Pope Benedict’s recent kindly invitation to disaffected Anglicans came across to many as a blitz from the blue, but it really shouldn’t have. Whether on the individual or congregational level, various and sundry Protestant groups of a persistently Roman hue, especially Lutherans and Episcopalians, have made the pilgrimage to Rome on their own, without any special prompting from the Vatican. The thing that surprises in this case, I suppose, is that Rome had never spelled out the process quite so systematically, making so many concessions to Anglo-Catholic liturgy along the way.

The real question people seem to want to know about this move is why? What is Benedict up to? Ross Douthat tackled the question the other day in his Times column and gave a pretty good accounting of the matter—but only “up to a point”, as Mr. Salter would say.

Douthat is right that Benedict certainly has in mind the exodus from the Protestant mainline in favor of seemingly more vibrant faiths like Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, and Mormonism, on the one hand, or secular agnosticism and religious apathy, on the other. (Some have suggested that the Anglicans’ liberal remnant should invite disaffected Catholics, but the flow doesn’t go that way, by and large. Rather than join other, more progressive congregations devoted to halting global warming through joint parish initiatives, lapsed Catholics just drop out of organized religion altogether.)

But Douthat was being way too clever (or too post-9/11) in suggesting that Benedict’s ulterior motive in attempting to unite the traditionalist elements of Christianity was to bolster Christendom’s flanks against a resurgent Islam. I don’t think this sort of “Nixon Goes to China” strategy goes very far in explaining Benedict’s invitation to the Anglicans. He has been very plain, since even before the beginning of his papacy, that he wants to help the West shake off the “dictatorship of relativism” and establish a society that is founded on a mutual ordering of faith and reason.

This traditionalist consolidation isn’t so much aimed at confronting an Islamicized Europe as it is confronting, as he sees it, the twin ills of relativism and fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, I’m sure we can all acknowledge, can come in Christian varieties as well as Islamic ones.

The struggle against relativism and fundamentalism was at the heart of Benedict’s controversial Regensburg lecture, before it was driven deep into the background by the ensuing fury over his quotation of a 14^th-century Byzantine ruler’s perception of Islam. This struggle is also what Benedict seems to have been referring to in his recent speech in which he described Africa as the world’s “spiritual lung”:

… [T]his ‘lung’ can take ill as well. And, at the moment, at least two dangerous pathologies are attacking it: firstly, an illness that is already widespread in the West, that is, practical materialism, combined with relativist and nihilist thinking… . There is absolutely no doubt that the so-called First World has exported and continues to export its spiritual toxic waste that contaminates the peoples of other continents, in particular those of Africa… .

To continue his metaphor, these spiritual toxins are weakening Africa (and, one would presume, the societies that gave rise to them in the first place), causing it to be susceptible to a secondary infection, namely:

religious fundamentalism, mixed with political and economic interests. Groups who follow various religious creeds are spreading throughout the continent of Africa: they do so in God’s name, but following a logic that is opposed to divine logic, that is, teaching and practicing not love and respect for freedom, but intolerance and violence.

It’s not wholly wrong to suggest that Benedict had the West’s confrontation with Islam in mind (not to mention Archbishop Rowan’s rhetorical excesses in this regard). But you have to put the issue in its overall context: The real problem for Benedict isn’t Christendom v. Islam, or some kind of vague cultural Clash of Civilizations; it’s the ideological maladies that arise when one fails to maintain a society founded on a mutual ordering of faith and reason.