Atlanta megachurch leader Andy Stanley wants to reach people who “are on a happiness quest” and “take them from where they are to the place where we think God wants them to be.” (H/T Rod Dreher)
I’ll give him credit for at least recognizing that he’s walking a fine line:
Stanley warned of the tension that comes with designing environments that are both unique and creative yet ordered and predictable, and said that when it comes to worship services, pastors must reject a “go with the flow” paradigm that doesn’t involve intentional and strategic preparation. “God is a God of systems and predictability and order, and God honors planning,” he said.
There’s a lot for an ecclesial Christian to lampoon there, but never mind.
I just wonder for now how Pastor Andy is going to lead people on their happy quest through the rugged places they must pass to get where God really wants them to be? Or has he figured out a therapeutic route that doesn’t pass through suffering? Or maybe he’s confused about the destination?
Unlike some of his compatriots at Front Porch Republic, Mark A. Signorelli is definitely not going to write a Going Home Story:
If I am correct, it seems there is a certain kind of arch-typical narrative that has become quite popular here at FPR, and in some sense, emblematic of its defense of place and home. It is the “Going Home” story, the story of someone rejecting the allures of wealth and status in the big-city, and returning to the fixed traditions of his or her hometown. While such narratives are of great interest, in and of themselves, and while they clearly emerge from the sincere experiences of their authors, I find myself entirely unable to sympathize with them. I suspect, moreover, that, taken together, such narratives tend to distort more about the reality of twenty-first century America than they make clear.
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The schools in my town had problems reaching far beyond the poisonous effects of identity-politics, however. They are the same problems afflicting schools throughout the country – the disorder in the classroom and the hallways, the narrowing of pedagogical aims to the strictly vocational, the failure to transmit anything resembling our intellectual and artistic heritage. I do not wish to sound ungrateful; throughout my schooling, I had a number of remarkable teachers, to whose instruction I owe much. But they, like me, were confined within an aimless system, which had long ago abandoned any responsibility to tend to the moral development of young minds. One of the most startling experiences in my intellectual development was when, once out of school, I began reading on my own initiative much of the classic literature omitted from my formal education. A short list of these works included the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, and Faust. It seemed to me as though my teachers had engaged in an extensive conspiracy to rob me of my proper literary patrimony. But they did teach me the varieties of STD’s. The situation was exactly the same in the Catholic as in the public schools; I moved between the one and the other throughout my youth, but found little difference between them except for the dress code at the Catholic schools, and their considerably lower rates of assault and battery among the student body.
I suppose I should not be surprised that the Church could not run its schools effectively, since, where I lived, it could not run its churches effectively either. When I was a boy, the small local church we attended played a very large role in my upbringing, and in the upbringing of most of my friends. But by the time I had reached my earliest maturity, it had become clear that it had ceased to be a place where any real spiritual work was being done.Sunday Masses were a most undignified affair; the chorus would sing cheesy folk music out of tune, and the priest would take his homily as an occasion to practice his stand-up routine. The parishioners, for their part, would arrive in tank tops, shorts, and, later, pajama bottoms, conveying the distinct sense that they did not really believe in the seriousness of the rituals they were attending. Their constant chatter and commotion in the pews made it impossible at times to hear the priest. In short, there was nothing even the least bit edifying about a trip to church, and well before I finished college, I had ceased attending services there, more than content to risk an eternity of perdition rather than suffer that slovenly debacle every week.
It’s not conventionally edifying reading, but to heal, we need an accurate diagnosis of our disease.
