Bondage, discipline, and the ecclesial trap of voluntaristic identity fronts

Last updated on: January 21, 2019 at 11:05 pm by Clint Schnekloth

Bondage, discipline, and the ecclesial trap of voluntaristic identity fronts 2019-01-21T23:05:05-05:00 Clint Schnekloth

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“Secularity is helpfully analyzed in terms of an earlier national spatial scale and media culture that tended toward the homogenization of culture and the captivity of religious traditions in a denominational frame. Our current context inclines toward heterogenization. Far from suppressing particular identities, its disciplining forces elicit them, reducing complex traditions to identity fronts and discouraging complex engagement across difference and in place. The various appearances and mobilizations of religion described under the rubric of the ‘post-secular’ fit well within this frame.

This context poses a profound and hidden challenge to religious traditions. The widespread post-liberal turn to particular, justified in the face of homogenizing dynamisms of previous epochs, goes terribly awry in this context. The primary threat to the church is not against the integrity of its traditions (although that threat continues). The catholicity of the church is profoundly threatened as believers presume communities must be internally homogeneous and become obsessed with identity and boundary distinctions from other groups. In addition, as culture becomes deterritorialize–floating free from geographical community and local place–religious traditions lose the casuist and jurisprudential traditions that connect their fundamental doctrines and principles to a collective form of life. Religious traditions become increasingly abstract collections of beliefs whose function is reduced to identity markers, having little impact on the lives of believers and the world in which they live. This is, in short, a cultural ecology in which sectarianism is the default form. Religious communities face a daunting double challenge: preserving their traditions in a context of cultural amnesia in a manner that does not succumb to a cultural ecology that reduces broad, living traditions to narrow, voluntaristic identity fronts.”

Excerpted from Vincent J. Miller’s essay, “Media Constructions of Space, the Disciplining of Religious Tradition, and the Hidden Threat of the Post-Secular in At the Limits of the Secular.

This is one of the most eye-opening passages I’ve read as I continue to ponder what it means to be “Lutheran” in a post-secular world. Is it possible that “eliciting particularity” is a discipline of post-secularism that serves to reduce them to identity fronts in place of living traditions?

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