It’s OK to Say the Word
Speaking of restless hearts and God-shaped holes, I spent my commute yesterday listening to an interview with Tara Isabella Burton, whose 2020 book Strange Rites offered an interesting, and I think mostly accurate diagnosis of our time. Burton’s basic thesis is that in the exodus from Christianity and organized religion has resulted in people turning everything from Harry Potter fandom to “woke” social justice culture to alt-right atavism to Silicon Valley tech-utopianism to wellness culture to polyamory into a kind of “religion.” According to Burton, religions provide their flocks with four crucial things: meaning, purpose, community, and ritual. People may be fleeing more traditional sources of these things in droves, but they’re still scratching that itch somewhere, she says. I think she’s right.
But this wasn’t the part of the interview that interested me. It was Burton’s own story. When she was talking about her book and her research, she was confident, knowledgeable, articulate. But when she began to talk about her own spiritual journey, she grew a bit more tentative and halting. She has, evidently, landed in a small Anglo-Catholic-type church, a church that she was quick to note was politically liberal (thus rendering her safe for CBC listener consumption) but liturgically traditional (she noted the use of incense). What led her to such a place?
Well, she began to use the word “moving” a lot. She was moved by the aesthetic, the liturgy, the community. She liked the Book of Common Prayer, mostly for what it symbolized. She liked that “other people with their own fears, worries, griefs, and hopes have said these same words over the years” (there was no mention of the content of the BCP or the God to which it stubbornly and particularly points). She spoke of the humbling awareness of being part of “a tradition.” All of this was “moving and meaningful and important.”
The most fascinating and frustrating part for me was when she began to talk about what all this was for. She talked about how belonging to this moving tradition was “part of a long, slow practice towards being mindful of…
[God? Perhaps this was being optimistic, but I waited expectantly…]
… um, my ethical behaviour… and being mindful of…
[God! Really, it’s ok to say it…]
… my, my spiritual life… and being mindful of…
[God, God, God! I wanted to forcibly pry the word out of her mouth by this point… ]
… the inevitability of death…
[Oh, for God’s sake! Can any of these “moving, meaningful traditions” ever direct us to be mindful of GOD?!]
She ended off with this gem: “Truth is what you make it.” I turned off the podcast in exasperation. Something told me if those six words had come out of the mouth of, say, Donald Trump they would not have enjoyed the same cheery reception that her CBC interviewer gave her. Sorry, truth is not what you make it. If your whole critique of the remixed religious landscape of the twenty-first century west is that it devolves into a do-it-yourself exercise in personal branding, it’s more than a little odd to say such a thing.
It’s even odder to struggle so mightily to say the word “God” out loud. I suppose I’m a bit old-fashioned here. I think that God either does or does not exist. There is a truth of the matter. I have bet the proverbial farm on the former. If I am wrong, I couldn’t frankly care less about how moving some tradition or liturgy or aesthetic is. I’m not interested in what David Bentley Hart once referred to as “religion as interior decorating.” I am well aware that I am a flawed and fitful pursuer of God, but it is God that I am pursuing.
I am growing increasingly impatient with religious traditions that try to keep the aesthetics of God or the ethics of God without the reality of God. The former depends upon the latter. If we can’t acknowledge this, or at least honestly wrestle with the question, then we are not appreciably different than those who try to scratch their existential itch with Harry Potter or politics or tech utopianism. Without God (we can say the word!), we’re all just engaged in a do-it-yourself exercise in personal branding. I need more—much more—than this.
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Excellent message as we see church attendance dwindling
Not sure if you feel this summary is accurate:
1. People seek meaning, purpose, community, and ritual often provided traditionally by religion.
2. New societal “religions” such as fandoms, social justice culture, and tech utopianism emerge to fill the void left by the decline in organized religious affiliation.
3. However, without acknowledging or pursuing a higher reality (God), these modern substitutes are insufficient, merely serving as personal branding or aesthetic pursuits rather than addressing deeper existential needs.
My question is that there might be no “true reality” of God that we can know. Lots of people have wildly different interpretations of God. What’s to say acknowledging God prevents personal branding etc?
Is there something about wrestling with the question of God that makes someone more reality centered or eliminates personal branding or a do it yourself exercise?
Yeah, fair point. It may not be entirely possible to escape the “personal branding” thing. Everywhere we go, there we are, sadly 😉
I do think that in pursuing God—even though God can never be known fully—we at the very least save ourselves from the most obviously narcissistic versions of religion and spirituality. It is to a least acknowledge the possibility of a transcendent reality that does not accommodate itself to our preferences, which I think is important.
I’ve been following Burton’s work quite closely and I’m pretty surprised by the comment “Truth is what you make it”, especially since her most recent book, “Self Made” is a history of self-creation and has written for some publications about her spiritual journey growing up nominally Christian and then eventually becoming Christian. (https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/12/02/how-i-learned-love-my-christianity; https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/bad-traditionalism).
I think she’s trying to be more of a historian and journalist of the current theological landscape rather than a public theologian. It makes me wonder if there is a need to reclaim the evangelical label. She does a good job diagnosing the problem, but I see your point and can feel it in myself sometimes. I have told others that I find comfort in reading the scriptures but sometimes have a hard time proclaiming to others that this is true – not just for myself but for all of us! Clearly, we mainliners and mainline-esque Anabaptists could use some evangelism training. Evangelical and Evangelism are words and concepts that have been abused, but I don’t think we should abandon them entirely.
I was surprised to hear her say that, too. I backed up the podcast a few times to make sure I heard correctly. Not only did the comment seem to run against much of her work, it didn’t even seem to make much sense in context. I even considered the possibility she was being sarcastic, but it sure didn’t seem like it.
She definitely seemed more comfortable in description and analysis mode than talking about her personal faith. She’s hardly alone here, as you say! I come across this all the time. God-talk has been so often abused that it is better avoided. At least this is what we say. I agree with your last line—I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s better to rehabilitate a word or concept that’s been misused than to abandon it.
I am sympathetic to anyone who is reluctant to use the word God, for reasons you would understand: the misuse of the word, the way it is freighted with so many contradictory meanings. I see your point, though, that you’d rather use and rehabilitate the word, as well as the point that in becoming religious, people really are looking for more than meaning, ethics, or aesthetics.
I once stopped using the word God in my personal writing and wrote instead the little Hebrew word el, in lower case, and there was something refreshing about the practice, though it didn’t last.
Yes, the word comes with baggage, for sure. And people mean different things by the same word. It’s certainly not an uncomplicated word to use. But we so easily and readily collapse theology into anthropology these days. For me, saying the word is maybe a small sign of resistance 🙂
Amen