I have been struck repeatedly by a sense that the “Going Home” narrative omits something fundamentally important about our present historical situation. In different ways, these stories all seem to underestimate the extent of the cultural wreckage wrought upon our communities by decades, and even centuries, of imposed liberal ideology. They seem to overestimate the amount of genuine civil society remaining in our local communities, to be preserved and reclaimed. The “Going Home” story, for instance, seems to ignore the ubiquitous reach of our polluted “popular culture,” which leaks, like a waste seepage, into nearly every house in nearly every sort of community, from the cabins dotting the open plains of Montana to the massed high-rises in the Bronx. Move where you will; you will not be able to evade its presence, or its influence upon the people with whom you live and work. The same may be said of our political discourse, with all of its corrosive tendencies. The identity-politics which plagued my mother in the last years of her career did not originate in our hometown; they invaded there from the broader culture, and so, I am sure, do they invade every nook and cranny of this country. There is no protection to be gained from this toxic nonsense just by returning to the place of one’s birth.
The work we have before us, the work of restoring civil society, is a spiritual work, an intellectual and a cultural work. This is something often omitted from the “Going Home” narrative. The physical act of returning home in these narratives is, of course, intended to signal the possibility of beginning such a work, but it is remarkable how often the “Going Home” story fails to give much consideration to the tremendous effort such a work would entail. Too often these stories stop short at the purely physical act of returning home, and tend to conceive of “place” in a strictly material fashion.Too often, the “Going Home” story dwells on the admittedly pleasant features of this or that locale, in the groundless hope that such things will provide a sufficient haven against the dark and frightening cultural winds blowing through our age.
I heartily recommend it.
Wendell Berry’s recent self-described “general declaration” in support of “homosexual marriage” shocked many, fans and critics alike. Berry, who once wrote that marriage “cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance” and has long argued that marriage is an inherited form premised on the embodiment of men and women, now treats sexual difference in marriage as optional.
(Christopher C. Roberts, Wendell Berry’s Marriage Reversal) Roberts goes on to analyze unpublished audio recordings of Berry’s talk to Kentucky Baptists and offers some tentative insights into what may have been more tentative, or more nuanced – and in one spot, emotive/explosive – than appeared from first reports:
Berry seems to back into support for same-sex marriage, his hand forced by our contemporary absurdity, driven by his desire to limit government involvement and steer clear of arbitrary preference. Marriage is antecedent to any state or government, but we are being forced to treat it as if it is subsequent, as if it is the government’s gift.
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I would like to hope that Berry’s new mistake is simply to overlook or underestimate the irony of his legal philosophy. His concession to the fictitious language of rights reinforces what he laments, extending government into the zone he wants to be private.
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When a government purports that the form of marriage is something it legislates rather than discerns or inherits, then that government is in everybody’s bedroom. In such a society, you are married only if Leviathan says you are.
This is Berry’s new and unwitting irony: Rather than returning marriage to a private pre-political sphere, the revisionist Berry enhances the power of the state and therefore fails on his own quasi-libertarian terms. It is not wrong to want to help people and facilitate domestic care, but by licensing a marriage any time two people undertake that task, Berry overreaches.
This new Berry is also playing at nominalism and gnosticism ….
But the bitterness of the second half of Berry’s declaration, the lack of subtlety, the premise that anyone who disagrees with him is darkly absurd and hateful (who here is condemning by category?), make me suspect that Berry’s support for gay marriage is at least partly the result of triangulation, of trying to distance himself from coreligionists who embarrass him.
I can certainly sympathize with Berry’s “trying to distance himself from coreligionists who embarrass him,” as Berry is some manner of Baptist, and Baptist support for traditional marriage tends to run shallow and nominalist (basically, that SSM’s forbidden because God forbids same-sex sodomy).
I do hope the audiotapes are transcribed and published. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this.
Mark “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford wants to be a Congressman.
If I were a South Carolinian, I think I could forgive everything except for the part when, caught with his pants down (almost literally), he polluted the airwaves and the minds of impressionable children and adults with made-in-Hollywood bullshit about his “true soul mate,” with the implication that he had a right to be happy and to hell with any commitment that gets in his way.
Until he publicly repents of such nonsense, I’d be in the “anybody but Sanford” camp.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
