Tradition in a Reactive Culture

Note: This is part five of a series on Tradition. Here are parts one, two, three, and four.

In my last essay, I unpacked some of the origins of deconstruction and pointed out how it is an inevitable product of modernity. Deconstruction pulls at the possibility of relationships, of symbol and meaning, of self to self. Deconstruction is the perfection of modernity’s idolizing of the self; it reduces all who practice it to irretrievable isolation within themselves. In the end, deconstruction leads the practitioner to lock the door from the inside of themselves, subjecting what is left of themselves to an endless ruminating scrutiny. They end in something like despair (although I do not know precisely what to call it because even despair seems too constructive a term). Yet, for all of the grim by-products of deconstruction, many questioning Christians are turning to it as a desperate last resort–perhaps as a great barbaric yawp or just a final cry for help. They are turning to it as a way to confront what they are experiencing as traditionalism in its obtuse, manipulative, and even traumatically abusive forms. Like someone who tries to cope with chronic anxiety by taking up cigarettes, though, the ‘solution’ can create a much more disastrous problem. Thus, if we in the Church have a concern for these seekers who have entered onto such a perilous path–as charity demands we do–then we have to ask why they might risk the road of deconstruction. We must ask how we may have inadvertently nudged them in that way. In this essay, then, I’d like to return to the matter of when tradition gets twisted up, and focus on the relationship between tradition and our current culture of reactivity, exploring how our churches have an opportunity to meet or succumb to that reactive culture. 

Culture is the sum-total of relations and functions emerging from a central organizing principle or set of principles and practiced in community. Culture describes how those relations and functions operate intramurally, toward or with each other. It can also describe how they operate interculturally between cultures. Churches have cultures, but the Church is not a culture or a culture-function. I can think of no better voice for describing our current cultural moment than Peter Steinke, a student of the systems-theorist Edwin Friedman, the student of Murray Bowen. Steinke’s unique contribution to the discussion of systems-theory dynamics is its application to religious congregations, observing how they experience anxiety and reactivity in special ways, and how they are especially situated to develop healthy communities with some education and practice. In his book A Door Set Open: Grounding Change in Mission and Hope, he notes that America has decisively shifted from the assumed security of a ‘Christendom’ atmosphere to the relative uncertainty of a ‘post-Christian’ atmosphere. I use the term ‘atmosphere,’ to describe this cultural climate because it largely concerns the less-than-tangible trends and tendencies in American culture that go unnoticed unless observed with great scrutiny. Among the trends and tendencies of Christendom America was the fact that people used to simply “become a member of a local congregation, contribute money and effort, participate in communal events, volunteer time and goods, and worship regularly or at least several times a year.” These cultural habits went largely unnoticed and were generally assumed for decades. Now, however, the atmosphere of post-Christian America is comprised of “many dispirited, bewildered, paddling-as-fast-as-we-can, struggling, or conflicted congregations[...]” (Steinke 9). At one point the Church could generally assume an amenable cultural context in which to operate, and that the propagation of its traditions would not encounter much overt resistance. In fact, the Church would generally count on culture to nominally propagate its main ideas. Now, however, churches are encountering the demand to present the Faith and its tradition into a culture climate in which there is a much narrower shared sensibility. The intrinsic pressure of this change, coupled with the unfamiliarity of the new environment, have created a condition of general anxiety in how the Church and the culture view one another, resulting in a cultural regression from a habit of open dialogue to one of entrenched, reactive suspicion. 

None of that, of course, is newly insightful; many have observed a similar shift. What is less obvious in Steinke’s analysis, however, are the symptoms of our regressively reactive and anxious culture. Steinke notes seven particular traits of our post-Christian culture in America. First, he observes the presence of postmodernism, which we covered at length in the previous essay. Second, he explores what he calls a ‘dogmatic atheism’ that has villainized religion in general and has argued strongly that belief in God is not only unnecessary but that belief in God is also reprehensible in itself. Third, Steinke points to a ‘supermodernity’ which tries to overcome the creep of irrelevance in modernist confidence by abstracting places and by encouraging consumptive superabundance. Supermodernity obsesses over the ‘global,’ which is ultimately incomprehensible, reducing our sense of being in a place and detaching us from a sense of equilibrium with that place through consumer diversions. Fourth, science has become a new religion for some as the ultimate voice of authority for connecting reality together. Fifth, religion has become a lifestyle choice, a way of dressing up life with selective ritual to medicate one’s sense of loneliness in the cosmos. Sixth, a rise in ‘neuroenhancement’ has led to the casual use of psychotropics as a means of escaping the crushing sense of alienation from others and from the universe. Seventh, Steinke notes a return to gnostic tendencies of disembodiment that free us from a sense of the tragic grind of history. Here we find areligious and anti-traditional ‘spirituality’ that makes oracles of us all in our discreet silos. None of these seven traits particularly align with any of the others; they represent a fragmentation of meaning and meaning-making left in the wake of abandoning the ancient Faith grounded in Scripture and its traditions of prayer and formation. The culture is not mounting a concerted effort against the Faith so much as it is tearing itself apart from within. Like a dying animal, it is bound to lash out against even a voice that might be trying to calmly help.

