II. The Promise of a Cultural-Linguistic Theory
How to Set a Table
This is the second post in a series entitled “How Religious Man Became a Means”. It is my take on the challenges facing American Christianity. I’d love to hear your feedback, and thanks for reading. — KHS
The women were primly arranged, perfectly coiffed, their wrists dripping with bracelets and their blouses trimly tucked. Their hands moved swiftly to beat and stir and layer and level. They supervised everything with a thin-lipped seriousness more common to sergeants planning a troop movement than women arranging a holiday meal. Make no mistake, the women were very much in charge. Their careful preparation and exacting concern with the execution of this meal told me that this was no ordinary meal. It was a ritual.
When I visited my in-laws the first time for Thanksgiving I was given a task in the kitchen. I was asked to help set the table. Specifically, I was asked to get the “iced tea glasses”. The trouble was, I had no idea what an “iced tea glass” was. I am from Massachusetts and have lived in the Northern states for my entire life, apart from a decade in the southeast where I went to graduate school. Where I came from, we had drinking glasses which were suitable for all purposes. In my mother-in-law’s home, it was clear there was an “iced tea glass” which was different from a glass for water or one for cocktails, and I did not know which they were.
I had to be taught. The small customs of table-setting were part of a larger story of the family I was joining. I was invited to set the table because I was being integrated into this family with its own culture and customs and preferences. I would need to learn their language and ways of speaking in order to fully understand how things were done. If I wanted to become one of them, I needed to learn to do things the way they did.
We tend to think about religion as if its primary task was to tell us what to believe. Under this view, a person demonstrates that they are a Christian by holding the right beliefs about the afterlife, for one example, or about who can be saved. It follows that a Christian must believe these things in order to be a Christian, because it is right belief that determines Christian identity. But what if “becoming Christian” was more like learning to set the table than agreeing to a set of doctrines?
This would change everything.
Setting the table mattered in this family because it accorded with how this family viewed themselves- well-ordered, neatly appointed, and privately led by women. Learning to set a table in a conference room according to an instruction manual might have taught me where the forks went, but it would not have meant anything. I needed to learn how to behave by observing and being invited into this family. The practices and rituals mattered because of the context they took place in.
I suspect that many Christian churches are confusing catechesis with teaching people where to put a fork. In doing so, baby Christians are learning how to behave as if they believed as a Christian might behave without learning why a Christian might behave in such a way. But behavior is only religiously significant if it coheres with a broader picture of what is true about the world.
The setting of the Thanksgiving table mattered because it was embedded in a multi-generational family that had said it mattered, because its mattering reinforced who the family says they are. Without such a story, setting a table was just a chore that was only about behavior. You could use a manual for that! But this practice accorded with a cosmic story that made claims about what was true.
Religions are “cosmic stories” that make ultimate claims on us. (Family cultures are not religions, to be sure, though they certainly make claims on us!) Religions claim that this reality is “more important than everything else in the universe”.1 The difference between a cosmic story and a fable is that a cosmic story makes ultimate claims about the world. Good moral stories that do not claim ultimate significance can seek to shape behavior. Like Aesop’s fables, such stories can instruct their hearers- “slow and steady wins the race” might fortify its hearers toward a morally good act. But though fables like these might influence discrete choices, fables for the most part are not making ultimate claims. Their demands on individual behavior are discrete and individual. This is why the context of their telling- privately read at home before bed- is fitting to their task. Because a fable primarily seeks to influence the behavior of its hearer, they are intended to be read to children to shape their actions.
On the other hand, the cosmic stories on which religions are built are not primarily intended to influence behavior. They are supposed to instill in their hearers awe and wonder at the universal claims that are being made. They are for this reason not simply intended for private before-bed reading. These cosmic stories instead seek to make their own world.
If cognitive-propositional approaches to religion view religious truth as external to an individual, and experiential-expressive views prize religious truth as what is internal to a believer, a cultural-linguistic approach to religion views religious belief as external but not as primarily intellectual or cognitive. Religious beliefs are true but not because they are propositionally stated or cognitively known. Rather, religion is like a culture that shapes one’s beliefs and practices, or a language that one learns to speak and that in turn shapes the way a person sees the world.
Learning a language is not simply learning a set of rules. When you learn to speak a new language, you gain a new set of tools but also a new imagination. There are little light-bulb moments, like when a new reader of Biblical Hebrew learns that the seat of the will and emotions in the Hebrew Bible lay in the “gut” and not the “mind”. Once you learn to speak in a new language you have a new set of conceptual possibilities in your tool-box. You can see and imagine new realities with this language. It shapes not only how you speak but what you can say and even what you can think. Languages create their own worlds.
“To become religious”, George Lindbeck writes,
is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated. The primary knowledge is not about the religion, nor that the religion teaches such and such, but rather how to be religious in such and such ways2
Religions make their own worlds when they behave like languages and not like dictionaries. If a religion is something you learn to speak, and not follow, the possibilities for how this religion will shape your life are significantly expanded. Lindbeck writes,
Pagan converts to the catholic mainstream did not, for the most part, first understand the faith and then decide to become Christian; rather, the process was reversed: they first decided and then they understood. More precisely, they were first attracted by the Christian community and form of life.3
They saw a Christian and then sought to become a Christian and then were taught to speak Christian.
What does it mean to “speak Christian”? What would it look like to teach people to “set the table” only once they’d joined the family? And can this view of religion really be abstracted into the “one best way”? I will be back next week with more reflections on Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic view, and what it might mean for American religion.
Lindbeck 32-3.
Lindbeck 35.
Lindbeck 132.
Catechesis seems to be, in my experience, telling us what to believe. Q&A formats even in modern catechisms seem to attempt to make doctrine “easier” or at least easier to comprehend/understand. Of course this is part of the teaching role of the church, but I wonder how we can catechize through practices instead. Looking forward to part 3!
Reading C.S. Lewis, especially the Abolition of Man, helps me to understand the point(s) you are trying to make. (He calls the "soul" the chest.) The mind is "where" we learn; the heart is the "body" process--the "how" of what we have learned. When the mind and the "body" are in alignment, the soul is transformed--the "why" of what we have learned. We can also think of this as preparing with the mind, doing with the body, and being with our soul.
We can also "see" this in a great violinist. The notes are learned with the mind; the hands play the instrument; the soul brings forth the music. What comes first? The soul cannot bring forth the music until the proper notes and the proper playing is learned. Yes, some seem to have an innate ability to play the violin, but it is always learning. This comes through acquisition of correct information, through the experience of playing, and through silence in the presence of the music (and the presence in the silence of the music). It begins within the individual but is learned in community. The American "church" for the most part focuses only on the mind and this is a very individualistic learning process. The "church" must return to the individual within community to properly reflect God.