The Church after Innovation

 

Andrew Root is a Professor of Youth and Family Ministry, who has written several books on ministry in our secular age - most recently The Church After Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity and Enrtepreneurship (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2022).

Root starts with an account of a Lutheran synodal event at which he spoke. a previous speaker , whom he nicknames "Applebees Boy," argued that the Church needs to be innovative and creative - or else die." Root also meets "Synod Executive Guy," a stereotypical church bureaucrat with the responsibility of disbursing money from the sale of closed churches. He, of course, favors investing in innovation. Later Root meets "Bearded Brown Turtleneck," who represents the interests of more traditional pastors, who would like some of the money so they can maintain their existing institutions and continue their ministry. "A few of them could have really used a roof repair. But as they spoke, they didn’t justify their opposition in such self-serving ways. Rather, they talked of liturgy, creeds, and sacraments. Innovation was wrong because it wasn’t deep, because it ignored the tradition, because it was a fad, just a hipster spin on church growth."

Not necessarily so opposed to all innovation as such, Root challenges his readers to dig deeper below the surface of the contemporary fad. He wants us to grapple with innovation and creativity's connections with contemporary capitalism and with the inherent contradictions in late capitalism. Thus the early chapters focus on the historical evolution of work and our attitudes about work. In part this is a variation on the classic Weberian thesis about Protestantism, work, and capitalism (appropriately updated by Daniel Bell's 1976 classic, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism).

In any case, whereas "once Protestantism and its commitments flowed directly into work, shaping work, now the ways we work in late modernity (driving toward permanent innovation) have come flowing back into the church, shaping what counts as ministry."

Meanwhile, capitalism's cultural contradictions combined with the unique experience of the Baby boom generation (a term I think Root rarely if ever employs, but which chronologically best identifies "the children of the 1950s and 1960s were creatures whose habitat was completely cordoned off from any self-denying work for the first time in history. They knew little to nothing of the childhood work on farms and factory floors from earlier American generations. This self-denying work was far removed from the experience and the imagination of the new American suburbs and the children.")

But capitalism requires such a sense of duty. So the "new source of duty became the self. It seemed perfect. It felt like a freedom beyond the contradiction of capitalism for the worker. But it wasn’t. It was deeply expressive and bound within you. But it was still a duty. You were now accountable to the project of your own self. You owed it to your self to work hard and advance."

Furthermore, for Root, it was Freud, whom he nicknames "the Viennese worm that exposes the true self," who has taken "us down a road where the self becomes fundamentally our own project."

Chapters 7 and 8 further develop the theme of the contradiction between contemporary capitalism's culture of innovation and  what the Church is ultimately supposed to be about. For one thing, "commitment and the neoliberal economy of permanent innovation don’t necessarily go together. Innovation produces engagement, but not necessarily long-term commitment." Drawing on Andreas Reckwitz, who builds off Foucault, Root writes about what he calls "an expressive creativity dispositif," in which - only in which - "in a dispositif that glorifies expressive creativity can disruption and insecurity (over routine and security) be embraced as a better way of being." But the "cultural realities that accompany expressive creativity corrode the faith life of the Christian confession. They become problematic for faith formation."

Chapter 9 returns to the period when money became so much more prominent. He recalls the story of Saint Francis, who "chose to be in the world naked with God, rather than follow the money." He links the reforming movement sin the medieval (Catholic) Church with the galvanizing effect of money, while also becoming "the object or target of the reforming spirit itself." Root regards the medieval Dominicans as especially interesting "for us as we seek to respond to singularity and recognize how innovation imposes an aesthetic of self-interest on workers." Root focuses on Meister Eckhart whose "mystical path, even inside a moneyed world, became the way to keep the self from curving in on itself, stripping money of its divinizing dreams and therefore its ability to overcome our desires and to inhabit our minds."

In chapter 10, "The Three Amigos of the Mystical Path," Root proposes resources from the past: "three fourteenth-century companions who will assist us in combating the inflation of the self. Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, and the Mysterious Frankfurter all enter the mystical path for the sake of embracing the world and finding God squarely in it." He then concludes, in chapter 11, with some more modern German figures - Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Theirs was German Romanticism's response to French Enlightenment empiricism. 

Root concludes: "Perhaps in our secular age of authenticity and the drive for singularity, what the church needs isn’t innovators and entrepreneurs but poets who pray. We need more Eugene Petersons than Rick Warrens, more Kendrick Lamars than Mark Zuckerbergs. We need poets who seek the epiphanic, losing their self in the beauty of the event of God’s arrival, recognizing that their poems are prayers. Their prayer is poetry. Can innovation be epiphanic? Maybe. But not as it’s constituted now, not without its crucifixion, not without its release from an expressivist, Napoleon-like will to dominate by disruption. Innovation, without bearing the cross, is too bound in the logic of money. It is therefore obsessed with forming (schooling) not poets but entrepreneurs. As we’ve seen, innovation overindulges the subjectivity of creativity, glorifying not gift but performance."

