"And Who Is My Neighbor? Thoughts on 21st Century Identity and Solidarity."
I don’t preach much anymore, so when offered the opportunity to reflect publicly on anything I tend to blurt out pretty much everything I’ve been thinking about recently. Mary June Nestler once said rather ruefully that, in her experience, most sermons were merely “home movies of the preacher’s mind.” To switch metaphors, I invite you to think of what follows as an expanded version of some Facebook posts.
When I told Susan Klein last week that I was working on this paper, she asked only that I not talk about Game of Thrones. Having spent Lent catching up on seasons 5 through 7 of the series, I must admit that the temptation is powerful. I quit watching Game of Thrones in 2014 during season 4 when I was working at the National Cathedral. Frankly, the conflict and intrigue between the Starks, Lannisters, and Targeryans seemed too much like my daily life in Washington and the inner workings of the cathedral’s staff and chapter. So I put the show aside. But as someone who always wants to be in sync with the cultural zeitgeist, I dove back in this year and am proud to say that I am now entirely current with the state of things in Westeros as of Season 8, Episode 2. And I think I even know who most ofthe players are.
Given last week’s release of the Mueller Report, I also flirted with the idea of laying out the moral case for Trump’s impeachment. When I was in high school I became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination and read not only the whole Warren Report but also the 26 volumes of evidence that came with it. Now that I am really retired, I had the leisure to give over most of the Triduum to reading the 448 pages of Mueller’s opus, and, especially in the second half, the picture it paints of the interior workings of Trump’s White House is at once revolting and fascinating. I know the Democratic leadership is loath to begin impeachment proceedings in the House, but honestly, I don’t see how after what we have learned from the report, we cannot try to impeach this man. As Maxine Waters said,
At this point, Congress’s failure to impeach is complacency in the face of the erosion of our democracy and constitutional norms. Congress’s failure to impeach would set a dangerous precedent and imperil the nation as it would vest too much power in the executive branch and embolden future officeholders to further debase the U.S. presidency, if that’s even possible.
While a death march through Trump’s enormities seemed beguiling, I decided that we’re all so saturated in his awfulness by now that a further rehashing of his offenses would do none of us any good. So after overcoming the powerful temptations to expatiate on high crimes and misdemeanors in Washington and King’s Landing, I decided to turn to a subject that has long intrigued me and actually has some bearing on all our ministries: the twofold questions of how we identify (by generation or social location) and with and for whom we stand in solidarity.
I vividly remember coming home on a weekday early in January of 1967, my senior year of high school. Sitting in our mailbox was the Time magazine issue of the week. The cover featured a painting of four young Americans—a white man and woman, an African American and a vaguely Asian male. These four people had been chosen to represent Time’s Man of the Year for 1967: “Twenty-five and Under”. Imagine that: at the tender age of 17, I had been chosen as Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year”, clearly getting an early jump on Donald Trump.
I could hardly wait to read about myself and my cohort. So imagine my pleasure as I thrilled to the deathless prose that only news magazines like Time can dish out:
In the closing third of the 20th century, that generation looms larger than all the exponential promises of science or technology: it will soon be the majority in charge. In the U.S., citizens of 25 and under in 1966 nearly outnumbered their elders; by 1970, there will be 100 million Americans in that age bracket. In other big, highly industrialized nations, notably Russia and Canada, the young also constitute half the population. If the statistics imply change, the credentials of the younger generation guarantee it. Never have the young been so assertive or so articulate, so well educated or so worldly. Predictably, they are a highly independent breed, and—to adult eyes—their independence has made them highly unpredictable. This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation. [Time Magazine, January 6, 1967 “Man of the Year”]
Here I was, a second semester high school senior, already anointed as a member not only of a new generation but of a new KIND of generation. I was too young and naive in 1967 to recognize this for the kind of tripe it was. (Years later, my son Oliver would label utterances of this kind, “Newsweek sociology”.) Amazingly, Newsmagazines then and now seem to be able to identify a society-changing trendline with only one data point. I put that issue of Timedown convinced that I was a different kind of person from my parents and the generations before me. It’s taken me years of living and working in the church—an institution unfortunately prone to falling for sociological fads—to understand that easy generational distinctions are at once beguiling, comprehensible, attractive, and wrong.
