Does Christianity Have a Future?

We are all postmoderns now, and that means anything goes.  Now that the premodern, traditionalist narrative remains only a ghostly presence, and the Enlightenment Rationalist narrative of the modern period persists as an old habit that we maintain for want of anything better, people have shown themselves capable of believing in almost anything.

And believing, I would argue, is pretty much all we've got when it comes to giving our lives meaning.  Even pure rationalism is a belief system.  There are all kinds of belief systems and our choosing one or the other of them boils down to what any of us is capable of believing plausible.  Understanding better what makes something plausible is something I want to get into at some point, but for now it's enough simply to point out that plausibility is a function of cultural legitimacy, and it's very interesting to consider why some beliefs are considered legitimate and others not. 

In the coming decades it looks as though we will continue to live through an awkward period of cultural fragmentation typical of a decadent transitional era, not unlike the last two or three centuries of the classical period as the Roman Empire declined.  Almost anything is plausible during such a time.   But then as now there was  a huge marketplace of ideas, philosophies, religions.  And from this hodgepodge a dominant narrative gradually emerged.  Standing in history around the year 100 and looking forward, Christianity would have seemed a very weak candidate to emerge as such. But it did, and it reached its high water mark of cultural influence at the time of the Renaissance/ Reformation, and for better or worse, it's been receding ever since.

I doubt that it will re-emerge as the primary narrative of the near future, but I believe that it has a latent power that should have an influence in shaping the global fusion culture that will emerge over the next century or two. I do believe it still has important contributions to make.  But who knows?  One thing is for sure, though: The Catholic and Protestant  narratives are no longer robust enough to play much of a role. They have come to represent the calcified remains of narratives that did at one time have genuine vitality.  The first was the Christian narrative of the premodern era; the second of the modern era.  Now we need a Christian narrative for the postmodern era.

That doesn't mean that the story is something that we just make up as we go along.  It's rather that our understanding of its truth evolves as our consciousness of it evolves.  The Christian mystery hasn't changed, but our understanding of it must change because our consciousness has changed.  (What I mean by this is outlined in Part II and will be developed in future posts.) 

In other words, because the old narrative has calcified does not mean that earlier Christians were wrong or were fooling themselves--their understanding, as is ours now, was provisional.  I see theirs as a form of Christianity that was appropriate for a kind of consciousness (premodern and modern) that we no longer have. Right now the churches are for the most part living off stale bread, and that's why their influence on the larger mainstream culture is so weak or downright sickening.

I understand why many people may not be thrilled by the prospect of Christianity or any other religion providing the basic framework for the primary cultural narrative of the future.  But I think that their misgivings are rooted in their perception of religious attitudes that have overstayed their relevance.  Moderns justifiably resented the churches insofar as they resisted the emergence of new levels of freedom, individuality, and critical consciousness.  They saw rightly that the churches insofar as they embodied that resistance to the modern spirit were  resisting something new and important that was struggling to be born, and had every right to be born.

It is human nature that the old resents and resists being pushed aside by the new.  That's what we saw in Europe during the religious wars of the 1600s, and it's what we are seeing now in the Middle East. These wars have very little to do with the spirit of the religions that the wars were waged to defend.  They are about the preservation of cultural identity, about fearing the loss of a way of life that one loves, about the persistence of old habits when new habits must be learned. 

Clinging to the old when the old has become obsolete is "Lot's Wife Syndrome"--the impulse or longing to look back with nostalgia rather than to look forward with hope.  And it is this impulse which leads inevitably to the calcification of souls and cultures.  And it is that calcification that prevents so many of our intelligent contemporaries from taking religion seriously, because that's mainly what they see--the rigidity of old forms that no longer deliver life in a fresh, healthful way. But it should be pointed out that moderns have also calcified to the degree that they look backward toward the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment with nostalgia. Stubborn modernists like E.O. Wilson are as resistant to postmodernity as the Reformation era popes were to modernity.
 
But the point is that Enlightenment rationalism is as inappropriate for our time as Catholic medievalism.  That does not mean that rationality is useless.  It does not mean that Catholic ritual is meaningless.  It just means that how we understand the uses of rationality and ritual have to be adapted to the different kind of circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

The mass, for instance, is a ritual that makes a lot more sense to premodern consciousness than it does to a modern consciousness.  It has roots in practices that go back thousands of years.  The very concept of "blood sacrifice" is something that is fundamentally repugnant to the contemporary sensibility. And yet something profoundly real happens there regardless of the level or type of consciousness of the people who participate in it.

