sociology and religion, what a pair

Feb 9th, 2010

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Traditionally, sociology has been trapped in two camps with regard to religion: those who seek to undermine religion as an important social force and those who more or less defend it. the former view was a driving force in the secularization of the American university as Christian Smith has shown. Religion was consistently argued as an epiphenomenal social force, something that was only caused by psychological or social needs. In other words, people only turn to religion when they need a psycho-social bandaid to resolve other deeper problems.

What is now evident is that religion is gaining legitimacy as a social force in its own right. This is an important direction for the study of religion especially in the global clash of societies where religion is clearly an important driver of economic, political, and other social behaviors.

As a new study has found, there has been a significant increase over the last 25 or so years not only in the quantity of work done by sociologists on religion, but also in how religion is treated in those studies. No longer is it assumed to be only a reflection of some other socioeconomic trend, but increasingly it is treated as the factor that may be central to understanding a given group of people.

via News: Sociologists Get Religion – Inside Higher Ed.

For those studying theology, it should be clear that sociology and biblical studies need to be more integrated as a way to gain a richer and deeper understanding of those social forces that have shaped doctrinal histories. Rather than assume that the dividing lines between heresy and orthodoxy have been established for eternity, this is one case where our changing understanding of religion as a primary mover in societies ought to fuel the engines of theological progress and creativity lest it get stuck in the irons of doctrinal anemia.

Posted in: Religion, Society, Theology.

pilgrimage

Feb 8th, 2010

by Drew Tatusko.

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Everyone has a story.

It isn't science that offers the most compelling reasons for belief or unbelief, but our experiences with others and with the worlds we inhabit. In November of 2009 I told my own pilgrimage to Thomas Mathie over at the Something Beautiful Podcast. I told him before hand that I would leave nothing hidden. The more open we are with one another, the more organic and healthy our communities can be. This is true of our partnerships with those we love, our children, our extended families, our places of work, and our churches.

It has been my experience that mainline Protestant churches have a tendency to avoid getting raw and open with one another. Testimonies are rare if they are told at all. This has been my life as a Catholic and as Presbyterian. I would challenge any pastor to step off the pulpit one summer and invite people from the congregation to open up and share their testimony every Sunday morning. We have no idea how God is at work in our communities if we are not aware of how God has shaped each one of us in our lives and how we then reflect and relate to those experiences.

This is something we are building up to at my church and talking about our hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, and sources of conflict and bad blood has been uplifting. Without knowing ourselves and our history, we could not possible hear God calling us into our mission and life together. We are learning to hear God in each other's lives for the first time. Testimony. It alone preaches.

You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you (Ephesians 4:22-32).

We had a long chat and it's posted in three parts:

My intent was to be very honest. I apologize in advance if I inadvertently offended anyone. That was never my intent and those who have shaped me in my life to this day I love deeply. They have shaped me for who I am as much as any other influence that has come into my life.

Peace.

Posted in: Letters to Churches, Life, Religion, Society, Theology.

mourning the death of american exceptionalism

Feb 5th, 2010

by Drew Tatusko.

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One of the problems that we face in today's geo-political framework that is new is the attenuated boundaries on the map that used to be rather solid and definite. We now live in a world where communications and transportation force once separate and distinct cultures, ideologies, and people to rub up against each other. If markets go down in Japan, they go down in the US. The exchange of goods works within a massive web of cause and effect where lives are effected thousands of miles apart in small towns from various industries that are networked.

Because of the confluence of economic and political flows outside and in spite of once solid boundaries, new orientations to the world are needed by all governments. This means that the myth that America is somehow exceptional in this massive mix must be changed or abandoned. David Kyuman Kim argues for the latter:

I am looking for a way to open a space for a disposition and an outlook that I believe can help mourn the exhaustion of the myth of American exceptionalism. Let me be clear: I do not think that the myth of American exceptionalism has gone away quietly in the twilight of the Bush administration. In my estimation, the disenchantment of giving up the myth of American exceptionalism will involve experiencing the lived effects of the catastrophic, of coming to terms with cultural nihilism, and even with worldly collapse. It will involve relinquishing the comforts—metaphysical and otherwise—of being an imperial power.

via All used up « The Immanent Frame.

