who you calling bourgeois?

Here's a very thought provoking excerpt from Johann Baptist Metz, a German Catholic theologian:

"The bishops sense the dangers which the practice of bourgeois religion contains for the life of the church. They are aware that the church will not so much change the hearts of the bourgeois as it will be changed by the bourgeois into the institution of 'their' religion, becoming a church which is there simply to service their own security needs. Nevertheless, the pastoral approach of our church toward bourgeois religion tends rather to be one of resignation: it is a strategy of latent mistrust fed by the suspicion that in the end the bourgeois are no really to be trusted, and that they would ultimately overwhelm Christianity totally with their priorities and preferences if one were to give in to them in a single instance. So the bishops react with legal rigorism in those cases in which actual or supposed truisms of bourgeois society come into all too open conflict with the preaching of the church: for example, in the question of divorce, especially the readmission of divorced people to the sacraments, in family and sexual morality, and lastly, in the matter of cumpulsory celibacy. What I am saying here is in no way to attack the Christian ideal of monogamy, to make a plea for sexual license, or to oppose the eschatalogical-apocalyptic virtue of celibacy. The question is only whether such legal rigorism is the way both to overcome the contradictions of bourgeois religion in Christianity, and to make the Christian alternatives to a bourgeois way of life really visible. Or to put it another way, whether this is the direction needed to heal the split between the messianic virtues of the gospel we preach and those which the bourgeois practice; that is, whether conversion leading to discipleship will become possible."

The problem here enunciated is that faced by a late modern institutional church in Europe, with it's own peculiarities. It's significance for now is simply this: the way a certain moral rigorism takes the place of a genuinely radical gospel lifestyle. This was paralleled in the way that forms of early Pentecostalism banned all sorts of things - smoking, drinking, dancing, fun of any kind - and this was not alongside the radical politics of Jesus, but replaced it, so as to exhaust the radical impulse of Christianity in personal moral legalism, instead of solidarity with the poor and oppressed (see Luke 4). This substitution occurs today, to take one example, in the way that Christian commitment to financial discipline manifests in the practice of giving to the church for it's buildings, rather than to the poor. Church activity becomes a proxy for genuine world-engaging discipleship, and one feels very committed, but the radical gospel lifestyle is absent. Deus meus, misericordia mea.