320 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

The Secular Search For Religious Experience
By Harvey G. Cox

"Our culture is now struggling to escape both nihilism and cynicism. . . . To do so, however, we will require a new type of religious sensibility. That sensibility must contribute to the search for style and vision. It must allow us to combine critical awareness and religious immediacy, sophistication and ecstasy. . . . The new religious sensibility I refer to is the comic élan, the spirit of festivity and fantasy which one finds at the creative edges of the churches and in the religious underground."

DESPITE numberless dark predictions, religion has not disappeared from the modern world. Though it often persists in unconventional forms and appears in unlikely guises, the search for what was once called "religious experience" goes on even in the most secular of cities. The reason the forecasters have been proven wrong is that they have defined religion too narrowly or understood its function too shallowly. Religion, broadly conceived, has a wider influence and a deeper location in human life than most observers have realized. Therefore secular man's quest for religious experience cannot be separated from his search for what appears to be the wholly secular goals of personal style and political vision.

I

Is Christianity ready to respond to this new form of an old quest? In each succeeding historical period the life of faith faces peculiar challenges and makes distinctive contributions. True, there are analogies and continuities between the problems which Christianity faces today and those it confronted in the time of Augustine, Aquinas,

Harvey G. Cox is Professor of Christian Thought, the Divinity School, Harvard University. He is the author of The Secular City (1965) and On Not Leaving It to the Snake (1967).

321 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

or Kierkegaard. But there are novel difficulties today as well. Also, the contribution Christianity made to the enrichment of previous eras may not be the most distinctive contribution it has to make today. It remains true, however, that faith and culture in any given period share certain characteristic marks of their age. This means it is never possible to discuss the state of religion in a period, our own included, without at the same time dealing in some way with the focal concerns of the culture.

It is hardly accidental, for example, that in our own period vigorous discussions about "mass society," the urban crisis, and identity diffusion alternate with explorations of secularization, the "death of God," and the crisis of faith. Faith is never a disembodied wraith. It arises within a particular constellation of social scaffolding and cultural imagery. It nourishes and in turn is fed by the peculiar sensibilities of an age. It is not only justifiable, therefore, to put theological concerns within the context of a discussion of the central issues of the culture. There is really no other useful way to do so.

In our own period, the closing decades of the twentieth century, the issues to which faith is most closely related are those of political vision and personal style. These concerns themselves are hardly new. The first recalls man's perennial quest for a sustaining community, the second his tireless search for a significant life as a person. These concerns have occupied human beings since the appearance of homo sapiens. In our own time, however, the questions of corporate community and individual meaning have assumed a particular form, and it is with this peculiarly contemporary form of an age-old dilemma that the matter of faith is bound up.

In brief, we wish to argue that the pursuit of personal style today can best be understood and enriched through a rediscovered theology of experience which understands the self as a center of generative innovation. The recuperation of man's frazzled capacity for political vision, on the other hand, will be facilitated only by a rebirth of eschatology, by a convincingly contemporary theology of hope. It will be argued further that these two focal concerns of the age are on the individual and communal levels, and that their respective religious correlates are personal faith and corporate hope. Their point of convergence has become the starting point for most theology today-the place of man in history and cosmos.

322 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

Are there resources in the current theological arena to deal with these coalesced concerns of faith and society? I will argue that there are. Despite some suggestions that ours is a period of theological poverty and religious ruination, I want to suggest that the three best known and most vigorous movements in theology today seem almost providentially prepared to contribute to a solution of these problems.

The three movements I refer to are, first, the widely discussed "radical theology" movement, especially in its focus on experience and in its recent emphasis on human creativity and the need for the imaginative transcription of symbols. The second is the "theology of hope" trend stemming mainly from the younger Protestant and Catholic thinkers in Europe, but already winning wide support in America. Third is the so-called "secularization theology" with its interest in grasping the meaning of sociocultural realities and uncovering within them their implicit theological dimensions. Together, these three movements can contribute not only a fresh understanding of the person and a new vision of our corporate future, but also a way of testing, utilizing, and refining the assets of the current secular sensibility.

II

During most periods in the past, man's search for community has focused on how to construct a viable polity, how to legitimate its authorities, and how to consolidate individuals into its institutions. In most cases, religion served this enterprise by providing a metaphysical justification for the civilization (the "orders of creation") and by relating existing earthly authorities to eternal heavenly ones. The tribal shaman told satisfying stories that explained why the chief had such awful power-and both chief and child believed them. Popes crowned emperors. Christians prayed for the Queen or the President.

