Secular Steeples 2nd edition

Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination

Conrad Ostwalt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441183415
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

An exploration of secularization in America, this book provides students with an innovative way of understanding the relationship between religion and secular culture. In Secular Steeples, Conrad Ostwalt challenges long-held assumptions about the relationship between religion and culture and about the impact of secularization. Moving away from the idea that religion will diminish as secularization continues, Ostwalt identifies areas of popular culture where secular and sacred views and objectives interact and enrich each other. The book demonstrates how religious institutions use the secular and popular media of television, movies, and music to make sacred teachings relevant. From megachurches to sports arenas, the Bible to Harry Potter, biker churches to virtual worship communities, Ostwalt demonstrates how religion persists across cultural forms, secular and sacred, with secular culture expressing religious messages and sometimes containing more authentic religious content than official religious teachings. An ideal text for anyone studying religion and popular culture, each chapter provides questions for discussion, a list of important terms and guided readings.

1

Popular culture, the religious imagination, and the evolution of God: A new metaphysics

Chapter Outline

God as becoming

The God metaphor: the process of becoming God

Relational knowing (or coming to know)

Towards a theology of culture

Some components of a theology of culture that depart from traditional theology

Study guide

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, a group of ingenious young physicists were remaking the way scientists and philosophers would understand reality. Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others were pressing ahead with “quantum” thinking, building on the revolutionary work of Albert Einstein. Their work questioned the old certainties of Sir Isaac Newton’s mechanistic world where causation and determination ruled science and theology. The new thinking had little room for certitude and, in its place, physicists began to think in terms of probabilities and uncertainty. At the same time, a mathematician-turned-logician-turned-metaphysician was trying to establish a philosophical foundation for this new physics. Alfred North Whitehead wrote to create a metaphysical basis for the new reality of the quantum world. New ways of thinking emerged as part of the postmodern agenda of the late twentieth century, and the result was, at one and the same time, a world where God could be declared dead yet also could be freed from the shackles of old thinking. If God were to exist in the quantum world, it could no longer be a God of causation or even an ultimate ground of being. Rather, God must be thought of as “becoming” and reality as “novelty.”¹ God had been liberated by the quantum theorists, not buried, and process theologians began to press the question of God given the new metaphysical limitations.

Of course, theological orthodoxies die harder deaths than do scientific ones. And, as Newton’s laws still describe the workings of the world quite well for most purposes, so does traditional theology cling to a Sovereign God to explain metaphysical questions. But process theory began to nag at the traditionalists because for some it seemed that an evolving God best fit what we now think about the workings of reality. In any event, a new metaphysics crept toward the twenty-first century with ways of thinking that accepted blurred distinctions between previously separate and delineated worlds. The sacred realms melded into the profane in ways they had not since the Enlightenment. The metaphysical and physical realms were sometimes joined at the theoretical level, making scientists and philosophers alike uncomfortable. Meanwhile, popular culture began to reclaim metaphysical categories, which the Enlightenment had pushed into the realm of the irrational. Physical and metaphysical, sacred and profane, spiritual and material realms began once again to comingle, and the boundaries between them began to blur. It is this blurring of boundaries that this book explores in the realm of popular culture. The blurred intersections of the sacred and the secular come together and inform one another in ways that are not always apparent and in ways that break down the separation of subject and object.

If we accept the blurring of sacred and secular realms, as I argue popular culture has already done, and if we strike a blow to determinism as the new physics has already done, then we are left with a metaphysical world that not only does not determine the physical world but is affected by its interaction with the physical. Causation either does not exist, or if it does, exists in two directions, with the sacred affecting the secular and vice versa. In popular culture we have already accepted the notion that God is affected by the profane rather than being an uninfluenced cause. To the extent that sacred and secular culture have been intertwined and correlated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, God is in dialectical relationship with the world and is expressed omnipresently in the culture. Secular culture reveals sacred reality, and sacred reality adopts the profane world.

This postmodern, blurred landscape, where all the old verities are anachronistic or are at least doubted, did not arise overnight (as it seems the new physics did) but has resulted from a long history of secularization in Western culture that I outline in chapter 2. For now, suffice it to say that the new physics, which threatened to abolish the distinction between subject and object, has given us a physical basis for metaphysical distinction where subject and object as distinct from one another no longer makes sense. As such, the concept of a God distinct from creatures or a sacred realm distinct from a secular one also embraces anachronistic principles that fail to recognize the dynamic center of twenty-first-century views of reality. In order to understand the dynamic principle of culture upon which this book is built, one must first accept a dynamic and dialectical view of the sacred principle—one must view God as becoming.

