535 - Religion by Cliche

Religion by Cliche
By Leonard I. Sweet

EACH AGE must compose hymns in accordance with its own traditions and theologies. So said Martin Luther. So said John and Charles Wesley. So says the Hymn Society of America. Why then are hymns that capture the imagination of Christian faith in the late twentieth century not being written? This question dominated the 1977 annual meeting of the Society, during which the featured speaker, Professor Peter Gomes of Harvard, tried to suggest a plausible cause. "Ours is not an age of hymnody," he observed, because we are "victims of the age of prose."¹ Gomes is right but only partially, for ours is not the age of prose either. It is the age of cliche. Poetry turns to prose and then to cliche. The nobility of poetry, once democratized into prose, is quickly abbreviated into cliche.

The social function and historical significance of cliches, graffiti, tracts, and other techniques of mass communication have for a long time eluded the attention of the scholarly community. Recently, however, the eminent historian Thomas A. Bailey has forayed into popular culture. His Voices of America (1977) is a pioneer and provocative study of slogans, songs, and epigrams in American history.² Such plebeian channels of communication in a unique way both mold and mobilize the aspirations, anxieties, and attitudes of masses of Americans. As Frank Trippet observes in a Time essay on "Slogan Power! Slogan Power!"-"the slogan lurks as a sort of floating hook on the psyche. Properly tugged, it can impel people to coalesce, to divide, to fight, to sacrifice, to vote, to buy."³ Unfortunately, Bailey concentrates on political slogans, western songs, and patriotic sayings, leaving largely unscrutinized religious sources which promise to be equally illuminating. The thrill of discovering mass religious ideologies awaits the historian willing to pick up where Bailey left off.

Leonard I. Sweet is the minister of the United Methodist Church, Geneseo, N.Y. He also serves as Adjunct Associate Professor at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer, and as a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY. In line with contemporary orthography, we have omitted the accent on cliche throughout the article.

¹ The Christian Century, XCIV (July, 6-13, 1977), 614-15. Actually, contemporary hymns, defined as songs "expressive of praise, adoration, or elevated emotion" (Funk and Wagnalls) abound in our society. They are just not found in church. The popular creeds of materialism, eudaemonism, and environmentalism are well represented in theological ditties by Kiss, Bay City Rollers, etc., and a few of these secularized hymns (especially those by Simon and Garfunkel and the Carpenters) have gained admittance behind stained-glass windows.
² Thomas A. Bailey, with the assistance of Stephen M. Dobbs, voices of America: The Nation's Story in Slogans, Sayings, and Songs (New York: Free Press, 1976), pp. viii, 520.
³ Time, February 12, 1979, 102.

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Let me advance a simple thesis: the dominant religion of many Americans professing religious belief today is a religion by cliche or a cliche faith. What is so disturbing about this state of affairs is not the presence of cliches in the household of faith, for their place must be seen as inevitable if the integrity of mass religious experiences is to be respected. Rather, the purveyors of popular religion have disseminated a patois void of sound theological content, allowing Christian minds to idle in neutral, ungeared for the unnerving, grueling challenges of life that await the Samaritan adventurer on the modern freeway where the turns are sharp and hidden, the pace is fast and frenzied, the directions unclear. If it is true, as Billy Graham remarked in an interview with David Frost on a British TV show, that "the average American has the intelligence of a twelve-year old, religiously," then the solution is only partly "to speak to everyone in a sense as though they are children." When each sermon becomes a children's sermon, the taste for spiritual junk food expands until faith is a lollipop and theology a Twinkie.⁴ Childhood Christians spend their lives spinning wheels at the starting gate, the rubber never hitting the road. Cliches have their place, but it is only a provisional, subservient place. To adapt communication to popular tastes is not a despicable enterprise. But contempt is appropriate when efforts at improvement are relinquished. Or to express it less soberly, to cliche is human; to theologize, divine.

I

A cliche is the formulization of an idea, the breakdown of thought into a mass consumable substance which is easily remembered and repeated. That substance may be a phrase, or it may be a gesture, a pattern or design, or perhaps even an entire narrative. For example, while cliches in contemporary conservative circles appear most often verbal and vertical, liberal cliches seem more physical and horizontal witness the number of huggers, kissers, and hand-claspers.⁵ Since cliche religion seems to be driving away mature piety, some telling suggestions have been made that would declare a moratorium on all cliches for a while. To do so, however, would be to impose a moratorium on all forms of mass communication. The theological notion of the priesthood of all believers necessitates translation of the abstract language and abstruse phraseology of theology into the vernacular, a language of little refinement, elegance, and sophistication to be sure, but a language which represents the efforts of the masses to understand what is happening to them and what is threatening them.

