This Means No Fear Cavalier

So this is part of an ongoing blogversation TM I'm having with Nickname not Yet Assigned. I think I made my response a bit long for the comments, plus it might be fun for you, dear reader, to see how life at GFC can be. Or at least, how a corner of life typed out and put into the internets can be. You can pick up the earlier parts of the conversation here.

This starts abruptly if you're just joining us...

I guess it depends on what we mean by cross-cultural and how cultures are crossed.

The first Christians certainly dealt with how one becomes a Christian in light of real cultural/ethnic markers. In that sense, Christianity crossed cultures- and, in part, is why Christianity is Christianity and not Judaism- why a Christian understands Isaiah 53 one way and a Jew understands it another way. And I am not one who is troubled by the fact that some Christian of 2nd c. Palestine or 21st c India does not practice the same kind of Christianity I do, though we are all happily called Christians. That's cross-cultural as well. And the first Christians did desire to spread their faith to all people and so in that sense crossed cultural boundaries as well.

Here's the "but" though. The first Christians did not have a position of overwhelming dominance in the world. The first Christians did not have the option of converting kings and their subjects wholesale. That's old hat, I know, we don't conquer whole people groups in the name of cross and crown anymore. But we did try to craft a common sense of the world- or at least we often tried to tie ourselves to the project of creating a common sense of the world and hoped to make the foundational propositions of Christianity compatible with the foundational propositions of the world.

What I mean is, we know that communication is possible across cultural boundaries, but we only know that because of the dominating project of Modernity that attempted to erase any sense of cultural boundaries by creating a common world, a project largely undergirded by a type of Christianity. As obtuse examples, it's why "we" call Indians Indians rather than what any of those groups would have called themselves. It's why "we" call Conquistadores conquerors and not slaughterers or genocidal invaders. It's why the Reformation is the Reformation and not a violent nationalist church split. It's why we would understand religious syncretism as a bad thing. Of course we don't kill people in the name of religion anymore- now we kill in the name of our civilization, our way of life- the totalizing, absolute claims on our existence and being. We kill to protect and expand our sense of the world. But we don't always kill; sometimes we educate or evangelize to expand our sense of the world because our sense of the world is right and true. That, in part, is what I mean by saying we accept cross-cultural missions as a good thing.

Still, I wonder generally what it means to speak cross-culturally, and I worry specifically if we think it means to give someone the knowledge we have to make them similar to us so they can be better people (or sometimes, historically, people at all). Of course, I can only say any of this because I am not capable of living with that Modern certainty, which may completely invalidate anything I have to say. For someone unlike me, someone who sees things with an objective certainty as "the way things are," I may represent a loosey-goosey threat to orthodoxy- I am the boogie man "relativism." But whether I am right or wrong is beside the point (at least in this instance). I'm just leading up to what I think it might mean to really speak to someone "cross-culturally".

The sense is/was that the ethical and moral claims of Modernity were as certain as gravity, but there is now a perspective that sees that what we understand as morally or ethically good, the world systems and powers that we build, the cultures in which we make sense of the world are not fixed or objective. At one time, there was the sense that learning was simply a matter of discovering the way things objectively are. That largely does not fly anymore, especially in matters of ethical, religious, and moral truth. If post-modernity is any thing, it is, in part, a perspective critical of that possibility. Today, some might understand learning as a form of acculturation, becoming well-adjusted to the systems in which you find yourself, becoming more and more narrowly fixed to a certain sense of the world.

Good grief I'm a windbag. See why I linked to it instead of being a comment jerk?

So...

