Rich in the treasures of faith
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jesus Walks
Religious individualism
Everywhere and at all times the love ethic of Jesus is a radiant light revealing the ugliness of our stale conformity. Nowhere is the tragic tendency to conform more evident than in the church, an institution which has often served to crystalize, conserve, and even bless the patterns of majority opinion. [Martin Luther King, Jr. Sermon "Transformed Non-Conformist"]
Bob Shepherd
"America's love affair with God"
In leaving the Old World, there was a strong bent among America's first settlers to put some distance between themselves and the controlling, dominating authorities that had restricted them. The Christianity they were all too familiar with was one which demanded conformity, and stifled independence and individualism. To the Pilgrims, as well as to the Puritans that began coming less than two decades later, the demand for conformity chafed. The old Church was limiting God, stifling the Spirit in every man and woman. The Old World with their prelates and potentates represented authority and its worst (tyrannical) stereotype.
Along with the anti-authoritarianism implicit in their rebellion against excessive ecclesiastical control, there were several positive characteristics of this new style of Christian believism. The insistence on what we can call an evangelical personalism led to a rediscovery of something of the mystical vein that existed (often quietly) throughout the history of Christianity. Since the individual must appropriate faith for himself, he needed the tools to assume this holy responsibility. No longer could he depend on priests and hierarchies to work out his salvation. He had to, like Jacob, wrestle with God for himself. He needed the knowledge of the ancient prophets and patriarchs. He needed literacy, and Bibles.
Rediscovered evangelicalism
Mystics of all ages, back to Genesis, have required a deep relational dimension. The I-Thou dynamic hinged on contact with God -- that is, prayer, by whatever name one uses. Anthropologists may be in front of theologians on some aspects of this mighty theme at the heart of mankind's spiritual quest. The deepest, most primitive, most subjective, most immediate niche of man's psyche is not an intellectual or rationalist or even theological one. The only theology at this most intimate depth is an exceedingly simple, even primordial one. The religion of the heart is deeply personalist. Jesus, at this level, is apprehended less by mental prowess as by intuitive grasp.
Ironically, in rebelling against the structure and controls of their immediate religious forbears, the evangelicals all across the Puritan spectrum were placing themselves a substantial step closer to primitive Christianity, which after all was Hebrew and Judaic, and in closer relation with the biblical continuity going back to Genesis. Where the church, throughout the centuries had ever been tempted with the allure of Power, the exercise of Power and Authority was never the source of the deep wellsprings of faith and prayer. It was, time and again, the mystics, tucked away in hidden corners of Christianity, to whom God's Shekinah, or his holy angels, appeared.
Renewal from below
Christianity has almost always received its renewals from below. It has been revitalized, refreshed, not from the seats of power, but from the almost underground sources of evangelical and mystical authenticity. There have been some shining exceptions. Just as Jefferson was an aristocrat who sought ever to lift the lowly, Christianity has been blessed by its Gregory the Greats, its Charlemagnes. Francis of Assisi turned his back on privilege and wealth to become a servant of the lowly, an example to all Christendom. Edward the Confessor, though a king, lived his life more like a monk and a mystic, giving himself to prayer and self-denial, living a life of love for the Lord. And even still, apparently, he managed not to neglect administration, with all its demands for heavy involvement and responsible oversight.
In the new world, the same pervasive grassroots principle was at work. To the degree that openness existed to what the "Spirit saith unto the churches," to that degree could revitalization and refreshing blossom. The benefits of 'puritan' anti-authoritarianism outweighed the dangers. Separatist churches re-established the principles of localism and gave voice to the idea that, if God is Emanuel, ever-present, then decentralization was no less important that hierarchy. The apparent "rebellion" of local assemblies might not be rebellion at all, if its non-conformity was in fact a stand taken in obedience to the Spirit.
Dangers of Authority
Time and again, fearing anarchy and loss of control, those in power sought to restrain the individualistic or independent impulses of the common believers --the promiscuous multitude of lower class rabble, with their religion of "enthusiasm" and "hysteria." Predictably, in every generation it seemed, the tendency of the power elites was to consolidate control. Just as in Europe where Popes and Kings distrusted the common folk, impeded the spread of literacy, feared what Bible-reading would mean as a spur toward democracy, so also in the New World, those in power had a tendency to fear and fight the increasing mood toward independence and individuality. Robert N. Bellah commented on the intimate relation between high literacy (a low-church obsession) and the ferment of revolt, or anti-authoritarianism.
Yet, the Boston Church leadership established their brand of Puritanism as an official Denomination, supported by state authority. They made war, so to speak, with the Separatists and Brownists in southern Massachusetts. Demanding total conformity, they persecuted Baptists and Quakers, quashed efforts toward freedom of conscience.
In Virginia, the Anglican church, also supported by state authority and public funding, required Church attendance each Sunday. Just as in Old England, when one church had the power, it found itself all to often blinded by might. Power corrupts, and political power, when aligned with church power, wound up (almost always) bad news for the people as a whole. Spain eliminated the non-conforming minorities (Moors and Jews) who had done so much to promote the medieval flourishing of southern Spain, but the Christian triumph in the end cost them for more than it was worth. The "winners" (Catholic Powers of church and state) wound up, over the long run, losers.
