A couple comes into a rectory for marriage preparations. The priest talks with them at some length. He tells them that he would prefer not to witness their marriage. Miffed, they contact the bishop who asks the priest for his reasons. I have heard this statement, and all its kith and kin, repeated on more occasions than I can count.
Comfort becomes the measure for what is right and for what is to be done.
I recognize that this focus on how we feel is hardly modern. The word consensus, after all, means to feel together and comes from antiquity. We are not the first to make comfort king in the land. I would like to challenge this view, but I do so recognizing that it has become the hallmark of American religion. What may come f as a surprise is that, the antiquity of its roots notwithstanding, it was not always so.