While watching syndicated news networks last night to follow the Congressional health care vote, it dawned upon me how shallow all the discussion was. I know, I know, this is not news. But it is news to me, since I don’t usually watch such networks, and haven’t for a very long time.
Reflecting on this a little more, I realized how intellectually impoverished our society really is. Where can the public go for real, substantive, effective debate? The press only allows for sound bites. Important issues are considered impolite conversation in mixed groups. Election-time debates are usually never that, but an hour long ritual where people repeat the same arguments they repeated on the last election cycle, with more recent political errors (and there are always enough for every party to use against the other) inserted to replace the ones from the last term.
What do we have left? The Internet?
Andrew tweeted about a study that LifeWay did in which they found that those who do not attend church prefer gothic cathedrals to contemporary church structures. The goods from the report:
“People who don’t go to church may be turned off by a recent trend toward more utilitarian church buildings. By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio over any other option, unchurched Americans prefer churches that look more like a medieval cathedral than what most think of as a more contemporary church building.
The findings come from a recent survey conducted by LifeWay Research for the Cornerstone Knowledge Network (CKN), a group of church-focused facilities development firms. The online survey included 1,684 unchurched adults – defined as those who had not attended a church, mosque or synagogue in the past six months except for religious holidays or special events.
‘Despite billions being spent on church buildings, there was an overall decline in church attendance in the 1990s,’ according to Jim Couchenour, director of marketing and ministry services for Cogun, Inc., a founding member of CKN. ‘This led CKN to ask, ‘As church builders what can we do to help church leaders be more intentional about reaching people who don’t go to church?’’
When given an assortment of four photos of church exteriors and given 100 ‘preference points’ to allocate between them, the unchurched used an average of 47.7 points on the most traditional and Gothic options. The three other options ranged from an average of 18.5 points to 15.9 points.
‘We may have been designing buildings based on what we think the unchurched would prefer,’ Couchenour concluded. ‘While multi-use space is the most efficient, we need to ask, ‘Are there ways to dress up that big rectangular box in ways that would be more appealing to the unchurched?’’
The report states elsewhere that this trend holds true for those who are from Roman Catholic and Protestant backgrounds and is even stronger among those in their 20s and 30s. This may be something as simple as a whether a building fits into your symbolic order – when one thinks of the word “church” certain associations or images are unavoidable. While having an older style of church building won’t necessarily draw people in, when they do come they can connect their surroundings to their expectations.
There may, however, be another factor at work here. Most contemporary church structures are architectural disasters. Most fall into the trap of looking either a warehouse (though sometimes that’s what the building was originally) or a shopping mall. I understand that much of this is a result of pragmatic thinking. It’s often cheaper and easier to buy up a swath of industrial park or soon-to-be-developed farmland and stick a couple multi-use rectangular boxes and ample parking on that land. Or is it? Walk through a city like Toronto and it’s easy to see all manner of abandoned or nearly-abandoned church buildings. The capacity of religious structures – and handsome gothic-revival ones too – in this city must far exceed the church-going population here. In the ‘burbs I understand that the situation might be different, but most suburbs are grafted on to what were once farming communities that often had their own churches as well. Many of these buildings are burdens on their congregations and/or denominations and I imagine that they would only be too pleased to have new tenants to share the structures that they own.
Maybe this is not a workable solution for every conceivable Christian community in search of a new digs. It is an alternative though to the mindset that what a new church really needs is to build some hideous new ticky-tacky shopping mall-like structure. At any rate, if a church community has choice between building a new monstrosity of a building and being a tenant in an old gothic-revival sort of place, we can now say with some confidence where those who are not going to church expect the church to be.
Recently Peter Leithart has been posting on the significance of the just war criteria. A few notable quotes:
Pakistan has been one of the staunchest American allies in the region, so staunch that it’s regularly denounced in the region as a US puppet. Now we’re bombing Taliban who have fled across the Afghan border into Pakistan. Islamabad charges that we and our allies have killed several hundred civilians, and has asked us to stop. Islamabad sees our missions as a violation of their national sovereignty. Islamabad has nukes. But we keep sending in the drones. We’re risking that testy alliance, and also running the risk of throwing Pakistan into a domestic crisis that might topple the friends that remain.
