by Os Guinness
On the other side of the cleavage is the private sphere. This is the micro-world of the family and private associations, the world of personal tastes, sports, hobbies and other leisure pursuits. Significantly, it is on this side of the divide that the Church has made her home.
Two developments have contributed to the special emphasis on the family in this private sphere. First, there has been a crucial shrinkage of the family’s place in the wider world. Fragmented in terms of what it means (the extended family giving way to the nuclear family, and the traditional family to a myriad of alternative families), it has also been reduced to its smallest size ever and relieved of many of its former roles (such as its part in education and economic production—the “cottage industry”).
Second, there has been an equally crucial shift to a new role for the family. The private sphere, in general, and the family, in particular, now have one overriding concern: to serve the personal needs, expectations and fulfillment of individuals. At the same time, the private sphere has become the sphere of spending rather than earning, consumption rather than production. This fateful convergence creates the possibility of “conspicuous consumption”3—spending that is not a matter of need but an expression of identity, a material consumption that is the badge of status and success.
All this means that modern people experience the private sphere as an island where the “real self” lives. To be sure, the computer revolution is now blurring this effect. Emails and text messages, for example, have obscured the hard and fast distinction between work and family, and private and public. The good news, as they say, is that you can work anywhere. The bad news is that you can work anywhere. Some corporations have expressed a concern that private matters will eat into the world of work, as friends email friends from work. But for most people, the effect is the opposite—the world of work never stops, either in the evening or during the weekend. The ability to work anywhere means that work can be with us everywhere. Needless to say, this is no problem to the Operation. Blackberrys may cover more and more of life and the world, so long as the Bible never does.
Negative Side Effects
None of the three main pressures of modernization originated with us, though they work decisively in our favor. But do not ever forget that each of them is double-edged. Here and there they carry disadvantages for us, so we need to assess them carefully before deciding how best to exploit them to the fullest.
There are two potential disadvantages of the process of privatization. The first is that it does represent authentic, if limited, freedom. Compared with the situation in the past, privatization permits more people to do more, buy more, travel more, and fulfill more of their dreams than ever before. Just think of the amazing world of information and opinion that is all a click away on the Internet. Add to that the fact that, unlike people in totalitarian societies, privatized modern people have a private world. Big Brother is not watching them, at least not in this part of their lives.
It is easy to caricature the results of this freedom, which are often chaotic. Do-it-yourself beliefs become as simple and as casual as online banking. Psyches can be redecorated as quickly as living rooms according to the fashions du jour. People surf convictions as easily as television channels. But be sure of this: To most people, the private world is “a world of our own,” just as Facebook is all about the free expressions of a “daily me.” It represents an unprecedented freedom and the chance to think and act independently as never before. So beware. The private world is a potential flash point for us, and we shall have to monitor it closely.
The second problem from our perspective is that the private sphere serves as a form of compensation. Many people make up in the private sphere for what they are denied in the public sphere, so the private sphere works like a safety valve or fire escape. “Out there” (in the public sphere) they may wear a uniform, whether factory overalls or a pinstriped suit, play a role and be identified by a number. “But here’s one place” (in the private sphere), they say, where they can “get out of those things” and be themselves.
In the public sphere, relationships are necessarily partial, superficial and functional, but in the private sphere they can be total, deep, personal, face to face, and “authentic,” as they say today. This can cut various ways. A person who is frustrated by being a small fish in a big pond at work can play the big fish in a small pond at home. Another can find the anonymity of work an escape from the problems of life at home.
The element of compensation has its advantages for us, since it acts as an opiate against public reality. But once more, the problem is that at its heart lies a dangerous core of freedom, independence and choice, which the Adversary may always tap.
These potential disadvantages of privatization are far outweighed for us by its advantages. As I lay out some of these advantages, you will see why we are able to move in on religion and drive it unsuspecting into captivity.
Limited and Limiting
The first great advantage is that privatization ultimately acts as a decisive limitation on freedom. Granted, it offers freedom, unprecedented freedom, but only within strict limits. In the end, the price of this freedom is captivity. What do people want to pursue? Yoga? Satan worship? Spouse swapping? Bridge playing? Speaking in tongues? Happy-clappy “worship experiences” (which once used to be worship “services”) and touchy-feely fellowship groups? Let them feel free. The choice is theirs. Everything is permitted in the private sphere. Money, time and, to a mild extent, local sensitivities, are the only limits.
But what will they discover if they try to bring those personal commitments out into the public sphere? The same Grand Canyon, metaphorically speaking. The world of work—the world of Wall Street, Capitol Hill, Google, and NASA—is a quite different world with completely different ways. Personal preferences have no place there. Prayer breakfasts before work maybe, or Yoga during the lunch hour for the East-West set perhaps. But in the normal working world, faith, along with hats and coats, is to be left at the door.