Were those born between 1946 and 1964 “a new kind of generation?” Or, for that matter, were the people Tom Brokaw labeled “the greatest generation” demonstrably more courageous than any who have come before or after? Based on the evidence, it’s hard to support either claim. For all our late teen flirtings with the counter-culture, many of my generation in their thirties settled into conventional lives. And once their own children had benefited from massive public expense on elementary, secondary, and higher education, the generation that fought World War II passed California’s Proposition 13 to lessen their own property taxes and thereby cripple public education, hardly a courageous or public-spirited act from the “greatest generation”. Sad to say, people in their teens, thirties, sixties, and nineties tend to behave like people in their teens, thirties, sixties, and nineties whatever “generational” labels we might attach to them.
I’ve been a priest now for just over 42 years, and I have seen generational sociology take hold of almost all of our thinking about congregational development, mission strategy, and even the ordination process. We look at our declining numbers and aging population and think, “We’ve got to do something to get those Baby Boomers or GenXersor Millennials into church.” And to my mind almost every generationally-based strategy we have employed has failed spectacularly. When I worked at All Saints Pasadena in the 1990s, I used regularly to run into people around town who would say, “Oh, I used to attend your rock mass in the 1960s and 70s.” “Great. Did you ever join?” “No, but I really liked it. Do you still do it?”
When I was dean of Seabury-Western in the early 2000s, both the Seabury and Garrett seminary communities were swept with a wave of enthusiasm for the “U2charist”, which seems to have been reborn as today’s Beyoncé mass.I used to try to imagine my parents swinging and swaying to a Glenn Miller Eucharist in the early 1940s, but somehow the image never quite took hold. And there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so worried about the age of people coming through the ordination process that dioceses seemed universally to be saying no absolutely to women in their 50s and yes uncritically to men in their 20s. I remember one deans’ council meeting in those years where we all complained about our greatest community problem: young men who had not been vetted by their dioceses. The bishops were so smitten by the tattoos and piercings that they couldn’t see the characterological flaws right in front of them.
Now I want to be clear: I’m not arguing at all against worshiping in the prevailing idioms of the culture or against broadening the cultural models for ministry. (I’ll come back to this issue later on.) I am merely arguing against treating people born in one generational cohort as somehow ontologically different from those born in another. If you want to use a Bono sursum corda or a Beyoncé agnus dei, fine with me. Just don’t think you’re necessarily going to attract a bunch of GenXers or Millennials in the process. They can get that stuff on their phones without leaving the house.
Our reflexive adoption of generational sociology has also been accompanied by some unthinking immersion in notions of identity and culture. Again, I want to be clear. I completely accept the idea that my own social location is contingent and not normative, that I am the lifelong beneficiary of white privilege—especially in regard to all the free public education I received in California before the advent of Proposition 13. The questions of identity—gender, sexuality, culture, and (especially in America) race are centrally important to all of us, especially in the church.
But I saw a tweet last week that made me pause. A priest I know complained about all the “Christian Seders” that would be performed in Holy Week, and he labeled them “appropriationistic”. Now, I have never liked the “Christian Seders”. At best they are hokey, at worst they are anti-Semitic. Indeed, I think Christians shouldn’t even try to pull off a “Jewish Seder”. Frankly, we should all just make friends with the local temple or synagogue and attend when they invite us, as they invariably do. But I began to wonder: what really is wrong with “cultural appropriation”? Isn’t the Hebrew Bible itself “culturally appropriationistic”? They took all those Psalm genres from the Canaanites! And Christianity? Isn’t our whole religion “appropriationistic”? We took our scriptures and even our liturgy from the Jews. Really, if it weren’t for plagiarism and rebranding, those of us who are not Jewish by birth would still be worshiping Artemis and Thor.
Since I identify as a straight, white male, and since I was born near the start of the postwar baby boom, am I consigned to a cultural and worship life within the bounds of my own cultural and generational confines? Must I eat white bread and listen to the Beatles forever? Or, understanding the contingency and particularity of my social location, is there a way for me to be in solidarity with a wider group of people?
Those are the questions I want to address in the remainder of this paper—the questions of identity and solidarity. With whom do I identify, and with whom do I stand? In order to get at those things, I need to say a word first about the origins of generational sociology and then about the prospect of a different way to think about acculturation.
