By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.

Our captors said, "Come sing a song of joy!" but how can we sing of joy?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand its cunning lose.

--Adapted from Psalm 137

Rodney Clapp's A Peculiar People is an important contribution to the literature of an emerging phenomenon, ecclesiocentrism. I do not think it too hasty to declare that Christian scholarship stands on the threshold of a potential intellectual revolution at the dawn of the new millennium. And Clapp is sensitive to the issues, concerns, and consequences that ecclesiocentrism holds for the way we understand and live the faith.

One perceives in Clapp a sensibility that animates the whole of the ecclesiocentric literature: it is a sense of estrangement and of dislocation that haunts the thoughtful Christian in our day. The comfortable connection that has bound Christian identity and American citizenship for so long now appears frayed to the point of breaking. Coupled with this unease is the search for a new stability, a new home if you will. In his prefatory self-description, Clapp identifies three different senses in which his work is peculiar for our day: plebeian in a culture of elitist credentialism ("I am not an academic"); postmodern in a culture still dominated by the rhetoric of scientific and bureaucratic rational objectivity ("I have renounced the longing for sure and certain, universal, once-for-all foundations to knowledge and action"); and Christian in a culture not so much persecutorial but uninterested in the faith once delivered ("Be careful whom you hate or dismiss out of hand").

Those already familiar with Clapp's work on the family and consumerism will not be surprised by the employment of the aphoristic or the ironic throughout this text. It is part of the postmodern package: provocation, the sudden thrust and parry, the sense of the absurd or shocking. These are all necessary aspects of the "making strange" that postmodernists hold as (redemptively) necessary. And there is good precedent for this stratagem. Consider, for example, Jeremiah's dung or Hosea's choice for a mate, both calculated efforts to jolt the smugness and unreflective self-assurance of their respective audiences.

Clapp sends an alarm to the American church. His message: the church has become subject to what he identifies as a "pervasive, infinitely insinuating social, political and economic ethos." This ethos in its institutional form exists as a "vast and captivating structure that both holds our world together and threatens to destroy it." In good "naming the powers" fashion, Clapp labels this structure "mass-techno-liberal capitalism." For shorthand, let us call it simply the Beast.

The insidious nature of the Beast is found in its ability to keep the church from truly being the church. In his first chapters, Clapp points to how American believers tend to view the church as a private club or a chaplain for the national way of life. The origin of such false understandings Clapp discovers in the "Constantinian shift," wherein the church lost its original identity as pilgrim, poor and martyred (a truly peculiar people in the eyes of the dominating regime) and, in return for state sanction, became chief sponsor and custodian of the state.

In our day, under the hegemony of the Beast, this has produced the curious situation in which American Christians feel themselves irrelevant to a system they believe somehow ought to be their own. With an insufficiently critical attitude toward the system, Christians are only now coming to have a sense of their cultural "impotence and uselessness." The American church has been captured. Socially, Christians accept the modes of being dominant in our culture. Economically, they structure their ecclesiastical and educational institutions along secular business principles and call it "stewardship." Politically, American evangelicals have been captured by the Republican party over the course of the past half-century by means of bait-and-catch stratagems. While lacking the empirical analysis that would convince the "show me the data" social scientist, Clapp tells a story that many of us will find persuasive. The American church, indeed, is in trouble.

Clapp locates deliverance from this late twentieth-century Babylonian captivity in the "rebuilding of distinctive Christian community" and the "relearning of what might be called sanctified subversion." Ecclesiocentrism rests upon the claim that the church, rightly understood, possesses the very resources for its own liberation. Illustrating a key characteristic of this ecclesiocentric project, Clapp maintains that the church cannot be thought of in ways to which we are most accustomed; that is, as largely individualistic, privatistic, and lacking substantive political, economic, or cultural claims.

The church exists as alternative space, an imaginative project where a truly alternative way of life is pictured and practiced.

It's what your church can do for you, not what you can do for the church that seems to be the animating principle in many of our congregations. But in the ecclesiocentric view, the church is a total institution, possessing its own language, its own history, its own practices, its own way of eating, handling conflict, propagating, and, even, its own politics. To recover the church in this way is to recover a history and a language that permits American Christians to (re)conceive themselves as no longer merely private individual believers, but as true members of a community. Clapp, following the British theologian John Milbank, writes of how "in its beliefs, practices, attitudes, and projects the church can claim nothing less than to 'exhibit the exemplary form of human community.' "

As such a disciplined community, the church lives everywhere and always subversive of the dominant ideologies of all regimes. As a truly distinctive altera civitas the church resists the embrace of any ideology, Western or Eastern, materialistic or idealist. Though enfleshed by culture and historical situation, the church nevertheless claims, by fact of the Spirit's abiding presence, to be truly distinct, a truly New Way. Clapp identifies the original practices of early Christians as "about creating and sustaining a unique culture—a way of life that would shape character in the image of God." The peculiar people of God indwelt a peculiar culture for God (and thus the book's subtitle). Thus the Thessalonican civic criticism of the apostolic message and of how "these men have turned the world upside down" (Acts 17:6) rightly identified the original critique and practices whereby the early church followed in the steps of her Lord. Similarly, in the Ephesian recognition that the sanctified practices of the Christians subverted the wealth-generating industries of Artemis (Acts 19), we recognize the potential for sanctified challenges to the great whore-goddess Nike. But the Constantinian capture of the church has occluded this truth. From subversives we became chaplains.