A heart religion - more than the head
The elites had their authority, and objected to their social inferiors holding "scripture" in their faces, declaring their own human dignity before God. "These ignorant rebels know nothing of God," the elites and ecclesiastics said. Yet turning within, who is to say that the populist movements did not meet God just as surely as the lordly clergy, with their obsession with control, their pride and pontificating.
"There you will find what Every man needs, Wild religion Without any creeds." (Louise Driscoll) Don't judge us for our lack of learning, the evangelicals would say. God belongs just as much to us as he does to you privileged and educated ones. And for all the smug grumbling of society's cream of the crop, God DID meet the humble, heard their sighs and cries, and truly blessed their lowly religion of the heart.
Democratization of the Gospel
With every great awakening, with every outbreak of brushfire revival that swept the land, religion found itself bursting out of the boxes of control, and warming the hearts of the common folk, the ordinary, the backwoods and indentured, the hardscrabble frontiersmen and lowly Americans. For all the learning and scholarship preserved by ancient denominations, what the great masses needed and craved, whatever their origin or complexion or status of bond or free, was an immediate manifestation from God.
If religion were a thing that money could buy, the rich would live, and the poor would die. This new Christianity, less structured and more evangelical, lacked the venerable theological scholarship of old Europe, but it more than made up for it in the freshness of its Christian witness, its contributions in terms of an existential authenticity, a vital spontaneity and immediacy of the Holy Spirit.
Karl Menninger says that religion has been the world's psychiatrist throughout the centuries. This fact was never more true than when religious expression seemed to spring, almost of its own accord, in grassroots manner, from American soil. Old divisions relaxed, and the gospel reappeared in a primitive simplicity and subjectivity, albeit with an all-American, freshness and life.
Color and class were no barrier
"For whatever reasons, Evangelicals acted contrary to traditional modes of public intercourse between the two races, and broke down the social distance between blacks and whites, just as they had among white converts." (Donald Matthews, page 67) Black people and white people, bond and free, found themselves swept away in recurring outbursts of soul-transforming enthusiasm. The social elites, sometimes hostile, sometimes favorable, in the end were powerless to resist this religion "from below."
W.E.B. Dubois notes the powerful influence that slave Christianity had upon the lower orders of white churches in the Old South. For all the fear that the aristocracy had of excess fraternization between "white trash" and the blacks, they were ineffectual in eliminating the constant spiritual encouragement that each community derived from the other. Music and prayer, modes of expression and preaching idiom, all were currency that flowed between races, across "denominational lines" and contributed, almost continuously, to the reinvigoration of American Christianity as a whole. Dubois says that after a while, white Christianity, the lower democratic denominations, wound up a "plain copy" of the black modes of gospel expression. For more on this.
The crusty guardians of old theology were often aghast at the unseemly displays these rude gospel outbreaks gave vent to. Blame it on frontier ignorance, blame it on their emotionalism, or African influences, the vibrant evangelicalism recurred, time and again, despite its lowly populist "image." Perhaps there was something in this revival Christianity that met the needs of the hard-pressed folk at the bottom of society. Donald Mathews tells how "Each person shed the old life in a cleansing paroxysm of grief, shame, and relief, which cast him into a new life of orderly submission to Christ."
The settled classes, the leadership "elites" of society feared the exuberant, near-revolutionary dangers of the revivalism sweeping the lower orders. It was evangelical exuberance and the formalists in the East frowned disapprovingly on the movement in general, which they deemed to include "enthusiasts, madmen, dangerous levelers, crazy reactionaries." (Henry F. May)
Subjectivism and joy
Typical expression in subsequent Christian life, after conversion, exhibited "a joyful exuberance that gave new meaning to the concept of discipline. Believers' tears -- which were so important to Evangelical preachers as a sign of God's presence -- were seen as expressions not merely of contrition and grief -- but also as expressions of joy in the discovery of meaning, security, love and hope." [Mathews page 46]
At the heart of this move of the Spirit, as they called it, was the feeling of unburdening. Along with the joyful release, believers testified to a deep cleansing from sin, an emptying of the sickness and madness of inner iniquities.
This is no doubt what Karl Menninger meant when he said that religion has been the world's psychiatrist throughout the centuries. Psychiatrists called it catharsis, the early Christians called it kenosis (at least the gnostics did), and the evangelicalism of black gospel and poor white camp meetings called it 'getting saved' or 'coming to Jesus.' You have to humble yourself before God, be honest with yourself, and then 'let go and let God.'
Modern psychiatry comes closest to making sense of it. Without God, it would appear the inevitable destiny for those at the bottom must be some form of violent revolution. But the hope offered by a movement such as pietistic revivalism, or frontier evangelicalism, represents an alternative. Elie Halevy praised the Wesleyan revivals in Britain for averting violent revolution that might otherwise have struck that nation.
