I was a worked with youth from 1996-2016 and saw a severe amount of change. I have also picked up some new tools as an academic that I hope will be helpful.
Millennial generation is burned out. We should believe them.
3 insights to help move the conversation along.
media culture and image
consumerism and branding
formed by our upbringing
Here is a short video. I would love to hear from you.
People are concerned about what they see happening right now. There are geographic divisions that seem increasingly pronounced. There are generational, political, and racial division that are inflamed at troubling levels. The news cycle, social media, and institutional corruption (banks, schools, churches, government, hospitals, Hollywood, Washington, etc.) provide a constant string of crisis and controversy.
Things seem to have escalated quite a bit in the past couple of years. Some people will say ‘every generation thinks things are chaotic and out of control’ and there is some evidence of that. However, we live in a unique era when there are the some distinct factors causing an intensification that is notable.
Change is a constant, we know that. Change at this rate, is not. We live in a time of exponential (not just incremental) change. It is no wonder that this environment breeds so much conflict and chaos.
One of the things that I would like to explore is the way that following 3 factors come together in a troubling way:
Consumerism
Globalization
Pluralism
The connection between those three might not seem clear initially, but it is the way that they come together in the 21st century that is relevant for our conversation.
Consumerism is so assumed that it often goes unnamed. It is as if we are on automatic pilot. Buying things has become second nature. I know people who claim to be Christians who can go a whole day (or days) without praying but can’t go a day without making a purchase. Capitalism is the real religion of the West. [1]
Consumerism makes us individuals – or is it that individualism makes us consumers? … either way, we have exposed the root of the problem. Speaking a language, participating in an economy, procreating and raising the next generation, and nearly every other human activity is a communal enterprise that requires cooperation and mutuality. Individualism is a mental fiction we have been sold that fails us at nearly every turn.
Globalization has brought our communities into closer proximity than ever before. We have never had this much access to or contact with one-an-other. It almost doesn’t matter where you live anymore, you have access to goods from all over the world. In fact, you do business with, go to school with, and stand in line with people from all over the world. You may all have different religions, worldviews, or notions of community and belonging. We live in age of radical connection and proximity …. but maybe not overlap. And therein lies the problem for our concern this week.
Pluralism is then a relevant factor that completes our trio. As individuals whose communities are in great proximity to each other, we have to develop an approach to one-an-other.[2]Some of us feel like we have does this well. Which is why it is so baffling why it cause some of our fellow citizens so much agitation and even anger. ‘Difference doesn’t need to lead to division’ we say, and if attitude or acceptance was the only issue we might be right. The problem is that the first two ingredients to trio are the wood and gasoline that make our current environment so flammable. Attitude (or our approach) is just the spark that makes that situation combustible.
Here is the most important thing to understanding our current culture:
Our society is a set of fragments – leftover remainders – of previous expression that may not be compatible with other or newer expressions.
Again – our society is a set of fragments, leftover remainders, of previous expressions that may not be compatible with other or newer expressions. More on this tomorrow. The examples of this phenomenon are endless once you know what you are looking at. Think about religion, Christian denominations, theories of educations, economics, politics, nationality and race, pre-1975 military, for-profit prisons, policing strategies, parenting styles, marriage equality, even grammar and texting language.
Here is a picture that I want to utilize for this 4-part series. It is a piece by my neighbor Jeff and it really speaks to me.
Our circles (communities) have diversity and differentiation within them. Those circles are in close proximity to each other and are even connected … but without overlapping. They are not integrated. They do not bleed into each other. They are distinct from one-an-other.
What makes this proximity profound is that the newer circles are smaller and bolder but are foregrounded on other circles that are faded but still present. Those larger circles are older and not as pronounced but influential. They haunt the work. They are ghosts and shadows to the primary feature. They are echoes of the past who still exert their voice. Their influence has faded but their effect still remains. The current configuration and focus wouldn’t make sense without them.
Tomorrow we talk about the nature of these remaining fragments and how people who think about such things differ on the subject.
Halloween is a watered-down substitute for something we actually need.
Unfortunately it is a heavily diluted version of what it could be. This is tragic because our culture is in deep need of a formidable challenge to the systems of oppression and marginalization. The old notion of Carnival was a least a vacation from the repetition and redundancy of the status quo. Carnival was a suspension of social norms and expectations. It provided an opportunity to examine and challenge ‘the way things are’ and to turn upside-down the domination of the established order.
