David Williams's Blog, page 30
May 24, 2023
Enculturation and the Death of the Church
My denomination is dying. Absent a miracle of Biblical proportions, the Presbyterian Church USA will cease to exist in my lifetime. It is, quite literally, the poster child for denominational collapse in America.
A recent article from Ryan Burge, a scholar of religion at Eastern Illinois University, took advantage of our very Presbyterian tendency to chronicle everything we do. There, using our own data, in stark detail from an objective observer, evidence of our near-inevitable demise. The article sounded an alarm, but it ain't like we haven't been hearing that klaxon for years. This was not news to any Presbyterian. We know it's coming.
It's a bit like those home videos of the Japanese tsunami of 2011, the best chronicled disaster of our media era. As the camcorders rolled in the hands of thousands, you can hear the tsunami warnings beginning well before the wave rolled in. Many moved to high ground, but not with urgency. They'd heard these warnings before, and the leisurely pace of their ascent is unsettlingly casual. Others thought they had more time. You can see them driving around in their tiny little cars, the chimes and vocal warnings echoing across seaside towns like church bells pealing before a coming storm. Those warnings continue as the water rises, and continue as first cars and then homes and then whole towns are swept away. There was no stopping the sea.
We're sloughing off members at a rate that puts that likely failure at some point within the next two decades. We don't have young folk, and in the absence of that replenishment, we're aging out with the Baby Boom. The PCUSA will die as the Baby Boom dies.
We've known this so long that we're bored with it, that it's old news, and we'd rather talk about anything else. I get that. But that doesn't make it less true.
There's a peculiarity to our organizational death, one that I find myself mulling over a good deal. Why have we lost our young? Why does only a white-haired remnant remain? I mean, the PCUSA has consistently chosen the more progressive path over the more conservative path, the nominally "young" path over the old.
We're pro women, and pro choice. We're consistently interfaith, and respectful of all. After some argument, and the departure of many who weren't, we're finally cool with Queer folk. We're into naming our historical complicity in past wrongs. We're full of care and concern for our dangerously warming planet. We're explicitly anti racist, and in every way present ourselves as opposed to the things that we believe are turning young people away from Christian faith in America.
And for all of that, we're leading the charge into denominational oblivion. No manifestation of American Christianity has done a better job of losing its children.
That decline is a confluence of many factors. I'm not going to touch on them all, but highlight three.
First, we don't really emphasize evangelism, because it's a little...well...it feels judgey to a liberal heart. It doesn't matter, we say, if you share our faith. You can be whatever you want. It's OK if you are Jewish, or Muslim, or Bahai. You can be agnostic, or atheist, or nothing at all. It's all fine. God's truth is everywhere, and God loves everyone, no matter who we are. There is no import to staying or leaving. We don't push to bring folks in, not in any direct way. It is, by clear implication, not important whether you are part of us or not. And so people aren't. Rocket science that ain't.
Second, biology is a factor. I know, I know, even using the word "biological" seems politically coded these days, but it remains a reality whether we like it or not. Like most progressives, the PCUSA doesn't have a whole bunch of babies. With smaller families, there were fewer children to come up in the faith. It's why the Amish grow, despite proselytizing even less vigorously than Presbyterians. There's not much we can do about that now that we're mostly postmenopausal, but that was a thing.
Finally, most significantly, we've failed at what I call "enculturation."
The evangelical church is notorious for coopting the presenting forms and surface patterns of culture. Go to a sprawling evangamegachurch, and the initial contact is carefully staged to be comfortable. To seem familiar. To put the new attendee at ease. The music is poppy and easy to sing. The facility gives off a big stadium vibe. There's likely a coffee shop. It's casual. That's a trick, the Oldline complains. A bait and switch, carefully designed to get folks comfortable before all of a sudden it's All Jesus, All The Time.
Because once you're in, you have a new way of understanding existence, a new set of norms and collective expectations that are radically distinct.
What evangelicals do, and the Presbyterian church no longer does, is create a discrete defining culture. Evangelical Christian culture has its own language and ethos, which is necessary for the formation of communal identity. That ethos gives cohesion through shared norms, and serves an integrating function for the individuals within it. Culture must be learned by new adult members, and becomes a central part of the identity of those who grow up within it.
