Another View 2-7

The term civil religion has always intrigued me. Sociologist Robert Bellah observed that the ethos of American civil religion was a desire to show how Americans had an individual and collective responsibility to carry out God’s will on earth -- as if there were a “new Israel,” a new chosen people. In general, civil religion describes how Americans throughout the nation’s history have created a collective national identity through bestowing sacred meaning on a variety of secular symbols, ritual, and institutions. Civil religion, in its many guises, lurks as a divisive tool of our ancient enemy, ultimately conferring upon some (Americans, especially) a unique place among the family of nations. And of course, the bestowal of such grace in in the hands of a much too capricious god.

What is utterly amazing is that this civil religion has worked itself out in the most sinister and acceptable way -- through a culture of piety. We might even recognize it today under the subset, “conventional wisdom.” It looks all cleaned up and very religious, all the while undermining the very core of sanctification, meaning, the true shape of the life longing for wholeness and holiness. So, what lives at the heart of this culture of piety?

Mostly, they are very attractive, things we’ve come to believe and accept as almost second nature, that is, we hardly think very deeply about them -- we simply accept them as “religion,” and practice them as symbols of what it looks like to be religious, even spiritual. It is the piety that Flannery O’Connor found despicable about the deep south’s experience of religion, and wrote her apocalyptic vision of life satirizing, through the grotesque, the diabolical nature of surface and self-righteous Christianity. Amazingly, we confer upon it, still, virtue and the imprimatur of holiness.

The basic distortion that lies at the heart of this culture of piety is its understanding of the meaning of salvation. Why have we taken salvation out of its dynamic corporate context, and made it highly individualistic? It occurs to me that the gnosticism of our day is the question, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”, as if there is salvation outside of the Body. The Body, as it is willing to live as the image of God, impacts the person to experience the longing to live in such a committed, incendiary Body. The corporate holiness calls one to personal holiness. Relationship with Christ is desired because this Body loves so deeply, listens so thoroughly, experiences so intimately, shares so openly. It is the dynamism of God’s presence that “calls one out” to long for the same. The Body’s cumulative presence is compassion and intimacy, a true forgiveness that exacts accountability and freedom to self-reflect.

You see, there is nothing self-serving or utilitarian about salvation. So lives the Body, so lives the person. One simply cannot be divorced from the other. Thus, the impact of Lent is that the Body politic calls and restores the individual. Repentance is no longer about moral obedience, about “doing,” but rather about “being” and quality of life lived within the community. The Body, as the living icon of the living Christ, invites this restoration, this living anew in each moment.

The deep longing, so it seems, is for more than an institution of people who are individually religious. The deepest longing is a community that reflects that we are the image of God, and therefore we conclude that we, also, are intended to be holy. More so, this holy community knows that each being is so precious, that it cannot afford to lose even one of these. And, therefore no one can experience the reality and fullness of life except through the life in the community.

We stop identifying ourselves by contrast or comparison, and value each as we value all, for the “other” is actually not the “other” at all, but rather an extension of our own mystical body. Our very sense of being alive is extended into the universe, where we daily rub ego’s and shoulder’s with this world, also our community.

The culture of pietism can never truly understand this. There is a “schizophrenic severance,” where the Body holds itself in captivity to models of moral obedience and religious duty. We must be cautious here, for as theologian Christos Yannaras warns, “Confession turns into a psychological means of setting individual guilt-feelings at rest, and participation in holy communion becomes a moral reward for good behavior…baptism becomes a self-evident social obligation, and marriage a legitimization of sexual relations without regard to any ascetic transfiguration of the conjugal union into a ecclesial event of personal intercourse or communion.”

Forbid the day that even the sacraments take on a conventional, ethical character, such as described above. This is only the “dust” on the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” regarding the culture of pietism, and I will return again to this subject, and soon, for it seems to me that people who find themselves standing, gazing upon the Church, want nothing to do with our pietisms. They long for something far more authentic. To them, the Church is not real. Our pietisms are our leverage for paling up to God, and covering our backsides, as though our moral obedience and religious duty will require of God some divine favor. Welcome Flannery O’Connor, and may you hit us up beside the head with Another View that will find intolerable any such notion of all our “who is inside” and “who is out.