Spring?

I was going to be a good doobie, and write some more about the concept of “post-Christendom.” But it’s a rainy, nasty, raw, miserable night out, and I just don’t have the energy to do much of anything except sit and stare at the computer screen and not write.

Our regular letter carrier came into the church office this morning and said, “Looks like we’re getting our winter this spring.” So far, April has been colder, wetter, and nastier than January was around these parts. And snow has been forecast for tomorrow morning.

Someone remind me why we thought it would be a good idea to move back to New England.

Oblivious

Carol and I were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. She was working on her book and listening to National Public Radio. I was reading the New York Times Book Review.

Carol laughed and said something.

“What?” I said distractedly, and kept on reading.

She repeated what she had said. It still didn’t register with me. I think it had to do with something she had heard on the radio.

Finally I looked up. “Uhn,” I said.

It’s not that I was intentionally ignoring Carol, it’s just that when I am reading I practically go into a trance state, and I am not particularly aware of the world around me.

Carol knows this, and politely ignored the fact that I had ignored her. She settled back into her writing, and I settled back into my reading.

Sometimes I become so oblivious of the world around me that I amaze myself. What I lack in mindfulness, I make up for in power of concentration.

Post-Christian congregations in post-Christendom

“Post-Christendom” is a term used by a small group of theologians (primarily European Anabaptist theologians, from what I can see) to describe society after the death of the 1700-year-old concept of “Christendom.” The Roman emperor Constantine linked Christianity and Empire, and in Europe and European-dominated lands they’ve been linked ever since — until recently.

Here in the United States, with an avowed Christian in the White House and Christians dominating Congress and the courts, it may sometime feel as if we are becoming a more Christian country. But even here, church attendance has been dropping slowly for decades, and we’re seeing increasing numbers of persons affiliated with non-Christian religions, as well as seeing increasing numbers of persons with no religious affiliation at all. Now when someone offers a prayer at a graduation, it’s no longer unremarkable; instead, it has become an act of defiance. At the moment, Christendom in the United States appears to be dying.

So where does that leave those of us in post-Christian congregations? For some post-Christian congregations, the death of Christendom has probably helped somewhat, because now it is more socially acceptable to join a post-Christian congregation.

I can’t speak for all post-Christian congregations, and really I can only talk about what I’ve seen in a handful of Unitarian Universalist congregations that have become post-Christian. Mostly what I have seen Unitarian Universalist post-Christians who seem pleased that Christendom is dying, but who forget the extent to which Unitarian Universalism has been supported by Christendom.

And yes, we have been supported by Christendom. Here’s one example: Up until very recently, most of our best new members were “come-outers,” those who had “come out” to us from Christian churches. They found it easy to enter Unitarian Universalist worship services, because our worship services felt very familiar — we have hymnals and sermons and things like that, and the come-outers knew how to do hymnals and sermons and things like that. But as Christendom slowly dies around us, more and more of our new members have never set foot in a church before, so that our worship services may feel a little strange or uncomfortable. Yet we are not good about trying to integrate these newcomers into a Unitarian Universalist worship subculture that is increasingly divergent from mainstream culture.

Take another example: Sixty years ago, such a large percentage of the population went to church that it was easy for Unitarian Universalist congregations to get new members. Tons of people just walked in our doors to check us out, and we barely had to advertise. It was as if dump trucks full of potential new members backed up to our doors each Sunday, and unloaded more people. Sure, we didn’t have a great retention rate and we lost a lot of these visitors, but who cared? –the dump trucks would be back next Sunday to dump more through our doors. Unfortunately, we didn’t notice that those dump trucks stopped running between 1960 and 1970, and we have few ideas about how to integrate the kinds of newcomers we now get.

And one more example: In the 1950’s, at the height of what has come to be called “civic religion,” children had prayers and Bible readings in public schools, families read the Bible and prayed together at home, and there was a rich ecology of religious education throughout society. So when children came to Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools, they had lots of knowledge about religion and all we had to do was teach them that Jesus isn’t God, the Bible isn’t literally true, and that there are other religions out there besides Christianity. Today, typically the only time children learn anything about religion is when they come to Sunday school — which means most kids get about 20 hours of religious instruction a year. Yet we still run our post-Christian Sunday schools as if it’s the 1950’s.

So you can see that on a pragmatic level, we continue to act as if Christendom is in place, and we continue to act as if our place in Christendom is to offer an alternative to Christendom. Even though we think we are post-Christians (and in our hearts, many of us are post-Christians), we run our congregations as if we were still in 1950’s congregations, in a land dominated by the civic religion of Christendom.

