Interview with Jake Meador: "In Search of the Common Good"

“I am forced, against all my hopes and inclinations to regard the history of my people here as the progress of the doom of what I value most in the world: the life and health of the earth, the peacefulness of human communities and households. And so here, in the place I love more than any other, and where I have chosen among all other places to live my life, I am more painfully divided within myself than I could be in any other place.” - Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill” (a 1969 essay)

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In Search of the Common Good

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Posted by Scot McKnight

September 14, 2019

An Interview between Jake Meador and David George Moore

Jake Meador is editor in chief of Mere Orthodoxy, an online magazine and is a director with the Davenant Institute. His writing has appeared in First Things, National Review, Christianity Today, Commonweal and Books & Culture.

The following interview revolves around Jake’s new book, In Search of the Common Good (foreword by Tim Keller). The interview was conducted by David George Moore. A few of Dave’s teaching videos and other videos can be found at www.mooreengaging.com.

Moore: Give us an idea what, perhaps who, motivated you to write this book.

Meador: It was two separate trends that I was observing in parallel. Within about a five-year window, a number of Christian intellectuals wrote books raising concern about the future of the church in America. Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option is the most well-known. At the same time, a number of books also came out from more mainstream publishing houses about the decline of civil society in America. J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy would likely be the most popular on the right. Robert Putnam’s Our Kids is probably the biggest title on the left. What I wanted to do with my book is weave those two trends together so that I could say something about the cause of decline that also offers a clear path forward for Christians. If it’s true that we live in this anxious, lonely, and disorienting world, what does the command to love one’s neighbor call us to in such a context? I wanted to answer that question.

Moore: I would like you to respond to a marginal note I made in my copy of the book. In thinking of your book, I wrote “If God created the world, we need to guard against doing too much tinkering with it. Yes, we are stewards who are given the creation mandate, but we must be careful how much we desire the world to be remade in our own image.”

Meador: This is an important question. The Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck said in his work that “grace restores nature,” and I think that’s an important insight into how this ought to work. On the one hand, Bavinck’s framing recognizes that the world truly is fallen and so as we fulfill God’s call to have dominion over the earth and to love our neighbor, both will necessarily involve working on the world in ways that change it. We must, Berry says, break the body of creation simply in order to live–we kill animals in order to eat meat, we break up the earth in order to farm. That being said, “grace restoring nature” comes with a kind of seat belt built into the process: As we are transformed by grace, we are enabled by God to restore nature, not to build something entirely new or to override nature or to crush nature. It’s important we understand the idea of ‘stewardship’ rightly. The power of a steward is relativized by the health of the thing entrusted to them. Theirs is not an absolute dominion, but a contingent one that is defined and judged by how their authority is used to serve the life of the thing they are stewarding. Benedict XVI says that ‘the book of nature is indivisible,’ which means that a human society that survives only by committing acts of exploitative violence upon the earth is itself going to be an unhealthy society—which, of course, is precisely what we have today.

Moore: Early on you write, “…we must face the fact that many of the wounds contributing to the American church’s decline are self-inflicted.” Unpack that some for us.

Meador: There are two great evils that have been characteristic of American evangelicalism for about the past 30-40 years. The first evil is a disordered relationship to politics that is closely tied to the rise of the religious right. The religious right has distorted our lens for viewing politics by frequently reducing Christian political witness to the accomplishment of certain policy objectives brought about by civic action intended to help the “right” political party acquire power. I don’t think it was originally intended this way, but over time what that has done is it has crowded out other political values, civic virtues, and a more robust approach to political life amongst evangelicals. It has made us power-chasers and, when combined with evangelical fears over persecution, has the effect of (we think) authorizing us to support even a moral abyss like Donald Trump if he will protect us from the godless liberals and pick up a couple policy wins for us. In other words, it makes us entirely indifferent as to political means because we apparently believe that the means justify the ends. I know of no other way to read something like Wayne Grudem’s deplorable endorsement of Trump than as precisely this sort of sub-Christian political thinking.

The other great evil is the seeker-sensitive movement. Willow Creek Church is exemplary of this movement and, if their recent job listing for a senior pastor is any indicator, they learned basically nothing from the abuse scandal involving their founder, Bill Hybels. A seeker-sensitive church is the American version of the “modernist” church lampooned in the old BBC sitcom “Yes, Minister.” In one sketch, a government official is explaining “modernism” to the Prime Minister. He says that the church wishes to be more relevant. The PM, bless him, says “to God?” and the official laughs and says, “of course not!” Later the official explains to the PM that the Queen is a non-negotiable part of the Church of England but belief in God is “an optional extra.” It would not be terribly difficult to translate many of those jokes into the American context with the seeker-sensitive movement as the target.

If you look at something like that Willow Creek job listing, you see a great deal of bleating about leadership and vision, the things valued by the American suburban business class that serves as Willow’s base, and alarmingly little about a rich prayer life, devotion to God, generosity toward the poor, a love of the Scriptures and the sacraments, and so on.

We might put it this way: If we suppose that the Ten Commandments are concerned with piety and with justice, then the seeker-sensitive movement taught us to be indifferent to piety while the religious right taught us to be indifferent to justice. And an ostensibly Christian movement that is indifferent to both of those will not be long for this world and will, indeed, alienate many people—and with good reason! Indeed, it would seem to be precisely the sort of religious movement that the Old Testament prophets as well as Christ himself spend so much of their time condemning.

Moore: You are the beneficiary of parents who live a vibrant and compelling vision of the Christian faith. How would you encourage Christians struggling with cynicism due in no small part to not seeing a compelling vision of the Christian faith being lived out, even though growing up in so-called Christian homes?

