Peter Rollins's Blog, page 27

Why Atheists Need the Church

 

“Only theologians can be true atheists”

Lacan

I’ve recently been preparing for an online seminar I’m teaching with John Caputo at the GCAS, and one of the thinkers I’ve been brushing up on is the 19th century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. While he never achieved philosophical sainthood and missed becoming a canonical figure in Western thought, his ideas have had a decisive impact on many key figures who came after him. Feuerbach marks an important development in the criticism of religion, and while he is most famous for his exploration of theology as anthropology, he can also be viewed as critical in the genesis of the idea that theology is connected with the development of atheism.

It’s this second aspect of his work that’s been intriguing me as I return to his books. It is often overshadowed by his theories of projection and human nature, but it might well be his most important and lasting contribution to the philosophy of religion, as well as offering some interesting insights into the subversive role of church.

Feuerbach was not only theologically literate, theology was his main tool in critiquing religion. Indeed he saw himself as a friend of the theologians, as one who was bringing them glad tidings by exposing their own deepest (humanistic) truth.

One of the keys to understanding the connection between theology and atheism requires that we first understand what Feuerbach meant by the term “religion.” Feuerbach didn’t make up his own definition, but instead embraced the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s view that religion was the expression of the experience of absolute dependence.

By viewing religion in this way a small rift is exposed between religious expression and belief in a God or the gods. If religion is concerned with responding to a sense of absolute dependence, then it is more fundamental than its symbolic expression. As a result, it is severed from some particular sets of beliefs. While the belief in God  might be the primary way that religion manifests itself in a Western context, the feeling of absolute dependence is able to express itself in other ways.

From this perspective religious critique is not limited to some critique of theism, but rather needs to develop an understanding of how the sense of absolute dependence arises (a subject Feuerbach approaches in The Essence of Religion). It is precisely this thinking that helped Marx articulate how the critique of heaven leads inexorably to the critique of earth and how the undermining of sacred sovereignty would ultimately provide the tools for undermining of secular sovereignty.

With this brief background we can begin to understand why some thinkers within continental philosophy think theology might be important in the development of atheism.

One of the justifications for studying philosophy is captured in the aphorism, “those who are least aware of theory are most enslaved by it.” In a similar way, one might say that those who are least aware of absolute dependence are most enslaved by it. From this perspective the theological enterprise has the most potential for freeing people of religion. For, if we have not seriously worked through the sense of absolute dependence then, even if we take up a position such as humanism, we will likely do so in a religious way.

If theology involves the systematic study of religion, and religion is the feeling of absolute dependence, then theology can be thought of as the discipline that reflects upon the nature and origin of this feeling. Other disciplines will either ignore this entirely, or look at it in some peripheral way. But theology proper will face it head on.

Without bringing this experience to the surface and reflecting upon its nature, the feeling will tend to manifest itself in unthinking ways. Whether it comes out in politics or culture, the foundational religious experience will continue to show itself in potentially destructive ways.

This does not, of course, mean that theologians tend to tread this path. Most of the work that takes place under the name “theology” is confessional in nature and exists to justify the claims of a particular denomination. But, from a Feuerbachian perspective, theological reflection that is not apologetic in nature can provide the tools for breaking free of religion presicely by exposing the various ways in which it continues to exist in a subterranean way amongst those who claim to eschew it.

The persistence of religion beyond a particular set of beliefs can be seen as one of the reasons why Lacan articulated the cry of atheism as “God is unconscious” rather than the more well-worn “God is dead.” To claim that God is unconscious is to claim that religion continues to function after the belief in God has been abandoned. Something that Nietzsche was well aware of. This is also why Lacan claimed that it takes a theologian to be an atheist.

Employing the insights and spirit of Lacan, one might want to slightly rework his formulation to claim that one really needs a church to be an atheist. For the (Radical) theologian is an individual who seeks to understand the workings of absolute dependance, but that understanding is neither sufficient, nor required in order to break free from it. What one rather needs is a set of practices that enable one to disrupt such a feeling of dependence. The radical church, as an expression of radical theology, is a place that lives out this disruption through its liturgical practice.

