Response To Professor Nimi Wariboko

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Pneuma 33 (2011) 409-416

Response to Professor Nimi Wariboko

Harvey Cox

Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School,

Cambridge, Massachusetts

hcox@hds.harvard.edu

Abstract

Professor Wariboko has rightly responded to Fire from Heaven in the context of the entire span of my writing from Te Secular City to Te Future of Faith and has pointed out some persistent themes. Te thesis of Te Secular City was that God remains present and active in a secularizing world, albeit not always under “religious” auspices. A new generation of thinkers, including Charles Taylor, has now picked up this theme. Fire from Heaven described the “surfacing” of this primal piety in the global Pentecostal wave, and Te Future of Faith suggests what the next stage may be. Te Pentecostal movement and the resurgence of Islam have made it clear that the “secular” is now only one possible worldview among others. Also, there are a number of different forms of secularism. Te emerging global cosmopolis will be multicultural, a world city “where strangers meet.” Using the metaphor of jazz, faith now follows no “score” but improvises within a chord structure, with players responding to each other. Te question of whether the Pentecostal movement can “play” in such a setting is still an open one.

Keywords

secularization, secularism, cosmopolis, primal piety

(My) thesis is that Fire from Heaven (1990s) is the re-cognition of the religious sub- strate of the emergent global, cosmopolitan urban civilization heralded by Cox’s Te Secular City (1960s). Today the spirit of God has escaped from the iron cage of secu- larization/modernization theory and the idea of God-free civilization prowls about in

the dry places of libraries “like the ghost of dead religious belief.”

— Nami Wariboko, March 11, 2011

Society for Pentecostal Theology

I am deeply grateful to my friend Professor Wariboko for his deft and discern- ing reading of Fire from Heaven.1 I am also grateful that he has read it in the

1

Harvey G. Cox, Fire from Heaven: Te Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157007411X598309

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light of much of the rest of my oeuvre and has located elements of consistency that many other readers have missed. He has also nimbly moved the discussion about the complex relationship between the Spirit and secularization to a whole new and promising level. Our valuable exchange prompts me to ask some questions about this relationship and where we now stand.

Following his lead, I begin my response by going back to Te Secular City, published in 1965,2 thirty years before Fire from Heaven. When I wrote that first book I had just finished my doctorate at Harvard and had been working for a year in Berlin, serving as an “Ecumenische Mitarbeiter” (Ecumenical Fraternal Worker), living in the Bundesallé and teaching in the Gossner Mission’s lay education center in East Berlin. I commuted four days a week through Checkpoint Charley. It was an utterly formative year for me, during which I made many friends and struggled with all three of the themes I have thought about during my whole career — religion, secularism, and culture — and the dynamic among and between them.

On both sides of the Berlin Wall I found myself immersed in the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and even got to know some people who had been his coworkers. For a year, Berlin had been both my home and my teacher. When I returned to America I drew on my rich experiences there, including Bonho- effer’s famous question: How do we speak of God in a “nicht-religiöse” idiom, in a secular age? My original title for the book was God in the Secular City, but the publisher suggested it would sell better simply as Te Secular City. He was probably right, but the American title, without the word God, prompted some scholars to lump me in mistakenly with the so-called “death of God” theolo- gians of the 1960s, although I had explicitly and forcefully differed with them in Te Secular City . Te thesis of the book was, and still is, a response to Bonhoeffer’s question: How do we speak of God in a secular age? Tis is some- thing Wariboko clearly understands, and I am glad he does not perpetuate the canard that I belong in the (now dead) “death of God” camp.

To the publisher’s amazement and mine, the book became a bestseller, was translated into seventeen languages, and eventually sold a million copies. Apparently questions about the relationship between the religious, the secular, and the cultural-political remain pressing. In fact, as I will suggest in a moment, events of the past few decades — including the astonishing rise of the Pentecostal movement and the rebirth of Islam — have rendered them even more urgent.

