What's the minister up to?
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| Flowers in the Cambridge Unitarian Church on Sunday evening |
This helpful email caused me to write the following reply which, given that as a church we are currently beginning carefully to think together again about what it is we are and can/do offer to our ourselves and to the wider community, might usefully be posted here. After all it's not a bad thing to be clear about what the minister thinks he's up to . . .
—o0o—
Dear __________
Thank you for writing — and for
risking a reassessment of what I said on Sunday morning as well as
going on an an actual drift yourself. I appreciate that more than you
might imagine.
Please also don't worry
about what you said on Sunday. I didn't hear it as dismissive but as a
completely appropriate concern to raise. Indeed, it prompted me to add a
short paragraph to the version of my address that was published on my
blog. If you go to the following link and then find the paragraph
beginning "And the point of this kind of drifting?" you'll see it.
As
to what I'm trying to do with the congregation, perhaps the best thing
to do would be to meet up at some point for a coffee/beer and to have a
proper conversation about it. But, to get the conversation going here
are a few things.
The first thing to say is it
seems to me that liberal religious communities are not, in their modern
forms, as radical and progressive as they like to think they are. To be
sure they were once — after all their forebears played key roles
in driving along the Protestant Reformation (especially in its radical
forms), the Enlightenment (in both its mainstream and radical forms), and the republican revolutions in France and the USA — but today the
problem is that so many of their ideas entered the secular mainstream of
what became liberal democracy that they have become themselves part of
the complex set of problems that, since at least 2008, caused liberal
democracy to go into, what may be, a permanent decline.
In
all this I'm very influenced by some of Adorno and Horkheimer's ideas
found in their "Dialectic of Enlightenment". In it they note that the
classical Enlightenment not only limited thought and reason, it also
played a key part in leading to, not only old school fascism but also (at least as I see it) to the
new kinds of fascism arising out of neoliberalism. Both of these systems
clearly applied and still apply Enlightenment principles of order,
control, calculability, domination and systemization to the running of
society. In such a society people have become merely material — eg
personel departments become "Human Resources" — in the same way the
natural world has become merely a set of "natural resources"
thoughtlessly and brutally to be used up for selfish, narrow and short
term aims.
As an Enlightenment inspired
religious tradition this massive failure needs seriously to be taken
account of. As far as I see it, many aspects of the Enlightenment
(especially in its radical forms influenced by people such as Spinoza)
are worthy of continuing (after all we don't want to go back/forward to
old style superstitious religions and nationalisms etc.) — BUT the
Enlightenment project needs now to be continued in very, very different ways
than before. This is certainly part of what I'm trying to do with the
congregation — getting them to "drift" is one way to help (I hope) get
people to see that the world we live in is far more complex and rich
than can be understood via thought/reason alone. One needs to get out
into the world (and get one's feet back on the ground and one's hands
dirty) and actually look for real (if often hidden and occulted)
alternative stories, myths and metaphors to help us move forward in
genuinely new and more healthy, just and loving ways. I suppose it's to
try and create a new kind of empiricism, one sensitive not only to
so-called "natural facts" but also to "existential facts." This latter
point reminds me that in my own mix is a need to take something from the
pragmatists — in my case particularly from John Dewey (1859-1952). I also think
that Heidegger (notwithstanding his own problematic Nazism),
Wittgenstein and Henry Bugbee can be of help here too — but that's for another conversation.
To
put it back into the religious language of the original Unitarian movement in
Poland and Hungary from the 1540s on I think what is required is a modern kind of "rational mysticism" (or in a modern version of the same:"free-thinking mystics with hands") that can keep the Enlightenment side
of its nature alive but not at the cost of its experiential,
existential side. Two key religious/political thinkers for me in this
regard are the German anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) and the German/US philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). There is a very fine recent chapter by Franziska Hoppen
called “A Reflection on Mystical Anarchism in the works of Gustav
Landauer and Eric Voegelin” which hold the two together in a way I find
very amenable. It can be found in the following new open source pdf book
from the University of Stockholm:
You
are also right to note that what happened within churches in the civil
rights movement in the USA plays a part in my thinking. But for me the
direct experience of this [kind of thing] comes about through a real, personal encounter
with some of the people involved in churches in East Germany and
Czechoslovakia who were able to make their own communities centres of
real resistance to the prevailing, repressive ideology of Soviet-style
Communism. Their example, in turn, led me to think about how one might
try to make the church community here in Cambridge an "interstitial
place" (Simon Critchley is important to me here)
or a "temporary autonomous zone", a place of real political and
religious resistance against both neoliberalism and, alas, the creeping
nationalistic and fascistic tendencies now abroad both here and in
Europe and the USA. In connection with this last point I sneaked a
massive dose of (mystical) Christian anarchism under the door in my
Christmas Day address last year.
The national Unitarian periodical, The Inquirer, even published it — though God knows whether many people realized what I was doing. Still, one tries . . .
[I perhaps should also have added in my reply a link to the following address: What else can one to do in so-called dark times but offer the civil humanism of neighbourly love?]
And then there is the continuing massive influence of Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) upon me . . .
So,
thanks again for writing and taking time to engage with some of these
ideas. To repeat my opening comment, I appreciate this more than you
might imagine and, if you ever fancy that drink and conversation, let me
know.
Warmest wishes,
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