As my last post indicates, I don’t know much about the new Pope. But one thing I’ve gleaned from his admirers and detractors alike is that he’s an archenemy of relativism. He believes in absolute truths and morals that don’t change, standing against a culture of pluralism and postmodern subjectivity.
Hmmm, this is sounding familiar. But I have to say, coming as I do from the virtual font of liberal relativism, that the way conservatives characterize it never seems quite right. The liberals I know are not total relativists who think there’s no such thing as fixed truth or good and evil. However, they have themselves partly to blame for this misconception. Just as the Shawmut Baptists say that they follow unchanging draconian values but practice something a lot more like situational ethics, pluralists tend to talk the language of relativism but can seem awfully absolutist a lot of the time.
This fact, I believe, comes from the basic nature of human social life. We bond with people over what we have in common, but there is no one with whom we agree on absolutely everything. So relational life is a constant negotiation working out what things you simply must share, and what is unimportant enough that you can disagree without disrupting the relationship or community. This is true of conservatives and liberals, Christians and atheists — everybody, really.
I think that if you state a position on something and a liberal starts criticizing you for being intolerant and absolutist, it really means either a) I think you’re wrong, but it’s easier to criticize your absolutism than explain why I think you’re wrong, or b) I don’t think this issue is important enough to be absolutist on. The former is irritating, but the latter causes deeper misunderstandings. As I’ve said before, many religious liberals disclaim the need for orthodoxy, saying churches shouldn’t throw people out because they disagree, and yet attack people like George W. Bush for claiming to be a Christian while behaving in an un-Christian fashion. This is often justified by pitting “orthodoxy” against “orthopraxis”, but honestly, I think you can’t really separate beliefs from actions. What they’re really saying, I think, is that a lot of points of orthodoxy having to do with past conflicts like transubstantiation don’t seem to have much to do with important conflicts in the present world. So the reason these “You’re intolerant!” “You’re a relativist!” arguments bore me so much is that I don’t think the parties are really arguing about the crux of their dispute.
That’s not to say there’s no actual difference between the amount of relativism practiced by people like the Pope or the Baptists and that practiced by Western liberals. Ault pointed out in his book that urbanites are almost forced to be relativists because they encounter so many people every day who are very different from them. The small-town milieu of a place like Shawmut River, along with the fundamentalist withdrawal from the world, makes it a lot easier to be a purist.
I think that this points to something many pluralists don’t want to admit. When you have profound differences with people, the differences themselves create distance between people: it’s not like someone always says, “Oh, you’re different from me, out you go.” We’ve all had the experience of “growing apart” from someone we used to be close to, because our lives and personal changes cause us to have much more different views of the world than we once did. The question is how you deal with that distance. Basically, you have three options. You can try to close the distance by one or both of you persuading the other to think more in concert, which may or may not be possible. You can attack and try to get rid of that person. Or you can resort to what might best be called courtesy: show respect towards that person, rein in your personal feelings, and try to avoid areas of disagreement and focus on what you do agree on.
The third option is basically the foundation of pluralist society. It keeps diverse people living peaceably next to each other. The more troublesome question, though, is whether it can really form a basis for community. Some liberals I know are so inculcated with the value of pluralism that all their relationships start to take on that respectful courteous distance. Ault remarks that his subjects who visit liberal churches say they found them “cold and unfriendly.” This is not because those churches mean to be, he points out, but because they think it’s friendlier to respect people’s personal space. (If you’re a newcomer at Shawmut River, they’re all over you like a cheap suit.) It would be pretty depressing, though, if that sort of interaction were the most you could hope for in a human relationship. I think most of us treasure most the relationships with people with whom we have profound things in common. Sometimes we have relationships with people whose differences prove educational and mind-expanding to us; but that is more often the result not so much of respecting differences as being at least partly converted to them. Or, you might say, of them imposing their beliefs on us.
