Escaping “Religion” — With the Help of the Blues
Doug Hynd | Monday, 4th May 2015
Christians engaged in conversation about their faith are often confronted with the assertion that "I'm religious but I don't go to church". The next time it happens to me I have decided that I am going to say, "How interesting. I'm a follower of Jesus but I'm not interested in being religious.”
Beyond the shock value of giving an unexpected response is my deep conviction that being a Christian really has nothing to do with being “religious”. The unthinking identification of being a Christian with “being religious” drastically distorts both our understanding, and our practice, of being disciples of Jesus. Unfortunately the connection in both the church and the public mind between being a Christian and being “religious” is so close that it is going to take a good deal of effort to even begin to disentangle the two.
Let me try and start the disentangling by posing some questions. Why do we as Christians care about being “religious” and think that being “religious” is an area of common ground rather than difference? Why have we accepted the confinement of the Christian faith within the sphere of the “religious”? Or, to put it more controversially, why do we think that the appeal to an interiorised, disembodied and individualised faith is adequate as an account of the Gospel vision of what God was up to in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus?
Our uncritical acceptance of this confinement, and the limitation of the power of the gospel to a “religious”, private dimension of our lives has had devastating consequences. It has left the Christian community complicit in the destruction of human lives, their livelihood, their communities and the created order by unfettered state violence across the globe over the past few centuries.
The story about the separation of “religion” and politics in Europe as it is usually told is that the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants were the reason for the development of the “secular” state. A state free from “religious” control was necessary to ensure tolerance and suppress the violence of competing religious forces. This story gains its substantial plausibility against the background of the co-option of the Christian church by the Roman Empire, the subsequent emergence of Christendom and the justification by theologians and church leaders of the use of imperial violence to enforce conversion to the Christian faith.
Emerging from some recent scholarship about the wars of religion, however, is a substantially different account from the story we summarised above about the emergence of a secular society and the confinement of “religion” to the realm of individual choice.
William Cavanaugh has strongly challenged the commonly accepted story about the “wars of religion” and has retold it as the story of the invention of religion as a sphere of life disconnected from our public, communal, and social life. In “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,”[1] the story is not about wars arising from the inability of differing “religions” to live with one another. The story is rather about the emergence of the state as “sovereign”, with a total monopoly of power within a limited geographic area, and its drive to eliminate all possible rivals and limitations of its authority.
The “Wars of Religion” were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birthpangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between “Protestantism” and “Catholicism,” but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order. … to call these conflicts “Wars of Religion” is an anachronism, for what was at issue in these wars was the very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance. The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subects.[2]
The story on this telling is very different from “what everybody knows”. We could not have had “wars of religion” according to Cavanaugh, because “religion” in the way we understand it did not exist at that time. Instead, “religion” was carved out during this time as a separate dimension of life, an internal belief system, detached from any significant bodily expression as a consequence of, and essential element in, the emergence of the modern state. “Religion” and politics were carved out as separate spheres of life as an essential element of the concentration of power in the hands the state.
What is at issue behind these wars is the creation of “religion” as a set of beliefs which is defined as personal conviction and which can exist separately from one’s public loyalty to the State. The creation of religion, and thus the privatization of the Church, is correlative to the rise of the State.[3]
The church, along with all the other sources of authority and power in medieval society, was brought within the scope of the state’s control. The results were far reaching.
The concept of religion being born here is one of domesticated belief systems which are, insofar as it is possible, to be manipulated by the sovereign for the benefit of the State. Religion is no longer a matter of certain bodily practices within the Body of Christ, but is limited to the realm of the “soul,” and the body is handed over to the State.[4]
Paul's Epistle to the Romans, addressed to Christians at the heart of the then imperial power, comes immediately to mind. According to Paul our bodies are to be a living sacrifice to the Messiah Jesus, No other authority can claim that degree of authority over our bodies.
Handing over of the control of our bodies to the uncontested power of the state was to surrender ourselves to unthinking participation in violence generated in pursuit of the survival of the nation state. The death toll of those whose lives have been offered up on the altar of nationalism, in the cause of the survival of the state, has been appalling, beyond our imagination in the period since the sixteenth century. The (relative) silence of Christians in failing to name this reality for what it is—to tell the truth about this—has been and remains a scandal that hangs over our claim to be followers of Jesus “who came preaching peace.”
… the term “religion” has accompanied the domestication of Christianity. It has facilitated the marginalisation of the radical claims of the gospel and the transfer of the Christian's ultimate loyalty to the supposedly rational spheres of nation and the market. The church is now a leisure activity: the state and the market are the only things worth dying for. The modern concept of religion facilitates idolatry, the replacement of the living God with Caesar and Mammon.[5]
To question the identification of Christian discipleship with religion is to open up from a very different angle the question of a non-religious Christianity raised by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his famous Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer was not, as assumed by liberal theologians of the 1960s, arguing for the reduction of Christian orthodoxy to the best insights of modernity. In a recent sermon Thorwald Lorenzen summed up recent Bonhoeffer scholarship around this issue.