What we now call “generational sociology” was first posited by a German academic named Karl Mannheim in a 1928 essay, “Das Problem der Generationen” and translated into English as “The Problem of Generations”. According to Mannheim,
people are significantly influenced by the socio-historical environment (in particular, notable events that involve them actively) of their youth; giving rise, on the basis of shared experience, to social cohorts that in their turn influence events that shape future generations. [Wikipedia article, “Theory of Generations”.
You can see how a German sociologist writing in the 1920s could think this way: he and his generation had experienced the horrors of the first World War together. And the subsequent march of history (through the Great Depression, World War II, the Nuclear Age, Civil Rights, Vietnam, etc.) seemed to confirm Mannheim’s insight. Advertisers were drawn to employ generational sociology in their campaigns—I still remember Joanie Sommers singing the theme song of my own Pepsi generation in the 1960s:
When you say “Pepsi, please”
You’re putting yourself among
People who like their leisure,
With Pepsi the drink that’s young.
And who among us has not thrilled to all of the car advertisements aimed at men and women over 60 using rock music from our youth? Generational sociology has proven to be an effective commercial marketing tool. But is it a just or even reliable argument for a mission strategy?
You don’t have to read Mannheim very deeply or long to realize that there is an unseen antagonist in his writing: his fellow countryman and bugbear, Karl Marx. We all know that Marx argued not for generational but for class cohorts. Marxism is based on the idea that our primary identity is a class identity. Indeed, I once had the opportunity to meet the great Tillie Olsen, one of my real heroes. Tillie Olsen was a great writer (Tell Me a Riddleand others) and she was also a Marxist. She began the talk by saying, “If you receive your income not from investments but from your salary, you are a member of the working class. Many Americans seem to be confused about that.”
It is Mannheim’s work that has led to some of that confusion. Generational sociology wants to convince me that I have more in common with those who went to Woodstock than I do with those who are yet to be paid a living wage. The triumph of the Republican party since Reagan has been to make many people believe that they have interests in common not with the Service Employees International Union but with the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Generational sociology is great for selling cars and Pepsi, but it’s a pernicious way of doing public policy. So why are we in the church so in love with it?
I think we fall for generational sociology for a couple of reasons. First, because we are alarmed by the aging of the church and the increasing identification by younger people of themselves as “Nones”—people with no religion. From what I’ve seen in my travels around the church, most of us in this room would qualify for the Youth Group in many congregations. We do seem to be at a crisis point in our ability to attract younger people, and so out of desperation we grasp at any theory that purports to explain our problem and suggest a remedy. “Are you fresh out of Millennials? Here’s how to attract them! Get clergy who can rap! Hip hop music at all services! Yoga and smoothiesin the parish hall!”
The second reason generational sociology appeals so much to us is, frankly, that we don’t think very well or critically in the church, especially when we’re under stress. We’re driven to a kind of desperation niche marketing not only in our generational thinking but also in our outreach to the many cultures coexisting in the United States. Since the 1970s we have been establishing congregations built on ethnic or cultural identity. Since the turn of this century we have established faith communities based on the loose notion of an “emerging church”. So far, neither strategy has seemed to work very well. Not only are our “traditional” congregations shrinking; the ethnic and emerging congregations aren’t doing that well either. I have a thought about this I’ll come back to at the end.
So I see one of our problems as a kind of loose, lazy habit of generational thinking. The second is more complicated, and it has to do with the larger questions of how each of us identifies in terms of our other cultural markers. It’s hard to talk about this stuff without seeming either “politically correct” or hopelessly retrograde. Happily we have a guide through this cultural swamp in the person of George Hutchinson, whose new book, Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940sdescribes not only our problem but the outline of a solution.
George Hutchinson is a professor of English at Cornell University. I am reading his book now, thanks to a provocative review by Edward Mendelson in the March 7, 2019 issue of the New York Review of Books. [“Reading in an Age of Catastrophe”] In Facing the Abyss, Hutchinson examines the literary culture of the 1940s, the last decade in American life when literature and reading were actually important. In reviewer Mendelson’s words,
His first chapter, “When Literature Mattered,” summarizes a brief era unlike any other, when Americans of all classes and backgrounds turned hungrily to novels, plays, and poems, provoked by a “need to recapture the meaning of personal experience.” Soldiers who had never picked up a book now read free Armed Services Editions paperbacks—more than a hundred million came off the presses from 1943 to 1947—first for relief from wartime tedium, then because the books offered them new ways to understand their relationships and inner lives.