This makes adding to the group a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, if your group is too exclusive, and your collective culture cannot be translated for other audiences, you quickly become a closed circle. You recoil at including those who don't express themselves into the world in exactly the way mandated by your group norms, and the walls go up. Unless you're pumping out offspring like the Amish, growth is impossible.
On the other, if inclusion is prioritized over enculturation, a group will simply dissolve into the broader culture. In that collectives are, as Old Uncle Paul put it, organic entities. Living things grow by taking other things into themselves, while at the same time maintaining the boundaries that define their bodies. Death comes when that breaks down and reverses. When an organism dies, the boundaries and processes that define the body fail, and it dissolves into the environment it formerly inhabited.
When the language and expectation of a group is borrowed from elsewhere, that group ceases to exist.
Within the Presbyterian world, we're more and more defined by externalities, so focused on deconstruction and inclusion that it becomes harder to parse the boundaries between ourselves and generic secular progressivism.
Which...given that sustaining a unifying narrative isn't one of the spiritual gifts of progressive Christianity...is kinda sorta part of the problem.
May 23, 2023
Church, Culture, and Aging
The Adult Education class at my little church has been indulging me in a four week conversation about faith and aging in America. I'm cobbling together a manuscript about the role of the church as our society ages, and there's nothing like getting the stories and insights of other Jesus folk to help inform and shape my thinking. As we've talked about the struggles and marginalization of the oldest of the old in our culture, something keeps gnawing at my soul.
There's a great deal of talk in the church about the young. I mean, I love young folks and all, and young families are a blessing to the church. We've got to be relevant, to speak to the zeitgeist of the twenty and thirty somethings.
"Young people are our future," we cry. "We need young people."
This is true. Without the engagement of "The Youth," the church will not survive. It is unquestionably in our organizational self-interest to be as youth-friendly as possible.
But then the contrarian in me pipes up. It's consumer culture that divvys up humankind into marketing demographics.
Is organizational self-interest the purpose of Christian faith? We want to "grow the church," but if that means parroting the values of culture, is that what we're actually doing?
As America grays, and more and more human beings will find themselves sidelined by the endless rush of our culture, our seniors are increasingly pushed out to the margins. They are conceptualized as either irrelevant or an obstacle to our cultural pursuit of whatever shiny object has most recently been dangled in front of us.
At some level, I wonder if the focus on The Youth represents a tacit acceptance of America's marginalization of The Old. The Old are not productive, are not driving profit margins in this fiscal quarter. They are not interested in the latest iPhone. Unless they are unusually well off, they have nothing the culture wants.
A church that is conformed to culture will share that understanding.
For all of our talk about being a community that reaches out to the last and the least and the lost, there seems to be a bit of a blind spot when it comes to those who have nothing to offer us. They can't offer a long future of participation. They can't offer financial support, because the majority of older folk in our culture don't have enough resources for their own care, let alone our latest Annual Campaign. Their preferences are conceptualized as an obstacle to our future. Their old hymns and familiar liturgies don't mesh with our vision of a TikTok ministry. We don't sing their songs, or listen to their stories. They aren't repositories of wisdom, but inconveniences, souls whose lives and faith have value to the institution.
"You have nothing more of value to offer to the church as a person," we seem to be saying to the homebound elderly, before fishing around in our bag. "But here's a brochure about Gifts and Bequests."
This is particularly true of my denomination, which is just the faintest bit ironic.
May 18, 2023
Fires
Again, today, the skies over the Washington metropolitan area are ashen with smoke.
A veil of haze, cast from horizon to horizon, through which the sun glows pale and muted. It made for a wan sunrise as I walked the dog this morning, the sky flattened and featureless.
It's not a local event. The wildfires that are producing this smoke are from Canada. Not nearby Canada, either. From Alberta, Canada.
Americans are kind of oblivious to our neighbors in the Great White North, so saying it's "from Alberta" means little. Al-whatt-a? Alberta isn't Montreal. It's not East Coast-ish. Meaning, hundreds of miles north of Montana and Washington state. Two thousand three hundred miles from the mid Atlantic.
These are not small fires.
May 17, 2023
Movie Night
"No, I don't think so."
