Are we cultivating a religious sentiment that makes God unnecessary?

In these past two weeks I have been chewing on Dominic Erdozain’s book The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion. I spent a lot of time (more time than I have) reading, trying to understand what his book is all about. Erdozain said things that reflect my own experience with church.  Up to this point, I had not been able to put it into words myself – but mot on that later.

 

Part of the title of this blog post comes from one of Erdozain’s quotes in the book that I believe points to the essence of what the text is about: Erdozain describes the slow process of cultivating a religious sentiment in Victorian Christianity that eventually made God unnecessary and led to a process of secularization.  

 

In what follows I will first, try to unpack Erdozain’s main arguments. Secondly, I will conclude by highlighting the significance of his arguments for our ecclesiastical practices today.

 

Secularization

One of Erdozain’s main arguments has to do with how his book contributes to a more accurate understanding of the secularization that has occurred in Great Britain. Erdozain asserts that, “rather than blaming the vaguely sinister external forces [such as education and advances in science] that undermined late-Victorian Christianity, our focus should be on the internal changes that either rendered the churches vulnerable to such competition, or simply performed the great handover of Christian agency themselves.” (200) Rather than locating the reason for secularization merely to external factors of Victorian Christianity Erdozain contributes in large to internal changes or mutations within the churches. In fact, he argues that one “can explain a large part of the [secularization] process by examining the shifting bases of morality within the religious cultures that ‘drove’ the religious boom. This is where the transition from a God-centered vision to a more humanistic moralism was particularly unforgiving. When churches reduced the spiritual ‘quotient’ in their own formulae for regeneration this was a major step towards secularity and possibly the decisive one.” (10) Thus Erdozain basically engages in the process of explaining Victorian Christianity’s mutation from theistic based morality to a humanistic based one. He particularly looks at the gradual mutation process and narrates how it unfolds in the content of Victorian activism.

 

Evangelicalism’s animating tensions

Erdozain’s contention is that Victorian Christians” redefined sin and salvation in terms that were devastating for their Christian protagonists.” (10) Part of the problem is that the animating tension that had made Evangelical Christianity was slowly but surely undermined. What was Evangelical’s animating tension? Erdozain explains this when he writes, “Evangelicalism was sustained by a spurring dialectic between God and humanity, spirit and flesh, and it is the tendency to elide such tensions simply because, in practice, they seemed to blend into one another.” (44) Crucial to this tension was the evangelical notion of sin. Evangelicalism “re-spiritualized” sin by emphasizing “an existential state of alienation of God rather than a set of earthly transgressions: a vast inventory of individual sins was exchanged for a single indictment of sin. [….] Sin was ontological not ethical – an idea depressing for the virtuous but strangely exonerating for anyone who fell short of the accepted standards of godliness. The evangelical mantra was that there was nothing you could do about your own sin except turn to Christ in faith.” (45) Thus the doctrine of sin is foundational for Evangelicalism.

 

In Erdozain’s argument it is particularly the mutation of the notion of sin that played a significant role in the secularization process. First Erdozain describes the shift from thinking about sin as ontological to codifying it into specific vices. Evangelicals started to engage in cultural wars on these vices. Certain external practices such as going to the theatre became a metonym for sin. Erdozain notes that, “the ‘occasions’ of sin were treated as though they housed the very spirit of human wickedness.” (74) This is a significant shift from viewing sin as being ontological. Thus, sin becomes more conceived as being rooted in external acts.

 

This shift also had significant implications for how salvation came to be perceived, namely as being liberated from these vices. Erdozain comments, “Again, this is not ‘disenchantment’ of any finality, but it is a clear example of what Taylor terms an ‘anthropocentric shift’: the transfer of a religious imperative into an essentially human idiom. Christianity is now defined by its war on vice. There is little in the religious vision that cannot be fulfilled by a combination of self-control, social action and political mobilization. Thus, the supplement to spirituality became a substitute.” (278-279)

 

Erdozain traces “the development of a subtle humanism of self-control and almost physically generated virtue, implicitly rather than explicitly this-worldly.” (203) Leisure which initially was seen as a vice came to be seen as redemptive in nature. The vices were combated by getting people to engage in wholesome and healthy activities – such as sports. Erdozain writes “Without formally denying the older springs of grace and virtue, Christian leaders had developed new mechanisms that, in a competitive leisure market, increasingly seemed to bear the load of their endeavors. In one very basic sense, recreation ‘worked’. It engaged at least some of those who were feared to have been lost to Christianity. In another sense it wrought quiet havoc on the redemptive principles of the institutions that employed it.” (229)

 

Endorzain views the emergence of non-transcendent morality as the epicenter of the gradual secularization.  This phenomenon – according to Endozain, was fueled by recreation as a “motor in the salvation industry“. However, the role of internal mutations have been downplayed by historians, who favour “largely extrinsic processes.” (200)

 

Conclusion

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.”

Matthew 5:13

Erdozain notes that “Evangelicalism was not a movement running out of steam so much as losing its savor.”( 84)

The moralism had slowly but surely been severed from the gospel. In fact the moralism came to stand on its own instead of the Gospel. This moralism which was intended to be a path to Christianity and to prepare the way became its own way. “Protestant piety, as Peter Berger has observed, is especially vulnerable to secularization because of its ‘exceedingly narrow channel’ between the believer and ‘the uniquely redemptive action of God’s grace’. “It needed only the cutting of this one narrow channel of mediation’, he argued, ‘to open the floodgates of secularization.’ Yet we can see that, in the British context, the cause was not the ‘systematic, rational penetration’ of ‘science and technology’ so much as the quiet calcification of decisively severed: what happened was that the horizontal axes of human exchange assumed priority, reducing prayer and spirituality to a regulative gloss on largely autonomous operations.” (201)

 

Concluding Observations

At the beginning I ask, “are we cultivating a religious sentiment that makes God unnecessary?”

A lot of the mechanism that were set in place for the secularization of Great Britain are at work in churches today. One area where this has stood out to me particularly is youth group. Since I work as a youth pastor that is the area of the church that I am most familiar with.

 

When I first started working as a youth pastor in 2005 I soon started to feel uneasy about some of the youth curriculum (Sunday School etc.) that is published. At this point and time I was not able to put words to this uneasy feeling. A few years down the road I discovered that a lot of teaching was in fact separated from the Gospel. In essence the “point” of the lesson did not need the gospel – it was simply teach people good morals. When I picture a middle school or high school students hearing some of these lessons I wonder what they hear and learn. I believe that for most people who created those lessons they had the Gospel in mind and for them the connection between this ethical behavior and what Jesus has done is clear. I wonder if this comes across in the lesson though. A lot of the lessons just seem to be about the things that we can do – be a better person, be nice, love others etc. But the idea that we are a new creation that we are no longer slaves to sin and are meant to live lives unto God seems to get lost. Furthermore, the power of the Holy Spirit in our life is ignored.

 

Without wanting to be overcritical whether we intend to or not we often communicate moral messages that are not based on the Gospel. A lot of the lessons sounds like self-help. One thing that children and youth workers can do is to teach clearly that we are grace and Spirit enabled people.