Do the People Really Want Theology?

THERE IS A New York Times op-ed that’s been making the rounds in my network, which is dense with people (like me) in the field of religious studies and theology. In it, New York Times columnist Lauren Jackson argues that—in the face of war, economic collapse, and political upheaval—Americans seem eager to engage in the form of public discourse that is theology. It’s not entirely clear what she thinks people want, when they want theology. It sounds like she could just mean “being Christian in public.” Or it could be she’s just noticing a hunger for that mixed brew of existential meaning and good feelings.

The irony, of course, is that many people (especially on the left) are no longer religious. But in this dismal moment, perhaps, they are looking for something that religion used to do, or used to provide. Jackson ends up in a conversation with several of my colleagues, trying to figure out what exactly that thing is. She calls it public theology.

The other irony, for me, is something that I’ve been writing about in my new book More Than Human Power: On the Afterlives of Theology (which is forthcoming with Columbia University Press). It’s that precisely at this moment when theology is something the wider public might want, it’s also something that’s essentially being starved into nonexistence in American higher education. This is true about many things in American higher education right now, of course, like scientific research. The American public is hungry for good scientific research, and yet here we are in a situation where that is being economically starved.

But the situation with theology is special. This has been happening for decades, because of the secularization of American culture. But it’s even happening in American seminaries where the conceptual, speculative, metaphysical work of theology is being sidelined in favor of more practical and pastoral approaches. Pastoral and therapeutic approaches are a better fit in a wellness-oriented culture like ours. The strange speculative work of conceptual theology is not. And yet, I don’t think that any pastoral or therapeutic method worth its salt should avoid the unsettling speculative questions that theology puts you into contact with. It’s not because they will make you feel good. Rather, I think it just gives you a better sense of what you’re actually dealing with, and how to navigate through it (hopefully without becoming more evil, in the process.)

WHEN I WAS WORKING on my book, I sat down with a lot of my colleagues in theology, for interviews. I wrote about them here. But there were a few insights that have stayed with me, and that I keep thinking about. My colleague Amaryah Armstrong, for instance, observed that there’s a kind expectation about what theology is that’s overtaken conversations in seminaries, especially. People come to theology looking for positivity and good feelings. “People want hope, people want solidarity, people want to feel some kind of unity,” Amaryah told me. “Maybe they’re willing to go through some kind of melancholy or lament. But they want to get to the other side of that by the end of the book, or whatever.” For Amaryah this is a problem because, “it always puts a limit on how you’re thinking about something. To me, honestly, it puts a limit on the study of God. The reason I left fundamentalism was that there was that kind of limit, in terms of the sorts of questions we should be asking.” It’s in part because of this demand that Amaryah has been part of a diaspora out of the field.

To me, this seems like a clear result of secularization. In a cultural context where religion is often present in public discourse as a political problem, and where it’s aspirationally sequestered in the private sphere, religion has to work hard to make itself look acceptable and appealing. It needs to look like something that helps, rather than something that challenges or unsettles you. It needs to look like something that will make you feel good, rather than something that will make you feel uncomfortable. It needs to look like something that will fix your problems, rather than cause them. Even in seminary contexts (or perhaps especially in seminary contexts) the aim is to cultivate religion as a feel-good resource for a wellness-oriented culture. This is how it makes a positive (rather than a negative) social contribution.

But, if you are taking theological questions, seriously, they often make you feel very uncomfortable. Some of the most important theological questions are some of the most uncomfortable. Why do we die? There are many predictable and easy ways to answer this theologically, but those are also often the least intellectually credible and the most unsatisfying. Why is there so much evil in the world? That’s always a hard one, and it’s not like asking that question will make the evil go away. What am I supposed to do with my life? Again, lots of easy ways to answer that one, and those are often the least satisfying. The ones that feel real and honest are often the most difficult to contend with. Or, one of my personal favorites: what’s the relationship between God and nothingness? Why does thinking about divine things (or even just what Paul Tillich called ultimate concerns) often feel like staring into the abyss? Not an easy question to answer, but an important one to struggle with.