Meador: The first thing I would want to say is that I am deeply sorry.

The second thing is I would encourage them to do everything in their power to find mature Christians who really are wholly given to the life God calls us to in Scripture. Having that support in your life is often going to be essential for one’s own spiritual health.

The third thing would be to attend closely to the voice of God in the Scriptures. The Bible knows something of people who follow God while alone and in the wilderness. And if the biblical record is any indicator, two of the great temptations to people who are attempting to do that are grumbling and despair. The Israelites believe God has abandoned them in the wilderness and grumble. Elijah believes God has abandoned him in the desert and nearly gives in to despair. The answer to both these sins is the same: Believe the promise of God offered to you in the Gospel. God does not forget his people. He is not indifferent to their suffering. He is familiar with sorrow, acquainted with grief.

And also: God is overflowing with life, joyous in his own perfections and delighted to share his goodness with us. So he also calls us to rejoice evermore. St Paul wrote those words and he was in prison when he did so. Why do we rejoice? Because we worship a good and loving God who has made provision for us in the Gospel so that we can know him for eternity. And we can see a taste of that goodness to come even today, even when we are lonely and deprived of Christian fellowship. Even if you lack close Christian community, you still live in the theatre of God. You see his works every day. He lays them out before you and, as the French Catholic writer Sertilanges puts it, his works “desire a place in your thought.” Give them that place. If music delights you, get a record player, buy some of your favorites on vinyl and make a habit of sitting in an otherwise silent room and letting the music roll over you. God made that music and he loves it too. Enjoy that and be comforted.

A similar discipline could apply to any number of things. Develop a good palate for wine. Learn to bake and relish the unique flavors you can create. The world is overflowing with things that are delightful and they are all gifts, they come down to us from ‘the father of lights,’ to quote St John. So cultivate the discipline of looking toward the good, even when there is much ugliness set before you and even when that ugliness takes the particular form of hypocrisy, spiritual pride, self-righteousness, and so on.

Moore: Most people, including most Christians, equate politics with advocacy for one candidate over another. How can we recover a more expansive (and ancient) sense of politics as what our contribution ought to be to the polis or city where we live?

Meador: Your political life did not begin when you became old enough to vote. It began when you were conceived. From your earliest moments of existence, your life was made possible and sustained by others. You only came into this world after being wrapped, quite literally, in the love of another human being, for what else is a mother’s womb then a place in which we are wrapped in love? We must recover this wider understanding of politics if we are to have anything useful to say about common life at all, including about electoral politics and public policy. We are all naturally gregarious as human beings. Our existence is not possible apart from the existence of other human beings and something inside us longs to be connected to others. One practice that may be helpful is to make a list of the political communities we are part of. We are all part of a family. That’s one. But then we should also list out any community of three or more people that we are part of that is organized around the enjoyment of some recognizable good. That could include our job. It hopefully includes our neighborhood. It might include a local coffeeshop where you’re a regular or your local CSA or a neighborhood board. For Christians, it ought obviously to include your church and, perhaps within your church, a small group. These are all communities that we belong to, that we have some stake in, and that we can contribute to in order to make the lives of others somehow more delightful and enjoyable. So I think we begin there. Recall that when Jesus was asked “who is my neighbor?” is answer was the Parable of the Good Samaritan. One thing we should take from that is asking “who is my neighbor?” is often a cutesy question that is meant to emancipate us from the obvious and immediate obligations put upon us by the people we encounter every day. Learn to love the people you are stuck with. Start there and you’re on your way to a healthy political life—and, through the assistance of the Holy Spirit, something of Christian virtue as well.

Moore: You do a terrific job of showing how certain constraints and order bring the best freedom. In a culture that prizes an untrammeled sort of freedom, how can we winsomely model that the truest freedom comes from sacrifice and delighting in God’s order?

Meador: Pope Paul VI says that Christian love, rightly understood, has four characteristics: Freedom, Fruitfulness, Fidelity, and Totality. Freedom means that love cannot be coerced. I cannot make a person love me. And if I do something kind for another person under duress, they might benefit from what I do but I have not loved them in that act. Most of us are clear on this point. But the others are often neglected, I fear. Fruitfulness reminds us that love produces an outcome. This is most obviously seen in marriage in the form of children. But all love is fruitful. Fidelity means that love must be committed. We recognize this, again, most clearly in marriage. But anyone who has been abandoned or betrayed by a friend will know something of this sting, I think, and therefore why it is that love must be faithful. Totality means that when we love a person, we love them completely. Love is a conscious acting to promote the good of another. But if I merely try to promote my child’s physical well-being by giving them food and a place to sleep while remaining indifferent to their emotional, spiritual, or social well-being then I have not loved my child, even if I make great sacrifices to make sure they have food and shelter. So we need to remember that love requires more than mere freedom. Indeed, there will be times when the most loving course may not feel like freedom to us precisely because we are consciously limiting our own options in order to faithfully love another person. But this is good, and, indeed, is a more perfect freedom because freedom is ultimately not about the multiplication of choices set before you, but about the actualization of a single, correct choice.

Moore: What are two or three things you hope readers take away from your book?

Meador: First, that there is always cause for hope because God’s promises are sure and do not fail. That alone is cause enough, of course. But we can also talk about another lesser reason for hope.

Second, I hope it gives us a tenderness toward our neighbors. We live in a deeply disordered world and that disorder often manifests in depression, anxiety, despair, and various forms of unhappiness. To remember that as we live alongside people is important.