It was a Sunday evening, and word had come from the home aid agency that the caregiver lined up for that evening wasn't going to make it. It happens on and off, and it's just par for the course. The folks who work to make my parents's lives more manageable have lives of their own. Their kids get sick. They get sick. They have unexpected emergencies. One could complain and kvetch about it, but that'd be shallow and oblivious to privilege. They're good about notifying me, and as I'm not the sort of princess who thinks the world exists to serve them, I just gird up my loins like a man and do what needs to be done.
So I combobulated myself, then hopped on over to my folks to insure their evening went smoothly. It's simple, really. Just prepping a light dinner, making sure Dad has taken his meds, and fetching things until he's ready to shut down for the night.
We were watching 60 Minutes and eating cheese toast, because it's what my folks always d on Sunday evenings. We'd gotten to the final segment, a fawning puff piece about Nicolas Cage, likely a publicist-driven tie-in for his latest terrible movie about Dracula. Not quite "hard hitting journalism," but hey. It was the final segment. He came across as...eccentric. Which is not a surprise, because of course he is. You expect Nicolas Cage to be driving a gaudy Lamborghini, wearing way too much makeup, and getting intense about things.
During the piece, some of his best films were featured. Moonstruck, of course. Leaving Las Vegas. The dark, intense Pig. And Raising Arizona.
As it turned out, my parents had never seen Raising Arizona. Somehow, they just missed it back in the day, and life moved on. It's one of the Cohen Brother's most delightfully silly films. Wonderful, absurd, intelligently-written slapstick, the kind of movie that transcends its era. As H.I. McDunnough, the endearing petty criminal who serves as the protagonist, Cage is just utterly wonderful.
It's a favorite, and I own it on DVD, so I suggested watching it. "Sure," Dad said, so the next evening I was over at my parents place, we all watched it together over dinner.
Mom found it delightful, because she loves the Cohen Brothers. Dad, who insisted it was "OK," nonetheless spent the portions of the film when he wasn't nodding off with an astonished smile on his face. It was a thoroughly pleasant evening.
There's an assumption about caregiving for the aging. It's a slog. It's a burden. It's Just So Hard.
But I love my parents, and I enjoy their company. I like hearing them laugh, or watching them flirt, which they still do on frequent occasion. I like playing ping pong with Mom, and hearing the old familiar stories from Dad. It's not mining salt in Siberia.
Spending time with them is a pleasure. Doing things for them is a pleasure.
May 15, 2023
Age and Privilege
"You've got to do what you can to avoid caregiver fatigue," my dear wife has told me, on repeated occasion. It's an admirable sentiment, a very self-care thing to say and think, and for many care providers, it's a necessary corrective. When you're trying to support a loved one who's aging...or suffering from a chronic condition...it's easy to get so caught up in the deep forest of their care that you exhaust yourself.
Caregivers become overwhelmed, and their health starts to suffer, and things start to fray. It's a real thing. I get that.
Only, well, I ain't in that category. Not at all. I'm busy about my folks care, sure. It takes both mental bandwidth and time. But I'm not trying to juggle that and care for children, plus a full time job, plus a million other things. I'm the part time pastor of a lovely little congregation, meaning about twenty hours a week. And sure, I'm mostly responsible for the cooking and cleaning, the laundry and the bills and the yardwork and the homemaking. But I don't mind that, and it ain't like it's 1902 and I'm doing laundry by hand. Machines really do help on that front.
It has meant less writing, sure. But that is what it is. Because as much as I love to write, and as much as I've spend the last decade trying to make a go of it as a writer, writing hasn't exactly proven to be a lucrative side-gig. I figure it's brought in about five thousand a year, if you average it out. With most of my manuscripts not finding a home, this is more of a hobby than a profession, if I am painfully honest with myself. It is what happens when life permits. I didn't write much when the kids were little, either.
But I can't claim any of that is "caregiver fatigue." Because, again, being utterly frank, I am wildly privileged as a caregiver. My parents have never lived large, but they've saved large. They have Dad's retirement income. They have significant investments. They own their home, free and clear. They have great health insurance. They also have long term care insurance, which may be expensive and a pain to manage, but is now covering about 80% of the cost for home aide support. Eight hours a day, six days a week.
