{"id":1440,"date":"2004-06-15T15:57:38","date_gmt":"2004-06-15T19:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/06\/15\/religious-ghettoes\/"},"modified":"2004-06-15T15:57:38","modified_gmt":"2004-06-15T19:57:38","slug":"religious-ghettoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/06\/15\/religious-ghettoes\/","title":{"rendered":"Religious ghettoes"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

    David, over at Oxblog, ruminates on the movie Saved!<\/span><\/a>, and he muses about religious communities that live in some sort ot isolation from the larger world.<\/p>\n

    I grew up in the community that Saved!<\/span>
\nsatirizes, and the first 30 minutes of the film were frighteningly
\nhilarious to me in ways that I think passed over the heads of the
\nBerkeley audience, as I sometimes was the only person laughing out loud
\nin the theatre.  I remember the whole culture of creating
\nalternative, parallel institutions to replicate and concurrently
\ncounter the broader “secular” culture.  We had “Christian” rock,
\nrap, and heavy metal; “Christian” school systems; “Christian” yellow
\npages and business directories; “Christian” media sources (not all of
\nthe TBN or Pat Robertson variety); “Christian” sports leagues; and so
\non.  Many of my friends went from kindergarten through college
\nentirely in a “Christian” educational system.  We were encouraged
\nto be “in <\/span>the world, but not of <\/span>the
\nworld.”  We were concerned about too active an engagement with the
\nbroader American culture, for fear that it would captivate us and bend
\nus away from the right and true way of living, transforming us for the
\nnegative rather than allowing us to transform it for the “positive.”<\/p>\n

    Several aspects of this parallelism have struck me
\nmore and more the further that I get from this culture.  One
\nreason I put “Christian” in quotes above was that our understanding of
\nChristianity stayed remarkably restricted.  Other people may have
\nbeen Christians, like Catholics or perhaps some mainline Protestants or
\nEpiscopalians (but those latter two were pretty suspicious in terms of
\ntheir Christianity), but they weren’t part of our “Christian”
\ncommunity.  It’s not that we didn’t think they were not
\nChristians, just that we were sure that our Christianity was better,
\nmore authentic, more trustworthy.  When I became an Episcopalian,
\nthat was viewed with more than a little bit of suspicion — not because
\nof the possible Romishness of the ECUSA, but because of the perception
\nthat Episcopalians were too liberal to really be Christians.<\/p>\n

    But another aspect of this parallel society, which
\ntried to define itself apart from the larger culture, was that the
\ndefinition was both oppositional and entirely on the terms of the
\nlarger culture.  If you think you’re in the world but not really
\npart of it, than much of your self-understanding comes from looking at
\nwhat you’re not part of and consciously going in another
\ndirection.  So when you see that the culture’s sexual ethic has
\nchanged from one which formerly matched yours — monogamy only in the
\ncontext of male-female marriage — you look at what the larger culture
\nis doing and declare it off-limits.  So sex, for example, in the
\nevangelical ghetto cannot include homo sex, no “casual” sex, no sex
\nwithin a committed relationship that has not been transformed into
\nmarriage, no divorce except for infidelity, and so on.  And the
\nreasoning should be pretty obvious.  The theological view
\ndetermines the socio-political view here: God (and even more
\nimportantly) our understanding of God do not change, so all the
\nstructures that are tied into that God in some way are also worthy of
\nprotection and resistance to change.  What do we do, however, if
\nour understanding of God is not immutable?  What if we begin to
\nunderstand human history as a narrative of nearly constant
\nchange?  What happens to faith and life then?  I think this
\ndilemma has just begun to become acute for many American evangelicals,
\nbut the full implications of what it means for their culture to undergo
\nrevolution in paradigm (which is what might be happening) aren’t clear
\nto many of them.<\/p>\n

    Even more interesting than the above definition by
\ndefiance, many people in this culture do not seem to realize that the
\nprocess of defining as “in the world but not of the world” requires a
\ngrounding in the very world that one seeks to deny.  Many
\nevangelicals seek to keep a wall between their community and the
\nsurrounding culture, but at the same time, they understand themselves
\nto have an imperative to transform that world.  The necessity to
\nchange requires engagement.  If one wants to attract people to
\none’s project of transformation, one has to make it attractive. 
\nSo you show that your culture is not significantly different from the
\nlarger culture, that it has all the same stuff — school systems,
\npopular culture (of a sorts), cultural institutions, economics, and so
\non.  But when you make “Christian” music, it sounds just like
\n“secular” music, especially given the fact that your group does not
\nhave sufficient cultural power to set the terms of cultural
\nchange.  So Christian music can never actually influence much of
\nthe course of popular music; it can only react to how popular music
\ndevelops, changing one step behind the mainstream culture, after
\nconsideration of how one can do that following and still “remain true
\nto your convictions.”  But it’s still this faint shadow of the
\nlarger culture.  And you become tied into and integrally part of
\nthat which you also deny.<\/p>\n

    I mean none of this aspersively.  I don’t think
\nthat evangelicals engage in doublethink about their social roles any
\nmore than the rest of us who belong to groups that aren’t very
\nself-reflective do.  And I think the movie, in its somewhat
\nham-handed way (as David pointed out in his post) recognizes that this
\ncontradiction exists; but just like evangelicals, it doesn’t know quite
\nwhat to make of it, and it’s at those points that the humor and satire
\nfall flat and the ending becomes a bit too pat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    David, over at Oxblog, ruminates on the movie Saved!, and he muses about religious communities that live in some sort ot isolation from the larger world.     I grew up in the community that Saved! satirizes, and the first 30 minutes of the film were frighteningly hilarious to me in ways that I think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rayleejun"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-ne","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}