Dead Christians Society

From the notes for one of my Bethel Seminary lectures--a few thoughts on the world Sayers (and Lewis and Tolkien and so many other worthy and productive Christian writers) faced:

The twentieth century: Paganism anew

[Credit where due: in the following section, I'm repeating what the brilliant Richard Lovelace taught me in a class at Gordon-Conwell seminary back in the 1990s:]

Whatever the exact causes, there was a spiritual vacuum that created a space in Europe for the dictatorships and totalitarian systems of the war years. This was a time of real crisis—a Twilight of Western Thought—whose effects are still with us today.

In the 20^th century, the Paganism that some had been dabbling with during the period of the Enlightenment resurged and invaded the arts. In 1913 you get, for example, the premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps—the Rite of Spring—a ballet in which a young girl adores the earth as a goddess, then dances herself to death as a sacrifice. As it turned out, this was one of the most influential pieces of music in the 20^th century—almost every composer who followed was touched by the melody or the harmony or the rhythm of this piece of music.

The 20^th-century Christian cultural theorist Francis Shaeffer has an interesting concept—the line of despair. It says that those working in a given culture have a certain amount of "capital" given to them by religion which they can spend. But if you are living in an era without religion, you will cross the line of despair, and produce art expressing chaos or deep pain, like Munch's "The Scream" (painted in 1893) or pagan stoicism like Hemingway.

T. S. Eliot, the author of great emblematic poem of the 20^th century, The Waste Land, observed after his own conversion to Christianity that Europe was engaged in an all-out battle between the Christians and the Pagans.

I don't want to give the impression that all the arts were irredeemably corrupt. Despite these manifestations of this new paganism, the Christian base was always there, under the surface. You see it in the novels of William Faulkner, though he had a messed-up life. Even Stravinsky converted, in 1925, to Russian Orthodoxy. And he began to write church music, and to return to writing classical music of a more traditional sort.

The Loss of Tradition and the Fragmentation of the Self

[Here I'm turning from Lovelace to some of the intensive thinking I did in putting together my dissertation:]

To sum up, I believe what the materialist turn of the 20th century did was to pull the moral rug out from under people. If everything was a matter of atoms and evolution, no longer was there any higher law or "map" to guide our behavior.

In broader terms, what has happened in the modern period—at least in the Modern West—can be described as a "problem of the self." This problem, as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes it, is that modern people have lost the traditional frameworks or maps that had for generations and centuries oriented people as successful, secure, coherent selves.

With the onset of modernity, these old traditional, moral maps became fragmented, questionable, unstable. Now, once individual reason has been raised to the status of final authority—through the extravagant claims of science, played out to their logical extreme in the thought of Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, no moral or spiritual framework for identity—for knowing who we are as "selves"—is shared by everyone and can be taken for granted as the unquestioned framework.

So in the modern era, the human self has become a "problem" in a new sense.

In the 16^th century, we have Martin Luther, standing on the doorstep of modernity, struggling to free himself with the massive structure of congealed, dysfunctional churchly tradition—especially the "superstructure of penance"—that definitively determined the meaning of all his "thinking, feeling, and acting."

In the 20th and 21st centuries (a new world that Luther perhaps helped create), we have millions of people who are much more likely to face the opposite problem from the one Luther faced: not that tradition over-defined their lives, but that now the structures of society have been rooted out and our cultural and moral environment is in disarray. The psychological term for people in this condition is anomie. It means a pervasive alienation and purposelessness.

The problem is not the problem of pluralism—that is, competition between various traditions that are coherent, but mutually contradictory. Rather the problem is one of incoherence. There are no consistent, integrated traditions out of which individuals live their lives, and by which they discover their identities. The problem is not that our lives are caught up in pluralistic competition between traditions, but that we live them in a piecemeal way, without access to any coherent tradition.

Again, we can see the root of this modern fragmentation. It came originally from that fatal insistence of Enlightenment thinkers like Kant on the authority of individual reason above all else. In the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the only test of truth is the test of reason, and each person must judge every question for him or herself.

By those lights, all traditions are dangerous and oppressive, because they condition people's lives in so many ways—implicit as well as explicit, emotional as well as rational, and so forth. And so we must do away with them, and we are left patching together with an incredibly difficult task—the task of patching together a self, let alone a society, out of the fragments of old traditions and the relativism of the modern, scientific, pragmatic creeds.

Such was the world Dorothy Sayers faced. And it is ours today, too, a fortiori.

