A Return to More Liturgical Worship?

Recently, a friend asked me:

"whether you saw in later generations of students at Houghton the desire to return to more liturgical worship, more connection with tradition? If so, what did you notice about what they seemed to be aching for? Conversion to the Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches is an extreme version of this; a more mild one is that Anglican (ACNA) churches are incredibly popular in among students and professors in some evangelical colleges in America."

The short answer to this question is 'Yes'. But it certainly wasn't a wholesale movement.

Here's what I saw:

Some made this kind of move out of a desire to hang on to a conservative Christian faith after they had concluded either

that what they had been brought up with was simply untenable, intellectually speaking;

or

because they could no longer stand the social and political dogmatism that had become tangled up with it like bindweed.

Others did so because they actually wanted to embrace some (or perhaps most) of the new social shibboleths without totally 'letting go' of Christian faith.

But rather more simply tailed off into Protestant liberalism to one degree or another, without 'going liturgical'.

In this they were helped by some of my colleagues, who suffered, deep into middle age, from a desperate need to be Not My Fundamentalist Father — and made this inner compulsion the centrepiece of the pedagogy they unloaded, week by week, onto the unsuspecting 18-year-olds delivered into their care. (Having been brought up in a home that was loving, very prosperous, and basically pagan, I never felt this social-inferiority tic myself.) Though I have no patience with six-day creationism (for, never mind the science; it rests upon a misunderstanding of Scripture ... and indeed of classical texts more generally), I am nevertheless annoyed at Christian pedagogues who are more anxious that their charges not be fundamentalists than they are that they be Christians. Luther (hardly my favourite theologian) was quite right to note that "the German people were much easier to convince that the pope is Antichrist than that the just shall live by faith". Over 30 years, I have noticed the same: it is the negative, deconstructivist aspect of whatever you teach that will win out — that will sink deep into the souls of your hearers — over anything positive or constructive you might have to say.

Anyway, the upshot of all this — a process that is going on in countless colleges — is that some students, at least, have found that they can take refuge in Catholic / Orthodox / 'high'-liturgical Protestant churches, once their confidence in (rather ridiculous) readings of Scripture has been shattered by said pedagogy. After all, at least they stand fast by the historic creeds.

I understand, but decline to join them there. The rationale that fuels my Anabaptism and (very moderate) restorationism is far too strong.

As a church historian, though, I tend to take a long-lens look at all this. For a tap-drip away from evangelicalism to liturgicalism has been going on since about 1830. The birth of the Oxford Movement (high-church Anglicanism), led by J.H. Newman and E.B. Pusey — both defectors from evangelicalism — was in large part influenced by Romanticism. That is why it was supported by people like Coleridge and, in his own eccentric fashion, by Edward Irving.

For evangelicalism was — and remains — emphatically modernist: rationalist-commonsensical; pragmatic; stressing literacy and textual authority; individualistic; concerned with function rather than form. It was this tendency that Dickens had in mind when nonconformist chapels were collateral (or perhaps exemplary) damage in his blast against modern industrialism in Hard Times:

"You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful.  If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it."

Ouch!

The period saw the beginnings of a trickle away from evangelicalism, with its assertive preachiness, rationalist expositions, and cut-and-dried formulae — on Romantic grounds: a love of Pre-Raphaelite art, of mystery, of the emotional consolation of priests and ceremonial that harked back to Merrie England. It's all very easy to mock, and to de-construct. Pre-industrial rural life was squalid; choices, non-existent; the modern recrudescences of its art and its religion, a mirage. (Even I can tell the difference, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, between a Pre-Raphaelite painting and one hailing from the era before Raphael.)

And yet the trickle effect has continued, remorselessly, down to the present. Many notable twentieth-century Catholics and Anglo-Catholics had past lives or upbringings as evangelicals. By now, the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century has become an all-pervasive, vastly debased romanticism — particularly of the self. It affects every movie and pop song, every TV program and pulp novel. And, obviously, our absurdly posturing politics. What the Victorian industrialists and the first readers of Dickens felt significantly, we feel acutely and almost unbearably: that we are rootless social flotsam, very, very far from home. We 'just lerrrvvv to travel', and we want a sense of belonging. We simultaneously want our 2021 creature comforts, along with some absurdly inflated version of 'our rights', and roots, a sense of place, and of solid identity (although always with the option of changing the last whenever we feel like it, of course).

And the liturgical churches offer that — whether in reality, in illusion, or some combination of both.

The Roman Catholic Church offers the fact of institutional continuity from the apostles with the illusion of changelessness. (Its own spokesmen would instantly agree that a lot of change has happened, of course; but if Fred in the pew wishes to ignore the fact and persuade himself otherwise — well, the option is there. And the presence of all that mediæval art is an undeniable connection to something a lot more solid than Hillsong.)

The Orthodox churches offer a combination of the same factual connection with the apostles along with rather more in the way of institutional self-delusion. But Betsy-Jo who has just 'had it' with her Southern Baptist blerrrggghh is hardly about to dive in to the discrepancies between the book of Acts and Byzantine eye-poking; if Father Pavle says there were patriarchs in the first century and that Luke was the first icon painter — well, perhaps it is so.

High-church Anglicanism and the oh-so-very-British fad for 'Celtic Christianity' offer greatly toned-down versions of meeting the same need for roots-for-the-rootless. Or at least an escape from evangelical crassness. And the advantage of the Celtic stuff is that sufficiently little is known about it that you can project back onto it as much postmodern fantasy as you like without fear of overmuch contradiction. (My favourites are books on this theme, solemnly informing us that the early-mediæval Celtic churches were trailblazers for feminism and ecological awareness!)

For myself, I have long ago dropped my youthful objections to liturgy. And, pagan upbringing that I had, I never inherited the biblicist paranoia about art (as being somehow idolatrous) in the first place. But, all that conceded, the Christendom churches remain far too contaminated — by a history of compulsion; by an inverted theology; by having long since lost sight of what a church is; and by an accompanying over-estimation of what sacraments are (yes: call me thus far a rationalist if you will) — for me to join the exodus.