I read a blog post yesterday in which a woman referred to herself as a “cafeteria Catholic.” I’d never heard the term, which she said was a derogatory description for people who pick and choose to follow parts of her faith, Roman Catholicism, and abandon the others when they don’t agree with the church for one reason or another.
This got me thinking.
Catholics don’t have a corner on cafeteria followers. For that matter, any commitment we make to anything in our lives that requires us to realign our desires, comforts and ways around a new set of requirements and responsibilities will tempt us to go the cafeteria route.
Take p90x, a grueling 90-day workout program Martin and I completed in the fall, as an example. For the first couple of months we followed the program without wavering. More than an hour of intense full body workouts six days a week. When we got past the pain of finding muscles we never knew existed, we began to love the workout. We even looked forward to it as we saw our bodies changing and began to feel stronger and more agile. In the final weeks, however, things changed. I went on a trip that was more talking and eating than exercising and Martin missed a few sessions while I was gone. When I returned we completed the last few weeks very differently than the first, just 3 or 4 times a week in the last stretch…
I can’t fault us for 3 or 4 days of hard work a week, it’s just that it wasn’t the program we’d signed up for. Of course, rather than be honest and admit we were going to finish up with p90x light, we began with the excuses and the justifications for missing a day here and there.
“Well,” I might tell Martin, “we took a nice long walk this morning, so that it kind of like a workout.”
We’d look at each other nodding our heads as we settled in on the couch, knowing we were full of it, but somehow justified in our agreement. We were claiming p90x, but had settled for the watered down version that best fit our needs.
I think that’s what Cafeteria Faith is like.
We encounter the parts of our faith (Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, you name it) that challenge us: physically, emotionally, financially, intellectually, and we find it is easier to abandon it as archaic or not meant for us than it is to press in and explore what might happen if we practiced it against the momentum of our own best thinking and comfort. Instead, we prefer to abandon the parts we don’t like and — like Martin and I with the exercise — find others who share the same comforts and discomforts with whom we can create a new “right way” rather than following the existing way. The result, unfortunately, is so many “right ways” that faith becomes so contradictory and confusing that people either spend all their time fighting or just give up.
Where are you taking a cafeteria approach to your life? Your faith? Your marriage? Your relationship with food? Your health or mental health? Addiction recovery? Would love to hear your stories…
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