Bonhoeffer rejects two alternatives. There is the sectarian alternative that Christians tend to withdraw from the world. Let the world be the world. The church which is often portrayed as a ship would then stay in the safe harbour and never brave the storms of life.
And then there is the liberal alternative where Christians and the church so identify with the ways of the world that the impression is given that the world does not need the Gospel and that people must not be challenged with the option of faith in Christ.[6]
Bonhoeffer, if he did not diagnose the issue of “religion” in quite the terms of Cavanaugh, was I would argue trying to say something similar in his cryptic account from prison of a “non-religious” Christianity. In Bonhoeffer’s account, “religion” tends to separate reality into holy and profane, sacred and secular. Reality, however, as Bonhoeffer understood it, cannot be divided into two spheres. In Jesus Christ these two spheres have become fused to constitute one reality in and through Jesus Christ. Reality is therefore one and our life as Christians should express that unity.
How can we find our way out of the confinement of faith and discipleship within the sphere of “religion”?
Habits ingrained in our language and habits of thought, as powerfully as the identification of Christian discipleship with “religion”, are difficult to break. To name and to diagnose the issue as I have tried to do is only a minor step forward. The weight of popular theology and the assumptions embedded in the language of most sermons reproduce the confinement. Some of our liturgical practices, such as the sharing of our common meal, dying to the powers of this world in baptism, and economic sharing through the offering speak against the limitation of Christian faith to the sphere of religion. Much of our gathered worship stands as a mute, unarticulated witness to the oneness of a “non-religious” life to which we are called by Jesus. There are some helpful resources available to assist us in the work that needs to be done along this line. John Howard Yoder’s Body Politics comes immediately to mind, along with the work sponsored by the Ekklesia Project.
Another way forward is to crack open our imagination to the possibility of a discipleship beyond the limits of “religion”. We have the resources, given in the work of musicians such as U2 and Bruce Cockburn over the last decades, expressing a world engaging faith that subverts the secular-sacred divide.
If these seem too elite in their style and intellectual in their lyrics for your taste, why not start with listening to the blues as a way of reshaping our vision? I glimpsed this possibility recently when on successive evenings I attended an overflow lecture at St Mark’s [National Theological Centre] on the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a concert by the American blues guitarist and vocalist Eric Bibb.
There is an interesting and suggestive link between the blues and the life and witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The turning point of his life from being “a theologian” to being a “Christian” seems to be located during a time when he was participating in the life of the black Christian church in New York. The Negro spirituals became part of the gift that he brought to his students in the illegal seminaries of the Confessing Church.
In the blues there is an embodied and earthy quality that subverts where it does not dissolve the line between the “religious” and the “secular”. There is a quality of “spirit” in the songs about love, work, oppression and an earthed and embodied quality in the songs of discipleship and faith.
The concert in Canberra by the American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter Eric Bibb embodied for me in the music, the lyrics and the performance this undivided approach to life. After nearly two hours of songs of love, faithfulness and struggle unobtrusively the music changed slightly in focus, though not in their style and character.
The closing bracket of songs began with a call to prayer, “The Needed Time”, an acknowledgment of dependence and connection, an invocation to Jesus to “come by here”, even if “you don't stay long”. And come by here ‘he’ clearly did as those present in Tilley’s Bar and Restaurant unwillingly came towards the end of an evening of music of engaging performance and moral presence. Perhaps better expressed, the presence of Jesus was explicitly named for the first time, though ‘he’ had been there all the time.
The final song, a traditional blues number, with its powerful evocation “I want Jesus to walk with me”, had the sophisticated, religiously indifferent audience attentive in a focussed, almost longing silence as the plea went out modulated through the blues melody and the lyrics, lyrics that registered the pain, and loneliness of the human journey in its echo around the café.
I want Jesus to walk with me
I want Jesus to walk with me
All along life’s pilgrim journey
I want Jesus to walk with me
…
When my heart is almost breaking
I want Jesus to walk with me
Here was the penetrating call of a faith that was wholehearted. The autonomous consumer and self reliant, rational individual of market capitalism was nowhere in view. “Religion” as an experience—disconnected from the reality of human life, joy and pain, faithfulness in relationship and the call to struggle for justice—was not what this was all about. Bodily life as a gift, to be lived in the journey with the ‘truly Human One’, expressed powerfully and truthfully in the performance, gave a new vision of what my commitment to living a wholehearted “non-religious” discipleship could be.
[1] William T. Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11/4 (1995): 397–420.
[2] Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough,” 398.
[3] Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough,” 403.
[4] Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough,” 405.
[5] William T. Cavanaugh, “God is Not Religious,” in God is Not…:Religious, Nice, “One of Us,” An American, A Capitalist (ed. D. Brent Laytham; Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), 112.
[6] Thorwald Lorenzen, “Remembering a modern Saint and Martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer: February 4, 1906 - April 9, 1945.”
Doug Hynd is a former public servant currently completing a PhD in theology at the Australian Catholic University. He has taught on issues of church and society and Christian ethics as a sessional lecturer at Charles Sturt University. Doug is also an editor of On The Road. You can follow him on Twitter.
