Keywords: Robust, Progressive, Christian, Movement

Perhaps as a Gen Xer I am too influenced by the twisted rise and flourishing of the "Christian Right" in the 80s. During my most formative years, guys like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson had a prominent voice, heading up loud and organized communities carrying significant cultural clout, and voting as a bloc.

By the time I got to college, and was in the process of disentangling myself from the morass of Christian conservatism and its creepy interest in moral and thought control (Remember that Dobson made his mark by encouraging spanking as the moral and Christian thing to do... or think, as a contemporary example, of Intervarsity's plan to fire anyone who backs gay marriage, or earlier this year Wheaton College's parting ways with Larycia Hawkins, or the Christian right's current bizarre alignment with Donald Trump), I started asking myself, "Where are the voices of the Christian left?"

Well, there weren't any prominent ones. Liberals tend to think back to a glorious past, and they name people like Walter Rauschenbusch, or the Niebuhr's, or a small journal like The Christian Century, as the central voices of our movement. If they name modern examples, they name people that, although influential on some levels, certainly don't lead movements--think Marcus Borg, or Martin Marty, or more recently, Brian McLaren or Nadia Bolz-Weber. Or eloquent radicals like Cornel West.

In the meantime, we've witnessed not necessarily a weakening but a shifting in focus of the ecumenical movement, so that although liberal Protestants are more aligned than ever before, they still don't have a cohesive center. Theories abound as to why this might be. Conservatives tend to see this shift through a Schadenfreude lens, gleefully clapping their hands together at the decline of liberal Protestantism.

Others see the shift not as a decline but proof of how important liberal Protestant ideas have been in advancing movements for social reform and in shaping our current self-understandings. This is to say liberal Protestantism's power is illustrated in the extent to which it gives itself away and shapes what becomes of plain old life--secular or religious. 

If this is true, this then explains the vast difference between Democrats' and Republicans' religiosity, but in a counter-intuitive sense. Most commentators assume that more Republicans are overtly Christian because their faith aligns with their politics. But if in fact liberal Protestantism has shaped our life through social reforms and indeed inhabits all of our own self-understandings, then it could equally be argued that more Republicans are overtly religious because they have to work so hard to try to align Christianity with a politics at odds with authentic Christianity. Democrats, on the other hand, and especially the group of Democrats who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated, may not need to do so because their faith already so closely aligns with their political and social practice that their whole life is imbued with their faith rather than added on to it.

Christians who lean left are already involved in the political movements they care about, they just don't do it through Christian organizations. They don't "wear" their religion overtly. They just get it done, together with all those who share common cause, of any religion.



Nevertheless, a part of me still wonders, can there be a Robust. Progressive. Christian. Movement? Or is that a pipe dream shaped by my mimetic desire for the perceived power of the right?

I guess I would like to overcome the public perception of Christianity as aligned with right-wing politics. The Christian right has "owned" that space, and I'd really like to steal it back. Yet I'm also convinced it's probably better to continue organizing and achieving various specific goals with ecumenical, interfaith coalitions than to break off as expressly Christian movements.

That being said, I would like to have some voices taking the lead in the Christian left that were not just authors but organizers. We have some great folks, like Rachel Held Evans, who people read. But the Christian left isn't mobilized. This is unfortunate, as one of the greatest parts of the Christian left in past eras was its power of mobilization. Think social Christianity, unions, and Chicago.



I'm particularly disappointed in the absence of Christian leaders from the current worker justice movements in America. Clergy and others have gone quiet. On the other hand, I'm fascinated and inspired by community organizing movements across our country working for positive social change.

Some would say the left needs to be cohesive absent of theology. Because it welcomes so many viewpoints, it won't work to herd them all into a group. This may be true. But I also think the fracturing of the left is something the left willingly accedes to because the one thing the right has going for it, above anything else, is the wealth and influence of large corporations. The last thing monied-interests want in the United States is a unified left that would speak up for the working class and the poor.

In fact, on this last point, I even have a frustration with the left itself, because it isn't left enough. AS a true Christian leftist, I have for quite some time thought the current Democrat candidate, Hilary Clinton, is the Republican's best candidate. Her platform (and the platform of Democrats more generally) is actually what I consider to be centrist conservative. Liberals, especially white liberals, seem to be quite comfortable allowing middle-class and suburban liberalism win the day in Christian left thinking.

But for progressive thought,  a truly organized and robust Christian left would move over towards acting with the bloc about which the left should have the most concern--the disenfranchised, working class, and poor.