So what do we do about this? On Wednesday, I’ll offer some suggestions for post-Christian congregations in a post-Chrsitendom world.

“My Sweet Lord”

I’ve been trying to sort out the naked-chocolate-Jesus kerfluffle. As you probably know, the Lab Gallery in Manhattan had been planning to show a life-size figure of Jesus, sculpted out of chocolate by Canadian-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro. Cavallaro’s Jesus was to be suspended from the ceiling in a pose of crucifixion. But the U.S.-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights deemed the sculpture offensive, and called for a boycott of the Roger Smith Hotel, which houses and sponsors the Lab Gallery. In a press release dated Thursday, Catholic League president Bill Donohue fumed:

“All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don’t react the way extremist Muslims do when they’re offended — otherwise they may have more than their heads cut off [presumably Mr. Donohue is implying here that extremist Muslims cut off genitalia]. James Knowles, President and CEO of the Roger Smith Hotel (interestingly, he also calls himself Artist-in-Residence), should be especially grateful. And if he tries to spin this as reverential, then he should substitute Muhammad for Jesus and display him during Ramadan…. The boycott is on.” Link

Today, the hotel yielded to pressure and told the gallery to cancel the exhibit. The gallery’s director, Matt Semler, told the press that the Catholic League’s demands amounted to hate speech. Outraged by this, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue announced yesterday that even though the exhibit was off, the boycott of Roger Smith Hotel is still on. And today, the BBC reports that Semler announced his resignation as gallery director [link].

Yesterday, the U.K.-based religious think tank Ekklesia offered this slightly wry commentary on the kerfluffle:

Christians in the US have been angered by the decision of a New York gallery to exhibit a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ. The six-foot (1.8m) sculpture, entitled “My Sweet Lord”, depicts Jesus Christ naked on the cross. It was a Roman custom to strip naked those being crucified, and the Bible records the Roman soldiers dividing up Jesus’ clothes between them. Many will also note the statue highlights how Easter has lost much of its Christian meaning amidst the giving and receiving of chocolate eggs.

But Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever”…. The Catholic League, which describes itself as the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organisation, also criticised the timing of the exhibition. “The fact that they chose Holy Week shows this is calculated, and the timing is deliberate,” Mr Donohue said….

Mr Semler said the timing of the exhibition was coincidental….

It is not known whether the chocolate is fair trade. Link

So Matt Semler probably should have realized that Holy Week wasn’t the best time of year to mount such an exhibit, but who knows if he even knew what Holy Week is. As for calling this “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever,” that sounds like an overstatement of the facts. Aside from that, I too wonder if the chocolate was fair trade.

Leading up to Palm Sunday

Twenty-odd years ago, I was in the Harvard Bookstore buying a philosophy book when I saw, there on a little stand next to the cash register, a bright red pamphlet with the provocative title “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy.” Even though I wasn’t in law school (and had no intention of subjecting myself to that experience), I was a young left intellectual trying to make sense of the fast rightward drift of the Reagan years. On an impulse, I bought the pamphlet. I think I paid three dollars for it.

Within a few months, I had given the pamphlet to a friend of mine who was actually in law school. She needed it more than I did. But I remembered the pamphlet’s advice that students should form study groups. Stand up at the end of class, the pamphlet advised, and say that you will be forming a study group at such-and-such a time, at such-and-such a place. When I found myself in graduate school for creative writing, in 1990, I did exactly that. Not that I tried to form a left-leaning study group — by that time, almost no one leaned left in public any more — but I found that participating in any kind of small study group turned out to be a good way to fend off the crushing anonymity of graduate study. (Analogies to small group ministries in congregations would be well-taken.)

As the years went by, I drifted away from left politics, and drifted into religion. I felt that Jesus (and Buddha, and a few other religious geniuses) did a better job of articulating egalitarianism and the essential worth of all persons, than did the Frankfurt School or the New Left.

So there I was yesterday, back in the Harvard Bookstore, when I saw a trade paperback published by New York University Press titled Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic against the System: A Critical Edition:– a critical edition of the little bright red pamphlet I had bought twenty years earlier. I had forgotten how turgid the prose had been, how simplistic the political analysis. But that little red pamphlet still offers good advice:

Because hierarchy is constituted as much through ideology as through physical violence, it is meaningful to oppose it by talking, by joking and refusing to laugh at jokes, through the elaboration of fantasies as well as through the elaboration of concrete plans for struggle.

Let me hasten to affirm, O Reader, that not all resistance is equally heroic, or equally successful, or equally well-conceived, or equally adapted to an overall strategy for turning resistance into something more. I propose in the next chapter that law students and teachers should take relatively minor professional risks. All over the world, workers and peasants and political activists have risked and lost their lives. There is a gulf between these two kinds of action, and I have no desire to minimize it.

