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Society and the Sacred
By Langdon Gilkey
New York, Crossroad, 1982. 170 pp. $12.95.

In this collection of "addresses and papers written over the past half decade and delivered to college and university audiences" (p. ix), the author, Professor of Theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, presents a "theology of culture" rather than a systematic theology. Given the "public" these essays are aimed at-an educated audience concerned with "common shared issues of contemporary culture, society, and history rather than with intra-ecclesiastical or theological issues" - he seeks a form of discourse wherein "religious reflection" can look at society and understand it "much as economic, sociological, or political theorists might do, and with the same shared 'object' " (p. ix). A theology of culture, then, is "an analysis of culture from a particular vantage point within religious reflection as a whole" (P. X).

How well has he succeeded? Let me evaluate Gilkey's "theology of culture" from the standpoint of a political theorist concerned with the classic questions that have engaged (most) political and (all) religious thinkers from the beginning. I have in mind such questions as: Is there some transcendent meaning and purpose in human life? If so, how is this revealed or known to us? How can human beings, on this earth, approximate or achieve the redemptive community? What is the relation of the individual to the social whole, hence of the "freedom" or "autonomy" of persons to the solidarity and order of communities? Where his approach to these questions diverges from contemporary political theory-and where political theory falls short-lies in his insistence on taking the measure of "the strange, inexorable inheritance of evil, of the career of good and evil" (p. x). Political theorists who reflect the glow of Enlightenment rationalism even to this day find it faintly embarrassing to think in terms of good and evil, for these are categories that flow from a presumably defunct discourse. One strength of his approach, then, lies in the manner in which he locates evil-hence the sacred, for one cannot have one without the other-as central in his theology of culture. Indeed he recognizes the manner in which the sacred denied erupts as the demonic affirmed, a fascinating thesis I shall turn to in a moment.

First, however, I must remark on the tone of his reflections. There is an aura of fin de siecle weariness in much of what he has to say. He recognizes, as have critical political theorists under the rubric "the crisis of legitimization," that the scientific, rationalist project of the Enlighten-

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ment has folded in upon itself. The societies wrought by that project, particularly our own, and the culture of productivity and consumption it spawned, can no longer "deliver the goods." We have lost faith in a progressivist theology and the control over nature and human nature it promised. Embracing wholesale the scientific faith, Western thought and culture, including Marx and Marxism, put its money on the capacity of human productive powers, ostensibly in tune with the deep working of social laws, to continuously transform human life in a way that would put the gods to shame. Now, in the wake of this development, we face terrifying threats to the environment. In the author's apocalyptic phrase, our culture seems "utterly menacing." We have gotten what we claimed to want and we find it-in many ways-horrific. Though he somewhat overstates his case against the theory and practice of technocratic rationality and faith in progress, he seems to me essentially correct. He has tapped the root of our collective discontent.

But there is more to the story than the dangers we face from technocratic rationalism run amuck. Here I turn to that "fascinating thesis" promised above. Gilkey suggests, as I see it, a "repressive hypothesis" as a central explanatory category within his over-all perspective. His is not that theory of repression which derives from psychoanalytic discourse but a different "return of the repressed." He suggests that to the extent that religious drives, impulses, or yearnings for the sacred cannot be expressed or are considered illegitimate within a culture, to that same extent they are likely to resurface in bizarre and destructive forms. "If the social world is bereft of all genuine, creative, and religious substance, new demons will rush in and take over, tramping under academic, philosopher of religion, and meditator together! For as we have seen, society is religious, its politics are sacral, and left without religious criticism and concern, it can well become demonic" (p. 25).

In the past several centuries, sacralism denied has re-emerged as Marxist or capitalist ideologies, both having claims to "ultimacy," both requiring faith, both implicating the believer in a ritual mythology, and both decked out in the mantle of science that promises (earthly) transcendence. The case of Nazi Germany shows that religious and mythic rites and obligations will be there "in any case in every culture, in creative or demonic form, providing the ultimate principles guiding the culture's scientific, technical, and political life" (p. 118).

More recently one finds "the reappearance of the religious in new, often creative, and yet also potentially demonic forms" (p. 107). One word-Jonestown-highlights the demonic possibilities of this return of the religiously repressed. He would also slot what he calls modern "self-absorption" into the category, for much of the current obsession with self is an attempt to find the peace that passes understanding, to secure some safe haven amidst the hustle and bustle of life geared along impersonal, technocratic lines, whether one is a "manager" or a human cog in the machine. He is more tolerant than I could be toward much of

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this flailing about that bears a "sacral" character or quality. For it strikes me that a rather rotten bargain has been struck; it is one Gilkey recognizes but chooses not to emphasize.

The deal is that "religion" as some form of private expressivism can coexist quite tidily "alongside the technical and the rational" (p. 109). From this he concludes that such "religion" makes a "servant" of "the technical and the theoretical." I think, however, it is just the other way around: the way of life wrought by our technocratic culture can proceed unchallenged as atomized individuals seek private ways to "find" themselves. A culture such as our own can allow a very wide berth to quasi- or simply off-beat religious outpourings precisely because they offer a "safety valve" that permits business as usual to proceed. In this matter I am more pessimistic than Gilkey.

And I find I part company with the author on another critical matter. There is no set of questions more important for the political theorist than those involving the relation between individual and community. Because I believe his final chapter, a paeon to Maoism and modern China, signifies a deformation in this theology of culture, it is necessary for me to conjure with the individual-social nexus for a moment in order to clarify our differences.

