You’ve
heard Liberals and Conservatives—and their extreme cousins, Radicals and Reactionaries—talk.
Conservatives say, "Slow down! We need to hold the line on change for a
while. Let’s wait till a consensus to emerge before we move ahead with new
policies." Liberals, on the other hand, say, "Let's go! We are way
behind the times. Let’s move ahead with ordaining practicing gays (or allowing
kids at the Lord’s Table, or demanding that the government act more vigorously
to alleviate poverty). Reactionaries—extreme Conservatives—say things like,
"Now you've done it. I'm out of here. I want to start over with a new
church that eliminates all recent changes. I want no part of them." And Radicals—extreme
Liberals—say things like, “You haven’t done enough. I’m out of here. I want to
start over with a new church (or no church) that changes everything.
In this
somewhat academic blog post, I want to explore how we, as Liberals and Conservatives
(mostly) and even Radicals and Reactionaries (well, at least a few of us) talk
about the church. Or, better yet, I guess I’d like to write about how our talk
about change helps us understand our Liberal or Conservative selves.
So first I
need to define a few terms. First, structure. The structure of a church is its
legal, organizational and cultural aspects--everything from confessions to
church orders, from congregations to ethnic habits. Second, drift. Drift is how
the pendulum swings within culture. Over the past fifty or even one hundred years,
most commentators would agree that within most denominations, regardless of
their starting point, that drift has been leftward. So, in Canada’s United
Church, for example, the Primitive Methodist current has mostly been swamped by
Unitarian and other theologically Liberal currents. In the United States, the
original isolationist currents of Fundamentalism have been overtaken by political
activism and media savvy. And, where Fundamentalists used to dress differently,
watch no TV at all, and discourage higher education, they now (even at the
beach) dress the same as everyone else, watch the same TV, and have many of
their own institutions of higher education.
My thesis
is this. Conservatives and Liberals both accept current church structures. But
while Conservatives and Reactionaries are suspicious and concerned about the
current drift to the left, Liberals and Radicals are not. Ironically, however, Reactionaries
and Radicals, unlike their more moderate partners, both reject current church
structures. They want to break them down or start over. Reactionaries tend
towards independentism or building new church denominations while Radicals tend
to drift out of church all together. The following illustration might help keep
these distinctions straight.
*******
A.
<<-----------------------Religious
Structures----------------------->>
Radicals Liberals Conservatives Reactionaries
(reject (both accept structure) (reject
structure) structure)
B.
<<-----------------------------Religious
Drift-----------------------------<<
(Radicals, Liberals (Conservatives, Reactionaries
Accept the drift) Reject
the drift)
******
Now, those
on the left and the right have favored ways of trying to get their point of
view across. While certainly not limited to these strategies, more often than
not, these are the fallback positions.
Liberals and Radicals, depending
on how far left they are, tend to argue from circumstance or situation. They
say things like, “We need to fix the inner city’s poverty,” or “Look at the
suffering in the Sudan! What can we do to alleviate it?” Liberals are motivated
by difficult realities like crime, illness, racism and illiteracy. They get to
work to fix such things. Conservatives and Reactionaries tend to argue from
purpose or principle. The say things like, “the Bible is inerrant!” or
“Everyone has to subscribe to our denominational confessions,” or “we need to
find the truth.” Conservatives and Reactionaries are motivated by the great
ideals that have been handed down to them, by the laws of the universe, and by
the rules that embody them. The get to work in order to bring people back to or
rally people around their ideals.
People on
the left and the right also have peculiar ways of working together (or not). In
the middle, the Liberals and Conservatives who want to stay with current church
structures treat issues one at a time because they and the world we live in are
complex. They understand the dangers of oversimplifying. Thus people who hold
to middle positions tend to see many causes at work in the church rather than
just a few. Causes that both Liberals and Conservatives are concerned about
include secularism, less literacy, wealth, new interpretations of old passages,
youth culture, TV, leisure, social pressures, and so on.
The
extremists, on the other hand, Reactionaries and Radicals, tend to treat all
issues as related since the world, in their mind, is really pretty simple.
Extremists love simplistic slippery slope arguments that suggest everything is
headed in one direction. Thus they tend to reduce the causes to a very few,
usually negative, ones: refusing to take the word of God seriously, or refusal
to take alienation or poverty seriously.
But Liberals
and Conservatives are also different in how they tend to communicate. Conservatives
and Reactionaries on the right argue deductively from principal (ie, if
scripture or the confessions say so, we must accept that). Liberals and Radicals
on the left tend to argue inductively from experience. So, if there is
suffering, then we better do something about that. The right argues from
written documents and cultural memory: laws, confessions, and traditions. The
left argues from relationships and people, striving to improve the lot of
people via equality, progress, or openness.
The bottom
line is that I think the past generation or two has seen a marked shift away
from the center and towards the fringes. As people read and study less they are
also less able to describe complexity or put up with bureaucracy. So they
reject the structures while holding every more extreme opinions that make
conversation ever more difficult.
So
what do you think? And where do you fit in?
(This blog post was informed by the scholarly work of the
late Bernard Brock, a mentor and teacher for me. As a communication theorist at
Wayne State University, he was especially interested in the political arena.
But his ideas can easily be adapted to the church setting, and that is what
I’ll do here.)