The important role of religion in helping man build community out of chaos should not be lightly criticized even though the job was often done so thoroughly that the person was eclipsed by the tribe. One must come to be in a community before one strives to be a person as such. So, although justifiable complaints are raised today about Christianity's historical complicity in maintaining different sorts of status quo, the fact is that the church's role in fashioning a new civilizational order after the dissolution of the Roman Empire

323 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

was probably a necessary and indeed an impressive achievement. The fact that the political task of Christianity now must be a different one does not diminish the stature of that colossal achievement.

Today in marked contrast to the crisis of the fourth and fifth centuries, however, the political mandate we face is not one of legitimizing stability but of facilitating orderly change. The sheer size and unimaginable complexity of technological societies produces a weight of order which many observers describe with terms like "elephantine overorganization" and bureaucratic inertia. Though competent observers differ on whether industrial societies conspire to concentrate power in the hands of the few or to diffuse it into self-canceling veto groups, most individuals do feel powerless and puzzled about how to change anything. The levers of change seem hidden, inaccessible, or stuck.

Yet, paradoxically, change seems to roar on at an accelerated rate. Buildings disappear and new ones rise. Public personalities come and go. New products and practices pop up with baffling rapidity. Fads flare and fizzle overnight. Yet the frightening thing is that change seems largely unplanned and unguided. Things we value are swept aside, and things we would like to get rid of stubbornly hold on. What seems to be lacking is a compelling vision of human community, a vibrant and viable political goal which can both induce social change and guide its course. Our age seems singularly devoid of social dreamers and political visionaries. It is suffering from what some have called the "failure of political imagination." Because human society is interrelated, however, this failure is not only political. It is a religious infirmity as well.

Christianity has not always blessed the existing order. Its history includes not only the popes who crowned emperors. It also includes its share of rebels and revolutionaries-St. Francis, Jan Huss, Thomas Müntzer, and Camilio Torres. Though this part of Christian history is sometimes swept under the rug by official church historians, it is still there and has a particular relevance for our period. In fact, because it speaks more eloquently to the cultural and religious conditions of our time, we may witness a rebirth of the visionary tradition in Christianity. Historically this spirit has often been born by sectarian and chiliast groups, sometimes in bizarre and even self-defeating ways. Theologically the challenge of political vision is related to eschatology, and the need to come to grips with it has re-

324 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

sulted quite recently in an impressive re-emergence of a "theology of hope." A rekindling of the capacity for political fantasy and the recovery of a viable eschatology are two sides of the same coin.

III

The anxious questions we raise today about the survival of the person are also closely related to the questions we raise about religious faith. But again the challenge we face is a somewhat different one. just as religion has generally been more concerned with stability than with social innovation, so has it usually been more concerned to relate man to a whole than to differentiate him as a self. It has facilitated incorporation more than individuation. To believe was to become a part of the church. Baptism grafted the individual onto the body. The process was dramatized in the joining of a religious order. The novitiate discarded the personal clothes and practices of his former life to find communion in the identical garb and common schedule of the order.

Again it is sometimes too easy for us to derogate the often self-obliterating quest for ordered fellowship which has motivated so many people in the past and which continues to do so today. Living as we do in the methodical organizations and rationalized routines of today, we only rarely catch a glimpse of the awful anarchy which lurked so near the medieval psyche or the brutal individual fiat which reigned before bureaucratic procedures regularized so much person to person contact. Today, however, we seem psychically oppressed by these impersonal procedures. We want to receive "due process" of course, just as everyone else does, yet we also want to be seen "as a person." Stamped with a selective service number, a social security number, a checking account number, a phone number, we begin to wonder how we can assert our own non-arithmetic singularity, how we can understand and present ourselves as unique and unduplicable persons.

Certainly much of the current literature about conformity, "mass man," and the erosion of personal identity is grossly exaggerated. Much of it assumes a cozy but inaccurate picture of a past which was supposed to be more personal, but wasn't. Still, the widespread discussion of the subject is a symptom of the fact that people do yearn for a distinguishable personal style and have not been able to find it. Fifty years ago industrial workers organized and struck because

325 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

managers were picking them off one by one, dealing with them as individuals. They demanded to be dealt with collectively. Now employees and students complain that they are treated as types or as a group. They want to be seen as persons. The fact that most people have a better chance of attaining a personal style than they did in the past does not deter them from complaining that they haven't yet achieved it. Thus the literature protesting "conformity" may say more about the higher degree of individuation we expect for ourselves than it does about the society in which the quest proceeds.

