A Theology of Modern Art

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The Telos of American Practicality; or why theology is (practically) meaningless to church.

tl;dr
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The other day I found my head nodding in agreement as a friend talked about the need for churches to offer practical real world solutions.  We all nodded. 

Later that day found myself wondering “What the hell does that mean?” 
“What is practical?” 
“Whose practical are we talking about?” and an  idea began to form that the insistence on the practical answer in churches can be a rhetorical powerplay.

On the one hand, I am sympathetic to cries for churches to be practical, especially in light of all the committees and discussions that attend rather obvious things.  Much of the church’s lofty religious talk and theology is genuinely negated by its indifference and inability to address real problems in the world.  Worse still, sometimes all the "spiritual" talk seems like filibustering to keep from being accountable to real problems.  Church discussions very quickly turn into something like congressional discussions – they drag on forever and create no meaningful action.  Our own little church has had a fondness for creating teams to deal with little things at times. (“We’re forming a team to discuss refilling the copier periodically, etc.)

But just as much as being idealistic and impractical can be ways to dodge real meaningful action, being practical is also a dodge.  If you always do the obvious thing, you are only doing what society allows, not what the Kingdom of God demands, right?  Otherwise the world would heal itself.

Church can seem apathetic about discussing hard problems in depth with people these days.  (unless of course its about evolution or the end times.)  We want quick solutions to get working on.  We like action and results, even if they aren’t actually the results we’re looking for.  So I have grown to distrust the practical answer.   Not in immediate, urgent situations, mind you - “Get to the hospital,”  “don’t let the kids play with knives”, and others are still good advice, but I distrust the immediate impulse to get out of the clouds and get something done in our discussions about church life. 

When we gather to talk about things, people say, “let’s get practical, ”  but we don’t yet know what we agree and disagree on, nor do we understand issues in depth enough to see what’s essential or nonessential, so the immediate impulse to practicality is blind.  It assumes everyone generally thinks alike and sees the problem the same way.  So what's the endgame here?  What does our practicality drive us towards?

What is practical  is doing what society allows us.  It’s the prevailing ideas and actions our culturals form in us that are the practical ones because they are obvious to us..  What is “practical” is perhaps  the only course of action that the Power and Principalities allow.  The harder thing to do is to think; to be held accountable to bigger ideas and make decisions and take action from a different place than the world would.

Reflective action isn’t fast enough, it’s not productive enough.  And the older I get, the more I am convinced that the ambiguity of not knowing what to do is intolerable for Christians.  It is too threatening to face the feelings being unsure elicits.  Quick, practical action provides a sense of control and surety, but it becomes its own justification – because I’m being practical, it must be right, of that I can be sure. In my own experience of churches, the most practical churches are the most businesslike, hierarchical churches, because they are skilled at doing what works.

But Jesus wasn’t really practical, not with all the dying and resurrecting stuff – why not just do a better job recruiting the right kind of people to be his disciples?  He needed a better leadership structure.  Why should he have let the woman with the alabaster flask waste all that ointment on him?  The Gospel is effective, but not practical enough to be lived very often. We need practical action and thoughtful consideration in equal parts, but our American culture values practical action more.   I'm just pining for some more balance and wondering if to be the church in America means we must create a different space in the world to be thoughtful.

The Shackles of History and Its Amnesia

-Still churning on Foucault, and thinking about how captive we are to our own histories, both personal and corporate.

I've had more interaction with other pastors recently and it's been interesting because we always seem to talk about "moving forward," building healthy communities, generating positive achievements.  No one reckons with the past, or acknowledges much that they have one, even as a church.  Sometimes it's like talking to a bunch of really sincere medical equipment salesmen sometimes.

At the same time, it's been hard for a few friends to grapple with  emotionally difficult parts of their pasts.  But they are grappling, more so than some of the aforementioned clergy.  I've come away from though, with a deep sense of how well our world keeps us from understanding of ourselves as products of history, even though we think of everything else as a product!   (I want to speculate here that part of the power of whiteness, or at least its privilege, comes from not needing to have a history.)  As much as the church is impugned for not being forward-thinking, especially in regards to race and gender, I think the problem is that we are not backwards thinking enough.

The veil is behind us, not in front of us.

Anyways, James Baldwin expresses this concern, this consciousness, much better than I in his essay, "Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes."    Have a look:

    One wishes that Americans, white Americans, would read, for their own sakes, this record, and stop defending themselves against it. Only then will they be enabled to change their lives. The fact that Americans, white Americans, have not yet been able to do this- to face their history, to change their lives-hideously menaces this country. Indeed, it menaces the entire world.
    For history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On- the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be other- wise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.
    And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror, one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one's point of view. In great pain and terror, because, thereafter, one enters into battle with that historical creation, oneself, and attempts to recreate oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating; one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and also changes history.
    But, obviously, I am speaking as an historical creation which has had bitterly to contest its history, to wrestle with it and finally accept it, in order to bring myself out of it. My point of view is certainly formed by my history and it is probable that only a creature despised by history finds history a questionable matter. On the other hand, people who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing them- selves or the world.

Baldwin's comment about, "[a] personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power," is profound and the way Jesus liberates people - especially White Americans, somehow.  Our individualism begrudgingly admits to an examination of family histories, but there is a still greater examination of corporate history that we all embody, whether we like it or not.  We are in many way products, and don't escape our "product-ness" until we can reckon with the social machine that created us and make room to hear the voices critical of the machinery.

"Entering into battle with that historical creation, oneself" is the challenge, especially for white men.  To be set free from that and spend my energies on helping others disentangle themselves as well requires the power of the Kingdom of God.