Everyone Has What I Lack: The Delusional Vision of Elliot Rodger and its Wider Message

In fundamental ways psychotherapeutic practice stands at odds with the wider society within which it’s embedded. Individuals are bombarded with the injunction to enjoy their life, while both sacred and secular sources openly provide formulas for achieving this goal (from embracing spiritual practices to finding the perfect partner, fame or wealth). Nowhere is this superego injunction to enjoy more obvious than in the way people conspire with it in Social Media. Here we witness how millions of people give in to the pressure of curating their lives in a way that creates the illusion of joy, depth and satisfaction. From a therapeutic perspective all of this can lead to destructive symptoms in those who internalize such a message, for the stronger the demand to enjoy the more they experience themselves falling short.

This injunction to enjoy feeds into the idea that there is an other out there who is experiencing the pleasure that we are being demanded to have. The greater the demand is felt, the more inadequate and impotent we feel.

Slavoj Žižek has written insightfully on how certain forms of religious violence can be read as a destructive symptom of this fantasy. For example, when a preacher screams passionately about all the rampant promiscuity out in the world it is often clear to everyone but the preacher himself that this tirade is motivated be jealousy. The point then is that not that the fundamentalist preacher believes too much in his own worldview, but rather too little.

For Žižek the true fundamentalist doesn’t look with anger at the society around her, but rather is likely to take a stance of superior and patronizing sympathy toward it. When a fundamentalist is willing to kill because of a hatred for Western decadence, for instance, this can hint at a repressed belief in, and desire for, that decadence.

Here the person’s real belief lies in the (fantasized) lifestyle of the other, a lifestyle that they feel barred from in some way. There is then hatred against both the other (for being able to have it) and oneself (for not). Pleasure thus arises from imagining how the others pleasure will be stripped from them in this life or the next.

This destructive logic can be seen clearly in the case of Elliot Rodger. Rodger provided us with a window into the feelings that fueled his murderous rampage by leaving behind multiple short videos and a 107-page document outlining his inner life. What becomes obvious in these vitriolic texts is the way that he was plagued by fantasies that everyone around him was partaking in an excessive pleasure that was out of his reach. His vision was one of a world engaged in some kind of unending adolescent party plucked straight from a teen movie. He fantasized that those around him had what he lacked, and his hatred burned against them.

To teach a medical student how to detect symptoms of an illness one shows her an extreme example. As she examines the advanced symptoms she will become better equipped to spot the less severe versions. In much the same way we can view Rodger as an extreme symptom of a wider cultural problem. One that rarely leads to murder, but often manifests itself in deep depression, hatred and loneliness.

Rodger provides us with a horrifyingly clear manifestation of the ways in which so many are tormented by a sense that everyone else is having a life full of enriching friendships, satisfying sexual encounters and meaningful activities. Such a belief, which we ourselves might perpetuate by crafting our own manicured online image of ourselves, can all too easily lead to destructive behaviour.

That is why we need sites where people can be honest about their struggles and discover that other people also are burdened by theirs. This does not imply that everyone is really unhappy, but rather, that happiness and unhappiness are both a part of life. While some of us are lucky to have suffered few externally generated traumas, all of us are faced with the trauma of life itself.

As Paul Tillich wrote in The Courage to Be, all us are touched in some way by anxiety (which, he writes, can manifest itself in the guise of guilt, meaninglessness, or a sense of our own impending death). Whether the scars this anxiety leaves are shallow or deep, none of us escape life unharmed.

And yet a happier, healthier life might be possible if we are able to compare our scars and realize that we are all, in different ways, walking through mountains and valleys.

The truth is that people are not as constantly happy, smart, and successful as their Social Media persona might imply. Life involves both joy and suffering (which are often mixed together in some way), and learning this might have medicinal benefits both individually and politically.

Association of Pastoral Therapists, TN

I’ll be giving a live online presentation for the AAPT (details below), which will be broadcast to various locations. For the AAPT website, click here

 

In the Church, But Not Of It

In fundamental ways psychotherapeutic practice stands at odds with the wider society within which it’s embedded. Individuals are bombarded with the injunction to enjoy their life, while both sacred and secular sources openly provide formulas for achieving this goal (from embracing spiritual practices to finding the perfect partner, fame or wealth). Nowhere is this superego injunction to enjoy more obvious than in the way people conspire with it in Social Media. Here we witness how millions give in to the pressure of curating their lives in a way that creates the illusion of joy, depth and satisfaction. All of which encourages further repression and the return of the repressed in often violent and destructive ways.

