A Lion in a Christian Den

A Lion in a Christian Den (My Ethnographic Church-Hopping)

            There is a well-known distinction made in the sociology of religion between religious belief and religious behavior. Ritual, that which engages in a public and thus shared manner of experiencing action in the world, with a view to integrating and maintaining community, is considered an external and thence observable set of behaviors. This is contrasted with belief, an internal sense or orientation that is in itself maintained by the faith in that said community. The most concise and accurate definition of their amalgam comes of course from Durkheim: “Religion is society worshipping itself.” Certainly, but what then of faith? In investigating this related, but different, question, I found myself over the past quarter century attending a diversity of churches in some very different geographic and cultural regions of North America. I will briefly summarize two outstanding examples below, before attempting an equally cursive analysis.

            Mississippi: For three years I found myself in the very heart of what Mencken sartorially called ‘a miasma of Methodism, a backwater of Baptism’ and so on, but in spite of appearances, these most deep southerners more endured the ritualism of their ancestral beliefs than exhibited any sheer fanaticism concerning them. As one neighbor of mine said, ‘We’re like 7-Up; you like us, we like you’. Amicable enough, but the rider to such a sentiment included the sense that one should live and let live in the very much ‘when in Rome’ style. I too was something of an appearance, even an apparition, being a stranger in the strangest land I have ever experienced. My ad hoc but abrupt criticism of people’s beliefs and behaviors could be put down to me being a foreigner, even an ‘alien’, but there is only so long a community of like persons can put up with such before inviting the interloper to take his leave. Before this inevitable moment came, however, I had been equally invited to a great number of churches, since there were not only a plethora of choices scattered round the haunted landscape but as well, I had a great diversity of contacts through my professional employ.

            I attended a Methodist church, where people of my ‘class’ – which did not merely refer to socio-economic status; not at all – and ‘race’ – self-explanatory in this region – and found it to be a convivial hearth of semi-reflective self-analysis. Much depends upon the minister, of course, his druthers and his education, and the more so, his concept of faith. These Methodists were engaged in a self-critique which did not extend fully into their society of upbringing, but preferred to lead by implication: ‘If I falter, it is not so much the sources of my character but the way in which I as a character behaves’. By contrast, the Southern Baptist Convention uttered criticism only in the direction of others. I attended an example of this denomination and found it to be in most ways the very opposite of the Methodists. It was overtly anti-intellectual, defensive in its posture, preening in its delivery, and was unconcerned about the hallmark of the distinction noted at the beginning of this piece; that people who heard the sermon could not recall anything of its content when asked promptly after service ended. It was enough to see and be seen. The Mormon students that were in my classrooms were an ingratiating bunch, and I visited their ‘spaces’ and found them to be genuinely interested in learning as much as they could about other viewpoints. These were young people, often quite literally on their youth missions, and they were, in this region, often at extreme risk for violence to their persons, as Mormonism remains the devils’ work in Baptist and Evangelical territories. I also worked with a Mormon colleague whose favorite band was Van Halen and who had taken a doctorate in the social sciences. All of this likely mediocre education had made no impression upon his beliefs, but had completely altered his behavior. I also attended the Church of the Nazarene. This community was made up of blue collar professionals who had climbed one social class above their parents. It was ‘whiter than white’, excuse the apt and oft-used regional expression, and my black students looked at me with great concern and dismay upon their faces when I related my experiences with that sect. And speaking of which, I also received invitations from Black Baptist students and these forays, simply due to my own status and the culture shock felt perhaps more by their community than by myself upon darkening their doors, made for what was by far the most genuine Christian experience of any. The Black churches were ebullient, joyful, and emotional without reserve and reservation. They certainly had their own version of the ‘false consciousness’ about them, and why not, given the circumstances of their parishioners. If salvation was unnecessary for many whites – the white churches exhibited a great self-assuredness not so much that they were in the right doctrinally but that those who accepted their sectarian sensibilities could do no wrong thus-wise – those black took up the work of being saved with great gusto and passion. In a word, the black churches were proud, the white, merely prideful.

            Cape Breton Island: An equally marginal economic and cultural region, this ‘white person’s reserve’ – again, excuse the local flavor – had unexpectedly a great many similarities to the deep south. It had been marginalized by historical and economic circumstances; all who could get out had gotten out long ago. It too had a haunted landscape, filled with relics, antique graveyards, historical sites and towns lost to time. The churches were, however, themselves mostly abandoned, which contrasted mightily with Mississippi and contiguous states. My wife and I sat inside venerable piles with less than ten others upon numerous occasions, and we were by far the youngest people present, with the exception of the pastors themselves, who were always in their twenties. The only church that was able to maintain any sort of community was that Roman Catholic, and all others were essentially extended family affairs, in perhaps a fitting mimesis to the original churches of this area, settled as it was so far back in European North American history as to have lost the ability to think itself into a future at all. The United churches had here become as had the Presbyterian and Wesleyan churches elsewhere on the continent; the last vestiges of an ailing demographic willing themselves in and out of a collective grave. Belief was sacrosanct, but in a politely delicate manner reminiscent of arsenic and old lace. There were no abandoned churches in the old south, not even museum conversions, but indeed this latter was the better fate of churches in Cape Breton.

