Church and the larger culture
The obituary for Philip Rieff in today’s New York Times has this as a description of his first book, Freud: the Mind of the Moralist:
It argued that Freudian ideas, which gave rise to the idea of the ‘psychological man’ as the dominant moral type in the 20th century, had had a corrosive effect on Western morality and culture because such an individual tended to relate all public questions not to received traditions of communal morality, but ‘to himself and his own emotions.’”
I happened to be reading in the last couple of days a little book by Franz-Xaver Kaufman, a German sociologist. In it he repeats a thesis he has been defending for a couple of decades: that the differentiations of social life that almost define modernity–the erection of relatively autonomous regions (e.g., the state, the economy, education)–meant in good part the denial that religion had much, if anything, to do with those realms; that the 19th and early 20th centuries saw the parallel concentration of religion into its own realm, the institution that is the Church (he calls this “the Churchifying of Christianity”); and that what has been happening particularly since the Second World War is a “de-Churchifying of religion” that runs parallel to the rapid individualization of morality in the larger society. The result is something like the slogans still sometimes heard: “Jesus, Yes; Church, No.” Or the distinction (quite new in fact, but threatening to become canonical) between “spirituality” (inner; mine) and “religion” (outer; theirs). The interest of the two positions is that they place what can be observed within the Christian churches (“the new individualism,” Charles Taylor calls it) into the context of larger societal and cultural movements that can’t be dealt with, on the one hand, by moralistic indictments of hierarchy or, on the other hand, by stamping-one’s-foot appeals to authority.
Fr. Komonchak:
This is a rather challenging bit of blogging. As to the first point, Rieff’s critique brings to mind Karl Kraus’s aphorism that psychoanalysis is the disease of which it pretends to be the cure, i.e., I suppose, it tends to engender an unhealthy preoccupation with one’s own feelings to neglect of everything else, all the while claiming to liberate one from such a preoccupation. Woody Allen was amusing way back when in a physical way, but all too soon he began to make films in which so many of the characters were Woody Allen variants.
I do not know Kaufman’s work. One feature of modern society is the rise of experts who command attention in a variety of specialities. Now in the natural sciences it is quite possible to become expert, and progress in knowledge both theoretical and applicable is beyond doubt. This computer I am using is a case in point. In the human sciences the situation is rather mixed. In the historical sciences there has certainly been progress, but the application of historical knowledge to contemporary problems is not a straightforward business. Be that as it may, in fields like education, economics, sociology, psychology, political science, insofar as these disciplines are presented as offering authoritative guidance in the solving of contemporary problems, those who pretend to speak with authority, who claim a certain expertise, so often fail to agree with each other, yet cannot convincingly refute each other, that one begins to suspect that their claims are the offspring of bias, more pretence than reality. Still it is a fable widely agreed upon that these experts speak in some degree with the voice of science and so cannot be ignored. In fact they are often employed at public expense. In contrast those who claim to speak with religious authority are thought to say things that have “validity” only for those who, as private matter, accept that authority. Being religious is like being the fan of some team–fan is of course short for fanatic. One should be respectful of such loyalties, but ultimately they are as private and irrational as falling in love. The Church then is like a fan club. But if a fan club claims to define the orthodoxy of fandom for a certain team, the fans may claim a right to go their own way. Who, after all, is to say what a true Red Sox fan must believe, much less behave?
Cultural trends of which one disapproves are notoriously difficult to do battle with. Those who isapprove are ipso facto t discounted. And solutions often have the unintended effect of worsening the problem. Hence, perhaps, Rieff’s recommendation of “inactivism”. The kingdom of God is after all a gift, not to achieved by human ingenuity. “What to do?” as Lenin said, but of course he was wrong in thinking he had the answer.
Joe K,
You have an interesting piece here, or challenge as Joe G writes. Would it help if you developed it further? How much has the internet culture changed things?
How about our parishes? Have they more often than not been ethnic rather than religious, more Italian, Irish, etc. than Christian?
Even today except for the families who have their children in the parish school there is hardly a community. And those families separate when the children go to high school.
Seems like the churches encourage individualism. Have they been won over by it?
Is our community more NCR, America, Commonweal, VOTF, CTA , First Things or the Wanderer? Further, there is a different community formed by prayer groups, charismatic or right to life groups.
So aside from the Jesus yes, relgion no, is there another level which says my Catholic group yes but the parish no? Which does present or expose problems with the parish which should center all aroung the Eucharist. Not that the other groups do not. But the parish is hardly basic or significant anymore is it? Something seems wrong here.
I confess that I read most of Fr. Komonchak’s posts as through a glass darkly, due, I’m sure, to my own inability to think as deeply as I ought.
But I found the “churchifying of Christianity” idea fascinating, as well as the difference between “spirituality” and “religion.”
Just some questions that arose as I read the post and Mr. Gannon’s response:
Does “churchifying” (relegating religion to inside the church, if I understand it correctly) apply to all religions, not just Christianity?