That places them...and me...in an enviable position. There's no worry about money for care. We have a team of doctors and PT folks and visiting nurses, home aides and house cleaners and lawn companies, all keeping them comfortable and cared for in the home that they love.
So sure, I spend as much time as a caregiver as I do as a pastor. I'm taking Dad to appointments, and sorting pills, and managing his caregivers. I'm paying attention to finances, and helping get taxes done, and managing the snares and tripwires our app-based culture throws in front of the elderly.
But I am immensely privileged, and it makes the experience of caring for my parents a relative cakewalk. It's hard, sure. But it is nowhere close to as draining as it can be for those who are less prepared, or have..for reasons of generational poverty, personal misfortune, or not paying attention...found themselves facing the closing chapter of their life without the resources that make it easier.
That's most people.
May 12, 2023
Debate
The answer: the moderator does not matter. What matters is the audience.
Think back to the first debate between Trump and Clinton. Hillary, who was and always will be The Smartest Girl In the Room, was expecting it to be a debate. Formal, fusty, a delivering of talking points and canned zingers. She's good at that.
But Trump brought the hype, filled the crowd with his loud. He's not interested in primetime. He's going for daytime. Jerry Springer. Maury Povich.
Donald John Trump couldn't care less if you've got a good point. He knows that doesn't matter. What he wanted...and what he got...was audience response. He made sure that the crowd in attendance at that first debate with Hillary was packed with his partisans, who howled and laughed and applauded on cue. It was unprecedented, and Hillary was blindsided. To folks watching at home, it didn't matter what he said. It mattered how it sounded. It sounded like he was winning.
The CNN "town hall" took place in front of a similar audience, one that Trump packed with MAGA Republicans. Having the crowd behind him as he pitched out his points meant that efforts to stop him were meaningless. Better yet, for him, it meant that the moderator could become the "heel," her efforts at correction shouted down as Trump confidently lied about the last election and parroted Russian propaganda.
It was a dominance display, and in that, it served his purposes.
May 10, 2023
Commercialized Representation
One of the most peculiar things about caring for my parents is how much their world revolves around television. Every day, for much of the day, the tee vee is blaring in the background. It's a comforting presence for them, as familiar stories and shows fill their days.
But there are commercials upon commercials, none of which are carefully selected for me by the algorithms that spy on my every online choice. It is, as I've noted before, like visiting a foreign land. And because it's different and new, I notice things about it, as one does when one is in an unfamiliar place.
What strikes me about advertising on broadcast television is race. As we must see race now, I do. I pay attention to where and how race is presented.
If I were to watch broadcast advertising, and I knew nothing at all about America and its demographic makeup, I would assume that the United States was a majority black country. Every ad, almost without exception, features black faces front and center. It's consistent across types of product and service. Without exception, those representations are positive. Here are people of color doing the things that people do, so buy our product or use our service.
In that, it's obviously an offshoot of the progressive movement for "representation." The idea behind this is that minority populations are underrepresented in a racist culture, and that in order to normalize marginalized perspectives and have them heard and seen, they must be intentionally centered. This has meant, over the last decade, increasingly prioritizing black representation in art, literature, and film. This is a basic moral imperative of contemporary progressive media.
But seeing it in marketing is...peculiar. Meaning, there's nothing culturally black about selling fast food, or pitching cars, or pitching pharmaceuticals. This isn't about justice, or equity, or anything other than hawking product. The faces and bodies are black, but the ethos is generic American consumerism, smiling happy lies about the joys that await if only we buy, buy, buy.
So why is this? It may be that it's virtue marketing, a way of associating a product with progressive values. Progressives are generally a higher wealth demographic, and so there's little downside to putting blackness front and center. Similarly, the N of actual vociferous "nonsystemic" racists is smaller than progressivism assumes, meaning you're not going to alienate any meaningful marketing segment by centering black faces. That, and the most vehemently and overtly racist whites tend to be low-net-worth, so they're of little interest to marketers. There's an upside, but little downside.
Or it might have to do with who watches what is now called "linear television," meaning cable and broadcast. That demographic is older, because of course it is, but it also skews slightly blacker. Breaking down the broadcast audience, sixty percent are white, twenty percent Latino, and just over twenty percent black. Meaning, black folk are nearly twice the proportion of the broadcast audience relative to their proportion of the overall population.