The Christian left recognizes, rightly, the old Grundvigian adage: Human first, then Christian. So the left will always in all likelihood be more willing to work with atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, anyone who shares common values with them. In fact, the left likely leans all the way over towards seeing the intrinsic value as much in Buddhism or secularism as Christianity itself, and is just fine with a balance of religions and various secularities together effecting the outcome and development of our nation and culture.

But the left does this on theological, Christian grounds: "Power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). Christian progressives believe power is for the poor, so that the sending at the conclusion of the liturgy might be fulfilled, "Go in peace and remember the poor. Thanks be to God."

Bondage, discipline, and the ecclesial trap of voluntaristic identity fronts

"Secularity is helpfully analyzed in terms of an earlier national spatial scale and media culture that tended toward the homogenization of culture and the captivity of religious traditions in a denominational frame. Our current context inclines toward heterogenization. Far from suppressing particular identities, its disciplining forces elicit them, reducing complex traditions to identity fronts and discouraging complex engagement across difference and in place. The various appearances and mobilizations of religion described under the rubric of the 'post-secular' fit well within this frame.

This context poses a profound and hidden challenge to religious traditions. The widespread post-liberal turn to particular, justified in the face of homogenizing dynamisms of previous epochs, goes terribly awry in this context. The primary threat to the church is not against the integrity of its traditions (although that threat continues). The catholicity of the church is profoundly threatened as believers presume communities must be internally homogeneous and become obsessed with identity and boundary distinctions from other groups. In addition, as culture becomes deterritorialize--floating free from geographical community and local place--religious traditions lose the casuist and jurisprudential traditions that connect their fundamental doctrines and principles to a collective form of life. Religious traditions become increasingly abstract collections of beliefs whose function is reduced to identity markers, having little impact on the lives of believers and the world in which they live. This is, in short, a cultural ecology in which sectarianism is the default form. Religious communities face a daunting double challenge: preserving their traditions in a context of cultural amnesia in a manner that does not succumb to a cultural ecology that reduces broad, living traditions to narrow, voluntaristic identity fronts."

Excerpted from Vincent J. Miller's essay, "Media Constructions of Space, the Disciplining of Religious Tradition, and the Hidden Threat of the Post-Secular in At the Limits of the Secular.



This is one of the most eye-opening passages I've read as I continue to ponder what it means to be "Lutheran" in a post-secular world. Is it possible that "eliciting particularity" is a discipline of post-secularism that serves to reduce them to identity fronts in place of living traditions?

How to thrive when your church/denomination is dying and everything you start is sabotaged

In most cases, the church is wasting precious time and capital attempting to redevelop dying institutions. This applies at every level, from the redevelopment work in local congregations, all the way up to denominations attempting to re-define themselves.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

If an institution is in decline, it's in decline. It's going to die, and no amount of study and work on "future directions" or "LIFTing" the church is going to do a shred of good. In fact, trying to reverse things is a failure of good pastoral care. It's like walking into hospice and slapping the patient on the face, shouting, "Hey, get up, there's still life in you! Let's make plans for the future!"

As much as I love my denomination, the ELCA, I honestly feel we witnessed something like this at our churchwide assembly in August. The organization put on a face of unity, rubber-stamped some pretty fascinating documents (in particular, one repudiating the doctrine of discovery), but then continued on afterwards with business as usual, with a public letter from the presiding bishop of the denomination that essentially eviscerated the repudiation document.

I'm not at all surprised at this. The ELCA event was a simulacrum, a copy of a copy of a copy of what we think we are. It was Oz with the curtain down. And as likable as Oz may be, once he's exposed, you know the jig is up and a new story is on the horizon.

The same kinds of things that happen at the denominational level also happen at the congregational level. When anxiety over death presents itself, the institution hunkers down, dims the lights, and says, "We need to take care of ourselves now."

But what do you do if you're moving to the margins of a dying institution?

This is essentially the question I've been asking myself these days. I'm a pastor in this denomination, the ELCA, and I don't really plan to leave, but I have been moving to the margins. I've moved to the margins geographically (I pastor in Arkansas). I've moved to the margins theologically (I'm more theologically conservative that the liberals but far more socially and politically leftist than the liberals, and definitely post-confessional in many of my core convictions). And I've moved to the margins of the denomination itself, aligning much more with reform movements like #decolonizeLutheranism and ELM and Reconciling Works.

