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"After a number of decades as a Christian, passing through several different iterations of the creed, I'm convinced Christianity needs a Christendom."So said a recent blog commenter. Many people recoil from the idea of an intentional Christian community as if those people (in some misguided Benedict Option cult-mindedness) are unwilling to engage with the wider world. It's odd to me that we build our lives around all sorts of things, but when we mention building our lives around Christians living next to other Christians and sharing in a liturgical life together, it's seen as some form of white-feathered retreat.
For my part I find it odd that we think Christianity is done any favors by living in places that are hostile to it. We can acknowledge the unitive effect of cheering on a sports team and know for certain that wearing a Cowboys jersey in Philadelphia is going to get you jeered at publicly. And yet we live in places where neighbors call the police on Bible studies where too many people show up, our society permits all opinions in public debate except those that have a religious origin for fear of being non-inclusive or threatening, or we find ourselves trying to instruct our children in one way of living while our schools push their institutional bias towards intolerant progressivism.
We seem to want to plant ourselves in dirt that is hostile to us and pretend like the soil doesn't matter. Or we feel called to be Christian in the modern world with a complete unwillingness (or paralyzing fear of being rude) to actually preach the Gospel to our neighbors. Said another way: If you want to live in the world and believe it to be the way Christians should be, you have to actually evangelize. Believing that Christians shouldn't retreat into safe, parochial small towns where everyone agrees with one another must be matched with your (and not some imaginary apologist who "has time for that sort of thing") robust evangelical effort.
If the pressure to secularize is omnipresent and the will to evangelize is missing, how can anything other than complete secularization occur? And how can it be anything other than hostile to a religion that "stands athwart history, yelling Stop"?
So, I'm not advocating for walled communities of Christians living in fear of the big, bad areligious soccer mom wearing yoga pants. I am saying that you cannot both live in a civilization barreling towards a societal cliff and be unwilling to point that fact out to people. You cannot look down your nose at people who want to build a network of families who pray and live together and also hold yourself blameless for where our society is headed as you sit there silently effecting no change.
Move to where other Christians are and make lots of Christian babies or convert people and build the Church up that way. Sunday worship apart from evangelical acts isn't going to cut it. If you seriously believe you are supposed to be planted where you are, you have to bear fruit.
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Excellent topic near to my heart.
ReplyDeleteIn the context of Orthodoxy, in my experience the subject is difficult because of the way Orthodoxy was born and continues to live "ontologicaly". Everything we do as a parish (and by extension the individually as we are formed by the parish/liturgical/ascetical praxis of Orthodoxy) is "borrowed" so to speak from Christendom - and a particular version of that Christendom in the form of the Eastern Church and it's two main branches: the Christendom of Byzantium/Ottoman empires and the particular Slavic Christendoms.
In other words, everything we do is informed by a different time and place, a different Christendom (that the western one that is now in its "secular" phase). We have imported this Christendom and apply it to our NA secular culture/habits/praxis/"lifestyles"/way of being in a very (very very) naive, unconscious, and ad hoc manner. Then we act bewildered at the results (and we are).
So it is not just a "why" (which we are not even adequately acknowledging the question, let alone wreslting with it), but a how.
You put forward the how but this is not the Orthodox way and has not been for a very long time. Orthodoxy assumes another kind of Christendom, culture, and circumstance, so nothing that occurs in the life of NA Orthodoxy points to your last paragraph - on the contrary.
This is not to say I disagree with you - your absolutely correct. It is to say however that you have imported this recommendation from outside and are not really supported by the status quo of Orthodox parish life as is found in *everything* it does...
Bruce Charlton makes the point that the modern Christian literally has no conception or experience of the Church qua Church as the early Christians and the Apostolic Fathers did. The thought discouraged him so badly he's not really in the Faith any more. (It doesn't help to have a prickly, genius-level personality).
DeleteThe mature Church arises through inter-generational succession of weddings, baptisms and funerals, with the liturgical cycle of feasts and fasts a part of public life. So everybody helps everybody to be a good Christian. The young are brought up in the Faith, and the foolish protected from error. Outside this model, Orthodox parishes will tend to be a revolving door of adult-age converts.
