The older I get (I'm now 42) the more I find myself convinced of the need for faith that is not just progressive/liberal but also contemplative. And the more frustrated I find myself at the lack of communities that truly are both progressive and contemplative.
Progressive Christianity without a spiritual contemplative heart tends to get stuck in its own head (or in more colourful language, perhaps stuck up its own arse). It tends to be quite... boring, quite stuck, very heady and intellectual. People just say the same thing again and again and again. It defines itself only in negative terms: "we're not homophobic," "we don't believe in taking the Bible literally." But it finds very little to say positively. If it says anything beyond negatives it can just drop into banalities, dropping Christian language completely and talking about gardening or knitting or things like that. Not that I have anything against gardening or knitting. It's just at that point you might as well just join a gardening club, or read books about gardening. Religion has ceased to be religion.
When faced with conservative religious cultures the progressive approach remains vibrant enough because it has a sense of mission in opposing such culture and a steady stream of refugees from conservative religion to swell the ranks. It is more political. There's nothing wrong with this, I'm all for politically engaged justice-seeking faith. It's just without the contemplative element the risk of burnout is high.
And so progressive forms of religion fail. Despite seeing their purpose as being "a more credible modern faith" they actually only attract a tiny tiny minority of people, while conservative religion, or simply unapologetically ancient forms of religion, thrive, or at least survive a little better.
My observation of progressive Christianity is that it tends to evolve in a certain way. When a person, or even a church or denomination, starts on the pathway of progressive Christianity, this is what tends to happen:
- You can remain stuck in a negative story of what you have rejected and just continue to repeat ad nauseum "we're not this, we're not this, we're not this."
- You can find community in those others who have been through the same process of rejecting conservative faith, so much so that the friendship of that community is all that matters. You're no longer really interested in the faith side, it's just that your friends are in this church/group and you enjoy it. Of course that's fine as far as it goes but it doesn't appeal to anyone beyond the life of a particular group.
- Your faith can just become synonymous with your politics. You campaign, you stand up for certain things, but though you label it with "faith" it's not really any different from someone doing these things while not claiming it as faith.
- You can just drift away from faith altogether. You either hold on to your religious trauma, or you don't (you do your work, you work through your trauma therapeutically) but at the end you find you don't really have much interest in faith community in any sense. You get on with your life.
- You find yourself still searching for that "something more", and you find it outside of Christianity, maybe in some form of Buddhism. Maybe it's because a new faith doesn't hold any of the trauma of your old faith. Or maybe it's because the new faith more coherently and clearly offers you a spiritual practice that you intuit does really bring a deeper feeling of liberation and happiness.
- Or, your hunger leads you to search more deeply within Christianity for the inner mystical tradition. You have moved beyond the certainty of intellectual fundamentalism but find something that feels solid in contemplative Christianity. It's not solid like stone, but it is, mysteriously, solid like air. You're not holding onto the stone of old certainties, but delightfully, you discover you don't need them, because this whole time you had the ability to fly.
Many of these options aren't terrible. Some of them (the ones where you're stuck) will probably leave you somewhat unhappy. Being healed and embracing no faith or another faith may will give you happiness and liberation. But I believe the only way Christian faith actually survives and thrives is if it finds, and practices, a contemplative approach.
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