The (Magic) Kingdom Of God

Christianity And Global Culture Industries

Michael L Budde, Michael Budde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429976537
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In The (Magic) Kingdom of God, Michael Budde offers a multidisciplinary analysis of the "global culture industries"-increasingly powerful, centralized corporate conglomerates in television, advertising, marketing, movies, and the like-and their impact on Christian churches in industrialized countries. Utilizing ideas from contemporary and classical

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Following Jesus in a Distracted Age

Once upon a time, I was hired as a consultant for a public-policy arm of a state-level Catholic bishops’ conference. The bishops, according to the institution’s staff people, wanted to engage in rededicated efforts to confront the realities of poverty in their state.

What the church bureaucracy had in mind was something on the order of a new lobbying initiative in the state legislature or perhaps an expert conference on poverty in the state.

I told them that they should attempt to take every Catholic in their state on an intensive retreat, with follow-up programs upon their return. Nothing the Church could do would benefit poor people more, I argued, than to energize, inspire, and ignite the passion of larger numbers of the faithful. Without attempts to “convert the baptized,” in William O’Malley’s phrase (1990a), the stranglehold of self-interest, isolation, and religious indifference would continue to throttle church attempts to deal seriously with poverty in a global capitalist order.

My advice, to put it gently, was unappreciated. I was fired. They had an experts conference. As far as I can tell, poverty in their state remained indifferent to their efforts.

Catholicism as a “Discipleship Church”?

Whenever and wherever Christianity has been an engaged, radical force for justice and human freedom, it has been because enough persons and groups in the church were passionate about the gospel, were deeply invested in the role of “disciple.” They have been committed to making as their own, as best they can under their circumstances, the choices, affections, and praxis first of Jesus of Nazareth, then of other exemplars of the faith. These exemplars themselves, whether prophets, mystics, social radicals, or church reformers, were similarly seized or given over to the grand narratives of Yahweh’s covenantal love in the Hebrew Scriptures and/or Jesus and his evocations of the Kingdom of God.

Whether one confines the scan to modern examples—movements against slavery, apartheid, the arms race, the exploitation of women, economic justice—or goes back further in history, an absolute requisite for Christian witness in the world is the presence of faith-based passion. The notion of passion, as will become apparent, is an underlying concept for much of this book. It ties together questions of religious formation that must move from background to foreground if we are to have churches worth preserving in the contemporary era; it points to the central narrative of Christian experience (the passion of Jesus) from which we derive our most potent insights into the life, mission, and message of the Anointed One; and, in the form of disordered and trivialized passions (a product of the cultural ecology of our time), we in the advanced industrial world find ourselves less able to sustain any life-forming narrative that is recognizably Christian, indeed, less able to be “passionate” about anything. I suggest that a Christianity drained of passion is no Christianity at all, the ultimate oxymoron, a pasty and thin gruel “neither hot nor cold,” and thus rejected by God (Rv 3:15). Indifference to the gospel, more than heresy, aberrant interpretations, or partisan politics, is the greatest danger to the church today.

Calls for more, rather than less, religious passion must strike Western ears as perverse, if not outright dangerous. The so-called modern age, born in the aftermath of interreligious wars and insecurity, can be seen as a thoroughgoing attempt to defuse religious passions, to render them harmless and unworthy of cultivation. In a world in which Christians still kill one another, in which narrow movements of “Christian inspiration” threaten human freedom and seek state power for their causes, revitalized and renewed Christianity must indeed seem threatening. And, indeed, the revitalized, passionate Christianity I seek is threatening to the world as it is, although not for the reasons usually assumed. But before making that point, I must make clear what I do not mean by Christian passion.

First, Christian passion is not uniform in its expression; it is not to be confused with William James’s notion of religious “enthusiasm,” his category for ecstatic/charismatic experiences. Charismatic phenomena may—or may not—be signs of authentic Christian passion as I conceive of it. They are not identical with it.