When it comes to church, this becomes even more fraught. When Rilina posted about the Pope the discussion turned mostly on this question of how much churches should enforce like beliefs, and whether they can do things like deny communion. One commenter said no, churches have no right to deny communion simply because a person disagrees with them. I don’t know. It seems to me like this may be another case of denying that differences do create distance, whether you want them to or not. You can give communion to everybody, but I don’t see how that could fail to dilute the meaning of communion — to turn it into a general courtesy like offering drinks to a visitor. The power of communion to bind people together, it seems to me, comes partly from the fact that for all those centuries it was always closed.
My own church practices open communion, I should say, but it has obviously given a lot of thought to these questions of unity and difference. This month I’m taking an inquirer’s class that PMC puts on as a prerequisite for membership. It goes over the history of Anabaptism and what Mennonites believe, and also about PMC’s specific covenant. The exact points of the covenant are a subject for another post, but what’s relevant to this one is the attitude the pastor wants us to take towards it. You don’t have to agree with everything on it, he said, but you do have to agree that these points form the basis of the community you’re joining. In other words, you can’t be like one of those women who, as one comedienne put it, shows off her new boyfriend by saying, “Look, I have an alcoholic! I can change him!” You have to accept the church as is. And while that does allow room for polite distance, I think the prospect of bonding yourself to an organization with strong beliefs — especially one that offers you “accountability”, according to one point of the covenant — is only going to be appealing to someone who agrees with it on the basics.
It may not always be easy to articulate what binds you to a church. Hugo said not long ago that a lot of things drive him crazy about All Saints, but “it’s home.” We can’t always articulate how we know what is safe and what is dangerous to disagree on. But somehow we do know, and this follows us through our lives.
Wow. Great post. I think one of the things to be said for “megachurches” (popular objects of derision though they are) is that nearly all of them make the cultivation of “small groups” a cornerstone of their ministry. There does seem to be a genuine emphasis on accountability and the formation of close ties that many mainstream/liberal Protestant churches have a hard time nurturing. Thus they manage (with varying degrees of success no doubt) to be open to “seekers” but also to do more in-depth “discipling.”
Also, regarding open communion, our church’s “official” policy is that you should be a communicant in another church. This seems sensible to me & preferable to full-blown open communion. The best response I ever heard to the idea of open communion was from Presbyterian theologian William Placher. Basically he said that if people want to be united to Christ we should baptize them!
Comment by Lee — April 21, 2005 @ 8:34 am
Thanks. Yeah, there are different degrees of hard-assedness about communion — whether you’re baptized, a member of our denomination, have confessed, etc. — and I don’t really have a position on that. I was just thinking of the practice of giving communion to anyone who shows up. The Mennonites ultimately descend from Zwingli, who was the granddaddy of the it’s-just-a-symbol theology, so I suppose it’s understandable that they see it as just “welcoming” to invite everybody to the table. In the Catholic theology of communion, though, that’s sort of like saying you’re unwelcoming if you don’t sleep with somebody on the first date. I haven’t studied the issue so I’m agnostic about the Real Presence, but I do think it’s more complicated than the “denying communion = intolerance!” position that seems popular these days.
Comment by Camassia — April 21, 2005 @ 9:25 am
By the way, regarding megachurches, another interesting remark the pastor made in class is that if a group grows beyond about 300 people, it loses its coherence as a group. (I think he had some social psych to back this up.) In his view, that means that if the church gets bigger than that it’s time to plant a new one. Megachurches, as you say, make up for that by having small groups. But my own experience with small groups in a megachurch says that’s not really the same as being in a small church. It requires a lot of initiative on the part of the congregant, because you have to find out about what small groups are available (which at CA meant tracking down the guy in charge of them, since there was no public list), and then you have to figure out what demographic slice you want to align yourself with: women’s Bible study? singles aged 18-35? people struggling with one sin or another? The small groups seem a bit too focused on finding things in common — or rather picking one thing in common to the exclusion of others. Meanwhile, anyone who doesn’t take that initiative can just float anonymously as long as they like. I don’t know if that’s true of all megachurches, but it seems kind of built into the structure.