When someone talks about cross-cultural communication I wonder what their assumptions about culture and communication are. When someone talks about "reaching" post-moderns, I wonder if they realize that the possibility of even articulating that, let alone doing it, undermines the possibility of reaching people they identify as post-modern. There are other questions. Are we talking about offering someone a pile of data about the world that we say is true? Do we understand that it is only possible for us to say this pile of data is true because of our world? If we are talking about crossing cultures, do we see that the other culture, if it really is another culture, is another sense of the world in which our pile of data is something else entirely? And why are we saying that Christianity is a pile of data, anyway? It's a different concern than knowing that people X are more comfortable with visual media and people Y like hymns. If post-modernity is a term that broadly reflects the inclinations, impulses, commitments and worlds of some people, then the very idea of "outreach" as the Modern church understands it is without the pale of those cultures. Advising evangelists to not be dogmatic when they try to reach these people is missing the point.

Of course what I'm loosely describing could be, for some, a sign of the death of the church. In a sense it is apocalyptic, it may be the end of one sense of the world. And that may be a bad thing. I don't think it is, but again, I'm part of the problem. In fact, I'm an excited part of the problem. I'm not trying to justify this position or even undermine Modernity, rather I hope it reveals a bit of why I think the very idea of "reaching" post-moderns is nonsensical. I don't means it's stupid. I mean it doesn't make sense in the way it makes no sense to say "I'm going to bisect this ray." It is meant to explain why I think being cross-cultural might depend on assumptions that work less and less.

As I said before, I too, think there is something in Friends tradition that is capable of flourishing within this mix. It's not that Friends have an anything goes, avoid confrontation, if it works for you go for it, man approach. Where that is, that's actually problematic to me. What I see as hopeful are those bits of tradition that allowed Friends to see the worth of others even as they were "other." Difference need not be a matter of division. It's the tradition that allowed them to see the Lenape as equals and not subjects. It's the tradition suggested by "The Peaceable Kingdom." It's a tradition parallel to Roger Williams saying, "You know, maybe we don't have to make them just like us for them to be okay." I know he wasn't a Quaker, but I'm talking about the sense he represented and it has had a parallel expression in Quaker tradition. Plus I like to mention him because that ridiculous perspective of his led to Rhode Island being called the cesspool of New England.

Anyway, it's not perfect. I mean look at the images of "The Peaceable Kingdom." There is a chasm between the ideal and what is. But look at what is. Two groups on an equal footing, each retaining their identities, Quakers do not become Lenape, and Lenape do not become Quaker, but neither remain the same in the contact. Of course we know how things worked out for the Lenape... and others. Like I said, there is a chasm between the ideal and what is. Maybe that's why the ideal is in the foreground. The human actions are just that, and, as hopeful as they ever are, that's all they can ever be.

But back to Kimball and reaching post-moderns. The gripes that he mentions, or that you pointed out to me, are not gripes about the church per se, but are an articulation of what a Modern Christian Evangelical Church system is capable of identifying internally. It's not a matter of making these changes and becoming attractive to post-moderns. It may be attractive to some people, I don't doubt that. I, for one, am glad to be a part of a congregation that doesn't tie leadership to male biology, but that's not a shift in the world. I've already said why I think that kind of shift is nonsensical, but to belabor it and make a point that might make more sense 'cos we're not "in it," it would be like a Medieval church looking for a way to attract (which of course is already an anachronism) "Renaissancers" simply by saying "You know, they trust their senses, and individual perception and reason are legitimate authorities- how can we repackage our metaphysical hierarchies, sense of virtue and order, and church authority in a way that will bring them into our Medieval sense of the world?" To me, that misses the stated goal. I would add this qualifier though, I don't necessarily think the various forms that fall under some emergent label are "post-modern." So what he is describing may be perfectly suitable for people with particular aesthetic sensibilities, and it may successfully attract those people. But that, to me, is different and not really cross-cultural.

So that said, I am not trying to say, "This is how things ought to be," or trying to make the case that this is right. I am willing to accept that this seems wrong and dangerous to some people. That's fine, but it wouldn't change what I think is problematic about an attempt to conceive of post-modernity as a system commensurate with Modernity or people as post-moderns that can be reached in a Modern sense of that term. I don't think Kimball is building that bridge, nor that it is a bridge that can be built.