LITURGY AND SOCIAL WORK: HISTORY HAS LESSONS FOR THE “WEIRD CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT” - PART TWO
A color-coded map of the neighborhood of St. Mark's, Philadelphia used in the 1879 lawsuit. Public domain.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we publish the second part of Lachlan Hassman’s essay on Anglo-Catholic liturgy and social work. Yesterday, he described the liturgical and political conflicts over the bells of St. Mark’s, Philadelphia, and placed this in the context of other Anglo-Catholic churches and their to the marginalized.
In a recent essay on public theology, the Rev. Dr. James Farwell describes the relationship between liturgy and social action this way: “Ritually enacted virtues, practiced in the hope for the full and coming reign of God, will orient the liturgical assembly to particular social, moral and political concerns as worthy of Christian engagement.” Farwell posits liturgy as “fund[ing] public theology by cultivating certain virtues, habits and values in the liturgical assembly.” He is careful to note that “liturgical formation will not, in most cases, prescribe detailed courses of action to take when facing specific instances of those concerns.” Taking seriously his assertion of liturgical agency in orienting communities towards public social action, however, we have seen that in the case of many Anglo-Catholic congregations this action is directed in a particularly localized way, one that incorporates “hands-on” work for the relief of the temporal needs of the communities’ neighbors.
At the heart of this issue is a dichotomous relationship between two frameworks for social change that can be referred to as policy-focused, on one hand, or immediate, locally-oriented work on the other. Pope Francis highlighted the tension between these two approaches in early 2017 when he told an interviewer that it is “always right” to give alms to people who ask for help on the street, despite concerns of waste or, to use the Pope’s example, that the recipient of the money will “spend it on a glass of wine.” A few weeks later, Thomas Tobin, Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Providence in Rhode Island posted a message on Facebook titled “Three Reasons Not to Give to Panhandlers,” in which he argued that “our community has legitimate and structured means of helping the poor and needy. We should support those.” Similarly, the work of the Sisters of St. Margaret, whose ministry among the urban poor in London was cited by John Shelton Reed, could be criticized as an ineffective “band-aid” to much larger, systemic problems. The disagreement between Pope Francis and Thomas Tobin encapsulates the difference between immediate, localized forms of charity, such as the Sisters of St. Margaret’s approach, and systemic and policy-level work. It is a question of agency and sustainability, as well as a politics and ecclesiology. Advocates of policy-oriented theology and Christian activism (the Rev. Dr. William Barber II and fellow leaders of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign, for example) place the onus of solving societal injustices on government-regulated agencies. By contrast, immediate, locally-oriented work focused on the temporal needs of neighbors envisions the hands-on work of soup kitchens, tuition-free schools, and free clinics, as appropriate ministry of the church. This form of Christian piety, was the favored charitable expression of Anglo-Catholic communities in the 19th and early 20th centuries in England and the United States.
I should note that it is entirely possible, if not advisable, to advocate for and pursue both policy-oriented and localized, immediate charitable work. As an aside, practitioners of Christian charity might find locally-oriented work most effective, and policy-oriented work most authentic when the two are coupled together.
Nevertheless, it is remarkable, and perhaps unexpected, that the sensuous and otherworldly worship favored by the Oxford Movement so regularly produced ministries so focused on this-worldly needs. The association between High Church liturgical expression and immediacy-focused charitable work is an unexpected example, following Farwell’s assertion of liturgy’s agency in orienting a worshiping community, if not towards specific projects or action points, then at least towards certain modes of charity and social work.
