Desiring the Kingdom (): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies Book 1)

by James K. A. Smith

first, I have tried to get us thinking about education, or pedagogy, in terms of practices or even rituals.

Our ultimate love/desire is shaped by practices, not ideas that are merely communicated to us.

We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart to certain ends.

The point is to emphasize that the way we inhabit the world is not primarily as thinkers, or even believers, but as more affective, embodied creatures who make our way in the world more by feeling our way around it.

The “desiring” model of the human person begins from our nature as intentional beings who first and foremost (and ultimately) intend the world in the mode of love. We are primordially and essentially agents of love, which takes the structure of desire or longing.[20] We are essentially and ultimately desiring animals, which is simply to say that we are essentially and ultimately lovers. To be human is to love, and it is what we love that defines who we are. Our (ultimate) love is constitutive of our identity.[21] So we’re not talking about trivial loves, like when we say we “love” pizza or the Boston Red Sox; we’re not even quite talking about significant loves, like when we say we “love” our parents or we “love” a spouse (though these will be wrapped up in the sort of love we’re concerned with). Rather, we are talking about ultimate loves—that to which we are fundamentally oriented, what ultimately governs our vision of the good life, what shapes and molds our being-in-the-world—in other words, what we desire above all else, the ultimate desire that shapes and positions and makes sense of all our penultimate desires and actions.

depends upon how our love is aimed. What distinguishes us (as individuals, but also as “peoples”)[23] is not whether we love, but what we love. At the heart of our being is a kind of “love pump”[24] that can never be turned off—not even by sin or the Fall; rather, the effect of sin on our love pump is to knock it off kilter, misdirecting it and getting it aimed at the wrong things.[25] Our love can be aimed at different ends or pointed in different directions, and these differences are what define us as individuals and as communities. This brings us to the second element of the “desiring” model

We are the sorts of animals whose love is aimed at different ends or goals

In other words, what we love is a specific vision of the good life, an implicit picture of what we think human flourishing looks like.[26] Such a picture of human flourishing will have all sorts of components: implicit in it will be assumptions about what good relationships look like, what a just economy and distribution of resources look like, what sorts of recreation and play we value, how we ought to relate to nature and the nonhuman environment, what sorts of work count as good work, what flourishing families look like, and much more.

Our ultimate love is oriented by and to a picture of what we think it looks like for us to live well, and that picture then governs, shapes, and motivates our decisions and actions.

A vision of the good life captures our hearts and imaginations not by providing a set of rules or ideas, but by painting a picture of what it looks like for us to flourish and live well.

cognitive and propositional is easily reduced and marginalized as just more “blah-blah-blah” when our hearts and imaginations are captured by a more compelling picture of the good life—the way it’s hard to listen to someone talking when the television is on, with its blinking images functioning as magnets for our attention.

It is not primarily our minds that are captivated but rather our imaginations that are captured, and when our imagination is hooked, we’re hooked (and sometimes our imaginations can be hooked by very different visions than what we’re feeding into our minds).

Good habits, for instance, are “virtues,” whereas bad habits are “vices.” These habits constitute a kind of “second nature”: while they are learned (and thus not simply biological instincts), they can become so intricately woven into the fiber of our being that they function as if they were natural or biological.

We feel our way around our world more than we think our way through it. Our worldview is more a matter of the imagination than the intellect, and the imagination runs off the fuel of images that are channeled by the senses.

We have highlighted four key elements of this model: Human persons are intentional creatures whose fundamental way of “intending” the world is love or desire. This love or desire—which is unconscious or noncognitive—is always aimed at some vision of the good life, some particular articulation of the kingdom. What primes us to be so oriented—and act accordingly—is a set of habits or dispositions that are formed in us through affective, bodily means, especially bodily practices, routines, or rituals that grab hold of our hearts through our imagination, which is closely linked to our bodily senses.