God as becoming

When Whitehead established the notion of God as becoming, he gave theology the impetus to liberate God from outdated metaphysical constructions of reality and perhaps save God from irrelevance in a scientific age. The main point of many of the new atheists is that the traditional concept of God is small and unnecessary given contemporary advances in science. If science has not already answered all the questions religion at one time attempted to answer, then it will in a matter of time. Perhaps this critique points to a truth—not that there is no God, but that God understood primarily in a Newtonian sense is too small for a quantum world. Many critics, and many believers for that matter, understand God to be an unchanged and unchangeable first Cause whose existence must be proven like Newton’s laws of motion can be demonstrated. But this necessity of proof misses the mark, whether it comes from skeptics or believers, because thinking about God in this way does not give us the necessary language or images to understand God in a quantum world. Causal, mechanistic, literal language is not wide or deep enough to give adequate representation or understanding of God. In order to understand a dynamic God of becoming rather than a static God of being, we must employ language that itself is more flexible and malleable rather than literal and scientific. We must reach back behind the scientific revolution and reclaim a religious language of vitality that has been lost since the Enlightenment. We must reclaim metaphorical language as real, vital, and “truthful.” Metaphor is the key to understanding the sacred in a secular age.

The God metaphor: the process of becoming God

Joseph Campbell taught us the power of metaphor and demonstrated that much of what religion oversees is a “concretization of … the metaphoric perspective.”² When concretization occurs, religion loses it mystery. Campbell challenges us to recapture the metaphoric perspective. Campbell’s point is important, and it is the perspective that I have adopted for coming to recognize the sacred. The way to come to know God is a process actualized through metaphorical thinking. Likewise, God, in metaphorical process, is coming into being through our heightened language. The sacred becomes real when actualized through metaphor, through story, and through the metaphorical products of our culture. This is where the sacred and secular intersect, precisely because most of those metaphorical products come couched as secular culture: books, movies, music, and the like. This is how the sacred, the ineffable, is made known through metaphor. If metaphor is “an implicit comparison, something presented as if it were something else, for what that substitution can reveal about the original”³ as Richard Gollin defines it, then metaphor becomes, by default, the language of the ineffable. How can scientific or literal language express that which is inexpressible and beyond categorization or description? Metaphorical language occurs whenever one thing represents another thing in order to illustrate it in figurative fashion or when one thing represents another thing that either cannot be understood using literal language or can be understood more richly with figurative.

The key, it seems to me, to reading and understanding what the Bible says about God is to understand the Bible largely as metaphor. When the Bible talks about God, the ineffable, the Bible speaks through metaphor. Metaphor is the flame of the burning bush, the heart of God’s self-identifying “I am,” the substance of Jesus’s parables (“I am the true vine …”). When we understand this, we free God from the literal prison that defines him so narrowly as to make him irrelevant. This is the sepulcher that traditionalists and atheists alike have constructed for God.

Much of science, both the hard sciences and the social sciences, understands God in the latter, narrow, literal sense—so does Christian fundamentalism and anyone who insists on a literal reading of the Bible. Thus, science claims to uncover the nonexistence of God (skeptics like Richard Dawkins) and fundamentalism simply makes God a relic. But the god that science makes nonexistent and the god that fundamentalism makes into a museum piece come alive with relevance as the God of metaphor. I can agree with the atheists who say: Science has made the traditional concept of God seem small and unnecessary and has proven that this God does not exist. But perhaps the God they presume from much of traditional theology was never meant to exist, or, if so, existed in a particular time and context. It is the mechanistic God whose oversight has been downsized by scientific theory. The beauty of seeing God through the eyes of metaphor is that it allows God to “change,” to evolve, and to expand. It allows God to be understood through poetry rather than through Newton’s equations. In the movie Contact, Dr. Arroway, a scientist and skeptic played by Jodie Foster, had no words when she was sent into space and saw the grandeur and beauty of the universe. Arroway comments that, instead of a scientist, they should have sent a poet. A poet, the master of metaphor, provides us the key to understanding God as metaphor so that God is never fully known and thus never fossilized but rather is becoming known and being revealed.

