I have noticed a trend in the (deeply weird and unrepresentative) intellectual discourse online of people both secular and Protestant suddenly discovering an interest in Catholicism.
This is strange. Christianity has splintered a few times in its history, and we are perhaps due for another splinter (some people think Wokeness is a third splintering, a quite respectable theory). But a significant reversion of members from one splinter back to a previous one is historically quite rare. While a few chattering class intellectuals are not necessarily indicative of a wider trend (it would be rash to conclude that the ranks of Catholicism in the West will swell), they do indicate something. I believe this phenomenon is a view to broader socio-technological changes, and does in fact signal a problem that Protestantism will face in the future, a problem that Wokeness, if it is another splintering, will not face.
Literate and illiterate religion
Catholicism is a functionally illiterate religion. I do not mean this as an insult, but as an observation. I have met many people who are illiterate in their first language, although I as yet know no one who is illiterate in any language. This high literacy rate (in some language) is an extremely recent state of affairs. When Christianity ascended to the position of favored state religion, many fewer people could read and write. Getting an exact figure of literacy rates in Rome is pretty much impossible: No official records attempted to estimate the number, and scholars have post hoc attempted various methods of estimation. Conservative historians put the number of literate Romans at around 10%, while others put the number much higher, closer to 40%. Literacy rates were probably relatively high in urban centers like Rome or (later) Constantinople in comparison to the countryside, although even there they were probably nothing like today. Whatever the exact number, that literacy rate definitely fell in the Medieval period: for a time, even many secular elites were not literate.
In both the Ancient and Medieval contexts, books were expensive to produce and thus relatively rare and not part of the ordinary man’s life, a situation which worsened with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Recognizing familiar local signs along with some pictorial help was sufficient for most people’s purposes. This first began to really change with the introduction of the printing press, although very widespread national literacy rates (well above 90%) would have to wait for the 18th and 19th centuries.
This is to set the scene for the social environment in which Catholicism grew up. The religion’s rituals and practices were codified in an era of mass illiteracy, a social situation which only became more entrenched as the religion established itself as hegemonic. People had to learn the belief system without access to literature. In terms of formal religious structures, this meant one thing: Spectacle. Divinity had to be communicated through the pomp of the Mass and the houses of worship, and the Gospel had to be made known pictorially and through the proclamations of priests.
Protestantism by contrast grew up in a literate environment (an environment which it, to some extent, helped develop). The religion was begun by a monk who felt that the practices of the Catholic Church were in contradiction with the written Word of God. Luther alone did not determine the whole course of the Reformation, but Sola Scriptura gradually became the defining creed. In the literate Protestant world, God is not known through the spectacle of the church, but through encountering Him intellectually in His recorded revelation. So many schools and universities were founded by Protestants not for secular or scientific reasons but for religious ones: Mass literacy was necessary for the masses to truly encounter God. The contrast between the literate mode of Protestantism and the illiterate mode of Catholicism can even be seen in their churches.
Protestantism is a religion that depends on literacy in a way that Catholicism does not. Protestantism is not as flashy, it is not as full of images and it has no tangible drama that can be directly experienced. Though both Catholics and Protestants depend on the Bible, it is the Protestants who are truly the people of the book.
The consequences of literacy
A mind trained with the written word is different from a mind without it. The organization of thought required for reading is very different from that in an oral environment. The differences come entirely from communicative form.
Oral communication is nearly always discursive. Even when someone gives a monologue, it is to an audience, which reacts (perhaps silently) and participates. But monologues are rare and nearly always have a particular social purpose: relating important cultural narratives, or persuading people or expounding to them from a position of authority (what the ancients called rhetoric). But discourse is more typical of oral communication.
Discourse is by its nature unstructured. When you speak with someone, the other person can disagree, change the subject, extend your thoughts in a new direction, or bring up something new. Discourse is extremely unlikely to follow a set of logical presuppositions and explore them all the way to their end. By its nature it jumps around, assembling different ideas from multiple people in a back-and-forth which may or may not represent a coherent whole.