If religion is “off limits” among people of different faiths, does this help them work together to, say, run a public school system?
Or does making religion “off limits” merely prevent people from getting at the underlying values they share and want to propagate?
What are some other differences between “spirituality” and “religion”?
It seems to me that “spiritual” has become loaded code, depending on whom you’re talking to.
I know people who construe “spiritual” as someone with a do-it-yourself religion, almost synonymous with New Age. So it riles up church-goers and church-haters equally.
“Spiritual” is also used almost as an apologetic adjective that I hear increasingly in church funerals, as in, “She was a very spiritual person, even though she didn’t attend church much.”
For others, “spiritual” is a compliment, but it seems to merely mean someone in tune with some Unseen Sphere, or at least someone who thinks about stuff besides material life. I’m always asking what “spiritual” actuall means to people, but the answers are all over the map.
Has “churchifying” become so pervasive that people even have the language they need to talk about religious/spiritual experience anymore?
Jean,
If you are puzzled by the variety and the vagueness of the ways in which people use “spirit” and “spiritual” you are not alone. There is a cliche one hears “body mind and spirit” which is supposed to indicate some sort of holism of approach. I think I know what a body is and what a mind is–or at any rate is supposed to be–but what the reference to spirit adds is obscure. It gets into English from the Latin spiritus, which in turn translates the Greek word pneuma, which in the New Testament is used frequently and its sense there must be influenced by the Hebrew word ruah. The original concept is breath, then, since breath is a sign of life, it is used of life and the principle of life in us. But in the Hebrew way of thinking God breathed life into Adam, if I remember correctly, so there is a connexion with God, and this is elaborated in the New Testament especially by St. Paul, whose use of the term spirit might be described as varied and not easy to pin down. I have a lexicon of the NT. The article on spirit goes on and on.
Actually I think we could say that “spiritual” in current and generic usage makes a vague reference to a certain distancing from the mundane along with a concern for higher things or some ultimate reality, variously conceived.
Individualism sounds pretty bad according to Rieff. But which of us would change the way we experience ourselves as individual agents in the world– relating to others and operating within social, political, even ecclesiastical spheres– for the way our forbears operated? And which of us could do it, in any case?
Charles Taylor talks about the “social imaginary,” a kind of “embodied understanding,” of the world and our possibilities within it that forms the background and context to our moral choices. For Taylor, it isn’t that during history certain ideas and attitudes have been found to be rationally flawed and therefore we have cleverly dropped them in favor of more correct ones. At a certain point, for many complex reasons, including but not limited to a critique of previous thought, the cultural perspective that makes it possible for us to conceive of things in certain ways, shifts, and we see things differently from those who went before us.
Anybody old enough may recall a time when local churchmen were fond of prefacing stern instructions to the faithful with the confident but somewhat content-less aphorism, “error has no rights!” When John Courtney Murray at Vatican II seemed to have put paid to that way of talking and thinking about the matter, the warm popular response to a more respectful way of treating individual rights didn’t require extensive “full-court press” hype from the clergy. The faithful were there long before the official seal of approval was given to their sense of what was only decent.
Bill: The relation between the traditional territorial parish and various groups of movements within the Church is much under discussion today. Many regard the parish as outmoded because of ease of travel, etc.; others think it’s too large and impersonal. On the other hand, some argue that the territorial principle is important theologically, for the integrity of the Church’s identity, in that it means that everyone within that territorial space is welcome no matter what class, ethnic group, political party, etc. you might belong to; whereas the groups and movements tend to be self-selecting.
Jean: Kaufmann’s work studies Christianity in western Europe mainly, so his thesis about the “Churchifying” of Christinaity (Verkirchlikung, if you want the German word) applies to the Catholic and Protestant churches. I don’t know if he has applied it to other religions.
I can illustrate the question of language by quoting someone who recently wrote: “Since the Council Catholics have become more spiritual and less religious.” She was responding to a comment that the Council was followed by a decline in such activities as attending Mass. “Religious” in this context seemed to refer to the rules and regulations of organized religion. “Spiritual” seems to have referred to inner authenticity, or something along those lines.
When I was in the seminary, “spirituality” referred to the area of theology in which the spiritual life was studied. Your spiritual adviser didn’t ask you “How is your spirituality going?” but “How is your spiritual life going?” There was a recognized reality called “Chrisian spirituality” holding much wisdom, on which one was expected to draw for guidance in one’s own spiritual life.
The meaning of “spirituality” now often seems to refer to one’s own spiritual journey.
I also don’t like the fact that the distinction seems to imply that “religion” means simple externalities, as if it did not always imply inner personal commitment. This marks a change even from William James’s highly individualistic definition of “religion” as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine”. For James religion was primarily inner; all the other stuff was secondary. Now in a not uncommon use, religion has become identified with the external, and all those “feelings, acts, and experiences” come under the individual’s “spirituality”.
Thanks for everyone’s posts on “spirituality,” its etymology and current usage.
I’ve noticed that “spiritual direction” has become more popular in my diocese, as a way to encourage Catholics to seek “spirituality” within the bounds of the faith, perhaps.