The practical result? "The Constantinian church, for many centuries, responded to the world in such a manner, that it lost sense of itself as an alternative way of life." An authentic church (as culture or way of life) exhibits acts and forms of "sanctified subversion" when it produces character traits among its people that allow them to be free from the grip of the Beast. Thus fasting, chastity, self-denial, contentment, taking the lower seat, and so forth are not only spiritual disciplines but, more fully understood, political acts of sanctified subversion as well. The church through its storied practices forms community and character peculiar enough to resist whatever principality or power seeks to capture it. Ecclesiocentrism is an intellectual movement with solid practical consequences.

In A Peculiar People, Clapp draws on some very important theoretical work that is creating the critical space necessary for a wholesale reconsideration by Christian academics (to date mostly theologians and philosophers, with a few political and literary theorists now beginning to arrive) as to the proper horizon for Christian scholarship. But he is not writing primarily for academics; rather, he seeks to provide "shock therapy" for adult education in Sunday school and other settings (pastoral conferences, spiritual retreats, and the like), for college students, and for all who long for a renewed church.

A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society

By Rodney Clapp

InterVarsity

251 pp.; $14.99, paper

Stanley Fish has claimed that, in the modern university, "there is no safe place" wherein certain principles or arguments like "freedom of expression" can enjoy unassailable standing. Everything is politics in the modern university and cannot be otherwise. In the same way, Clapp paints an ultimately political picture of the context that the church inhabits. A Peculiar People is a call for action. For again, there is no safe place: "As I have already observed, we cannot in any event leave or even take a vacation from mass-techno-liberal capitalism. That is a system that, for the foreseeable future at least, we have no choice but to acknowledge."

The importance of this observation is twofold: First, it puts to rest the frequently heard criticism leveled against thinkers like Clapp or Stanley Hauerwas that ecclesiocentrism is simply counsel for withdrawal, a repudiation of public responsibility, a going Amish, a revival of the dreaded Anabaptism of Richard Niebuhr's critique. Rather, by viewing every context as political, Clapp, like Fish, is able to argue that there is simply no safe place to where the church can retreat. But unlike Fish who (to date) has no ecclesiology, Clapp doesn't leave us only in the partisan power struggle of the postmodern political cosmos. For ecclesiocentrics, there is a there there. The liberal cosmos has been invaded by alien space.

This leads to a second important observation: The church exists as alternative space, an imaginative project where a truly alternative way of life is pictured and practiced. Let Woodstock and the Summer of Love go the way of all "mass-techno-liberal-capitalist" flesh. Within the Beast there cannot exist a real alternative. They merely produce after their own kind. But for Christians struggling to be faithful "in a post-Christian society," there is a better way. In several important areas, ecclesiocentric thinking possesses a practical payoff that can tangibly reorient our everyday lives.

Historically, Americans have been faithfully committed to the idea of public education. But for the last several decades, the public has been awash with talk of a crisis in our public education. There has been a curious air, however, to these public discussions. For in keeping with the needs of the American commercial republic, the crisis in education has been almost exclusively conducted in terms of our ability to compete in the international global economy. The crisis has been cast, then, not in terms of local character, but rather competency in global and technologically based disciplines.

In an essay in Schooling Christians (a 1992 collection edited by Stanley Hauerwas and John Westerhoff and largely devoted to a Christian critique of current educational practices), Nicholas Wolterstorff writes of how for all the talk of crisis we have, in fact, "the schools we deserve." Wolterstorff notes: "Our present educational morass is the consequence of ideological convictions, social structures, and social dynamics deep in the American system." The problem with capitalism is that it "eats away all traditions and all subcommunities. It powerfully pushes all of us towards the melting pot."

Education in advanced capitalist societies serves the wants of the national and global economy, creating a brain drain and the flight of the best youth from rural and small town localities to the megapower centers of our society. This modern linkage of education with national economy has so shaped our psychology or habits of mind that we consider leaving home and being permanently separated from any stable roots in a community as natural, thus inevitable. Our education, as currently structured and practiced, fits us only for being wandering gypsies for America, Inc.

