The People’s Work
Not all that long ago, I saw an item in our denominational magazine about an innovative worshiping community that had—I promise I’m not making this up—patterned its services on workplace seminars. There were round tables with markers and other things to write with. My memory is probably patching in the easels, flip charts, pitchers of water, white coffee carafes, and cups in the middle, but you get the idea. How do we make Christian worship relevant to un-churched or de-churched people? By making it like what they already know. And what do they know? Apparently the answer is “regulatory compliance trainings held at the Schaumburg Ramada.”
If my memory serves, this was a few years after the “U2charist” concept emerged, heralding among other things a hideous and magnificent new era of the portmanteau.1 People know U2, who were then past their creative prime but still undeniably famous and popular and also sort of Christian. Nothing is easier than casting a critical backward glance at church fads, and I’m going to try to stop for the remainder of this essay. It’s the motivation and assumptions behind these lurches into dead ends that are important and interesting, not the incidental scenery. And when I think about it now, I wonder how much of the motivation for these experiments went beyond the unrelenting progress of religious disaffiliation (which has produced in churches every possible malady and neurosis) into the particular conditions of the time. Same-sex marriage was the big cultural wedge issue and, while I don’t remember anyone in church circles making this connection at the time, the Iraq War had at best divided and undermined institutional liberalism in the Anglophone world (do I make too much of the emergence of the U2charist and its migration to the U.K. during the Bush-Blair years? Maybe. Probably). And certainly in the U.S., the financial crisis and recession greatly increased the stress on churches without proportionately increasing our ability to understand and address the wider economic situation. So rather than take the unmanageable conflict, the devastating loss of legitimacy, and the political-economy crisis head on, we could change the subject. Or, to put it more innovatively, we could pivot. Whatever the David Paul Hewson of history believed, the Bono of faith was neither for nor against the Iraq War. The office seminar room is neither left nor right, neither bankrupt nor opulent.
The act of borrowing these clothes was in itself hardly new. Just as there is no pristine “Christ against culture” theology, in H. Richard Niebuhr’s profoundly flawed but super helpful typology, there has never been a form or practice of Christian liturgy that is not inflected by “culture,” broadly understood. And even in the narrower sense of culture—our magpie’s anthology of shiny odds and ends plucked from mass media or academic trends—we’ve been doing this deliberately, at least in the U.S., for decades or more. Culture is the form of theology, someone told me, attributing the claim to Paul Tillich. And there’s some truth to that, though it’s the kind of truth that sits like a loaded gun on the seminarian’s floor mat.
This Stuff Used to be Fun
The assumption behind these experiments and attempts at synthesis was not just that culture did shape theology, but that we really desperately needed it to. We had run out of things to say, or compelling ways to say them. After a thousand years as the custodial keepers of “the culture,” we were in the position of needing to learn. And in the age of high modernism, we had some compelling ideas to learn from and try to adapt for our own use. Kant and Hegel were wayward but identifiable children of theology, and so our attempts to return them to the fold were kind of dull, family-reunion affairs. But Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and Darwin offered, or prepared the ground for, truly penetrating critiques of theology and Scripture along with everything else. It made sense to trot along behind them because they demanded some kind of response. It probably mattered that we had mostly lost our own capacity to seriously analyze and critique our societies. Borrowed profundity was better than home-grown shallowness.2 The 20th century movements against colonization, racial oppression, and gender hierarchy too, while all having some kind of relationship with institutional Christianity, ultimately spoke to the churches in a way that required us to learn, respond, and receive their influence in one way or another.3
And what was true of ideas was eventually and equally true of aesthetics. Christians were ultimately obligated to engage with modern art, architecture, literature, and music. And that engagement produced some good things! Something really did need to succeed the Magic Kingdom Traditionalism that produced the Sacre-Coeur in Paris. I personally happen to like abstract expressionist art and Brutalist architecture but however you feel about it, aesthetic modernism was interesting and new. It made claims that couldn’t simply be ignored. It demanded, at a minimum, an attempt at refutation. It could tolerate synthesis and reward imitation. This is even true of the popular-culture upheavals after the War. I don’t always love the work that was done to bring mass-media forms and sensibilities into liturgy and theology during and after the 60s and 70s, but I don’t know what else people should have been expected to do. The change in, say, popular music between 1957 and 1967 is mind-boggling even with the seeming inevitability of retrospect. That’s not to say that all, or even most, attempts to capture the energy of the age were wise, or faithful, or in good taste. But something had to be done, because something undeniably was happening out there.
