There's an article by Matthew Parris in the UK's Times Online that has been making the blog rounds for the past couple or weeks. The title is "As an Atheist, I truly believe Africa need God" . I hadn't yet posted about it here because I hadn't really settled in to think about all the implications Parris puts forward, though it does play into a bit of the previous post with all the little stick figures. Toward the end of the article, Parris offers this insight:
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Parris identifies what I affirm Luther reclaimed--that the priesthood of the believer allows for unmitigated access to the goodness of God. This conversion experience is a transformative event in the life of the Christian. It changes you in ways you cannot begin to put words to.
Today as I re-read the article, fully expecting to go into greater detail about the relationship between personal conversion and piety and it's residual effect on skeptics and unbelievers, I realized there was something deeper going on. Sure, there are ways in which Parris articulates something akin to Paul's explanation on Mars Hill, but the bigger story for me may be the similarity between his understanding of the influence of the African tribe and the predominant model of success in America.
Parris says of the traditional tribal model:
I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the "big man" and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
Though it is often exaggerated, the American "worker bee" corporate model is not dissimilar. This perceived weight is portrayed in all forms of culture, from the landmark 1927 film
Metropolis (which, though German, got it's greatest reception as portraying American Industrialism) to the British and American versions of
The Office that mock the eccentricities of the cubicle-landscape. The box-office hit
Wanted (which I foolishly thought would be a decent movie) is the odyssey of a worker drone turned-assassin-turned-target-turned-back to everyday life. The final scene of the film is the featured character detailing the last six weeks and then staring at the camera saying "What the (expletive) are you doing?" The message is abundantly clear--even if you have to go right back to that office, at least you were an assassin, got the girl, lived a crazy life and took control of your destiny. The individualism is as rugged (if not coarser) than John Wayne could have ever dreamed.
I get that it may seem disingenuous to claim direct comparisons with the African tribal mindset, but for all of America's swagger and rhetoric, for all the marketing and pandering to rugged individualism, the majority of employed persons work pedestrian jobs and can often feel like a cog in someone else's wheel, or, as art reminds us, just one more "brick in the wall." Something clearly has to give in this equation, whether it's the perpetual hypnosis of Peter Gibbons in
Office Space or the psychotic break of Michael Douglas' character in
Falling Down or the widely perceived nobility of Chris McCandless' journey from mind-numbing corporate work to the wilderness in
Into the Wild , there is a fascination with the fantasy of what would happen if someone just had enough.
Though McCandless' story was tragically true, most of the stories that get screen time are fantasies, but by their popularity they clearly reflect thoughts and ideas dreamed by hundreds of thousands of employees. My point is not that all people break, but precisely that they don't--there is a need for some kind of coping mechanism--something that brings life and vitality to their work--something that tells a person "you are NOT a machine."
For hundreds of thousands of Americans (and most of the ones sitting in church with me on Sunday) this is the role of faith in their daily lives. It grounds them and gives depth and breadth and vitality to their everyday experiences. It is among these most faithful followers of Jesus that Scriptures are never quoted to win an argument around the watercooler, nor are expense reports questioned--they are people who have put into practice the very thing Parris describes of the Aid workers he encountered in Malawi:
But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. "Privately" because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.
It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.
Parris is articulating the lost art of witness. Not witness-ing as such--not rabid evangelism that markets faith like vacuum cleaners--but "martyria" witness. The kind of thing John's gospel speaks of in this weeks lectionary reading--the kind of thing that one's entire life testifies to.
Whether our liberation is from the tyrannical rule of an oppressive regime or tribe or from the slow-death of being evaluated solely in terms of production, it is the way in which we carry out those tasks that our claim to liberation is proven true or false.
I would want to think if Parris followed me around he would see the same evidence of faith he saw in the kindness and diligence of the Aid workers in Malawi, but I tend to think otherwise. Perhaps the greater reality is not to rage against the machine but to consistently embody the shalom that my kips confess but my actions so often belie.