One of the open secrets in the academic field of theology is that studying theology often leads people to disaffiliate with the religious traditions they were raised in. When they take these theological questions seriously, they often feel a sense of betrayal over the fact that these questions are often elided, and not engaged with seriously, in a pastoral context. It might be the case that the pastoral aim is to provide a certain kind of therapeutic resource, but many people feel cheated when they realize that the therapeutic resource they were offered didn’t actually show them what kind of a cosmos they were dealing with. It didn’t show them the voices from their own tradition that were hidden from them, for the sake of expediency.

Is this unsettling what Jackson imagines that the public really wants? I kind of doubt it. Would the American public benefit from contending with questions like this? I don’t know.

JACKSON CITES AN old article by theologians Charles Mathewes and Paul Dafydd Jones, as a kind of gloss on what public theology might look like now (as opposed to the mid-20th century, when American Protestant thinkers established it as a category). In that essay, they address the positivity question to some degree. Public theology, they write, is a form of civic engagement “that combines contemplation, prudence and a hopeful democratic sensibility.” But what interests me about this point is what this form of hope is oriented around: hope for democracy, for this complex and messy shared life that’s conditioned by our political framework.

Right now, cultivating hope for democracy also necessarily means cultivating some critical reflection about your own religious (or anti-religious) sensibilities. That’s not really therapeutic work. It doesn’t offer people flattering pictures of who they are. It’s not easy to fit into a feel-good narrative for our wellness-oriented culture. And it’s unclear to me that the New York Times, or our social media ecology, can really accommodate that sort of difficult labor right now. Even here on Substack, people tend to click on the links that promise to make them feel good, and righteous. I’m guilty of it, too.

In my book, part of what I’m reflecting on is the death of theology. But of course, as I acknowledge, people are going to keep doing theology in public. People are never going to stop talking about divine things. God, other gods, questions of ultimate existential uncertainty: as long as we are human, these things will exist in our publics. That never dies. But what concerns me is that the fragile institutions of higher education that have allegedly been designed to prepare people to live in this aspirationally democratic world increasingly find this kind of formation (this kind of intellectual training) to be a luxury product, or unnecessary. These institutions are disinvesting, not only in theology but also other fields in the humanities, which take similar questions on in different ways.

People will always do theology, don’t worry! That’s a refrain I’ve heard from many people, as I’ve talked about this book project. I’m not worried about that. What I’m worried about is the disappearance of formal spaces where people (especially people who aren’t part of a religious institution) can struggle with some of the most difficult and unsettling elements of this kind of knowledge, in community with one another. If you don’t have an actual community of human beings to struggle through these questions with, you may never find the fortitude to explore the most difficult, unsettling, and ultimately important questions. Speaking things aloud to real people builds courage. A small room of other people is a nascent public.

This semester I’m teaching a new course that I’m calling Food, Fitness & Faith. We’re talking about religion and wellness culture from all kinds of different angles. The other day, in a conversation about collective effervescence and team prayer, one of my students uttered a phrase that made me feel pretty good about what we’ve been doing in that class together. Acknowledging the ambivalence of both collective effervescence and team prayer, the student said, “sometimes you kind of have to pick your poison.” Nothing is pure. And yet we have to live, and make decisions. That’s one of the things that we’ve been talking about all semester, though not in quite those words.

Poison isn’t necessarily a good thing. Not always. But medicine can be poison. So, in other words, poison can sometimes provide a little bit of healing. It doesn’t mean you should forget that it’s poison. Talking about theology, or doing theology, doesn’t necessarily offer redemption. But I do think it can do a kind of harm reduction. I think the public sphere is better off when the people who exist within it know how to pick their poison. They know what kind of medicine they might need. They know what happens when you take too much of it. They know what happens when you give it to the wrong people, who don’t need it. But poison is a hard sell. Nobody thinks that they want it.