What are the most helpful ways to think about how we live in community if we are to understand our place in the world?
I have been pondering this question a lot over the past couple of months as I have been working through one of the oddest reading experiences I've had.
Several years ago I was introduced to the work of James K. A. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I have found each of his books helpful, and was excited to read his most recent book (Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology) on the way in which political activity is a formative practice. I also hoped for some guidance as to how Christians could engage in that activity more faithfully.
The high expectations apparently set me up for disappointment. Marcella had time to begin reading it first, and we both had the similar confusion and frustration with the book. We both found a deeper tension in Smith's thought that seems to undermine much of the work he has done over the last several years.
In theory, this book is a continuation of Smith's cultural liturgies series that argues against the enlightenment conception of humans as thinking beings (which has driven the "World View" approach to much evangelical thought) and instead argues (following Pierre Bourdieu, among other) that people are shaped by their actions and desires. In fact, he goes so far as to argue that our actions and desires provide direction and content to our thoughts, leading Smith to claim that we are liturgical or worshiping animals that shape our lives around what we most love.
If this contention is right, then building good habits and choosing the proper environment in which to live are essential to thinking and living well. I had hoped that Awaiting the King would provide some analysis of what our forms of civic engagement actually do to us as we participate in them. This is largely absent from the book, however, and instead Smith has attempted to fuse several different ideas together to chart a middle-course between giving up on political participation and an attempt to establish a theocratic state.
So far, so good. But if people are shaped by what they do, then it is essential to think about the power of political institutions to shape communities and individuals. As a historian interested in state formation and cultural history, I know of many scholars who have done similar work. Smith does none of this, however, and instead makes a number of sweeping claims drawing from a random assortment of examples over the last 3000-ish years of Western history.
Summarizing much too much, he generally argues that states are good (up to a point) and that Christians should try to use them to make the world better (as far as they are able) while insisting that political institutions should be liberal (and emphasize freedom and representation) while those institutions should also seriously consider sectarian theological arguments concerning public policy (because they are an essential source of truth).
As a historian, I found the lack of specificity and context in this argument frustrating. While I sympathize with the desire to provide a universal model for approaching these kinds of questions, I longed for specific examples of places which had institutions that balanced these tensions well (or poorly), or of how individuals ought to respond to broken institutions.Without them, I found myself only able to think of counter-examples that seemed to undermine the possibility of the kind of institutional arrangement that Smith championed.
On the one hand, I want to like this book and its project. On the other, I found the entire project unconvincing and actually off-putting. I know I haven't gone into any details as to his argument, but I've never wanted a book to succeed and seen it fail so completely. Or perhaps I'm just not getting it, because Smith has garnered reasonably strong reviews for this volume...
I have some specific historical examples that I think are relevant to this project and that can help us understand the practical consequences of different theological approaches to the relationship between Christian communities and the power of the government. I plan to discuss some of these in other posts, but for now, I'd like to return to the question with which I began this post: what are the most helpful ways to think about how we live in community if we are to understand our place in the world?
Here are a few of the approaches that I have come up with as I try to figure out a more constructive approach to these kinds of questions:
1) We can approach the question from the inside out, thinking about our individual responses to the community that we inhabit. This is the most practical approach for the vast majority of us, and focuses on individual responsibility.
That, however, can easily lead to missing the significance of the structures of our community, which leads to another perspective:
2) We can think about this from the top-down, considering the logic built in to the institutions and practices that shape our community. From this perspective, we can see the ways in which our interactions with neighbors (and the racial/social/economic/religious (etc.) composition of our neighborhoods) lead us to identify some things as normal and others as abnormal. It also illuminates how ceremonies (singing the national anthem before a ball-game) link disparate parts of our lives (afternoon entertainment with civic religion) in ways that shape our outlook on life.
And this approach lends itself well to the third perspective:
3) We can compare the top-down model of our community with that of another community. This provides at least two benefits. First, we can see how another community with different institutions and practices takes a different shape from our own. Second, we can see things in our own community that were invisible without the comparison from point two above.
The comparative model can also help us get a sense of how someone entering our own community might find it uncomfortable and confusing.
While incomplete, considering the different ways in which one can approach how we inhabit our community, and the interplay between how it shapes us and how we in turn shape it, can provide some direction for thinking about these matters.
Does anyone have another perspective that they think would be helpful?
Or an alternate wording to the question?
I have been pondering this question a lot over the past couple of months as I have been working through one of the oddest reading experiences I've had.
Several years ago I was introduced to the work of James K. A. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I have found each of his books helpful, and was excited to read his most recent book (Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology) on the way in which political activity is a formative practice. I also hoped for some guidance as to how Christians could engage in that activity more faithfully.
The high expectations apparently set me up for disappointment. Marcella had time to begin reading it first, and we both had the similar confusion and frustration with the book. We both found a deeper tension in Smith's thought that seems to undermine much of the work he has done over the last several years.
In theory, this book is a continuation of Smith's cultural liturgies series that argues against the enlightenment conception of humans as thinking beings (which has driven the "World View" approach to much evangelical thought) and instead argues (following Pierre Bourdieu, among other) that people are shaped by their actions and desires. In fact, he goes so far as to argue that our actions and desires provide direction and content to our thoughts, leading Smith to claim that we are liturgical or worshiping animals that shape our lives around what we most love.