Second, Christian passion is not a fanatical close-mindedness; it does not coerce consciences and behaviors. Rather than seek power in the worldly sense of domination, strength, and lethal means, it inspires people to live a radical reversal in which service is privileged over being served and “success” is measured in ways often considered bizarre by outside judges.

Third, Christian passion is not a substitute for, or in opposition to, human reason and the intellect. It does not privilege irrationalism, emotivism, or anti-intellectualism; rather, the sense of Christian passion I advocate stands prior to, but not independent of, the exercise of human reason. It orients and motivates individuals and groups to exercise their intellectual and cognitive gifts in the service of the Kingdom and Christian discipleship. To the extent that these goals are of transcendent significance, intellect and reason become more, not less, important to individuals and groups who hope to take on the mind of Christ.

The more I have come to reflect on the notion of passion in Christianity, the more fertile the metaphor becomes—pulling together ideas and practices, texts and interpretive communities, churchly and worldly concerns. Several things come to mind that will be explored throughout subsequent chapters.

Hans Frei and others have argued that the passion accounts in the New Testament historically have constituted the central narrative of Christian experience. Indeed, it seems fair to say that it was the specific, historical passions of Jesus—for the poor and exploited, for a way of being that affirms life and not death, and against wealth, power, and privilege—that led the powers that be to set in motion his passion/execution. The “eclipse of biblical narrative,” in modernist scriptural study and scholarship, detailed by Frei (1974), in turn has meant marginalizing the particulars of Jesus’ ministry and praxis as orienting guides for Christian life. The consequences of this move have been considerable.

As evidenced in the synoptic Gospels, the passion of Jesus radically scales down all other desires, subordinating them to the central imperatives of proclaiming and living the new reality of the Kingdom. It identifies the idolatry that is misplaced passion, that puts the “natural” categories of cult, family, property, and purity above the imperative “Follow me” (Lk 5:27; 14:26–7; Mt 10:35–6). The willingness to let go of inferior passions and loyalties, to “die to” lesser goods, is a sign that passion for the gospel is taking root in believers and in communities (e.g., Lk 18:28–30).

Christian passion seeks to do, to live, and to be all ad majorem Dei gloriam (AMDG) (“to the greater glory of God”), in the words of the Jesuit motto. For some members of the Church, this “AMDG” leads to martyrdom or a highly visible witness in the world; for others, it may manifest itself as the “little way” of St. Therese—living a life of obscure vocation, perhaps caring for sick relatives, comforting the lonely, or “praying at all times” (Lk 21:36), if such is all that circumstances allow. In ways large or small, one is to do as much as can be done to live Jesus’ way, while always seeking to change those circumstances in ways that enable a more comprehensive practice of discipleship. The church is the community called to live as an alternative community, the group in the world that empowers, enables, and encourages its members toward a more complete, more passionate embrace of the gospel and its way. It is here, as part of the church, that the humble and limited practices of discipleship become enlarged by being part of a collective project. The Eucharist is the sacramental call to do as Jesus did, to affirm the community’s efforts to continue and intensify their efforts in this regard.

In this view, one test of the integrity of the Church is whether it is content to baptize the limited practices of its members, instituting a minimalist, legalistic interpretation of Christian life and practice or whether it celebrates the positive limited practices that exist while acting as a source of encouragement, imaginative experiments, fraternal/sororal correction, and collective movement along the Way of Christ. None of this is a matter of Pelagianism, or works-righteousness, or Pharisaism (Lk 11:37–46): perfection in the Christian life is beyond human capabilities, and accomplishment and pace matter less than direction and constancy.