            Whereas ritualism was mostly avoided in Mississippi and like regions, the Cape Breton churches gave the appearance of only being able to go through the motions, perhaps reflecting the very lives of their fading converts. Interestingly, tradition was cited as the chief rationale for maintaining such small parishes and this in turn implies that most active reflection upon faith itself had long been replaced instead by a rote genuflection. It was personally disturbing that the two persons who had reached out to us most intimately died almost immediately after we had begun our social ties with them, one in his 80s, but the other in her 20s. They had given us the distinct impression that they had been moved by our interest and our interpretations of their work, which made their unexpected passing all the more resonant of the general passage of the wider cultural landscape and thus religion within it. The only other kind of church in this region could be called ‘new age’, or even ‘hippyesque’, and my impression of these meeting places – like some evangelicals, they disdained the term ‘church’ and did not themselves use it – was that they had collected all of those who had no familial networks through which one gained access to either the Catholic and especially the United options.

            Yet in almost every other way of life, the deep south and the extreme maritime regions enacted the same sensibilities and nursed the same sensitivities. Though the American Civil War yet resonated in Mississippi, it was not impossible that the Anglo-French war, occurring a century and more earlier, did not still have some effect in Cape Breton. One could argue that the island never did recover from the final obliteration of Louisbourg. Its simulacra, a brilliantly executed if only slightly more profound version of Caesar’s Palace, did not, in its faux resurrection, bring any of the rest of the region with it into the very much seasonal light of a niche tourist market.

            Reflections: A small church is today simply a gathering place for those who have grown up together. It is both a surrogate and genuine family, and one cannot simply show up out of nowhere and expect to be treated as one of its own. This is what large suburban churches, such as the ‘Alliance’ network and like others, are for. Now living in Winnipeg, my wife and I have found a small church that in general acts in a Christian manner, but here too, because of my own ethnic background, a Mennonite church can afford to exhibit its ‘welcome here’. Both sides of my family are from Winnipeg, and I am myself connected to well-known scions of the Mennonite presence, even if at a generational distance. All of this is highly suggestive that due to both the utter erosion of religion’s explanatory power – its cosmogony has no such force up against scientific cosmology – and the serial scandals that plague almost all churches of whatever credo and covenant, many of them to do with sexual abuse, even the word ‘church’ has begun to accrue to itself a kind of difficult baggage. And just as, also sociologically speaking, all churches begin as cults, some also end the same way.

            At the same time, modernity has fostered its own hallmark of an absence of community, and at all levels and in all of its institutions. It is a relatively simple thing to debunk belief, and an objective history of consciousness has shown that the very concept of the soul is at the least a cultural figment, at best a place-holder for an as-yet unexplored mechanism of the human psyche. We are mostly content to have supplanted its presence with an amalgam of personal conscience and the law. We have thus successfully displaced the spirit and its mortal expression in the church, but a perduring question remains: how does one replace the human heart?

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Past Lives I have Loved and Lost, part 1: on mixing one’s metaphysics

If you have ever felt like you are living more than one life at the same time there are reasons for this. The usual suspects include social role conflict, serial relationships both at home and at work, and the transitions between life phases. But there is a deeper structure to our diverse sensibilities, and this has to do with the structure of consciousness, no less. Structures, plural, should we say, as there have been three types of metaphysics known to human existence. Their appearance is associated with the kind of social organization and subsistence pattern followed by respective human groups.

Transformational metaphysics hails from the period of ‘social contract’ societies; small groups, intensive hunting and gathering, pastoralism, and horticulture. Here, humans and animals interact intimately in a spiritual realm. One’s ‘animal spirit’ is a commonplace idea. Forces of nature and other kinds of objects also embody spirits. The level of abstraction and metaphor is low. Such relations are to be taken more or less literally. Upon death, one’s soul cycles back into the group at hand with little delay. Time is static and thinking practical.

Transcendental metaphysics is the hallmark of large-scale intensive agrarian societies. It is familiar in the doctrines of the religions that survive from that historical period. The gods are either personifications or abstractions, their communications with us are metaphoric and upon death, the soul is evaluated, either returning to embody some unlike form or never coming back, destined to dwell in some other realm. Time is cyclical and thought mythical.

Anti-transcendental metaphysics is the dominant mode of consciousness at present, and its recent advent is associated with industrial states and the rise of science. It is literalist, ‘realist’, and rationalist in its outlook. There are no gods or other realms of being, and no soul. Upon death, it is one’s material form that returns to the cosmos but it does so most modestly. Time is linear and thought ‘logocentric’, or linguistic.

All of this is old hat, but if you reflect on your own personal beliefs, which ones hail from which of the three forms of metaphysics? Often enough, each of us harbors an unquiet mix of unkempt beliefs and passions. One of many examples would include the sectarian person who is a creationist but drives a vehicle based on the same science that states evolution as a fact. We don’t generally even attempt a cohesive and coherent world view at the level of the individual, and we probably shouldn’t. More on this later on.