Tolkien and his Christian literary peers wrote for people who did not know the faith, or did not like it, or did not think it important—"a public which knows no History, no Classics, no Theology, and has almost forgotten its Bible," Dorothy L. Sayers complained.

"At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily," said Flannery O'Connor.

T. S. Eliot described the writers (and readers) of the day as "those who have never heard the Christian Faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism."

This was the reader to whom writers like Tolkien, Sayers, Eliot, O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene wrote. Yet Tolkien's books were less obviously Christian than theirs. He did see his Lord of the Rings as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work." He even expressed some frustration that readers did not see this. But in writing Christian truth to a swiftly secularizing modern world, Tolkien took a different tack.

First, he only wrote stories. He wrote nothing directly Christian or apologetic. C. S. Lewis wrote apologetics, literary criticism, theological studies, allegories like The Great Divorce, and whatever The Screwtape Letters is. Williams wrote apologetics, biographies, histories, and theology. Sayers wrote apologetic essays like "Creed or Chaos?" and theological works like The Mind of the Maker. Waugh, Eliot, O'Connor, and Walker Percy all wrote essays on the faith and reviewed religious books for secular magazines.

These writers used their literary gifts to present the old arguments in a new way. Tolkien did not do this at all. Besides his stories, he wrote a few academic papers on early English literature and just one essay, "On Fairy-Stories," giving his own religious ideas in any explicit form.

Second, he did not give his stories an overt religious meaning. Almost all his peers wrote stories whose Christian meaning was fairly obvious. In Lewis's Narnia Chronicles, Aslan, an obvious Christ-figure, tells the children that they were brought from earth to Narnia so "that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." At the end of Sayers's play The Zeal of Thy House, the archangel Michael argues theology with the main character. Eliot wrote poems with titles like "Ash Wednesday" and reflected on prayer in his poetry and his plays. In O'Connor's Wise Blood, a young man tries to establish the "Church of Christ without Christ" and The Violent Bear It Away is the story of a boy called to be a prophet.

Last week we looked behind the recent headlines about "Elvis Priestly," a Canadian Anglican minister who has integrated a jump-suited impersonation routine into his sacred services. We surveyed a few of the many points at which Christians have co-opted popular artistic forms in order to get their evangelistic message across.

This week, we ask the questions: how have Christians historically reacted to such forays into popular forms? And how successful have the resulting products been in themselves—that is, as songs, plays, novels, and so forth, quite apart from their message? Of course, we can only touch the surface of these issues. But with Elvis now in the (church) building, this seems a worthwhile use of a few minutes.

Let's begin with Christian novels. Despite the widespread churchly acclaim for Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), America's conservative Christians have not always been pleased with the novel as a genre. For much of the twentieth century, for many of the faithful, "novel reading, like other worldly amusements such as dancing, card playing, and attending the theater, was considered suspect." (Rabey and Unger, Milestones). Surely Jesus wouldn't waste his time with such trivial entertainments.

Yet something has happened in the past two decades. In 1979 and 1985, Janette Oke and Frank Peretti brought the erstwhile "secular" genres of the romance novel and the fast-paced thriller into the Christian mainstream with their novels Love Comes Softly and This Present Darkness. And whatever objections may linger, sales in the millions testify that these and a thousand titles like them—can you say Left Behind?—fill a need. The Old Guard's suspicions notwithstanding, the Christian novel is here to stay.

Fine. But a book is a static thing, and reading a private matter. What about Elvis, gyrating at the altar? Surely this is not just a potentially trivial or time-wasting pop culture invasion, but downright sacrilegious!

This reaction is not, of course, a new one. For example, in her 1942 radio serial, A Man Born to be King, the devout Anglican author Dorothy Sayers had an actor deliver gritty, colloquial lines as Jesus himself. For the time, this was a daring move, as it was illegal in England (and continued to be so until 1968) for a stage actor to portray any divine person. The proscription did not apply to radio, but outraged complaints poured in. As one shocked listener put it, "a sinful man" must not presume to "impersonate the Sinless One." To do so "detracts from the honour due to the Divine Majesty."

Though Elvis impersonation hardly blasphemes a sinless original, such pop-entertainment spectacles in church do raise similar questions of due honor to God. No doubt many among the twenty-first-century faithful, inured though we are to a stunning array of pop-culture evangelistic efforts, would echo the conclusion of that flustered listener to Sayers's radio play: "Could anything be more distressful to reverent-minded Christians?" One guesses such a reaction contributed to the Canadian Anglicans' decision to proscribe "Priestly's" act.