The ecclesiocentric recovery of education posits a different model: education as training in discipleship; or, in other words, a form of catechesis. Westerhoff, in his contribution to Schooling Christians, describes catechesis ("to echo the Word" or "Christening") as "the means by which a community represents Christ (his life, teachings, death, and resurrection) in symbol, myth, rite, and common life." Along with other character-forming practices, catechetical education is the "deliberate, systemic, and sustained effort" to fashion Christians. While the term catechesis may be off-putting to some Protestants (and invoke painful memories for some Catholics!), it points to the substantive differences that ought to exist between Christian educational practice and secularized public education. Education is always character formation. The question is, what kind of character and for what?

Just as it offers to reorient our thinking about education, so ecclesiocentrism redefines the debate over family issues. The campaign for "traditional family values" is a big winner, an empire builder among American evangelicals. But champions of the traditional family structure, while accurately identifying profound social problems in late twentieth-century America, fail to place those problems in context. Ignoring or downplaying the corrosive impact of unfettered capitalism on family life, pro-family advocates such as James Dobson and Gary Bauer present a grossly oversimplified view of social life. While conservatives rightly emphasize the irreducible significance of individual moral decisions, ecclesiocentrics point out that those decisions are not made in a vacuum.

As Clapp observed in his earlier book, Family at the Crossroads, the list of ills that Christian family advocates commonly draw up "does not go deep enough. It fails to ask what it is about our setting and ourselves that so inclines us to eroding families." He then identities the issue: "To put it bluntly, the deeper problem is that capitalism has succeeded. It has succeeded for good, certainly … . But capitalism has also succeeded for ill." Ironically, some of the American economic system's staunchest supporters now witness that system undermining the very institutions they claim, in the name of "American values," to be defending.

For ecclesiocentrics, the call to reaffirm "traditional family values" does not go far enough. Families—healthy, whole, and complete—are certainly part of the cure. But truly to care for our families forces us outward, to care for those communities in which our families are nested and by which our families are nurtured. So, Clapp:

The primary polity, the real foundation of order and morality for the Christian, is not the nuclear family or the nation-state. It is the church. The church is a family that includes not just the nuclear family but extended families, singles, and indeed those few who have no other kin on the face of the earth. It also gives the family a purpose not confined to the "private" or "personal" and, therefore, not reduced to mere sentimentality.

This nesting of the family in the broader communal context is also a central theme in the work of poet-essayist-farmer Wendell Berry. For Berry, the health of family and the health of the local community are inseparable. Berry, too, sees the Beast as an economic system based on a form of competition that destroys community, or what he likes to call "the practical harmony" that exists over time between a particular locality and its variegated forms of life, ecological, economic, political, domestic.

Strong communities make flourishing families possible. Nuclear families, isolated and in constant motion, are not enough, and indeed, cannot be enough for full human flourishing. Something must be held firmly in place for a family to grow. Berry's call is for citizens to return their loyalties to small, local communities. But such an exchange of loyalty comes with a cost. As he writes (in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community):

to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession—not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting them and destroying their homeland … . All true patriots must find ways of opposing it.

In Berry's writings we see another example of Clapp's call for the rebuilding of community and the relearning of sanctified subversion that offers hope for the American church. For as Clapp points out, "The church sees family life as a great good. But the Christian family does not live, as some families in some cultures have, to perpetuate a name or preserve a nation-state by providing taxpayers and soldiers." Rather, a Christian family exists to be "an agent of the church to witness to the truth of the kingdom of God." And Berry's "quiet secession" may be just the ticket for those patriots of that city whose builder and maker is God.

It is a difficult but exciting time we inhabit. Ecclesiocentrism taps into some of the most basic concerns of everyday contemporary Christian living. It touches on the family, on education, on culture, on politics, and yes, ultimately, it touches upon identity. In an age of identity politics, ecclesiocentrics offer the struggling Christian the one sure foundation for an identity that can enjoy what John Milbank has described as the church's singular and distinctive quality, that of "harmonic difference." We are conceivably nearing the end of the great American secular experiment of forging unity from diversity. E Pluribus Unum needs to be returned to its rightful and proper context.

In the ecclesiocentric redescription of education and family (as well as economics, politics, culture), we hear a call for the church to reconceive the space it occupies in the broader contemporary cultural context. As Christian citizens "in a post-Christian society," we stand in desperate need of critically revising our systemic allegiances. Ultimately, whether or not at the end of the day we agree with the ecclesiocentric critique, for the sake of the embodied life of the church in America, this is the kind of thinking necessary for our time. I am tempted to say that if the church in America is to have a future as the church, it will be due to the efforts of more plebeian postmodern Christians. May God bless the work of their hands.

Ashley Woodiwiss is professor of political science at Wheaton College.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

Nov/Dec 1997, Vol. 3, No. 6, Page 38