Reframing the Nature of Religious Community
As I meandered through my reading this week, a couple of quotes on religious community stood out. One was from a Quaker reader and the other was from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. First, what I read in Jessamyn West’s introduction to her selection of Quaker writings:
God’s presence may be experienced with a minimum of “feeling.” The proof of the Presence is in the life lived. […] For no people have been as convinced than the Quakers that, if God is known “experimentally,” God’s love must be lived out in our relations with others. Any communion with God which does not bear this fruit of love in our lives cannot, in their opinion, have been viable. And the Quakers who have been called “mystics” have also been called “practical mystics,” people who experience God for the purpose of knowing God’s will and carrying it out here and now. Their “practice of the Presence” is for purposes not of feeling good, but of being good. And the good people act. They act, as Woolman says, “so as not to lessen the sweetness of life for others.” They labor for “a perfect redemption from the spirit of oppression.”1
And Bonhoeffer:
One who wants more than what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires into Christian brotherhood. Just at this point Christian brotherhood is threatened most often at the very start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its root, the danger of confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea of religious fellowship, of confounding the natural desire of the devout heart for community with the spiritual reality of Christian brotherhood.2
Each in their own way, they helped me understand things about worship that I had experienced, but which didn’t fit well into my conceptual mold for what I was doing. And I’m still not sure where Bonhoeffer generally fits into my worldview, conceptually speaking.
Probably in large part due to my musical background, I’ve long been an enthusiast of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s feeling-centered approach to religion. Schleiermacher was writing in the early nineteenth century, and a major concern of his was to frame religion in terms acceptable to his Enlightenment peers. His very definition of religion is the “feeling of absolute dependence,” a definition that bypasses the dogmatic, conceptual approach to religion that had divided Christianity into literally warring factions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So, Schleiermacher provided a smooth link between my musical and my religious interests - a link that the theologian Danielle Lynch explored in her God in Sound and Silence, which I reviewed.3
But both Jessamyn West and Dietrich Bonhoeffer point us away from feeling as the center of worship. There is a distinct feeling to worship I can identify - it is a unique sensation, although there is a fair amount of resonance with the experience of concertgoing I had at least once a week as a child. But the feeling isn’t really an emotion - it’s a kind of stillness. A stillness that can be easy or difficult to sit with, and a stillness that is always at least as draining as it is invigorating. It’s a stillness that reveals the divine in a different way than the conceptual definition of God “as our power in mutual relation” I learned from the theologian Carter Heyward. And this movement away from feeling also points to why, even when worship is completely dry, it remains valuable. I sometimes frame that value as “staying in the habit” so that richer experiences can emerge another time, but if we shift away from feeling as the only arbiter of “good worship,” a dry worship experience doesn’t need to be justified with another criterion. It’s simply another kind of response to God’s presence.
West’s quote also gets at something I have been very aware of for decades - that there is always a tension between the contemplative and the active sides of religion and that if this tension comes to a breaking point, what you are doing is no longer religion. One of the best introductions to this issue is Robert McAfee Brown’s Spirituality and Liberation: Overcoming the Great Fallacy - in which he explores the interconnections between spiritual and political action with his characteristic sense of humor. It’s a tension that I’m generally comfortable with. When the tension emerges in a way that makes me uncomfortable - most often in the pull between what the Peace and Social Concerns committee needs to accomplish and where the Meeting as a whole is at (I have been on both sides of this experience) - I remind myself that it’s not a tension that will ever be “resolved” and that the discomfort is a reminder that I have a growing edge within my own central commitments.
Bonhoeffer was writing at a time when the religious legacy of Schleiermacher had devolved into the wholesale endorsement of Nazism, as seen in the theology of Georg Wobbermin, which my friend Brent Hege analyzed. The answer of the Confessing Church, which denounced Nazism and “German Christians” as heretical, was to lean heavy into an understanding of God as Other and Jesus Christ as the unique revelation of God. For the theologians associated with the Confessing Church, this emphasis on the exclusivity of Jesus as revelatory of the divine provided a kind of fulcrum from which the “naturalized religion” of the post-Enlightenment tradition could be named as an insufficient source of resistance to the manifest evil of Nazism. So, these theologians can’t be disregarded, even today.