But they are nonetheless parts of the same universe, and we possess no grand theory telling us that actions of one kind or the other are bound always and everywhere to be futile, any more than we can no that the most heroic behavior will be always successful.

Tomorrow, those of us who are spiritual followers of Jesus of Nazareth will remember his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. That’s always the occasion for me to wonder whether Jesus’s acts of resistance in Jerusalem were well-conceived and adequately adapted to an overall strategy for turning resistance into something more. It’s also the occasion for me to think about how far I want to go with my own resistance to the inhumanity of hierarchy, with my own personal work to promote egalitarianism.

Not that I have a final answer to that question, but it’s something to think about.

Pilgrimage

Religions have been basically clueless when it comes to dealing with global climate change. Which is to be expected, because ecological crisis is so completely new, no one has a clue how to deal with it. Being clueless myself, last Saturday, March 24, I walked on the last day of the Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue. The walk culminated in an interfaith worship service in Boston’s Old South Church.

I know that a walk for “climate rescue” seems pointless;– certainly, the walk had enough trappings of 60’s “counterculture” (signs with slogans, chanting, etc.) to make it seem even more pointless. And like many interfaith worship services, the one last Saturday seemed more like a disjointed collage than a unified worship service. In spite of all that, interfaith worship services and pilgrimages on foot might be exactly the right thing to do right now.

I don’t know. You watch the video and see how you feel. (6:26)

Quicktime video — Click link, and where it says “Select a format” choose “Source — Quicktime”. Wait until the file downloads to your computer, and then click play. This should work for dial-up connections, and offers higher-resolution for all connections.

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

It’s not about belief

Recently, I’ve been bothered by ill-informed commentators and pundits like Richard Dawkins who assume that all religion is defined by some belief in a supernatural God. Those of us who are Unitarian Universalists encounter this attitude frequently;– I’ve had people say to me, “Well, you don’t belong to a real religion, ’cause you don’t even have to believe in anything.” Even some Unitarian Universalists worry about coming up with a statement of what they believe.

But belief is not the single most important defining characteristic of religion. Today I happened to be reading Introduction to World Religions, edited by Christopher Partridge, and I found some powerful examples of religions in which belief is not particularly important. For example, Hinduism:

Hinduism has no historical founder, no unified system of belief, no single doctrine of salvation, and no centralized authority.

And what about Confucianism:

Neither Confucianism nor Taoism is like Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — monotheistic religions with God at the centre. Confucianism, especially, became a religion without any great speculation on the nature and function of God. For this reason it was often not even considered a religion [by Westerners]. However, it clear that Confucianism is a religion, and that it was the dominant tradition of pre-modern China.

And this interesting bit about Judaism:

From biblical times Jews have subscribed to a wide range of beliefs about the nature of God and his action in the world… Reconstructionist and Humanistic Judaism rejected the supernaturalism of the past, calling for a radical revision of Jewish theology for the contemporary age. In more recent times, the Holocaust has raised fundamental questions about the belief in a supernatural God who watches over his chosen people….

Yes, Christianity is somewhat obsessed with belief in God. But it is wise to remember that outside a Christian context (e.g., as a post-Christian, or as a non-Christian), you can be perfectly religious without worrying one way or the other about belief in God.

Unitarianism in Nigeria

On Monday, I wrote a post about new and emerging Unitarian and Universalist congregations in central Africa [link]. Janice Brunson, member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix, has given me permission to reprint her account of her recent visit to a 90-year-old Unitarian congregation in Nigeria.

Her (fairly long) story appears after the jump….

Continue reading →

Just saying…

The string section of the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra needed a place to rehearse tonight, and we arranged to have them come to First Unitarian. I said I’d volunteer to serve as sexton for them, which meant I had to be up at the church from six to eleven tonight.

Carol brought her laptop down to the church to keep me company, and a woman from the South Coast Sustainability Network arranged to drop by so I could show her how to administer the Network’s Web site. Showing her the Web site didn’t take long, and she and Carol and I wound up talking for a couple of hours.

Now as it happens, this woman, a grad student at U Mass., is about twenty years younger than Carol and I. We had a great conversation, the three of us. In one sense, the age difference between us made no difference at all; but at the same time she really is in a different stage of life than we are, and she is part of a different generational cohort.

I like talking with people who are in a different stage of life, or a different generational cohort, than I am — it can be fun and even exciting (and once in a while frustrating) to get that different perspective. Which is my selfish reason why any congregation I belong to has to include people all ages:– it’s because I get bored just hanging out with middle aged folks like me.