Others have argued that the problem with such Christian co-optations of popular forms may be not that they perpetrate sacrilege, but rather that they purvey saccharine. Sayers herself warned those tempted to use the play form to push for conversions, "If he writes with his eye on the spiritual box-office, he will at once cease to be a dramatist, and decline into a manufacturer of propagandist tracts. … He will lose his professional integrity, and with it all his power, including his power to preach the Gospel" (Dorothy Sayers, "Playwrights Are Not Evangelists").

Christian filmmaker David Cunningham, director of the gritty (and, by most accounts, aesthetically and narratively successful) To End All Wars, updates Sayers's warning by applying it to "Christian" films made not by filmmakers but by "evangelists trying to use film." Such efforts are bound to compromise story, realism, complexity, leaving only an unsatisfying pablum.

In the end, it may be that eager, culture-savvy preachers who use popular forms to convey the gospel risk foisting on the world impoverished—even laughable—expressions of those genres. And in so doing, they may well do what they would never wish to do: compromise the message of the gospel itself by hitching it to a poor-quality product.

So to anyone out there growing their sideburns and brushing up their sneer, in hopes of joining Mr. Priestly in leading "the king's" faithful to faith in The King, take heed:  "Caveat gyrator." If you want to borrow from the world, as Jesus and Paul did, to get across the message they preached, be prepared to do the thing right. Gospel kitsch may get some notice in the short term, but it's only a matter of time before people notice it doesn't touch the deep things of life or the true grandeur of the evangelium.

I once wrote a clerihew (a kind of biographical poem invented by a friend of G. K. Chesterton's) about this trait of Margery's. It uses the 50-dollar German loan-word meaning "salvation history":

Had Margery Kempe
been puffing the hempe?
No, her heart was transfichte
by the heilsgeschichte.

Susan Wharton Gates, “The Enduring Legacy of In His Steps,” Rediscovering The Heart Of Public Administration: The Normative Theory Of In His Steps (Ph.D. Dissertation, 1998)

“Notwithstanding the uncontested popularity of In His Steps, it is [Walter] Rauschenbusch, not Sheldon, who is remembered by church historians as personifying the social gospel movement. Rauschenbusch was the systematic thinker, the purist arguing for a “high” Social Gospel. In contrast, Sheldon is remembered as the mass propagandist for the “low” Social Gospel—low in the sense that Sheldon’s evangelical skirts were showing. Because he “learned how to be and write of the people,” it was Sheldon’s “pious nonsense,” with its powerful ethical thumb rule of doing as Jesus would do, that would capture the hearts and imagination of the Progressive era. A critique in the London Spectator dated June 3, 1899 says it well:

“‘There are few dogmas in his sermons . . . his moral is so carelessly wrapped up that it bursts through the paper. Yet there is something curiously Apostolic about this narrative method . . . we think the public buys them [the books] because it agrees with them. These books illustrate a “rule of thumb” for the production of a good life and this is what the average man wants.’

“But the so-called rule of thumb drew criticism from Sheldon’s gospel peers because it did not go far enough. Rauschenbusch criticized the ‘imitation of Christ theme’ saying it ‘created no ideal of human society, demanded no transformation of social institutions, produced no collective enthusiasms, and furnished no doctrinal basis for a public morality.’

“Yet the simple theme endured. To commemorate the 70th year since publication, one author reflected on the continuing puzzle of the book’s mass appeal. Offering ‘simple solutions for complex problems,’ it ‘came out of an age of reform when idealists wanted to clean up politics, rid the cities of their slums, and find a personal answer to the moral confusion they knew existed in their lives.’

“Whatever the final publication tally, In His Steps had (and continues to have) broad influence. Perhaps most telling is that the prophet was not rejected by his own. Following publication of In His Steps, members of Central Congregational took the pledge to do as Jesus would do. An 1899 article in the Topeka Capital reported that, ‘Those who have taken the pledge met the close of each of the six communion services held during the year and relate the experiences and ask questions and sing and pray together.’ To which Sheldon added: ‘These consecration services are growing in usefulness and power and the church is better in every way on account of them. The pledge is purely voluntary and those who take it do not judge those who are not ready to do so. At every meeting, so far, additions have been made to the number who are willing to take the pledge. Other churches and endeavor societies are beginning to take the pledge and try to live it out in business and politics and everywhere.’

“The same year, the Topeka State Journal reported that a new United Christian Party had embraced the principle that ‘We believe in direct legislation of the people, and in order to make a government from God through Christ, we should be governed in all things, lawmaking included, by the standard, What would Jesus do?’

