No Way Home

Glifford Geerz defined religion in this way: 

(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Geertz was an anthropologist, not a theologian, so one need not accept this as a description of Christianity. But it is a prescient observation about how Christianity works within the larger context of society and in individual human lives. When the evangelist calls a person to faith in Christ he or she is precisely hoping that the result will be a transformation creating “powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations.” 

And the Church, through its study of scripture, worship, fellowship, and engagement with society is absolutely seeking to deploy a system of symbols that formulate a conception of the general order of existence clothed in such an aura of factuality that they seem uniquely realistic.  

It doesn’t demean religion to say this. In fact it speaks to its importance to observe that it has competitors doing the same thing. Politicians seek to create just what religion creates, but this time centered around the idolatrous worship of the nation and its leader. The same thing can be said of materialist ideologies such as scientism and communism. The same can be said of so-called “New Age” religions as for the older religions of the Axial Age.

In short we have seen in the West the rise of religious and secular alternatives to Christianity in the realm of providing meaning, or better, in providing new contexts in which meaning is possible. This has occurred because within the old Christendom we have been unable to advance a “conception of the general order of existence” that makes our Christian moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. This is what Charles Taylor aptly demonstrates in his work A Secular Age, even as he notes the “supernova” of alternatives that arise out of the breakdown of the Christian “aura of factuality.” 

Not all Christians find this state of affairs satisfactory. There is an intense desire to find a way back home, a way back to that place where meaning can be found in an order of existence that makes our religious beliefs seem uniquely real. 

In the contemporary United States this is most manifest in the ever-strengthening alliance between the Evangelical Christianity (that grew precisely out of a protest against secularity and modernity that threatened a "Christian worldview") and political and social conservatism that grew out of a protest against economic and social liberalism. Groups like the Institute of Religion and Democracy and the Confessing Movement, as well as many others bring together this effort to return to an American society in which meaning is easily found in the certainty that “One Nation under God” has captured that order of existence clothed in such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations of patriotic Christians seem uniquely realistic. This Americo-Christianity is one of the supernova of new religions Taylor speaks about. And it is new, created largely by a conscious and concerted effort as documented by Kevin Kraus in One Nation Under God. 

The Donald Trump presidency represents the culmination of this effort, even though many of its supporters do not attend church. What Trump’s supporters are seeking isn’t personal fidelity to Christian moral standards, whether for either him or them, nor is it the worship of the one true God. They are looking for the reassurance that in then union of their religion (however nominally held) and their patriotism (however much contracted out to the military and first responders) there is an unchanged and unchanging order of existence in which their lives have meaning. 

That is too bad. For two reasons. 

First, the America they believe in is gone. Even absent constitutional provisions for the separation of church and state, provisions so commercially useful that powerful business interests will defend them, Christianity in the United States is far too fragmented to provide a safe haven for those seeking meaning in a Christian America. And the flag in which many would wrap themselves, clinging to a copy of the Constitution they have never read, has been ripped and torn by the culture wars. The old United States is gone, if it ever existed except as a nostalgic fantasy. What the new United States will look like isn’t yet known.

Secondly there is no return to the naiveté of the Christendom they miss. The expression “you can’t unsee that” is manifestly true, as Taylor points out. We may wish we could possess the certainty of pre-modern Christendom, but because materialism, atheism, and agnosticism, not to mention a variety of theisms are a constantly available option in our society that naiveté is unavailable to us. The old Christianity, the “Faith of our Fathers” has washed away in the same flood that recognized those words as imperialistic and patriarchal. Indeed it had to be for the new Americo-Christianity to emerge. Its very existence as a distinctive religion in a religiously diverse US undermines the purpose it serves for its followers.

Is there another shelter in which to find the old sense of secure meaning? Well recently American Evangelicals and United Methodists in particular have sought it in the apparent growth and assumed evangelical purity of Christian churches outside the US. Christian America may be a dimming light, trailing European Christianity, but in the new worlds of Asia and Africa it is presumed to be different. In its former colonies the old Empire of the Spirit is presumed to maintain its purity and power. 

Well not really. As statistics show, African Christianity is barely growing at the rate of population growth, and across Africa United Methodism isn't even keeping up with population growth. As anyone who has actually read African theologians knows, the continent is hardly a paragon of doctrinal uniformity in the evangelical tradition. Moving your spiritual home from Colorado Springs or Atlanta or Wilmore to Nairobi or Harare may prove culturally disconcerting and in any case is fruitless. As the old order changes does one really want to follow Bedivere? "Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

There is an alternative, but it involves moving forward rather than backward. That alternative is something like what Lesslie Newbigen describes in his works beginning with The Foolishness of the Greeks. Or more broadly this forward movement can draw on Barth, some forms of liberation theology, and narrative and post-modern theology. 

It is a way forward that understands the Christian community as a distinctive religious community not merely united in belief and practice, but which cultivates an epistemic attitude based on faith as a means of knowing that which is unknown and unknowable by empirical methods. Those who share this epistemic attitude may well disagree about belief and practice, and yet still have an underlying unity in Christ. Because faith in Christ is fundamentally a decision to recognize that God incarnate affirms a human personhood that as such is always both within and beyond the empirical. 

Such a faith, based on this epistemic attitude, must inevitably be in dialogue with other ways of knowing, since it makes no claim to comprehend the whole of reality. Nor can it have any claim to control any society or culture. Such a Christianity doesn’t come from an assured place in the dominant political/religious order, but from a confidence “things unseen” revealed to faith by the God of love. 

And in this faith finds the freedom to leave its nostalgic longing for home, and follow the pioneer and perfecter of that faith into the future.