One major obstacle to the renewal of more passionate expressions of the Catholic tradition lies in the endurance of “dual ethic” thinking—the notion that, although certain individuals might be called to “heroic” expressions of gospel discipleship (the saints and martyrs, for example), such a standard cannot be made normative for all believers. Particularly after the accommodation with the Empire in the fourth century, two classes of Christians emerged: an elite (almost always clerics or members of religious orders) whose socialization in the faith was considered crucial (and from whose ranks most “heroic” exemplars emerged); and the great majority of the baptized, who were thought incapable of living lives of gospel quality beyond minimalist expectations. This circumstance differs significantly from the practice of the pre-Constantinian church, in which baptism was considered an act of great significance, to be conveyed only after long preparation and formation, and a covenantal step involving high expectations and mutuality. Dual ethic assumptions are a central element of what I have elsewhere described as “loose” theories of the church—in which the similarities between the gospel and non-Christian ways of thinking and living are emphasized and in which being a Christian involves few obligations or loyalties that might conflict (except incidentally) with those privileged in the larger realms of power and influence (e.g., soldiers, capitalists, heads of state, patriots, citizens, revolutionaries) (see Budde 1992, pp. 33–4, 93).

The relative neglect of the religious and spiritual formation of the vast majority of believers during Christendom was justified by several dubious assertions of a theological and anthropological nature. The “simple people” were often thought to be “naturally religious,” hence not requiring the expenditure of significant resources on their religious formation; being “simple” in social terms, the assumption that most were “simple-minded,” and thus to be dictated to, seemed to follow almost inevitably. Also important were theological notions derived from the doctrine of Incarnation that held that since revelation builds upon (rather than opposes) the precepts of natural law accessible with unaided reason, concentrating religious resources on future leaders would still leave the great unwashed with those religious insights naturally available to them.

What “formation” of the laity that did occur in Christendom was often partial, incomplete, starved for resources, and designed not to interfere with the Constantinian bonding of religious and sociopolitical power—hardly the stuff to encourage manifestations of the Christian message in close continuity with those of the pre-establishment church. What Christendom represented instead was a “Christian ethos,” built by force, represented in architecture and public art (among other things), as a substitute for intensive, gospel-centered formation. Intended or not, the effects of the dual ethic have been profoundly deradicalizing and alienated from the ecclesiologies of the New Testament and patristic eras. This explains at least some of the huge gaps between gospel values and the practices of Christianity in “Christian” Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere where the dual ethic has been determinative of church practice.

Such is not meant to disparage the sincerity of those whose faith is so described. Indeed, one can only marvel, with gratitude, at the depths to which the gospel has been internalized and lived in those parts of the Church left underserved and devalued by dual ethic thinking. For all that, it is still true that the gospel begins, for all of us, as a word from the outside—a set of stories, roles, and choices that do not spontaneously and randomly emerge across the time and space of history. Christianity is a conveyed tradition, one that is refashioned on the road, but one in which it matters if the versions conveyed are shallow, distorted, or drained of passion, or are life-engaging and capable of rearranging one’s “natural” priorities and passions. In practice, it has never been an all-or-nothing thing, of course—even denatured, minimalist versions of the faith retain subversive potential and memories. Nevertheless, the dual ethic—poorly grounded in Scripture, better understood as a legacy of the Constantinian captivity of the Church than as a universally valid norm—remains an internal obstacle to revitalizing the Church’s sense of mission and commitment.

Fortunately, some trends within Catholicism are pushing against the double-standard counsels of the Christian life. Most notably, the Church’s renewed theology of baptism, which sees the sacrament as binding all—equally—in service to Jesus’ mission on earth, undercuts much of the theological ground from beneath minimalist readings of popular discipleship. The more profound understanding of baptism, reflected especially in the Vatican II documents and the renewed Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA), has implications not fully explored or accepted by the hierarchy; nevertheless, this enhanced view of baptism, with a more comprehensive set of entitlements and obligations, is a development that brings change and controversy in its wake.

Catholic Ecclesiology and a Passion for Discipleship

It isn’t a new idea, but I believe the primary purpose of the church is, and should have always been, to make saints. Its purpose isn’t to be just a social service agency, nor to sponsor art for art’s sake, nor to provide “meaning” and consolation to holders of power and privilege. Other movements can and do perform these sorts of things, often better than the church. What the church can and must do, what it alone can do, is make room for the Spirit within human hearts, to inspire individuals and groups to follow the example of Jesus of Nazareth. Anything less is to confuse byproducts with objectives, to be less than we are called to become, to trade the terrifying, adventurous birthright we inherited through baptism for inferior goods. Although I believe that certain social “goods” often emerge from the church when it is true to its own calling, those goods are derivative and dependent upon prior attention to the religious tasks of the church. Seeking the “goods” while neglecting the groundwork was the mistake of Protestant liberalism, which sought to legitimate Christianity as socially “useful” even while its “religious” underpinnings eroded from neglect and the impact of modernist rationalism.