As just one example, I actually went to our synod assembly this past spring, but mostly to staff a Reconciling Works table. I felt really awkward at the assembly itself, even marginal. I like the people there... I don't know how or why I belong to the institution.

In my local congregation, we've gone through some similar shifts that make me wonder who we are... now. Certainly we're still an ELCA congregation, and many would identify us as that. We have Lutheran in our name. And we're not dying, though an exodus from our congregation a couple of years ago made us worry over our long-term health.

But after going through such a massive split, and staying (most pastors don't stay... in fact, I'm still hoping to connect with some pastors who have stayed through and after a massive split in their congregation), we are a different organization than we used to be. In fact, on many levels we're thriving in ways we never have before. 

A lot of the resources you can find on church redevelopment (and they are legion) tend to apply to congregations that have been on a sustained downward trend that leaders want to reverse. But that's not us. We're on a slightly different course, one I'm trying to articulate in this post.

Is redevelopment worth it?

It's no surprise there's a huge market for church revitalization resources. There are far more existing churches and dying churches than there are new and growing churches, so of course the market for revitalization resources is massive.

It's also no surprise that the majority of church growth is happening in newer churches. And equally no surprise that new churches frequently fail. So you can find plenty of books and resources and conferences on church planting.

But what fascinates me lately is neither redevelopment (which I think is wasted energy), nor new starts (which are hard), but the shape of the transition that needs to take place to move from one system to another. And I can't do better at describing the shape of that transition than this quick video, so take six minutes and watch it.

Two Loops: How Systems Change from Deborah Frieze on Vimeo.

If a ship is hurtling through space, it takes immense energy to reverse it's trajectory. If it's huge, and there's limited fuel, it's a lost cause. 

It takes less energy to jump ship and slow down, so if there's an escape pod available (or a spaceskin suit) and you're low on fuel, the best option is to abandon ship, get all the escape pods together, put some energy into constructing a new ship, and then head off in a new direction. 

Thing is, that's no easy thing. 

It takes quite a bit of skill to move around in outer space, assemble resources for an alternative trip, and then launch in a new direction. No wonder lots of new churches and ventures fail. It's tricky.

However, if you are one of those who finds yourself at the margins (and wow do I ever!), then thinking through how to assemble your team of other marginals and strike out in a new direction is totally worth it, even if the attempts fail multiple times.

Practical truth is more likely found at the bottom and the edges than at the top or the center of most groups, institutions, and cultures. (Richard Rohr) 

I've failed in Arkansas more than once. When I first moved here, I tried to facilitate our congregation going multi-site in order to develop a campus ministry or new faith community. It didn't work out.

Which isn't the same as saying it wasn't worth doing. It totally was. The time we invested, the work we did, the lives that were changed, all of that was worth it. We just didn't "launch" the new.

Then this past year, I found myself on the margins again (more culturally than congregationally), this time around refugee resettlement. So we started again, this time with a group of like-minded individuals. I didn't try to get my whole congregation to sponsor refugee resettlement. Instead, we built a non-profit.

Over time, we discovered hundreds of people passionate for resettlement in our state, with volunteer leaders willing to form a self-directed work-team that did everything necessary to successfully apply to become a new refugee resettlement site, and as of this writing the organization, Canopy NWA, is poised to launch this fall with the staff and funding it needs to resettle refugees in Northwest Arkansas.

All of us involved in the ministry didn't try to get our whole current institutions to get on board.... instead, we found ourselves at the margins, and got together and started building a new ship headed in a different direction.

It hasn't always been easy. I find myself having to conduct two different kinds of pastoral ministry in the meantime. Sometimes the work we're doing with Canopy causes anxiety among the existing systems--in the congregation, in the community, in the state. This is where the pioneer/hospice concept carries so much value. There's ministry to do in both contexts. Among the group launching the new, the work is figuring out how to get the ship space-worthy so it can launch. That's the pioneering work, and as a pioneer, it's the stuff I most lean into.

But I also have to know how to be a pastor in the other context. I need to put on the hospice hat. In hospice, there's pain, grief, anxiety, fear. The words of hope, the way of being present, is different. I've been learning I need to listen, sit down for longer one-on-ones, just be present. I know how to put on the hospice hat when I walk into an actual hospice facility. The reframing is important, and helps me know how to be present in multiple contexts.

So I would tell all redevelopers, and really all pastors, if they were willing to listen: If your organization is in decline (and almost all our churches are, statistically), then spend 50% of your time as pastor of the existing institution. Wear that hat, and wear it well. But then do the hard work of pioneering. Start something new, together with others, exercising the practical truth that is found at the margins.

