It is continually repeated in the evangelical Christian world that the greatest battle and the biggest choice of our time is between belief and secularism. We, as evangelicals, are set up to believe everything we hold is under attack from “secular humanists,” and as a response we seem to be called to a nearly militaristic defense of the sacred and significant from the onslaught (Wallis, GODS POLITICS, p 345).
Jim Wallis, in his book “God’s Politics” takes on the issue of belief vs. secularism in an enlightened way. Wallis writes, “Prophetic faith does not see the primary battle as the struggle between belief and secularism. It understands that the real battle, the big struggle of our times, is the fundamental choice between cynicism and hope. The prophets always begin in judgment, in a social critique of the status quo, but they end in hope-that these realities can and will be changed. The choice between cynicism and hope is ultimately a spiritual choice, one that has enormous political consequences.” (p. 346)
Wallis goes on to describe cynicism as a sort of retreat for the “smart, critical, dissenting, and formerly idealistic people who are now trying to protect themselves. They are not naïve. They tend to see things as they are, they know what is wrong, and they are generally opposed to what they see. These are not the people who view the world through rose-colored glasses, the ones who tend to trust authority or who decide to live in denial. They know what is going on, and at one point, they might even have tried for a time to change it. But they didn’t succeed; things got worse, and they got weary. Their activism, and the commitments and hopes that implied, made them feel vulnerable. So they retreated to cynicism as the refuge from commitment.” (p 346)
Wallis is right. Cynicism is protection. It allows one to live with the world at arms length, a comfortable distance shielded by a combination of doubt and apathy. It keeps one from looking foolish or naïve, always able to hold hope at bay. Cynicism is a completely selfish mode of behavior, for it is all about self-preservation, safety and security. Cynics just have to look out for #1. So no wonder there is such a rampant lack of morals in our country. If people are looking out for number #1 because it’s the most secure thing to do, then why not make it pleasurable and easy?
The key to battling “secularism” is not found in building stronger forces of militaristic morality. It has to start from a different place, at community. We as believers must stress three things: community, social activism and beauty. All three of these is rooted in the hope we have, and that hope is rooted in one of the things that I can agree on with Mohler. It is a hope rooted in the grace we have been gifted by a just and loving God, a grace that is free and undeserved, but a grace that calls us to live lives that produce the fruit of the Spirit, community and social activism, not divisive politics and moral superiority.
I could spend countless paragraphs on community and activism, but Wallis does it much better in his book. And if Wallis is too “left” for the conservative people out there, then pick up Donald Miller. He has a fair amount to say about it, too. What I feel best prepared to discuss is the matter of beauty, and at the same time respond to the assumed problem of postmodernism in society. Once again, like secularism, post modernism (read: pomo) is seen as an enemy of the Church, specifically labeled so by the fundamentalists and religious Right. Pomo is most certainly synonymous with pluralism, and it is no big step in logic to connect pluralism with secularism. But we must remember that all these things are symptoms of cynicism (anyone tired of the “ism’s” already?). Certainly, Mohler has recognized the cornerstone of contemporary critical theory that devaluates absolutes and claims “the death of the author.” Yes, these pomo ideals are a threat to the claim of an absolute God and the infallibility of scripture, which gives absolute law, absolute salvation and absolute grace. Yet we know our God and His WORD is greater than these threats and cannot be knocked down by them. It’s just a tough go for us. In fact, it seems as though people of faith are losing the battle on many fronts. I can’t help but think its because we are fighting pomo in the wrong way. If the people of the contemporary western world are going to wallow in the cynicism and selfishness of pluralism and secularism, then perhaps we need to find an alternative way to live out and share our faith. The wallowing is just getting worse. And what is most unfortunate is that many believers are starting to get pretty comfortable in the mud, too.
Perhaps the best way to counter…wait, maybe counter is too strong of a word. Let’s forget about battle analogies and first recognize that pomo is not going to go away, it is a paradigm of our society and will remain so. Instead of vilifying it, why not embrace it and work within it instead of always remaining diametrically opposed. The church’s opposition to the times only allows the cynics to label us as “old fashioned” and “close minded.” Let me start over. Perhaps the best way to SHARE OUR FAITH WITHIN A POST MODERN SOCIETY is found though a reconsideration of who God is with a reconstruction of the language that we use (after all, pomo is all about language) into a language that more freely and openly describes a God of beauty. Are we not all created with the ability to recognize beauty? This ability is an absolute that no pomo philosopher or critical theorist would argue with. In fact, many of them are writing on the subject right now, and have been over the last 10 years (see authors/philosophers Dave Hickey, Arthur Danto, Crispin Sartwell and Elaine Scarry. And they aren’t writing on beauty as a simple aesthetic value but instead writing on what it means across cultures and beyond the contemporary period. Most simply, beauty can be defined as the expression and experience between a person and an object of beauty. It is an active, experiential term, not an adjective that describes an object or person as “pretty”. It is more than that. Beauty is the interaction of a redemptive God and the justified, it is an interaction and interconnectivity with creation, it is a well-made tool, it is something desirable.) Isn’t beauty something every human longs for and searches out? What if this longing for beauty that we all experience is located in the same place as that “God shaped hole” we all seem to have?
It is through Beauty- the beauty of creation and the Creator- that we find Truth, Justice, the Poetry of Grace and the Word of Redemption (check out those LANGUAGE terms. And for more on the interconnectivity of beauty and justice, see Elaine Scarry’s fantastic book, On Beauty and Being Just.). Moreover, there is a power in our faith and within our scriptures that the contemporary church leaves largely untapped. This power has been strangled out and relegated to the outskirts of theological thought since the Reformation and the iconoclasm that followed it. In our desperate defining of Absolute Truth we have forgotten the beauty and poetry of our faith and scriptures. Our idea of truth too often relies on concrete vocabulary, provable fact and theological doctrine that leaves little room for imagination and aesthetic appreciation. Instead, why can’t the contemporary church take a lesson from the Romantic poet John Keats who, after viewing the timeless, transcendent beauty of the scenes sculpted on the side of a Grecian Urn (see Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819) declared, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” And that is in response to a piece of pottery-the work of the hands of man-an urn, no less, used to hold the dead!
How much more beautiful is creation, the Creator and the grace He openly gives to all? H
ow much more beautiful is the Object we worship, for He holds Life- life abundant, life fulfilling, life everlasting. But a society steeped in relativism has a hard time seeing the Life we’ve been give by grace because we choose to wrap it, along with our hope, up in the ugly, divisive clothes of religious fundamentalism and moral superiority. What could happen if we focus instead on Beauty? Society is crying out for it and desperately needing it. And I believe it would readily accept it. We worship ultimate Beauty and Truth, and it is proven that the appreciation of beauty leads a society to justice and the establishment of a moral code (see Scarry). So why not point to the God of creation instead of the God of our limited, specific counter social/cultural group of moral legalists? Why not experience the God of beauty in a way that causes us to treat each other, our enemies and the poor in a beautiful way? What would happen to the cynicism of postmodernism, or more importantly to us, if we reflected the beauty of Grace and spoke a new language of truth and beauty in this divisive, tumultuous, ugly time? Perhaps things would seem a lot less antagonistic.
-Jared, May 21, 2005
