Churches: God Love Them for Someone Must
Some time ago I had a conversation with a colleague
about churches. I noted the almost universal disenchantment of congregants with
their congregations and that this disenchantment stemmed from conflicting and
apparently irresolvable motives. Conservatives, moderates and progressives not
only disagreed about fundamental matters to do with doctrine, society and mores
but, even worse, disagreed about the standards for resolving such disputes.
Each side appealed to principles and standards not recognized by the other. My
colleague observed shrewdly that whatever was the case with churches society
would move on with or without them. I agreed at the time but now, alas, I see
that we were both completely wrong. Religious institutions cannot be healthy
when civil society is corrupted and there can be no functional civil society
when religion is in disarray. They are mutually corrupting and mutually
sustaining and the crisis of legitimation that I once assumed was an internal
problem for the Catholic, Anglican and other churches is now the daily business
of Facebook and Twitter. Partly this is
a matter of the way internally divided churches interface with the general
society. Partly it is a matter of civil society running across the same divisions
within itself over fundamental principles of ethics and policy. Both face the
problem of how to mediate disputes in the absence of agreed upon mechanisms for
doing so. This tension generates aggressive radicalism and aggrieved reaction
along multiple conflicting axes that defy traditional distinctions between
liberalism and conservatism. Conservatives now attack institutions as
hopelessly corrupt while liberals and progressives are caught flat footed and
reduced to shaky defenses of the status quo. Traditionalists are now
radicals and radicals now traditionalists. Liberal Catholics, for instance, now
appeal to the Pope to reign in right wing bishops! The problem with smashing authority is that
in a plague or crisis one needs that same authority to assert itself.
One could, once upon a time, say to the devil with all
these pastors and prelates. Let’s simply hector or ridicule or tax the lot of
them out of existence or let their churches die of apathy. THAT would be no
more than SOME of them deserve (though ‘deserves’ has nothing to do with things
in this world as Clint Eastwood pointed out).[1]
This attitude was somewhat defensible before the internet. Now, however, it is a
catastrophic strategy for new religious movements beholden to no doctrine, no
tradition, no authority structure and no internal or external check can spring
up overnight. We cannot save our society from being engulfed in anarchy without
saving our churches, mosques and synagogues. We cannot, literally, as a species,
survive privatized religion. Nor can the secularist fantasy of a purely
technocratic ‘a-religious’ society ever be realized. This is apparent even from
the banal fact of the burgeoning ‘atheist churches’. It is apparent also from
fact that the decline of mainline denominations does not affect the religiosity
of the general society one single bit: religious behaviors simply move from
churches to pop culture or, worse, the internet. Such behaviors replicate
themselves in other environments where they are less visible and less subject
to control. Plus, people see no requirement for consistency. I have students
who ape ALL the anti-religious rhetoric of new atheism yet still devote
themselves to crystals or Wicca. For the epistemic puritan science, reason and
evidence may not consort with crystals and spells yet people are not and never
have been epistemic puritans. Inculcating the one set of values will not
automatically drive out the other for people are not wired like that. They mix
and match beliefs as occasion serves. Alas, the answer to this problem is as
old as antiquity: people need to belong to spiritual communities with common
rituals, rules or beliefs as a check on violent caprice.
The idea of a society founded on ‘logic’, ‘science’ or
‘instrumental reason’ is as boring to me as it is to most others. I prefer art
to all those things to be frank. At any rate, there is no basis for the idea
that there is a simple, potted account of empirical method the broad
dissemination of which will create a nation of critical thinkers (though there
are whole organizations devoted to this daft notion). [2]
As people in the past have heard the voices of gods and spirits, so they will
in the future. I cannot foresee any basic change in what has been the human
condition for millennia nor do I see anything in the present that might herald
such a change. People will receive messages from God making the following
question inevitable: “who gets to make such a claim? Who gets to say they speak
for God?”. Thus, we have the claim that the Pope, say, speaks infallibly under
certain carefully circumscribed circumstances that occur only rarely. At the
other end of the spectrum we have the Pentecostal prophets who prophecy about
political events seemingly indiscriminately yet claim full authority to compel
the beliefs of others. God perhaps DOES speak to Hank Kunnemnn but, alas, he
does not speak to me. Yet Pastor Kunneman clearly claims that I and all people
are obliged to recognize his ‘anointing’ even if (or perhaps especially if) his
prophecies visibly fail. Self-certified authority to speak for God is no better
than self-certified authority to speak for nature yet here we face a problem
that may be intractable. WE currently have high expectations for our religious
and secular institutions. Institutions cannot, typically, meet these
expectations because, to put it bluntly, cream does not rise to the top.
