Consider this an epilogue to the three parts in this series that precede it. There are a bunch of random themes and ideas that didn’t fit into the already too-long earlier pieces, and I have been thinking about whether it would be worthwhile to continue on in successive parts to explore them. But the nature of these pieces was more apologetical than it was an attempt to get into a more developed exploration of central Christian themes. To do so would not be interesting or helpful for skeptical people outside looking in, and for the most part redundant for people already alive to the mystery at the heart of Christian belief. I don’t have much to offer that can’t be find fairly easily elsewhere.
The main challenge in this series of posts was to explain to the skeptical why it could be both plausible and sane to be an orthodox Christian. And in doing that I was giving a personal view that relates pretty much to my own working things out in a way that makes sense to me. And while there is nobody I am in any kind of dialogue with about these issues–no one I know is personally interested enough in these questions to engage me on them–I am also aware that I a swimming in a larger stream. I’d situate myself somewhere between the emerging church folks on the evangelical side and the radical orthodoxy folks on the Anglo- and Roman Catholic side.
I’m peripherally aware of both these movement, but am not involved in either or know anyone who is. Both of these movements are directly engaged with our human predicament as postmoderns, and it seems to me that if you want to think, really think, about religion, and Christianity in particular, you have to do it in a postmodern idiom. I know the word sounds pretentious, and it’s too connected with a French academic jargon that hardly anyone understands or cares to. But I do think that there are essential insights into our current condition to be found in postmodern thought that have to be grappled with and ultimately passed through.
We are all postmoderns now whether we like it or not, or whether we are aware of it or not. That being said, it doesn’t matter what Lyotard, Derrida, or Foucault think about it, but how we in fact experience our lives in this time of cultural fragmentation, decentering, and spiritual torpor. To say we are postmoderns doesn’t bring any relief from the condition it tries to describe. It is at this point no more than a cultural sensibility that has not really defined itself on its own terms, but only with the prefix "post" to suggest not what it is but what it is not. We are no longer moderns. Modern habits of mind persist, but the zeitgeist has moved on, and we’re in an in-between time. And Christians have just as legitimate a role in trying to define what comes next as anyone else. And if what Christians contribute in this defining of the globalizing era that lies ahead is inspired by the liberating spirit of the gospels–as opposed to the fascism of the Christianist right–the world will be the better for it. I would argue, along with people like Chris Hedges, the Dobsons, Falwells, Robertsons and Haggerts are inspired by impulses that are profoundly anti-Christian–and they have to be called what they are.
These people are the proverbial devils quoting scripture. They are cult leaders just as manipulative and misguided as Jim Jones and Rajneesh. They open their mouth and Christian-sounding words come out, but there is nothing of the spirit of Christianity in them. Their goal is not freedom but seduction, and in a confusing transitional time as ours is, huge numbers of people are vulnerable to spell that they cast.
There have always been such false teachers among us and always will be, but the threat they pose at this time is far more significant than most ordinary Americans have grasped. These Dominionist or Christianist leaders are not just foolish and mistaken, they are dangerous, and a containment strategy must be developed to neutralize their influence in the political sphere. For they provide the political ballast needed by those who are already laying the groundwork to transform our democracy into an authoritarian corporate state. It’s chilling. They see themselves as fighting to save the soul of America, but I see the more important task as fighting them to save the soul of American Christianity.
So I don’t know. The radical orthodoxy folks might be laying a foundation for something important that will be built some time in the future. I am sympathetic to their liturgical focus, their Christian neo-Platonic metaphysics (I too am a fan of de Lubac and von Balthasar), their politics, and their project to turn secular postmodern thought on its head. They are all about recovering or retrieving treasure from the premoderns what the moderns foolishly cast off. Such themes interest me deeply, but, for me anyway, they are issues to be grappled with once the present threat abates. Right now it is more important that we find a less abstruse, more accessible narrative that will offer to those attracted to these Dominionist frauds something better.
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