Culture/Stories/Heroes, Catechesis.

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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Postliberal.

The term "Postliberal" gets increasingly used these days.  Since I have used this term to define myself for many years, I find myself both amused and alarmed to hear how some secular writers and politicians use it now.  For one thing, I understand that Sen. J. D. Vance describes himself this way.  Since I don't have a whole lot in common with him, I felt a need to get to the bottom of this language.

I have considered myself "Postliberal" since college, from which I graduated in 1977.  So this is not a new thing.  In reading books like The End of the Modern Age by philosopher Allen Wheelis, I came to the conviction that the whole civilizational framework that has dominated the West, and then the world, since the so-called Enlightenment in the 1600's, had basically ended.  Something else would take its place which people began to call "Postmodern."  In seminary and later I found myself most attracted to theological thinkers who questioned the assumptions and practices of Modernity, starting with Karl Barth's rejection of Liberal Theology after World War I, and extending to people like Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and others.  I call myself Postliberal in that sense.

But today, many of those who adopt this label, who often come out of a Roman Catholic perspective, just use it to mean "conservative."  As I read their stuff, they seem really more anti-liberal and pre-modern than anything else.  They hate a lot of the way Modernity turned out.  (So do I, but we are repulsed by different things.)  They respond by looking back and seeking to restore some important things that Modernity originally devalued or even got rid of.  I understand the sentiment and have some sympathy with it.  But when they say they want to get back to the traditional virtues, I have to wonder what they mean.  I could never go along with them because of the cruelties they casually embrace and defend.  Too many of these guys seem motivated mainly by homophobic bigotry.  Like Rod Dreher, who writes a very interesting book called The Benedict Option, and fatally mars it with hate-speech towards Gays throughout.  Or take the case of Vance who admits to inventing and spreading noxious lies defaming immigrants to make a point.  So... lying is now a virtue?    

I do not believe it possible or desirable to go back.  Even to make the attempt requires the deployment of massive and unconscionable violence and cruelty.  Think Fascism.  For me "post" means after; "Postliberal" means we always move forward.  For one thing, this is the only way time moves.  Nothing ever gets "restored" or "recovered" in full; new things are new because our context continually shifts.  Every moment and everything in it is new.  

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Another word that describes me is "traditionalist."  But I cannot abide those who take this to mean looking back and keeping things rigidly the same as they were.  For me tradition does not reject change, but understands it to happen within a framework of continuity and community.  I hold to basic values and practices, particular ways of thinking and acting, while responding to an ever-changing world.  For me the organizing principles are those of orthodox Christianity.  

I use a sailing metaphor to talk about this.  As a traditionalist I maintain the same larger goal, but I also realize that I need to respond to changes in my context moving forward.  As with sailing, a straight line simply doesn't do it.  Rather, to reach the destination one must make turns and go in directions that seem completely counter-intuitive.  In sailing the sails and the rudder, and the immediate direction of the boat, continually change.  But it is all in the service attaining an unchanging goal.  Walking a labyrinth has similar qualities of being led in directions that seem to preclude reaching the goal.  Yet we must trust the Way itself as continuous with the goal.

In my view, the conservative approach, even if they call it "postliberal," insists on keeping the sails and rudder where they have always been, which means to go in circles at best.  On the other hand, I can't follow the approach of many liberals that dispenses with the goal altogether and chooses to simply go along with where the wind and the current take us.

As much as liberal theology would like to imagine otherwise, we never exist outside of the context of tradition and community.  Never.  If we think we can do this we not only lie to ourselves but allow ourselves to function as a tool of Empire.    

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The goal, destination, telos, and desire of Christianity -- and me, I hope -- is Jesus Christ.  We only have access to Jesus Christ through and in the community and tradition bearing his name.  So no matter how radically we may feel we have to tack and wear to account for rough and challenging conditions, we have to make an honest and credible case that this serves that one Destination.  The end does not justify the means because the end is the means. Jesus Christ is not just the destination; he is also the path, the Way.  We have some leeway, but not infinitely.  It is in fact very limited.  Postliberal for me means both reestablishing Christ as the Goal, and seeing and participating in his life as the Way to the goal.  Here the labyrinth image works better than the one about sailing. 

