The Liquidation of the Church

Kees de Groot

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317104766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Is religion dying out in Western societies? Is personal spirituality taking its place? Both stories are inadequate. Institutional religion is not simply coming to an end in Western societies. Rather, its assets and properties are redistributed: large parts of the church have gone into liquidation. Religion is crossing the boundaries of the parish and appears in other social contexts. In the fields of leisure, health care and contemporary culture, religion has an unexpected currency.

The metaphor of liquidation provides an alternative to approaches that merely perceive the decline of religion or a spiritual revolution. Religion is becoming liquid. By examining a number of case studies in the Netherlands and beyond, including World Youth Day, television, spiritual centers, chaplaincy, mental healthcare, museums and theatre, this book develops a fresh way to look at religion in late modernity and produces new questions for theological and sociological debate. It is both an exercise in sociology and an exercise in practical theology conceived as the engaged study of religious praxis. As such, the aim is not only to get a better understanding of what is going on, but also to critique one-sided views and to provide alternative perspectives for those who are active in the religious field or its surroundings.

Part 1
Religion in liquid modernity

Introduction

What’s going on?

Charles Chaplin captured solid modernity magnificently in the movie Modern Times (1936): getting together at the same time and place in order to act according to standard procedures. It’s all about knowing your position in the system – to the point that you become part of it.

A fitting image of liquid modernity is provided by a cover of a Dutch magazine (De Groene Amsterdammer, September 22, 2012). The headline refers to contemporary demands to be flexible (Sennett 1998). The ‘Flexible Woman’ is challenged to adapt herself to various circumstances and to be at several places at the same time – all the while being passionate about it, too.

Loyal surrender versus fervent quest. The conformity of the former stance with a religious attitude has been noted far more often than the latter’s. One story about religion in the age of liquid modernity is that religion is oppositional. When everything, even the foundations of one’s existence, tends to become a matter of choice, when solid institutions are being replaced by fluctuating networks, and when experience is everything and dogma taboo, there is no place for something like religion unless it is a safe haven closed off from the other domains of society. Religious communities, then, are a place for withdrawal from or, at least potentially, an attack against a society without solid foundations. This is basically what Zygmunt Bauman is saying about religion’s role in postmodernity, or “liquid modernity”, as he successfully renamed the contemporary stage of modernization. Echoing Gilles Kepel, Bauman perceives fundamentalist movements as the genuine representations of religion. Besides these typical by-products of modernity, religion is anachronistic or, perhaps, reduced to harmless, socially irrelevant aesthetics: Evensong on Sunday afternoon for the elite, Christmas Eve for the common person. We live in a secular age.

This characterization of secularity resonates in a dominant strand within ecclesial thinking as well. ‘The world around us has forgotten God’. ‘People have become individualists’. ‘We live in a wholly secularized world’. Even the Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels (2012), arguing against a church that withdraws from the public domain, expressed this view in the Annual Lecture on Christianity and Society at my university. His suggestion was to put more emphasis on evangelization, as is Pope Francis’ mission, accompanied by a lower degree of cultural pessimism. More often, the focus is on guarding the boundaries between an orthodox church and a hostile world. This attitude may also be expressed in a plea for evangelization – only this time, evangelization primarily serves internal purposes: to strengthen the Church’s identity, to mark the difference with the outside world, and to separate the true believers from those who are reluctant to testify.

Figure 0.1 Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times

Source: (Chaplin 1936)

In the last decade, a different story has entered the sociological community. In this account, religion is not just disappearing, but getting replaced by something more individualistic, network-based, and experiential: the “spiritual turn”, as Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead framed it. Their book in 2005 was even entitled, The spiritual revolution: why religion is giving way to spirituality (Heelas and Woodhead 2005). This revolution thesis may be considered as an extrapolation of an interesting case study of the holistic milieu in a British town called Kendall. This milieu was marginal, it didn’t appear to be growing particularly fast, and there were no signs of any severe competition with the churches. However, the authors were onto something, since the revolution-thesis has influenced the sociological agenda.

A parallel version of the revolution thesis appears in a normative, critical, discourse as well: contemporary spirituality is egoistic, shallow, and narcissistic.

Figure 0.2 Cover of De Groene Amsterdammer, September 22, 2012

It lacks Christianity’s fundamental focus on others, on community, and on transcendence. This critique may be too easy. An analysis of Dutch survey data (Berghuijs, Bakker, and Pieper 2013) indicates that the social issues connected with an interest in contemporary spirituality (ecology, animal rights, health, wellbeing) differ from those connected with Christianity (education, poverty reduction, economic development). Thus, the social dimension is not lacking. The theological critique that contemporary spirituality worships the Self rather than the Other is perhaps more fundamental. Yet, this critique implies an empirical claim and, for now, we don’t know whether this is true. It would be interesting to find out whether particular religious believers are more open to external critical voices than particular spiritual-minded people. Or will religious believers be prone to have firmer convictions compared to people with an interest in spirituality? The latter might be more open to the transcendent Other than the former. It would require a thorough and subtle empirical comparison between specific spiritual-minded and religious-minded individuals to sustain the empirical presuppositions in such theological evaluations. Thus far, generalizations and comparisons of theological ideals with present-day non-Christian practices have been more common.

Rather than turning the new holistic- and anti-institutional-minded into a distinct category of believers, I would regard them as spokespersons of a broader social trend. The longing for deep personal experiences expressing itself in a language borrowed from various traditions, including Westernized Buddhism, esotericism, and humanistic psychology, is a widespread cultural phenomenon in the West. It appears in the economic, medical, and other domains in society as well. What is called ‘spirituality’ is not an individualistic phenomenon at all. It is one of the fluid ways in which religion is present in today’s society; the fact that its fans like to stress that they’re all individuals – as the anonymous crowd puts it in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Jones 1979) – and tend to denounce the label religion doesn‘t change that. The social trend of today is the cultivation of the individualist illusion.