Or it may be that marketing professionals are closely adjacent to the "creative classes," and come out of the same schools and are steeped in the same ersatz "leftist" ethos, even as they serve the purposes of capitalism.
Or it may be that the larger corporate powers have no issue with a bourgeois, academic progressivism that focuses endlessly on race and gender. They're happy to magnify it, to celebrate it, to defend it, because it poses no threat to corporate power.
Or perhaps it's something else.
Such a peculiar phenomenon.
Commericalized Representation
One of the most peculiar things about caring for my parents is how much their world revolves around television. Every day, for much of the day, the tee vee is blaring in the background. It's a comforting presence for them, as familiar stories and shows fill their days.
But there are commercials upon commercials, none of which are carefully selected for me by the algorithms that spy on my every online choice. It is, as I've noted before, like visiting a foreign land. And because it's different and new, I notice things about it, as one does when one is in an unfamiliar place.
What strikes me about advertising on broadcast television is race. As we must see race now, I do. I pay attention to where and how race is presented.
If I were to watch broadcast advertising, and I knew nothing at all about America and its demographic makeup, I would assume that the United States was a majority black country. Every ad, almost without exception, features black faces front and center. It's consistent across types of product and service. Without exception, those representations are positive. Here are people of color doing the things that people do, so buy our product or use our service.
In that, it's obviously an offshoot of the progressive movement for "representation." The idea behind this is that minority populations are underrepresented in a racist culture, and that in order to normalize marginalized perspectives and have them heard and seen, they must be intentionally centered. This has meant, over the last decade, increasingly prioritizing black representation in art, literature, and film. This is a basic moral imperative of contemporary progressive media.
But seeing it in marketing is...peculiar. Meaning, there's nothing culturally black about selling fast food, or pitching cars, or pitching pharmaceuticals. This isn't about justice, or equity, or anything other than hawking product. The faces and bodies are black, but the ethos is generic American consumerism, smiling happy lies about the joys that await if only we buy, buy, buy.
So why is this? It may be that it's virtue marketing, a way of associating a product with progressive values. Progressives are generally a higher wealth demographic, and so there's little downside to putting blackness front and center. Similarly, the N of actual vociferous "nonsystemic" racists is smaller than progressivism assumes, meaning you're not going to alienate any meaningful marketing segment by centering black faces. That, and the most vehemently and overtly racist whites tend to be low-net-worth, so they're of little interest to marketers. There's an upside, but little downside.
Or it might have to do with who watches what is now called "linear television," meaning cable and broadcast. That demographic is older, because of course it is, but it also skews slightly blacker. Breaking down the broadcast audience, sixty percent are white, twenty percent Latino, and just over twenty percent black. Meaning, black folk are nearly twice the proportion of the broadcast audience relative to their proportion of the overall population.
Or it may be that marketing professionals are closely adjacent to the "creative classes," and come out of the same schools and are steeped in the same ersatz "leftist" ethos, even as they serve the purposes of capitalism.
Or it may be that the larger corporate powers have no issue with a bourgeois, academic progressivism that focuses endlessly on race and gender. They're happy to magnify it, to celebrate it, to defend it, because it poses no threat to corporate power.
Or perhaps it's something else.
Such a peculiar phenomenon.
Sports Book
I’ve been watching a whole bunch more broadcast television lately, as I putter about my parents house sorting medications, preparing food, and generally trying to make myself useful.
With the exception of the Super Bowl, or the rare occasions when power is out and we’ve got to depend on our rooftop aerial, I don’t see commercial television. It’s like a visit to a different country, a visit to a strange land with peculiar customs. I would, for instance, never willingly and of my own accord watch Judge Judy.
And yet, there I am. What I find most fascinating, and most telling, is not the shows themselves. It’s the advertisements. Most of the products and services pitched to me are creepily targeted, as my information is sold by Facebook and Twitter and Google. But daytime television is pitching to a different audience, and the ads are…different. It’s an endless stream of ads for big pharma and legal firms, which it’s been for years. That’s a familiar dystopia. But there's a new game in town, the newest bit of evidence of the decadence in our society. Every commercial break, mingled among the ambulance chasers and drugs, there are now ads for gambling. They’re constant. They sponsor entire programs. It is, or so it seems, the new norm in the culture around us, after a 2018 Supreme Court ruling…Murphy v. NCAA…opened the door to sportsbook betting in the United States. Seems the state of New Jersey wanted a piece of the action, and in a six to three ruling, the Supremes said, hey, sure. Youse guys wanna bitea dat tomato pie? Takea bitea that pie. All of a sudden, it’s the norm, the expectation. Look! Here it is, and it’s totally normal. Gambling is fun, totally acceptable, and so very easy! Look how quickly they win in those ads!