Possible minor point of interest: Many Unitarian fellowships (such as the one I was raised in) offer house room for people who want to be “spiritual” in the Jamesian sense but not “churchy,” as in the “holy roller” sense.
There is a deep mistrust of “church” among Unitarians–and many of the “unchurched,” I would guess–”church” implying authority, authoritarianism, rules, punishment , exclusivity, all interwoven with unpleasant personal experience, I would guess.
Most Unitarians have “de-churched,” but their children tend to “re-church,” if they have any interest in religion at all. A “cradle to grave” Unitarian is darn near impossible to find.
Last year, on the 100th anniversary of great publications of Einstein and Freud, NPR offered NPR presented some incisive pieces on how their contributions affected us.
Listen to this one on Freud:
1905: Science’s Miracle Year
Freud’s Nephew and the Origins of Public Relations
by Alix Spiegel
Enlarge
Public relations pioneer Edward Bernays, shown (L to R) from the late 1920s to early ’30s, the mid- to late ’40s and 1990. The Museum of Public Relations
Bernays Reflects On…
• Public Relations
• A Hearty Breakfast
• His Efforts for Ivory Soap
Archival interviews courtesy of the Museum of Public Relations
Morning Edition, April 22, 2005 • Years ago, Americans grabbed toast and coffee for breakfast. Public-relations pioneer Edward Bernays changed that.
Bernays used his Uncle Sigmund Freud’s ideas to help convince the public, among other things, that bacon and eggs was the true all-American breakfast.
He took Freud’s complex ideas on people’s unconscious, psychological motivations and applied them to the new field of public relations.
This story is part of a series commemorating the scientific breakthroughs of 1905. That was the year Freud published his seminal work, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Albert Einstein published most of his important papers.
As the program relates. Freud was angry at his nephew’s misuse of his ideas that would be typically used by Americans for greed; even Bernays himself was shocked at the outcome of what ge’d done.
Freud then, the “Father of Spin,” created a world we now enjoy where manipulation and perception management serve at the altar of power and greed. The virtues of modesty and humility and the distancing of avarice from the capital sins have corrosively undermined community to the individualism and division that grows apace.
Nor is the American Church hardly exempt from this process; witness all the episcopal statements on the sex abuse crisis.
Shortly after reading this posting last night, I opened the evening paper here; a lengthy letter to Editor by one of our Hindu members of the community responded to an evangelical’s complaint about the High School graduation address that had taken lesson from the environment to emphasize our interdependence and the need to continue to search widely for wisdom. No Jesus, no bible, the evangelical had proclaimed.
“Don’t shove Jesus down our throat…,” the Hindu man wrote and then quoted an old song from an old song from India: “Into the bosom of the one great sea flow streams that flow from every side. Their names are various as their springs. And thus in every land do men bow down to the One Great God, though known by many names.”
If our Church is to be a stream of wisdom in our multicultutal society, it strikes me we must return to the early (pre-spin) days where folks marveled at “se how these Christians love one another” – a love generated by the breaking of the bread among many.
It would also help if we took the view from Luke 9 that instead of “not being like the rest of men,” we could start by recognizing we need the mercy of God; beyond that, that we could strive all together again to fulfill the Master’s desire for our behaviour staked out in Matthew 25.
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In the TLS for June 30 there is a review of The Spiritual Dimension by John Cottingham. Cottingham, whose background is analytic philosophy, although he has written extensively on Descartes, is out in this book to defend religion against its philosophical despisers; but he also has a good word for psychoanalysis in so far as it does seek self-knowledge and Augustine is suggested as a parallel. The author of the review is one Janet Martin Soskice, unknown to me, but she is sympathetic to Cottingham’s effort and appears to be a believer.
I think the idea of a territorial parish has limited application except in the most remote of locations. People (mostly urbanites) now have access to parishes that best suit their needs. If one tends toward the more traditional liturgies, parishes that promote that are available. If someone doesn’t feel comfortable in those parishes that (over)stress families, there are parishes that focus more on adults. If ethinicity is important, ditto.
My parish in San Francisco is comprised mostly of the LGBT communities and most of us travel a significant distance to be there.
This all, of course, flies in the face of traditional ecclesiology that states that the parish for all within its geographical boundaries. True in theory; less than true in contemporary practice. Is is wrong to be selective in one’s parish membership? It is better than dropping out all together.
I just ran across this point and I pass it along. Paul uses the triad “spirit soul body” only once (1 Thess. 5:23), and he appears to be first one to do so. Elsewhere he speaks of spirit, soul, body and flesh, often contrasting one of these with another. Some commentators think he is thinking of the three (spirit, soul body) as components of the human person, but the more common view seems to be that he is thinking of three aspects rather than three components. This, I gather, would be a distinctively Jewish way of thinking and not what Greek philosophy would lead us to expect. If you have access to the New Jerome Bible Coimmentary there is a good discussion in the chapter on Pauline Theology.