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Harvey G. Cox, Te Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Teological Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

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In the years since 1965 a torrent of literature on these topics has flooded academic and church circles. Te reasons for this deluge are not hard to dis- cern. Europeans and even some Americans were discovering that their differ- ent forms of secularity placed them in a distinct minority in the world. I do not believe that the reason for this is some mysterious “resurgence of religion.” Rather, as Wariboko has suggested, I believe that religious and spiritual impulses that had remained quiescent and out of sight once again became vis- ible. Tis “primal spirituality” provides the background for the growth and spread of Pentecostalism in the past half century.

In the West many elites had either not noticed these submerged impulses or had dismissed them as the fading residues of a previous period. In the non- Western world they had also continued to be present, but temporarily stifled by the imposition of Western laws, education, capitalist economic practices, and colonialism. In some cases colonized peoples reached back into religious traditions to retrieve symbols and rituals to deploy as weapons against a dom- ination they saw as originating in the secular-Christian West. Tis provides the background for the renaissance of Islam. Te “return of the sacred” was also a political event.

Te revolt of the “majority world” against “the West” was, of course, very selective. Not everything was rejected. Some, not all, were attracted to democracy. But because Western domination had often destroyed traditional mediating institutions, many newly freed democracies soon degenerated into authori- tarianism. Some, not all, were drawn to the idea of the sovereign national state. But others, especially in the Muslim sphere, remained suspicious of breaking the pan-Islamic umma into separate states. In the past decades we have watched these tendencies play out, most recently in the Arab world.

Tere was one particularly significant, and for some a surprising, victim of “de-westernization” and postcolonialism. Tat unexpected victim was secular- ism. It should be recalled that in Te Secular City I drew a sharp distinction between the process of secularization and secularism. Tose Westerners who advocated some form of secularism for the majority world often believed they were the bearers of a more advanced civilization. Tey sponsored a “mission civilatrice” that would rescue benighted peoples from obscurantism and religion. Te secularism the West brought was allegedly nonreligious, even anti-religious in some of its forms. Secularism insisted that religion should be strictly confined to the private and personal worlds, a peculiar idea in much of the non-Western world. Te state would be neutral. Education would be non- religious, preparing citizens of any faith or none for citizenship. Secularism was alleged to be fair and rational, progressive, and — especially — more

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civilized. To be “modern” meant to be secular. Turkish Kemalism, imposed by the Turks on themselves, is the most drastic example: away with the beards and the scarves! But aside from certain privileged elites, the majority of people in what is now called “the majority world” remained deeply distrustful of the whole idea. Many suspected that secularism was yet another foreign yoke being pressed on them, and I think they were right.

Tis turn of events shocked scholars into a new, often tempestuous, discus- sion about the nature of the “secular.” In Te Secular City I had argued that secularization as a historical process was in large measure a product of Christi- anity, but that secularism was a rigid and toxic ideology. Te same thesis is now advanced by a group of younger thinkers such as the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, who maintains that secularization is the historical continua- tion of Christianity, expressing its essential kenosis. He celebrates it. Te Cana- dian philosopher Charles Taylor, on the other hand, in A Secular Age, also contends that secularization is a product of Latin Christendom.3 But he sees it as a distortion, not a fulfillment. But what do we mean by “secular”?

Taylor distinguishes three levels. Te first is the institutional separation of religion (“the church”) from the state. Te second is a palpable decline in the practice of religious rites such as church attendance. Te third is a change in “conditions of belief,” the cultural atmosphere, what he terms “the social imaginary.” But Taylor’s portrait has not gone unchallenged. Scholars in an important new collection contend that all three of Taylor’s levels are questionable.4 In regard to the first, church-state separation, they remind us that “separation” is anything but a fixed concept. It appears quite varied from time to time and place to place. It is historically conditioned. French laïcité, American constitutional separation of church, German public support for religion, and British “established church secularity” express very different faces of “secularity.” By most measures, religious life in America, with its legally mandated separation, is much more robust than in Germany, France, or the UK. Separation and secularism can hardly be equated.

