What are the consequences of dumping “a reasonable faith” and switching our affections to “sensual spirituality”, as Duncan Park urges? David Boulton suggests that...
Duncan Park’s brilliantly presented defence of “the evangelical experience” as “religion in the mode of passion” will stir hearts and provoke minds. It is a great read, bringing a gutsy blast of Salvationist blood and fire into our often too-well-ordered Anglican/Quaker/Humanist discourse. It offers a powerful challenge to our much-criticised “intellectualism”.
But if it is challenging, it is also challengeable, and I would like to pursue some of the points he raises.
First, what is this evangelicalism which Duncan finds so sexy?
Evangelicalism is the name given to the movement within Protestantism which had its origin in the eighteenth century religious revivals based on belief in the Bible as the uniquely inspired and inerrant Word of God and on salvation by faith in the blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It produced the “Low Church” party within the Church of England, the Methodist break-away, strong evangelical factions within the “chapel culture” of the older dissenting churches such as Baptists and Congregationalists, and scores of new evangelising “free” churches from Plymouth Brethren and Pentecostalists to the Salvation Army. In close alliance with white cultural imperialism, it spread throughout the globe. In an uncertain world it offered certainty, wherein lies the secret of its phenomenal success.
“Duncan’s assertion that ‘evangelicals do not believe this stuff’ would not, I fear, go down well with those whose mission statement is “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved”.”
Duncan’s distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists is surely no more than a question of preferred terminology. Because Muslim fundamentalism evokes fears of violent extremism, many evangelicals have disavowed the word — but without disavowing what they see as the fundamentals of the Christian faith: an inerrant Bible, salvation by faith in Christ’s atonement, the looked-for “Rapture” at the second coming of Christ, to be followed by everlasting heaven for believers and everlasting hell for the unregenerate. Duncan’s assertion that “evangelicals do not ‘believe’ this stuff” would not, I fear, go down well with those whose mission statement is “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved”, and who sing “The vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives”. The theologies of the respectable Evangelical Alliance and the fundamentalist Ian Paisley are identical.
If evangelicalism is not a form of realism — indeed, realism at its most rampant and unapologetic — any distinction between realism and nonrealism (or Duncan’s “post-realism”) is meaningless. There is a difference between belief in a metaphysical or supernatural God who once created humankind, and belief that the gods are human creations; between belief that God exists independently of humankind and the view that the only real God is real human love in action; between belief in the Bible as absolute authority and the conviction that there are no absolutes and no divine authority. The one is called realism, the other non-realism.
Evangelicals belong, as they themselves will insist, at the realist end of the spectrum.
Of course this is not to say that it is quite impossible to be an evangelical and a non-realist. An evangelical who makes it clear that she does not believe in a real God, does not look to a real everlasting life in a real heaven or hell, does not make her salvation dependent on Christ’s blood-sacrifice, does not look to the Bible as ultimate authority, and who does understand that the Christian myth is one culturally-produced meta-narrative among many, is as non-realist as they come! But does it still make any sense to call her an evangelical? A post-evangelical, perhaps? A non-realist evangelical will have his work cut out. It won’t be easy to stay within the evangelical sub-culture — the Bible-based church, chapel, gospel-hall or Salvationist citadel — and come out, as a nonrealist will surely want to do, in principled opposition to Biblical literalism and the whole reactionary and dangerous catalogue of theological absolutism. It will be even harder to speak out against the miserable politics of evangelical fundamentalism: for instance, the homophobia and misogyny derived from ancient scriptures (which looks likely to be much in evidence at this summer’s Anglican synod: watch out for the part to be played by the Evangelical Alliance!). But if the battle for nonrealism is to be waged from within the evangelical camp, it cannot be fought with the weapons of confusion and unclarity: by pretending that the distinction between realism and non-realism is illusory or unimportant, or that the evangelical tradition is just as non-realist as any and every other religious tradition, when it patently isn’t.