The search for a personal style is of a piece with what in religious terms we would call the quest for a way of life, a pattern of beliefs and values, a "faith of my own." Many of the same helps and hindrances apply to both. An ordinary resident of Christendom in the twelfth century would undoubtedly have been deeply puzzled if someone had asked him about his "personal faith." His was the faith of his neighbors, his town, his world. It was his faith, to be sure, but it was his in a far less critical and less conscious way than is the modern man's faith or lack of it. The question of personal style and the desire for a "faith of my own" are also two sides of the same coin. They both have to do with personal existence, its problems and possibilities.

Both the need for political vision and the quest for personal style are at the same time theological and cultural issues. If then we now ask what are the peculiar difficulties confronting faith in our time, the question ceases to be a provincial one. These threats and challenges touch the entire culture.

IV

In the nineteenth century, the threat to traditional religious belief came in two forms. On the social level it stemmed from the industrial revolution which, though it had gotten underway in the middle of the eighteenth century, reached its crescendo in the nineteenth. Traditional residential and work patterns, and the beliefs and values that went with them, crumbled under the impact of the factory system. On the level of theology and belief, Christianity faced the challenge of natural science and the historical critical approach to the Bible.

Industrialization ravages traditional religion. This is a fact about which there is now little reason for doubt. Study after study of

326 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

church membership and participation clearly show that churches have never really adjusted to the industrial revolution. Surveys indicate that indices of church participation remain highest among young people, women, older people, and those who live in rural areas. They are lowest among middle-aged people, men, and city dwellers. Unless we accept the unlikely theory that teenagers, women, and farmers are somehow more congenitally religious than other people, we are forced to conclude that the intensity of church participation goes down as involvement in the modern industrial process goes up. Farmers, women, and people too young or too old for the work force remain more on the margin of modern society. Men in the middle years are most deeply involved. The connection is substantiated further if we subdivide women between those who work outside the home and those who do not. Here statistics show that working women exhibit just about the same low interest in church participation as do working men. The conclusion is undeniable. Industrial life plays havoc with conventional church attendance and activity.

Why should this be? The answer is a complex one. Religion always lives within a particular social form. Change that form and there will inevitably be religious consequences. Industrialization took people away from the home and village and placed them in factories. It put them on a new schedule, gave them different work companions, altered the rhythm of their lives, and made them responsible to new authorities. Since their previous religious beliefs had been tied together with the old rhythms, schedules, and authorities, the change to industrial life diluted belief by dissolving its supports. Despite worker priests and industrial missions, the church has never really recognized or adjusted to this process. In the twentieth century, accelerating urbanization and pluralism have continued this process and intensified it.

The other nineteenth-century challenge to religion came from natural science and the application of critical methods to the study of the Bible. The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin dramatized the confrontation with science. The fights over "modernism" in the church highlighted the struggle over historical criticism. The two currents came to a glorious noisy climax during the Scopes Trial in 1925 where William Jennings Bryan, the "great commoner,"

327 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

fought his last battle with the devil in the person of Clarence Darrow over Tennessee's law prohibiting the teaching of evolution.

Today the "warfare" between natural science and religion is virtually a dead issue. Though college freshmen may believe it is still a lively question, most seniors realize it is not. The battle is over not just because religion has simply surrendered to science as some people suppose. True, religions now mostly recognize that the creation story is not about geology, nor is the Tower of Babel legend an attempt at linguistic anthropology. But science has changed too. The science of the twentieth century, though it knows immeasurably more than that of the nineteenth, is much less smug about its claims. Scientists today talk about operational models and are usually apprehensive about escalating any scientific theory into a worldview. Though many questions remain unresolved, religion's problems today are not, by and large, with natural science, but with social science, in particular with the scientific study of religion.

V

The emergence of a theoretically adequate and scientifically rigorous study of religion is a fairly recent phenomenon. Its great pioneers-Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, Sigmund Freud-lived in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century. Only in very recent years has the science whose foundations they laid come into its own. But why does this science pose difficult problems for theology? The comparison with the rise of the historical critical method is instructive.