About Taylor’s second level, religious practice, these critics doubt just how much of a decline there has really been. Tey deploy statistics and clergy com- plaints of low attendance and indifferentism from previous centuries. And they remind us that the premodern period, sometimes presented to us as an era of nearly universal religiousness (when belief was “axiomatic,” according to

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Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

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Taylor) was in fact characterized by heresies and indifference. Otherwise, why did the Catholic Church need to resort to inquisitions and to evangelizers like the Dominicans? Besides, some thoughtful researchers, especially in France, contend that “religiousness” may be changing, becoming more diffuse, rather than declining. Religion may be adapting to new conditions that make the old attendance statistics and belief-unbelief scales less dependable. Tis is another useful prism through which to think about the Pentecostal surge.

Regarding the third level, “conditions of belief” in the contemporary world, was it really the Enlightenment, urbanization, science, or one of the other alleged causes that brought on the current so-called “secular age”? Or did something else also contribute? For example, did the “shock of recognition” felt by the West during its global expansion upon discovering that there were alternative religions contribute to changing the “conditions of belief” in the West itself? Te medieval age knew about “Jews, Turks and heretics,” as the formula in the old English Book of Common Prayer has it, but did the discov- ery of so many more religions raise questions about the nature of religion and therefore, inevitably, about the nature of secularism? Furthermore, these other religions show no sign of disappearing. Far from it, they are even more visible now due to communications technologies and migration. Te prediction of an American Protestant bishop in 1900 that since Christianity was the religion of the “dominant powers,” by the end of that century it would be the only reli- gion in the world has come to naught. But, then, neither has Marx’s prediction of the disappearance of religion been fulfilled, nor has Bonhoeffer’s religionless “world come of age” arrived. In short, the relationship of the “religious” and the “secular” is far more complex than most people had anticipated. One clear result of these developments is that the received “secularization thesis” has been eviscerated and is now in tatters. Still, something has indeed changed and is continuing to change. Neither religion nor secularization is what it used to be. But what has changed, and why?

Tere are many indications that the standard, inherited Euro-American narrative of evolution from religious obscurantism into secular modernity has become highly questionable. It was always a myth, a grand récit that we in the West have told ourselves for a long time. If our secularism seemed to be a minority position in the world, many of us insisted that the world would sooner or later catch up. We expected to see our narrative re-enacted in the non-Western world, and meanwhile our version of world history provided an ideological rationale for Euro-American imperial projects: “Take up the white man’s burden” (Rudyard Kipling). But this story is coming unwoven, and a new narrative has not yet been spun. As religions, for good or for evil, soar into

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public prominence all around the world, Europe appears, at least in this respect, now no longer the avant garde of world history.

Te unraveling of the secularization narrative had begun before the persis- tence of religion and the unavoidable reality of religious and cultural pluralism became so starkly noticeable. Te story had been an optimistic one. But the twentieth century with its gulags and holocausts and ruthless bombings of civilians turned out to be something quite different from the apex of progress. “Secular” and anti-religious regimes seemed just as capable as their religious predecessors of grave horrors.

Is there a link between the secular and modernity? Today the thrust toward modernity continues, but there seem to be multiple ways, not just one, to be “modern.” Some are secular in one of its many forms; some are not. Tere are also multiple ways of being “secular.” Te “secularity” I described in Te Secular City, spawned by Christianity, has now been joined by other “sec- ularities,” spawned by Confucian, Buddhist, and Muslim cultural traditions. New religious mutations are emerging. Pentecostalism, the fastest growing wing of Christianity (mainly in the non-Western world) is expanding in part because it offers people a way of being both “modern” and religious (or “spiritual”) at the same time.

