475 - Liturgies and Trials: The Secularization of Religious Language

Liturgies and Trials:
The Secularization of Religious Language
By Richard K. Fenn
New York, Pilgrim, 1982. 249 pp., $15.95.

At the outset we ought to say that although the title of this book is precise, it could be misleading. It is a book not about liturgies or worship but about language, and its author is a distinguished sociologist, not a liturgist. That said, we must next say that it is an impressive performance, a tough and rewarding book, as nice a piece of printing as I have seen in a long time, and an essay which provokes as many thoughts as it announces.

Its subject is communication: the different ways in which the church and the legal profession communicate, and what happens when the two meet. What happens, says Fenn, is Babel. He refers in some detail to several legal cases in which true conversation has broken down because of this Babel, principally the Karen Quinlan case and the Berrigan trial.

I am reminded of the sort of story they used to tell of seventeenth century Puritan dissenters on trial, in which, when asked for an address, the defendant would say things like, "Here for a season, but my conversation is in heaven." Not that the cases are quite parallel: because in the matter of Karen Quinlan and her parents, a profound and sincere religious conviction causes the witness to say what the judge as a lawyer cannot accept, while in that of the Berrigans, a positive desire to maximize the gulf between the world they walk in and the one the court walks in causes them deliberately to speak language that the court won't accept because it knows what they are doing. The Quinlans do all they can to make their point in the only language which, as religious believers, they know; the Berrigans use such language to establish their credibility and to diminish that of the court.

All this comes near the end as a sort of demonstration of the thesis which the author seeks to work out in the middle chapters. There he distinguishes between communications which are "eventful" and "uneventful" - the speech of conviction being "eventful," that of the seminar, for example, "uneventful." There is, if I have got it right, speech which proclaims and speech which seeks exactitude and precision.

Very well. Having done a good deal of what I presume to call thinking on this very subject myself, I have followed a route very different from the one this author takes. Most of the books he cites I haven't read, so I feel as if a conversation is going on of which I am not altogether a part. But of the importance both of the subject and of what Fenn has to say about it, I am in no doubt. What is quite extraordinary to me - I can't think the author hasn't noticed it-is the weird effect of so many of the

476 - Liturgies and Trials: The Secularization of Religious Language

quotations he gives, The judges in his quotations seem to have learned their English from ex-Secretary Haig, and as for certain examples of "seminar speech," they strike me as being the utterances of people whose speech-habits have been irretrievably corrupted and confused (pp. 106-7).

I am also impressed by the implied indictment both of the church (pp. 140-7) and of the law as bodies neither of which is able to put a sensible sentence together. The church appears to speak very bad poetry, and the law very bad prose. Now a sociologist, which our author is, must be an observer, and as such refrain from criticism. This isn't a book which answers the question, "What should we do about it?" It presents, with a kind of alarming and depressing honesty, what seems to be happening. There's a staggering passage (p. 188) referring to the inability of one of the Berrigan witnesses to get the judge to understand what he means by "response." I don't know how American courts work, but I surely want to keep out of them if this is normal form.

This, I say, is a tough book to read, but it should be persevered with. In my own view, nothing is more necessary in modern society than to recover a sense of the difference between those situations in which "poetry" or "proclamation" is out of place, and those in which legal or scientific precision is out of place. I am a little surprised that the author hasn't mentioned the Creationism controversy, which looks like a good example of the lack of that sense.

Since I see any speech that is here called "proclamatory" as failing within the realm of art, I would add a footnote to Fenn's phrase, "Few sermons, for instance, are interrupted for dialogue and cross-examination of the speaker." The footnote would be: "Similarly, few stringquartets," But I do not challenge him. On the contrary, I find this remarkable book an outstanding example of a measured and careful utterance set in motion by a controlled but passionate conviction. It is undoubtedly a book for preachers and teachers, and a solemn and timely warning for all who communicate without troubling to find out how they sound to others.

Erik Routley
Westminster Choir College
Princeton, N.J.