Discipleship and formation are less about erecting an edifice of Christian knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively “understands” the world in the light of the fullness of the gospel. And insofar as an understanding is implicit in practice, the practices of Christian worship are crucial—the sine qua non—for developing a distinctly Christian understanding of the world.

These rituals form the imagination of a people who thus construe their world as a particular kind of environment based on the formation implicit in such practices. In just this sense Christianity is a unique social imaginary that “inhabits” and emerges from the matrix of preaching and prayer. The rhythms and rituals of Christian worship are not the “expression of” a Christian worldview, but are themselves an “understanding” implicit in practice—an understanding that cannot be had apart from the practices. It’s not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly “express” these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble up from there. “Doctrines” are the cognitive, theoretical articulation of what we “understand” when we pray.

The distillation of the Christian worldview in terms of creation-fall-redemption-and-consummation can never adequately grasp what is understood when we participate in communion and eat the body of Christ, broken for the renewal of a broken world. And such an understanding is the condition of possibility for any later “knowledge.”

the key to directing and increasing one’s desire for God is the acquisition of the virtues—which, you’ll recall, we described above as noncognitive “dispositions” acquired through practices. So how does one acquire such virtues, such dispositions of desire? Through participation in concrete Christian practices like confession.

Culture is, one might say, more of a verb than a noun; it is the fruit of human “making” or cultivation (poiēsis). So cultural institutions are those conglomerations of practices (and built-environment) that have unfolded and developed over time to address human needs, wants, and desires.

Thus our cultural criticism should not be asking what ideas or beliefs are being bandied about in “culture”; rather, we should be discerning to what ends all sorts of cultural institutions are seeking to direct our love. In short, we will only adequately “read” our culture to the extent that we recognize operative there an array of liturgies that function as pedagogies of desire.

I suggest that, on one level, Victoria’s Secret is right just where the church has been wrong. More specifically, I think we should first recognize and admit that the marketing industry—which promises an erotically charged transcendence through media that connects to our heart and imagination—is operating with a better, more creational, more incarnational, more holistic anthropology than much of the (evangelical) church. In other words, I think we must admit that the marketing industry is able to capture, form, and direct our desires precisely because it has rightly discerned that we are embodied, desiring creatures whose being-in-the-world is governed by the imagination. Marketers have figured out the way to our heart because they “get it”: they rightly understand that, at root, we are erotic creatures—creatures who are oriented primarily by love and passion and desire. In sum, I think Victoria is in on Augustine’s secret. But meanwhile, the church has been duped by modernity and has bought into a kind of Cartesian model of the human person, wrongly assuming that the heady realm of ideas and beliefs is the core of our being. These are certainly part of being human, but I think they come second to embodied desire. And because of this, the church has been trying to counter the consumer formation of the heart by focusing on the head and missing the target: it’s as if the church is pouring water on our head to put out a fire in our heart.

says Williams, is a testament to the in-breaking or emergence of the divine in human experience, and thus to be affirmed as an expression of our deepest erotic passion, the desire for God: Any

Our love is aimed from the fulcrum of our desire—the habits that constitute our character, or core identity. And the way our love or desire gets aimed in specific directions is through practices that shape, mold, and direct our love.

such acquisition of automatic dispositions and tendencies happens “intentionally”; that is, we choose to learn them by “frequent and consistent pairing”—namely, by practice. “We purposefully engage in the considerable practice (frequent and consistent performances) required to sublimate many of the components of the skill.”

This slippage perhaps helps us to recognize that—within the desiring framework we’ve constructed—no habit or practice is neutral. This is not to say that every habit is a thick one, but only that even our thinnest habits and practices ultimately get hooked up into desires that point at something ultimate.

