Christianity after Religion: Introduction

Small town churches, earnest preaching about how Christianity is about a personal relationship with Jesus, not about an institution, alter calls, bible study, Wednesday night prayer meetings, Bible verse memorization, ostracism, separation, the final days, the rapture—Diana Butler Bass’s Introduction to her Christianity after Religion sounded familiar to me because I lived it, much as she had, in the 1970s. Only, where Professor Bass hailed from a nominally Methodist family, mine was nominally Unitarian. Even “Jesus”—the name—came to me like a bolt out of the blue. So profoundly did this experience transform me that, following seminary in the 1980s, twenty years later I found myself writing my dissertation (arguably) about this very experience.

In her Introduction, Professor Bass documents the enduring character of the shift in spiritual temperament that she and I and millions of others participated in in the 1970s. Along with Harvey Cox and many others, Professor Bass finds evidence for this shift in the previous century, i.e., the nineteenth.

This awakening has been under way for some time now and has reached a crucial stage, as a new “Age of the Spirit” has dawned. Theologian Harvey Cox points out that this turn toward spirituality as the new form of faith started in the previous century. The 1970s were a significant period in a long process of moving away from old-style religion toward new patterns of faith. In the last decade, this shift has accelerated exponentially, sweeping millions more into both discontent and the longing for change.

Bass, Diana Butler (2012-03-13). Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (p. 6). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

And where many scholars have overlooked the trans- and extra-religious character of this transformation, Professor Bass notes that the shedding of institutional, dogmatic, and historical forms has scarcely been limited to the Christian religion. Describing the spiritual trajectories of childhood friends, Professor Bass sees in many of them clear evidence that the 48% of Americans who in 2009 admitted to enjoying some kind of mystical encounter:

The 48 percent is, if nothing else, a theological motley crew, diverse and pluralistic in their spirituality, as ineffable as the divine itself. But whatever the differences between these people, it appears that a good many of them are traveling new paths of meaning, exploring new ways to live their lives, experiencing a new sense of authenticity and wonder, and practicing new forms of community that address global concerns of human flourishing.

Bass, Diana Butler (2012-03-13). Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (p. 4). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Like Professor Bass, my research in 1999 showed a revival that spilled over narrowly parochial boundaries.

Taking this long view, the ‘spiritual situation’ of the age is not only what most clearly distinguishes contemporary social actors from social actors in other social formations or at other times, but also what most clearly shows our kinship with one another – irrespective of our religious (or non-religious) upbringing or our current beliefs and practices. . . . [I]t matters very little whether this preference is announced by a conservative evangelical Christian, a secular Jew, a liberal Catholic, a Unitarian, an agnostic, a western Buddhist, or a new age follower of Baba Ram Dass. What matters for our purposes is that our reservations over institutional or historical religions – religions embodied in documents and institutions, with established rites and rituals, religions that possess a history with which practitioners are expected to identify – are entertained by religious practitioners or adherents all across the religious spectrum. These reservations identify us as shareholders in the present age.

Joseph W.H. Lough (2009-03-21). Weber and the Persistence of Religion: Social Theory, Capitalism and the Sublime (Routledge Advances in Sociology) (p. 8). Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

Yet, unlike Professor Bass, I was inclined to lodge this gradual (in my view centuries long) migration not in changes that emerged in the nineteenth century, but rather in changes that first began to take shape in the fourteenth. And, rather than seeing in the shedding of institutional, theological, and historical boundaries evidence of a new “Age of the Spirit,” I was inclined to see in this transformation evidence of a much broader tendency to shed the body, not only of religion, but of the world as such.

As evidence for the latter, I at the time pointed and would still point to our suicidal pursuit of fossil fuels, a pursuit that quite literally entails a kind of self-immolation, the willing destruction of our own body writ large.

Not, to be sure, that all bodies are uniformly emancipatory. And, yet, as Hannah Arendt pointed out over a half century ago, there may be something inherently redemptive about limited, bounded, invented, built, constructed and therefore structured forms—institutions, written works, even recorded utterances—our compulsion to transcend the limitations of which may actually reveal a secret (or not so secret) death wish. We want to shed our bodies.

But, rather than locate this compulsion to shed our bodies (institutional or otherwise) in an inherent revulsion of tradition or order, I would instead locate this compulsion in the emergence of a new social form in fourteenth century western Europe—capitalism—that reproduces itself by turning upon and destroying its material form of appearance, its body. This shift in social reproduction—which has its own occasions—made possible that shift in religious subjectivity and practice that would eventually be known as the Protestant Reformation.

On a purely descriptive level Professor Bass’s account is intriguing, enticing. The spiritual transformation she describes and that I described is both global and durable. Her Introduction leaves me with two questions, which I am hoping she will answer:

1) what is the mechanism that has generated this global transformation?

2) is this transformation potentially emancipatory?