This needs to happen at the denominational level also. Currently, the ELCA at its national level is a sick system, intractably caught up in its own mode, and really unlikely to recover. It needs hospice. The problem is, it keeps meeting every three years thinking it can rise from the ashes and enact change from the top and center. It keeps telling us, "We are church together," when in fact it has little if no effective method for hearing from the margins and launching something new.

What the ELCA needs, even though institutionally it will fight it tooth and nail and implement many kinds of sabotage (not the least of which will be stonewalling, what I have started calling the Boozman strategy) to undermine it, is a movement of pioneers from the margins, who will gather, and then move, and will, if successful, eventually organize structurally in such a way that it becomes not a simulacrum of the current ELCA, but the next thing that moves on while the ELCA dies.

I have no doubt, based on the functioning of our current denominational headquarters, that things will go out in a spectacular fashion, with the leadership continuing to put on a show of listening to the margins while regularly buffering itself against any actual change. And increasingly I'm just fine with that.

But what I do want to do, and am inviting in this post, is to find ways to "live on the edge of the inside" (in Richard Rohr's words), and discover who else is out there with me.

The real presence of the gods

Some books are more present than others. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press prints books, with an emphasis on the print. Belknap has printed Robert Orsi's new book, History and Presence, in such a way that there is so much "there" there.



For example, the endsheets are colored and ridged, offering a tactile experience as soon as the boards of the book are opened. Even prior to handling the book block, which is squared and carries a heft, the book draws you towards its attentive intentionality and presence.

The book block itself is printed on a high grade, almost bond grade paper, so the text prints crystal clear and almost levitates off the page. I don't know the name of the font, but it's lovely. I do know the name of the book designer--Graciela Gallup--and if she reads this review, I want to thank her.

Now, to be honest, when I bought the book, I thought Orsi had written a theological treatise on "real presence," and I was looking forward to reading that book.

But what Orsi offers is something more than a book about the theology of real presence. He wants us to encounter real presence as it functions in religious community. So instead of multiple chapters on the theology of Christ's presence in the Eucharist (which would be a book about more books, a simulacrum of real presence), Orsi invites us into an ethnographic study of real presence, with a particular focus on Marian devotion in the Catholic tradition.

There are a couple of reasons for Orsi to go in this direction. First, and most important, scholars of all types have been shifting towards ethnography in their intellectual inquiry, and they do so because they seek to pay attention to life from the ground up, from the lived world. This is not an anti-intellectual or anti-book stance. Far from it. Orsi has written a book after all, and his endnotes are long. He mentions other books all the time.

But to get at real presence, you have to attend to where presence happens. Scholars, the hierarchy, etc. have frequently felt compelled, in order to maintain certain doctrinal positions or ecclesial structures, to protect against religion from the ground up. As Orsi writes, "The precincts of presence needed to be guarded against the faithful who were endlessly resourceful in breaching them" (29).

Real presence of Christ is typically a destabilizing force, even a source of resistance, against authority and ecclesiastical power.

Often this fear of real presence is related to a concomitant fear of those who carry around such notions of real presence. So Orsi also observes, "Fear of fecund Catholic bodies circulates in the public debate over migrants coming into the United States from the Catholic south" (31).

Essentially, Orsi charting the religious history of what didn't happen. Theologians, scholars of the West have for centuries argued that increasingly, because of the Enlightenment, the gods were going to recede and be more absent. Yet on the ground, in popular piety and devotion, nothing quite like that has happened at all.

So Orsi conducts his inquiry on two fronts. He is a rigorous scholar, and engages the literature. He's also an indefatigable ethnographer, and has conducted interviews over about a twenty hear period as preparation to write this book. Along the way, he's collected material history as well, examples of real presence in popular piety and devotion, and pictures of comic books, collector cards, and more, pepper the book (including one entire graphic book depicting the life of Saint Maria Goretti)

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I love his concluding paragraph, which I take as inspiration for continuing to discover how complex the inter-relation of the sacred and the secular is on contemporary life.

"The future that Hume envisioned for the human race has not happened yet. The gods were not turned back at the borders of the modern. The unseeing of the gods was an achievement; the challenge is to see them again. If the presence of the gods in the old Catholic sense is an absolute limit that contemporary scholars of religion and history refuse to cross, then they will miss the empirical reality of religion in contemporary affairs and they will fail to understand much of human life" (252).