How to get from secular democratic society to there, I have no answers. Rod Dreher to his credit is taking a stab at it.
I'll add that in my slice of Orthodoxy, the parishes on balance are doing well and the priests and bishops are happy. I know from a friend who has talked very closely with a prominent Athonite monk that they admire and approve of the course of American Orthodoxy, jurisdictional messes and all. So there is plenty that is being done right. Thanks be to God.
DeleteDo you have a link (or a book) where Charlton lays this thesis out? I have yet to read Charlton.
DeleteFor a while now I have realized that my own parish (of which I have been a part of now for > 10 years, about half my Orthodox life) is "a revolving door of adult-age converts..." or what I call a parish full of folks (not everyone of course) who are not Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, but rather Moralistic Therapeutic Theists. They are not completely unaware of the faith-as-cult, but they have no experience of it nor any clue as to how to be a cult through time (marked most obviously by the passing of the faith on to children). An inward looking, individualistic, and therapeutic way of being Christian/Orthodox is simply not lasting and "a revolving door" is one of the signs.
Like you point out, not all parishes are like this. That said, when I have been part of parishes that were deeper it was because they had a core group of a few key families who who had managed to not compromise with Secularism to the more usual level, and thus in a real sense keep Eastern Church Christendom "alive" in this NA circumstance. Chalk me up as a pessimist, but I don't see this as a long term solution. Secularism has a very good record at breaking this pattern - usually in just a single generation.
Jake - blogspot's search function is pathetic so I can't find the particular post. The phrase is "church qua church" if you're better at Google than I am. Charlton's site is here: https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/
DeleteMind you, he is a strange personality, so it's easy to see parishioners giving him a wide berth at coffee hour, but I was intrigued by this idea. There is simply nothing like the Church of antiquity left any more. Our modernist perspective would be as alien to the Byzantine Christian as it would be to Black Forest pagans. The secular State and its corporate creatures are now the preeminent institutions in human affairs.
Thanks Anti-Gnostic. Pursuing his writing for about 30 minutes just now, in my judgement he is defiantly an accomplished dialectical thinker, able to discern presuppositions behind "normal" understanding and examine these in novel ways that lead to (idiosyncratic, negatively speaking) novel positions/thoughts. On the positive side, he reminds me of men like Florensky & Bulgakov, or more recently D.B. Hart. On the negative side (noting the inherent anger, tinged with perhaps paranoia, behind some of his words) he reminds me of broken genius such as Bobby Fischer (not that Charlton comes across as that far on this continuum).
DeleteOddly to me (perhaps simply because he is still on the 'outside' of a Traditional Christianity? I could not determine if he is a parish going RC or Orthodox) his critique of modernity and everything else appears tied to an existentialist self and being (ontology) - which is why he appears to be a (even self avowed) modern Gnostic, by which I mean a *real* Gnostic (not the much more common new-age sentimentalist). Does his "divine self" really escape a Cartesian gnosis and ontology? Is it worth the effort of reading more of him to find out? Is he disciplined and *patient* enough to be consistent? The temptation for those who are really good at dialectical thinking is the same for all those with a talent - to lean on it too heavily (the whole hammer/nail thing).
Your right about this idea, or more accurately reality, of the triumph of a core "secularity" (in the Charles Taylor sense) in almost everyone standing with you in the modern Church. As Taylor would say, the essence of our (secular) mind is not this or that metaphysical understanding (e.g. modern materialism), rather it is our deeper disposition and 'way of being (all the way in our hearts) "provisional" about our "construals". In other words, we always have one foot out the door, never truly immersed in deep commitment of the heart. Christianity (and the Body, Church) is an 'all in' way of being: body, heart, and soul and this is defiantly not what modern Christians are, excepting perhaps a handful of Saints.
Translation, you cannot live and act like the early Church.
ReplyDeleteI strongly disagree. When a person lives the Gospel they are living and acting like the early Church. Especially in today's pagan society.