Institutions are ruled by functionaries not visionaries. Careerists determine
our response to complex and difficult social problems and they do so about as
well as you would expect. People from ‘outside’ must shake them up but THAT
brings us right back to square one. Who gets to be that outsider?
In a previous piece I discussed the nature of privilege:
how interactions in an institutional setting are so structured that certain
positions or attitudes must account for their grounds and others do not. No one
in a philosophy department has to defend not reading Shankara but one WOULD
have to defend not reading Hume. There is, in philosophy, a presumed right of
ignorance concerning the thought of ‘others’ and a presumed obligation of
others to study ‘philosophy’ first before studying ‘Indian’ philosophy.
Privilege is determined by whose philosophy has a modifier and whose doesn’t.[3]
There is the ‘thing in itself’ and the thing with an adjective that marks some
sort of otherness or deviation. This is neither a bad thing nor a good thing in
itself. Privilege will always exist. My point was that privilege should also be
challenged and in a ‘secular’ or ‘enlightened’ society privilege can be called
upon to account for itself and demonstrate that it is earned. Plus, in such a
society such calls will be frequent. This is, however, a dangerous process. The
all too typical result of this rigorous questioning is cynicism and
disengagement with institutions and the further privatizing of core human
activities. This is because any privilege that has to be consciously defended
is already half way to being discarded. This is why reactionary prose is so
embittered for the cause of the conservative is lost the instant he is forced
to compose an apology for it (and liberals are now in the position of
conservatives having to defend the police, military, and science industrial
complex from radical right and left wing critique). Plus, few human things, if
any, can stand such scrutiny. Privilege analyzed is all too often privilege
exposed. This can be every sort of
cathartic in the moment but one does have to ask what the long term outcome is
supposed to be.
IF the answer to this is ‘better, fairer institutions
overall’ then we can have a fully enlightened society that does not collapse of
its own contradictions. Critique is a high stakes gamble but it is possible to
win. On this assumption, and I suppose it is only an assumption, we could have
better churches. We could also have better, less terroristic, versions of the
enlightenment. [4] We could even have science which serves
public not private ends! Let me stick with the first though. I will begin by
noting that we can have good people in churches but we cannot, as a matter of
intrinsic possibility, have good churches. This is because EVERY church will
face the dilemma of squaring its stated ideals with mundane facts about paying
the bills and guarding its other worldly responsibilities and interests. Any
bishop or pastor who wants to be responsible to his conscience will also have
to responsible to his creditors or answerable to his lawyers and insurers.
Plus, reform of the ‘ideals’ (which will always be one-sided or incomplete in
their ‘statement’) will be undertaken with great reluctance for no leader wants
to create the impression that everything is conditional and up for grabs. A
liberation theologian who attacks wealth and privilege in the church will have
to turn conservative and authoritarian the instant he meets an anti-vaxxer!
Further, whatever inequities and injustices exist in the broader society will
replicate themselves in churches too, so without a ‘good’ society there will
never be ‘good’ churches. This is as much as to say that EVERY church is a
penitent church and NONE of these problems can be evaded simply by founding a
new sect. This is especially so given that the higher and purer a person’s
aspiration the more insidious their will to sin becomes. A lecher or glutton
cannot hide his nature from himself very long but a sanctified prig can and
that makes him doubly dangerous. His sins will be those of diabolic pride and
coldly considered cruelty rather than simple, more human, intemperance. When the consequences of this attitude become
public, the self defense mechanism of institutional life will kick in: cover
up, denial and delay meant to save appearances which are now more urgent than
reality. Scandal is the most banal fact of human existence: institutions are
harmed if the response to scandal is defensiveness, cowardice or fearful
secrecy.