The enormity and peril of the undertaking should not elude our attention. Nor should it excuse our inactivity. The endeavor of trying to

⁴ See Dennis O'Brien's discussion of philosophy in "Logic and Lollipops," Commonweal, 105 (March 31, 1978), 207-10.
⁵ What cliches modern liberalism has embraced have most often been cliches of works rather than words. A study of the liberal means of popularizing the gospel through marches, demonstrations, petitions, meetings, and other non-verbal activities would illuminate much of the character of liberalism.

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convince theologians to stop talking to one another for a moment and communicate with Main Street is in itself a mission of great difficulty. Then not only must Christian apologists vie in an already crowded marketplace where approximately thirty-five percent of the Gross National Product involves idea creation and mass tuition. They also must contend with the discouraging fact that in the past the claims of materialism, secularism, determinism, consumerism, and other "isms" have been more authentically communicated than the claims of Christ. The Christian religion has become a form of "cheap grace" without the grace becoming cheap, at least in the sense that we expect good bread to be cheap without it being "cheap bread" (that, is, diluted with artificial ingredients and preservatives).

The fact that grace is no longer cheap and accessible is illustrated by David G. Sharp's story of Cliff College students in England who, as they worked as missionary interns with youth, discovered that the hit-song "Amazing Grace" was unintelligible to them because they assumed that "Grace" was a girl's name.⁶ For many people elementary theological terms comprise a foreign language, a tower of unedifying babel. For many others who are somewhat versed in God-talk, theology matters very little, as revealed in the fact that theological beliefs register last in a list of factors important in church selection.

My plea is for a simplicity on the other side of complexity, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes would put it. My perception is of a stick-figure simplicity on this side of complexity. Cliches, epithets, and catchwords, once expressive and reflective of theology, have become less derivative and more determinative; less illustrative and more definitive. Rather than contemporary religious values and theological insights patterning cliches in their images, cliches are fashioning religious thought and experience into a greeting-card theology of milkish sentimentality and swanky frivolity.

The wholesale substitution among Christian constituents of painless cliches for toilsome content and first-hand conceptualizations is so prevalent as to be deemed predominant. In short, Christians don't seem to be thinking any more. They are out encountering "where you're at" in group gropes; or they're getting drenched from pentecostal downpours of the Spirit; or they're legging it for the Lord in committee donkey-work; or they're jogging for Jesus to raise enough money to pay public relations firms busy designing ingenious ways to find out if you've found it and to universalize daily horoscopes with the prediction "something good is going to happen to you."

Amid all the beneficent restlessness where is there an intelligent attendance at public worship? Where are the theologizing segments of the Christian community whose spiritual reading is not limited to the do-good theologies of Reader's Digest and Ann Landers? Where are the Christians who refrain from taking their cues from newspapers and

⁶ As related by David G. Sharp in No Stained-Glass-Window Saints (London: Epworth Press, 1976), 84.

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other sources to whom everyone else looks for guidance? Who's constructing the theological scaffolding for the enterprise of building the kingdom?

II

Of course, to say that Christians aren't thinking any more is to say that at some time at least some Christians did think. In an age of theological idleness and indifference, this seems surprising, especially to a "nation of behavers." Accustomed to a retreat from reason in culture and a "final fling" mentality in economics, theological acedia and stagnation contrast sharply with the clearer thinking and more rigid discrimination that characterized both pulpit and pew in some earlier periods.

At some points in the past people actually found theology interesting. Colonial America witnessed many theological colloquiums between the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth settlements. In eighteenth-century New England, Harriet Beecher Stowe noted that "every man, woman, and child was more or less a theologian," a phenomenon she described more fully in her chapter entitled "Theological Tea" in The Minister's Wooing (1859).⁷ One of the most popular entertainments in the West, ranking almost up there with Indian fighting, were garnish debates among clergy of different denominations. A robust spirit of friendly competition characterized this early spectator sport, as frontier settlers of limited literacy learned to find their way through the maze of controversy over baptism versus paedobaptism, free grace versus predestination, and backsliding versus eternal security.⁸ Hundreds of people travelled hundreds of miles to Cincinnati in 1827 to attend a theological debate between Alexander Campbell and Robert Owen on abstruse issues of doctrine.⁹ Lengthy sermons of elaborate doctrinal intricacy requiring an equal amount of lay theological sophistication and physical stamina were customary at least until Charles G. Finney. Whether or not the heavy theological content of sermons was understood or merely tolerated by church members remains problematic. It is interesting, however, that Whitney Cross discovered in The Burned Over District a "considerable portion even of laymen [who] read and relished the theological treatises...and took pride in the ability to thresh things out for themselves."¹⁰

The lasting effect of the nineteenth-century democratization of knowledge, however, was paradoxical. Theology either became more

⁷ Harriet Beecher Stowe, "New England Ministers," The Atlantic Monthly, I (February 1858), 487.
⁸ Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974).
⁹ Alexander Campbell and Robert Owen, Debate on the Evidences of Christianity … (Bethany, Virginia: A. Campbell, 1829).
¹⁰ Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1960), 109.

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mundane or more arcane, with an increasing simplification on the one hand and an accelerating specialization on the other. Secularization of life (especially education) put theological understanding out of the minds of many, just as the knowledge explosion put it out of the reach of many. After all, who but the professionals can keep up with the pace of knowledge when fifty thousand scientific journals alone were publishing some two million articles a year by the mid 1900s-some forty thousand articles a week?

The professionalization of theology proceeded in two stages: first, within the circle of clergy from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, and then, within the circle of the teachers of the clergy from the 1930s to the present. In the early 1900s ministers were accused of knowing too much of what John Calvin thought and too little of what John L. Lewis was thinking.

Today a case could be made for clergy knowing too much of what Ralph Nader is thinking and too little of what Reinhold Niebuhr thought. The shy disclaimer of the efficiency-minded ministers of the 1930s "I'm no theologian; I'm just a parson!"¹¹ has exhibited remarkable endurance into the late 1970s, when a poll conducted for the National Council of Churches revealed that over two-thirds of the responding ministers were unfamiliar with the term "liberation theology."¹² Perhaps subconsciously both laity and clergy have heeded psychiatrist William H. Sheldon's warning that theology is not for minors---only for people over fifty.¹³ Theology has deserted the laity in part because the clergy have deserted theology.

III

A theology-less religion, which has characterized popular Protestantism in the twentieth century, owes its existence to other cultural factors besides clerical negligence. For one thing, as Ivan Illich has observed, children who have grown up in front of TV screens have consumed barren, programmed language until human encounters become exchanges of canned dialogue. Primary expressions exploring personal feelings and thought have become a casualty of the pervasive impact of secondary speech packaged by the modern media. Reflex and rote have replaced research and reflection. What this means is that, ironically,

¹¹ Edwin Ewart Aubrey attacks this sentiment in chapter two of his book, Living the Christian Faith (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 27-56. The theme of this study by a University of Chicago Professor of Christian Theology is especially germane to our focus: "This is the source of the vitality of the Christian faith," he writes on p. x, "that it is worked out in terms of the problems of laymen, and finds its test in its usefulness to them." And again on p. 16, "when theology deserts the laity it cuts itself off from the raw materials on which it must live."
¹² The Christian Century, XCIV (July 20-27, 1977), 648-49.
¹³ See William H. Sheldon, Psychology and the Promethean Will (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), 205 and especially 1 16: "Theology is the end product of a life of religious thought. If an agreement could be reached among all the religious teachers that no person under sixty be permitted to teach or lend the authority of his approval to a dogmatic theology, and then only in the presence of and for the benefit of persons past fifty, the perplexities of religion might be greatly alleviated."

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Americans may be reading or seeing more than ever before, but thinking less. Dependence on the printed page, for example, at the expense of original reflection itself adds to intellectual indolence.

William Penn advised his children,

Have but few books…. [for] reading too many books is but taking off the mind too much from meditation. Reading yourselves and nature, in the dealings and conduct of men is the truest human wisdom. A spirit of a man knows the things of man, and more true knowledge comes by meditation and just reflection than by reading; for much reading is an expression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.¹⁴

The smothering of originality and creativity by reading dependencies was illustrated in reverse by the tribute given Abraham Lincoln by his law partner: "I have never known a man who read less or thought more." The life of the mind does not consist merely in the extent of its bibliography.

To the dependency on secondary reading at the expense of primary reflection Friedrich Nietzsche added the indictment that Christian scholars and teachers had spread the art of reading badly.¹⁵ Entranced by the imperious influence of electronic tranquilizers, Christians have gone one step further and spread the art of thinking badly. We examine our faith seldom. But when we do think about God, it is with an imaginative dullness and undisciplined intellect of embarrassing proportions. Slogans tryannize over substance; rhetoric reigns over reason; bromides replace brainwork; cliches determine content; truth is reduced to truism, and the fashions of feeling force into cold storage the rigors of rationality.

Karl Barth, following St. Anselm's advice defined theology as "faith seeking understanding." We would have to define it today as "faith seeking feeling." Whereas Teilhard de Chardin would cry out, "O God, you knead me," today we cry out, "O God, you make me feel good." Whereas Peter expected Christian testimony to give "reason for the hope that is in you"(1 Peter 3:15), Christian witness most often today is to the feeling or experience that validates the hope that is in us. As Christopher Lasch points out in The Culture of Narcissism (1978), we have become as intellectually lightweight as we are emotionally muscle bound.

Religious beliefs we may entertain that are not based on feeling are all too often also not based on the systematic study of Scripture, traditions, nature, or experience. Rather, cliches legitimize faith. In the past, of course, Christians had a narrower framework from which to think-all of life was conceptualized within the theologic ambience. A sincere Christian today must also contend with natural history, psychol-

¹⁴ William Penn's Advice to His Children (Philadelphia: Friends Council on Education, 1944), 38.
¹⁵ Friedrich Nietzsche, Dawn of Day in Oscar Levy, ed., The Complete Works Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), IX, 67.

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ogy, sociology, and a host of other conflicting "ologies." The truth is more elusive, so cliches are easier and less strenuous. Like Voltaire's Candide, who advised other pilgrims "travaillons sans raisonner" (let us work without thinking), we shift our minds into neutral and are pushed about by every billboard or bumper sticker that passes by. And unlike Bunyan's Christian, who allowed the rugged pilgrimage of life to exercise the sinews of the mind, we have sought alibis for theological immaturity in the strain of the journey and have permitted intellection to become so arthritic that it limbered when biblical illiteracy (recall the uproar over Jimmy Carter's quoting Proverbs 23:7 and Matthew 5:28) leads willy-nilly into theological imbecility.

IV

Yet, cliches we shall always have with us. It is part of human nature to stumble and mumble over the verses of a hymn while bellowing forth the chorus. Furthermore, cliches perform some positive, if hidden functions in religious discourse. First, they represent a groping for fresh ways of stating old truths and embody a feeble awareness of the need to find creative ways of appealing to our sources so that the Bible, Christian tradition, and theology might come alive. Second, a cliche is not untrue for being wellworn, trite, or predictable. Indeed, the very element of predictability may perform an indispensable social function in an unpredictable world where authorities change their advice and argot as often as they change their calendars. Perhaps cliches should even be classified as a part of "phantic speech"-words that serve as social cement, binding people together in brief moments of intimacy and understanding. Verbal gestures that become "greasy" from over-use and excessive fingering may in fact help to lubricate a creaky, contentious church into functioning more smoothly as the body of Christ. Third, cliches exhibit a sparingness of speech, thereby standing as a witness to a world which fills with chatter every corner into which silence might creep. The best cliches have what may be called a "stunning" effect-they are able to stop perpetual communication and sting the mind into an exploration of forgotten assumptions. At a time of verbal overload and word pollution, the amazing economy of speech revealed in cliches gets our word-resistant attentiveness. Finally, it is helpful to remember that these mots are in fact a somewhat humorous, or comic, approach to truth. The history of the church abounds in ample displays of homo ludens and the need for non-ratiocination in religion-consider for example the medieval feast of fools. Except for misogelasts, the comic, playful elements in religion can become hormones that trigger the issuance of great joy and juice from the spiritual life. "Be merry," Aristotle counseled, "that you may be serious."

If cliches are thus inevitable and even somewhat beneficial, it devolves upon each generation to revise old ones, devise new ones, and impose a critical posture on all of them. Cliches belong to the people,

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their situations are its subjects, and cliches are most fresh, suggestive, and puissant when theologians assist laity in the development of their own authentic religious language. This is rule #1 in the fashioning of cliches expressive of spiritual insight: encourage their emergence out of the interpersonal matrix of thoughts and emotions experienced by the ordinary believer. This has been the secret of the authors of great devotional classics which have appealed to people of diverse aesthetic sensiblities-Martin Luther, John Bunyan, John Wesley, Thomas á Kempis, C. S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is even possible, as G.R. Evans has shown in his book on Anselm and Talking About God, to write theology with precision and integrity without the sacrifice of simplicity and clarity.¹⁶ "When the plain truth is in question," wrote Franz Kafka, "great minds discard the niceties of refinement."¹⁷ At least Jesus did.

Rule #2 is, among physicians, the first rule of healing: do not harm, or as is more appropriate to the subject of popular religion, do as little harm as possible. As A.J. Ayer has noted, "If our aim is never to succumb to falsehood, it would be prudent for us to abstain from using language altogether."¹⁸ Evangelistic cliches which do the least harm are those which direct and conduct us toward the mighty, mysterious workings of God-a criterion which would eliminate much undignified bumper sticker evangelism and faddish sermon titles like "Humility is Cool," "Grace is Groovy," or "Hope is Hip." Devotional cliches which sometimes are all we have to support us when reason becomes fugitive during moments of despair, dread, and death, do the least damage when they serve as vestibules which prepare for entrance into greater chambers of truth.

Rule #3 is that cliches must be made more like graffiti, which is as new and fresh as the periodic coat of paint, and less like gravestone markings which are etched for eternity. Cliches have a standstill, predicitable quality about them, not only because the repetition of familiar phrases is metronornically soothing, but also because they become embedded in associations with critical moments in life-bedside prayers during childhood, condolences at death, encouragement during suffering.

While some cliches may be ancient, they may not be anachronistic. Christine Miller, that lonely, desperate, heroic voice pleading for sanity amid the final moments of messianic madness at Jonestown, breathed new life into a shop-worn cliche for me when she stood up and protested the sacrament of suicide with "I feel that as long as there's life, there's hope" (variously attributed to Terence, Cicero, John Gay). I also think of "To err is human, to forgive divine" (Alexander Pope); "You can't win them all;" "God has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet;"

¹⁶ G.R. Evans, Anselm and Talking About God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).
¹⁷ Quoted by Robert Short, Something to Believe In (New York: & Row, 1978), 10, who calls this "Kafka's Law."
¹⁸ A.J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (London: St. Martins Press 1956), 52.

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"Do what you can and then pray that God will give you the power to do what you cannot;" the Indian chief's prayer, "Don't let me criticize another until I have walked one day in that person's moccasins;" "Pray not for tasks equal to your powers, but powers equal to your tasks" (Phillips Brooks); and Lyman Beecher's "The church is not a heaven where the spirits of the just are made perfect, but a spiritual hospital," which today has been shortened to "The church is not a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners." Perhaps Karl Barth suggested the most enduring of all cliches, one that is especially pertinent to moments when the vagaries of life drive away understanding: "Jesus loves me this I know."

The church has forfeited its nurturing function by the refusal of its leaders to challenge stale, fraudulent, and misleading cliches and to substitute cliches that can speak to the gamut of human needs with equal "emotive efficacy," as Henry Nelson Wieman termed it.¹⁹ A few contemporary cliches and graffiti suggestive of gospel insight might include, "It takes both rain and sunshine to make a rainbow," "The just must live more simply that others may simply live," "Please be patient, God isn't finished with me yet," "What you are is God's gift to you-what you make of yourself is your gift to God," " People cannot discover new oceans unless they have the courage to lose sight of the shore," "You have to make your own sunshine," "The ground is level at the foot of the cross," "Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life."

Dr. Samuel Johnson once recommended to his biographer James Boswell: "Clear your mind of cant." Clearing the mind of cant does not mean, necessarily, clearing the mind of cliches. What it does mean is a process of "cleaning up the Christian vocabulary,"²⁰ as Vernard Eller puts it, in which we do not become so captivated by cliches that they push us around, rather than our sources pushing them around.

For Christians are known by the cliches they keep.

¹⁹ Henry Nelson Wiernan, "On Using Christian Words," The Journal of Religion, XX (July 1940), 266.
²⁰ Vernard Eller, Cleaning Up the Christian Vocabulary (Elgin, Illinois: The Brethren Press, 1976).