When scholars in the nineteenth century first introduced the historical critical study of the Bible, many religious people feared that their program would erode the foundations of faith and eventually destroy religion altogether. How could man poke into Holy Writ and still expect people to believe it? How could scholars classify the biblical materials as myth, legend, and tradition and still declare the Bible to be the authoritative source of faith and morals? In short, how could the Bible be subjected to historical study and still be the Word of God? The scientific study of one source of faith seemed to undercut the very possibility of faith itself.

In the raging debate that followed, it is easy to point to the conservatives as closed-minded and cowardly and to the critical scholars

328 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

as open and daring. To some extent this was true. However, in retrospect both sides seem to have misjudged the dimensions of the problem. The conservatives claimed that higher criticism would destroy the faith. They have been proven wrong. The critics claimed they were only advocating a research method and that the nature of faith and its object would not be affected. They were wrong too. The net result of historical criticism far exceeded the mere introduction of a new method. It produced in the end a whole new theology. It resulted in a different understanding of what faith is, what "truth" means, and how the God of biblical faith discloses himself to men. What began as a new method ended in a theological revolution whose end is not yet in sight. In a way, the conservatives had sensed the scope of the problem better than the "liberals" had. The fact that they supported the wrong conclusion does not make the naivete of the liberals any more excusable.

We now recognize the historically conditioned character of the biblical material. For that reason among others, theologians decades ago began saying that God discloses himself not "in the Bible" but in the historical events to which the biblical documents testify. The man of faith became the one who discerned the divine presence in secular events. Rather than shattering biblical faith, ironically, higher criticism probably contributed to the fact that theology in the middle decades of the twentieth century was more "biblical" than it had been for centuries.

Today the social scientific study of religion poses problems comparable to those posed by historical criticism. There is a difference in focus. While historical criticism focuses on documents through which the object of faith becomes known, contemporary social science fixes on the believing self and on the institutional patterns of religion. It probes the psychological aspects of belief, the social location of various religious attitudes, and the cultural dynamics of symbols and doctrines. When this scrutiny fastens on pygmies and Patagonians few mind it, but when it turns, as it recently has, to Presbyterians and Catholics, difficulties emerge. The study of religion raises vexing questions for theology. The questions are particularly urgent in view of the widespread popularization of the study of religion, everywhere from the drugstore paperback book rack to the university seminar. For many people it has raised the question of whether in fact religious faith is still possible.

329 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

In the twentieth century, the pluralism of city life has surpassed the factory routine as the main social solvent eating away at the conventional structures of religion. The scientific and comparative study of religion has replaced the critical analysis of the Bible as the source of the principal new intellectual quandries. The two taproots of difficulty for traditional religion support each other. Urban pluralism often stimulates people to look into religious beliefs they might never have heard of in a simpler society. The study of religion intensifies pluralism by bringing Buddhists and Moslems, Hopis and Patagonians, into our mental world.

VI

The problem of faith in an age of pluralism and social science is dramatized by the bright young lady who used to accompany her boyfriend to a Christmas Eve communion service every year. Everything went fine until the Christmas of her sophomore year in college during which she had drunk deep from the cup of cultural anthropology, reading especially about the religious behavior of Kwakiutls and Trobriand Islanders. The season was sparkling as usual, and once again she accompanied her friend to the midnight service. The candles, choir, and carols created an atmosphere at once both joyful and solemn. Still, something bothered her. When their turn came, the two friends approached the green bedecked altar and knelt there waiting to receive communion. Then turning her head to her escort, the fledgling social scientist whispered, "From the point of view of cultural anthropology, you know, this whole thing is ridiculous."

Can we be aware of the relativity of our religious tradition and still participate in it? Can we be sophisticated about the rites and symbols of faith without destroying their religious immediacy? These are the questions to which the radically pluralist and critically conscious man of today must find some answer. If he has a faith at all, it must take pluralism with its accompanying relativism into consideration. It must also copy with the ineradicable fact of our growing knowledge about religious behavior and belief.

As yet, theologians have not come very far in answering these questions. Pluralism tends to be examined more as an intellectual issue than as a challenge to the supportive social structure of belief. The root question raised by the obvious relationship between social

330 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

location, belief, and truth has not been dealt with adequately. True, some theologians, principally Ernst Troeltsch, began to investigate this problem early in the twentieth century. But for decades their work was pushed into the background by the impact of Karl Barth and his followers. Only very recently have theologians taken it up again.