The President in Kyiv

 

What an edifying picture to see the President of the United States visit Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, the nation-state which has become the symbolic, as well as geographic, border between Western civilization and Russian barbarism! What better way for a U.S. President to spend "Presidents Day"!

(Apart from an obligatory afternoon meeting, I myself spent Presidents Day much less heroically rewatching HBO's 2008 John Adams, about another American President underestimated by many in his own time.)

Here at home, a lot of the talk has been about how the bipartisan consensus in support of Ukrainian independence may be fraying. Meanwhile, America-hating, Hungary-loving appeasers spread their anti-Western, anti-democratic poison on the internet, under the guise of sparing the world an (always possible but in practice probably unlikely) nuclear war. None of this is really new. The U.S. went through a similar moral ordeal before Pearl Harbor, when long-standing American self-absorption and tunnel-vision about the world were exacerbated by the bad taste left by Woodrow Wilson's questionable military adventure in Europe in 1917-1918. Now it is the traumatical legacy of two decisively lost wars - Vietnam and Afghanistan - that leaves a bad taste and threatens to exacerbate the perennial problem of American isolationism.

Every year at this time, in observance of George Washington's birthday, Washington's "Farewell Address" is read aloud in Congress. There is much wisdom to be gleaned from our first President. But, like the rest of us, he was also wrong on some things. He was, most obviously, wrong about political parties, which, now as then, are essential for a successfully functioning democratic polity - something which Washington and the other Founders simply did not understand, given their historically conditioned fears about democracy and their aspirations to aristocracy (which in practice usually means oligarchy). Likewise, while Washington may have been right about the merits of neutrality and avoiding foreign entanglements as a weak nation in the 1790s, his view on that has long since been rendered moot by a very changed world situation, in which it is no longer the British Empire but the United States which is the primary power in the world, with all the burdens and responsibilities which that entails.

The U.S. is, however, hardly the only power, however primary it may be. As de facto leader of the Western world against retooled imperial Russian barbarism, its sphere of influence must nevertheless include all of Europe, all of whose ancient (and some not so ancient) states, which - with the unfortunate possible exception of Hungary - have learned from history the terrible cost of being abandoned to the Russian sphere.

Holidays

As holidays go, "Presidents Day" definitely promises more than it delivers. To start with, the official, legal holiday (both federal and New York State) is still Washington's Birthday. Of course, George Washington's actual birthday is February 22, and it was duly celebrated as a holiday on that date until 1970. Then, presumably in order to give federal employees a three-day weekend, the unfortunate Uniform Holiday Act of 1968 moved Washington's official birthday to the third Monday in February, which is always the Monday before February 22. The new holiday soon became known as "Presidents Day" (sometime with, sometimes without an apostrophe, further evidence, if any were needed, of its confusing character). 

When I was growing up in school in the 1950s and early 1960s, February was the "Month of the Presidents," two presidents in particular. In addition to Washington, many states celebrated a legal state holiday on February 12, Lincoln's Birthday. Many mistakenly think the two were somehow officially merged when "Presidents Day" was created. In fact, Abraham Lincoln's birthday was never a federal holiday. So the Uniform Holiday Act of 1968 could hardly have merged it into anything. I suppose some of the states where Lincoln's Birthday was a holiday may have done so. But, at least the last time I checked, Lincoln's Birthday was still an official legal holiday here in New York, albeit a barely noticed one, if noticed at all. The NYC public schools no longer observe it. Nor technically do they observe Washington's Birthday or "Presidents Day," having replaced them with a week-long "Midwinter Recess."

They'd all probably be better off staying in school that week. And, if they also learned something about our presidents during that week, so much the better. Of course, one of the inevitable and obviously foreseeable consequences of the unfortunate Uniform Holiday Act of 1968 was the dilution of whatever historical and cultural consciousness accompanied our civic holidays, turning them into, at best, merely leisure time opportunities and, at worst, occasions for commercial sales and orgies of shopping. Undoubtedly workers deserve leisure time, and I have not quarrel per se with long weekends, but rather with the loss of holidays' historical and civic significance. In any case, apart from government employees, it seems a lot of people nowadays have to work on days like "Presidents Day" anyway!

As the ill-fated French Revolutionaries learned in their time, tinkering with calendars can be risky at best and will likely fail in the end. That said, perhaps a desirable solution to the holiday dilemma would be, first, to keep as full holidays only the few that are actually widely observed as days of leisure by most workers, - e.g., New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Then, in the other months - February, March, April, June, August, October - simply to create a monthly artificial holiday - say on the second or third Monday of the month - and somehow make it possible for most workers really to get the day off and enjoy a leisurely long weekend. As for the other civic holidays - e.g., Martin Luther King Day, Lincoln's Birthday, Washington's Birthday, Juneteenth, Columbus Day, Veterans Day - let them be observed in schools and churches and by social and civic organizations in ways that publicly call attention to their historical importance and real significance, sparing them the indignity of being turned mainly into excuses for special sales in stores!