In the face of this cultural fragmentation, however, many churches have not responded by non-anxiously retranslating the traditions of the Faith to meet the spiritual needs around them. Instead, we have seen a strange resistance to authentic evangelism. Instead there has been a kind of panic among churches that the American culture is shifting to a post-Christian posture and that it is coming apart. Curiously, this panic is not out of concern for those being eaten up by the chaos, but a real surge of survivalism among Chirstians as though they were personally endangered. I have observed a few possible reasons for this. For one, some churches have actively benefited from complicity with the Christendom-culture of America. To the extent they have founded themselves on the ease of a relatively unchallenging culture, they may not feel prepared to meet the challenge of greater cultural animosity. For another, some churches seem to be cheering on the dismantling of Christendom-culture, but for problematic reasons. On the one hand, some churches have distanced themselves from cultural engagement and seem to relish in the idea of the secular culture getting what they feel it deserves; if it is coming apart, that is its own fault. On the other hand, some churches have centered their practice around fundamentalist novelty, regarding as suspicious anything that has happened since the time of the Apostles. For another, some churches of what was once called the ‘emergent’ strand have become the engines of cultural shift toward postmodernism by conflating Christian practice with deconstruction. In general, these movements are short-lived because it has become so much easier and rewarding just to be an ex-Christian instead of a deconstructing Christian. Finally, some churches seem to be frozen by confusion over how to translate the traditions of the Faith so that the Gospel can be proclaimed and people can be formed in a language they understand.

Beneath these reactions to the cultural shift, however, we might observe in churches what is observable in individuals who are faced with a break with familiarity: the panic responses of fighting, fleeing, freezing, or fawning. Unless a person or church is formed deeply in habits of prayer, in good teaching, and in a healthy community, it is unlikely that they will resort to the presence and ministry of the Holy Spirit when confronted with crisis. They will be much more likely to act out in these unthoughtful, knee-jerk ways. Our tendency to react ultimately betrays the ways we tacitly or openly believe that the Church is a function of culture and not a distinct entity that is bound by charity to presence in the culture. It is true that our culture has become antagonistic to the integrity of the Gospel, but we are not free to become combative by way of grandstanding, protesting, or pugilistic apologetics (fight). It is true that American modernist culture is experiencing its own end-game, but we are not free as Christians to abandon it (flight). It is true that much of the old language of evangelism will not apply anymore, but that does not mean that we should bury our heads in the sand of a frozen periodic nostalgia and wait it out (freeze). And it is true that many American churches got too cozy with the culture and aided its violence and ambitions in exchange for benefits and peace, but that does not mean we are free to abandon the past by becoming accessories to the new culture (fawn). 

The response of traditional churches needs to be a return to the heart of our tradition. It will not be found in dogmatic formularies, in canon laws, or in ritual notes, although these are very important and can be very stabilizing. As Fr. Martin Thornton spent his writing career affirming, the core of the Church’s practice is in its habits of prayer, in its ascetical community. The Church’s formation in prayer, in its experience of life before the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit, among the brethren is the nucleus of what the Church is in any generation and it is the thing the Church meaningfully imparts to each new generation. Before anything else, ours is the way, the truth, and the life because it is the tradition through which people learn how to pray, how to encounter God. This is the one omnipresent quality of the Church since the time of the Apostles, and out of it has come the articulations of theology, the governance of the Church and its ministries, and the observance of its liturgies. These engagements with culture require for their stability the one, truly trans-cultural activity of the Church and that is to experience God. The unity of the Holy Spirit is the ground for any meaningful cultural conservation, progress, affirmation, or critique. The consolation of the Spirit is the only power that can save us from a life of endless reactivity to the changes of our world. 

How do we live as Christians in a post-Christian culture? We might look to the iconic quotation of Stanley Hauerwas when he said “the first social task of the church is to be the church.” We have to be renewed in a constant practice of prayer, of experiencing life with and in God. Until this is a firmly established habit for us individually and in community, we will likely just recapitulate the cultural practices with a religious veneer. We will contribute to the confusion of some future generations and set them up for greater calamity when cultures continue to change, as they only can do. We have to become again the place and people among whom those who have been hurt by the fragmentation of culture or by the reactive excesses or deficiencies of other churches can come and experience a counter-culture oriented around a trans-cultural encounter with God. We have to practice what we preach; we have to become a place where the traditions of the Faith are handed down in a community that is aware of its situation in a shifting culture and which deliberately practices spiritual stability in the midst of it. Each of us has to return again to a pattern of prayer in community, to the self-examination and confession that emerges from it, and to the charity that points us outward to seek those who need the healing presence we have experienced. We can only give to our unstable culture the stability we have received from beyond it, both from those who have gone before us and from God Himself. 

In truth, we do not ever immediately know at the moment we experience such cultural shifts what to do about it–no previous generation has either in their times. We know in retrospect what they did or did not do, and maybe even what they should or should not have done. And some future generation will judge us as well. For those who seemed to live well and testify to the Gospel, who inherited and bestowed the Faith with integrity, they all began with a return and renewal of prayer in communion with each other. They became again by grace the Body of Christ on earth again, in union with the saints in glory. In our final essay of this series, we will discuss what this kind of reconstruction of a traditional practice of the Faith looks like in greater detail. Until then, may we be given grace to meet this shifting moment of history with thoughtfulness and courage as only the Spirit of God can create, bestow, and sustain.