Millions of people have some level of experience of this thing that happens during the mass, this event (and for millions of others it remains opaque). But the problem is not primarily with the lack of experience but with the interpretation given that experience for those who have it, and with the fact that there is very little wisdom in the culture now about how to work with it in a spiritually productive way. A postmodern Christian narrative has to start from experience and then make sense of it not in medieval or modern language, but in a postmodern idiom that points to possibilities of meaning that are not currently available to the mainstream culture.

Even if the main Catholic and Protestant narratives have calcified, lots of people do in fact find genuine meaning in the Christian mystery as it lives in the biblical narratives and in the subterranean streams of grace that nourish our souls in ways that we are mostly unaware.  So when I speak about developing a postmodern narrative, such a thing will have practical value only insofar as it brings the subterranean to the surface and makes it more available, something easier to find and from which one can drink deeply. There are now communities of people which are like desert outposts, oases built around springs where these underground currents have broken to the surface. That's the Christian task as I understand it--to increase the number of these outposts, so that eventually the wasteland might be transformed into a lush, fragrant garden.

Neither the medieval narrative nor the modern narrative, no matter how much their habits of mind persist in our day, meet our needs. This has been true at least since the end of World War I when the West lost its confidence in the optimistic Enlightenment narrative.  T.S. Eliot's great poem in 1924 announced that we had entered "The Wasteland," and that's where we still wander.  We are in a period now which is neither here nor there, neither in Egypt or Canaan. The old thing is left behind; the new thing has not yet been found. 

And it has become clear to me that the future of Christianity, because it does have a future, will have more to do with what is happening now out in the desert--at the periphery rather than what issues forth from the official center. For it is up to the rest of us to develop a  narrative that is compelling and which orients us toward Canaan, and if we do it in a way that draws truly from the depths, the official church, whose clergy, no matter what they think of themselves, is no less thirsty than the rest of us, will sooner or later recognize it.

Anyway, when I talk about "progress", these ideas are at the heart of what I mean by the word.  Click here for Part II in which I talk about Owen Barfield's ideas about the movement from Original Participation to Final Participation.

Comments

[Mike McG...]

"*We* are all postmoderns now."

"Neither the medieval narrative nor the modern narrative, no matter how much their habits of mind persist in our day, meet *our* needs."

Jack, please clarify *we* and *our*. How broad is this circle? If it is small, what obligations attach to membership in the vanguard? If it is nearly universal, how is the resilience of religious observance explained?

I identify with the anomie described here. I suspect many (but surely not all) others drawn to the world of ideas can relate to the experience of disenchantment.

Beyond that...I'm not so sure. We may judge that the masses ought to feel our angst and affirm the emptiness we observe...but do they? We may well judge their narrative to be facing collapse, but do they?

I particularly wonder whether our judgments about the barrenness of contemporary religious belief corresponds with the exeriences of the less well educated, the non-white, the less affluent among us. I find, for example, that the Christian story of salvation retains enormous resonance among the African Americans I encounter.

Is there a risk of our condescending to those who don't share our postmodern sensibilities? Might our deconstuction of premodern/modern belief systems be the agent for the collapse of their plausibility structures?

[forestwalker]

I’m interested in Jack’s answer, but I’ll give a shot at answering from my perspective.

*We*, as a cultural group, are now all postmodern in the sense that we no longer share nor are we united around the Modern Idea. Many never were, and they (the pre-moderns) continue to beat the dead horse that the rationalists and secularists (the moderns) keep trying to mount. And neither of these two groups are any longer able to meet *our* (human) needs because they both are answering our questions from a perspective that no longer holds relevance to most of us, if it ever did. An increasing number see the absurdity and are either wandering looking for something else to rest their hopes and spirits on or have embraced the absurd and reverted to a soulless competitive instinct or a base comfort or debauchery.

