I’m starting to wonder about the possibility of a very counterintuitive truth. What if we evangelicals are among the more secular folk around? Even as a I write it, this is a question that seems odd. Evangelicals are known for their historical opposition to secularism and evangelicalism (if it can be defined) is often defined by individual piety and the priority placed on a vital personal relationship with God.
But the more I think about it the more I’m suspicious that many of key markers of this ‘relationship’ could best be understood as accommodations to secularism. This could lead to the ironic conclusion that much of what is generally pointed toward as evidence of spiritual vitality could be deeply secular in nature.
The historical secularist concern was to uncouple the church from its long-held position of public privilege and influence. This separation of church and state is now so much a part of our understanding that it is taken as axiomatic that religion has no place beyond the subjective experience of individuals who find that sort of thing helpful.
It seems to me, looking at how a life with God is conceived of an practised within the circles I have spent much of my life, that we have largely accepted the secular assessment of the role of religion. I see this in a number of areas, primarily the persistent priority given to individual experience as the barometer for measuring spiritual health.
Phrases like ‘hearing God’s voice’, ‘discovering God’s will’ are just two examples of ways of relating to God that, at first glance, seem external but are conceived of mainly as private exercises in which individuals ’sense’ what God might be saying or doing. This, coupled with the unspoken assumption that the church exists for the purpose of nurturing individual relationships with God and meeting the spiritual needs of its members are so much a part of the vocabulary and DNA of evangelicalism that it can be very difficult to see life with God in any other terms.
In short, it can be very difficult to see that the categories and expectations that we operate with are largely secular in that they take as given the notion that God is to be sought, experienced and followed primarily (exclusively?) in the realm of the private, subjective experience of the individual. While there is an irreducibly subjective element to life with God, it seems to me that there is something very secular about ‘relating’ to God in such a privatized way. Worse, I fear there may be something very misleading about this kind of a presentation of what should be expected of a life lived with God.
Fascinating thoughts, Gil. There is a lot to chew on here. Thanks for giving us things to ponder. Hope you and your girls are doing well. Ken has every intention on firing an email your way sometime here too.
I’ve been mulling this since I read it — you raise some very interesting questions, questions I encounter also in other places, as we evangelicals or Anabaptists or MBs (who claim we are both) struggle for balance between individual and community. To what you write, I find myself saying Yes, Yes, But… The But comes in that break-out individual encounter stuff I keep bumping into in biblical stories (or are those exceptions?). Is it just my long wrong reading of this that’s skewed me? Or maybe it’s my personality (We lived for a couple of years in a context in which community was very very strong, “all for one, one for all” type of thing, in which community rather than individual piety would be the prevailing measure, and when we returned from that environment to Winnipeg, I recall being in Superstore practically giddy with joy and relief to be anonymous, alone, individual!) I know this isn’t quite what you’re saying, but what are the implications, realities, of the counterintuition you’re suggesting? Let me throw a counter-counter-intuition into the mix, that our secular world may be more profoundly “evangelical” or right about the essential spirituality/meaning of human life than we realize! Which isn’t to say that the responses to this freedom aren’t often awfully far from God’s intention… Just for the conversation!
Dora,
Thanks for your comments. I think you’re asking some very important questions about the relationship between individual and communal piety, questions that I honestly haven’t considered all that much. My original motivation in the post was not so much to contrast individual and community but to contrast the private experience of the individual and the broader world as the key arena in which God acts and makes himself available.
Not that your questions are unrelated. I think the backlash against individualism, while needed, can sometimes point toward ‘community’ (whatever that means) as an end unto itself and we can forget the fact that true community tends to emerge in the context of some other shared pursuit, whether making a living, raising a family, or worshipping God.
Your suggestion that the secularism might be more evangelical than is usually thought is intriguing. I think our world still tends to see ‘religion’ or ’spirituality’ as predominantly private exercises, efforts at meaning-making that take place in a person’s spare time. I think we desperately need to recover a sense of the presence of God within all of life and I think the usual evangelical conceptions of spirituality tend to point away from that as a real possibility.
We tend to see God primarily in the extraordinary, in the things that defy alternative explanations (miracles). Or we tend to see the actions of God in the private, subjective experiences of individuals (usually self-interpreted) and point toward these kinds of phenomena when people ask the question: ‘So what do you see God doing?’ This, I would suggest, puts too much pressure on the individual and specifically the individual’s ability to interpret their experience of God without much direct input from the broader community.