Reading declined in the 1950s, as Hutchinson says, when “other media drew leisure-time attention”. So, for the 1940s, mass interest in literature resulted from a combination of accidental historical circumstances. But Hutchinson has another, bigger point, one more relevant to you and me. The 1940s were a decade of war and suffering on a gigantic scale. People read not only because books were freely available. They read to make sense of their own experience. Again, in Edward Mendelson’s words:
Hutchinson’s central theme is that literature mattered in the 1940s because it focused on experiences that happened to everyone and because it made sense of them, not by abstracting or generalizing, but by recognizing that those common experiences came to everyone in a unique way:
When Richard Wright narrates episodes of his youth in Black Boy (1945), he doesn’t mean to say that the fear, shame, and hatred that haunted his childhood can only be true for him, nor are they only relevant to other African Americans. He writes as an embodied human being to other human beings—who also are afraid, shamed, and hateful for their own reasons—with a faith in the possibility that they will listen and come to a “human” (his term) understanding of his experience and also of themselves, whoever and wherever they are—and that they will be changed by that understanding as he was.
Hutchinson then proceeds to argue that writers in the 1940s aspired to universality, “an inclusive sense of what it means to be human”, and he moves to examine works by black, Jewish, LGBT, and women writers who use the particularity of their own situations to explore the universal dimension of their problems:
Hutchinson’s moral point throughout is the difference between a sympathetic sense of another person’s inner life and an objectifying sense of another person as a member of a category. Ethnic, sexual, and racial hatreds are always directed collectively against categories of persons, but anyone who is the object of such hatred experiences it subjectively and uniquely, as a direct assault on that person’s self.
I went to college in the 1960s, seminary in the 1970s, and graduate school in the 1980s, and then taught off and on (both literature and theology) in the subsequent decades. Over the course of my schooling and then professional life, we have moved from any sense of universal values and aspirations to a kind of categorizing by identity—racial, gender, sexual, ethnic, and generational. We have come to assume that human beings are primarily defined by their categories, and we treat their cultural products as at once proprietary to their own location and appropriate only to those within the category. As a result, we both misread and misunderstand them, mistakes that ensue when, as Hutchinson says, “categorization precedes interpretation”. Moreover, as Edward Mendelson notes,
Cultures incline either toward virtue or penitence: either toward declaring their own virtue by shaming others for lacking it, or, as in Hutchinson’s portrayal of the 1940s, by seeking inwardly to correct their own faults and failures.
Paradoxically, the earlier imperialistic impulse to shame geographically distant so-called “primitive” cultures is matched by the present-day desire to shame historical eras removed from us in time.
In arguing for a return to striving for universal human aspirations and values, I am aware that such a call will be construed as a tacit, colonialist appeal to impose white straight male developed world values on others and call them universal. I mean nothing of the sort. I believe it is possible—no, necessary--that in a multicultural interfaith post-colonial world we work together to build a vision that could be in fact truly universal and not an imperialistic fantasy. In the liberation struggles of the last 60 years there has been good reason to assert the integrity and value of what we have come to call “target” (race, culture, gender, sexuality, age, ability) identities. But the looming challenges of the disruption brought about by climate change along with sectarian violence demand that we develop a new sense of cross-cultural, cross-identity solidarity. We need to learn to construct that solidarity together. We need to find ways to speak with and to and not at and for each other.
The point of George Hutchinson’s book is not to exalt the 1940s—as he admits, a decade rife with racism, sexism, homophobia, genocide, and nuclear violence. The point is to observe how people like you and me, under enormous personal and collective stress, once upon a time negotiated those conditions and looked for meaning. They did so according to what now seem like reactionary principles—the idea that people, regardless of social location, share a universal kind of subjectivity, and the notion that our categories are a secondary, not primary, aspect of our human identity. As Hutchinson notes, in the 1940s, the main proponents of identity politics were fascists, anti-Semites, homophobes, white supremacists, and segregationists. The real progressives then were on the side of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document now regarded by academics as both imperialistic and naive.