The essays in this volume suggest that religion as a social phenomenon has become part of liquid modernity. Therefore, it takes a different shape and is to be found not just in, but also outside, the religious field. This is neither the whole nor the final story: next to these processes of de-institutionalization, processes of institutionalization take place. New churches evolve around the experience of the Holy Spirit; schools are formed to train practitioners in healing energy fields. The focus in this book, however, is on the Roman Catholic Church dealing with a culture in which people tend to behave as clients and experience-seekers, on how this Church and other organized religions operate in the public domain of the media, on the spiritual market and in the field of care, and on the secular use of religion.

In sociology, ‘church’ is shorthand for a religious collectivity, Christian or otherwise. In theology, definitions of church are plenty (‘legion’ in the words of the obsessed man from the Gospel of Marc [5,9]), varying from the exclusive identification with one particular collectivity, considered as representing Christ on earth, to a fuzzy pneumatological concept of church that may fit any encounter where the Spirit is at work. I do not have an obsession with definitions, but I concede that I disagree with both extreme positions. From those points of view, researching how the Church bursts its banks would not be an option. When there’s no salvation outside the ‘real existing’ Roman Catholic Church, such a process cannot occur and doing research would be futile when what qualifies as ‘church’ is entirely in the eye of the beholder. I study how various conceptions of church are operative in and outside the religious field. Is the Church a ‘members only’ society or open for guests? What happens when the Church enters the secular domain? And under which conditions can actors in the secular domain ‘do religion’ without becoming church? These issues deal with sociological preferences implied in ecclesial practices, and with secular practices continuing or taking up elements of religious traditions.

Church in liquid modernity

My aim is not to suggest that churches should adapt to liquid modernity. This is what the Anglican theologian Pete Ward pleads for with his ‘liquid church’. Ward (Ward 2002, 2005, 2008) celebrates the commodification of the Gospel, networking and smart answering to spiritual desire. His ecclesiological reflections come down to a clear message: the Church has to be more attractive in order to rescue those in the world to provide them with salvation. My aim is more descriptive and analytical. How does the Roman Catholic Church deal with liquid modernity? What happens when this Church becomes fluid itself? Where does religion appear in liquid modern culture outside the Church?

I start by noticing that the Roman Catholic Church itself can be characterized as a hybrid organization (Chapter 1). It is not just a membership organization; it also provides services to the public and sends messages to those who do not belong to it in order to influence the world as a whole like a campaigning organization for human rights or the protection of the earth. What happens when this Church finds itself in liquid modernity, or gets lost in liquidity, or finds itself gone to pieces? The theoretical introduction is therefore followed by three parts, each consisting of, again, three chapters based on surveys and fieldwork. The first part is about the religious field: the parish, new movements, and big events. The second is about ecclesial initiatives in the secular sphere: the Eucharist on television, chaplaincy in hospitals, prison, and the army, and Christian spiritual centers. The third part is on the secular transformation and the secular usage of religion: pastoral care developing into mental health care, a museum delving into religious matters, and liturgy on stage. The first part deals with the world within the religious field, the second with what happens on the boundaries between the religious and other domains, and the third is about religion in social domains other than the religious. I start with the parish, where ecclesial control is strong; I end with secular theatre, where ecclesial control is absent.

Ecclesial maneuvers in fluidity

Most of the material in this volume is taken from the Netherlands, with a special interest in Catholicism. Although the Roman Catholic Church is the largest denomination in the country, Catholicism leads a marginal life in contemporary Dutch society. This contrasts with the strong international position Dutch Catholicism used to have, at least until the 1960s. What has caused the weak identity of Dutch Catholics? Is theological liberalism within the Church largely responsible for this and therefore for its diminishing market share in the long run? In Chapter 2, I suggest that this scenario exaggerates the role of church leaders. In a religious heterogeneous country such as the Netherlands (secular, Protestant, Catholic, spiritual, and Muslim), the Catholic Church can’t be much more than a marginal phenomenon unless it becomes associated with a larger social issue, such as the fight against Islamic extremism or capitalism. Both liberal and conservative church leaders have probably stimulated the alienation between church and Catholics by falling out of touch with popular religiosity, thereby losing part of the symbolic capital they had. On one hand, there is the liberal disregard for devotional practices, fraternities, and the veneration of Our Lady. On the other, there is the conservative rejection of the familiar faith: people tend to expect in the church a continuation of what is customary but are confronted with ecclesial regulations that are perceived as strange. Both ecclesial strategies display a common trait: an affinity with the formally organized Church which corresponds with a systematized theology. The official Church has been, and still is, very much at home in solid modernity.

This Church has become strange for many Catholics. In 2015, half of those baptized as Catholics did not identify themselves as such in a survey. They regard the Church as a useful institution at most. These Catholics in particular, regard themselves as persons to whom the Church delivers services, even sacramental services, rather than as members – if they perceive a relationship at all. In 2003, I initiated a survey among Roman Catholic parish councils to find out whether these councils are going along with this trend and express the attitude of a service organization (‘Anyone is welcome to celebrate their relation here’) or rather the attitude of a membership organization (‘You are welcome to enter the marriage course of our parish’) (Chapter 3). It turned out, however, that par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART 1 Religion in liquid modernity
• PART 2 Parish and beyond: ecclesial maneuvers in fluidity
• PART 3 Losing control: ecclesial initiatives within the secular sphere
• PART 4 The world takes over: the use of religion in the secular sphere
• PART 5 Conclusion
• Index