In a recent conversation on "The Gray Area" podcast, Ta Nehisi Coates and Sean Illing make the point that, "What happens in the larger world is a function of the stories we tell each other." In the movie, The Apprentice, the character of Roy Cohn makes a similar point that there is no truth, only narratives.
They refer to culture. Our culture comes encoded and presented in the stories we tell about ourselves, the past, and the world. Our culture shapes a lot of what we take as truth. Culture is a complex of stories we tell about ourselves and our world.
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Many of the basic stories that underpin our culture -- Modernity -- valorize outlaws, rebels, settlers, pioneers, people who go against the grain and even break the law to win. Copernicus. Martin Luther. Galileo. Andrew Jackson. Howard Roark. Like how the lone scientist who goes against the corrupt orthodox establishment (is there any other kind?) gets presented as the hero of many disaster movies. The starving artist who pursues his own radical vision against the stifling grain of conformity. The woman who leaves her restrictive family and its oppressive norms -- and unexciting, dutiful husbands -- to find herself, like in Eat, Pray, Love, or The Bridges of Madison County. America thoroughly buys into this model of the hero. If they have to, such heroes will fight, lie, steal, betray, and kill in order to win. They will most certainly transgress. "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." "I gotta be me." "I did it my way."
Hence, many of Donald Trump's supporters not only don't care that he has felony convictions; to them that makes him a hero. He has a lot of money, he gets away with stuff, he's selfish, he breaks the rules and norms, he takes what he wants. He wins. Trump embodies a lot of the hero archetype prevailing in the Modern Age. We idolized these figures in our entertainment and arts for centuries; now we act shocked, shocked! that people have actually come to think like this?
If our basic stories are corrupt or false then only bad actions and bad actors make sense. If our stories praise the outlaw who steals and wins how can we advocate for the order and generosity necessary for a society to function? Therefore, we have to develop a counter-story of the brave law enforcement officer who keeps the outlaws from getting completely out of hand. But notice how many of these characters themselves have to break or bend the law and resist the "hierarchy," "politics," and procedures. Only good outlaws can control the bad outlaws, apparently. It reminds me of the quip about the difference between Canada and the U.S.: in one the frontier was the north and the hero was a policeman, and in the other the frontier was the west and the hero was an outlaw, holds true. Modern mythology needs and therefore synthesizes both of them. Indeed, we build this false binary into the culture. Both renegades and Mounties had the same larger goals: to displace and exterminate native peoples and exploit natural resources. Our two party political system reflects this as well. They share the larger goal while keeping in tension the story of the outlaws and the cops.
After generations living in a culture that marinates itself in such narratives, who wonders that we have no trust in institutions, or communities, or traditions, or laws, or leaders? Because the stories do not stay stories; they shape perceptions and actions. We live by these stories. We all innately want to emulate these kinds of heroes, at least unconsciously.
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A lot of American Evangelical Christianity turns Jesus into one of these outlaw heroes. To do this they have to use precisely selected passages from the Bible, ignoring or explaining away most of what Jesus says and does. They have to find sometimes ingenious ways to neutralize his most important teachings -- like the Sermon on the Mount -- which do not fit into the Modern hero paradigm. They cannot tolerate such an emphasis on humility; they cannot accept practices like turning the other cheek and loving enemies. To attain success in American culture, we must accommodate the Modern hero myth, even at the cost of basically rejecting Jesus' actual teachings. Thus some of them even invent a perverse identification between this corrupted version of "Jesus" and Trump.
In Reformed Christianity we have had the same problems. Historically we also preached the Modern hero "Jesus" who supported America and advocated for Enlightenment values. This reached perhaps its sad nadir with Christian chaplains convincing airmen to keep firebombing Japan even though it was clear they were incinerating civilians by the thousands. We can find numerous accounts of Reformed Christian leaders preaching a heroic "Jesus" who bears little or no resemblance to the actual Jesus of the New Testament.
But Reformed Christianity had the benefit of hearing the voice of Karl Barth which managed to turn some back to the Jesus attested in the Scriptures. While this helped the Church to recover its authentic voice, it also meant the Church would gradually but necessarily fall out of synch with American culture. We may identify many reasons for the precipitous and steady decline of the mainline church in terms of numbers of participants over the last few decades. The influence of Barth and others has to be a factor. The more preachers recognized and let go of the Modern hero version of Jesus, the less the Church's message found a hearing among Americans. The Jesus of the Scriptures, who sided with the poor and marginalized, and whom the authorities crucified for sedition, simply did not compute.
The mainline Church started "declining" to the degree that it paid attention to the gospel rather than the culture. If we want to reverse this loss of members, influence, and money, the accepted strategy means finding out what people want to hear and tell it to them. Every other outlet of the media and entertainment knows this and acts accordingly. In the Church it means conservatives cherish and preach a version of culture from the past, and liberals striving to be relevant to more recent and contemporary culture. Neither shows any interest in following Jesus if it means losing its relevance to Modernity and its stories and heroes.
Pentecostalism today represent the fastest growing segment of Christianity in the world. This tells me that their style and message resonate most with whatever culture is congealing around us as Modernity disintegrates. I wonder if Pentecostalism will have a function and role similar in the new version of Empire that Protestantism had in Modernity.
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The early Church experienced Roman culture as toxic, murderous, and corrupt. We have that sense embedded in Christianity from the beginning when Rome crucified its Founder for sedition. They based their new culture on his resurrection, by which he defeated the Empire. Christianity is therefore inherently anti-Empire and counter-cultural. They knew that becoming a Christian did not involve some shift of attention and allegiance within the framework of Roman culture. Rather it meant repentance, conversion, and discipleship: a change of culture, a replacement of the basic stories that give people's lives shape and meaning. And that means living and acting differently.
In terms of this essay, it has to do with letting Jesus Christ define heroism for us. He becomes the One we want to follow, emulate, and become, which happens by participation in a particular community and tradition. It means living differently from the way everyone else lives.
For this reason, joining a church involved a long and difficult process. The convert had to relinquish one culture, laying aside a whole complex of stories and practices, ways of thinking and acting, values and aspirations, and take on new and very different ones. They had to exchange the culturally approved action heroes for saints and martyrs of the Church. They had to exchange loyalty to their nation, Empire, and government, for Christ and the Church. They called this journey catechesis, and it could take years of study, conversation, prayer, ascetic discipline, and self-examination.
American Protestant Christianity sucks at catechesis. Under the regime of Christendom, we assumed that Americans (with a few exceptions) were Christians. We admitted little or no daylight between American culture and Christianity. We still assume that a visitor to worship will not only have some clue about Christianity, but they will have a basically positive view of it.... and they largely don't have either. Hence few even show up. They come bearing baggage from whatever they managed to pick up about Christianity along the way, good or bad (mostly bad). And we happily and gratefully make them members, and even elders (!), with barely a thought. At most a new member class might focus on the polity of the particular denomination and the traditions of the local congregation. But it would be difficult to get across a necessity for a person to change their whole culture when the church itself sports an American flag right behind the pulpit. When all the members consider themselves Americans first and Christians... somewhere down the list. A church without catechesis is a church happy to remain thoroughly embedded in the culture of a dominant Empire. A church that does this sees its fortunes rise and fall with the culture to which it has bound itself.
Catechesis, repentance, conversion, discipleship. We have to recover these practices. We have to preach the biblical narrative of liberation, which means setting aside, and drawing out the contrasts with the cultural narratives that dominate Modernity and whatever expression of Empire comes after. We need first to rescue our portrayals of Jesus from the corrupt renditions of right and left, and recover the "Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture" who stands at the center of the Declaration of Barmen.
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