My Worst Book

Let me begin with praise for self-help books.

I love 'em.

Seriously.  Yes, they are full of terrible assumptions.  They often glorify the self, reducing everything to psychological adjustment.  In many ways, they are the triumph of late modern capitalist democracies; technologies of the self that perpetuate middle class values. Sure.  Absolutely.

But often times they are also the best advice people will receive in churches today; not for lack of other opportunities, but because of the way modern lives are closed off from real relationships over time.  So for many people wrestling with their dysfunction, they provide guidance towards maturity that most people don't find in church communities, largely because they can never go there with people.  There is something about the safe interiority of reading, however, that opens people up to truths they would not otherwise hear.  Or maybe print just seems more official, learned.  Either way, there are a whole lot of people in my church who still need to read Boundaries because they aren't taking the hint from their friends, so even if I have to warn them to check every botched scriptural reference, I still want them to be be equipped with the concepts and help negotiate the boundaries in our relationships informed by people who have considered them.

And sometimes self-help books are not worth the carbon offset they require.

Case in point:  Mindset

I don't want to tee off on this book.  I am sure that the author, C. Dweck, a Stanford professor, has done a great deal of powerful research over the years with much to report.  But the book is really the most tepid pool of poor editorial decisions that you can imagine.  It feels cobbled together by the market and not the research.  This is too bad, because it's basic point is great: people can change.  Our capacities for growth are not fixed. In her research (which the book provides no access to), people with a "fixed mindsets" are often more limited than people with a "growth mindset".  The key then is to praise effort and practice more than achievement to help people grow.  Sounds great, right?

It should be.  Laying aside the industrial world's obsession with "personal achievement  and "fulfilling our potential," the book seeks to trace some cognitive aspects of what hope looks like in individuals.  This is a fantastic thing!  At the same time as Mindset, I was serendipitously reading an article on Middle East conflict resolution which also asserted that reconciliation occurs when people believe the other party can change.  Together, both pieces drew me to consider the message of hope in the Gospels, and specifically how it gets worked out in real people and real situations; what does hope look like?   Over the last year or so, God has been impressing upon me that I am awfully cynical for someone preaching that Faith, hope and love abide.  If  God can and does change things, perhaps I should be more optimistic about people in general.  Not naively, of course, but with hope that springs from the Risen One.

Understand, of course, the hope in Mindset has nothing to do with Jesus.  At all.  I just hoped to learn some things about being optimistic.  So I approached the book humbly, aware of how bogged down, faithless and stuck my own cynicism makes me.

But the book was really bad.  After divulging the main point in the first chapter, the rest of the book is full of the most banal, forced illustrations you can imagine with few practicals to teach people how to hope.  Particularly grievous were the sports analogies.  In comparing McEnroe to Michael Jordan, the author paints Jordan as this virtuous athlete who believed in the power of hard work to change, a basketball Jesus.  Poor Mac, though, was just a petulant, insecure athlete.  The book doesn't bring up how Jordan flew out his highschool coach to the Hall of Fame induction ceremony just to humiliate him.    Or the women, or the gambling....  As a sports fan (I admit it) the book instantly looses credibility by forcing the example soo hard to make a point:

"Hey I like rap.  Are you into the Fresh Prince, too?"

My negative reaction is probably proportional to the hype surrounding it, but this sports example points out  how painfully formulaic the book is;  "Athlete X is great because he demonstrates my principle  _______." 

/spoiler alert/
So here is my basic problem with the book:
It is ironically, shallow enough to feel cynical, feel like it was cobbled together by editors who washed out the real research and instead tried to imagine how they could reach the common person they describe by various market-share formulas.  There really is no research in the book, no real depth, and once you read the first chapter, you have the whole book, and yet there is soooo much buzz surrounding it.  Apparently no one was ever told "keep trying, you can grow," before.  If you want a perfect, short synopsis of the main points, check out this education website summary instead and give the money you save to a worthy charity.

(As an aside, I kept wondering if there's a warning here somewhere for the interminable Bible study booklets people are forced to use in church.  Doubtless you know the type:

• a paragraph of vague background material/summary
• 3 questions about specific verses in the passage 
• a concluding, "what are you going to do now" question. 

When you see a small group of people trying to study a new book of the Bible, wait and watch their faces when somebody suggests they could read one of those study guide pamphlets to help them.  The expressions I've seen pretty much confirm that their formulaic nature doesn't really satisfy.)  
/aside

So the book fails badly at being a book and that's too bad since the main point is solid.  Maybe I should be glad for the hype surrounding it.  It could mean people are genuinely being helped.  I dunno.  Since I've picked it up, I've discovered that there is an attendant Franklin-Covey-ish product line and seminar opportunities in tow, all of which seem even more cynical somehow; a great way to take a dollar while telling people something they probably have heard before.  I wish there were more emphasis on the research findings, and less terribly forced stories to make the point.  At least Cloud and Townsend's generic stories illustrate the points they are making.

Which brings me back to self-help books in general.  What separates the good from the bad?  Writing really does make a difference.  I feel like I could write a "how to write a self-help book" manual because the styles and arrangements are so similar.  Mindset almost mocks this with its paucity of substance and preponderance of chatty examples that demonstrate very little.  At the very least, poor writing can obscure any good intentions.  Take this blog, for instance...

I'm back.

Hello,
I'm back.  My sabbatical was lovely, thanks.
One of my conclusions is that writing and blogging is a healthy discipline for me since it allows me to think and argue about things the daily scatter of a pastor's life doesn't always have room for.  Important things.  The danger is that I so very much want to have something to say, but I shall try and temper this.  In the sage words of Whitesnake, "Here I go again...."