, unmediated acquaintance with divine inspiration. When a parishioner cries to Father Leo, a friend and colleague of Father Ray, "I want to know! I have nothing to hold on to!?" he responds, "Nothing but you anti God -- that is as good a definition of pure faith as I've ever heard."
This response reflects the Emersonian yearning to recover the divine by striking out on one's own, free of church or crowd -- as alone as the pioneer who lit out across America's abyss of space with nothing but God and himself. In Emerson's terms, the crowd, by urging conformity, prevents you from being yourself. The church, by stifling the spirit, prevents you from knowing God. Knowledge of the self in solitude begets knowledge of God; the freedom to be yourself becomes one and the same as the freedom to be by yourself.
Emerson permits this American self to be as boundless in potential as the unexploited wilderness. He urges each of us to enthrone a sacred Me -- itself part of God -- whose potential is as vast as the prairies, but whose power has been sapped by organized religion.
To the contrary: The fervid spiritual individualism of Emerson echoed by Nothing Sacred's priests in fact leads to conformity. The self, having discarded tradition and authority, has little to fall back on but the opinions of others. Or it collapses into the arms of hustlers who promise to guide it back toward being . . . itself. Whatever that may be.
Emerson's legacy may be discerned in the legions who are averse to organized religion, in whom churchless "spirituality," in all its solitude, flourishes. It is evident in those who shop and hop from church to church, captive to the self's every whim, in search of a religion built to their specifications. Nothing Sacred gladly drinks from this legacy. It is a legacy that disposes us to hear the voice of God in a self that believes it can speak of God by speaking of humanity in a loud voice.
Says Emerson, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. " For ABC, nothing is at last sacred but the ratings. Thus Nothing Sacred is likely doomed. If only its departure could doom the claim that nothing, but nothing, is sacred but the puny self.
Christopher Stump is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.