In other words, we depend on Jesus Christ like a "tractor beam" that occurs in science fiction, pulling a spaceship towards it source.  Jesus Christ works like an energy field that grabs us and draws us inexorably towards himself.  Just as in the words of pacifist, A. J. Muste, that there is no way to peace but peace is itself the way, so also with Christ.  There is no way to Christ except obedience to Christ.  In him the Way and the Goal are one. 

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Finally, I only care about postliberalism as it pertains to the Church.  We have no stake in getting in on the ground flood with the next manifestation of Empire, even if it is technically post-Modern.  Our Protestant forebears made that mistake by making an alliance with Modernity, the new form of Empire that solidified in their own time.  Our global society hurtles towards a postmodern civilizational framework that only now begins to congeal and take on a recognizable form.  I see as yet no evidence that it will manage to separate itself from greed, shame, domination, injustice, cruelty, and the manipulation of fear and anger by the Leaders, whatever we will eventually call them.  Whatever it becomes, it will inevitably be at least as far from the Way of Jesus Christ as was Modernity.  Our initial job is never to convert the culture, but simply follow Jesus. Our following the Light needs to be enough of an attractive and admirable example to function, like salt and yeast, and influence the whole around us.

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Exvangelicals.

I have noticed a class of Christians that we have come to call the "exvangelicals."  The word refers to people who have left evangelical churches for various reasons.  Often they experienced some kind of abuse or rejection.  Sometimes they simply realized that what their church taught did not reflect the Jesus of the gospels, or their own views. 

Exvangelicals have been around for a while.  They featured prominently in the Emerging Church movement around the turn of the century, and they had an instrumental role in setting up the Wild Goose Festival, which Susan and I enthusiastically attend every year.  I've met a lot of them.  In the beginning these folks sought to rediscover Jesus and the Church, and emerge free from corrupted versions of both.  Sometimes they even came to see things that we in the mainline Protestant churches have known and done for decades, like social justice, and we welcomed their participation.

But lately it seems to me that many exvangelicals do not just want a better, more faithful and authentic understanding of Christianity.  Instead, they either reject Christian faith altogether or seem to feel they need to reconstruct it for themselves along new and different lines.  In other words, they abandon orthodox Christianity and try to invent some new kind of spirituality that may or may not have anything to do with Jesus.

I think they took the version of Christianity they were being fed in evangelicalism as somehow the whole thing.  So when they left their former churches they assumed they were leaving Christianity.  Hence, they may toss out much of basic Christian doctrine and even the Bible.

While I understand their motivation, I also feel that maybe it exhibits a certain immaturity, like when a person bitten by a dog as a child therefore resolves to fear all dogs forever.  Or someone uses their bad experience with one person of a certain demographic category to be always suspicious of everyone in that category.  As if their experience of a toxic evangelical church justifies their belief that all Christians, all churches, and Christianity itself need to be radically changed or done away with.

Sometimes people carelessly toss into a dumpster something that, when cleaned up, polished, and restored to its original form, holds immeasurable value.  To reject something because of what it looks like to me at the moment is the hight of arrogance.  People have pulled amazing and precious things out of trash bins or found them in garage sales.

In any case, I certainly hope that people leaving evangelicalism -- or any presentation of Christianity that they find wanting -- will look anew at the deeper, broader, higher, and older strains of Christianity, many of which conventional churches of all stripes tend to ignore.  We have a rich mystical tradition, for instance.  And even our core creeds and doctrines are not the oppressive documents they often get presented as, but powerful statements to guide practice and transcendence.  Finally, there are expressions of authentic Christianity from other times and other parts of the world that counter a lot of the toxicity that has come to predominate in the West.  I have found that the Eastern Church offers a deep well of spirituality in a different key that is often quite refreshing.  It's time people knew about all this.

So if your church is disappointing you or even worse, please don't let that lead you to reject Christianity altogether.  You may choose to go deeper to find and follow a very different Jesus Christ, the real One, who remains present and alive in you and the world.

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