Plus, the bombings often fail to meet the requirements of the classic standards of jus in bello, justice in the conduct of war. Daniel M. Bell has recently noted that “it is not enough that just warriors do not intend the death of noncombatants,” he writes, “they have a responsibility to exercise due care in avoiding noncombatant deaths and protecting them from harm.” …
I believe in just war, but I feel the sting of John Howard Yoder’s complaint that in practice just war theory is toothless, incapable of doing anything but endorse whatever “military necessity” demands. If the church is going to be a credible witness, both in the US and to the Muslim peoples of the Middle East, that charge must be put to rest.
And also:
In the previous post, Jim Rogers asked what can morally be done about enemies who use innocents are human shields? That’s a difficult question, but I’ve found Daniel Bell’s discussion helpful (Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State). …
…the response should be ”to be more discriminate. Instead of using air power, one might have to send in ground forces. Instead of using a tank or artillery, one might have to use infantry. Instead of using an M-16 or hand grenade, one might have to use a sniper.” He admits that this rigorous standard might mean that a military target will have to be left intact for the time being, until it’s possible to mount a discriminate attack, and he would also admit that, despite all precautions, innocents get killed. But Bell takes the standards of jus in bello as rigorous demands that cannot be simply dispensed with when they get difficult to apply.
The fact is, much of modern warfare is unjust by just war standards. One does not have to be a pacifist to see that. Yoder was right to point out the implication of just war theory is that it is at least possible that the only just thing to do in some situations is surrender.
A long time ago on this blog we discussed the sociology of belief surrounding politics and religion, or more concretely, why it is that so many religious and political beliefs seem to come as a “package deal” (when a person believes x they also tend to believe y, even when there is no necessary logical connection between to the two).
This is something I’ve had to revisit in different ways over the past few years, and I’ve decided that I think the motivation behind the “package deal” mentality is ultimately rational, and probably based on the social nature of human beings: we have to trust people to function, and that includes trusting others in belief formation. At the same time, beliefs formed in this way ought to be held as corrigible if they are only held for that reason: if an individual in such a group comes up against a good argument against the social consensus of that group, then that individual is obligated to look into the issue more directly.
And this brings me closer to my point: I’m not sure where I fit on the contemporary political spectrum. I have a few political issues I’ve made my own through studying them fairly thoroughly (just war theory, abortion, gay marriage), and my opinions would tend to lead me, socially speaking, to support the Conservatives (or, if I were American, the Republicans). But, at the same time, I have seen enough intelligent criticism of the right wing on matters of geopolitics and economics that I find it fairly difficult, cognitively speaking, to just trust the right wing because I agree with them on other matters.
What do I do?
From Philip Jenkins’ modern classic, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2nd ed.):
Any knowledgeable observer in the 1790s would have concluded that orthodox Christianity had reached its last days, and of course, this sensible opinion would have been absolutely wrong. In the early nineteenth century, orthodoxy and tradition made a comeback, as did the papacy and, indeed, the Jesuits. The rationalism prevailing in many Protestant churches was overwhelmed by a new evangelical revivalism, which received an enormous boost from the revivals that began in 1798. Far from dominating the American scene, Unitarian-Universalists today comprise around .02 percent of the U.S. population. So thoroughly was eighteenth-century liberalism obliterated that many modern writers tend to assume that its ideas were invented anew by Victorian skeptics and rationalists, or perhaps grew out of the controversies over Darwinian evolution. Then as now, the triumph of secular liberalism proved to be anything but inevitable. (11)
Writing in Eye, Kate Carraway remarks on what she calls the tyranny of stuff:
“As my friends and I become more and more situated in our adult lives, it seems that the need we feel to both accumulate and keep random debris is informed by a secretly and malignantly aspirational urge to hold on to something lost (track-and-field medals), or to be someone else (red-sequined shorts) or to know other things (uncracked books) or to rebel against not having money to invest or buy better stuff by spending blindly on smaller, shittier, more attainable stuff (DVDs, H&M separates, IKEA everything). At best, the stuff we have contributes to our lives and even our identities, but unchecked, it holds us in thrall, a tyrannical presence with a heavy price tag.”