None of this is bad. It is just the nature of having multiple minds in real-time communication with one another through the medium of linear speech. Valuable knowledge can be imparted and also discovered in this process. A single mind following a single set of logical presuppositions cannot arrive at complete knowledge. But oral communication is by nature unstructured.
Not so the written word. Writing forces communication to be continuous and follow some particular path. There is no interlocutor to correct, derail, or add to the argumentation. If discourse is by nature a hodge-podge, with different thoughts from different minds combining to make a gestalt, writing has the ability to unmask whether the thought itself, expressed in language, has internal coherence. The act of writing forces the writer to pay attention to this. The act of reading brings to the attention of the reader whether what is being said has structure and consistency. Literacy is an avenue to greater coherence and precision of thought.
Literacy changes the way people think, or rather it opens up a new manner of thinking. It doesn’t necessarily supplant the discursive oral communication (elite Ancient Greek society, existing on the bleeding edge of the novel technology of writing, considered both oral and written language, in their proper uses, to be learned forms of culture). However, literate cultures have different qualities from illiterate ones. This kind of research is inevitably controversial, but it appears to be the case that written languages (even when they are spoken) more frequently use conjunctions and have more types of conjunctions. Many languages around the world lack a word for ‘or’, not to speak of ‘however’, ‘nevertheless’, or ‘yet.’ You can get on just fine with no conjunctions, or with a smaller number of conjunctions, or just a single generic conjunction that means ‘mostly and.’ This should not be surprising. If language occurs mostly in a context of unstructured discourse, there is less need for lots of connectives that link one set of thoughts to the next (contrariwise, there is more need for discourse elements acknowledging and addressing the interlocutor!). The increased attention to internal coherence in writing seeps back into the oral language here it is in an unexpected way: a multiplication of conjunctions.
Complex mathematics do not arise in oral cultures. This is not to say oral cultures cannot do math — you can find oral cultures comfortable with surprisingly high multiplication baked into their number systems. However, no purely oral culture has developed algebra or complex geometry. This kind of lengthy, step-by-step algorithmic process is something our brains are not naturally very good at. We seem to require an external aid for structuring, in the form of writing, to jump-start higher mathematics. After people are taught step-by-step mathematical processes, they can become quite adept at doing (some limited amount of) math in their heads. It just seems to be true that to take that first step requires writing the mathematical formulae.
There is somewhat of a middle ground between written and discursive communication, and that is the practice of the oral speech. Speeches are typically more structured than discourse, but even in this case their oral nature never quite takes them to the level of structure present in writing. In writing, one can go back and reread a passage to see if the argument hangs together. There is no similar “pause” function on a speech. Writing is often very much longer than even the longest speeches (save empty and repetitive speeches like filibusters), and thus reading requires a much longer period of active attention from the participant. The writer cannot see his audience, and so cannot use accent, intonation, or mannerisms to convey or evoke emotions: Everything must be spelled out clearly, or at least be recoverable from, only the words and their meanings, arranged according to whatever the grammatical rules of the language are. Cut off from these extra methods of (largely emotive) communication and burdened by the persistence of the word on the page after it is read, the writer is forced to adopt a different style from the orator.
Literacy is not just a communicative tool, although it is that too. Literacy causes a shift in how people think. It enables and enforces certain kinds of structured thought and is a step away from the gestalt, ad hoc compositional thought of discursive or oral communication. We all begin our linguistic lives with only oral1 communication, and only later learn to be literate. Literacy is not a replacement for oral language: it is built on top of it, both historically and in each person’s personal development.
A new age of illiteracy
So far I have spoken mostly about the historical development of literacy. The introduction of first mass media and then information technologies has radically changed the nature of immersion in language and written communication. I have seen the term “post-literate” thrown about here and there to describe the new world we are entering into. I would be much harsher. I would call it illiterate, although it is with a twist: It is illiteracy with writing.
We have achieved in virtually the entire developed world an extremely high rate of basic literacy. With vanishingly few exceptions, everyone can read and write either their native language or the dominant language of their local state. However, there have been two technologies that have changed how literacy functions in society.