If this contention is right, then building good habits and choosing the proper environment in which to live are essential to thinking and living well. I had hoped that Awaiting the King would provide some analysis of what our forms of civic engagement actually do to us as we participate in them. This is largely absent from the book, however, and instead Smith has attempted to fuse several different ideas together to chart a middle-course between giving up on political participation and an attempt to establish a theocratic state.
So far, so good. But if people are shaped by what they do, then it is essential to think about the power of political institutions to shape communities and individuals. As a historian interested in state formation and cultural history, I know of many scholars who have done similar work. Smith does none of this, however, and instead makes a number of sweeping claims drawing from a random assortment of examples over the last 3000-ish years of Western history.
Summarizing much too much, he generally argues that states are good (up to a point) and that Christians should try to use them to make the world better (as far as they are able) while insisting that political institutions should be liberal (and emphasize freedom and representation) while those institutions should also seriously consider sectarian theological arguments concerning public policy (because they are an essential source of truth).
As a historian, I found the lack of specificity and context in this argument frustrating. While I sympathize with the desire to provide a universal model for approaching these kinds of questions, I longed for specific examples of places which had institutions that balanced these tensions well (or poorly), or of how individuals ought to respond to broken institutions.Without them, I found myself only able to think of counter-examples that seemed to undermine the possibility of the kind of institutional arrangement that Smith championed.
On the one hand, I want to like this book and its project. On the other, I found the entire project unconvincing and actually off-putting. I know I haven't gone into any details as to his argument, but I've never wanted a book to succeed and seen it fail so completely. Or perhaps I'm just not getting it, because Smith has garnered reasonably strong reviews for this volume...
I have some specific historical examples that I think are relevant to this project and that can help us understand the practical consequences of different theological approaches to the relationship between Christian communities and the power of the government. I plan to discuss some of these in other posts, but for now, I'd like to return to the question with which I began this post: what are the most helpful ways to think about how we live in community if we are to understand our place in the world?
Here are a few of the approaches that I have come up with as I try to figure out a more constructive approach to these kinds of questions:
1) We can approach the question from the inside out, thinking about our individual responses to the community that we inhabit. This is the most practical approach for the vast majority of us, and focuses on individual responsibility.
That, however, can easily lead to missing the significance of the structures of our community, which leads to another perspective:
2) We can think about this from the top-down, considering the logic built in to the institutions and practices that shape our community. From this perspective, we can see the ways in which our interactions with neighbors (and the racial/social/economic/religious (etc.) composition of our neighborhoods) lead us to identify some things as normal and others as abnormal. It also illuminates how ceremonies (singing the national anthem before a ball-game) link disparate parts of our lives (afternoon entertainment with civic religion) in ways that shape our outlook on life.
And this approach lends itself well to the third perspective:
3) We can compare the top-down model of our community with that of another community. This provides at least two benefits. First, we can see how another community with different institutions and practices takes a different shape from our own. Second, we can see things in our own community that were invisible without the comparison from point two above.
The comparative model can also help us get a sense of how someone entering our own community might find it uncomfortable and confusing.
While incomplete, considering the different ways in which one can approach how we inhabit our community, and the interplay between how it shapes us and how we in turn shape it, can provide some direction for thinking about these matters.
Does anyone have another perspective that they think would be helpful?
Or an alternate wording to the question?
What are the most helpful ways to think about how we live in community if we are to understand our place in the world?
ReplyDeleteThanks for asking this question, Phillip. This is such an important and complex question that I feel a little presumptuous in attempting a response, but here are my reflections from my limited corner of the world.
1) I believe individuals need a healthy sense of identity in order to function well in community. Each of us needs a satisfactory answer to the developmental questions, "How am I unique? and How do I belong?" I think this question must be answered in the context of family and then small local communities such as church, neighborhood, or school before we can see our place in the wider world. Included in the individuals personal answer to these questions is hopefully an awareness of the complementary in a healthy community. We don't want others to be just like us, but we do want to connect with them, forming some kind of a whole, like individual puzzle pieces crating a complete picture.
2) I believe we need to be educated about our community history and about our cultural liturgies. Civic liturgies can become just as meaningless and dogmatic as religious liturgies when detached from history and meaning. Also, we have to be honest about our rituals and symbols, realizing that some of them symbolize abuse of others and should be discarded. I find it fascinating that some people can at once minimize the importance of symbols and cling to them so resolutely. One example of this is the debate over displaying the confederate flag. One group is offended by the flag because it represents a society founded on the enslavement of an entire race of people. Another group minimizes the offensive symbolism on one hand, but feels a tangible loss of cultural identity when the symbol is removed on the other hand.
3) We have to ask ourselves the hard questions about our community practices. I believe we must intentionally engage in those practices that both accurately remember and reflect our past and intentionally shape our future in a positive direction, and at the same time we must be willing to discontinue practices which glorify abuse and which foster the continuation of it. Again, using the Confederate flag as a rather simple example, perhaps that flag is displayed in a museum with other antebellum and civil war relics, and a new flag representing equality and unity is is painted on pick up trucks and worn on T-shirts.
4) I think, as we develop our community values and practices, we have to be respectful of other communities even when we have profound disagreements. It is important to understand the history and formation of other communities whether those communities are
religious, national, racial, or something else.