For those who seek out therapy within a faith community, this disparity is often pronounced in the way that personal pastoral care conflicts with the wider religious structure within which it is offered. While the former helps the individual gradually face their trauma, the latter all too often offers distractions from it, or easy answers to it.

In this session Peter will argue that we should attempt to close the gap between individual pastoral care and the wider constellation of practices advanced by the religious community offering it. He will outline some basic elements that make up the therapeutic “cure,” show how they relate to a radical reading of faith, and draw out how they can help us reconfigure the practice of faith communities in a way that directly undermines the disparity.

Facing What We Dare Not Speak: Communities of Exorcism

There’s an old Russian joke from the days when goods were scarce. It tells of a man who finally gets to the front of a line and says, “I guess you don’t have any beef?” To which the shopkeeper responds, “I’m sorry sir, I’m a fishmonger, I don’t have any fish. You want the butcher next door, he doesn’t have any beef!”

This little story exposes the difference between simple absence and a “present absence.” Something that we can understand a little better if we consider how everyone reading this article will likely have someone  they deeply miss, someone they would love to meet again and reconcile with in some way. That person may be alive or dead, living close or making a home far away, desirous of our contact or resistant to it. But regardless, their absence is present to us even when we are thinking of other things. That same person you might be thinking of is also absent from me, however there is a big difference. Their absence to me isn’t felt, it doesn’t impose itself upon me and mould my behavior.

Each of us are haunted by things we do not speak, indeed we are haunted by them because we cannot speak them. These are the absences that are present to us, regardless of how hard we try to ignore or avoid them.

There is nothing wrong with this, if people did not repress things society would be unable to function. As such there are any number of religious, political and cultural narratives that help us to cover over our anxiety, offer distractions and/or tell us that everything is fact fine.

The problem arises for us whenever our coping mechanisms start to show cracks, or when the symptoms of our repressions become destructive. This might be the Christian whose dogma no longer protects them from anxiety and doubt, the professional whose career begins to feel meaningless, or the millionaire whose money fails to offer the wealth it seems to represent. At these points we might push even deeper into our religion, career or money making activities to ward off the anxiety, but the pressure will only increase, and with it, unhealthy symptoms.

In contrast, we might get to the point where acknowledge that we must face our ghosts, that we ought open the doors we fought so hard to keep closed.

It’s at moments like these that we need places of disruption rather than distraction. Places of exorcism that call out to our demons, demand they speak their names, and, in doing so, weaken their hold.

My own work is dedicated to exploring the theory (pyrotheology) and practice (transformance art) of this exorcism. It arises from my, perhaps naïve, belief that this risky activity is also a life giving one. Such communities of exorcism do not offer an easy path. Indeed they represent a narrow way that none will want to walk. Yet there are some of us who feel that the alternative to walking it is even worse, that our current coping mechanisms are failing, and that the repressed is returning to us in destructive ways. These will be the ones who, often in desperation, will seek out such places, hard as they might be to find.

Gay people? North Korea, Hillsong and the Denial of Denial

 

North Korea never fails to offer up interesting and telling examples of how ideology functions. One such example can be found in their claim that homosexuality doesn’t actually exist there.

What this strange denial presents to us is the way that ideological systems do not simply operate with prohibitions, but also with prohibitions against speaking of the prohibitions. Regarding North Korea and homosexuality we can describe the situation as such,

Injunction: You can’t be gay

Super Injunction: You can’t talk about how you can’t be gay

When one is embedded firmly within the system itself this reality poses no real problem because everyone knows not to ask certain questions. But, when North Korean officials are interrogated by outsiders, they suddenly find themselves in a very awkward position. Avoidance can only happen for so long within the international community. Eventually have to answer the question, “can you be gay in North Korea?” In response to this there are two primary options,

- Yes

- No

The problem is that the first answer demonstrates that they are a repressive regime, while the second speaks directly against the conservative and totalitarian position of the State. Either way the official using “yes” or “no” would quickly be arrested and put in a concentration camp. Unfortunately for them the answer, “I don’t know” would fair no better as it would signal indecision and weakness on the part of the State. In light of this, the only live option for the official is to feign surprise and claim that the question is not relevant because no gay or lesbian people exist there.