Third, I would love for people to adopt a consistent practice of Sabbath. The Sabbath disrupts us, it reminds us that we are made to know God, and it creates a space in which we can share unhurried time with others. It creates a space in which we can both encounter God through public worship with his people in which we hear the Word preached and receive the Eucharist and in which we can give and receive hospitality to one another. If you want to identify one concrete thing you can do to try and repair civil live in your home place, I think adopting a consistent Sabbath practice of public worship and giving and receiving hospitality would be a great place to begin.

Process Theology: The Peace of Uncertainty

Introduction

I find here in Farmer's process reflection all the best of "open and relational theology" coupled with "process thought." In opposition is the egregiousness of hob-nailed booted theology which misses everything that is said here in her well written article. Yet it is in this space we must take off our boots if we are to learn to walk again upon this earth in the presence of God as we would amongst all things holy and divine.

R.E. Slater

September 3, 2019

The Spaciousness of Uncertainty

https://www.openhorizons.org/the-spaciousness-of-uncertainty-a-place-for-love.html

by Patricia Adams Farmer

September 3, 2019

In the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

- Rebecca Solnit

In her book Hope in the Dark, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit argues a strong and eloquent case for uncertainty. Uncertainty? But no one likes that word. Don't we often remark that the worst part of waiting for news about a diagnosis or a lost dog or an unpredictable hurricane is the "uncertainty"? Today, we face serious, existential uncertainties in the larger world: Will we finally address climate change before it's too late? Is it, in fact, too late? How much more violence will we see before hate runs its present course? Will our democracy hold? All this uncertainty makes us crazy. That is, until we discover the riches inherent in uncertainty.

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The elegance of Solnit's premise, which she develops in historical context, is this: "In the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act." And this—uncertainty itself—forms the basis for all hope. She explains: "Hope is the embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists." She's right. Certitude is deadly. I often hear extreme optimists, particularly religious ones, exclaim with certitude (which they mistake for faith): "God's in control! It's all good!" I hear pessimists, especially lately in the face of the Amazon's raging fires, say with the same certitude, "We're toast! It's too late, it's all over." Both of these expressions lead to apathy and inaction, to say nothing of mental health problems. It is between these extremes that the gift of uncertainty steps in to save us. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, when asked if she is an optimist or a pessimist, replies, "I am an optimist who worries a lot."

The idea of uncertainty from a spiritual viewpoint is a rich and fertile area for nurturing meaning and enthusiasm. And yes, hope itself. That's because in the spaciousness of uncertainty we come face to face with our freedom, not an illusory freedom, but authentic freedom to act, to make a difference to God and to the world. Freedom creates new worlds of possibility, but it also creates anxiety as it opens up possibilities for evil as well as for good. And so, our freedom is both a curse and a blessing. It fills us with the dread of uncertainty, but without it nothing would be real or fresh. Creation would end. Civilizations would cease.

As a process thinker and contemplative Christian, I embrace this sense of authentic freedom, even with the unpleasant side effect of uncertainty. I see God and the world as deeply interconnected—i.e., panentheism. To use religious language, we are in a covenantal relationship with God. We are co-creators with divinity, not inert chess pieces or puppets with the illusion of freedom. We possess authentic freedom to act and dream and change the world—a world of unrelenting uncertainty. But now we see that uncertainty is our best friend. Without it, it would be useless to do anything, to pray, to act, to write a letter to the editor, to protest. Nothing would count for anything without authentic freedom and its side kick, uncertainty.

In a Whiteheadian cosmology, uncertainty marks the character of every fresh droplet of experience in the universe. Every new moment is open and pliable and receptive until it becomes the past. In our human freedom, we have input, we have significance, we have power—albeit, limited. We are part of a whole universe infused with innate freedom, which means that even influencers like cancer cells and tyrants have input. But God has input, too. Always. In every fresh, becoming moment, God is at work. We may not see it or feel it, but God's presence imbues everything in the world, maybe not in an extrovert "Here I am!" sort of way, but rather in the quiet depth of things: in our sufferings and our joys, in our confusions and in our passion for a better world. God's power is not the kind of power that determines our fate like a master puppeteer; God's power is like the lure of oasis in a desert, an attraction, a beauty that we are so thirsty for that we choose it as we do a lover.

And so, God tenderly lures all creation toward the best possible choices given the circumstances. Of course, we humans often bulldoze over the best choice in favor of selfishness and greed and so break the heart of God on a daily basis. Nevertheless, love—the greatest power in the world—persists. As process theologian Marjorie Suchocki says, "God works with what is to bring about what can be." Such ongoing divine enticements toward joy and meaning and connection are driven by an unflagging cosmic love that beats quietly and patiently in the depths of the world, in the wings of the dragonfly, and in our cries for help.

So, yes, there is a kind of certainty, too, but it is not certainty of outcome or the certainty that "everything happens for a reason," or that "everything is in God's hands," but rather a faith in love itself, in beauty, in kindness—a trust in the power of creative transformation and resurrection possibilities, come what may. This is the firm, unwavering ground on which we stand.

I believe "God is love" as the New Testament says. And love never coerces or bullies or abandons or goes it alone. And so, in this thoroughly relational world, our faith in God is blended with the colors of empowerment within ourselves to create a fresh and more beautiful landscape. This means we have to be willing to accept uncertainty, even the anxiety of it.

If we have trouble accepting anxiety as a part of uncertainty, we may need to enlarge our palette to make room for several colors of feeling: contentment and restlessness, grief and joy, anger and forgiveness. All of this spaciousness helps Beauty do her work in the creation of a new world. Beauty, from a process standpoint, is not a pretty picture with monochromatic color of easy, uncomplicated feeling. It is not a Hallmark movie. Rather than a thin line of either/or, Beauty calls for a spacious, richly intense harmony of inclusion and transformation. Like the Psalmist of the Hebrew Bible who chooses all colors of feeling to be expressed in song and poetry, so maturity is learning to hold contradictory feelings in the wideness of God's mercy and love.