Yet, I’d spent enough time - my entire life - in a religiously plural society to know that the theologians who insisted on a return to Jesus Christ as the sole source of authentic knowledge of the divine were giving up a key gift of the Enlightenment, the notion of religious tolerance that would mature into the practice of inter-religious dialogue. I could see a severe contradiction between the Confessing theologians defense of German Jews and their insistence on the absolute uniqueness of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. So, by the time I was in seminary, I was still holding onto a Christian faith, but my fraught relation to Jesus made it extremely tenuous.
Last week, I described the moment that broke my connection to Christianity - a breaking that wasn’t final in the sense that I rejected Christianity absolutely, but was crucial in pushing me into a very liminal place where it makes as much sense to say I’m not Christian as it does to say I am. Thinking back on that moment with Bonhoeffer, I can see it as manifesting a kind of “muddled” understanding of what religion is for. This is a different framing than my therapists would like, and there’s a way in which Bonhoeffer’s framing of religious community as only possible through Jesus is something I can’t accept. But to focus on the framing is to miss the picture.4 Quakers have another metaphor, the Light, which doesn’t get me into the theological conundrum of putting an implicitly antisemitic claim at the center of my religious life. On one level, I can make perfect sense of my decision to leave the United Methodist Church and the Christian faith - but Bonhoeffer lets me see that decision from another angle that is subject to a kind of judgement. The two angles don’t exactly cancel each other out - and it’s this sense that I can view a key unpleasant moment in my life through very different angles without negating the truth claims of any of those angles that is kind of freeing in a way.
Another thing the two quotes bring together is some clarity that helps me see through my anxiety about the cultural implosion of mainline Protestantism.5 I do think mainline Protestantism articulated and articulates a genuine truth that I am sad to see in decline. (Ryan Burge’s Substack Graphs About Religion provides excellent data on that decline among other phenomena.) But getting too wrapped up in a specific institutional space for the articulation of that truth mistakes the form for the content. If the Spirit moves where it will, it will move in and out of whatever structures we create to try to hold onto them. That might be a great closing line, but another item on my reading this week demonstrated that movement very well.
Mainstream Protestantism’s main competitor in the last decades has been Evangelical Christianity and I’ve long defined myself in opposition to Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christianity. “That’s the wrong kind!” is the generally subconscious cry I sometimes allow to rise to consciousness. But this week, I also read Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God, in which the author, Katilin B. Curtice, describes rediscovering her Pottawatomi roots and identity and the effects of that journey on her Evangelical faith. It’s a journey in which her Evangelical faith is transformed into something different, very different, but one that doesn’t end up rejecting it entirely. It’s a book that relativizes Bonhoeffer’s claims about religious community, precisely in its journey toward a religious view of nature that extols it rather than sees it as a “limit on freedom.” It’s a journey into the truths of non-Christian spirituality. It’s a journey into the tensions between spirituality and identity of the sort I couldn’t hold on to well enough to keep faith with United Methodist Church. Bonhoeffer would say trying to integrate spirituality and identity is a radically misguided task,6 but Curtice shows the damage that evading that task does. And in feeling the resonance between her alienation from her Christian community as a Native person and my alienation from a Christian community as a queer person, I can process Bonhoeffer’s judgement on a moment of my life without giving it the final word.
Jessamyn West, “Introduction,” in The Quaker Reader, selected and introduced by Jessamyn West (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1962), 16-17. Emphases in original.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), 26.
I’m still annoyed with how the Reading Religion editor broke up paragraphs I’d crafted for a specific coherence into Tik-Tok-sized bits of text.
The truth of the statement “to focus on the framing is to miss the picture” is in profound tension with the truth that the meaning of the picture is always deeply determined by its framing, but I’ll need to let that slide for now.
Quakers tend not to identify as Protestants, mainline Protestants generally claim Quakers as part of their landscape. A major step for me in getting comfort with the idea of officially joining Quakerism was reading H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Kingdom of God in America, in which he squarely situates Quakerism within the stream of American Protestantism. I still consider myself more Protestant than Christian, although this is a framing that is probably irrelevant to most people in my community, and one that would horrify Luther, Calvin, and other early Reformers.
I was also thinking about some other quotes in Life Together in which Bonhoeffer opposes desire and truth as incompatible opposites and how that conception is diametrically opposed to just about everything I’ve learned from queer theory, but thinking that through will have to wait for another day.