What does all this mean for us in the church? If you’ve given up listening—and who can blame you?--let me restate my primary arguments. By buying into generational sociology, we are making enormous (and I believe flawed) assumptions about human identity and solidarity. And by adopting the current academic tendency to categorize before we engage, we are in fact profiling and stereotyping not only others but ourselves. I do not believe in false choices. I don’t think our only options are either to invite everyone into the primarily white, male, Anglo experience of ’79 Prayer Book and ’82 Hymnal worship or to keep founding congregations with a particular ethnic or generational identity. To my mind, we need to find a way to evangelize across generational and cultural lines. And I think there is a pretty obvious (though difficult to pull off) solution.
In the fall of 2015, shortly before I retired in Washington and moved back here, I attended a workshop at Virginia Seminary about acculturation and evangelism in the Episcopal Church. One of the speakers was VTS professor Robert Prichard, who gave a fascinating talk on the way our church reached out to German immigrants at the turn of the last century.
According to Prichard, in the late 19th and early 20thcentury, German immigrants were an enormous (and largely unchurched) population in the U.S. To address this challenge, for the 1896 and 1916 Hymnals, the General Convention decided to add a substantial number of German hymn tunes and texts. One of the reasons we sing “A Mighty Fortress”, “Silent Night”, and “Glorious things of thee are spoken” is that our forebears wisely understood that, though second and third generation German immigrants had made their way into the English-speaking mainstream they still wanted to see their own culture reflected in Sunday morning worship. The result, according to Prichard, was an unprecedented success in incorporating a large number of German Americans into the Episcopal Church in the early decades of the 20th century.
Prichard’s analysis confirms my own anecdotal parish experience. At All Saints Pasadena, the 1 p.m. Spanish language service is rapidly dying, while more and more Latino/Latina parishioners attend the Sunday morning services. All Saints is one of the few congregations I know smart enough to include music from many cultures (including Latino/Latina) in its principal liturgies. As earlier Episcopalians understood, the solution to the problem of broadening our cultural reach is not to balkanize our liturgies—“Come to our 8 a.m. old-timers, 10 a.m. white guy, 1 p.m. Hispanic, 5 p.m. Millennial services!” The solution is to find a way to incorporate a wide variety of cultural, racial, and generational traditions in our principal services.
We tend to teach congregational development by advocating an ongoing strategy of “parallel development”: keep the old thing going as it is and build the new thing alongside it. (At least we did in the Seabury congregational development D.Min. when I was there.) And there are still good reasons to build new services, say at non-Sunday morning times more attractive to new constituencies. But I think we fall into parallel development because it feels easier and less conflictual than doing the hard work of opening our people to different modes of liturgical expression. I’m sure our WASP forebears grumbled when asked to sing German hymn tunes. They got over it. Sowill we learn to love not only Spanish and Korean and Filipino music. We might even find ourselves loving Bono and Beyoncé, too.
It’s important that we remember what we are really living and working for. Easter was two days ago, and the hope and promise of resurrection point us toward a universal, not a categorized or particular, horizon. The Hebrew prophets remind us that God is gathering us in an expansive and inclusive community that recognizes both the particularity of the givens of our identity and the universality of our nature and destiny. As Isaiah proclaims (Isaiah 40:5),
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
He doesn’t say “White” flesh. He doesn’t say “Black, Latino, or Asian” flesh. He doesn’t say “Baby Boomer, GenX, or Millennial” flesh. He says ALL flesh. As Christians we believe that the story of one particular Palestinian Jewish carpenter has transformative implications for all of us, regardless of how we identify. Let us continue to celebrate and embrace the particularities of our own identities and experience. But let us turn away from defining them in ways that are hard and fast. Speaking as a member of the Man of the Year class ofthe Pepsi Generation, please do not consign me to eternity in straight white guy Boomer limbo. The one who rose for all of us on Sunday calls us all forward to a new and deeper and shared humanity, one in which we need the fullness of each other in order to become who we really and fully are.
How do we identify? As ourselves and with each other. With whom do we stand? The human community. As sentimental and naïve as this may sound, it seems like the gospel truth, at least today in this latest home