“Sheldon had particular appeal in England, the source of millions of pirated copies of In His Steps. As remembered some 70 years later, Sheldon ‘made all other popular writers of his day seem small. . . . In England they call him the Great Devouring Sheldon. In His Steps has become a flood, and has swept over Great Britain as if a vacuum had been preparing for it for a thousand years. But his millions of readers are only part of the story. In His Steps has been an abundant pulpit theme. . . . Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists have praised it, published it, preached it. In England, elections have been carried by it.’ Further, one town council in England reportedly installed the pledge of ‘What would Jesus do?’ as the criteria in public decision-making.

“[In America,] writing for The Saturday Review, commentator Eric Goldman in 1953 cited In His Steps along with The Federalist Papers and Uncle Tom’s Cabin as ‘one of the volumes that had a substantial role in changing America during a particular period.’ In a ‘decade swinging for reform,’ it ‘reached as many as 20 million Americans with its reformer’s insistence that Christianity means not fear of God but love of the distressed.’

“The impact of the ‘best-seller on nobody’s best-seller list’ should not be underestimated. Concludes White, ‘Sheldon and In His Steps deserve to be studied in college, universities and seminaries. The ‘low’ Social Gospel intersected the popular culture of its day to a degree that must be taken seriously . . . What the popular mind proposes’ need not be disposed of by the sophisticated mind, but rather become the subject for teaching and learning.’ Cordova is also mindful of Sheldon’s ability to draw forth the needed combination of both individual and social reform. ‘Since the Social Gospel contributed to Progressivism, the New Freedom, the New Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society, perhaps Sheldon’s work as the chief popular propagandist for the movement and as a daily reformer in his own life should not be overlooked as unrealistic or impractical.’

 “How to explain the uncontested popularity of In His Steps? By all accounts, it was a sentimental story written by a so-so writer with nothing more to offer his readers than an axiom simple enough for a child to learn and apply. And yet it inspired millions of readers in numerous countries and fueled an unprecedented period of heart-felt social reform and active citizenship here at home.

“Because the axiom ‘what would Jesus do’ is not prescriptive or legalistic, it has great power to both transform and to motivate. Because it is highly contextual, it survives religious and theoretical fashion. And because it is action-oriented, it has the power to unite people who may have little or nothing in common. Not bad for a four-word thumb rule.

Susan Wharton Gates, in a 1998 public-policy oriented dissertation on Sheldon’s In His Steps, describes Sheldon’s famous “Jesus Newspaper” like this:

“Second to Tennesseetown, Sheldon’s other well-known (but less enduring) experiment was to run a Christian daily newspaper successfully for one week. Journalistic integrity was close to his heart and he had complained enough about ‘yellow journalism’ to cause one newspaper owner to take him on. As part of a well-pitched public relations campaign, the Topeka Daily Capital agreed to give him full reins of the paper for one week. He could do as he pleased—and the world would see once and for all if Christian principles could be applied to the pagan world of journalism and still turn a profit. The effort has been cited as the ‘best-publicized experiment of the entire social gospel era.’

“In January 1900, the new owner of the Capital announced the unprecedented venture: for the week of March 13 later that year, the author of In His Steps, by then published in the millions, would edit the eight-page paper for one week. During the next three months, a blitz of new subscriptions poured in; brilliantly, Sheldon-adoring youth, members of the national ecumenical Christian Endeavor Society, were enlisted to sell subscriptions, keeping a fraction of the proceeds for their local chapters. As anticipated circulation mounted, extra presses in Chicago, New York and England were engaged. Compared to the Capital’s average circulation of around 11,000 in 1899, circulation during Sheldon week exceeded 360,000.

“While low on content, Sheldon having forbidden sensational reporting, distasteful ads (or those whose claims could not be validated), prize-fight coverage and partisan news, the Christian daily showcased a tight code of journalistic ethics. Bylines were used and the masthead displayed every employee’s name down to the janitor. Reporters were instructed to not press for an interview beyond a first refusal. Furthermore, they were obliged to obtain written permission to use an interview and show the subject the final article before going to press. Slang was out—as was reporting on theater. Crime was downplayed, the extra space devoted to moralizing about how the crime might have been prevented. Even the society page took a beating when a reporter was sent out to investigate how society matrons frittered away money in trivial afternoon pursuits.

“While successful by some measures, the experiment—not surprisingly—was derided in the secular press. His greatest support came from fellow-gospeler, Washington Gladden, who praised Sheldon for downplaying ‘gossip and rumor and scandal and the disgusting details of vice and crime…there are thousands of bright and beautiful things which would be the best kind of news if the reporters were trained to look for them.’”