For generations, the rejoinder from more conservative voices has been some variation on the chestnut that the man who marries the spirit of the age is a widower at the end of it (though I prefer Lewis’s related, but more felicitous line about everything not eternal being eternally out of date). The measure of truth in these sayings can easily obscure our real need to discern what we mean by “the age” and “eternal,” and our own estrangement from and entanglement in both. But, critically, that measure of truth is true and is ignored by more creative thinkers at their peril. What happens when the architectural style goes out of fashion (or, more urgently for mid-century American churches, when the materials start looking every minute of their age)? What residue is left when the aesthetics keep changing, the form disappears, the argot gets stale? The modal Chicago church building from the 1960s looks much more “dated” than the gothic-revival jobs from the 1920s. Today I wonder what formation and discipleship in the virtual-church era looks like in the second generation. Even our most aggressive innovations are usually adapting some kind of template, attempting a variation on inherited expectations and experiences. I don’t know what happens when those templates and experiences are simply unknown.
When Culture Stops
But even before we find out the answer to that question, we’ll be confronted with what to do when “culture” stops offering any fresh insight or energy to borrow. Whatever I’ve said about it in staff meetings and on the internet, I don’t actually hate Christian Contemporary Music. A lot of it is bad, for sure, but some of it is good and capable of whatever emotional heft we imagine is carried by our churchier hymnic warhorses. I’d cry to hear “Everlasting God” sung by the faithful volunteers of the “contemporary” ensemble at my last call again. But bad or good, like it or not, CCM definitely sounds stuck to me. I used to joke rather bitterly that “traditional and contemporary worship” on a church website meant “music from the 1890s to the 1980s” but even apart from the way we all get frozen in the music of our formative years, there just hasn’t been much innovation in Christian pop in a long time. There hasn’t been much innovation in pop music generally in a long time, a fact that pretty profoundly undermines the whole rationale for trying to co-opt it and claim it for Christ. No analogy for the transition from 1957 to 1967 on the pop charts can be found in any ten years since I’ve been able to vote.
And it’s not just music. The last big idea that really migrated from academia to my corner of Christianity was Hardt and Negri’s “Empire,” which was charismatic and insightful enough to eventually become overused in exegesis and historical theology by workaday preachers (myself very much included).4 Even that’s been largely supplanted by neoliberal intersectionality, which in church usage is less an idea at all than a system of etiquette or a language game. It produces all of the frustration and hostility of actual politics with none of the material stakes. Gendered language for God, I heard a theological writer say in a news item about the Church of England, “has risen to the front of the list of things that need to be addressed, given the cultural moment.” A lot of us talk this way now, with a severe aversion to direct claims of causation and clearly defined terms, so I don’t want to harp on this instance. But I did wonder what someone might mean by a “cultural moment” and how it sets priorities for Christian communities (or anyone else). One could argue that the Brexit referendum and the 2016 elections in the U.S. constituted a “cultural moment,” given which a serious rethinking of Christianity’s traditional ethical stance on welcome to foreigners would “need to be addressed.” As, indeed, has happened in the form of “Christian nationalism,” a meritless and faithless workshopping of Christianity to respond to contingent political and cultural developments.5 Cultural moments are like rainbows: every bubble has one.
Of course, it’s easier to see the grifting and crankishness in our neighbor’s eye than to remove it from our own. But without trying to rank the material defects in contemporary American Christianity’s various adoption of sloganeering, patent medicines, conspiracy theories, fraudulent financial instruments, and useless trainings as forms of cultural engagement, I’d like to make the point at a minimum that it is all in very poor taste. It is all played out. It is one thing for culture to be the form of theology. It is another thing for theology to go rummaging around in culture’s remainder racks.
So here the residue of a more dramatic era in American culture and intellectual life really has remained in Christianity: a conviction that whatever interesting, fresh, exciting things God is doing in the world are happening out there rather than in here.6 For the mainline this was a conviction about culture and politics, for the evangelical movement it was an insight about markets and business models, but either way it has proven hard to uproot, however thin the surrounding soil seems to get.
You have heard it said to those in former times, ‘We’ll circle back to that’
One plunges very steeply into curmudgeonhood at this point, or into another argument for Christians to make our own culture again, this time in a humbler, DIY mode. The stasis of mass culture and mass politics is a phenomenon subject to analysis (and a claim with inherent limits—not everything is bad, or in decline). I enjoy movies, books, TV shows, and music as much as ever, and I encourage you to as well. But it is liberating to not have to search them for styles, lessons, or agendas. We don’t have to define ourselves, positively or by contrast or in synthesis, with cultural products that aren’t trying especially hard to be majestic, penetrating, or devastatingly subversive.
Instead, church can just aim for a minor kind of excellence. I could talk here about our own wonderful resources and how we should all read Chrysostom instead of dreary contemporary writers, but the hard truth is that I’ve probably read ten thousand words by John le Carré for every one I’ve read by Chrysostom. I’m hardly alone in standing to benefit from more time with “the tradition,” but I’ve given it some thought and I actually need a higher minimum of spy-and-heist content than ancient-sermon content in my life. That’s no excuse for pointless preaching or bad music or marching everyone through ‘Blessed Assurance’ for the millionth time. But one can let politics, music and literature have their place without forcing everything into a single unstable identity.
So in strictly prudential terms, I think there’s a decent case for dusting off our books of music and liturgy and seeing what we can do with them. Doing an old, slightly weird, not obviously relevant thing well might be more compelling than chasing after a trend that may have peaked before we try to get in on it. It’s worth remembering that a lot of it was made for people with fewer years of formal schooling than most of us have, with little formal musical education, and no theology properly so called. I don’t know much about those people, what use they made of those songs and words, or whether they were serenely indifferent to sophistication and relevance. The idea that these things really did, and still do, serve as vessels for very ordinary beauty on their own terms should be humbling and moving to us. At least moving enough to write that down in the parking lot and come back to it after the break.
The less said about the hopefully one-off “Dr. Suesscharist” the better, though I did actually slightly know the priest who did that one. I myself suggested, tongue partially in cheek and in a blog post now wisely hidden from public view, a “Leonard Cohenpline” concept that did end up taking some kind of form in a “longest night” service we did in 2009 and 2010. Mea maxima culpa.
Even now I can’t find a depiction of 19th century Christian social thought, even of the relatively robust Catholic variety, that praises it more highly than saying “it did a pretty ok job of making the case for unions and social welfare that was made obvious by other voices.” And that was the better stuff! Abolitionism and Black theology in the U.S. is an exception, but even then only partially and not from within the mainstream. It was pretty grim.
This was even, or perhaps especially true of churches that simply resisted these developments. Their theology, rhetoric, and even worship ended up being deformed by the anxious attempt to deny any “radical” influence.
Not sure I even need to say this but I did not read this book.
I am very honestly unclear whether people think “culture” can every be bad or wrong, whether people with profoundly different views have “culture” too, etc. I almost always hear it invoked with explicit or implicit approbation.
This was the message I got in my very first year of ordained ministry at a required “theological education” event. “Go where God is at work in the world and invite yourself to join in” is how I’d shorthand it. Which has always left me wondering at my bad luck to have wandered into the one employment sector in which God is doing nothing at all.