Sex and Post-Christian

I came across this article in “The American Conservative” website.  To be honest, I’m unfamiliar with the website or what I presume is the print magazine.  This article, “Sex After Christianity: Gay marriage is not just a social revolution but a cosmological one,” by Rod Dreher brings up some interesting thoughts.

I find in the author’s analysis a lack of consideration that gay marriage may actually add to and encourage the same kind of communal commitments that are not individualistic.  Marriage necessitates a giving up of a completely centered self.  The equating of homosexuality and the desire for gay marriage with the relinquishing of a cultural propensity for the common good is wrong, I think.

I agree that the sexual revolution of the 1960’s changed nearly everything related to ideas of marriage and sexual ethics.  I do think that the sexual revolution open more widely the doors of possibility for acceptance of same-sex relationships.  Yet, heterosexual marriage was even more impacted by the sexual-revolution than were notions of acceptance of same-sex relationships.

I think same-sex marriage is a conservative position, as well as a progressive one.  I have yet to find sociological studies of any substance (within technical definitions) that show that promiscuity, infidelity, hyper-individualism within sexual expression, etc., benefits the individuals involved or the common society.  Yet, that is separate from same-sex relationships in and of themselves and whether same-sex marriage is a help or hindrance for the common good.

Anyway, here are a few paragraphs commenting on sociologist Philip Rieff’s ideas that I think should be considered on matter one’s position on same-sex marriage.

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.

Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.

How this came to be is a complicated story involving the rise of humanism, the advent of the Enlightenment, and the coming of modernity. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.

Gradually the West lost the sense that Christianity had much to do with civilizational order, Taylor writes. In the 20th century, casting off restrictive Christian ideals about sexuality became increasingly identified with health. By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom.

To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order. As Rieff characterizes it, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for’ is ‘more’.”

Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.

Trendy “Spiritual Formation”

This is an interesting piece by John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.  He details seven aspects he thinks trendy notions of “spiritual formation” have picketed up, recently, and the baggage clinging to it coming from people who just want the latest trendy thing in their spiritual lives (mostly my interpretation).

A couple of the examples I find good:

1. I hate how spiritual formation gets positioned as an optional pursuit for a small special interest group within the church. People think of it as an esoteric activity reserved for introverted Thomas-Merton-reading contemplatives. I hate that. Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an “outer you” that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an “inner you.” You have a spirit. And it’s constantly being shaped and tugged at: by what you hear and watch and say and read and think and experience. Everyone is being spiritually formed all the time. Whether they want to or not. Whether they’re Christian or not. The question isn’t if someone will sign up for spiritual formation; it’s just who and what our spirits will be formed by.

6. I hate how hard spiritual transformation is, and how long it takes. I hate thinking about how many people have gone to church for decades and remain joyless or judgmental or bitter or superior.

The practice of the “Christian Spiritual Disciplines”, which is at the core of the Imago Dei Initiative, is incredibly ancient and varied.  As Mr. Ortberg states, it is incredibly hard and it takes a long time – from glory to glory, in the way we experience the ever deepening insight and humility that results from the practice of it.

The “Faith” and the “Religion” of Jesus

The recent interview in Rolling Stone of Marcus Mumford of the Grammy awarding winning music group “Mumford and Sons” gets at a developing distinction being made between the “faith” and the “religion” revolving around Jesus Christ.  Marcus was raised by parents who were instrumental in the development of the Vineyard Church in his native land, the U.K.

Increasingly, I’ve been making this distinction over the last couple of years.  This is not the same thing as “spiritual but not religious.”  The “faith” contra “religion” of the endeavor of following Jesus Christ tends to come from those who truly are engaged in their “faith” even if they don’t purport to engage in the “religion.”

Among the attitudes of younger people, generally, this isn’t necessary a negativity toward organized religion per se, though they will certainly point out the hypocrisy of and the negative things about those who call themselves Christians.  Can you blame them?

I found this comment made by a person reading the article interesting:

BRAVO for Marcus Mumford! Jesus’ person and life is the great equalizer and exemplar of FAITH. Not of Church-codified “Christianity” which, while theologically and liturgically may be the “body” of Christ, is NOT the essence of FAITH. An inability to distinguish between these two, and the ignorant over-indulgance in dogmatic, punitive and politicized theology has veritably severed the (Church) body of Christianity from Jesus, its head. Leaving it an amputated appendage bleeding out–useless and fruitless, for those whom Jesus most intended its spiritual, and Religious embrace.