If you think cultural critique is based on ideas or beliefs, and that cultural “threats” come in the form of messages and “values,” then you’ll have a cultural radar that is only equipped to pick up on ideas and beliefs. But the mall has never been guilty of being a think tank; one doesn’t usually think of the Gap or Walmart as sites of the culture war because they don’t traffic in ideas. As a result, the threat of these sites doesn’t register on worldview radar; because such worldview approaches remain largely fixated on the cognitive, something like the mall drops off the radar (while an institution like the U.S. Supreme Court is unduly amplified). But all the while the ritual practices of the mall are grabbing hold of hearts and capturing imaginations, shaping our love and desire, and actually forming us in powerful, fundamental ways.

If our cultural critique remains captivated by a cognitivist anthropology, then we’ll fail to even see the role of practices. This constitutes a massive blind spot in much of the Christian cultural critique that takes place under the banner of worldview-thinking.

What are some of the most significant habits and practices that really shape your actions and attitude—what you think and what you do? What does your time look like? What practices are you regularly immersed in each week? How much time is spent doing different sorts of activities? What do you think are the most important ritual forces in your life? And if you were honest with yourself, are these positive (forming you into the kind of person who embodies the kingdom of God) or negative (forming you into someone whose values and desires are antithetical to that kingdom, oriented toward another kingdom)? What do you think are some of the most potent practices in our culture? Or, if you have kids, what are the cultural forces that you don’t want your children shaped by? What are the ritual forces that you do want to shape their desires? And why on both counts? If you step back and reflect on them, are there some habits and practices that you might have originally thought were neutral or thin, but upon further reflection, you see them as thicker and more significant? Is there any way in which you see worship as a thick habit? How so? How not?

If Christian worship is a thick practice, what do you think are its most significant “competitors”?

I want to distinguish liturgies as rituals of ultimate concern: rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate particular visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to trump other ritual formations. Admittedly, this might include rituals not associated with traditional religions (e.g., rituals of Nazi fascism or other rituals of totalizing nationalism); indeed, expanding our conception of what counts as “worship” is precisely the point.

Liturgies are the most loaded forms of ritual practice because they are after nothing less than our hearts. They want to determine what we love ultimately. By ultimately I mean what we love “above all,” that to which we pledge allegiance, that to which we are devoted in a way that overrules other concerns and interests.

Secular liturgies capture our hearts by capturing our imaginations and drawing us into ritual practices that “teach” us to love something very different from the kingdom of God.

By the same token, Christian worship needs to be intentionally liturgical, formative, and pedagogical in order to counter such mis-formations and misdirections. While the practices of Christian worship are best understood as the restoration of an original, creational desire for God, practically speaking, Christian worship functions as a counter-formation to the mis-formation of secular liturgies into which we are “thrown” from an early age.

So the question we bring to culture is not primarily or only, What does this or that institution have to say? Or, What is the message being communicated in this film? Or, What ideas or values are contained in this or that policy? Rather, the questions we should be asking are quite different and will often be aimed at sectors of culture that have hitherto received little attention. We should be asking: What vision of human flourishing is implicit in this or that practice? What does the good life look like as embedded in cultural rituals? What sort of person will I become after being immersed in this or that cultural liturgy?

At what point does our attachment to cultural practices touch upon our central nervous system, so to speak? When does our engagement with culture become assimilation to culture? Is it possible that our laudable goal of transforming culture has unwittingly led, instead, to our transformation into its image, assuming its goals?

liturgies or worship practices are rituals of ultimate concern that are formative of our identity—they both reflect what matters to us and shape what matters to us. They also inculcate particular visions of the good life through affective, precognitive means, and do so in a way that trumps other ritual formations. In short, they are the rituals that grab hold of our kardia and want nothing less than our love.

But usually the liturgies of the mall and market inscribe in us a sense that something’s wrong with us, that something’s broken, by holding up for us the ideals of which we fall short.

Hence comes the irony that consumerism, which we often denounce as “materialism,” is quite happy to reduce things to nothingness.

By our immersion in this liturgy of consumption, we are being trained to both overvalue and undervalue things: we’re being trained to invest them with a meaning and significance as objects of love and desire in which we place disproportionate hopes (Augustine would say we are hoping to enjoy them when we should only be using them) while at the same time treating them (as well as the labor and raw materials that go into them) as easily discarded.