Privatization thus spells freedom but only in the private sphere. In fact, far from being the arena of choice and creativity it sets itself up to be, the private sphere is really a sort of harmless play area.4 Individuals are free to build a world of their own to their hearts’ content—so long as they rock none of the boats in the real world. This means that for the religious believer, the private sphere serves as a sort of spiritual Indian reservation or Bantustan, a homeland for separate spiritual development set up obligingly by the architects of secular society’s apartheid.
It is true that disastrous outbreaks of spiritual revival in history have always featured a highly personal faith. You well know of the cell groups set up by Wesley in the eighteenth-century awakening, and there are signs of such an outbreak in the developing world today, especially in places like Costa Rica and South Korea or in Chinese provinces like Henan. These are places where the fire is spreading fastest and most uncontrollably when the spiritual movement is rooted in home groups and Pentecostal styles of worship. The last generation has even seen a decided shift in the West toward more personal, informal and home-based expressions of faith, and more contemporary styles of worship in churches.
All this I freely concede. Such evidence only illustrates why this pressure has risks and why we cannot be too careful. But remember, our sector of responsibility is the modern sphere alone, so citing pre-modern examples is beside the point. We are not concerned with the past or with the developing world where it is not yet modernized. Remember too that in the modern world the very point of using privatization is that it adds a new and unexpected catch to faith. It guarantees that personal freedom is no longer what it has been in the past.
There is therefore only one serious issue for us: Are the various movements of Western renewal still contained by the social inhibitions that accompany privatization, or are they marked by a spiritual inspiration that has the power to break out of the limits of the private sphere? Put the question that way, and
you will see your answer. Look closely at the marked shift of emphasis in religion over the last generation—from institutions to individuals, from programs to people, from the formal to the casual, from the mind to the feelings, from the set-form to the freeform, from the head to the whole body, from the word to the spirit, from the local church to the home.
Would you have taken all that as a disturbing sign of authentic revival? In the past the answer would have been yes. But, thanks to privatization, that is no longer so. The outbreak of spiritual concern may be authentic, but the boa-like squeeze of privatization acts to constrict and smother any dynamic that could have culture-wide significance.
Put simply, the charismatic movement in general and your American renewal in particular are not what they seem to be, nor what they wish they were. Their weakness is not that renewal starts in the private world, but that it ends there too. Spiritual inspiration they may have. But social inhibitions overwhelm them in the end.
If this were not so, the renewal movement would be extremely dangerous. It has reawakened a hunger for transcendence that refuses to be satisfied with secularism. It has rediscovered how to exercise a diversity of individual gifts that threaten to by-pass professional categories. It stresses the practice of community and claims to answer the modern cry for meaning and belonging. Were it not for the grip of privatization (and of a further tactic I will introduce later), all this could become disastrous.
We have come a very long way in the last 200 years. Lord Melbourne, British prime minister in the 1830s, once listened to a pointed sermon and made the indignant remark: “Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the private life!” He was a perceptive old curmudgeon. Personal faith was once seen as very demanding. In touching the personal life, it threatened to become a force that reached out into all of life and left nothing untouched. That, for a prime minister in the days of the British Empire, was a bit much.
Compare that with the present view of personal faith. In the early 1970s, an American historian commented on what he had observed of the Christian faith in California: “Socially irrelevant, even if privately engaging.”5 We could ask for no better. Lord Melbourne would be untroubled now. In much of today’s world things have come to a pretty pass if religion is allowed to invade public life with integrity.
In terms of Christian theory, privatization means that the grand, global umbrella of faith has shrunk to the size of a plastic rain hat. Total life norms have become part-time values. In terms of Christian practice, watch your average Christian businessperson or politician. Are there family prayers at home before leaving for work? That’s the private sphere. Are there Bible studies with colleagues at the office? Still the private sphere. Are there big, impressive prayer breakfasts that attract the high and mighty in the land? Still only the private sphere.
Look for a place where the Christian’s faith makes a difference at work beyond the realm of purely personal things (such as witnessing to colleagues and praying for them, or not swearing, not fiddling with income tax returns, or not sleeping with their secretary). Look for a place where the Christian is thinking “Christianly” and critically about the substance of work (about the boardroom and not just the bedroom; about the use of profits and not just personnel; about the ethics of a multinational corporation and not just those of a small family business; about a just economic order and not just the doctrine of justification). You will look for a very long time. This or that business leader may be “into religion,” but so are colleagues “into golfing” or “into theater” or a score of other hobbies.
A Christian’s priorities outside the office may be God, family and business, but once inside the office that order is reversed. Such Christians are of little use to the Adversary and pose no threat to us. The fascinating thing is that their fatal deficiency is so subtle they do not see it. The problem with modern Christians is not that they are not where they should be, but that they are not what they should be where they are.