What can I say, then, in response to Prof. Wariboko about the future inter- action of the “fire from heaven” and the “secular city”? Somewhere, Aristotle once mused on the question: “What is a city?” He dismissed the idea that either physical size or population defines a “city.” As I recollect it, his answer was, “A city is a place where strangers meet.” Our question then becomes, can the “secularism” in the Secular City be understood as only one among the many worldviews that inform and sustain those who are, at some level, the strangers who live within it? Can the religions, including Pentecostalism, engage in dialogue with the secular the way they (sometimes) engage one another? Can the secular understand itself not as the summum bonum of his- tory, but as one possible worldview among others? Can the secular become one voice in the choir?

Where can we look for clues to answer these questions? We have already noted that our Western form of secularization is the child (sometimes unwanted, unexpected, even rebellious) of a Judeo-Christian culture. But like other children, it has inherited both some of the good features of its parents and — alas — some of the less attractive qualities, such as its exclusivity, its expansionism, and its zeal.

Perhaps the secular can take the next step toward maturity by recognizing that it is itself not a uniform or univocal phenomenon. I have already men-

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tioned the book Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Te title encapsulates the book’s thesis: there is not a single “secularism.” Within its realm there are denominations, sects and schismatics, traditionalists and radicals. Intra- secular disputes are often rancorous. Maybe secularism needs its own ecu- menical movement.

Are we talking here about the vexed idea of “multiculturalism”? If so, then one of the major carriers of the next stage of the Spirit’s always restless surging among the peoples of the earth will be the Pentecostal movement. But the question is: Can Pentecostals avoid the doctrinal and institutional sclerosis that has proved so lethal to so many renewal movements before? Can “the Pentecostal” with its multicultural dynamism avoid becoming Pentecostalism? If a true city is a place “where strangers meet,” it cannot be monocultural. It must be a place where the music, culture, art — and religions — and people — meet.

As we envision the future of the secular city, I propose that we use the term cosmopolis. It suggests a world city, a pluralistic polis. But, given the ever swirl- ing currents of history, such a city cannot by definition ever be arrived at. It is always incomplete, a work in progress. In Fire from Heaven I devoted a chapter to comparing Pentecostalism with jazz. Here again jazz provides a useful anal- ogy. First, jazz musicians do not rely on a score. Tey improvise within a chord sequence. Tey are creators, but within a structure. Tey are both composers and performers at the same time. Tere is no blueprint for cosmopolis. We will need to make it up as we go along.

Secondly, jazz is mutually responsive music. It does not rely on baton- waving conductors. No one person is leading. Jazz players frequently engage in what is called “changing fours.” One musician improvises a phrase for four measures, then another picks up on what he or she has just created and elabo- rates it into a new configuration. Ten the process repeats itself. Sometimes jazz groups “pass fours” around to everyone in the ensemble. Cosmopolis will have to be more like a jazz group than a band marching in step.

As a place where strangers meet, the cosmopolis must nourish genuine encounter. I disagree with my late colleague Prof. Samuel Huntington, who predicted a “clash of civilizations.”5 He was right to suggest that at the core of every civilization there is a religious tradition. I would add that it is more like a chord sequence than a fully written score. But Huntington was wrong to forecast an inevitable clash. His is a flawed and fatalistic reading. History

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Samuel Huntington, Te Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Foreign Affairs, 1996).

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shows that when religions meet each other they do sometimes clash, but more often they change, mingle, and mutate. As Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus move into the West, the West changes, but so do these world faiths. We can see this happening in our own faith; as Christianity moves into the “majority world,” its theologies, liturgies, and Christologies also change, as the global Pentecostal tide demonstrates. While preserving the core of the Gospel, Christianity in Beijing and Bangalore will be different from the Christianity of Boston or Bavaria.

It is no accident, I think, that Professor Wariboko, who has interpreted and responded to Fire from Heaven with such finesse, speaks from the perspective of an African, and thus from the “majority world,” the one in which the con- tinuing drama of religion, spirituality, and culture will continue to play out in the twenty-first century. May the conversation continue.

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