Apatheism and Flexidoxy: Believing in what?
28 Apr 2008
There has been a shift “from a world in which beliefs held believers to one in which believers hold beliefs”
This is a quote from one of the best books I have read on consumerism and religious belief, by Vincent Miller, ‘Consuming Religion’ (p90). It’s a quote I often reference when teaching theology students about the nature, process and relationship of people to beliefs.
The force of it still hits me every-time I use it, and reflect on it. And I’m pondering it again today, as I have been doing some more reading about the nature, and process of belief, in our western consumer culture.
To be an individual used to be about the capacity to have beliefs, things external to you, truths and realities that lay claim to your life, and form you, and for you come alive to them and live them out, to embody them.
When we meet someone who literally has beliefs that hold them, our material secular liberal society cries ‘ fundamentalist’. We live in a world that seems to see believing deeply in something a priori (something independent of and prior) to ourselves as dangerous, and then fosters an alternative relationship to beliefs, where we are trained, encouraged, and nurtured to believe in nothing deeply.
Except ourselves, our self creation (autopoesis), that the only thing to believe in deeply is that it is wrong to believe in anything deeply, that all believes are a lifestyle choice, personal, and relative.
Our strongest belief, is that it is we, the believer that holds beliefs, not beliefs that hold us.
Apatheism
If Christians are annoyed by people’s apathy to beliefs, take heart that apatheism, annoys vigorous atheists just as much. Apatheism, is where the issue of God is met with a ’shrug of indifference’, or as Charles Matthewes describes it, ‘Apatheism is the theological stance of all those people who have grown up in our culture religiously tone-deaf’.
Apathy towards belief is not an exclusive response to Christian beliefs, it is a way of believing shared by most of western liberal secularism.
Flexidoxy
And when religion becomes a lifestyle option, a matter of ‘preference’, where we chose what we want to believe, and ignore what we don’t, the filter for what should believed is based on individual choice, and anything else is seen as abusive, and controlling.
So What?
So apatheism, undermines real human identity, because it makes us unable to even be bothered with beliefs at all. Whilst flexidoxy enables us to be passionate and committed, to what ever we currently choose to belief in, with no solid identity. An identity built on shifting sand.
So whilst modernity held us captive to it’s systems of ‘knowing’, so much so, that we were forced into beliefs and identity by institutions, the pendulum has swung the other way, where we are on a continual quest to find ourselves, and are unable to have any extra subjective-commitments, to find ourselves in others, and any organisation/community/tribe/network etc.
For all the benefits of unmasking the certitude and arrogance of modernity, there is a crises of believing in the post-modern world, and the separation of beliefs from practice, of knowing from being and doing.
There is nothing new in these two extremes of certitude and uncertainty about beliefs. We see it in the 4th and 5th century AD, with Augustine and the Donatists and Pelagians.
In the Donatists we might see as our modern fundamentalists, where beliefs were black and white and determinative of our standing with God and his people, and led to exclusion. Pelagianism on the other hand, is alive and well today, where it is us the believer, our will, where we are free to choose all we believe.
How Christian’s navigate and reconnect knowing, being and doing, might be the greatest challenge the ‘church’ faces in our emerging culture. Within this problem of belief might be the reason we find it so hard to form any concrete missional churches, that have any real world traction at all.
How we do that, well that’s something for another post.
Tagged: Belief, Ecclesiology, Epistemology, Orthodoxy, Practice, Truth
8 comments
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8.24 am on 28 Apr 2008
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Comment by Gary Manders
9.56 pm on 28 Apr 2008
Jason, I agree the pendulum may have swung the other way towards finding ourselves, to a radical individualism but I question whether we are unable to have any extra-subjective commitments.(unless I mis-interpret you) The challenge is to show what we mean by greater commitment, a whole-life faith that can mediate between the two extremes of certitude and uncertainty. A passionate faith is still exceedingly attractive and people are crying out for community that demonstrates embodied believing in belonging eg Shane Claiborne. I like where you are going with this and think undertanding the nature, process and content of belief is extremely helpful in articulating a way of living out the gospel in late/ post modernity.
Comment by steven hamilton
11.30 am on 29 Apr 2008
this really hit home jason…i just came from several days spent with Vineyard Central in norwood, and i was thinking about how they have connected not only knowing, believing and doing, but also those three re-connected to private-sacred-puiblic spaces (which thoughts were provoked by a previous post of yours)…i think – particularly with concrete missional churches – it is this re-connection of knowing, believing and doing (maybe add being in there as well) with overlapping spheres of personal/public spaces has given real traction to living among the citizens of norwood…
anyway, thanks for that…
Comment by Paul
8.08 am on 30 Apr 2008
I think it is too easy to label faith/belief as a “life-style” option and be critical of people who have added in x but not y. People can have sincere and action direted beliefs but perhaps the underpining framework is no as cohesive? or people have assumed that it should be cohesive and are surprised that not everyone knows this?
Comment by Jason
8.14 am on 30 Apr 2008
HI Paul, it might be easy to say, but I do think it is the basis of western secular materialism, which is the underpinning framework.
To suggest that beliefs hold you does mark you out as a fundamentalist.
Miller talks about bricolage, how we put together beliefs and practice in a consumer society with the things around but, and the problem is not that we shouldn’t do that, but that most of the time it is shallow and superficial.
What does it look like for beliefs to take hold of you and form your life in all areas in a consumer society?
Comment by Paul
9.17 am on 30 Apr 2008
yes buti wonder wherether any who has beliefs contra to the status quo of the majority belief system of their time/culture as always been labelled a danger, and tagged with whatever choice word is reserved for that set of people – in our age it is the fundamentalist?
What it then boils down is to which beliefs hold you that we order our life around – we all hold beliefs and we organise our life around – a lot of them we don’t stop to distinguish as individual strands that we daily opt in to/out of – it’s just the way the world works for us.
It’s only when something happens that conflicts with that belief system where we might alter our behaviour -so the current credit crunch biting is seeing us experience the hangover after a decade long consumer blow out funded on cheap borrowing.
I’d say that any belief system is shallow to begin with and reinforced with practice (makes permanent), peer support (to normalise & encourage) and +ive feedback validating that belief.
In that sense all those aspects have been practiced by christians for centuries who have recognised that there are key practices to follow, that we should do so as part of a community and hopefully the feedback is a better way of doing life.
Comment by Adam Moore
3.23 pm on 30 Apr 2008
Very interesting…I’ll have to check out this book.
As believers holding beliefs, do we also “hold God,” rather than God holding us?
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1.34 pm on 20 May 2008
[...] use of the word fundamentalist and the candid views expressed made me predujiced to begin with. Is there a more emotively negative word in our post 9/11 age than “fundamentalist?” However sometimes the views of film maker, David, boarded on a hysterical reaction, e.g. filming [...]
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