Which brings me to my main quarrel with Duncan’s argument. I read with some astonishment his assertion that “the concept of a ‘reasonable faith’ is nonsense”, as daft as “talk about a ‘reasonable orgasm”.
It’s a good phrase — but a bad analogy, and mischievous theology.
It is hard to think of anything which has done more damage to the religious project, the pursuit of enduring values to live by, than the widening rift over the last two centuries between faith and reason. The churches’ progressive abandonment of reason led to their abandonment in turn by men and women who knew that reason, fallible and encultured as it is, is the faculty that differentiates us from the non-human animals. We know nothing if we have not learnt that where reason sleeps, monsters breed. Shakespeare knew that when “men have lost their reason” they are “brutish beasts”. To write off reason is to choose to be unreasonable: to denigrate the rational is to embrace the irrational.
A Response: “The evangelical...listens to his heart and thinks with his glands of hope and glory. His engagement with God is not a search for meaning but a hunger for satisfaction.”
How else are we — how else is Duncan — to choose between faith in this and faith in that, other than by the exercise of our reasoning faculty? When Duncan rejects the kinds of fundamentalism he associates with “tiresome doctrine police”, does he do so by intuition, by emotional spasm, or by thinking it through: the exercise of reason? If we are no longer flat-earthers, if we no longer sacrifice our children to ensure the grain harvest, if we no longer appease the gods and drive out demons, is that not because we have exercised our minds and concluded that faith in such practices is unreasonable and irrational?
Disparagement of reason, of thinking, is deeply embedded in English culture. We don’t like “intellectuals”. We oppose “cold” intellect (bad) to “warm” emotions (good).
We give reason a male gender (unfeeling, uncaring), and intuition, emotion and imagination are promoted as female virtues. It is all very foolish (and sexist).
Evangelical Christianity has no interest in reason. It prefers what Duncan calls “the mode of passion, sensual spirituality”. Don’t think, feel. So Duncan’s sexual imagery is fitting. The evangelical doesn’t bother his head with these matters, he listens to his heart and thinks with his glands of hope and glory. His engagement with God is not a search for meaning but a hunger for satisfaction. Oddly, the same evangelicals who won’t accept women priests or gays make eyes at their masterful God, plead for his touch, whisper their sweet nothings in his ear and head for the consummation devoutly wished for: the divinely unreasonable orgasm.
The problem with this “torrid evangelical love story” is that it has more to do with pleasuring oneself than with exalting those of low degree, putting down the mighty from their seats and sending the rich empty away. The language of the religious tradition — of the God myth, of incarnation and redemption, of sacrificial love, of death and resurrection, of a “heaven” to be won and a “hell” to be trodden under — makes sense, rational sense, only in so far as it generates the energy and inspiration required if we are to recover something of Paradise by building a better world here on Planet Earth.
That’s why we have pitched the Sea of Faith enterprise as a quest for a reasonable faith, a shared quest for a rational and creative framework for the one life we have to live, a life we seek to nourish with human purpose, human imagination and the inexhaustible energies of the wholly human spirit. Now there’s a project to get evangelical about! But to abandon the idea of “a reasonable faith” as “nonsense” and substitute for it a “feel-good” religion in pursuit of spiritual kicks is to start walking backwards to Christmas.
Headless religion tends to behave like the proverbial headless chicken: it runs round in circles, making rather a mess and getting nowhere.
But a heartless chicken wouldn’t lay many eggs. Head and heart, reason and passion, are not mutually exclusive alternatives. Which is why we say in our SoF introductory booklet, “No faith is fully human if it excludes the emotions, imagination and the creative spirit. A faith which fails to recognise anything beyond reason and logic will never change the world for the better...We need head and heart together: reason and imagination”. I wonder if in his heart, but also in his head, Duncan really disagrees?
Duncan Park was sent a draft of this response to his article and will respond in turn in our next issue.
Meanwhile, let us know what YOU think (or feel).