Recognizing this relationship is particularly important for contemporary adherents, leaders and cheerleaders of the “Weird Christianity Movement.” Tara Isabella Burton, columnist at the Religion News Service and author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World has recorded a “fringe identity, one largely consigned to Twitter and Anglo-Catholic parishes in urban areas,” which she calls “Weird Christianity.” While many mainline congregations continue to get older and smaller, this “movement” of Christians attracted to a much more aesthetic, embodied, and mysterious liturgical expression skews young. Its followers are much more likely to be reading Søren Kierkegaard, David Bentley Hart, or Julian of Norwich than John Shelby Spong or Marcus Borg. They are, she notes, less concerned with the tired liberalism versus fundamentalism debate than with the foundational truth of the Christian message. Faced with divine mysteries, adherents prefer to embrace the mystery and dispense with theological or historical justifications for Christian dogma. Taking the idea of a literal resurrection, for example, Burton writes that these “weird Christians” embrace the fact that “it is counter-cultural, and unsettling and also downright ridiculous that God became man - still weirder that such a man died and then came back. Christianity can only work, these practitioners argue, if it embraces the sheer weirdness of its theology.” The mysteries of faith, they argue, operate on a very particular internal logic which stands at odds to that of the world. Turning again to Farwell, who posits liturgy as an act of theological “world-making,” we can see how the counter-cultural logic of Weird Christianity is encountered in the liturgical experience.
Burton writes that adherents of Weird Christianity are, “like so many young Americans of all religious persuasions, characterized by their hunger for something more than contemporary American culture can offer, something transcendent, politically meaningful, personally challenging. Like the hipster obsession with “authenticity” that marked the mid-2010s, the rise of Weird Christianity reflects America’s unfulfilled desire for, well, something real.”
Leaders in the Catholic Church in Ireland have also noticed this trend. In a collection of essays from a symposium on priestly formation, Aoife McGrath notes a “cultural drive for authenticity” manifesting in “a visible number of young adults, including a number of candidates discerning for the priesthood, [who] are choosing to follow the path of (what would appear to be) a very traditional form of faith…They look to the past to appropriate the language, customs, dress and practices of what they perceive to be a traditional identity.” This searching for authenticity, he notes in Models of Priestly Formation, is essentially reactionary. “It asserts a form of public religiosity in the face of a culture that is judged no longer to give room to religion…Since this outlook is reactionary, proponents might view themselves as being authentically and justifiably countercultural. Paradoxically, like their peers in broader society, they are following the demands of their culture” (118-119, emphasis added). McGrath, in his Catholic context, identifies an existential threat to Burton’s “weird Christianity.” Looking to reclaim a mysterious and highly liturgical expression of the faith, he argues, will fall flat if it means “little real engagement with the complexity of the Christian tradition.” Or, I would add, without the accompanying and equally counter-cultural expression of Christian social work.
Burton writes that “the Weird Christian movement, loose and fledgling though it is, isn’t just about its punk-traditionalist aesthetic, a valorization of a half-imagined past. It is at its most potent when it challenges the present, and reimagines the future.” For a new liturgical movement to have any of the authenticity it craves, especially at this crucial moment in American history, it must not be relegated to a few priests on Twitter and Instagram organizing requiem masses or posting pictures of private celebrations of the Eucharist in their own homes. Early adherents of the Oxford Movement recognized their project not only as rediscovering an incarnational and sensuous liturgical expression, but also as modeling an incarnational and deeply localized program of Christian piety. If worship has the agency Farwell claims it does in “teaching us how to attend, and what to attend to in our lives,” then participants of this movement must follow through with the demands of its liturgy. If history has anything to say, among these demands is a commitment not only to the sacrament, to frequent corporate worship and engaged and intentional communities, but also to a rigorous outreach to the poor. Perhaps clerical leaders of this movement will find that it is exactly that localized outreach that young people are craving, new and justice-building ways of being in the world partnered with a symbolically rich liturgical expression and a community that calls together and actively loves the “obscure people living in side streets and alleys,” as the opponents of the bells of St. Mark’s characterized Philadelphia’s poor. Todays “weird Christians” may recognize the imperfection of local outreach in addressing unjust policy but, like Eugene Hoffman, rector of St. Marks in 1876, must realize the social demands of their liturgical expression and ring the bells on behalf of their neighbors, nonetheless.