As with any social change, those who experience anxiety towards it will react in often negative and incendiary ways. This is not unlike the reaction formation a two year old shows in the face of change. In order not to experience the pain of loss, the two year old will pre-emptively negate everything. The persistent negation by the Republican party as well as the Tea Partiers who are gathering this weekend show a similar reaction. Before they submit to mourning the death of exceptionalism, they will deny that it is true and react with hostility, anger, and nihilism. By now it is clear that this kind of reaction is evident in the language and demeanor of those involved with the reactionary stance. Yet, the resistance itself is evidence that change is happening somewhere. If it is not in terms of "business as usual" in the United States, change is happening somewhere that has a direct effect on what happens on US soil.

Let me put it more forcefully: I am trying to engage and join a project that recuperates these values of democracy, freedom, and hope. Nonetheless, I think that such recuperation can only take place through a reckoning with American complicity with evil in the world and with the acknowledgment that it will be difficult to be different from what we have been––as a nation, as a people––for the last two-plus centuries. Again, I worry that America is a nation that is too prone to arrogance, to over-confidence, to the indulgence of self-interest. And I also worry that once we realize as a people—the social imaginary of “the American people”—that we are in fact living through a catastrophic age, the relinquishing of the myth of American exceptionalism will leave us prone to reactionary forces rather than to moral and ethical ones.

Kim calls for an elegiac tone and posture for working through this change. However, what will happen with the reactionary buildup? Does is by natural selection dissipate? That is to say, is the prospect of adapting to change so inevitable at this point, that the hostility from the reaction will die off like a dying branch on a tree? Who are the actors responsible for initiating this change of tone and message to move to a more radical kind of change that embraces the death of exceptionalism? It would see to be the responsibility of every citizen. However, this is a tall order given the amount of attention the reactions from the Right on Fox News and the counter-reactions from the Left on MSNBC give us. Reason and this elegiac demeanor are hidden under all the rubbish. Who will liberate this view and is it within the President's power to do so?

I am also wondering how the world wide community of Christians fits in with this set of problems. Is the church helping or hindering the healthy mourning of exceptionalism in order to adapt to a changed world? Kim's closing lines seem to address the position that the church as an organizations like international corporate trade that is, or ought to be, grounded apart from the limitations of political, social, cultural, and economic boundaries.

To adopt an elegiac temperament is to embrace an ethic of aspiration, as well as the commitment to self-cultivation and attunement. It is, finally, also to acknowledge that one has to die a little in order to live fully, freely. This is an elegiac move because it requires acknowledging that with change there is loss, especially a loss of love. It requires sacrifice. And it requires courage, conviction, and the willingness to leave one world behind in order to lay claim to another world, and, further, to leave a love behind by claiming a new love. Disenthralling ourselves from American imperial ideology may mean that we will make a world with heavy hearts, but hearts that have turned, converted, shifted to a world worth dying for and living for.

Posted in: Politics, Religion, Society.

the influence of the westminster confession on religious freedom

Feb 5th, 2010

by Drew Tatusko.

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In a fascinating article, Leah Farish argues that the revised Westminster Confession offers an interpretive framework for 1st Amendment Establishment Clauses. The argument reinforces the separation of church and state powers. However, the twist is that this was not from an agnostic Enlightenment ideal, but from the content of the Westminster Confession itself as revised at the same time the Constitution was being written. In particular, Farish argues the language of "free exercise" of religion is derived from the revised Westminster Confession itself.

The Founders’ religious heritage motivated them to accord procedural protection for those who did not share their religion, because Reformed Christianity naturally spreads individual civil liberties and a concept of public service within a culture. The landscape of the Confessors and Founders is one in which Christian presuppositions underlie public policy, and the government avoids interfering with and even protects religious groups, to the degree of allowing local variations in what is understood to be an impermissible establishment of religion. It is a landscape where the Christian elements of the nation’s heritage and traditions are affirmed. It even allows for a degree of preference and support for “the church of our common Lord” that today would not be tolerated by many Americans. Yet in the same landscape dwell those who deeply disagree with Christianity, and those who are undecided or uninterested in it. And those too are afforded freedom and safety.

via Journal of Religion and Society.

