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The Problem of Talking about God in Practice
The rule ‘no politics or religion’ is sometimes needed to keep conversation civil. People have different reactions to religious talk. Some wax eloquent. Others are embarrassed, or irritated. Even in religious circles, words and their tone can be crucial. A parishioner watching a DVD presentation approved, because:
they’ve got it down to the nitty-gritty of ordinary everyday life. Not too pious, holy pie in the sky, just quietly living ordinary lives.1
This is the kind of God talk that connects with experience – but theology seems to be something different. In the minds of many, ‘theological’ is synonymous with ‘irrelevant’, dissociated from human experience and cut off from the everyday business of living.
‘We don’t do God’ has been a common saying ever since Alastair Campbell used it to prevent Tony Blair being questioned about his faith. The surprise is how many of those who ‘don’t do God’ today are actually believers. Some feel prevented from being upfront because of their job or position, as Prime Minister Blair was. But even in some religious bodies, faith convictions are kept in deep cover. Looking for public funding for a church social project, for example, is often a pragmatic reason for not advertising faith, lest it be seen as proselytizing. But it is the strong reaction to public declarations – from hostility to blank incomprehension – that more than anything inhibits any mention of God in polite company. Religion has become a new taboo.
The taboo takes a mutant form within the Church. For example, during research interviews, parishioners in a Church of England parish were frank about their discourse not being very explicitly theological – they ‘didn’t do Jesus’. As one person put it:
The only expectation I think [this parish] places on people is to be present in a church and to celebrate God as you understand him. 2
The conclusion, nevertheless, was: ‘It’s so non-expectational that it’s magnetic!’ Too much religion might, apparently, be counter-productive!
Again, volunteers at a churches’ cold weather shelter project found God talk problematic:
I think these are very profoundly difficult questions about evangelism, and some people feel very evangelistic . . . But that doesn’t strike me as the flavour of this particular project, and no one has ever mentioned to me the idea of pushing a more evangelistic agenda on to it. I think it would change it.3
But, they were in for a surprise at how their ‘guests’ spoke. One guest commented:
I am finding it interesting that despite the difference of the churches here, actually they’re coming together as a body, as it should be, in the Body of Christ and actually working together and establishing some sort of unity and strength in unity together to help the outside.4
The volunteers had to admit: ‘They were a lot more religious than [we] thought . . . they are very conscious of being in a church, much more than we are.’ One person’s excess of religion is just what someone else needs!
Theology in today’s culture
The cultural prejudice today is more resistant to religion than to faith or ‘spirituality’. What meets with suspicion are the structured forms of faith, faith with a hard edge. This includes theology. Theology has an image problem. It was never easily accessible to the non-theologian given the highly speculative form it took in recent centuries. And now the word has acquired authoritarian overtones. ‘Theology’ is bracketed with ‘theocracy’ and seen as a throwback to medieval times. To brand a discussion point ‘theological’ is to accuse it of obscurity, delving into trivia, avoiding the real matter in hand. Our scientific and secular culture is not only non-theological, it has turned anti-theological – theology being bracketed with ‘religion’.
It is also the case that the analytical discourse of theology can be off-putting to the enthusiastic believer. Its measured approach does not always resonate with the people in the pews. Even the clergy can have a jaundiced view. The preoccupations of committed church people – about, for example, spirituality and/or social justice – come in their own characteristic modes. In spirituality, the mode is ‘expressive’ rather than analytical. Social justice agencies rely on the socio-economic disciplines rather than the theological. Parents, teachers and clergy fret about the irreligion of the young, and look for effective ways of handing on the gospel truth. Critical theological enquiry might not serve their purpose. And bishops, who have to defend Christian positions in a hostile culture, are not always patient with theological speculation.
But theology has actually been driven, especially over the last half century, by the sense that the well tried practices of the past no longer embody faith and mission effectively. The reason, in a word, is secularization. Our culture has shed much of its previously presumed Christian idiom, and we are now constrained to find new ways to portray Christianity. We think about things differently because material and social conditions have changed.
As people of faith struggle with the dilemmas of social change, the pervasive doubts about religion can feed into their self-perception. Faith-based organizations – schools and colleges, health care facilities, social action projects, voluntary organizations – find their identities being subtly remoulded by the pervasive organizational culture. As they (mostly rightly) adopt today’s professional standards and bureaucratic practices they can also drift into today’s secular world view. A similar thing strikes at the heart of the Church, among parish congregations, diocesan agencies and grassroots movements. They can readily – and too easily – identify with that strange blend of community values and individualistic values that is characteristically post-modern. And theology can capitulate just as easily. It can give up on any claim for the truth of faith, and rest content with being simply expressive, a mere paraphrase of human-spiritual experience.
The ARCS research with church groups and agencies noted all these complex cultural dynamics. The research team was intrigued when one organization described its use of Theological Action Research as ‘outsourcing our theology’! Needless to say, the ARCS effort then was ‘to send the theology home’. A number of the agencies we worked with were effective in enculturating the gospel into contemporary cultural modes. But with this went the challenge to present the gospel in all its fullness including the elements which are seen as radical in the current context.5
The social conditions of belief 6
These ...