The problem is that Halloween has become nothing more than a distraction from the way things are. Instead of wetting our appetite and creating a desire for something greater – we are easily satisfied with mass-produced candy and slightly risqué costumes.
Our costumes and rituals bring us closer to reinforcing problematic gender stereotypes than they do to challenging us in reexamining our assumptions about sexuality within the essentialist binary understandings that we have inherited.
We miss the opportunity to boycott the drunken capitalist system and its insatiable market driven orgy of perpetual consumerism. Instead, we reinforce the very system of marketing and goods that daily bombards us with commercials of manufactured desire and unrelenting need.
It’s not that I don’t like Halloween, it’s just that it makes me sad to think about what it could be and to know what it has been distilled from. I wish that it was an intensified version of what Carnival points toward, rather than this – a compromised and impotent cartoony descendant that actually reinforces that very structures and institutions we need to challenge.
Anyway – those are my thoughts during a quick study break from exam prep … now back to the books.
We are going to have to agree to disagree about some things. One thing that I would ask (in my generous orthodoxystyle) is that we both acknowledge those things that we agree on as well as those we don’t.
The reason that is important is because of something that Phyllis Tickle points out (paraphrase): it is not that former (and maybe dominant) expressions go away, it is that they no longer hold the prime spot and wield the kind of power that they once did. They are all still around however.
The interesting terrain that we inhabit in the 21st century is littered with artifacts and occupied by pockets of groups – possible ones that were once in the ascendancy. This is, as I am often saying, the bricolage nature of our cultural/societal environment.
You have methodists who have no idea what the methods were. You have ‘Amish’ fireplace stoves being mass-produced and sold on TV (think about it). You have can still, more tellingly, find actual Amish folks if you know where to look.
In my context, practical theology and its qualitative methods (interviews, case studies, ethnography) is my chosen approach.
There are several implications of these two things. Unlike Tripp, I don’t do systematic theology.* It is not that I don’t value other branches of theology. In fact, practical theology as a field is in a major renovation, at least in part, in order to join the other 4 primary branches of theology that do their own research and provide their own innovations:
Practical theologians commonly assert that the primary text of our field is lived experience– diverse persons and communities that are contextually located, inextricably related, and experiencing each other through countless interconnections and interactions.
Almost invariably when I am enduring critique from a conversation partner who is more conservative than myself, it is only a matter of time before they bring up Aquinas. I don’t get the nuance of Aquinas. I didn’t distinguish between the early and late Aquinas. I wasn’t careful to appropriate this or that of Aquinas’ formulations. I didn’t read the right translation of Aquinas. (the same things with Barth and Scotus too)
What I am saying is that we don’t need to understand Aquinas better or deeper.
We are to do in our day what Aquinas did in his.
As a contextual theologian I don’t think that is accomplished by obsessing over Aquinas. I’m not saying that we aren’t generous or respectful … I’m saying that Aquinas lives neither where we do nor when we do. He lived in a different context and time.
Call this dismissive if you will but The Church’s future is not to be found in Europe’s past. I say it all the time.
Historic thinkers like Aquinas never saw what I call the 5 C’s of our theological context:
post-Christendom
Colonialism
global Capitalism
Charismatic renewal (especially Pentecostalism in the Southern Hemisphere)
Cultural Revolutions (from Civil Rights in the 60’s to the ‘Arab Spring’)
Add to those 5 to pluralism, the internet and a growing environmental crisis and you have the 8 things we as theologians need to give great attention and care to. They are the context in which (and for which) we do theology in the 21st century. Go listen to our interview with Grace Ji-Sun Kim if you have questions about this.
You may want to focus more on the christian tradition (like Augustine or Aquinas) and I would understand that – I view that impulse through a Lindbeckian tri-focal lens. I understand the work you want to do within that cultural-linguistic silo. [I’m having fun in this part for those unfamiliar with my style]
Disagree as we might about the importance of a writer in the 3rd or 13th century – I just wanted you to know where I was coming from and what my focus was.**
I would love it if everyone would leave a comment and let me know how this sits with you.
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*One implication of that is that when I read systematic theologians I do so though mostly thought trusted secondary sources. Admittedly, I don’t major in primary sources – for reasons I hope are clear in this post. I find scholars who know their stuff like Elizabeth Johnson, John Caputo, Joseph Bracken and Stuart Murray and trust them.
** If you want to read more about my approach check out ‘After MacIntyre’ that I wrote a while ago but never put up on the blog. It will explain my concern about everything from consumerism to hipsters and the radical orthodoxy project.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 