One Year of War

In a few days it will be one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. That heroic nation has been at war now for a full year (actually longer). Europe and the U.S. are not at war in the same sense. We are not in daily danger of Russian terror bombings and wars crimes. In a deeper, profounder sense, however we are at war. For in this war, Ukraine has recalled Europe and the U.S. to what the "West" is about, to the true values of the West, which Ukraine has increasingly embraced, progressively leaving behind its centuries of entanglement in the anti-Western Russkiy mir. Decolonizing itself, disentangling itself from Russian culture, including the historic caesarism of the Russian Orthodox Church, Ukraine, personified by its once Russian-speaking president, is aligning itself with Europe and the West. Hence the symbolic (as well as strategic) significance of President Zelensky's pre-Christmas visit to the United States and his more recent visits to the United Kingdom (photo) and the EU. Ukraine really wants to be part of Europe, and seems to want it more and more the longer this war lasts.

Of course, Western Ukraine has always been more European than Russian. Western Ukraine's largest city, Lviv, once capital of the Kingdom of Ruthenia, became part of Poland (as Lwów) in the 14th century. Following the partition of Poland in 1772, it became part the Austrian Hapsburg empire and became known by its German name Lemberg. On the eve of the First World War, the city was 51% Roman Catholic, 19% Greek Catholic, and 28% Jewish. So much for the claim that Ukraine is historically, culturally, and religiously Russian!

No Ukraine does not need Russia! On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a revived Russian Empire that didn't incorporate much of Ukraine, particularly at least the non-Hapsburg parts that, after the partitions of Poland, came under Russian rule. And, of course, the caesarist Russian Orthodox Church famously traces its own institutional origin back to Kiev and the conversion of Kiev's Grand Prince Saint Volodymyr I (Vladymir in Russian) in 788. Had Germany and Austria won the First World War, an independent Ukrainian Kingdom would likely have been born out of the fragmentation of the Tsar's empire. Instead, western Ukraine became part of the newly reconstituted Poland, while the rest of the country fell under Soviet control. And, under Stalin, Ukraine paid a heavy price for its absorption into the Soviet version of the old Russian Empire. At least 3.9 million Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin's genocidal Holodomor, "the "Great Famine." Stalin also purged the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, of his supposed political enemies, resulting in the loss of a generation of Ukrainian intelligentsia. 

The entire Ukraine was reunited under Russian rule thanks to the German-Soviet partition of Poland in 1939 and the decisive Soviet victory over Germany in 1945. (Conquered for Russia by Catherine the Great, Crimea was transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1954. Thus, that largely Russian-speaking peninsula found itself part of the new Ukrainian state in the aftermath of the latter's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, where it remained until Putin reconquered it for his renewed Russian Empire in 2014.)

An independent, pro-Western, European-oriented Ukraine both strategically and symbolically will threaten any prospect of a truly renewed Russian Empire, bringing Western European civilization's borders that much further into the old imperial domain, while fatally undermining imperial Russia mystical self-understanding that is being promoted by Putin and supported by his Russian Orthodox Church. What that might mean long-term for Russia remains one of the major unknowns of this conflict.

Less unknown, Ukraine's valiant struggle against Russian imperialism has inspired a renewed enthusiasm within the Western alliance. While internal cultural conflicts continue to undermine the West's social, political, and religious historical heritage, a recovery of historical memory may be in process as the West rediscovers the difference between it and the horror of Russkiy mir.

Creating Coalitions

 

Assistant Professor of history at George Washington University and coeditor of Dissent magazine, Timothy Shenk has expansively tackled the challenge of forming viable political majorities in America - "the narratives, policies, and symbols—in short, the ideas—that produce coalitions" - in Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy (‎Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).

Illuminated by his detailed treatment of how coalition building has happened through American history, Shenk effectively equates coalition building with democracy - "as both a practical necessity and a moral obligation," at least "for anyone who believes that politics can be more than a way for the few to exploit the many."

Shenk starts from the evident fact of American history that, for most of our history, "one party has tended to dominate: Jeffersonians in the early republic; Democrats in the age of Jackson; Republicans during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, then again from the 1890s down to the Great Depression; and Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats in the Depression and postwar years. But neither party has been able to put together an enduring majority since the collapse of the New Deal coalition."

The universe has plenty of political analysis and punditry about the collapse of the FDR New Deal coalition and how to revive something similar today. What distinguishes Shenk's effort is his extensive study of what it took for previous political coalitions to be formed and to deliver (or not). In the process, he focuses on those he calls "the democratic elite, the portion of the ruling class whose authority derives, at least in theory, from the public’s consent. And they have a power that’s unique to modern democracies: the ability to form electoral coalitions that bind millions of people together in a single cause."

