The proclamation of the gospel, as a Christian would put it, may be first of all the telling of the story, but this gains power and meaning insofar as it is embodied in the total gestalt of community life and action.1
It is wet and muggy but they are still setting up near the playground on the damp grass. They have their military-style ruck packs on and they set out on a brisk walk around the town square, ending with a dozen pull-ups. You admire their posture (and the fact they can do a pull-up). It’s been a while since you’ve moved your body with any intention. Of course you could just go for a walk or practice pull-ups in your basement, but you want to join what seems to be a team of sorts, bound together by a common purpose.
Or maybe you see a group of people with their dogs in tow, navigating obstacles and strangers at a local park with ease. The animals pay close attention to their minders, completely unperturbed by the unpredictable setting. The entire group moves as if scripted, sharing a common sense of how an animal might approach a stranger, how they might yield for new dogs, how they “check in” with their human when they need reassurance. Though there are many pairs of dogs and their owners, they share a common understanding of how dogs and humans should relate and execute this in the world.
Or maybe you are on the street as the night falls and the shadows lengthen. It’s hard to avoid peering into windows at this hour, and you notice one dining room through the smudged window. The table is cluttered with piles of schoolwork shoved aside, but the two children are chattering happily and sometimes arguing while they play a card game and you think- that- the mess, the liveliness, the shared experience of home- that is something I’d like to be a part of.
The neighborhood ruckers or the dog trainers or the happy family- all of these are less clubs that you might join and more things you might become. The goods that they offer might be abstracted from them, but they would cease to offer these exact goods if extracted. To join the neighborhood fitness club you need to buy the pack for rucking, but you also need to learn the particular language and habits of those who carry it. You could buy the card game the family plays after dinner, but without the particular history of this game (“house rules”, “youngest always deals”), you don’t have this family’s particular experience of play.
Though the dog training or the fitness or the card game could be had individually, you can’t extract the goods of any of them and retain the form of life. To gain the form of life you admire, you have to be initiated in ways that are small- buy the pack, acquire the dog- and larger- learn to think like this family does and share their values and priorities. In each of these examples what you want to absorb is more than an isolated benefit. You may desire the benefit of a well-trained dog or an efficient workout, but when you show up at the park at 6am and leave an hour later soaked in sweat, you have also been uplifted by the camaraderie that shared suffering enjoins.
In becoming one of the group, you learn the language they use and what various terms mean. Your participation might start out elementary, but you observe the experts and follow their lead. Over time, you learn to tell the difference between a true expert and a novice. Your practice generates a sensitivity to how the exercises should be done but also what habits they generate- how you hydrate, or when you stretch and how often to take a rest day. What was initially a generous observation- “I really admire them”- slowly becomes a form of life that you want to share. To understand this form of life you need to practice it from inside. Acquiring the habits and language of the form is a necessary part of practicing the form. You can’t be a rucker without understanding and using their language. Without the language and insider-knowledge they have, you will remain an outsider who is merely imitating them. You can’t even describe what is required to be one! The language you gain as one of this group allows you to communicate the goods of the group and the hopes you have for belonging. Language allows you to share this form of life, and it generates entire new worlds when you use it.
George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic theory argues that to become religious means learning to use a language that allows you to move from an outsider to an insider. It is language that allows individuals to speak of an unnamed religious dimension, and it “makes possible the description of realities, the formulation of beliefs, and the experiencing of inner attitudes, feelings, and sentiments”.2
Without the ability to share this language, a person cannot be truly religious. There is no religion apart from “the rituals it practices, the sentiments or experiences it evokes, the actions it recommends, and the institutional forms it develops”.3 One “becomes religious” by “interioriz[ing] 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”.4
Once a person is religious according to this view, they see the world differently. They have a different imagination and they understand the story of their life in a new way. The language they have learned by becoming religious has transformed not only what they know but what they can express. By becoming religious, an individual can newly understand the possibilities that come with being religious. They learn not only to communicate in this new language, but to dream in it. Concepts that were previously difficult to understand, like loving one’s enemies or praying for those who persecute you, now make a certain kind of religious sense. By learning a new language, a new world has opened to you.
None of these religious realities can be understood apart from the form of life that generates them, however- and here lies one of the main errors of modern American religion. As Lindbeck writes,
The mere idea that becoming religious might on occasion be rather like achieving competence in the totally non-optional grammatical patterns and lexical resources of a foreign tongue seems alienating and oppressive, an infringement of freedom and choice, a denial of creativity, and repugnant to all the most cherished values of modernity. It is much easier in our day for religious interests to take the experiential-expressive form of individual quests for personal meaning. This is true even among theological conservatives, as is illustrated by the stress placed on conversion experiences by the heirs of pietism and revivalism. The structures of modernity press individuals to meet God first in the depths of their souls and then, perhaps, if they find something personally congenial, to become part of a tradition or join a church. Thus the traditions of religious thought and practice into which Westerners are most likely to be socialized conceals from them the social origins of their conviction that religion is a highly private and individual matter.5
Because religions are seen primarily as suppliers of meaning, as “multiple suppliers of different forms of a single commodity needed for transcendent self-expression and self-realization”, it is difficult if not impossible to explain the difference with this approach from the common American one.6 But Christians according to Lindbeck’s view are not calling people to be better but to see better. And to do that, they need a new vocabulary and way of understanding what is true about the world.
The problem with most American Christians is that there is no “inside”; just a series of extracted practices, habits, and preferences. Unless we address the thinning out of American religion to preferences that serve the ends of individual religious experiences, Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic option will remain unavailable to us.
There are two questions I hope you are asking by now:
What does it mean to be an “insider”? What habits or dispositions accompany insiders? And how can you tell a novice from an expert? (If you are a certain kind of Christian, this last question will make you cringe).
How on earth do we make “insiders”? How can we cultivate communities that share this enriched form of life, without relying on simply extracted practices?
We are going to keep circling these questions as we go. They are good ones, and I hope we will eventually land on some ideas.
Next week I’ll be back with Part 4, on the temptations of strategy, and why we need to stop making Christianity “practical”.
Lindbeck 36.
Lindbeck 33.
Lindbeck 33.
Lindbeck 35.
Lindbeck 22, emphasis mine.
Lindbeck 22.