But at the cultural level it is a different story. Witness, for lack of a better term, the ‘naked kidnapping’ case from Alberta, where four sectarians abducted their neighbours, hoping to save them from the apocalypse. What next, you say? The two teenage daughters were arrested but not charged, which was reasonable. Indeed, if a church were to send naked teenage girls to our homes to ‘save us’ I wonder if many men would not in fact go rather quietly. But the prelude to paradise, perchance? That aside, such an event was inevitably interpreted by the psychopathology of the day as an aberration, and that the family suffered a rare form of shared delusion, in other words, something diagnosable.

No, no, and no. What occurred cannot be so simply dismissed at such a personalist level. This, and other less piquant episodes, are rather the symptoms of a conflict of metaphysical narratives. Transcendental metaphysics initiates the idea of history, yes, but also the end of history, the end of time. This event, the most important in this version of human consciousness, translates what already occurs to the dead into the world of the living. We are to be judged as we stand before a god; and naked, by the way. What occurs ‘after’ this is neither history nor time, but some other form of Being to be announced in its detail to those worthy of redemption. The naked family’s intents, by their own normative rubrics, were of the very best standard. They do not suffer from a mental illness, shared delusion, or criminal passion.

What they are, are anachronists, real ones, unlike the thespians who dabble in Renaissance fairs and the like, and cannot by definition be considered to be like most of the rest of us in any important way. They have, in fact, managed to construct a more coherent set of beliefs and intents – though they drove their unwilling victims off in a BMW SUV no less – than the average ‘normal’ person. But for this feat of self-coherence they pushed themselves so far off the spectrum of the everyday they cannot but be shunned and now, medicalized as well. Fine, we might say to ourselves, the rest of us have to live in the real world so also should they.

This reaction too is incorrect. Like a Pauline figure, the anachronist asks us ‘what is our world, after all’? What is the ‘everyday’ made of, and why? Why do we expect that the future is not only open-ended but also indefinite? How can human judgement be objective when the world is so diverse? How can one know what the right thing is? In a word, such a person questions both our metaphysics and our ethics and is, ironically, kindred to the thinker and culture critic. Now the philosopher does not abduct people, let alone doing so in the buff. Nevertheless, the questions themselves remain and they cannot be dismissed by mere psychologism, even if such persons appear to be so.

In anti-transcendental metaphysics right and wrong, good and evil, are irrelevant. Correct and incorrect, and perhaps even good and bad, yes. The first is based upon the mathematical sciences and the second on an humanistic ethics. These are the foremost tools of human reason available to us as moderns and they are impressive. Even so, the questions they allow us to ask of ourselves are quite different than those someone hailing from another metaphysics would ask, and indeed, would have us ask. Just so, we cannot know with certainty the outcomes of our ethical actions, nor is infinite certitude available to our evolutionary cosmology. We live in a godless, finite world of often cynical politics and self-absorbed hedonism; a world not entirely unlike that which Paul imagined himself confronting.

Which brings out both the sense and sensibility of the sectarian line: If the world seems threatening, then why live as we do? Why not change the world, why not save ourselves? This question has its origins in eschatological thought, that which promotes a self-understanding in the light of divine reason and the end of history. A ‘Kairos’, or arbitrary and yet decisive starting point, a moment where the world ends and a new world commences, is at the heart of the environmentalist, peace, women’s and subaltern movements. These quintessentially recent social critiques seek to both save us and begin a different kind of world. They are also immensely practical, for the end of life on earth seems to be a most impractical development. So how ‘modern’ are they, after all? The same question may be asked of ourselves as human beings.

In fact, these recent ideas are as mixed a bag as almost everything else human history brings to the table each morning. Their presence and their diversity argue forcefully that we should not attempt to be overly and overtly consistent within any one of the three metaphysical forms. The hard-nosed rationalist misses the mark existentially, the sectarian finds pragmatism incomprehensible, and the practical-minded communitarian forgets the larger picture and thus as well cannot accede to the cosmic question. If it is true that human consciousness has undergone three sea-changes over a period of some half a million years or so – its very origin, its shift into agrarian thought, and its recent upshift into that technical and scientific – it may be equally true that we as living human beings carry bits and pieces of all three around within our just as living and present consciousness.

So I am going to gently suggest that we remember to ask the questions a being from some other guise of ‘human nature’ would ask. Just so, those few who remain amongst us but appear as anachronistic must be introduced to the questions we moderns have invented and must, with increasing and dramatic urgency, respond to. This last is the metaphysical underpinning to any psychotherapy the two daughters from Alberta will no doubt now undergo; likely years of it, given that they stated they thought the RCMP officers were demons attempting to drag them to hell. No doubt as well, Freud and his followers have been called the devil often enough. However that may be, and whatever the outcome of such ‘rehabilitation’, unless we take seriously the critique of consciousness that emanates from the entire history of that self-same consciousness we may well be doomed in a much more literal manner than any sectarian had ever the literary flair to imagine.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over thirty books on ethics, religion, aesthetics, 

and social theory, as well as metaphysical epic fiction.