by Os Guinness
Do you see the contrast, and therefore the measure of our success today? In the modern world, pluralization sees to it that there is no sacred canopy, only millions of small tents. There is no global umbrella, only a bewildering range of pocket umbrellas for those who care to hoist one. The grand overseer of life has been reduced to being one of a jostling crowd of job seekers and volunteers, all competing for the consumers’ attention. The once-commanding symbol of unity has become just one more element in the abstract mosaic of diversity. Taken-for-grantedness has gone the way of the ancestors.
Roads to the Present Position
There are different roads to the present position of pluralization. One way for you to trace its rise is to study its Christian origins. By its very character, the Christian faith carries the pluralizing potential within itself.4 “In the world, but not of it,” the Christian faith stands as a permanent criticism of every given, every established institution and every rival belief. By calling for a switch of allegiances (“repentance and faith”), it unmistakably draws a line and calls for choice. Thus Christian propaganda always insists on an alternative perspective, and as such it is a constant generator of choices and dissent. This, as we have unfortunately seen in the past, is the source of the Church’s disruptive and revolutionary power in history.
Today, however, we have turned this strength into a weakness. For the principle became self-destructive when what was always inherent in the Christian faith became rampant after the Protestant Reformation. It then went to seed and began to work back on itself. Protestants rejected papal authority and unwittingly began the fateful swing to the authority of personal conscience, which was soon indistinguishable from a riot of personal choice and individualism.
“Here I stand,” cried Martin Luther, who in facing the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor tackled the most powerful political forces and structures of his day. “Here I stand,” cry our contemporary Christians, who use it to opt out of any and every belief, practice, and music style that does not suit their petulant preferences.
Strictly speaking, the Reformation did not introduce pluralism. Nor did it intend to. Indeed, Protestants at first tried to defend their separate Protestant realms as zealously as Catholics had defended the whole of Christendom before. But in the wake of the wars of religion, the irrepressible urge toward pluralization was born, and we have fostered it carefully ever since.
Christians may point to their more virtuous contributions (the generating of choices, the respect for freedom of conscience), but the contribution of their vices was as important. Pluralization gathered momentum through the fragmentation of Christendom and through the tolerance bred by widespread disillusionment with Christian fanaticism and bigotry.
You move much closer to the present with the invention of the denomination (as with so many things, “made in the U.S.A.”). Prior to the American experience, a national Church had territorial claims and its membership was virtually established by birth. But those who came to America were not just from nonconformist groups such as the Baptists, who had rejected national churches; they were also drawn from various state churches, each of which had now lost its territorial supremacy and had arrived to find other “former state churches” already there.
The result was the modern denomination, the “ex-Church,” which has been forced to bow to the permanent presence and competition of other churches within its territory. For a while, the Roman Catholic Church, as Lenny Bruce quipped, was “the only The Church left,” but now it is falling nicely in line with the others as one more denomination. In the South, the Southern Baptists are “the only the church left.”
You will appreciate that this kind of pluralization bites far more deeply than denominational differences. It eats into basic beliefs too. What modern Christian would argue against the place of the modern denomination? But then, how much can the same Christian still believe that his own denomination has the inside lane on interpretation, especially when he realizes there are some 20,000 others in the world (2,051 in the U.S. alone)?5 But what then of the absolute truth of his own faith when there are so many other religions? If other religions are shaped by different cultures and times, could his own faith be so too? Before long the acid of doubt has eaten through to the core.
The Modern Contribution
A second way to trace the rise of pluralization is to see the forces within modernization that have accelerated the tidal wave of choice and change.6 These are obvious and hardly need elaboration. Through the crowding growth of cities, modern people are all much closer, yet stranger, to each other. Through the explosion of knowledge, other people, other places, other periods and other psyches are accessible as never before. Through modern travel, people can go to any part of the world within twenty-four hours. Through modern media, the world and all its options can be brought to them. And so on.
Pluralization is accelerated and intensified in a hundred such ways. “Everyone is now everywhere,” it is said. What then happens, the heightened awareness of the presence of others leads automatically to a sense of the possibilities for ourselves. In essence, therefore, the modern person/consumer scans the smorgasbord and says, “Their cuisines, their customs, their convictions are all now my choices, my options, my possibilities.” The widest range of choice is often at the most trivial levels, but the proliferation of choice at more important levels is staggering.
Life is now a supermarket or a smorgasbord with an endless array of options, whether the choice is a question of a gender, a marriage, a hobby, a vacation, a lifestyle, a world view or a religion. There is something for everybody—and every taste, age, sex, class and interest. The family of your choice (traditional/gay/lesbian/polyamorist/polygamist)? The church of your choice? A liturgy to your liking? The Good Food Guide has its counterpart in The Good Church Guide. Pass down the line. Take your pick. Mix your own. Do your thing.
