(Grateful?) Cognitive Minorities

I count it a good Sunday morning at church when I leave the building empowered with good ideas for living well. Among other things, I think, the Sunday morning service ought to provide people with tools for interpreting their experience (at an individual or collective level) through the lens of the biblical narrative. Church ought to be a place where people can go to have both the world, and their beliefs about it (religious or otherwise) rendered in intelligible terms, and in a manner that both challenges and encourages the way in which they participate in it. No small task, to be sure, but this morning’s service managed to accomplish all of these things, benefiting greatly from a little “outside help.”

Today we were joined by two Mennonite Brethren leaders from Québec, Éric Wingender of École de théologie évangélique de Montréal and Charles Martin, the moderator of the Québec MB Conference. Together, they provided us with a window into the religious culture of Québec , as well as a timely challenge regarding the nature of the church’s influence in the broader culture. The province of Québec, much like the Greater Vancouver area, is an overwhelmingly secular environment—one in which a public profession of Christianity is likely to be met either by bemused apathy or open hostility. Québec’s situation differs from other parts of Canada due to the historical influence of the Catholic Church—an influence which, according to Martin and Wingender, is widely perceived to be a negative one. The Quiet Revolution in the 1960’s—a period of accelerated secularization in Québec culture—figures prominently in the collective cultural mindset. Christianity is perceived largely as a thing of the past, a relic from a period of Québec’s history that is best forgotten.

So how is one who continues to believe that Jesus Christ really does represent the clue to history to respond in a cultural context such as this? Peter Berger used the term “cognitive minority” to describe those in the modern West who believe in the supernatural despite powerful social and psychological pressures toward secularization, and while Wingender did not use this term, Christians in Canada—whether in Montréal or Vancouver—will likely resonate with Berger’s explanation of it:

Whatever the situation may have been in the past, today the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life of large numbers, very probably of the majority, or people in modern societies, who seem to manage to get along without it quite well. This means that those to whom the supernatural is still, or again, a meaningful reality find themselves in the status of a minority, more precisely, a cognitive minority… By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society.

In a context where the absence of belief in God is assumed, confidently self-identifying as “religious” isn’t always easy. Yet the fact that Christians no longer enjoy the status of “cognitive majority” is not necessarily something to be bemoaned. The message of Martin and Wingender in today’s service was that the overwhelmingly secular context in which many Canadians find themselves might just give us the chance to take a fresh look at how the nature of the gospel message ought to affect how Christians engage with the broader culture.

Both men strongly advocated a re-imagining of Christian influence within culture, moving away from the top-down approach those in Québec are so familiar with, and toward a “bottom-up” mentality, where Christians exercise influence through love of neighbour, compassion, building community, and seeking not only to present Christianity as a plausible “cognitive option,” but to demonstrate its truth in everyday life. On this view, the main issue is not “how do we take back what we’ve lost?” (especially when what we “had” might have been acquired illegitimately or immorally in the first place), but “what unique opportunities to reflect God’s redemptive gospel are made possible by our position as ‘cognitive minorities?'”

The text Wingender preached from this morning was Matthew 8:18-27. In these verses, Jesus displays two apparently contradictory ways in which God has worked and continues to work in the world. In 8:18-22 Jesus responds to a teacher of the law’s declaration to follow Jesus wherever he goes with an enigmatic description of the nomadic and uncertain nature of his ministry on earth. Wingender interpreted the “foxes have holes” statement as an expression of God’s peculiar and less-than-obvious way of working in the world. God “hides” himself from us in that he comes to us in unexpected ways that we find confusing and unsettling. Then, in the calming of the sea in 8:23-27, Jesus displays his power over nature, working in ways we are more accustomed to expect from a deity. This, Wingender referred to as God’s “revelatory” nature. Thus, God simultaneously hides and reveals himself from us. And the appropriate human response to God’s paradoxical manner of working in the world is trust.

So what does this have to do with how Christians, as “cognitive minorities” ought to think about and respond to culture? Simply put, God’s way of working in the world will sometimes seem strange to us. The loss of cultural influence by a once-dominant Christianity may not seem like a good thing—it may even seem to be something that God might have some interest in preventing. It certainly doesn’t seem like the most obvious way to “make disciples of all nations” (Mat 28:19).

But perhaps here in Canada we are entering or in the midst of a season of “hiddenness” as opposed to “revelation” with respect to how institutional Christianity relates to the broader culture. Perhaps the church’s mode of being in the world at times reflects the God they are called to image, operating in different ways—now advancing, now receding from view—in different historical contexts. For roughly 1500 years, God’s name was proclaimed or “revealed” by a culturally dominant church, which had both positive and negative consequences. Now, with the rapid secularization of the West, maybe the time has come for the “hidden” face of God to be proclaimed by a church who is humble, penitent, open to dialogue, and committed to loving our neighbours as ourselves.

I’m probably guilty of any number of exegetical errors in the preceding, but I am, at any rate, grateful for the message communicated by my French-Canadian brothers this morning. Both seemed deeply committed both to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to embracing the challenge of representing him to a culture that seems, on the surface to have had enough of God. I’m grateful for their reminder that wherever we find ourselves—Québec, Vancouver, or anywhere in between—we must realize that God does not work according to the straightforward linear models of “progress” by which we evaluate “success.” He reveals. He hides. And we trust.