So now you can sportsbook from your phone, encouraged by an endless stream of ads that afirrm it's all fun! So much fun! Hey Benny, what’s the over-under on the increase in calls to gambling crisis hotlines?
Well, that depends on the state. In the state of Virginia, calls increased by 387%.
I know folks, in personal life, and in both of the congregations I've served, whose lives have been upended by gambling. And yet here we are, and it's everywhere, just the most normal thing in the world.
Because of course it is. It's a source of parasitic revenue on a culture, as the resources of the poor are siphoned away to feed state power that that is too cowardly to require citizens to pay for the services we need. It's a morally bankrupt and predatory system, one that plays on all the worst impulses of our society.
May 8, 2023
Widows and Orphans
Jesus, after all, didn't seem much for the traditional niceties of familial obligation. Nor did he encourage his followers to spend any of their time tending dutifully to their aging parents. "Let the dead bury their dead," he said. When family came a lookin' for him, Jesus ignored them. "Who are my mother and brothers," he said, turning to those gathered. "You are."
Which is a fine thing for a crowd to hear, but Mary, being a Jewish mother, couldn't have been pleased. "What am I, chopped liver?" "Yes, mom. Chopped liver."
The challenge in the Gospels and Epistles, as we consider our care for our still-living-ancestors, is that the radical message of Jesus pushes us to extend our love to all. Not just our blood, our family, our tribe, but to the outcast and the stranger and the enemy.
It's a radical redefinition of neighborliness, one that assumes the care for kin is just a given. The emphasis is newness, is a putting away of the old and embracing something yet unseen.
Which, of course, it ain't, not any more. Being a caregiver is a burden. It's something that gets in the way of our careers, of our self-fulfillment, of the living of our Best Lives Now. The old are an inconvenience to be managed, rather than a duty to be fulfilled.
So where do we find a commitment to care for the aged in the teachings of Jesus?
That seems to rise from two places. First, from the Gospel commitment to the outcast and the marginalized. Our culture has no use for the old old. Age is hidden away, compartmentalized and separated from the endless rush and busyness of consumer culture. Caregiving does not contribute to our productivity. There's no significant return on investment. It does not serve our immediate self interest, and it's hard, and it's draining, and we just can't right now.
But Jesus, pesky pesky Jesus? He always challenges culture, in any era. Our culture's shallow self-obsession and churning, family-shattering careerist diaspora is no exception. When Jesus calls for us to care for those that have been forgotten and set out on the margins, that moral imperative extends to the forgotten, isolated elderly among us.
Second, from the broader demand to care for widows and orphans. It's a fundamental theme of Torah, one picked up by the Gospels and Epistles. Widows and orphans are members of society who find themselves disconnected from society by circumstance. The basic protections that come from participation in a culture are no longer theirs. They are not, for reasons of ability or cultural expectation, able to provide care for themselves. So into the sacred teachings of scripture is etched the demand to provide care for those persons. It's a basic metric of a just society, and a fundamental duty of the righteous.
Because what human beings have always known is that those circumstances could befall any of us. Sudden misfortune could happen to any person at a time of vulnerability, and only a nation of brutes and monsters would allow those who were part of it to suffer in such a way.
You might be thinking, hey, that's a stretch. But is it? I mean, sure, many older women are widows, but orphans? Oliver and Little Orphan Annie pop to mind, which isn't exactly the demographic of most residents in nursing homes.
Then again, pretty much everyone in their seventies and eighties is an orphan, technically speaking. Their parents? No longer alive. Their ability to care for themselves, increasingly reduced by physical and mental limitations.
So there you are. What awaits us, all of us, in the arc of our lives, is a time when we will find ourselves on the margins of consumer culture, no longer relevant, suddenly strangers in a strange land.