In the spaciousness of uncertainty, we can find a larger peace—Peace with a capital "P." This wider sense of Peace, Whitehead says, is primarily "a trust in the efficacy of Beauty." In this wideness filled with possibility and love, we can act, we can create, we make meaning. We can paint the world anew.

July 4th Thoughts on Church & State

Can Christians be a people of justice rather than looking for the state to give justice? The first task of the Church is not to make the world more just but to live out to the world what grace-filled justice is that it may show to the world justice to the invisible people of the world desperately fleeing from evil seeking justice to protect and help, feed and clothe.

Christians are to be an alternative to the world. The Church of God embodies the witness of an alternative reality - of the people of God telling the world you are loved, you are cared for, you will not be harmed - neither you nor your children.

American cannot be a nation of nationalism, militarism and capitalism at the expense of its populace – and particularly Christianity cannot be aligned with a government espousing harm and destruction to those whom it serves or under-serves.

America cannot be a nation which runs on fear. It cannot be a democracy that is governed like those nations committed to ruling in fear and injustice. It must be a nation committed to grace, mercy, and grace-filled justice. A true democracy that is representative of Christ must be shown the way by churches of Christ telling of Another Way. A Way that follows Jesus in ministries of helps, healing, peace, and refuge. A Way of personal and community redemption. This is the path of the Church and can be the path of any nationalised democracy seeking wholeness, unity, and service to mankind.

R.E. Slater

July 3, 2019

Bruce Epperly - The Future of Process Theology

  

  

The Future of Process Theology: Personal and Planetary Meditations

article link here

Bruce Epperly

July 2, 2019

The upcoming conference focusing on the “Future of Process Theology,” to be held July 24-26 in Fairbanks, Alaska, has inspired me to articulate my own future vision for process theology as it continues to interact with our postmodern, pluralistic, and increasingly interdependent world.

I have been a process theologian, amateur and professional, for nearly fifty years. I first encountered process theology as a student at San Jose State University in Richard Keady’s and Marie Fox’s classes in 1973. Looking back, I can assert that I might not be an active Christian, indeed, a theologian and pastor, apart from the impact of process theology on my understanding of God and the relationship of Christianity with other world religions. Process theology is more than an intellectual system to me; it is a way of life that shapes my ministry, teaching, politics, marriage and family life, citizenship and spirituality. The open-spirited, possibility-oriented vision of process theology has inspired me to adventure and given me courage to face adversity, trusting a way will be made when I see no way forward. For me, process theology addresses the totality of experience and provides a life-changing vision of God, the world, Christian faith, and spiritual experience.

Once upon a time, as every good story goes, I was a novice process theologian, studying with John Cobb, Bernard Loomer, and David Ray Griffin at Claremont Graduate School and Claremont School of Theology. Now, forty years after completing my doctoral dissertation, I have become a member of the older generation of process theologians, a mentor to present and future process theologians, lay, academic, and clergy. Though my process mentors remain John Cobb and David Griffin, I have claimed my vocation as a theological and spiritual artist, shaping the contours of process theology, spirituality, and ethics as a writer, pastor, professor, and mentor. I have discovered that one of my vocations over the past few decades has been to convey the wisdom of process theology ways that are understandable and convincing to laypersons and pastors, expanding the impact of process theology beyond the academic community.

In the wake of the sixteenth century Reformation, Protestant theologians proclaimed that the reformed church is always reforming. In a similar fashion, I believe that process theology is always in process, navigating its way through a changing world, innovating and adapting, and, as Alfred North Whitehead says, initiating novelty to match the novelty of the environment. I believe that the future of process theology is evolving and widening, with no and final sure destination. Faithfulness to the insights of Whitehead, Hartshorne, Loomer, Meland, Cobb, Griffin, Ogden, and others, inspires the continuing creation of theological novelties to match the shifting novelties of our time. Not novelty for novelty’s sake, but as a reflection of the call to creative transformation as a catalyst for changing the world.

As I look at the future of process theology, my perspective is that of a North American Christian process theologian, grounded in my theological-spiritual home and open to the wisdom of other paths of faith. While process theologians are always pilgrims, journeying to new lands and learning new things, my lens is that of the church, seminary, and interactions with seekers and persons of other wisdom traditions. Though rooted in the North American church, I seek to have a global vision. Christian process theologians seek the creative transformation of the church while recognizing the importance of sharing broadly articulated visions of process thought to seekers and questioners of our time.

My vision of the future of process theology can be described by the following affirmations:

• The future of process theology is global. God is the inner energy and wisdom of all creation, the principle of creative transformation giving life and growth to all things, the reality in whom we live and move and have our being. Revelation and inspiration are everywhere. God’s presence and witness is universal, thus liberating us from the parochialism of denomination, culture, and nation. Process theology invites us to articulate theologies of stature in dialogue with other wisdom traditions and the secular world. Process theology is always emerging – new every morning – learning and sharing, growing in wisdom and stature.

• The future of process theology is integrative. Holographic in nature process theology takes us beyond opposition to contrast and will continue to break down walls of separation and isolating siloes of faith and science, religion and medicine, intellect and emotion, conscious and unconscious, Christianity and other faiths.

• The future of process theology is multi-disciplinary, inviting us to find points of contact between the various academic and professional disciplines. Connection is everything, truth is relational, and what happens in the laboratory, library, archeological dig, and church are interconnected.