Gilkey's argument begins with the presumption that we cannot separate "individual-social." In many ways this is trivially true. In others it is more profoundly the case and what he has in mind is the fact that we are who we are only because we have been formed as "individuals" in a social world of a particular kind. We can no more wrench ourselves out of this social matrix and emerge full-blown from the head of John Locke and the social contract theorists than we can revise the law of gravity. But what conclusions does one draw from the intimate nexus between individual-social?

Minimally, if he and others who see us as beings nurtured within communities and becoming persons only in this way are right, and I believe they are, it means the atomistic theory of the individual derived from seventeenth century social contract theory is deeply flawed, if not dead wrong. If atomism and the possessive individualism it spawned is out, what are the alternatives? One alternative, and I cannot here develop it but it would be my option, is to see the deep, necessary sociality of our human being but refuse to be assimilated as particular beings to the social whole so that our autonomy is submerged or threatened. Another alternative, and it is the one toward which Gilkey's analysis pushes, is a kind of organicism. Accepting, with Gilkey, the interdependence of the individual and the social community, I do not go on to conclude, as he does, that we must work to overcome every conflict between the individual and the social. For example, he wants to heal the split between "Christianity as committed, personal concentration on sin, grace, reconciliation and, on the other, concentration on outer, social political liberation within the institutions of society" (p. 42).

This gives me pause. Perhaps tensions between the individual and the

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social are necessary. Perhaps the "full integration" of religious and moral forces into "our common political life" will slide into the idolatry of presuming we have attained heaven on earth, or nearly so, and we will mean-spiritedly trivialize the individual's search for grace. Perhaps. But it seems to me this outcome is likely within the author's world. The urgency in his argument is that one must fully accept the sacral nature of the political world-for it will be there anyway-and in so doing seek a kind of historic redemption, a redeemed social order as well as redeemed individuals. "For we have seen that there cannot be the one without the other" (p. 55). Surely, however, this is not so. I think of the luminescent life of Dorothy Day within a social order that never came close to her redemptive ideal. Yet she surely found and exemplified a life of grace and reconciliation.

The danger in embracing wholly St. Paul's "the powers that be are ordained of God" as an astute recognition of the sacral foundation for "social norms, and economic and political structures" is the danger of creating what I can only call a massive ' secular idolatry. In this idolatrous order, history may be declared redeemed but individuals may well be lost. Absorbed within the social order totally, we would lose the spark and flame of self. That dimension of the sacral gets denied. The author's celebration of Maoism is a case in point. In some ways, I find his discussion baffling. Yet it does make sense given his critique-one I share-of the destructive atornization and deracination of the Western world.

He asks us to consider the moral reality of present China where a "dynamic living culture" has replaced an "out of date" Western/ Christian synthesis. Why is this so good? Because, he argues, American culture is "desperately weak, yes even morally so, on the communal side. The embeddedness of the individual in his or her responsibility to the community, the ineradicability and value of relations and their obligations, the priority, therefore of community obligations over obligations to the self, the absolute importance of the category of the 'common good' as a balance to that of the person-all of these communal emphases are peculiarly oriental, as the Confucian tradition in both China and Japan witness" (p. 145). This is a curious passage. First, it is palpably untrue that the category "common good" is "peculiarly oriental." This theme is traceable from Aristotle through Christian social theory to the theorists of democratic community and into present communalist and populist argumentation. All one need do is read John XXIII's "Mater et Magistra" or John Paul II's "Laborem Exercens" to find a theory of the common good powerfully stated as an alternative to the consumerist West and the state socialist East.

Be that as it may, Gilkey sees this communal good alive and well in its modern, progressive, and creative form in Maoist thought and in the reality of the new life of China: in the principles of the Mass Line" and in the "identity of the substance of China with the whole people of China" (p. 145). For him, this constitutes the reintegration of individual

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to community. For me it is the playing out of a repressively enforced consensus that has run roughshod in often tragic and despicable ways over individual "goods," being, and identity. Whether one looks to those musicians and teachers and artists demeaned, tortured, imprisoned, and denied their self identities during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution or to those visibly pregnant Chinese women who are at this moment, in some cases, hauled off the streets for forced abortions or put through a public shaming process to "re-educate" them so that they "choose" abortion for themselves, this reintegration has been bought at a terrible price.

Somehow he glosses over mountains of evidence concerning the repressiveness of the Chinese order and speaks of a "genuine covenant, a monument to Mao's genius" (p. 148). 1 am quite willing to grant Mao's political genius, but did the Chinese people really covenant for the order they now live within? The author finds, in contemporary China "a sense of transcendence that is able, to a remarkable degree, to be critical, and permanently critical, of each of the polarities of socialism in process" (p. 150). But who gets to be critical and of what? Recent books on China detail the taut structure, the policing and self-policing down to the micro-level that is part and parcel of this order. Perhaps then, Western stress on the individual isn't wholly defunct. Certainly the idea of "inalienable rights" takes on a liberating and redemptive force when one confronts the leviathan of a secular organicism. What he finds sacred about China I construe as sacrilegious.

These are weighty matters. I have concentrated on some portions of the book to the exclusion of others, focusing on those most intriguing to me as a political theorist. I commend the book as a provocative attempt on the part of a thinker who cares deeply about the human condition to re-cognize our rather mordant contemporary realities.

Jean Bethke Elshtain
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts