Thursday, May 06, 2004
(8:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Importance of Tradition in Developing a Worldview Relevant to Our Contemporary Postmodern Context
Or, These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins
I think Brian McLaren is great. I deeply enjoyed A New Kind of Christian, and I passed it along to my parents, who also loved it. I hope he has some influence in evangelical Christian circles, just as I hope that the movements for the recovery of tradition, for a recovery of liturgy, for a more rigorous pursuit of social justice, all have their own influence in evangelical Christian circles. As Ralph Luker is fond of saying, there is no shame in being an evangelical Christian. The various traditions of the Reformation are rich and complex -- certainly not perfect or self-evidently desirable in all respects, but worthy of preservation and development.
My only complaint with Brian McLaren, as with so many evangelical intellectuals at the cutting edge, is that he seems to me to misstate the problem. We do not need a new postmodern Christianity. We already have a fully functional, and in fact almost overwhelmingly powerful, postmodern Christianity, which I will provisionally designate as generic "church growth"-style Evangelical Republicanism. This style of Christianity is both rigorously new and rigorously postmodern. It revels in the new, enthusiastically embraces and engulfs the new: the new media technology, the new trend in popular culture, etc.
Generic "church growth"-style Evangelical Republicanism is unprecedented, a new kind of Christianity that was structurally impossible in previous ears of human history: Christianity as a media phenomenon. As Ted Jennings often points out, the biggest names in this movement have no concrete parish. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are not pastors in the traditional sense -- their media outlets are not ways of making accessible events that properly happen in a particular time and place. Their television ministry is, exhaustively, a television ministry. Their congregation is completely virtual. Similarly, James Dobson is a psychologist without a practice, a pure media phenomenon. The new clergy of this new kind of Christianity are ordained to media ministry, a minor ghetto of the cult of celebrity, ministering to the faceless masses, with both minister and congregant ensconsed in a radical comfort.
Wherever a church body loosens its hold on tradition (and for me, holding firmly to a tradition necessitates, precisely, development of the tradition), wherever the tradition ceases to exercise its hold over its members, even if only for a fleeting moment -- generic "church growth"-style Evangelical Republicanism immediately floods in to fill the vacuum. It is the evil twin of the ecumenical movement, "overcoming" the differences among specific traditions by erasing all difference and distinction, introducing the "simple message of the gospel," allowing people to be "just plain old Christians" in a radical and perhaps irrevocable forgetting of the past. This occurs even in the most surprising places -- a militant subset of revivalistic Methodism, emphasizing a rigorously legalistic style of life, is completely overwhelmed by generic "church growth"-style Evangelical Republicanism in the space of a generation; a subset of Mormonism for whom the Book of Mormon has become an embarrassment suffers a similar fate.
If generic "church growth"-style Evangelical Republicanism seems like fundamentalism, that is only because the fundamentalists were most adept at creating formulae. Classic fundamentalism is a properly "modern" movement (the specific modernity that seems to be at the root of McLaren's desire for the postmodern). By comparison to generic "church growth"-style Evangelical Republicanism, fundamentalism looks like a rich and variegated intellectual tradition, full of interesting practices of biblical interpretation. Our new kind of Christianity, by contrast, has dispensed with argument, dispensed with reasons. The pretense of proving one's position by reference to the Bible has been completely abandoned, in favor of bald assertions that a given view is "biblical," taken as a synonym for "good," which is itself a synonym for "ours" -- we Bible fans, we Jesus fans, we Christians. Simultaneously "only Christians" and the only Christians, ignorant of all history and tradition other than a suspicion of Catholicism -- hospitable to a fault, addressing every self-described "Christian" as one of the elect, with a familiarity for which the word "superficial" is not adequate, a familiarity that is familiar because utterly, exhaustively superficial. If "modern" Christianity was too introspective, then I would argue that we have finally solved that problem: there is no "intro" to "spect."
No church body is immune. The only church body that can hope to stand up against generic "church growth"-style Evangelical Republicanism is the Roman Catholic Church -- but only at the expense of emulating the postmodern methods, turning the pope into a media celebrity, even adopting the jingoistic politics in an effort to advance at least one fraction of the Church's moral agenda. But the Republican Party itself has been infected with the postmodern ethos that bred generic "church growth"-style Evangelical Republicanism, so that its slogans (such as its pro-life stance) are radically disconnected from any kind of political practice and governance beomes an exercise in pursuing raw power through mutually contradictory policies whose material telos can be nothing short of the effective destruction of the very structures of governance.
Those advocating that the church open its doors to postmodernity are about two decades too late -- there are no longer even any doors to open. The question is now how to help the church to survive the ravages of actually existing "postmodern Christianity."