• The future of process theology is interspiritual. One can be profoundly Christian, rooted in the way of Jesus, and still be evolving as we embrace the gifts of other wisdom traditions, as well as atheistic and agnostic critics. Hybrid or fluid spirituality invites us to explore the spiritual practices of other faiths as well as their visions of reality, recognizing both differences as well as commonalities, and places of personal edification. The Christian faith of future must be spiritually fluid, centered on Christ, whose wisdom embraces truth in its many manifestations and pathways. Profoundly incarnational, process theology and spirituality live out John Cobb’s affirmation that Christ is the way that excludes no way.

• The future of process theology is holistic. Relational in spirit, process theology joins mind and body, cell and soul, promoting healing and wholeness at every level of life. The heavens declare the glory of God, right whales sing praises to their Creator, and the cells of our bodies vibrate with Divine Wisdom. The whole and part are connected, and this means that we need to expand the horizons of healing and spiritual experience to embrace the environment as well as global medicines, healing practices, and unexpected cures and healings.

• The future of process theology is political and liberating, challenging us to join national affirmation with global interdependence and moving us from individual and national self-interest to world loyalty. There is no “other” as we welcome the diversity of human culture and experience. Political policy, from a process perspective, promotes relationships, beauty of experience, and expanded circles of concern. Politics is about healing and wholeness embracing the interdependence humankind and the non-human world, and balances national integrity with world loyalty.

• The future of process theology is ecological, inspiring us to love the earth, reverence the non-human world, and claim our role as God’s companions in healing the earth. Process theology inspires ecological economics focusing on sustainability, relationships, and meaning. The world is an incarnation of Divine Wisdom, the body through which the Divine Spirit flows and grows, calling us to be partners and companions with all creation, seeking to heal our planet.

• The future of process theology is mystical. We are all mystics. The “sighs too deep for words” of God’s Spirit well up from with us, though we are often unaware of this ubiquitous inspiration. Awakening to the real presence of God in all creation and ourselves is at the heart of process spirituality. Process mysticism inspires us to discern God’s call in every moment and invites us to update our spiritual practices for our setting. Mysticism is holistic, and not siloed to the monastic life: mysticism inspires contemplative social transformation and prophetic healing, challenging injustice so that all can experience the fullness of God. Mysticism experiences divinity on a summer day, observing with Mary Oliver the intricate machinations of a grasshopper eating its lunch, and launches forth in appreciation and affirmation of the Holy Here and Holy Now, embedded in every moment of life.

Process theology has a future. But, with the diminishing impact of seminaries and the marginalization of process theology on many seminary faculties, we need to imagine the future in novelty ways and discover novel ways of communicating process thought in the larger society, to lay persons and professionals alike, to those within the church and to the church of the open spaces. Not bound by seminary walls or church sanctuaries, the future of process theology lies with intellectually-lively pastors, inspired laypersons, and insightful environmentalists, economists, health care providers, and innovative theology thinkers, willing to go beyond jargon and technical language to incarnate the wisdom of process theology in daily life and the intricacies of ecology, economics, and education.

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About the Author

Bruce Epperly is a Cape Cod pastor, professor, and author of over 50 books in the areas process theology, scripture, healing and wholeness, pastoral excellence and well-being, and spirituality.

His books in process theology include:

• “Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed”
• “Praying with Process Theology: Spiritual Practices for Personal and Planetary Healing”

Energion series on Process Theology:

• “Process Theology: Embracing Adventure with God”
• “Process Spirituality: Practicing Holy Adventure”
• “Process and Ministry”
• “Process and Pastoral Care”
• “One World: The Lord’s Prayer from a Process Perspective”
• “Process Theology and Celtic Wisdom”

He is featured on the weekly progressive-process theology podcast, “Faith on the Edge: Equipping Congregations to Face Our Century.” (https://faithontheedge.org/)

Is Research into Religion a Fool’s Errand?

Trying to explain religion from a non-religious point of view can be as difficult as it is complex. To the big question of whether religion has helped the world it seems it may not be as humanitarian as it thinks of itself as. To the other question as to whether religion helps mankind live better with itself this too seems doubtful when reaching across a mosaic of differentiating cultures and unreforming societal thinking and behavior. 

Would the world be better off without religion? To this we may only be able to say that "religion" would only replace itself with another sort of "religion" as it is a large part of the human condition. If we cannot rid ourselves of ourselves than to remove religion would be just as impossible as witnessed by atheistic societies seeking to remove all forms of religion with superseding forms of nationalising state behaviors.

We might enlighten ourselves but only some few can do this in a way which is heart-broadening into the larger cultural contexts we find ourselves in. For those who try it may be a fruitless task if society as a whole refuses to give up its own identity of itself, or needs to follow group expectations, and so forth. As much as we think of ourselves as malleable, as adaptable, cultural mores have become the bedeviling factors which refuse to change either easily or willingly. And so, it is into this context that Connor Wood wishes to explore in hopes of expositing some bit of hope or help exploring the same questions with other who similarly venture within their minds and souls seeking answers to the question, "How might we become more uplifting-evolving civilization than we have shown ourselves to be."

R.E. Slater

June 17, 2019

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Tradition and Innovation as Worldviews:

Is Research into Religion a Fool’s Errand?

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceonreligion/2019/06/tradition-and-innovation-as-worldviews-is-research-into-religion-a-fools-errand/

by Connor Wood

June 13, 2019

Here’s a scenario. Let’s say that you, an enlightened resident of a modern country with electricity and anime and internet access, went back in time to the colonial Caribbean, where enormous plantations forced slaves to work under the scorching sun to produce nearly all the world’s sugar. Imagine that you also had, right at your fingertips, all the information you could ever need to logically prove to the owners of the colonial plantations that – despite their deeply held beliefs – slavery was actually pretty bad for slaves. Let’s further say that, as you step out of the time machine, you’re blissfully certain that as soon as the plantation owners hear your airtight argument, backed up by facts and evidence, they’ll immediately realize their error and emancipate their slaves.

