Jim posts a response to Ben's question about Stanley Hauerwas here.
From Hauerwas:
“I assume most of you are here because you think you are Christians, but it is not all clear to me that the Christianity that has made you Christians is Christianity. For example: How many of you worship in a church with an American flag? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt. How many of you worship in a church in which the fourth of July is celebrated? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt.”
Hauerwas is fine with this statement as long as he admits that the only plausible outcome is a sectarian movement that is isolated from irreducible social and cultural influences in our religious behavior. Because he is adamant in saying that he is not promoting sectarianism, he is simply disingenuous.
The problem I have always had with Hauerwas since reading Resident Aliens is that what he is actually talking about is unclear at best. In fact it appears quite implausible. It seems to be a continued commentary on "in the world but not of the world", but then does not explore the plausible outcomes of what this actually means. Rather, those cultural and social influences from the faith's environment, wherever a religious organization may find itself located, are arbitrarily parsed. The truth is that every kind of religious practice is irreducibly social and so, it contains within it both explicit and latent objects from those social and cultural moorings that are operative. To say that we can effectively de-socialize our religious practice from our socio-political, psycho-social, and socio-cultural environs quite goes against the grain of any psychology or sociology one can do. This would be a conclusion without audience.
Since religion is a social structure that develops, it must internalize objects from those social surroundings in order to exist at all. Christian communities are continually faced with a dialectic of the Body of Christ and the socio-cultural objects that they bring to the Body by necessity. Understanding the reasons why some are part of our religious practice and why others are not is perhaps the more foundational question that under-girds the very notion of "in the world but not of it" that Hauerwas argues. However, he fails to give attention to the former and instead continues to make assumptions on the latter and thus, his ideal of a Christian social structure remains implausible unless we can all agree that what he is arguing for is clearly characteristic of sectarian behavior. To that end I would submit that the Amish are the one's who have got it right.
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