The liturgy of consumption births in us a desire for a way of life that is destructive of creation itself; moreover, it births in us a desire for a way of life that we can’t feasibly extend to others, creating a system of privilege and exploitation. In short, the only way for this vision of this kingdom to be a reality is if we keep it to ourselves.[18] The mall’s liturgy fosters habits and practices that are unjust, so it does everything it can to prevent us from asking such questions. Don’t ask; don’t tell; just consume.

Rather than properly countering the liturgy of consumption, the church ends up mimicking it, merely substituting Christian commodities—“Jesufied” versions of worldly products, which are acquired, accumulated, and disposed of to make room for the new and the novel. This happens, I think, mainly because we fail to see the practices of consumption as liturgies.

Typical Christian analysis of the situation, including the critique of materialism (where that still happens), tends to focus on what is being purchased, rather than calling into question the gospel of consumption—the sense that acquisition brings happiness and fulfillment.

constitute liturgies of ultimate concern: the ideal of national unity and commitment to its ideals is willing to make room for additional loyalties, but it is not willing to entertain trumping loyalties. (Just try to remain seated at the next playing of the national anthem.) The fact that there seems to be little tension between Christianity and American nationalism is not a function of the generosity (let alone “Christianness”) of the American ideal but rather a sign of a Christianity that has accommodated itself to these American ideals of battle, military sacrifice (which is very different from the Christian ideal of martyrdom),[27] individual (negative) freedom, and prosperity through property.

I think the liturgical take on American nationalism can help us to see why so few Christians experience a tension here; it can also help to diagnose the cause of the church’s complacency and complicity: many Christians experience no tension between the gospel according to America and the gospel of Jesus Christ because, subtly and unwittingly, the liturgies of American nationalism have so significantly shaped our imagination that they have, in many ways, trumped other liturgies. Thus we now see and hear and read the gospel through the liturgical lenses of the “American gospel.”

I should have added, ‘The church is a “sign, herald, and foretaste” of the coming kingdom; we refuse to allow national borders to be mapped onto the body of Christ.’” Finally the officer articulated a linchpin question: “Is he a loyal American?” While the answer in Aaron’s case was undoubtedly yes, Brent heard echoes of Dorothy Day in his head: In the U.S. there is assumed to be a smooth fit between discipleship and killing. That assumption, held so easily and unreflectively, trespasses against our obedience to God alone. I wonder whether my questioner understands that for descendants of Jeremiah and followers of Jesus, obedience to God may require us to refuse the state’s claim to our loyalty. Does the Department of Defense grant that my fundamental obligation is not loyalty to country but obedience to God? I doubt it. In such circumstances, where Caesar cannot distinguish between our proper subjection and our ultimate allegiance, it may be best to say bluntly, “A loyal American? Of course not. I’m a Christian!” (D. Brent Laytham, “Loyalty Oath: A Matter of Ultimate Allegiance,” Christian Century, July 12, 2005)

Consider, for instance, Richard Mouw’s wise words about worship and nationalism. Recognizing that we de facto inhabit national and cultural contexts, he warns of “the constant danger of nationalistic pride”: “When we come together for Christian worship, we are acknowledging our identity as members of ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation’ (1 Peter 2:9). And we need to be reminded that other racial and priestly and national loyalties are constantly competing for our allegiance.”

Rather, Christian witness to culture can affirm that even these secular liturgies, with their misdirected , are a witness to the desire for God; the misdirections are a sign of a perduring structure that we can build upon.

I don’t mean to say that secular liturgies give us implicit knowledge of God, but they are oblique signs that we desire God.

First, sometimes Christians fail to articulate strategies of resistance because they fail to see a threat. Because they fail to see these cultural institutions and practices as formative—fail to see them as liturgies rather than just neutral, benign “things we do”—they also fail to recognize what’s at stake in them.