A Manifesto for Radical Religion

HARVEY COX'S Seduction of the Spirit is properly not a book at all but a manifesto and a scattering of blueprints. Its thrust: Marx was only half-right. Religion is not always and everywhere or merely an opiate of the masses. Though it often serves as a "sedative administered without consent," religion is also sometimes the only way a defeated culture can preserve its history. An oppressed people's religion becomes a way to stave off extinction and absorption. Through ritual and symbol, collective remembrance and testimony, it endures as a sanctuary for the impulse and energies of liberation. In times of social revolution, in Mexico, for example, a Mass may emerge, in Cox's description, as a concrete instance of the "radicalizing of false piety," a store of resonant symbols with real political content. And in times and a culture such as ours, what Cox calls "People's Religion" becomes partisan and critical, defending people from the control, domination and the catechizing perpetrated by massive bureaucratic structures.

Over the past few decades a handful of historians, Rude, Thompson, Hobsbawm and some others have turned attention to the "people at the bottom." They do not treat working people, peasants, or the "lower classes" as a necessary and incumbent labor force or as the passive victims of prevailing policy. Instead, they are engaged in exploring the varied and manifold historical responses of the people at the bottom to their own condition, the political acts and cultural expressions of the "losers" in history. Escaping the mute parochialism and indifference of many historians, they realize that causes which they portray and analyze that were lost in Europe and in the United States may yet be won in Latin America, Africa or Asia. The most valuable chapters in The Seduction of the Spirit stand as one of the first attempts to carry these his torians' Marxian insights and intentions into the field of theology.

Again, maybe "call" or manifesto is closer to the mark than a full-fledged "attempt." But stammering and piecemeal as it is in comparison to the works of Hobsbawm or Thompson, Cox's book still manages to point out ways and directions for the creation of a new discipline. The phrase Cox uses is a "Theology of Liberation."

THE WORK that has gone on under the rubric of "radical theology" for the past ten years or so has taken many forms, from proclaiming and then dissecting the death of God to staging folk-rock masses, none of them particularly "radical" in any substantial way. In fact, none of the so-called radical theologians, including Cox himself, has proved either as substantive or as radical as the three humbler men from whom they learned their stuff, Bonhoeffer, Buber and Tillich.

So, it is time to set questions of definition and purpose straight. If one is to go under the title, Harvey Cox, Radical Theologian, one is bound to explain what one holds the label to mean. Here Cox sets out to explore the dimensions of a "Theology of Liberation." If the work is haphazard, it doesn't lack attempted breadth.

The first major concern is one of subject matter. Western theologians have to a large extent been both provincial and elitist in outlook. Learning from the religions of the poor has not been a serious undertaking in recent theology. "Radical theologians" have not been conversant with Third World religious movements. Cox directs attention to the political radicalization of Buddhism in Southeast Asia and to the revolutionary movements among Catholic priests and laymen throughout Latin America. His indictment of the provinciality of contemporary white Western theologians is strong medicine: "Because we are part of the imposed culture we cannot understand why a flat renunciation of all imposed culture is an indispensable step in the Third World's developing independence." So, Cox angrily explains, "We are baffled by the way dominated people often use their religion to express their rage in the battle for cultural and political independence." In our inability to accept that rage we are overlooking "the most important religious revolution of our time," the "conversion" of the people of Africa, Asia and Latin America towards self-emancipation. Too little of Third World religion is actually analyzed or described, but the direction at least is innovative and fruitful.

The second major concern is with method. What questions would a "Theology of Liberation" ask? What norms would it adhere to? First of all, primary importance goes to people, not to texts. To interpret a religion one must interpret people, their actions, expressions and goals. And in interpreting religion, the radical theologian forms judgments and takes sides with the oppressed and against the exploiter. Cox embodies the crucial distinction between what a radical theologian might be and what sociologists of religion (and most everything else) traditionally have been. In asserting his commitment to certain values and concerns, Cox has made his norms, however partially formulated, at least explicit and not hidden behind a rhetoric of objectivity.

The touchstone of these values and concerns for Cox is "liberation;" it is the "plumb stone" by which theology should assess religion. If liberation of humankind is seen as the purpose of Christianity and theology is to serve the purpose of "the faith," then it should recover from its fascination with the "essence" of Christianity (and other faiths) and turn its attention to religion's operation within history.

The "truth" of a doctrine should not be determined by how well it sticks to orthodoxy or past formulations. The question should be, does this teaching or rite lock people in stupefying bondage? Or does it contribute "to the fuller consciousness, the joy, the maturation and the emancipation of man?"

So goes Cox's argument. If it sounds somewhat simplistic or at least unrefined, the problem lies only partly with the retelling. As an initial staking out of a position the argument is at least bold, and it suffices. That, after all, is what one must expect of a manifesto. The trouble with the book is that it manages to cover well over 300 pages without significantly deepening, refining or even making much use of this foundation.

COX'S rationale for his rambling discursive style is compelling, but at the end one finds it has failed him. Personal "testimony" or telling one's story is a crucial and restoring activity that Cox feels has degenerated in our culture. Bearing witness to one's own experience can be downright healthily subversive, he argues, since it reasserts the value and power of unique, individual expression over and against the manipulated and prepackaged garbage the commercial culture foists on us. All this is profoundly true. Cox points to the spiritual autobiography of Augustine and to the journals of Kierkegaard as examples of the immediacy of understanding and identification that "testimony" brings to the reader of a theologian's work.

But in Cox's case, the closer his writing gets to personal experience the more distant and nebulous and disturbingly superficial he seems to become. His depiction of a multi-media Easter celebration that he and others organized and held at the Boston Tea Party reads as though it were poured from a Waring Blender. It is not that Cox is slick or simple-minded. But rather, "bearing witness" or simply telling one's story does not come as easily or simply as Cox would like to believe.

Nonetheless, in one instance--a few short paragraphs, composed of short, fragmented sentences describing a radical priest and a folk mass in Mexico--Cox does achieve a purity and simplicity of style that enables one to fully graps and appreciate the event he is describing. In fact it comes closer to defining what Cox is trying to say than any other passage in the book.

Perhaps Cox should alter and humble his aspirations and concentrate on this type of fine personal narrative. But he seems to see himself more as the harbinger of a new committed theology. At times Cox seems to be playing with the image of the Young Marix, echoing him in phrases like, "Theologians have interpreted; the time has come to change." If that is so, then like Marx grown older, he should quit with manifestos and get down to serious writing with its requisites of analysis and disciplined argument.