First there was television (and to a lesser extent, radio). Though hotly debated at first (and with many scholarly defenders of television as a neutral development), as time went on it became clear that an increase in television viewing was concomitant with a decrease in reading and advanced literacy (here, here, and here). There was no need for these early defenders of television as a maybe-positive or maybe-neutral development. There are only so many hours in a day. If television is introduced into a child’s schedule, some other things that he would have done do not get done. The natural thing television replaces is reading.
This has accelerated with the internet and social media. Focusing strictly on the American context, the National Endowment for the Arts released in 2004 a comprehensive report, “Reading at Risk” (executive summary here), a sobering report on increasing disinterest and lack of engagement in reading among all Americans. The 2004 report was the first time that less than half of American adults read literature (i.e., “literary books”) in a year, and the number of adults who read a book of any kind in the past year before the survey was barely over 50%. Rates of decline varied a little by demographic group, but rapid decline was occurring among all racial, gender, age, and education groups. The youth read the least. In 2004 reading time was already competing with the internet, a trend that has doubtless only accelerated in the intervening 17 years as the internet became more omnipresent with phones and an explosion in social media.
But wait, someone might say: Isn’t using the internet basically reading? There are plenty of image-based internet platforms (Instagram and Youtube, for instance), but a huge number are text-based. Most of our social media takes place in text form: for example, Facebook, the third most visited place on the web, or Twitter.
While someone does have to be able to read in order to use these sites, and may (by word count) even read quite a lot, these technologies replicate the discursive mode of communication, not the kind of lengthy, connected thought of older forms of book-driven literacy. Social media is oral communication by text, not so different from text messages (only in this case read by a wider audience). It does not foster any of the virtues of books or the literary mode of communication.
Aside from reading on the web, as bandwidth has increased, text and video have become increasingly popular resources online. I notice when I need to find instructions on some low-level technical issue, the search results are often Youtube videos, and these are easier to find than written instructions (Youtube is the second most-visited website on the internet). The popularity of podcasts are another result of increased bandwidth. Of the top 10 most visited websites, only Wikipedia (#5) sort of approximates old literacy, however this is a pale approximation. A Wikipedia article is not like reading a book about a topic. The articles are fairly short information dumps (like a news article—this is after all, what encyclopedias are), and do not typically require sustained attention or following a lengthy logical chain that one gets in a proper book. A few paragraphs of text describing a thing is the most sustained engagement in literacy many or even most people have now. If you think all of this has no effect on society, or perhaps like the early 1960s researchers claiming that television did not affect literacy or education you say that this is neutral or good, I invite you to read letters written by soldiers in the Civil War, most of them ordinary people of average education, and compare their diction and use of language to the writings of your contemporary acquaintances and friends.
A return to illiterate religion
The return to illiterate society requires a return to illiterate religion. And American Protestantism is nothing if not adaptive and responsive to technological innovations. The astute reader will have noticed from the title that I think this illiteracy is bad for Protestantism. It is, and it will be, but this is not for lack of trying to adapt.
American religions have always been extra dynamic, and extra strange. Methodism may have begun with British Anglican preachers Wesley and Whitefield, but it took off in America perhaps more than in Britain. Jonathan Edwards’s fiery sermons are probably the most well-known in American revival Protestantism (although we are getting quite far away from him in time now). The second wave of Protestant religious fervor in America generated the Adventists, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Still later movements created sects like the Pentecostals, the trans-denominational Billy Graham, and innovation of mega-churches. From the European viewpoint, these are all strange and exotic religious experiments.
In more recent movements, there is something shared among American Protestant sects: A rapid adoption and exploitation of novel communication technologies. Pentecostals were among the first to realize the power of radio and television, and further revival and sectarian movements followed suit.
The Pentecostal pivot to video was wildly successful. Religious movements with a television network and broadcast sermons got more money and grew faster than traditional churches. You had to have a little bit of a thick skin, as some people would laugh or mock you, but the success and growth of the movement was a pretty good trade-off.
Pentecostalism was already a religion retreating from the literate world. A preacher may expound upon the Word of God, but the real draw of the church was abandoning the stodgy study of a book for spectacle. Stand up and dance. Speak in tongues. (All of this in the Spirit, naturally.) It is no wonder that a religion that had already developed its own sense of spectacle was the first to realize the power of the new mass communication technologies.