I have too much stuff: music I don’t listen to anymore (if ever), stereo equipment that doesn’t work, video games that aren’t compatible with the computer own, clothes that don’t fit, an espresso machine that I don’t use, roof racks that don’t fit my car – and this is just the stuff that is nakedly useless.
I wonder if Tim Keller talks about surplus stuff as one of his counterfeit gods in his eponymous book on idols (Note to publishers: I’m not above taking free copies of books to review them and stuff). Think about the power of stuff, you probably have at minimum a shelf or drawer of things you don’t need or never use, some people have whole rooms or garages of stuff.
In my previous post on determining the method for finding essentials, I discussed two steps in the process I think we need to follow to carry out my proposal: we first read for explicit statements that state what I defined as essentials, and then deduce what is implicit in such statements.
One step I overlooked is something not quite covered in either of the above: non-explicit statements of essentials in the words of the apostles. In other words, we also need to take into account the non-explicit communicative intent of the apostles when doing our survey. It is possible, for example, that the structure of a Gospel might communicate something about the essentials of the faith in a manner that is not stated explicitly. I actually don’t have any such example in mind at the moment, but I am just pointing out that it is possible the apostles could communicate this way.
This is obviously an area where things will quickly get complicated and contested, as the more subtle communication becomes the more difficult it is to be sure one is not reading into the communication something is not there. But nevertheless, we should ultimately take such things into account.
Continuing with my last post, I want to clear up the kind of methodology I think needs to be used to determine what the apostles teach are essential doctrine for the church.
The first step in this kind of study would, I think obviously, be simple gathering of data. The kind of data needed for this essay would be statements that explicitly say some belief is required for salvation, or that denial of some belief puts one outside of Christ. Obviously all that needs to be done at this stage is simple reading.
The next step, however, is a bit more complicated. Obviously language functions in a system of meaningful signs, and understanding those signs implies being able to explain their meaning. Thus any statements we find in the previous step must be understood: we have to be able to explain what they mean beyond simply repeating the words. Implicit in this step is deduction: we deduce the meaning already implied in whatever statements we discovered in the first step, so we have a fuller understanding of what they already exclude.
What needs to be noted here is that this kind of deduction is elucidating a kind of “implicit meaning” which is significantly distinct from the kind of “implicit meaning” that theories of the development of doctrine articulated by Cardinal Newman teach is present in the words of the apostles. For Newman, later Magisterial teaching only must be present in the early church in “seed form”, which functionally speaking means “there must be something analogous to the later teaching in the earlier teaching.” But obviously analogy is a much weaker connection than deduction, since everything is analogous in one way or another to everything else, and thus this method of reasoning can be used to establish that any teaching was “present in seed form” in another teaching. Thus (for example), the early church had bishops, and Papal infallibility is analogous to Episcopal authority (in that it is authority exercised by an officer of the church), therefore Papal infallibility existed in “seed form” in the early church.
Deduction, on the other hand, traces out things that necessarily follow from other things. Again, it is this latter kind of reasoning that needs to be applied to the statements of the apostles, because only this kind of reasoning does not add to what the apostles were teaching. We have to be careful not to slip from deduction into analogizing, or else we might slip from doing historical analysis into pontificating ourselves.
Some links to kick off November:
Atheists face a schism of their own?
Hitch reflects on his time debating believers (and manages a plug for Collision).
Hyundai spins the now notorious “Epic Parking Fail” in Thornhill into a modest PR win.
The Tall Skinny Kiwi explains why he is not a New Calvinist.
