Religion & Re-Enchantment

Explorations in religion after modernity, a paradigm literally turning inside-out...

Marshall McLuhan was the master of the jarring statement. He once said the following in an interview, reflecting on his explorations of the new electronic media:

"Once I began to move in this direction, I began to see that it had profound religious meaning. I do not think it my job to point this out. For example, the Christian concept of the mystical body - all men as members of the body of Christ - this becomes technologically a fact under electronic conditions. However, I would not try to theologise on the basis of my understanding of technology."

What does McLuhan mean? Sometimes I think he doesn't mean so much as he probes. He rolls things down the hill to see what happens. The meaning is in the curiosity. I've wondered about these rather heretical sounding words for a few years now. They seem to reach toward a general shift in the common religious imagination that feels rather present to me.

I held a moot a few weeks ago on the enigma of two letters written during WWII. Walter Benjamin said that our attempt to secularise the world was over, and that theology, in its hidden awkwardness, runs through everything we do. Meanwhile, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison that, "we are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all: men as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore." I think he rather welcomed this, though for him it raised the question: "how can Christ become the lord of even those with no religion?"

There's a fascinating paradox in these letters at the closing curtain of modernity, in which religion is ending and also reappearing all at once, on quite different terms.

Religion is a rather imprecise term. Helpfully, Bonhoeffer specified what he meant by it:

"In my view, that means to speak on the one hand metaphysically, and on the other individualistically. Neither of these is relevant to the Bible message or to the man of today. Is it not true to say that individualistic concern for personal salvation has almost completely left us all? […] it is not with the next world that we are concerned but with this world as created and preserved and set subject to laws and atoned for and made new."

Bonhoeffer lost none of his piety or awe or faith, but he did sense two things were turning inside out. One was the location of religious belief in the inward and private realm. The other was that religious beliefs concern "spiritual," as in, immaterial or otherworldly, things. He found himself feeling for the apparent opposite; for a "worldly" Christianity: outward and earthy.

This shift from inward to outward, from private to public, from abstract to material reminds me of Gershom Scholem's description of the age old dissonance between Christianity and Judaism:

"Judaism, in all its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community. It is an occurrence which takes place in the visible world, and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearance. In contrast, Christianity conceives of redemption as an event in the spiritual and unseen realm, an event which is reflected in the soul, in the private world of the individual, and which effects an inner transformation which need not correspond to anything outside."

For Scholem, the general posture of the Christian religion was "a flight which sought to escape verification of the messianic claim… a non-existent pure inwardness." From his prison cell at the dreadful final call of modernity, the Christian Bonhoeffer agrees and welcomes a "clearing of the decks." 

Part of the matter might lie at the beginning of modernity. I learned from William Cavanaugh that in the medieval era the word "religion" was rarely used. That which permeated everything didn't need to be named or delineated or specified so much. Cavanaugh wrote that it was because of the rise of the state that religion (which produces all kinds of rebellions and deviations against sovereigns and kings), was forced into a quietist realm of non-political inwardness. Meanwhile, Judaism dodged modernity's bullet. Its more earthy religious energies continued in its enclaves as the outsider's lore: partly because it was of less concern or interest to the Christian powers that be, and partly because the religion of the oppressed rarely sinks to demur quietism. This was the Jewish religious imagination that, for Walter Benjamin, would not go away, even if it knew it had to stay out of sight.

For Marshall McLuhan, of course, the root is technological. "From the invention of the alphabet there has been a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation of the senses, of functions, of operations, of states emotional and political" (McLuhan, p42). This process reached new force with the appearance of print technology at the beginning of modernity. Everything tended toward the cerebral and the individual. The age of electronic media is a great reversal. Bonhoeffer found himself at war in the global village. With radio, telephones and aeroplanes, time and space suddenly contracted and everyone was thrown into a world of alarming interdependence and involvement; thrown into each other's business; members of one chaotic body.

I think a change in the wind is observable in real time. There is an emerging religious sensibility that is somehow less private and individual; more common or communal. Less inward and abstract; more external and material. Our religious imagination is turning outward, as something immersive in which all are held. Something acoustic and tribal and folk-ish; not linear, hierarchical and managed. Our religious imagination is becoming mysterious again; less name-able and own-able by the individual or the group… it is becoming something with its own isness, otherness, and autonomy.

This shift lurches alongside many others, but here we mention two:

One is, as McLuhan noted, a shift in medium. The inward and individualistic world that was natural to literary humanity - the children of modernity's printed word - has given way to the immersive electronic age, which throws us all outside of ourselves and into each others business. 

Another is a rediscovery of ourselves as small and fragile and subject to the throes of a wider groaning creation. We have woken up in time to realise we've become the business of the nature gods, whose wrath we have roused. In all scientific narratives, life will outlast the human. In this moment when our extractive and colonial hubris reaches breaking point, we gape at the end of our brave conquest of nature. We are confronted with a situation and indeed a wonder that is much greater than ourselves. We are not the only autonomous presence. We are now obliged to become awe-philic once again.

What does this mean? Many things. Many more than can be mapped or anticipated. But to name some, it means that the personal becomes political, which means our religious imagination becomes political; it means pantheisms and panentheisms, old and new; it means a loss of control as the sacred migrates from the managed laboratory of inwardness and becomes an autonomous Other; no more the religious mascot of one group or another, nor the individualistic private wish dreams of modern liberalism; it means matter is re-enchanted as it begins to take back its lost sabbaths' rest. It means the human becomes hummus, adamma, soil once again.

I'll offer two windows into this word soup. One is a memory: Trafalgar square 2019, during an Extinction Rebellion action. The entire book of revelation was read aloud to a crowd of maybe a few thousand people, of all faiths and none. The text suddenly became ecological and political (which of course, it is), belonging to none and all, equally. The second is an extraordinary poem by visual artist and farmer Jack Baumgartner. The poem stands in odd resonance with Bonhoeffer's questions. Here, old paradigms fall apart, not through snide cynicism and superiority, but through an experience of sheer awe. 

I have all kinds of hopes and misgivings. I don't wish to advocate or resist so much as to describe and understand. Nor do I wish to be naive about what is passing, which always remains with us, like a ticking watch on a dead man's wrist, as they say, with both its blessings and its curses, its gifts and its discontents.

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Bibliography

Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination

McLuhan, The Gutemberg Galaxy

Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism

Stearn, McLuhan Hot and Cool