This can be said of both the present-day liberal or conservative churches and para-church organizations.

I think this sums up the attitudes developing within emerging culture.  This doesn’t mean the institutional Church with its “cultic ritual practices” (technical term in theology) and doctrinal stuff involved are rejected out of hand. This does mean, however, that the hypocritical attitudes, words, and behaviors of people within those institutions who call themselves “Christian” are rejected – that which any outside observer knows does not particularly match up with how Jesus calls us to act and be.  That’s the “religion” that is rejected – that which comes from the people calling themselves Christians but doesn’t mirror Jesus.  The “faith” is the authentic engagement with Jesus Christ whether found inside or outside the institution.

Where we are…

I’m reading Proverbs – seek wisdom!

Within the Church (and greater American Christianity) there is much “wisdom” that is going around these days on how to “save the Church” and increase involvement in Christianity among the increasingly disinterested and disaffected.

There is a standard and official, “This is what you have to do to survive and grow…” But, we tend to not really look around to see what is working, instead we tend to want to double-down doing what is subjectively familiar (even if not objectively working).

The parish I’ve served in for the past nine years has nearly doubled its average Sunday attendance within this time frame – and most of the new people are twenty-thirty somethings, singles, young-families.  Yet, if you listen to the “wisdom” of the zeitgeist that is going around concerning how our churches need to be situated, by what we do and focus on, we should have no one attending.  We seem to be the anti-zeitgeist (but not intentionally – we just don’t get caught up in all that “stuff”).

We never talk about inclusion or welcome.  Yet, we have tea-party people and Communists (literally – except for the religion part).  We have Socialist and stanch Capitalists.  We have people who think the next Pope should be a woman and people who think women shouldn’t be priests.  We have gay people marrying and people who think marriage is only between a man and a woman.

We never talk about diversity.  Yet, we have African-Americans, West Indians, and African-nationals; we have Hispanics and Asians and Middle-Easterners.  The majority is now Caucasian, but in the past they weren’t.  We have people who struggle mightily with belief in all this stuff and people who have amazing, deep, and simple faith.  We have people who have been members for literally 80-years and four new babies this past month.

Worse yet, our music is traditional (hymns for the 1982 hymnal with anthems and the like) our liturgy is non-fussy Anglo-Catholic with old fiddle-back chasubles (not all) with maniples, three sacred ministers, and “smells & bells.”  We are absolutely straight Prayer Book.  We use Rite I in our Sunday Mass and don’t change the words.  We celebrate “East-facing” with the priest leading the people all facing “East” together.  Frankly, we should be driving people out of the church screaming.  Yet, we are growing and struggling to keep up with the new people coming in.  Right now, we aren’t doing a good job with youth group ministry.  We don’t glory in all this, we don’t fight to maintain it, we just do it – it is just us.

Our sermons tend to be long for Episcopalians – probably closer to 15-minutes than not.  We don’t use all the buzzwords.  We rely on Scripture to do the talking.  We don’t emote all over the place, we don’t tell people that they should be liberals or conservatives or support the latest, greatest causes – we trust the people do determine for themselves what to be involved in as long as they obey the two great commands of Jesus (which they hear every week in the Rite I liturgy).

We don’t have an agenda, other than being the Body of Christ in this location – loving God with all our being and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

If we listen to the “powers that be” in current American Christianity we should stop doing just about everything we do.  Except, that is, if we listen and look around with humble hearts and seeking-to-learn attitudes and with open minds to listen and observe where God is building up His Church – those places that are growing like gang-busters, particularly among younger people – and observe what God is doing.

You see, those in power don’t need to be a block to what is coming.  There doesn’t need to be a “new movement” separate from the established institutions that live into new methods and approaches that resonate with the emerging generation.  They don’t need to be the block or hindrance, but too often they are.  At some point, we will learn or we will fade away.  “How do we not fade away?  Into the wild” we should go!

That, I think, is a good beginning point for employing wisdom.

Why the Church?

Why the Church?  What good is organized religion?