Comment by Camassia — April 21, 2005 @ 10:11 am
A good (thoroughly nuanced) paper on “the gospel truth of relativism”: http://academic.udayton.edu/BradKallenberg/Relativism.pdf .
On small groups: in my experience, if a group doesn’t form organically out of some natural affinity, I want there to be a clearly-defined organizing purpose (e.g. a book study, conversations about urban issues and Christianity, etc.). If a group meets for the express purpose of being a group — “being community” — I tend to feel suffocated. While I’m as big a critic of individualism as anyone, I get uncomfortable talking about relationships and intimacy for their own sakes. I waver between trying to protect myself and my privacy and assuming that I’ve found a place to dump all my garbage and get free therapy.
Comment by Andy — April 21, 2005 @ 11:06 am
Andy – Sociologist Robert Nisbet, who I think I’ve touted before, traced the decline of community precisely to the fact that many communities had lost any purpose external to themselves. His argument was that as the state and the market took over certain crucial tasks (economic production, welfare, education, etc.) genuine communities were left with nothing much to do other than provide a kind of generalized emotional succor for their members.
Camassia – good points about megachurches. My experience with them is admittedly mostly second hand. Though I think any church is ultimately going to have to find a way to balance openness to new members with opportunites for deepening one’s commitment. I’m not sure any church has successfully squared that circle.
Oh, and I think it was Luther (who else?) who said “I’d rather drink blood with the papists than wine with the Zwinglians”
Comment by Lee — April 21, 2005 @ 11:38 am
Actually Andy, I think that just means you’re a guy!
But I should say, I didn’t mean to knock task-oriented small groups. I just meant they don’t take the place of a small church. When I’ve told people I left CA partly because I was looking for a smaller church, they sometimes say, “What, weren’t there any small groups?” as if that amounted to the same thing.
I think Lee’s point is the crucial one here: when you worship together you’re focusing on something outside yourself, while picking your small-group mates based on characteristics like age and sex is making the humans the focus. Like I said, I think a lot of the way we recognize “home” is unconscious, and probably best develops when you’re not really thinking about it. When conflicts arise, though, it often helps to think about what commonalities are really important.
Comment by Camassia — April 21, 2005 @ 11:46 am
There is a hierarchy of truth, traditions and Tradition. A complex mix. For Catholics, Ludwig Ott is helpful. But also for Catholics it’s academic in a way because Jesus handed Peter the keys and said what you hold bound will be held in heaven. As Zippy writes, “Well, one place where it gets squirrelly is in areas of discipline/practice. The objective moral fact in those cases is that the Church has the authority to set discipline/practice and to specify rewards and consequences. So in discipline/practice it is true that the Church generates moral facts; she does so on the foundation of the moral fact that she has the authority to do so.”
Zippy has more interesting things to say concerning relativism here.
Comment by TSO — April 21, 2005 @ 2:40 pm
I rather wish that the discussion my blog hadn’t turned into an argument over the theology of communion, since it somewhat confused the original point–which was more about the theology of authority than about the finer points of communion. I still don’t believe that you can separate the authority to define beliefs from the authority to enforce that definition. The absence of the latter undermines the existence of the former. I suspect that some of the more virulent objections to Benedict that I’ve seen are rooted in an inherent suspicion of authority in all forms.
But I don’t think the question of authority is just another page in the relativism vs. absolutism debates. It would seem to me that even some relativists could acknowledge that the pope has a certain amount of authority over people who have voluntarily chosen to become members of the church that he leads. To me, as an non-Catholic, it seems fairly straightforward: if you truly find the official orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church intolerable, especially as embodied by the new pope, you always have the option to leave.
So why does the attitude of many Catholics who dissent with the current orthodoxy as represented by the new pope and college of cardinals seems to be that of the woman with the alcoholic boyfriend: the Catholic leadership has to change to suit them. I don’t think it’s just cluelessness. Perhaps it is also a result of a belief that individual Catholics have ownership of what it means to be Catholic. And perhaps that’s partly because Catholicism (in America at least) often feels more like a culture than a religion; we see that in the way that lapsed Catholics often still identify with the label “Catholic.” If one is born into a group, I think it’s somewhat understandable that you might feel you have some ownership of how that group is defined, that the body can define the church.