But really, of course, it’d be about thirty-five minutes before you got hacked to death by sugarcane machetes. Why? Because slaveholders’ warm, fuzzy beliefs about slavery were motivated cognition – jargon for “believing in things for emotional and usually self-interested reasons.” If someone believes that it’s raining, but I open a window and show that it’s not, he’ll just change his mind. But if that same person believes that forcing hundreds of malnourished slaves to work 14-hour days in blistering heat until one day they drop dead is perfectly okay, then there’s not much I can immediately do, in terms of marshaling evidence and reason, to convince him otherwise. His beliefs about the current weather are just inferences from evidence, but his beliefs about slavery are motivated. He has extrinsic incentives to believe them.

I’m bringing this up because I’ve started recently to wonder whether I’m on a fool’s errand. In trying to study and write about religion in ways that make it more intelligible and legible to scientifically minded, educated, technocrat-y sorts of people, what am I really expecting to accomplish? Do I think it’s possible to change anyone’s mind?

Let’s just say that overwhelming gobs of objective, empirically sound evidence supported the clear conclusion that, in fact, religion is more or less impossible to get rid of, and moreover that rationalist attempts to get rid of it generally produce extensive harm in the form of disrupted communities, impaired life cycles, the breakdown of cumulative culture, and other social and psychological problems.

In fact, a good amount of evidence does support these conclusions, but I wouldn’t say that it’s overwhelming. An independent researcher acting in good faith could be perfectly justified in not drawing these conclusions. Still, for the sake of argument, let’s say that the evidence was that good. That compelling.

Cool Science, Twitter, and Religion

Would it change the technocratic view of religion? By “technocratic view of religion,” I mean something like the opinions about religion held by your typical rationalist – heuristically, a voracious reader of blogs like Slate Star Codex and Less Wrong, or a Silicon Valley coding whiz with a major presence on Reddit, or a big data nerd who gets in violent Twitter debates about Bayesian versus frequentist statistics, or someone like that. Obviously these aren’t all overlapping categories, but they do share something in common: a view of religion that, on average, consists of a set of gut-level assumptions, semantic associations, and socially learned biases to the effect that religion is Out Of Date and, probably, not just neutral but actively inimical to technological, epistemic, and social progress. (It goes without saying that the claims of religion are also seen as obviously false.) 

Sure, some rationalists might acknowledge that religion can have social value. But this is a minority position. Overall, the technocratic view of religion sees nothing wrong with the sudden, rapid decline of religious faith in the U.S. over the past decade, or the long, continual slide of Europe into post-Christianity. After all, compare these largely secular societies with more religious countries. Who’s got better health care, infrastructure, life expectancies, and functioning civil societies? Iceland has a church attendance rate of only 10% and a Human Development Index of .935 (on a scale from 0 to 1), while Nigeria is only 1% atheist and has a Human Development Index of .532(putting it 157th out of 189).

(We won’t get into the logical and statistical problems of comparing countries by levels of atheism against development indicators, such as the ecological fallacy or issues with historical path dependency that make cross-sectional comparisons quasi-worthless. Technocrats mostly take these comparisons at face value – inasmuch as these comparisons seem to demonstrate that religion is, at best, unnecessary for social well-being and civil society – so I won’t argue here.)

So that’s the technocratic view of religion. My thought experiment is, let’s say that I could irrefutably demonstrate that religion is objectively critical for human well-being in any core way, or that the excision of religion from human life would predictably lead to massive social and political problems over the scale of two generations.

To reiterate: I don’t have this evidence, and no one else does, either. I’m just imagining that I did.

Would my irrefutable proof of the necessity of religion for human well-being actually have any effect on what readers of rationalist blogs, or Twitter-savvy social science professors, or Silicon Valley mavens, or attendees of the Aspen Ideas Festival, or mostjournalists, personally think about religion?

No. I bet it wouldn’t.

The reason isn’t because technocrats are bad people who reason in bad faith, as I realize (belatedly) that my spiel about slavery in the Caribbean in the first few paragraphs may have set you up to think. So to make myself clear: I am not comparing technocrats to slaveowners. Not on the level of moral judgment, anyway. I happen to believe that history will judge our current Silicon Valley overlords harshly, but I don’t think their excesses are as obviously bad and cruel as whipping kidnapped African people to make them cut and process more sugarcane until they die. Not many excesses are.

What I mean is just that, like Caribbean plantation owners weren’t going to change their minds about this awful but – for them – economically profitable system based on anything as disinterested as objective evidence, rationalists and technocratic skeptics of religion have motivated reasons not to change their minds about the value of tradition or religion.

Farmers and Foragers

I’ve written here before about forager versus farmer mindsets. Roughly, a forager mindset values individual initiative, exploration, loose social ties, and mobility. It’s useful for many hunter-gatherer societies, because their economic life depends on constant exploration and movement. As a result, their social structure is often a “fission-fusion” model, characterized by the constant cycling of individuals in and out of different bands. In a foraging social world, if there’s a conflict between people, one of the parties often leaves the band and joins another one. Problem solved.

By contrast, farmers are tied down to the land they work, so they don’t have the luxury of just moving away. Their work is often highly interdependent and rule-based, so innovation and exploration become de-emphasized, with farmers relying instead on highly predictable routines and mutual coordination. Farming societies are more hierarchical, too. Storing grain or crops in sedentary, permanent settlements leads to inequalities in wealth, and farming economies are complex enough that formalized leadership structures become useful for setting measurement standards, coordinating markets, and so forth. Moralistic, authoritarian religions with formalized hierarchies and doctrines about afterlife punishments are effective for establishing and perpetuating these farmer values, so farming civilizations often have elaborate, formalized religious systems with strong priesthoods.