As Church we are called, I argue, to become disciples of Jesus, to help one another take on the mind and heart of Christ, and to live our everyday lives in ways that reflect the choices, priorities, and dispositions of Jesus as narrated in Scripture. Such a vision of Christian purpose requires a degree of religious passion and conviction that mainstream ecclesiologies (Protestant and Catholic) have sought to marginalize. We cannot engender the degree of conviction and fidelity to the gospel our era requires by working through unchanged church self-understandings and structures. We need to rethink our notions of church as mission: What is it we are supposed to be doing? and church as community: How are we to organize ourselves and move together in pursuit of the mission left us by Jesus through the Holy Spirit?

In Christian ecclesiology, one could construct an interesting genealogy stretching from Ernst Troeltsch’s The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1913), Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) through H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1951), to Avery Dulles’s Models of the Church (1974). Troeltsch and Weber, and later Niebuhr (to a lesser extent Dulles), did much to establish as normative the distinction between “church” and “sect” types in theories of the church. To Troeltsch and Weber, sects—small, particularistic, demanding in their expectations for believers’ conduct and involvement—represented a notion of church that seemed to guarantee social marginalization, withdrawal from public concerns, and excessive “otherworldliness.” The church type, in contrast, was more pluralistic in composition, allowing for a wide range of involvements, and better suited to influence politics and public concerns in a responsible manner.

I have elsewhere discussed at some length the ideological biases in favor of the status quo, of assumptions of strong continuities between secular/Western and Christian values, that inhere in privileging the “church” model (and demonizing anything considered “sectarian”). The sect category works its rhetorical magic by insisting upon a very narrow definition of politics and public involvement (strongly state- and violence-centered) and by assuming that the church-type’s minimalist interpretation of the gospel is truer both to the text and the “needs” of modern societies (Budde 1992, pp. 30–7). Using these categories, a boatload of theologians and ethicists have sought to protect mainstream Catholicism from more demanding ecclesial visions with the assertion that while discipleship-style (read “sectarian”) practices might be tolerable for fringe groups, the Catholic Church (in capital letters) is, by its very nature, too broad, too grand, and too big for that. Catholicism is meant to be a “big tent” for all, and “sectarian” demands represent steps backward to withdrawal into the much-despised “Catholic ghetto.”

A partial and interesting exception here is Dulles, a Jesuit scholar from a patrician East Coast family. His Models of the Church was a touchstone for most subsequent discussions about ecclesiology in the Catholic tradition. The influence of H. Richard Niebuhr is evident throughout Dulles’s book, along with the church/sect binary therein. In the years after 1974, however, while continuing to develop the themes and topics that made him one of the more influential American Catholic ecclesiologists of his time, Dulles began exploring the relevance of more radical ecclesiologies for Catholicism.

Two more recent works in particular stand out in this development. In A Church to Believe In: Discipleship and the Dynamics of Freedom (1982) Dulles developed the notion of discipleship—much as I have discussed it thus far—and showed how it was a view consistent with Church history and contemporary scriptural scholarship. When a new edition of Models of the Church was published in 1987, Dulles added a final chapter, titled “The Church: Community of Disciples,” in which he outlined how the discipleship model corrected and integrated the other postconciliar models h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Following Jesus in a Distracted Age
• 2 Why Culture Matters in the World Economy
• 3 The Power of Global Culture Industries
• 4 Learning the Language of Faith
• 5 How Global Culture Industries Undermine Christianity
• 6 Church Barriers to Understanding Global Culture Industries
• 7 The Way from Here: Radical Gospel, Radical Church
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index