“The Church comes into your life to bring you a knowledge of the presence of God. If one were going to live in a far country, would he not, if opportunity offered, make friends of the King of that country?

“The Church comes into your life to make life more joyous, more free from sin, more contented, more spiritually furnished, more sound in its judgement of things that are worth while. But likewise the Church nourishes that growing union with God through Christ which is man’s best heritage and the best compensation for his labors.”

From: “The Episcopal Church: Its Message for Men of Today,” by George Parkin Atwater, p.180. (New York: Morehouse-Gorham Co.; 1917, 1944)

Young-adults and ministry

One aspect of campus ministry that every campus pastor/chaplain understands is that we work with young people not for the long term benefit of our own ministry, because in a couple years those people, those students, will be gone. What campus pastors/chaplains understand clearly is that our work is for the benefit of others – other churches, other towns, other pastors/priests. We work to form students not for ourselves but for others. That ministry, that church, that pastor/priest reaps what we sow in the formation and development of students.

Students are transitory and are only with us for a few years, so we have to be very targeted and efficient with and in our evangelism, Christian formation, and leadership development efforts. Every student will leave the campus and continue onward in their life – this is just a fact of life.

What the Church must understand is that in our day and particularly among urban emerging-adults, our work as pastors/priests is and will be much more like campus ministry. We invest in the lives of young-adults not for what they will contribute to our parish over time, because young-adults will more than likely only be with us for a short time. Our presence, work, and efforts with 20-somethings will by necessity need to mirror the approach and attitude of campus pastors.

If we don’t change our expectations of 20-somethings in our churches, we will become incredibly frustrated and perhaps resentful because they are not “stepping-up” in responsibility and commitment the way 20-somethings generally did over decades past. This is just a fact of life and a fact of ministry in our day.

We invest our time and efforts in the lives of 20-somethings, but we will not reap the benefits over time in the majority of cases. We work in the formation and development of emerging-adults and young-adults for the benefit of others. Campus pastors revel in this, so to must we.

Emerging Generations and the Church

I highly recommend this review of two books written in 2002 that appeared in the magazine “Touchstone”.  It is a great summary of the generational trends with regard to Christianity and the Church that began in the 1990’s among GenX’ers, and that have only increased over the past 10-years among the Millennials. The insights and the suggested trends are proving to be true!

The title of the review article is, “Orthodox Twenty Somethings,” and the reviewed books are: The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy
by Colleen Carroll, and The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World by Robert E. Webber.

Here are a few paragraphs that I find particularly compelling.

It isn’t supposed to be happening. Traditional Catholic piety is finding zealous practitioners at universities across the United States. The children of Planned Parenthood devotees are becoming advocates of Natural Family Planning. Nice suburban girls who ought to know better are making monastic professions in—you guessed it—traditional orders, and there are enrollment spikes on the charts of conservative seminaries across the Christian spectrum.

At the same time, some of today’s Evangelicals are unresponsive to the agendas of their immediate forefathers in worship, theology, and general “church strategy.” They are seeking instead “a biblically rooted, historically informed and culturally aware” evangelization of their hometowns, and the creation of new congregations attuned to the ancient faith. This isn’t quite supposed to be happening either.

None of this is supposed to be happening because it’s not the project for which two generations of Protestant and Catholic clergy have worked. And it’s certainly not what for decades a graying army of secularists has agitated for in American public life. The push for relativist moral teaching, “simplified” worship, interchangeable sex roles, and an utter separation of private belief from political expression has come from the pulpit as readily as it has been demanded by pseudo-intellectual elites. But against all odds, portions of a modern American society, which groans to find itself secularist, is returning in a quiet revolution to the fundamental truths of the Christian religion.

It goes without saying that “the primary cravings of young orthodox Christians in America—for tough time-tested teachings and worship imbued with mystery and a sense of the transcendent—are often the result of deficiencies in their childhood spiritual diet.”…

The evidence of public opinion polls shows a trend of twenty-somethings “clamoring for convention,” writes Carroll. The increase in Latin Mass attendance during the 1990s, for example, can be attributed to a “retro-revolt among U.S. Catholics,” rather than a nostalgic return by the elderly to a rite with which they grew up. Marie-Thérèse Scott-Hamblen, the young orthodox wife of a young orthodox Episcopal priest, may not have been the first to use the term “young fogey,” in The Living Church magazine in 2001, but she put her finger on a phenomenon that has reached even the most liberal denominations in the United States. As often as not, those who seek traditional worship in their congregations are young men and women whose only opposition is their parents’ generation of clergy and laymen. The older generation’s response tends to be in the negative; after all, worship has to be modern in language and form to appeal to “the young people,” that strange mass of mainline census data that never actually finds its way into a pew on Sunday morning…

