Radical Theology: The New “White” Religion?

[rug]

April 25, 2013
By Christian Piatt

I’ve experienced some strange extremes lately. First, I attended – and spoke at – the Subverting the Norm conference in Springfield, MO, where we took some time to consider how, if at all, so-called “radical theology” could exist within today’s religious systems. Then I got home and found my latest TIME Magazine, with a cover story titled “The Latino Reformation,” which reveals what most within Protestantism have known for some time, which is that formerly Catholic Latino Christians are dramatically reshaping the face of the American Christian landscape.

Interestingly there is little to no overlap between these two groups – a point which was made clear to me by the fact that there were very few people of color in attendance at Subverting the Norm. One comment, from an African-American woman who was there, was that the very focus of the conference (on academic, esoteric questions of theology and philosophy) assumed the kind of privilege still dominated by middle-class white males. Put another way: while we’re busy navel-gazing and discussing the meaning of Nietzsche’s “death of God,” non-Anglo religious leaders were busy dealing with real-world problems, right in front of them.

A fair critique, for sure. I’ve said before that philosophy is the preferred recreational sport of the intellectual bourgeois elite; she just put a finer point on it.

Then I read an article by Diana Butler Bass on the Huffington Post this morning that indicated such a bifurcation along both racial and ideological lines:

The first group, the unaffiliated, is largely uninterested in conventional religion, embracing humanism, non-specific forms of spirituality, or post-institutional forms of community. Their concern with old-fashioned religious questions is waning, as is their commitment to religious structures of the past. They are, by all reports, angry at the admixture of religion and politics that has roiled American life over the last three decades, and prefer more inclusive, less dogmatic but more pragmatic politics.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christianpiatt/2013/04/radical-theology-the-new-white-religion/

[grantcart]

1. I believe that this guy has touched on something that is going to have a profound impact on

churches in the future; South American Pentecostalism.

It is so popular and drawing so many from traditional Catholic churches that the Catholic church now has organized outreach and numbers more than 100 million.

Eventually the Catholics are going to nominate a Pope from their largest base, Latin America.

In Protestantism the 'war' has already been won in LA by conservative and Pentecostalism.

The majority of Mormons are Spanish speakers

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2004-06-05/news/0406040432_1_mormon-church-congregations-church-of-jesus

Christianity in Latin America tends to be more emotional and contain anti-intellectual strains.

It makes for a Church that will strain against the scholarship of the German/American leadership which has formed the intellectual basis of scholarship for Biblical studies and the training of clergy.

[rug]

2. There is something to be said for having a different than Eurocentric take on theology.

Thomas Merton was exploring that when he was electrocuted.

[grantcart]

3. Absolutely

but as Albert Schweitzer launched a blistering critique of Eurocentric Christology the scholarship that happened in Germany and then latter in the United States was not Eurocentric but historical, literary, textual, and redaction criticism that worked hard, and successfully at being author/textual centric.

Pentecostalism and the kind of right wing Protestantism that is most prevalent in LA doesn't portend to replace Eurocentric Christology with an objective Christology but promote a derivative form of outdated Eurocentric right wing fundamentalist/Pentecostal Christology as an anti intellectual response to the scholarship which has taken place in Europe and the US but is not Eurocentric.

Of course Guiterez's Liberation Theology did confront the Eurocentric remnants of a status supported establishment Church, even as the scholarship at the Seminaries had already moved away from that approach.

Guiterez is, IMO, much more Biblically based but still approaches Scripture and Theology with an end game in mind.

The broad movement in Latin America is not for a more liberated Christian experience but a more contrived and reactionary form of Christianity that supports and envies the ruling classes, not challenge them.

Thomas Merton's unfortunate death at the President Hotel in Bangkok ended what was basically a one man mission to recapture the sacrament (if you will) of meditation that had been prevalent in centuries past but now lost to the modern Church. It would be difficult to find a more polar opposite to the loud screaming Pentecostalism that is happening in Latin America.

[rug]

4. My sense of Pentecostalism is that it's light on theology but heavy on experience.

I suspect that's true in Latin America as well.

It's almost as if the theology does not matter if you're filled with the Spirit.

Demographics and attendance aside, the only direct influence I've seen on the Catholic Church was its charismatic movement, but even that seems to have ebbed considerably.

I'm less sure about the older Protestant Churches but it seems that nondenominational and so-called Bible Churches with a Pentecostal flair have grown almost in direct proportion to the Protestant decline. I can't say I've seen a direct charismatic or pentecostal surge inside those older churches but, as I said, I'm less familiar with them.

[grantcart]

11. Pentecostalism isn't just light on theology it is a virulent form of anti-intellectualism

and is almost always mixed up with extreme right wing politics.


The decline in mainline Protestant denominations is happening at the same time community 'bible' churches have grown as individual community churches are not constrained with connectional ecclesiastical structures that will force them to face issues like abortion and same sex marriage that the want to avoid. Pentecostalism is an even more virulent form of this but tends to draw from different populations that are less educated, more impoverished, and in the US more immigrant based.

If you have not gone to a full blown Pentecostal church service, you should, it is an eye opening cultural shock that will leave you with an appreciation of just how deep and wide the religious mumbo jumbo is.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

5. "Eventually the Catholics are going to nominate a Pope from their largest base, Latin America."

Apparently, you haven't been paying attention. They did. (If you were being sarcastic, then I apologize for not seeing the sarcasm.)

[grantcart]

12. Of course you are right and if asked I would have correctly answered what country he is from but

he has made so little impression on me that I wrote the sentence in error you cite.

(It may also be that we don't bother with TV anymore reducing my impression of him even more.)

[MADem]

9. The current pope is from Latin America! He was born there, and raised there. nt

[grantcart]

10. Absolutely correct, I wonder why I missed that. Maybe he still seems European.

[MADem]

13. Sometimes we forget that South America, like North America, has an "immigrant culture" too.

The only "native" South Americans are the indigenous peoples who were there before the Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Japanese, etc. showed up on the scene! His parents were Italian, but he's Argentinian, through and through!

If they ever pick an American one, that guy (and I'm guessing it will still be a guy, but who knows?) will have ancestors that came from somewhere else, unless he's from one of the original tribes!

[grantcart]

14. Not an excuse for me.

In the UN office we worked we had a Chilean and I was well schooled on the differences between the different countries.

I actually like the humility of the present Pope.

[okasha]

6. From what I've seen in Mexco and South Texas,

a couple things are going on. One is a movement toward a more contemporary «worship experience.» These churches have «praise bands» instead of organs and choirs and hymns that sound like pop radio. The other is that Latin Americans, particularly Mexicans, have always been simultaneously deeply devout and deeply anticlerical. The «Bible» and «Community» churches don't have obvious hierarchies or readily apparent ecclesiastical structure.

[Jim__]

7. The 3rd chapter of the book he references as "radical theology" opens with a Wallace Stevens poem.

The chapter The Death of God Theologies Today opens with an excerpt from Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning:

1

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

...

7

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

8

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, 'The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.'
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

[kwassa]

8. Do most religious white people care the slightest bit about radical theology?

This isn't a white vs. minority issue, I think. I think there is not much interest in the subject.