And, yeah, I’d say the shift is now nearly universal in the West though most may be unaware and unable to articulate how their minds are different from their parents’ and grandparents’. The vanguard of this shift in consciousness are long in their graves. They pointed to the fatal flaws in Modernism centuries ago. As for the resilience of religious observance, that speaks to the failure of the Modern and *our* need for Connection and Community with something larger, deeper, and more real than ourselves, a need that has outlasted Materialism.

“We may well judge their narrative to be facing collapse, but do they?”

Probably not, but premoderns definitely feel embattled and threatened. As for moderns, they do, as evidenced by the academy’s embrace of the hyper-modern gobbledy-goop that it’s labeled ‘post-modernism’.

“I particularly wonder whether our judgments about the barrenness of contemporary religious belief corresponds with the exeriences of the less well educated, the non-white, the less affluent among us. I find, for example, that the Christian story of salvation retains enormous resonance among the African Americans I encounter.”

The Christian story of salvation retains enormous—primary—resonance in my own life (and I assume Jack’s) as well. I haven’t understood any of what Jack has said over the last couple of years to imply that the faith narrative is untrue, just that the way it is explicated by those with power and influence within institutional religious bodies no longer resonates with the Mind of our culture.

“Is there a risk of our condescending to those who don't share our postmodern sensibilities? Might our deconstuction of premodern/modern belief systems be the agent for the collapse of their plausibility structures?”

And this would be the hyper-modern gobbledy-goop I was referring to earlier. ;)

Folks are hungry for meaning and for the opportunity to experience and interact with the divine. It’s not about tearing down their beliefs but about forging a path to a place where that interaction with God can be experienced in a way that meets the needs of a postmodern people. If that can be accomplished many will surely choose to follow.

[Jack Whelan]

Thanks Mike and Forest for your thoughtful posts. I think Mike's questions are good ones that probably a lot of readers of this blog are asking. And there is nothing that I would disagree about in Forest's response, which is in most ways better than the one I was preparing before I read it.

He's too kind to say it, but I think that at the heart of Mike's question is a concern about whether what I'm writing is just another form of intellectual elitism that doesn't really reflect the experience of most ordinary people who are more in touch with reality.

There's the implied question, and it's a legitimate one, about whether the future of Christianity lies with middle-class cosmopolitans or does it lie rather with Christians in Africa and South America, where it could be argued the Church has greater vitality and relevance to the lives of the people who live there.

I have often thought that the future of Christianity in this country could very well lie with the black churches for similar reasons. The Civil Rights Movement and the religious ideals and disciplines that shaped it is for me a model of a spiritually centered politics that the country badly needs. I think the experience in South Africa with Mandela and Tutu are similar, and I am very sympathetic to much of the liberation theology that has emerged out of Latin America.

The one thing that links all of these movements is the experience of suffering and injustice that is the special experience of the dispossessed, and for me it is clear that an authentic Christianity must always at some level be in solidarity with that experience of suffering and struggle.

But that still does not answer the question: Where is it all going? Is this an impossible question to ask? Is Christianity only a religion that has meaning in the context of physical suffering and deprivation? Is the goal to get the poor and dispossessed so that they can live like alienated university types?

Surely there is more than that even if it can never be detached from those who are suffering in this way. That "more" and what it means for our future is what I'm trying to explore in this blog.

[forestwalker]

Perhaps there's a generational difference. I'm a gen-X'er, come out of a poor working-class family and neighborhood, and grew up in a Pentecostal Holiness church (which, in form and as an institution at least, is about as zombie traditionalist, to use your words, as you can get). I say 'in form' becuase there is genuine community and real transformation going on there in spite of the empty legalism and reactionary and fearful retelling of the Gospel.

But that community and transformation exists, for the most part, only for boomers and older. Of the dozens of kids I grew up with in that church, most of whom are still poor and working class, only a handful are still in church of any kind. And when I speak with them, though they may not speak about it in the way we are here, it's clear that they know deep inside that the church (as they know it) has nothing to say to them or to their children. They have a demanding thirst but perceive the church they grew up in to be a dry well. Ditto for the secular alternatives. I hadn't viewed my observations as much more than anecdotal until recently when I discovered Barna's numbers showing the same thing nationally.

I think your and Mike's concern about elitism is very valid. I sense that my friends will refuse to be led out of the wilderness of their cynicism by any type of traditional leader, autocrat, professor, etc. But they'll follow a saint.