In America, no doubt similar things could be said for our own evangelicalism. The British radical E.P. Thompson felt the Methodist revivalism innoculated the lower classes, offered them a narcotic enabling them to avoid responsibility. Calling it "sanctified emotional onanism," Thompson said the religious experience was thus a "ritualised form of psychic masturbation." Energies and emotions which were dangerous to the social order, or which were merely unproductive…were released in the harmless form of sporadic love-feasts, watch-nights, band-meetings or revivalist campaigns.' (See African Christianity by Paul Gifford)
Offended elites
Just as in the days of Popes and Kings, just as when the Boston authorities sought to impose control, the social elites of growing America lashed out, and stigmatized, evangelical religion. The old line defenders tried to use fear and scandal as tools to prevent the spread of the new infection. There was something "obscene" about this low-class, ecstatic Christianity. There was something African, or tribal, about the exuberance and song and dance. Learned men benignly explained that blacks were just "Religious Beings." In the writings of Southern religious leaders there was an oft repeated refrain regarding the slaves' religiosity.
"They are a people of religious dispositions, " wrote the Rev. Andrew Flinn Dickson, "beyond any other race in the whole world." The Negro character, he felt, had an "undertone of plaintiveness" which found "vent in devotion." A professor of moral and intellectual philosophy at Randolph-Macon College wrote, "The religious sentiment is strong in the African. Both his mind and his heart respond readily to the fear of God, the love of virtue, and the hope of heaven." [p 31]
God resists the proud, but giveth grace to the lowly
Rev. Holland M'Tyeire, founder of Vanderbilt in Tennessee, associated with black folk "that predominance of passion always pertaining to inferior races." [M'Tyeire. Duties of Christian Masters, pp 97-98] Perhaps so, but whites of the lower orders were either copying the blacks, or discovering "passion" on their own. Long before the date commonly given as the inception of the Pentecostal Movement, evangelical Christianity regardless of race, often outside the walls of any denomination, spontaneously manifested much of the "passion" and immediacy and subjective - relational dimension that in the 20th century were called Spirit-filled, holy roller, or old time ("bible-thumping") gospel.
The description of M'Tyeire is but one example out of many affirming much the same thing. God hath chosen the weak things to confound the wise. He hath regarded them of low estate, and the proud He hasth sent empty away.WEB DuBois had called blacks "religious animals" - but he did not necessarily mean it in a negative sense at all. I have said many times, that whether we keep it in mind or not, the simple truth of human nature is, we ALL have a tribal subconscious.
We all have a tribal subconscious
- The predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature. (Edward O. Wilson, On human nature)
- All the civilizations of mankind that have existed have been rooted in religion and a quest for God. (Ivar Lissner. Man, God and Magic)
- There is not a civilization known to us that did not have faith in God or Gods. (Herbert Benson, MD. quoted by Matthew Alper)
- Religious belief is one of the universals of human behavior, taking recognizable form in every society from hunter gatherer bands to socialist republics. Its rudiments go back, at least, to the bone altars and funerary rites of Neanderthal man. (Edward O. Wilson. quoted by Matthew Alper)
- Destroy your primitivity, and you will probably get along well in the world -- but Eternity will reject you. Follow up your primitivity, and you will be shipwrecked in temporality, but accepted by Eternity. (Kierkegaard in his diary)
- The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions. (Wittgenstein. 1948)
Prophetic Biblicalism
America's unique contribution to the world: Undergirding the ethical mysticism of Martin Luther King was his bedrock faith in the Christian system of "absolute moral values" and the affirmation that "God has placed within the structure of this universe certain moral principles that are fixed and immutable." Something about the gospel simplicity and passion one finds in King's worldview articulated for his generation the core principles at the heart of all that is best in American history, from the idealism of the Pilgrims, to the angst and resolve of Lincoln, to the resilent patriotism of the Civil Rights Movement.
Dr. King declared, "Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Saviour."
For all his learning and intellect, Dr. King never lost the soaring biblical eloquence of his religious heritage. Alice Walker says "he had his tongue wrapped around the roots of Southern black religious consciousness."
As Martin Luther King put it: "Calvary is a telescope through which we took into the long vista of eternity, and see the love of God breaking forth into time."
The grotesque consequences of rejecting God
As the twentieth century has witnessed the rise in Europe of evil empires whose basis was nothing less than a rejection of the principles of religion, history has somewhat less justification for the intensity of its hostility to the "superstition" and "medievalism" of the past -- religious reins which might have exercised a moderating check against the rampant totalitarianism run amok (of tyrants like Hitler and Stalin), and against the ensuing atrocities of these godless ideologies the modern world has seen arise in supposedly enlightened, (so-called) advanced white nations.
Dostoyevsky could have been prophetic when he said, much earlier, "Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has only been grotesque."
Havelock Ellis wrote:
When we have put aside those people who are congenitally non-religious and eternally excommunicate from the Mystery of the World, I find that Religion is natural to Man. People without religion are always dangerous. For none can know, and least of all themselves, what volcanic eruptions are being subconsciously prepared in their hearts, nor what terrible superstitions they may some day ferociously champion. It has been too often seen.
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America's love affair with God: the gospel biblical roots of America's social idealsBob Shepherd (facebook)