We have reached the stage in pluralization where choice is not just a state of affairs but also a state of mind. Choice has become a value in itself, even a priority. What matters is no longer good choice or right choice or wise choice, but simply choice. Freedom is simply having choice, and to be modern is to be addicted to choice and change. Choice and change have become the very essence of life.
Driving Home the Consequences
The processes of pluralization are fascinating and the possibilities they open up kaleidoscopic. But do not miss the wood for the trees. Our real concern is only with consequences.
What happens when choice becomes a state of mind? Obligation melts into option, “givenness” into choice, form into freedom, and duty into decision. Facts of life dissolve into fashions of the moment. But the consequence we care about most is this: The increase in choice and change leads to a decrease in commitment and continuity.
Imagine someone who owned a silk handkerchief inherited from his Victorian great-grandfather. If he lost it, he would search for it everywhere. It would be a prized possession, beautiful, old and with special associations. He is “attached to it,” he might say. Yet no one in his right mind would become attached to a Kleenex tissue, and it would be absurd to waste time looking for one if it were lost. After all, a Kleenex is disposable. It is made to be thrown away. Commitment and continuity are entirely foreign to the notion of a paper handkerchief.
Another trivial illustration, you may say. Deliberately so, but never forget the sociology of knowledge. The truth about the modern world can be learned as readily from the trivia of life as from the philosopher’s essay. Most modern people have a relationship to their choices that’s closer to the model of the Kleenex tissue than to that of the silk handkerchief.
There is no nostalgia in that judgment, I assure you. I hold no brief for silk handkerchiefs and no grudge against disposable ones. We are interested in the extension of this mentality to more important areas. What may be trifling at the level of handkerchiefs becomes telling at the level of relationships, societies and, above all, faiths. What happens when modern people “
run through” homes like disposable handkerchiefs? Better still, when they “run through” marriages? Above all, when they “run through” beliefs?
New Partners for New Phases
An obvious place to look for the impact of pluralization is marriage. Pluralization at the level of relationships is putting a unique strain on Christian marriage, which as it disintegrates puts an added strain on the plausibility of faith and the stability of the Church. Christians often forget that the centuries-long persistence of one man/one woman marriage was not due solely to their own principles. True, for a couple to commit themselves to each other “till death us do part” was a matter of principle. But social pressures played their part too.
Traditional communities, mostly rural, were comparatively small and stable. Under such conditions, permissiveness would have led to social chaos. Christian principles were therefore silently supported by strong social pressures. And because people did not live so long in the past, “till death us do part” used to be a realistic assessment of the odds. Today it is more often wishful thinking.
Pluralization has been key in effecting this change. The modern individual lives longer and meets and knows more people than ever before, but as I said in the previous memo, is also more anonymous in more situations. The average modern Londoner meets as many people in one week as a medieval person would have met in a lifetime. A Londoner’s (or New Yorker’s or Washingtonian’s) lifestyle is accordingly faster, freer and more flexible, just as the average relationship is briefer, more superficial and more functional.
The result? Cultural pressure and Christian principle have parted company and now work against each other. “Ring the changes!” says the one, “New phases in life. New partners in life!” “No!” says the other, “If marriage collapses, civilization does too!”
Which of the two is winning in wider society is easy to see. The wedding vow “Till death do us part” has given way to the wedding wish, “So long as love lasts.” With the expressive revolution triumphant, and sex now linked to pleasure rather than procreation, love seems not to be lasting so long. Surprise, surprise.
“It is ridiculous,” Clare Booth Luce remarked, “to think that you can spend your entire life with just one person. Three is about the right number. Yes, I imagine three husbands would do it.”7 And that she said as a good Catholic, and a full generation before the bewildering chaos of fragmentation that we have promoted in marriage and families since then.
The fashionable philosophy behind this is at its height. With the value of choice and change up and the value of commitment and continuity down, freedom, flexibility and convenience are everything. Courting has given way to “hooking up,” and lifetime faithfulness to free sex just as formal dining has given way to fast food. Of course, do not expect most people to swing to the silly extremes that magazines trumpet to sell copies and that moralists attack. Free sex all the time—whenever, however, and with whomever—is no more pleasurable or healthy than fast food all the time.
The damage to Christian faithfulness is done at a far less advanced stage. “Creative divorce” is a little avant-garde for the average Christian, except where you are going. But once change is considered appropriate and necessary, and marriage has been boiled down to one thing only—the make-or-break achievement of emotional intimacy—faithfulness can easily be made to look constricting and hopelessly old-fashioned. Can anyone devise a surer recipe for a loveless marriage?
It is instructive to examine the expanding range of Christian rationales for change. Some spouses are quite straightforward. Their marriages no longer “fulfill” them, and they want to get out. But keep your eyes open for more sophisticated cases, particularly those infected by thinking that is the product of privatization and pluralization combined.
For instance, a Christian conservative writes that the break-up of his marriage was a sad but “healthy new beginning for each of us in our own way.”8 And he continues that he was called by faith like Abraham to leave the security of marriage to embark on a spiritual pilgrimage toward emotional authenticity.