Shenk starts with the founding generation and its ambiguous approach to democracy and political parties.  "A dose of oligarchy is just what the framers wanted," he agues. "They saw elections as a check against the dangers of democracy, a way of supplying the political class with the authority that came from representing the public while keeping power in the hands of the right sort of rulers." 

As is well known, for all their wisdom and prescience in so many respects, the founders were woefully wrong about political parties. When parties did arise - rather quickly as it happened - they were at first "parties against parties." Soon enough, however, the Jeffersonian "Republicans had pulled off the first realignment in American history, creating a strong and durable majority that kept the party in power while slowly choking the life out of the Federalists."

Soon enough, in the Jacksonian era, popular political parties (as we understand them) were taking their place on the political stage.  And, with them, came the professional politician - e.g., Martin Van Buren, who "considered partisan struggle essential to a functioning democracy. Parties channeled the inevitable conflicts in a democracy toward productive ends."  The Jacksonian coalition - the ancestor of the Democratic Party as it was until living memory - was a coherent "coalition of urban workers, western frontiersmen, and Southerners of all sorts."

The mention of southerners, of course, points to the unique racialization of American politics that would be (and remains) one of our politics most enduring features.

Meanwhile, opposing the Jacksonian-VanBuren Democrats, arose the Whigs. "Although both parties had coalitions that cut across class lines, Whigs tended to draw support from merchants, planters, and industrialists," while "they denied "the existence of class conflict."In an era when mass immigration first became politically salient, "Whigs were also the party for evangelicals looking to improve the country’s moral character (and wary of Democratic acceptance of Catholics)."

From VanBuren and the Democrats, Shenk moves on to Charles Sumner and the new, radically anti-slavery Republican party. "Aside from abolition itself, however," the radical Republicans' victories were rolled back with the collapse of Reconstruction. The biggest winner in the Republican war against the slave power was, arguably, the same as in the Jacksonian war against the money power: Northern capitalists."

Thus, post-Reconstruction American politics became "battles between competing partisan tribes divided along lines of race, ethnicity, faith, and region. Republicans won native-born Protestants and the South’s dwindling number of African American voters, while Democrats relied on Catholics, immigrants, and the Solid South." This impasse was broken only by the rise of Populism, personified by William Jennings Bryan who won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1896. "Bryan’s victory dealt a stinging rebuke to the Democratic establishment, upended Republican electoral calculations, and brought the American political system closer to a full-blown crisis of legitimacy than at any time since the Civil War."

But Bryan was defeated. The new realignment, which Shenk calls "democratic conservatism," he sees as "an early demonstration of what became a global pattern in the twentieth century: a party of the right defying the hopes of radicals and the fears of reactionaries by reconciling industrial capitalism with representative government."

This produced the Progressive Movement, followed by what Shenk calls "the culture wars that dominated politics in the 1920s—Prohibition, immigration, Jim Crow," all of which "cut across the parties," with "the most reactionary voices" on the Democratic party side. The arrival of the Great Depression, however, ended "the cross-class coalition that had kept Republicans in power for a generation." This produced what Adlai Stevenson called "the party of everyone" - the New Deal majority, which Shenk calls "the strongest and strangest coalition in American history ... a brittle colossus, able to push through historic reforms but always in danger of cracking open." This, of course, has since happened: "The parties traded the core of their old coalitions, with Democrats picking up the Northeast and Republicans gaining the South and West. At the same time, the connection between income and partisan affiliation broke down, pushing working-class white people into the GOP and drawing educated professionals toward the Democrats." 

This is, of course, familiar territory. "If the New Deal order was made by an economic crisis, it was undone by a social one." In this regard, Sheck's chapter on Phyllis Schlafly as one of his coalition-builders is especially important. While the polarization she and her allies produced didn't quite deliver an enduring Republican majority, it has "remade American democracy."

In the present, Shenk sees "a comprehensive breakdown in American politics. There’s the steady buildup of popular discontent with a status quo where elite self-dealing and technocratic gatekeeping deny most people real influence over government. Plus the distorting effects of an electoral system that all too often converts a strategically placed minority of voters into an electoral majority. Then there’s the failure of self-proclaimed champions of democracy to assemble a coalition large and durable enough to reform this antiquated system. And don’t forget the polarization machine that turns campaigns into apocalyptic struggles between good and evil while holding the results close enough to keep the battle going another day."

"If there’s an abiding winner in the long history of American democracy," Shenk concludes, "it’s the people with money." Hence, his invocation of the great democratic tradition of coalition building ""as both a practical necessity and a moral obligation," at least "for anyone who believes that politics can be more than a way for the few to exploit the many."