(See my previous posts on big gods for more about this relationship between economics, social structure, and religious values.)

Heuristically, the farmer-forager distinction is useful for thinking about the cultural tensions in today’s world, particularly with regard to religion. What I’m calling technocrats – or rationalists, or libertarianish educated professionals, or whatever the best term is* – live a kind of modern-day foraging lifestyle. They usually have a lot of autonomy and self-direction at work, which itself tends to be pretty variable and to reward creativity and innovation. They need to be mobile, since good professional jobs often turn up in distant cities. Moving from hometowns to college to graduate school to first job or residency or whatever, they get used to uprooting themselves regularly, and their values reflect the resultant mobile mindset. Their ethics are highly individualistic, focused on autonomy and tolerance and not inhibiting others’ self-direction. They distrust tradition, not because they’re immature nonconformists, but because tradition would inhibit success within the social ecology they inhabit.

You can’t be ready to move to New York on the drop of a dime and then Washington, D.C. a few years after that if you’re too invested in your hometown. It’s hard to be a supercharged innovator if you regularly practice a millennia-old religion. Good luck fitting in with your skeptical, rationally minded peers if you accept the essentially arbitrary authority of some hoary religious doctrine.

In other words, today’s cognitive elites have a vested interest in ideologies that promote mobility,  innovation, and autonomy from tradition. They materially benefit by ignoring or spurning religion.

These incentives are a lot more complicated than they might seem, too. It’s not that educated urbanites / rationalists / technocrats rationally calculate that religion rand tradition would prevent them from being effective manipulators of the postindustrial, globalized, professional economy. More often, they feel a strong – and sincere! – moralaversion to religious authority and tradition. Why? Their social worldviews are built up out of thousands of interactions with people who all face the same incentives and strategic pressures that they do. Moral sentiments are shaped in an emergent way by each person’s interactions with her social network. People learn what’s right and wrong by observing their high-prestige peers, and by paying attention to the consequences of acting and saying the right things versus the wrong things within the social contexts they identify with (or aspire to).

Moreover, despite the fact that moral beliefs are objectively very different in different societies or subcultures, our brains don’t process prescriptive morality as being culturally contingent and variable. In fact, the (non-) acceptance of different, valid cultural standards is one of moral psychology’s key criteria for differentiating between mere conventional beliefs and true moral emotions.

In other words, if you have a moral belief about something, then your instinctive belief is that it applies everywhere, without exception.

Thus, traditional values, authority, hierarchy, and religion might actually be highly adaptive for inhabitants of farming societies or, in our modern world, holders of blue-collar occupations that feature a lot of routine and rule-following. But if you’re a highly educated, mobile technocrat-y type person, your instinctive belief is that religion and traditional authority is bad for farmers and working-class people, too. Because they’re bad for all people.

Incentives and Social Change

Okay, so given all this, would powerful evidence that farming-style values (including moralistic religion and the acceptance of traditional authority) are necessary or valuable convince rationalists/technocrats/educated urbanites – who are presumably the major audience for intellectual products such as evolutionary social science – to, en masse, become advocates of G.K. Chesterton-style traditionalism?

No, it wouldn’t. The strategic and social incentives for maintaining a libertarian, autonomy-maximizing value system are just too great, within elite, rationally minded, professional social circles.

This leads to some absurd consequences, such as conspicuous mismatches between explicit knowledge and implicit attitudes. Plenty of my highly educated, professional friends are perfectly willing to acknowledge in conversation that conservative or religious values can be good, even indispensable, for certain kinds of people, maybe even a lot of people. But their value systems don’t change on the basis of this acknowledgment. They’re still members of a social world where tradition and religion bear net costs. So they carry on, in all practical domains of life – from voting to sharing news stories from Vox on Facebook – exactly as before.

But do I even want people to convert to G.K. Chesterton-style traditionalism, anyway? No, because not everybody can or should be a traditionalist, just like not everybody can or should be a progressive. Despite the insane polarization of American politics over the past five years, I still believe that society needs both farming and foraging types. So is my goal just to increase the quality and rigor of public and academic conversation about religion, tradition, and human psychology? I don’t know. “Increasing quality and rigor” seems like a pretty watery, feel-good type of objective. It doesn’t seem to get much done.

Maybe the problem is that I don’t know what should get done. Really, if I believe that tradition and authority and all those farmer-type institutions are necessary for civilization, I should want a higher proportion of people to actually hold those values. But you can’t convince people to hold particular values by rational evidence, no matter how compelling that evidence is. Values emerge, as I mentioned above, from social experiences such as strategic uptake of behaviors and beliefs from respected peers, long-term exposure to cultural systems during childhood, and things like that. In other words, only cultural processes can effect cultural change, and peer-reviewed papers in evolutionary social science journals don’t really count.

A Case for Optimism?

But maybe I’m being too pessimistic. A recent post at Slate Star Codex reviews Joseph Henrich’s book The Secret of Our Success. Henrich makes the case that unquestioning obedience to cultural authority is what enabled humans to spread across the globe and become the most successful vertebrate species ever. The review comes to some interesting conclusions:

One of the most important parts of any culture – more important than the techniques for hunting seals, more important than the techniques for processing tubers – is techniques for making sure nobody ever questions tradition. Like the belief that anyone who doesn’t conform is probably a witch who should be cast out lest they bring destruction upon everybody. Or the belief in a God who has commanded certain specific weird dietary restrictions, and will torture you forever if you disagree.…There’s a monster at the end of this book. Humans evolved to transmit culture with high fidelity. And one of the biggest threats to transmitting culture with high fidelity was Reason.

