Today's post will be a bit different. I will begin with a brief excerpt from an article written by Peggy Noonan in the summer of 2011. A thoughtful man in my congregation asked me how I thought her observations impacted religion.
I thought it was a good question! Instead of writing him back directly, I thought I would share my comments in the blog so others may hopefully benefit. Today I will write about those who share Noonan's feelings of cultural unease and import it into their religious practice. Tomorrow will share an alternative view.
I am always looking for new material to think about, so send me more!
From Peggy Noonan (July 2011)
This Is No Time for Games
Ronald Reagan wouldn't be playing 'Targeted Catastrophe'
But there are other reasons for American unease, and in a way some are deeper and more pervasive. Some are cultural. Here are only two. Pretty much everyone over 50 in America feels on some level like a refugee. That's because they were born in one place—the old America—and live now in another. We're like immigrants, whether we literally are or not. One of the reasons America has always celebrated immigrants is a natural, shared knowledge that they left behind everything they knew to enter a place that was different—different language, different ways and manners, different food and habits, different tempo. This took courage. They missed the old country. There's a line in a Bernard Shaw play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession": "I kept myself lonely for you!" That is the unspoken sentence of all immigrants toward their children—I made myself long for an old world so you could have a better one.
But everyone over 50 in America feels a certain cultural longing now. They hear the new culture out of the radio, the TV, the billboard, the movie, the talk show. It is so violent, so sexualized, so politicized, so rough. They miss the old America they were born into, 50 to 70 years ago. And they fear, deep down, that this new culture, the one their children live in, isn't going to make it. Because it is, in essence, an assaultive culture, from the pop music coming out of the rental car radio to the TSA agent with her hands on your kids' buttocks. We are increasingly strangers here, and we fear for the future. There are, by the way, 100 million Americans over 50. A third of the nation. That's a lot of displaced people. They are part of the wrong-track numbers.
So is this. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because being a parent is hard, and not everyone has the ability or even the desire. But in the old America you knew it wasn't so bad, because the culture could bring the kids up. Inadequate parents could sort of say, 'Go outside and play in the culture," and the culture—relatively innocent, and boring—could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Popular songs, the messages in movies—all of it was pretty hopeful, and, to use a corny old word, wholesome. Grown-ups now know you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed. And there isn't less bad parenting now than there used to be. There may be more.
There is so much unease and yearning and sadness in America. So much good, too, so much energy and genius. But it isn't a country anyone should be playing games with, and adding to the general sense of loss.
So what does this mean for religion? I think for some it means much. Many churches and Christians base their faith on a warped longing for the past. As Noonan states, they feel like refugees in the midst of confusion. Religion becomes the anchor that keeps then stable in the midst of turbulent cultural seas. All a church needs is the underlying message that "our faith" is the "old-time faith and values." Then, the church attracts other cultural refugees who have the same feeling of lostness and alienation.
What does this look like? I believe it is the foundation for many fundamentalist and conservative churches in America. I use these terms broadly, and I hope not in a pejorative manner. While much of the doctrinal conservation of these churches is commendable, their approach to culture and outreach is marked highly by this refugee feeling. For them, evangelism means to come and embrace our culture.
Their message is "Be like us and be saved from this evil world."
These churches live and thrive by condemning our "secular" and awful culture. There is often a high emphasis on children and children's ministries, because these churches fear for our youth.
Another manifestation of these church is their wholehearted embrace of 1950's style of worship, church governance, or church social networks. They might be reluctant to change anything of worship style because of an underlying fear that such a change will be giving in to a secular age. Any attempt to change even the smallest element of worship will be seen as proof of secularization. In the same way, church woman's groups may reflect this tendency. By emphasizing "staying at home" and by having ministries during the day they harken back to a day in the 1950s when less women worked outside the home. Unfortunately, they also silently condemn those women who cannot make these meetings because of work.
What is interesting is that churches can and do grow using these methods if they can tie into enough "cultural refugees" in the surrounding culture. Most of these "cultural refugees" will be churched or formerly churched with Republican/political conservative values. This type of church will have a hard time reaching out to those who embrace today's culture.
This refugee feeling also has manifestations in the lives of the individual Christians who inhabit these church.
I have seen refugee individuals and families apply this mindset in two completely different directions. One manifestation is the culture rejecting Christian. This believer and their family, in defiance to the culture, dress and act like people who live on a farm in the 1950s. To help them in this cultural rejecting stance, they often gather into a church of like-minded people. Like the Amish or the strict Mennonites, they do offer an alternative! One side effect is that they silently but clearly condemn anyone who is not like them. In my experience, the children of these families either whole-heartedly embrace or reject this lifestyle.
The second direction runs in the opposite direction. These believers want their families to fit in with other families. They allow their children to dress like and to play with all types of people. What is different is they pick certain cultural phenomena as demonic while embracing the rest. They also join rigid fundamentalist churches. These families are interesting contradictions. They truly live, believe, and affirm a totally different world view on Sunday than they live, believe, and affirm the rest of the week.
Why? I think Noonan is onto something here. These churches are picked to help "raise the children." The rest of the culture is evil, so we sprinkle in the church to make all the difference. The unarticulated assumption is that the church can be the anchor that holds our children in the midst of the raging cultural seas.
As a youth pastor for years, I have seen this many times. The entire family structure is not Christian, and it is not shaped by a Christian worldview/framework. It has particular elements of culture it condemns, often rather loudly and condemning of those who do not reject these elements as loudly. Yet, the children are left for the culture to shape and form. The parents may love their children, but they do not do a good job of raising them to think Christianly. Instead they expect the youth pastor and church to somehow "save" their children, while embracing a culture that points away from the gospel.
Tomorrow, I will talk about an alternative view of religion in America. I will offer an opinion on how the gospel cuts through these tendencies to reach out into the culture with Christian understanding and thought.
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