Of course what I am saying here is that appearances ARE
in fact important. Scientific institutions must not only serve human good they
must be SEEN to serve human good. The same holds for churches. Personally, I think that only truth will set
us free and that churches should pursue it to the end even if it hurts our
worldly standing or interests. This goes against every instinct of the
functionary, of course, so we will need visionaries. But what will these
visionaries tell us? Here the temptation is to fill in the blanks with whatever
ax you like grinding. A conservative will call for a return to tradition and a
progressive for pride flags on churches. Every scandal is an opportunity to
push for your favorite cause as the only thing adequate to the urgency of the
moment. For this reason, I hesitate to plunge in with my own bugbears but, I
suppose, discussion must start somewhere. I will start with what I surmise is a
fundamental issue which is the cultivation in churches of a nasty form of works
religion. This manifests itself in the miserable cruelty of monks and nuns
trained in ‘spiritual perfection’. Everyone taught to be hard on their own
flesh will be twice as hard on someone else’s. It also manifests itself in the
bourgeois sanctimony of ‘Toronto the good’ and other centers of WASP-ishness.[5]
Nor, I MUST emphasize, is the Facebook
moralizing and the performative ‘allyship’ of progressives ANY adequate
purgation of this spirit.[6]
Christianity CANNOT be a sect of the pure and good in either its confessional
or secular expressions. The 'good' are at the heart of every atrocity. Here, if I may borrow the language of our Muslim
neighbors, is where we need the peace that comes from interior submission. This
submission would entail a renunciation of worldly pride: in this instance the
spiritual pride of European Christendom and its terroristic follow on the
‘secular’ enlightenment. If the result is a better Christendom and a better enlightenment,
then the exercise will have been worth it.
[1] I
note that in the 60’s and 70’s the Catholic and other mainline churches
attempted to ‘modernize’ and ‘renew’ themselves. They failed. In the former
church in particular the worst aspects of the tradition of clericalism were
incongruously wedded to the most faddish and hollow expressions of modernity.
The result has been complete humiliation. Worse, with their relentlessly upbeat
attack on the sense of sin and consequent glorification of spiritual egotism
ALL these churches left their congregants unprepared to apprehend the scale of
atrocities represented by residential schools and other such phenomena. The
aspiration for the best will produce the manifestation of the worst; the higher
the light the deeper the potential shade and anyone who fails to grasp this
tragic fact of human existence is not prepared for any kind of spiritual life.
Now, though, one might wonder whether Christendom and enlightenment together
might consider their shadows (i.e. the tendency to evil latent in any stated
ideal of good) with some degree of chastened realism.
[4] In ancient Egypt the sun slew the dragon Apophis on a daily basis and this seems an apt enough image for the ‘light of reason’. Simply put it must slay something or more to the point somebody: preferably someone ‘other’ than enlightened Europeans. This I suspect is because the ‘light of reason’ is constituted by narrative action: the narrative of the sun of reason destroying the forces of darkness and superstition. Since narrative is structured by conflict some person or other must represent those dark forces and who better for that than a person with dark skin? Thus the public ‘atheism’ of people like Christopher Hitchens embodied a seamless attitude to the world: celebrating the genocide of Native Americans (as making room for ‘prosperity and freedom’) and calling for new genocides against ‘theocratic’ Iran and Muslims generally. At any rate the racism of light and dark skin shows that the most primitive kind of imagistic thinking can lie at the heart of our most sophisticated conceptions. Such is the nemesis of people who boast too readily of their ‘rationality’.
[5] Here I must say a rather hard thing about good, decent people. One thing the virtuous Anglo-elites of North America are brilliant at doing is making ‘others’ the public face of problems that pervade the general society. Think of the word ‘terror’ and the word Islam follows. This is in spite of the fact Western state terror piles up corpses at an alarming rate. Think of the word ‘crime’ and the word black follows as night follows day. This in spite of the fact that a man beloved by so many whites was allowed to turn the office of the U.S. presidency into a criminal racket for four years with no consequence. If I say the word ‘abuse’ the word ‘priest’ follows though no one speaks of the abuse of children in the porn industry with anything like the concern or outrage they speak of abuse by the clergy of ANY denomination.If I say the word ‘Pornhub’ the word ‘abuse’ does not follow automatically unless I actually dig for stories about it (and there are any number of these!). Nor need I even state the painful and embarrassing reason for this asymmetry. This is not to say that Muslim, African American and Catholic communities don’t have serious problems. However, their function in the discourse of the chattering class is to stand as signifiers for general evils about which its own conscience may be just a little shaky. This came home to me the other day when I glanced at a C.B.C article on the issue of child brides. This article was festooned with photographs of exploited child brides. Every single face in every single photo was racialized. White men in the U.S. congress, apparently, do not marry children. The effect of this of course is to completely nullify the point of the article. If the face of the child bride is the face of the racialized other then, of course, it is no longer really a problem. It is sad, of course, if a twelve-year old has to marry instead of pursue her education but, if she is not adorably blond, it might as well be on the moon.
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