Do you see what an opening this is for us? We can encourage Christians to accept a damaging degree of spiritual specialization as entirely normal. When this happened before, in the fourth century A.D., we fostered a gap between the “advanced” believer who was truly spiritual and the “average” believer who muddled along as best he could with a less demanding rule of life. Christians even spoke admiringly of the difference between the “perfect life” and the “permitted life.” It was this widening gulf that slowly brought the conversion of the Roman world to a halt.6
The new gulf is different—between the private and the public, rather than the average and the advanced—but our goal is the same: to create such a spiritual specialization that Christian penetration of the modern world slows to a grinding halt.
Let these four words privately engaging, socially irrelevant be engraved on your mind. That is what privatization does to renewal in the modern world. “Jesus is Lord,” they declare (and sing and strum on their guitars to their hearts’ content). But what do they demonstrate? Little better than a spare-time faith and a pocket-discipleship. The once wild animal may roar, but safely behind bars.
Fragmenting and Dislocating
I have spent time on the first advantage, since it is absolutely critical to us, but let me briefly cover some others. A second one is that privatization induces a sense of fragmentation or dislocation. In the highly complex and diversified conditions of the modern world, there is not only greater freedom within each separate sphere but also a greater difference (and distance) between each sphere.
On the one hand, this fragmentation means that people today are more anonymous in more situations than ever before in history. This is important because it does not take a cynic to see that morality is often a matter of accountability through visibility. Thus, if character is who they are, and ethics is what they do when no one sees, character will now be trumped by image and ethics by compliance (and what they can get away with when no one is looking).
On the other hand, fragmentation means that the different worlds through which people migrate daily will all be very different. Worlds that are only minutes apart physically may be light years away morally and spiritually. A person’s life can therefore come to resemble a nonstop process of commuting between almost completely separate, even segregated, worlds.
The net effect of these constant crossings is spiritual compartmentalism, if not ethical and psychological confusion. For some people, moving in different worlds and having to wear different hats are a source of only minor irritation. Others can be driven into a state of deep inner division, as has been said of the bureaucrat: “He lives in two worlds, and he must therefore, so to speak, have two souls.”7
The potential here for spiritual, moral and intellectual schizophrenia is great. Christians have always been warned against the hypocrisy of double-thinking. But now that they are juggling with double-, triple-and quadruple-living, modular morality and compartmentalized convictions are becoming as interchangeable as Lego-like lifestyles.
At the very least, this fragmentation fosters the breathless, strung-out feeling characteristic of busy modern Christians. Better still, it means that modern Christians are denied the chance of a total expression of their gifts and personalities. Best of all, it makes certain that there is no Christian mind integrating all of life, only a personal faith with compartments between its various disciplines and activities—one mind for Church, another for the classroom; one for reading the Bible, another for reading the newspaper; one for the world of the family, another for the world of business. In the busy rush of life’s commuting, Christian convictions are boxed-in as neatly and firmly as the commuter behind his paper in a crowded morning train.
Unstable and Unrealistic
A third advantage is that privatization creates an inherently unstable private sphere. Consider the difference between steering a sailboard and piloting an ocean liner. For anyone wanting the freedom to follow every caprice of the breeze, wind surfing is the obviou
s choice. But for crossing the Atlantic, the ocean liner is the surer bet.
From the perspective of the believer in the private sphere, much of the institutional Church—sometimes at the local level, certainly at the denominational level—appears about as maneuverable and responsive as an ocean liner. So the growing desire is to cut loose and find the freedom and exhilaration of spiritual wind surfing in the burgeoning home groups.
So, Christians and their groups today can be as free as sailboarders, and as collapsible too. There are two reasons for this instability. On the one hand, the private sphere is decidedly understructured.8 The extended family (such as it was) has shrunk into the nuclear family, and religion has retreated from its previous position of influence in the public sphere. Thus the two strongest supports that traditionally undergirded people’s private lives and tied them into a wider public world have been sabotaged in a stroke.
The result is a crisis in the traditional ways of setting up and running the private life, a crisis that leaves people more uncertain as well as more free. Conventional values are no longer taken for granted, and the traditional supporting web of family, friends, neighbors and community can no longer be counted on. Family members may be scattered across the world, neighbors and colleagues change with the speed of a game of musical chairs, and genuine community has died. Some sort of supporting web can certainly be rewoven and maintained, but only by a strenuous effort of will. Privatized man and woman are free to be Atlas to their own worlds, but they will always be somewhat anxious Atlases to largely doit-yourself worlds that can collapse as suddenly as they were created.
On the other hand, the private sphere is distinctly oversold.9 It has become the sphere of spending rather than earning, and of personal fulfillment rather than public obligation. Naturally then, when conspicuous consumption grafts spending into identity, appetites become insatiable and expectations unrealistic. In short, privatized man is not only an anxious Atlas but also a spoilt Narcissus. He wants more, and he wants it now. After all, to others at least, he is what he consumes. And so is she.