Metaphor is not an inferior way of knowing something—in fact it is stronger and superior to other forms of figurative language and even literal language. For example, if I say to my son-in-law, “You are like a son to me,” I pay him a great compliment. But if I say to him, “You are a son to me,” I accept him into the family, a much greater act of grace. The first is a simile, the second metaphor—one can sense the greater power of the metaphorical in this example. Or, if I say, “The sky is blue,” I have constructed a simple descriptive sentence that is valuable to someone wanting to know the color of the sky. But if I say, “The sky is a cerulean canopy,” I have added to the basic description an attempt to provide meaning that is illusive without figurative language. Of course this statement is factually false but attempts to describe the transcendent appearance of the sky above. To be factually correct, I might try saying “the sky appears blue because gases in the atmosphere absorb and scatter light the wavelength of blue.” The factual account provides a certain type of information, but metaphor is powerful in its inexactness, in its heightened language, in its desire to express the ineffable. Metaphor exists in the gap between the ineffable and literal description, and it is in that gap that meaning resides.

Relational knowing (or coming to know)

What does it mean to say that metaphor exists in the gap wherein meaning resides, and what are the consequences to cultural theology of such an understanding? Metaphor is comparison and, as such, it is defined through relationship: of objects; of concepts; of images; of people. In metaphorical language, we experience a linguistic relationship that understands one thing or being in a relationship in light of the other thing or being in a relationship. The metaphorical thus involves a dynamic understanding. Likewise, dialogue involves communication that is based on dynamic and relational understanding. True dialogue exists only in a relationship where one is willing and open to being changed by the dialogue partner. This contrasts to debate where words are meant to affect a change in the debate antagonist or to defeat the debate opponent. True dialogue, then, is based on relational knowing that forges a dynamic and evolving “coming to know” between dialogue partners. We see this dynamic in virtually every successful human relationship. For example, children are not only formed and forged through interaction with parents, but parents likewise are affected and changed through interaction with children. If one extends this notion of relational knowing to God, then we can see that relationship with God (something that many believers claim and is understood here as true dialogue) means not only that the believer will be changed by God but that God is changed through relationship with the individual. If it were otherwise, God would be static, unyielding, approaching irrelevance through increasing distance from an evolving creation. Rather, through this understanding of relational knowing, of metaphoric dialogue, God the ineffable can be made known, but this knowing must be in terms of a process of being understood through intimate relationship that changes both parties. When we arrive at this dialogical model, then we can begin to construct a metaphysics that can undergird the visions of reality being suggested by theoretical physics. If we maintain the vision of a static God based on literal language and debate-style orthodoxies, then we will run the risk of maintaining a theology of irrelevance in a quantum world.

This view of relational or processional knowing based on metaphorical language and dialogue frees God from the literal and mechanistic standards of the past—this view allows God the luxury of novelty and creativity and to enter into true dialogical relationship with creation. This gives God over to serendipity and sacrifices the old standards of certainty, but uncertainty is the price of relationship, and uncertainty seems to be a given of the new understanding of reality anyway. So relational knowing simply gives theology a way of describing and understanding the ineffable that allows God to retain metaphysical standing in a quantum world. Whatever we understand about relationship with God, whether we are moving toward God or God moves toward creation, or both, such movement in time or space means that God changes (relatively) in relation to humanity or to creation. Such a shift in understanding God does not mean that God simply becomes relative in the sense that relativity means unnecessary. Rather, God is moving toward us (God changes in relation to us) and in this sense exists and relates relative to our lives and our struggles. Neither does this mean that God is untrustworthy or unpredictable—rather, it means that God trusts us (gave us free will) and asks for our trust in return. In all these ways, God exists in relation to our changing selves and thus God changes in relation to our changing selves. God evolves, and we can come to know God through relation, dialogue, and metaphor. As a result, we know God though time in a variety of ways.

We can illustrate knowing God through dialogue rather than debate through a pair of metaphors. I would suggest that, throughout most of Christian history, we have been taught to know God through debate. Traditional theology, orthodoxy, preaching, and teaching tend to use the debate model to convince non-believers of the one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also available from Continuum
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Popular culture, the religious imagination, and the evolution of God: A new metaphysics
• 2 Secularization: The evolution of Western religion
• Part One: Pre-text
• Part Two: Text
• Part Three: Post-text
• Part Four: Con-text
• Conclusion: Theological appropriation of secularization: A cooperative model
• Notes
• Works cited
• Index