Another Christian writes, “I hope my wife will never divorce me, because I love her with all my heart. But if one day she feels I am minimizing her or making her feel inferior or in any way standing in the light that she needs to become a person God meant her to be, I hope she’ll be free to throw me out even if she’s one hundred. There is something more important than our staying married, and it has to do with integrity, personhood, and purpose.”9
The ultimate in refinement are those who claim to be separating out of faithfulness to Christ. Formerly, this would have meant a non-Christian husband or wife leaving the Christian partner because of the faith itself. Now it often means a Christian divorcing another Christian over a Christian issue.
Would you have thought, for example, that a commitment to a simple lifestyle could ever lead to divorce? Yes, one writer urges today, “The split finally comes when one recognizes that this kind of conscience can’t be compromised. There are levels of importance and urgency in biblical morality. And Jesus’ driving concern for the coming of the Kingdom, as a counter to the culture, far outweighed his concern for the maintenance of family structures. There can be as much sin involved in trying to perpetuate a dead or meaningless relationship as in accepting the brokenness, offering it to God, and going on from there.”10 Disobeying Christ out of faithfulness to Christ! The irony is exquisite, and I must say that some of our recent successes have a perfection that is sublime.
Early on, it appeared that ordinary Christian believers would be resistant to these trends, but the sluice gates have been opened. The incidence of divorce among clergy and Christian celebrities has become an epidemic, and the wider Church is going down with the same virus. Divorce is now in the air they breathe. The opinion-formers went down, and the sheep were bound to follow. “A fish decays from its head first,” they say in the intelligence world. Or, as the Director puts it more pertinently, a Christian celebrity sneezes and the Church catches the cold.
Commitment-Shy Convictions
The collapse of Christian marriage is a signal of success for us, especially when we can now sit back and read polls showing that Christian marriage is worse off than the marriage of atheists. But when all is said and done, the only level of damage we really care about is the pluralization of beliefs and believing. Commitment-shy faith is a contradiction in terms, you might think, but we have achieved it in various unnoticed ways. Think of some of the side effects that pluralization has had on faith.
One side effect of pluralization is that modern believers have an excessive degree of self-consciousness.11 Each choice raises questions. Might they? Could they? Should they? Will they? Won’t they? What if they had? What if they hadn’t? And so on. The forest of choices raised by modern options leads deeper and deeper into the dark freedom, then the even darker anxiety, of seemingly infinite possibility.
Like a hall of mirrors, the reflections recede forever. Choice is no longer simple. Choosing is never complete. The outside world becomes more questionable, the inside world more complex. What can they believe? What ought they to do? Who are they? Modern people are constant question marks to each other. Permanent self-consciousness is the price of modern choice.
“He who never visits,” runs an African saying, “thinks his mother is the only cook.” Today’s believer does not have the excuse of such blissful ignorance, and with the wider outlook comes not only self-consciousness, but uncertainty … anxiety … doubt. We do not need to force this. Pluralization is an acid that works slowly but effectively. Modern faith is rarely as assured as it sounds, and the few remaining pockets of certainty can be driven toward defensiveness and fanaticism.
A second side effect of pluralization is that modern believers have become conversion-prone.12 Just as the traditional bedrock of faith was solid and reassuring, so the traditional turn-around of conversion was complete and lasting. Indeed, it used to grate on us when Christians claimed that conversion was
the most radical and complete transformation in life, but they were right. Reorientation to a new life, new world, new relationships and new ways of life was radical, and Christians did not see this as unreasonable: It was a once-in-a-lifetime requirement that was expected to last forever.
That has all changed. Under the impact of pluralization, faith has grown precarious, which leaves it prone to being converted—and reconverted—and reconverted. Or, as has been recently perfected in American Christian circles, “Born again, and again, and again, and again,” ad infinitum. In today’s pluralized and mobile society, the once-telling “testimony” of the great life-change is reduced to the status of a temporary visiting card, where the address is left blank to allow for constant updating.
Multiple conversions in a single life are now common, but the special conditions of periods like the 1960s step the pace up even further. The activist Jerry Rubin, for instance, was a master of spiritual “switch-craft,” who claimed to have experienced 18 different “trips” in 5 years, ranging from EST to bioenergenetics.13 Not that such fruitless exploits have any value to us. What matters is their aftertaste.
Slowly, a whole generation grows shy of commitment, embarrassed by conviction, and congenitally open to revision. For the counter-cultural type, the order of the day was “hang loose.” Today’s version is “cool,” “laid back,” and “undecided.” For the postmodern type, the passwords are “ambiguity” (never certainty), “reflection” (never revelation), and “conversation” (never conclusion). The general result is the same. The search for meaning has shrunk to finding meaning in the search. To be on the pilgrimage is the only progress. All else is yesterday’s arrogance, passing out of the reach or the desire of today’s thoughtful person who can never decide for long.