When it comes to the problems raised for faith by the comparative and scientific study of religion, the situation is not much better. As in the nineteenth century, there are those who claim that too much cerebral competence is dangerous and is bound to erode real religious sensibility, that faith cannot be both an object of critical scrutiny and an avenue of access to mystery. Others insist, as the historical critics did in the nineteenth century, that social science is merely an investigatory method, that it can never touch the area of faith itself.

Both groups are wrong again. The scientific study of religion will not in itself destroy faith. It does, however, raise some serious questions which theology will avoid only at its peril. It demands, as did historical criticism, a new theological formulation of what we mean by faith.

The search for personal style and political vision, the quest for individual faith and corporate hope-all figure in the strange mixture of torpor and ferment which we witness today. The bewildering fact of pluralism-in values, beliefs, and meanings-leads some people to an intensified personal search, others to a frightened withdrawal to shaky but familiar conventions. The intense sociological and psychological scrutiny of behavior which paralyzes some prompts others to a more fervent investigation, in the hope that more knowledge may help us solve the quandaries our present knowledge seems to have produced. Pluralism can lead to relativism, and relativism can push people to a stygian nihilism. Self-consciousness can lead to sophisticated cynicism. Our culture is now struggling to escape both nihilism and cynicism. In this struggle faith cannot be the deus ex machina. It shares the culture's difficulties. But perhaps it can make a modest contribution to overcoming these difficulties. To do so, however, we will require a new type of religious sensibility. That sensibility must contribute to the search for style and vision. It must allow us to combine critical awareness and religious immediacy, sophistication and ecstasy.

Is there any evidence that such a new religious sensibility is appear-

331 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

ing? I think there is, and I wish to indicate here how that sensibility might cope creatively with the three problem areas described so far.

VII

The new religious sensibility I refer to is the comic élan, the spirit of festivity and fantasy which one finds at the creative edges of the churches and in the religious underground. It can be felt in jazz liturgies, in the almost dionysiac verve of Catholic "underground" worship, in the magical quality of some new forms of religious drama, in the art of Sister Corita, in the return of the dance to the sanctuary, in the self-mimicking playful spirituality of so many young people. But what does this sensibility have to do with the search for personal style and political vision in an age of heightened self consciousness?

Festivity is at its base the trustful affirmation of experience. It is an immediate and expressive rather than an instrumental phenomenon. As a type of play, festivity is close at its core to contemplation, that is, to an activity which is done for its own sake and with no extrinsic end in view. Thus the festival spirit permits the individual to affirm himself and his own experience not simply as they contribute to a distant or delayed social objective but as they are in the here and now.

American radical theology, ironically enough, may have given us some tools to understand this celebrative spirituality even though its own rhetoric has been far from festive ("God is dead," etc.). It has done so by focusing rigorously on experience. It is experience-oriented theology and as such must now make sense of the holy mirth in our midst which seems at points even more salient than the sense of loss on which it has focused so far. Only a new theological appreciation for the unique religious experience of the individual will enable faith to contribute to the quest for personal style. William James is not dead.

While a further development in radical theology may thus help with this quest, it is the theology of hope with its emphasis on eschatology and future which may help make possible a rebirth of the political imagination. The problem with the theology of hope so far is, I believe, that it has been too Christologically oriented, focused on the object of hope (the kingdom of the risen Christ, etc.) rather than anthropological, focused on man as the creature who

332 - The Secular Search For Religious Experience

hopes. Hope can be discussed not only in terms of Christ but also in terms of the Creator who implants the capacity for fantasy in all men, or in terms of the Spirit who enlivens the imagination. A theologically informed investigation of man as imaginer, player, and hoper (homo ludens et sperans) instead of man as sinner, or even as creature, might yield some beneficial results.

Finally, the comic sensibility helps solve the contemporary problem of cultural self-consciousness by allowing us to play while we pray. The comic sensibility, as Bergson said, has to do with a situation which is open to two entirely different meanings at the same time. The earnest and self-conscious man of today must be a fanatic believer, a serious agnostic, or a sober atheist. The homo ludens looks at religious symbols, practices, and doctrines playfully and can sing or pray without anguishing. The comic not only combines festivity and fantasy, it also combines sophistication and ecstasy.

Today's emerging religious sensibility is a comic one. It trusts and delights in personal experience rather than sublimating it to conventional expectations. It encourages fantasy instead of repressing it. It is not offended by laughter in the holy place. Informed by this religious ethos, theology may be able to say something to the search for authentic selfhood and social renewal which is our secular quest for salvation.