Wokeness, or the successor ideology or however you want to call it, is also a movement of post-literate and illiterate spectacle. There are significant parallels with Pentecostal spectacle. The big-haired ladies of the Trinity Broadcast Network are swapped out for drag queens. Speaking in tongues, unofficially obligatory in a Pentecostal church, is replaced with token social media posts and profile image changes, unofficially obligatory to the Woke. In scenes that would not be too different at Pentecostal churches, white people wash the feet of protestors or kneel down asking for forgiveness, while a spiritual leader speaks over them, first condemning and then forgiving them. Even the original Pentecostals are in on the action, attending new sacred sites like the shrine of martyr George Floyd and feeling the Spirit move.
The Woke movement is just a better, more viral version of Protestantism-without-the-book. It is so without the book that it is not Christian anymore. If Pentecostalism was one of a series of steps toward removing the literate component (and perhaps the Emergent Church was another, less successful move in that direction), maybe this is its endpoint. What is Sola Scriptura without the Scriptura? Here it is, a religious mutation to take us into the illiterate future. Wokeness is already creating its own spectacular holidays: Pride Month, high holy days at sanctioned protests, denouncing previous holidays like Thanksgiving. I expect more to come.
In an illiterate world, the person who reads a tiny bit is like a font of wisdom. It’s probably safe to say that a middle class educated mid-20th-century man read more than a 10th-century monk. Nevertheless, the latter possessed far more social cachet with respect to his (religious) community based on his access to and knowledge of books. This shift back to veneration of people who read even a little bit is already clear from within academia. Modern academics, like my theoretical 10th-century monk, read shockingly little per year. When they expound to (what they consider to be) the plebs about Truth, they are not, typically, speaking from a position of a well-read scholar. They are just as immersed as the plebs in visual media and short-sentences/few-paragraphs “reading” online, but they have read maybe one to two books in the past year and this puts them far beyond the ordinary man. If you have ever wondered how such obvious intellectual lightweights like Robin DiAngelo or Ta-Nehisi Coates (the latter of which has begun to pursue his true passion: comic book writing) could become so influential within the academy, this is the reason for it. These people are already more like medieval monks than the midcentury scholar or even autodidact. They inhabit the illiterate world of spectacle more than the world of literacy.
All this brings me back around, finally, to those people suddenly discovering or rediscovering Catholicism. Now that I have situated the current moment as a transition toward an illiterate society (another way in which I think we are living in something very akin to Late Antiquity), the intellectual Catholic converts are living within the broader zeitgeist, not bucking it. If one dislikes the novel illiterate religion on offer (Wokeness), where can one turn? Why, to the older one, of course. The Catholic convert typically speaks, above all, of the ceremony and symbolism, of encountering God in the Mass and the ritual of Catholicism. And he is very sincere when he says this (as is the Woke penitent, who deeply encounters truth when participating in protest or social justice actions). But both actions, though they have different aims and beliefs, are part of the same wider social turn away from literacy. God is no longer in the book, a communicative form for which we no longer have time or patience. God is in the community ritual and in the spectacle.
Protestantism is going to have a difficult time in this new world. It can perhaps degenerate in the Pentecostal direction, but I think the woke religion does this better than the Pentecostals did. Worse still, Wokeness and Pentecostalism are compatible, which means the latter will eventually fall to the former. To survive, the Protestant will have to raise his children to be people of the book, cultivating and growing a pocket of literacy in a world where this is not valued and sophisticated social engineering works against it. And this is not only a problem for Protestantism. It will be an issue also for anyone who values complex and internally consistent thought, thought which is hard to encounter only in the discursive mode (this would include old-school scientists, agnostics, and the atheists from before the New Atheists). How does one preserve a tradition of literacy in an illiterate world, and keep this tradition from passing out of all memory? This is perhaps the most critical and time-sensitive question as we face a transition into this strange new dark age.
This argument does not change by saying “What about the deaf?” Signed languages have the exact same properties of spoken languages in this regard: primarily discursive in their use and fleeting.