This comic situation reflects the same logic used during the Stalinist purges when top officials would mysteriously disappear. While it was obvious to everyone that this had happened, no one was allowed to speak of it. But more importantly, they were not permitted to even speak about how they were not permitted to speak of it.

If someone were naïve enough to ask a party member what had happened to a particular person, the response would be to act shocked and insinuate that the question was nonsensical (more than this, the one asking would themselves be removed for going against the super injunction).

Something similar could be said to have taken place in the history of the American military. The common sense idea of how equality legislation came about there is broadly as follows,

- Gay and lesbian people were not allowed to enlist

- A “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was instated (1993)

- The prohibition was finally removed (2011)

However there was a position before these, namely the existence of an implicit “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. This means that, before people started asking questions about sexual orientation in the military, gay and lesbian individuals were effectively treated as if they didn’t exist. Some occasional questioning could easily be fended off with equivocations and blurred answers like “we’ve never had to deal with that”.

However, once the questions become more persistent and public the institution was faced with increasing anxiety. Like any organism, it attempted to rid itself of this anxiety and achieve homeostasis. It did this by first dodging the question and then openly admitting its discriminatory position. But, now that the ideological prejudice was out in the open, activists were able to push in and create new anxiety. This in turn led to an explicit “Don’t Ask, don’t tell” policy. A move that could only ever be a short-term solution, as its hypocritical nature was now on full display. Thus, eventually, the institution was forced to embrace equality under the law (though, in other times, it could have reverted back).

The point here was that the move from an implicit “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to an explicit one was only a short term solution, and one that signalled a strong, if not decisive, victory for equality. It was the D-Day that preceded VE Day, for it reflected the last dying attempt of the institution to retain its ideological inequality.

The point of outlining this is that we see something similar taking place within popular evangelical Churches like Hillsong (as evidenced in a recent interview by CNN with Carl Lentz). Here the New York Hillsong pastor struggled to maintain the idea that homosexuality was not an issue they needed to address. Like the officials in North Korea, Lentz was visibly struggling with how to answer the question of whether gay and lesbian people were welcome to participate fully in their church (taking leadership positions etc.). In response to the incredibly weak and non-journalistic questioning, what one got was a series of equivocations and answers like, “Jesus didn’t talk about that openly and so neither do we.”

The implicit position here is to try and pretend the issue doesn’t exist, thus allowing gay and lesbian individuals to quietly be involved while maintaining a homophobic theology (in psychoanalytic terms, hiding the transgression from the homophobic Big Other).

What needs to happen now is for groups like Hillsong to be pressured to reveal their implicit position. For as the questioning grows the collective anxiety of the church will also grow and they will be forced to either admit that they don’t allow openly gay and lesbian people full participation, or (less likely in the short term) open the doors to full access.

This is why people should support Jay Bakker’s strategy of asking Christian leaders where they stand. For years now Bakker has used the twitter platform to publically ask Christian leaders where they stand (using the hashtag AreYouGayAffirming). This anxiety inducing strategy, if supported by enough people, can cause a movement to respond in order to achieve homeostasis.

North Korea can continue to function the way it does because of its minimal involvement with the wider world. However groups like Hillsong can only trade in denials and equivocations for so long. With enough pressure they will be forced to show their hand, or change it.

Either way is progress.

All Saint’s, Beverly Hills, CA

I’ll be giving the sermon at All Saint’s Episcopal church at 11:30am

 

You can find the church here

All Saints, Beverly Hills, CA

I’ll be giving the sermon at All Saint’s Episcopal church at 11:30am

 

You can find the church here

New Atheism, Fundamentalism and the Eclipse of Belief

“I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway… Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it’s statistically too improbable.”

Richard Dawkins

For all their real and apparent differences, one of the things that unites religious fundamentalism and New Atheism is a distrust of belief. Both make claims to direct knowledge, and both show ambivalence to the idea of a passionate commitment to something that fails in the courthouse of Foundationalism (we should have a solid rational base for our claims) and Evidentialism (the stronger the evidence for our claims, the more justified we are in having them).

It is this point of agreement that can help us to both a) discern the relationship these positions have with each other, and b) articulate an alternative that places both into question.