The evidence of public opinion polls shows a trend of twenty-somethings “clamoring for convention,” writes Carroll. The increase in Latin Mass attendance during the 1990s, for example, can be attributed to a “retro-revolt among U.S. Catholics,” rather than a nostalgic return by the elderly to a rite with which they grew up. Marie-Thérèse Scott-Hamblen, the young orthodox wife of a young orthodox Episcopal priest, may not have been the first to use the term “young fogey,” in The Living Church magazine in 2001, but she put her finger on a phenomenon that has reached even the most liberal denominations in the United States. As often as not, those who seek traditional worship in their congregations are young men and women whose only opposition is their parents’ generation of clergy and laymen. The older generation’s response tends to be in the negative; after all, worship has to be modern in language and form to appeal to “the young people,” that strange mass of mainline census data that never actually finds its way into a pew on Sunday morning…

There is a built-in nostalgia for the pre-Constantinian Church in this worldview, which assumes the death of traditional Christendom and the birth of a new post-Constantinian model for Christian life—hence “ancient-future.”

I highly recommend reading the review if you want to understand what is truly happening within the cutting edges of American Christianity, rather than what those determined to maintain the status-quo would like us to believe.

‘Relevance’ Is Not Enough…

May I suggest a good, brief article to read from February’s Sojourners Mag.?  More than that, I highly recommend that you read it.

‘Relevane’ Is Not Enough: Many young adults are leaving the church these days. Two 20-somethings reflect on what keeps them in the pews.”

I keep saying that the Anglican form of Christian spirituality is well suited for younger generations…

Anne Marie: “While many congregations modify their music, order of worship, and sermon topics in an attempt to make church ‘relevant’ for newer generations, I am more interested in figuring out how I fit into the rich and complicated tradition of Christianity than in asking how Christianity can be molded to meet my needs.” (After her Baptist, Anabaptist, and Evangelical upbringing, she ended up in an Episcopal Church after college.)

Joshua: “During my college years, this concept of transcendence became real to me as I interacted with the Book of Common Prayer. Together with my community, I would recite the ancient affirmations of faith and engage in timeless rites and rituals that remind the church of its shared vision, the hope to which we aspire. The wonderful thing about transcendence is that it scoops us up locally and globally, backward and forward. As I participate in a liturgical service, I am investing in the local community, making peace with those I see on a regular basis, lifting up prayers of joy and concern week after week, and communing around ancient symbols of nourishment and sustenance. This practice of gathering around a common structure has historically guided the global church and continues to direct us today, giving these words and rituals enduring meaning.” (After growing up Lutheran, he ended up in an Episcopal Church.)

Read the whole article:

http://sojo.net/magazine/2013/02/relevance-not-enough

Listening and Doing

Funny how the “Sermon On the Mount” stands in such stark contrast to much of what our present and predominate culture (including far more of the Christian subculture than I would like to admit) seems to champion.

To whom do we listen? To what do we yield?  Do we simply listen to those who scratch our itching ears?  Do we surrender ourselves to our proclivities, willingly?

 

The love of many…

stbasil

Icon of St. Basil the Great

The love of many has grown cold; concord among brothers is no more; the very name of unity is ignored; Christian compassion or sympathetic tears cannot be found anywhere. There is no one to welcome someone weak in faith, but mutual hatred blazes so fiercely among brothers that a neighbors’ fall brings them more joy than their own household’s success. And just as a contagious disease spreads from the sick to the healthy during an epidemic, in these days we have become like everyone else: imitators of evil, carried away by this wicked rivalry possessing our souls. Those who judge the erring are merciless and bitter, while those judging the upright are unfair and hostile. This evil is so firmly rooted in us that we have become more brutish than the beasts: At least they herd together with their own kindred, but we reserve our most savage warfare for the members of our own household.

ST BASIL THE GREAT – “On the Holy Spirit” (78)