When Joan and Carolyn Green got married, they made all the decisions that any couple makes, like who they would 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 church's 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 conform our 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.

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."

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?"

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," Hansen 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."

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 1900's 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 1800's and early 1900's, 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 1970's 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 that 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 was 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.

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

Reprinted with permission of U.S. Catholic magazine (http://www.uscatholic.org). U.S. Catholic is published by the Claretians. Call 1-800-328-6515.

If interested in how a percentage of young adult Catholics are embracing orthodoxy, you can read a book called: New Faithful! Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy. (Loyal Press) By Colleen Carroll.

If you wish to obtain a full copy of this article, it is found in the May '03 issue of U.S. Catholic call 1-800-291-8481. I would love to hear your thoughts and feelings on the above article.