Of particular note, Farish also makes a case that the language of the 1st Amendment was likely written by Fisher Ames rather than James Madison. Ames was more flexible with the idea of a state established religion (as opposed to a federal establishment) than James Madison who was more adamant about state disestablishment altogether.

Madison, …, was wandering further from, not closer to, what proved to be the winning approach when he tried to split the provisions, disestablish religions even at the state level, and insert his two ideas in various places in the text of the Constitution.

Implied throughout is the notion that religion offers a unifying force in the colonies which is likely the reason for its protection through the 1st Amendment clause. Over the next 40 years after the Constitution, Madison's side would prove to win out in the end as Massachusetts was the last colony to disestablish the state sponsored religion. Indeed, as Farish quotes Voltaire, this view is what the courts have been consistent in upholding as the religion in the nation would become progressively more pluralistic which is evident by the current religious landscape of the United States.

“If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut each other’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace.”

What this article does do is show just how powerful the Presbyterian establishment was at the time. It also reveals the influence of Calvinism with its emphasis on law and order in the drafting of the Constitution. The irony is that this very influence cultivated the soil for progressive religious disestablishment. When combined with Enlightenment discontent over religious establishment, complete disestablishment was only a matter of time. It's ironic that the idea of "the United States is a Christian nation" was undermined long ago by the very language of "free exercise" which derived its energy from Christian tradition itself.

Posted in: Politics, Religion, Society, Theology.

pcusa + emergence: is the talk too cheap?

Feb 4th, 2010

by Drew Tatusko.

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David Williams asks the same questions I tend to ask on a regular basis, but does so in a better way. He gets to the issue of why the energy often wanes in emergent groups. Can we claim the power of the Holy Spirit at work within and among us? Can we dare to be truly radical and seek change within the church?

(T)ransformation only occurs when you graciously engage with the Other. That means making a point of getting out of our comfortable klatches and pushing outward into ones that aren't quite as easy. Can we share the value of Spirit-driven relationality with that fundamentalist blogger? Or that atheist with a chip on his shoulder? Do we reach out to that young Korean who's burned out on the relentless demands of the church she grew up in? Or that soldier who has returned from war with a shattered faith? Or that mom who goes to a Big Parking Lot church because it's kids program is a well-oiled machine that fits well with little Tyler's soccer schedule? Or the blue-haired matriarch of that little country church with 22 members?

via Beloved Spear: Emergence, The Spirit, and the Trap of the Klatch.

For the emerging church within the church to be what it wants to be, I think this hits the nail on the head. It has to be a movement that radically alters the social field of the church in terms of age, race, gender, and the biggest elephant in the room, class.

If we look like a middle to upper class white denomination, then that is who we will attract and never change. If we expect people to have a certain level of dialogue and discussion skills without opening the doors to teach people, then we will never change. Ties and khakis are a symbol of white collar work and class. Jeans and dirty boots are symbols of blue collar work. Clothing is class. We dress who we want to be like and who we are.

The problem with change is property and income. Pastors have a hard time doing this stuff because of the anxiety and resistance, even if there is a small core of members in the church that are on board with it. In this economy, it is far too difficult to get up and walk at the behest of Jesus to make change when that damn mat you are sitting on is the only thing you have to live on to support your children. Change requires risk and without an ample safety net to catch the risk taker, it's too much to ask of a mainline pastor.

We need a financial net somewhere to catch people in order to inject risk into the system in order for people to nudge it towards something that it not a lilly white classist organization – which it is for the most part. (If you are saying "that's not my church" you are either right or ignoring the reality in front of you. I have seen both.)

Faith is supposed to be the net here just to move people in a direction of radical change. Relying on the promises of God is what is ultimately supposed to catch risk takers. Butted against the realities of American life, however, the line between faith and irresponsible delusion is very fine one. This is where better discernment and calling on the Holy Spirit to give life is indeed necessary.

Posted in: Letters to Churches, Religion, Theology.