DeleteIt's beyond "living and acting." It's that the Church no longer occupies the same psychic space in the minds even of devout and strictly observant Christians. Not even close.
DeleteSpeak for yourself. And yet the Church continues to produce saints.
DeleteThat speaks of their relation to God, not the Church, which once equalled the State in the minds of her adherents. You don't think of the Church even in the same terms as the Renaissance Catholic, much less a citizen of Byzantium in late Antiquity.
DeleteAmen.
ReplyDeleteAnd do we really live in societies where Orthodox Christians experience any significant amount of the examples provided regarding the "hostile soil" of America? While I'm sure there are examples of "neighbors call[ing] the police on Bible studies where too many people show up", where "society permits all opinions in public debate except those that have a religious origin", and "schools push their institutional bias towards intolerant progressivism", I haven't experienced it. I didn't experience it as a Protestant either. I haven't experienced it in the most diverse, liberal places in America. I have experienced overly zealous Orthodox who do not care about how traffic might affect their neighbords (thus being bad neighbors). I have experienced religious zealots demanding privileged status for their religion while denying it to religious minorities. I have experienced religious bigots and nationalists who rightly see tolerance in the public square as anathema to the discriminatory preferences they demand for their group, belief, etc. Those yelping the loudest are typically from groups that used to be bigger, used to have more influence and now feel threatened and want to blame someone/thing else for the fact they lost that influence and status through their own actions and words. That is, "society" and "liberals" didn't turn this nation away from Christ - Christians did.
ReplyDeleteAs usual, the icon of Christ the Bridegroom is more befitting us than Christ Driving the Moneychangers from the Temple. Our suffering and repentance will save, yet we are unwilling to suffer or repent. It's always someone else's fault.
The positive message of the post is more resonant and true than the criticism it levels at society. Building "a network of families who pray and live together" may be the solution (without the rather poor societal critique), but the fact most Orthodox (most Christians, most religious) don't want to says something important about whether the message as a whole (and its messengers) has resonance.
Where to begin? Your unaware of the basic nature of the water in which you swim - secularism. Your a fish saying "what water are you talking about - it does not exist!".
DeleteThat said, your right when you say:
" That is, "society" and "liberals" didn't turn this nation away from Christ - Christians did."
Just not in the way you mean...
Excellent post! For my two cents, having done my undergrad in Elementary Education, my particular concern is always the education aspect of being Christian in America.
ReplyDeleteI was taught to help Kindergartners explore their sexuality, include children's books with homosexual and non binary characters, and had to take classes on "Human Diversity" that could be summed up by simply saying "If you are white, conservative, Christian, or worst of all a male heterosexual, everything evil is your fault, and you are automatically an oppressive, privileged bigot".
All that to say, our public schools are not only no longer neutral or Christian, they are more indoctrination than education.
Christendom for me starts with having an Orthodox school, for at least K-8th grade, to make sure our children aren't brainwashed before they can be formed in the faith.
As a young white heterosexual father about to become a teacher, I couldn't agree more.
DeleteSuch a timely article. Thank you for writing about this.
ReplyDeleteEach generation has to form community in a living way that is proper in the time and place. Our culture is destructive to community in general and Christian community especially. That is due to its nihilist foundation that promotes the power of the individual above all else.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure if it is possible to have a genuine Orthodox community in this culture. It is complicated by the fact that, for the most part Orthodox have tried to survive on old versions of community that have no roots here and now.
Still, what is not possible for men, is possible for God. The question is, do we want God or our own way?
Good comment. Orthodoxy is incredibly alien to America, but to those of us who manage to wander into it, we see at once how amenable and salutary it could be for American society. But then we have the jurisdictional mess tied to Old World ethno-nationalism and remittances to hierarchs back home.
DeleteOn the one hand, I appreciate that the American Church is way too young to be truly self-governing, and on the other, I fear development of an American Orthodoxy is being artificially retarded, even walked back, by diaspora mentality.
Or maybe there's no longer an integral American nation to which an Orthodox Church can be wed? I hope not!