To approach the first of these we need to draw out the way that fundamentalism is a child of the scientific revolution, albeit a rebellious and belligerent one. For while fundamentalism rejects the general consensus of biologists, they do affirm the idea that their religious claims need to be rooted in some kind of correspondence to what philosophers call the “in-itself,” i.e. the way things are outside of our interpretation and interference.

Fundamentalism does not simply embrace the scientific approach, it seeks to enlist its support by attempting to show that methodological atheism ultimately supports metaphysical theism. What this means is that methodological atheism (the idea that a scientist should always seek natural explanations for phenomena regardless of their metaphysical commitments) is viewed as an earthly path that leads to heavenly destination.

The religious apologist argues that some of the things we can’t currently understand in terms of natural cause and effect are inherently impossible to understand in these terms. While methodological atheism always involves an “ignorance of knowledge” (phenomena we hypothetically could know scientifically, but currently don’t), the Fundamentalist apologist attempts to expose a different field of reality justified by the scientific method that could be termed “knowledge of ignorance” (phenomena we know cannot be explained in purely scientific terms). This latter field is used as a means of justifying the idea of God as a scientific explanation. Such an approach can be seen most clearly in the Intelligent Design movement, which argues for Irreducible Complexity as a legitimate scientific theory. In this way, fundamentalist apologists attempt to show that their metaphysical claims correspond with the in-itself as revealed through the scientific method.

As an aside, it should be pointed out that the claim of Irreducible Complexity is very different from what we witness in physics with the Uncertainty Principle. For while the latter also points out a certain necessary ignorance that arises from knowledge (we cannot know the mass and velocity of a particle at the same time) this is mathematically grounded and requires no recourse to transcendent justification.

In contrast to serious philosophical and theological rejections of such an approach, New Atheism rests upon certain structural similarities to fundamentalism. For its advocates also show skepticism regarding religious and political beliefs that would lack rational justification; something evidenced in Richard Dawkins’ recent comments regarding fairy tales.

Both religious fundamentalists and New Atheists here agree that personal commitment based upon direct knowledge is the ideal, and that the legitimacy of beliefs is directly proportional to the proximity of their orbit to this Absolute Sun. As such New Atheism can be read as a type of dialectic offspring of fundamentalism: the dissident antithesis of its parent that actually shares the same underlying commitments.

It is against such a shared position that Paul Tillich positioned himself when he wrote of how unconditional commitment is inherently risky and lacking in some Ultimate Justification. In his article “Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” he outlined how humans cannot help but offer unconditional commitment to conditional and contingent reality. He argues that this commitment to a person or cause is not something that can be justified in some empirical way, but is a basic mode of being in the world.

He goes on to write that the problem does not lie in making unconditional commitments with regard to conditional things, but rather in thinking that what we commit to is Absolute Truth. Instead he makes the claim that we must give ourselves over to concrete concerns with the full realization that what we are giving ourselves to has no ultimate guarantee and may well end in disaster. An example of this is, of course, love. When we fall in love we offer an unconditional commitment to someone who is a contingent being with shortcomings and imperfections. As such, the commitment is saturated in risk. The problem only arises when we enter into such a commitment without acknowledging this risk and without taking responsibility for the inherent danger.

The argument that such an idea is impotent when faced with something like Female Genital Mutilation misses the point that such systemic practices gain their very justification from a Big Other (i.e. through justification to a cultural, political or religious Absolute). Once the death of the Big Other is acknowledged (barring the way to the idea that any symbol gives us direct, unmediated access to an Absolute), the communities concern will no longer be enslaved to this justification and will land on the plane on immanence. When this happens, protest against such inhumane practices can have a real and lasting effect for the scaffolding that justifies them has been effectively dismantled.

For Tillich, theology proper involves celebrating Ultimate Concern while untiringly undermining our tendency to mistake our commitments for the Absolute itself. Seeing them instead as symbols that reflect a personal response to a deeper call.

The problem for Tillich then did not lie in the fact that our commitments fail to pass the exams set by foundationalism and evidential, but rather in the mistaken idea that they would need to sit such tests in the first place.

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If you’d like to read Tillich’s insightful article, you’ll find it in Theology of Culture

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Bailey Lectures, University of Texas, TX

I will be giving the Bailey Lectures. More information to follow.

To see where I’ll be speaking, click here

Figures of Transgression, Guelph, ON

More information to follow