Of course, I happen to disagree with that notion, as I believe ownership of the church (in the grander non-Roman Catholic specific sense) lies with God, not with church leaders or individual members. That still posits a top-down flow of authority, which nixes the idea that anyone can just say, “This heretical notion is Christian, because I call myself Christian and happen to believe it”, and lends credence to the idea that church leaders can have some authority to teach, even if those members don’t give them permission to teach them that.
Comment by Rilina — April 22, 2005 @ 10:05 am
[...] rovides too much of an opportunity for community to be disrupted. Even though Camassia is talking here about the tendency of liberals to avoid conflict by maintaining a “safe zone” [...]
Pingback by blip » Open Source Sermons — April 22, 2005 @ 1:47 pm
FWIW, it seems to me that two positions are often confused: relativism and fallibilism. Relativism says “There’s no truth, so it doesn’t really matter what we believe” (Or beliefs should be evaluated by non-noetic standards such as their psychological or political effects). Fallibilism says “There is a truth; I think what I beleive is true; but I could be wrong.” It’s fundamentally a position of intellectual humility.
For that reason fallibilism seems to me to be an attitude much more conducive to dialogue and engaging with others than relativism. If there’s no truth, then why bother to find out what other people think since that won’t get me any closer to the truth? (In fact, far from being humble, relativism breeds arrogance since it claims to know that there’s no truth – which is of course a contradiction).
Comment by Lee — April 22, 2005 @ 2:07 pm
Camassia,
I think your analysis regarding the pluralist option gets us somewhere. It feels more like what many of us do everyday with giving up that we do in fact have truth claims.
Lee,
Thank you for this distinction. This was the word on the tip of my tongue when I was posting elsewhere about my concerns over an absolute/relative dichotomy:
I agree with you the Truth exists and has been revealed to us in the flesh in Jesus Christ, especially in the Cross and Resurrection. The Truth is Self-giving, Self-emptying, all-forgiving Love and of that I’m sure we all fall short.
This knowledge or gnosis as St. Paul and St. John call it lends itself to contemplating all of our claims with considered qualifiers to any human claims to absolute truth. We see as through a glass dimly. Does that mean we do not do our best to see, by considering what it means, for example, to “love your neighbor as yourself” or “do not kill”. No. And we have several traditions to go about doing this from Jesuit and Anglican casuistry, natural law ethics, and so forth. But no matter how great our efforts, sophisticated our reasoning, right our convictions, we too are likely sinning even in the good we do.
As faithful people, I will agree that we are called to engage with the ethical deliberations of our tradition in making decisions. Critique of our culture and society likely will arise from this. But of course, critique can also go in the other direction or between traditions. And that necessitates a certain openness to rethinking. When we start the conversation of a given concern from an absolute position, the danger is that we’ll close ourselves off from hearing challenging points-of-view worthy of consideration and debate.
And it does seem that this label is thrown about quite a bit (just like “conservative” and “liberal”, “modern” and “post-modern”) when we come into contact with someone who doesn’t accept our claims or bases. The terms too often mean whatever disagrees with us. And that is an underlying reason for my caution.
Fallibilism. Thanks.
Comment by *Christopher — April 25, 2005 @ 11:52 am
Thanks, Camassia, for this post, and Lee, for the “relativism/fallibilism” distinction. Lik Christopher, I often think of the “through a glass darkly” passage in this context. And I do agree that criticizing someone for being absolutist, without doing the hard work of explaining why this issue in particular isn’t one you think one should be absolutist on, leads to misunderstanding.
Comment by Lynn Gazis-Sax — April 29, 2005 @ 8:39 am
[...] is saying goodbye as she prepares for her new life as a nun. For those interested in the relativism discussion, Dave Rattigan has been discussing the same topic on his blog, here and here. Ly [...]
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