c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As the Catholic Church tries to replace Pope John Paul II, one aspect of the great impact of this world-changing religious leader has received too little attention: the way in which his moral witness contributed to a historic religious realignment in North America.

Prior to this papacy, most conservative Protestants were painfully aware of the factors that divided us from the Roman Catholic Church, far more than we might have noticed anything we had in common. Now, 26 years later, as is evident from the torrents of praise Pope John Paul II has received from evangelicals, it is clear that the divisions between our two branches of the Christian church are in many ways overshadowed by our commonalities.

When one thinks that the often bitter conflicts between Catholics and evangelical Protestants go back to the early 16th century, such a profound bridging of these divisions must be viewed as both amazing and a major part of the legacy of John Paul II.

Morality, especially social ethics, has proven to be the force that brought the warring camps together at last. We have discovered that as far as morality goes, the differences we have with each other are dwarfed by those we both have with secularists. Both evangelicals and the Catholic Church oppose abortion on demand, euthanasia, easy divorce, gay marriage, the erasing of all gender distinctions, the use of embryonic stem cells, and much else. Both seek a society that honors life, recognizes human dignity, and exalts what is best in human nature rather than appealing to what is worst.

As concerns about such pivotal issues have come to the center of evangelical moral consciousness, we could not help but notice that one of the most articulate advocates for the views we hold most dear has been the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

As Protestant scholars, pastors and parachurch leaders have sought clarity and support for their moral positions, they have been drawn more and more to the work of John Paul II, and through him to the broader moral tradition of the Catholic Church. In fact, it is abundantly clear that the way in which leading evangelicals have been formulating their positions in recent decades owes much to the thought-categories of this pope and of the Catholic tradition generally.

Easing the adoption of Catholic ideas has been the way in which John Paul II managed to formulate Catholic moral claims in language that drew heavily on the Bible even while being shaped by the distinctive Catholic theological and ethical tradition. In other words, the writings of this pope were saturated with biblical citations and not just references to Augustine, Aquinas and natural law. This way of grounding moral claims appealed deeply to Protestant evangelicals, who if they are true to their own tradition will always ground their ethics in scriptural texts and themes.

The realignment that has brought Catholics and evangelicals together has a flip side. It has highlighted divisions within the Protestant house, between our own conservatives and liberals. It is now clear that conservative evangelical Protestants have more in common with traditional Roman Catholics on such issues as abortion, stem cells and sexual ethics than we do with our own Protestant liberals. Unfortunately, evangelicals have not yet learned as much as we should have from the pope about a broader, more consistent ethic of life that would also oppose the easy resort to war or use of the death penalty.

The same realignment has happened within American Catholicism. Those criticizing the pope in recent days have not been conservative Protestants but liberal Catholics. So the religious divisions that matter the most these days are not between denominations but within them.

A new ecumenical orthodoxy is emerging, bringing together like-minded conservative Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox into a grand coalition of common concern, while in a sense a parallel liberal coalition is also forming with the opposite agenda and vision.

This is what the religious landscape looks like in the early days of the 21st century, and the ministry of Pope John Paul II had a lot to do with making it look this way.

(David P. Gushee is the Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tenn.)

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