The author of Slate Star Codex – pseudonym Scott Alexander – isn’t exactly, like, a First Things-style Catholic reactionary. He’s a rationalist par example, with tremendous cognitive and educational resources, a congenital mistrust of inscrutable traditions, and a pretty autonomy-focused ethics. If Henrich’s book could get Alexander to question whether post-traditional rationality is always the best strategy, maybe there’s a space in the rationalist/progressive/science geek/educated elite world** for evidence-based argumentation about the relative merits, or cultural and psychological functions, of religion, after all.

The point is that I don’t know. I’m using this space to try to think through what it is, exactly, concretely, that the scientific study of religion is supposed to accomplish. Most of the funding pitches (including my own) in the field appeal to stopping terrorism or something like that, because science is ultimately instrumental. It often seems as if the whole cognitive science/cultural evolution of religion hinges on the idea that (1) religion causes social problems, particularly terrorism, and (2) by understanding it better we can neutralize it and solve those problems.

If, therefore, you examine the evidence for a decade or so and come to the conclusion that this view of religion just isn’t true – that religion is a fundamental feature of human life and cannot simply be rationally managed away, and may even be pivotal for solving perennial, key psychological and social problems such as self-regulation and social cohesion and the production of meaning – then you’ve broken the axioms of the entire discourse. What you’re saying isn’t interpretable within the framework. It’s like trying to describe quantum chromodynamics using birdsong.

But Alexander’s review of Henrich’s book offers a hint that maybe there could be a common epistemic framework after all. Some of the information may be assimilable across our cultural, social class, cognitive farmer-forager divides. I’d like to think so. I’m still not sure where that leaves my own work. I’m not complaining – I love my work. I’m just trying to figure out how and in what ways it matters, and how to be better at it without being partisan.

Conflict Is Real

The political philosopher and economist Thomas Sowell argues that an optimistic view of human nature leads naturally to the belief that all conflicts are based on misunderstandings. Clear up the misunderstanding, and the conflict will be resolved. But a pessimistic view of human nature leads to the conviction that conflicts are, sadly, rarely reducible to simple misunderstanding. Quite the contrary: many conflicts really are just zero-sum clashes between groups or individuals with fundamentally opposing interests. For example, militant Palestinians and militant Israelis are both heavily armed ethno-cultural groups with very different identities and histories that want the same land. There’s only so much land, and they both want it. This problem isn’t going to be easily solved if all parties simply sat down and practiced the kind of responsive listening and affirmation that couples are forced to learn in therapy. It’s a deep, bitter conflict, based on incompatible, mutually exclusive motives.

It seems to me that reality often bears out the more pessimistic vision. In our cultural clash between educated, forward-thinking neo-foragers and conservative, tradition-bound farmers, I see real conflict. All the Model UN meetings in the world won’t change the fact that the value systems that work for routine-based labor and sedentary settlement patterns just don’t work for innovation-and-initiative work in mobile social environments, and vice versa. Even if neo-foragers cognitively grasp the sources of the value gap between themselves and neo-farmers, they can’t very well just drop their socially fluid, anti-traditional values if they still want to function well in the knowledge economy.

The conflict, then, is perpetuated by really big, totally impersonal, macro-social and macroeconomic processes, in which we’re all – neo-farmer and neo-forager alike – caught up.

I don’t know where that leaves us. I’d love to know that crisp knowledge about religion and tradition – including knowledge that disconfirms the technocratic world’s prejudices – could have real effects in terms of better policies, putting brakes on cultural polarization, etc. But I mostly currently see an increasing scientific understanding that religion plays a key role in things like social cohesion and self-regulation, without any shift in the normative judgments that researchers and their audiences make. That’s because, as innovation feeds on itself, the small cognitive elite that have the chops to keep up with the constant change and creative destruction are more or less structurally forced to become less and less personally open to religion or tradition, since religion and tradition make it hard to function in a flexible, globalized economy. This is true even if a small minority of the cognitive elite keeps up with developments in my field and understands, propositionally, that religion can have benefits in the abstract. Abstraction is a different beast than real life, even for people whose jobs are fundamentally about the manipulation of symbols.

I don’t have any pithy conclusion, and this post is one of my longest ever, so instead of trying to wrap things up neatly I’ll just end here. Having written all this down, maybe I’ll get a sudden gobsmacking realization in the middle of the night about exactly how my kind of work can be useful and assimilable. If so, I’ll write that up here, too. Maybe it just means learning to be as good a public communicator as Joe Henrich. Or maybe it’s to just keep plugging away, adding brick by tiny brick to the edifice of knowledge – to defer immediate rewards for long-term ones, and to trust in the cumulative process of habit and disciplined routine to accomplish great things over many, many years. Just like a farmer.

* I realize that a lot of libertarians would shudder to think of themselves as technocrats. But the worldview similarities between rationalist libertarians and cool, Twitter-savvy academics are too profound and numerous to be mere coincidence, despite their disagreements about how big the government should be. Most obviously, both libertarians and true technocrats tend toward the forager side of the farmer-forager spectrum.

** Have you noticed that I’ve used a different combination of social descriptors every time I’ve tried to point out the audience I don’t know whether I can reach? That’s because the category is fuzzy. But it’s still a category, and it’s still useful. So I’m using a kind of conceptual triangulation to evoke a heuristic sense of the religion-skeptical worldview, rather than wasting my time trying to isolate a precise denotation of it.