Dreher, Modernity and Evangelicalism

W.H. Chellis

Rod Dreher has a great post about the rise of pentacostalism and evangelicalism as a response to modernity’s crisis of authority.

Dreher writes:

Still thinking about why Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism are so appealing to the poor, and why more traditional forms of Christianity are lagging (except, in many cases, when they take on the trappings of charismatic Christianity). A Pentecostal reader has a terrific post about this in the “Church big enough for us all” thread. In short, he or she says that Pentecostals believe in a personal and ongoing relationship with the living God — one that is direct and vivid, not mediated. I think TMatt has spoken of how the Anglicans in Africa are hugely successful in part because they are Pentecostal-ish in the way the present and live out the Gospel. So there is absolutely a theological component to it.

But I want to focus for a moment on why the older churches, especially the more hierarchical churches, may be ill-suited to speak to the modern listener. I have a half-baked theory, and I’d like to offer it for consideration, comment and revision.

Consider Jose Ortega y Gasset’s 1930 classic “The Revolt of the Masses.” Ortega writes that modern — that is to say, 20th century — man lives in a condition without parallel in human history: “life presented itself to the new man as exempt from restrictions”:

We are, in fact, confronted with a radical innovation in human destiny, implanted by the 19th century. A new stage has been mounted for human existence, new both in the physical and the social aspects. Three principles have made possible this new world: liberal democracy, scientific experiment, and industrialism. The two latter may be summed up in one word: technicism.
Ortega writes that for all men in the past, “life was burdensome destiny, economically and physically. For birth, existence meant to them an accumulation of impediments which they were obliged to suffer, without possible solution other than to adapt themselves to them, to settle down in the narrow space they left available.” In the second half of the 19th century, the rise of democracy made social barriers begin to fall. Social and technological revolution has created mass man, and imbued wiht the “the radical assurance that to-morrow, it will still be richer, ampler, more perfect, as if it enjoyed a spontaneous, inexhaustible power of increase.” Ortega goes on to say that mass man has forgotten that such advances as have been made for his social and material benefit “still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.”

What does this have to do with religion and modernity? This, I think. More and more of us live in a world in which we think that everything around us is a given. We live in a time of immediacy, which entails ignorance of and indifference to the past. We also live in the time of Philip Rieff’s “psychological man,” which radically redefined the proper aspirations for human beings. Today, the complete man is one who is psychologically untroubled, who is satisfied (”senorito satisfecho” is Ortega’s withering term). As Rieff interpreter Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn writes:

As Rieff showed in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, authority traditionally worked through moral interdiction and culture’s provision of legitimate releases. Remissions were expected and accepted. But the elites of the second culture took a “radically remissive” stance, attacking their culture head-on. Replacing traditional authority with a new antiauthoritarianism that cast all interdiction as intolerable restraint on individual freedom, the third world constituted an anti-culture, replacing humility with a sense of unlimited possibility and the everyday reality of restraint and satisfaction with the gospel of self-fulfillment through personal experience, “always ending in the name of a better world elsewhere.”
What form of the Christian religion is modern man (mass man, psychological man) most prepared by this culture to respond to? It would have to be one that’s therapeutic, experiential, individualized, and non-hierarchical. It would have to be one that believes strongly in progress and self-improvement, and not merely giving one the wherewithal to endure suffering. It would have to be one that doesn’t rely on historical precedent, traditional authority, or a physical place — one that is highly exportable and transmissable amid a mobile, increasingly rootless population.

The modern world was made for Pentecostalism.

I don’t say that as a criticism of Pentecostalism. The Christian religion in all its forms is to some degree experiential and personal, and offers hope for divine intervention to lift invididuals out of their seemingly hopeless circumstances. And it is true that human beings have legitimate emotional and spiritual needs that are beings that are being met by Pentecostalism in ways that the old Christian churches are struggling to do. But it’s important, I think, to keep in mind that the old forms of the faith developed over time in cultural milieux in which structure and hierarchy were necessary and natural in a way they simply aren’t — or aren’t perceived to be anymore. They developed in a time in which death and suffering and privation were far more acute facts of daily life than they are now. True, for the elites, modernity meant the loss of faith. The poor by and large still crave it — but they seem to be moving toward a form of the faith that is more immediately apprehensible to them in their condition.

Does any of this make sense?