We, we, WE!—all the way home
David R. Weiss – August 25, 2023

I often read “at a crossroads”—turning pages in multiple books over the same days. The texts tease and entwine, occasionally taunt and entangle. Argue and affirm. Chorus or cacophony? Usually both.

Gil Rendle’s new book, Countercultural: Subversive Resistance and the Neighborhood Congregation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), is as evocative as it is underwhelming. Which, I suppose, explains both my excitement in turning the first page and my deflated relief in reaching the final page. I was excited because his basic project—fostering countercultural subversive resistance in local communities of faith and goodwill—is also my project. I suppose I was deflated for the same reasons. I wanted—needed—more than he could offer. And I knew this, not least, because of my company at the crossroads.

Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (North Atlantic Books, 2021 rev., orig. 2011) makes the case for how money has become misshapen and now misshapes us—while holding out hope that it might be otherwise. The writing is alternately insightful and opaque (I am lost in the economic theory), clear-eyed and naïve (a word I used advisedly because Eisenstein’s knowledge so clearly outstrips mine, but my gut tells me knowledge alone doesn’t get the final word). Were I not reading it in a book group, I would set it aside. Nonetheless, I am mulling money with extra attention these days.

Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide (Icon Books, 2022) trades the relative comfort of opaque writing for a plainspoken heartbreaking travelogue of climate breakdown. I’ve read several dozen books on the ecological crisis—climate often gets centerstage as if to distract us from the multiple drivers of calamity that dance at the edge of our vision. McGuire—now Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards(!) at University College London—has a wide-angle awareness of what’s coming our way. Hothouse makes for grim reading, and yet when the truth is so damn grim, there’s something to be said for low-key clarity.

Finally, Sophie Strand’s just-published novel, The Madonna Secret (Bear & Company, 2023), is an altogether different animal. Not quite historical fiction, the story peers into a hidden past seeking a person (Mary Magdalene) whose life and truth can only be fully excavated by imagination. Strand’s writing is loosely informed by scholarship; I say “loosely” not in judgment but in recognition that her commitments run elsewhere than the academy. A nature-mystic herself, she is determined to “recover” these impulses in both Mary (Miriam in her book) and Jesus (Yeshua). If she needs to go beyond the reach or between the lines of scholarship to do so, she does, with luminous self-assurance.

Strand’s book has the least to do with Rendle’s “church-help” text—on the surface. But these past days at the crossroads, hers is the voice that has been most alluring. Hers the pages I most eagerly turn to. Hers the writing that challenges me: find that pulse, shape those words, carry that tune. Hers the tale that feeds my soul.

So, from this crossroads, a few thoughts on Countercultural: Subversive Resistance and the Neighborhood Congregation. Rendle is an ordained United Methodist minister whose work as author and congregational consultant is abetted by years in parish ministry and a PhD in organizational and group dynamics. Here he is writing to the church at large, though hoping his words are heard—and held—by individual congregations.

His over-arching thesis—with which I agree—is that we (society-at-large, church denominations and religious traditions on the whole, and individual faith communities in particular) are on the cusp of a great cultural shift—a “hinge” moment, he says. And the choices we make in this moment matter. Immensely. Yes. And yet, I found his whole book oddly off-point. Despite the aspirations declared in his title, he doesn’t go (anywhere near) far enough in his text. As my title counters, it’s “We, we, WE!—all the way home,” and Rendle never gets there.

In developing his thesis he follows the work of generational sociologists who chart the course of unfolding (Western—this is crucial) cultures through “oscillating cycles”: an unending series of “course corrections”—recalibrating social values and cultural expressions from one pole (too much “WE”) to the other pole (too much “I”). From this vantage point, the 1950’s are an apex of WE values and expressions, with the turbulent 60’s and 70’s marking the start of a “course correction,” culminating in recent decades in an excessive I-culture, driven by individually-focused values and expressions. Which means we’re ready to turn back toward the WE pole over the next 60-70 years.

This perspective does offer some insight. It helps explain why church membership and social influence peaked in the post-war years, riding a larger cultural crest. Churches thrive in strong WE cultures—and understandably struggle (in declining membership and in a faltering social voice) in eras where individualism is at the fore. Based on this reading of cultural cycles, Rendle’s book is a rallying cry to congregations: Your (next) moment is coming. Be ready to seize the day!

For Rendle, this involves helping curate and cultivate the renewal of public space and the common good. This work is at the heart of the church’s role as one carrier of society’s moral wisdom (a role it shares with other cultural institutions), and it requires creativity and careful attention to context. The congregation of the 2020’s cannot (dare not) use the congregation of the 1950’s as its model of success. The world has changed, both globally and locally. So how churches carry forward the common good/ morality held (for them) by the gospel must be creatively responsive to this hinge moment and not limited by images of a heyday that will never be again. (Whatever heyday might be coming, will look very different than what was in the past.)

By calling on churches to be “countercultural” and practice “subversive resistance,” then, Rendle is encouraging them to become “early adopters” of the coming WE cycle. Anticipating the (inevitable) swing of the pendulum, they can subversively resist the (soon to be waning) I-culture and lead the way counterculturally back toward a WE era. This is all fine stuff. But is it truly countercultural when churches are merely among the first to jump on the next cultural bandwagon? Or really subversive resistance when you already “know” the present cultural era is fading away anyway? That seems a bit like choosing to “resist” daytime when the clock tells you twilight is just around the corner.

But my biggest disappointment with Countercultural is its failure to reckon the utter dysfunction of Western culture as a whole, which leaves much of his “inside advice” sorely beside the point. If Western culture has been unfolding in an oscillating cycle between “WE” and “I,” the much larger context is one that sets the whole of humanity as an “anthropocentric-I” over against the rest of nature. For several thousand years now, the dominant Western patriarchal viewpoint, echoed in all too many of the world’s religious traditions, has helped imagine humanity as distinct from nature, failing to recognize (and relish!) that humanity ONLY is within nature, as part of an interwoven ecosystem of living relationships.

From this perspective, the whole series of oscillations between “WE” and “I” have been mere variations on a singular Western theme: exploit, extract, consume, discard, lay waste to the world. Sometimes we’ve pursued ecocide more gleefully united; at others we’ve done so with individual desires at the helm. But our consistent failure to embrace the truth of “We, we, WE … all the way home”—that is, all the way home to Earth’s ecology—that failure goes unchallenged in Rendle’s book.

It’s a devastating omission because short of being truly and daringly countercultural to this Western motif of human separateness, and short of being subversively resistant to the current capitalist project of planetary destruction, the next WE cycle is going to culminate in … extinction. Research suggests these cycles run about 70 years from one pole to next. But if we go another 70 years without entirely rejecting human separateness and capitalism, we will not be around to oscillate another time.

Bluntly, Rendle’s entire project sits on top of a cosmic-theological-ecological-existential lie that goes unaddressed. He does acknowledge climate issues here and there as being among the pressing challenges of the moment. But he doesn’t begin to grasp the extent to which climate breakdown and socio-ecological collapse are THE defining challenges of this era. Is that too harsh a critique? Sadly not. Indeed, climate breakdown and socio-ecological collapse are now THE defining challenges of human history. Unmet, they will usher in the END of human history.

To be fair, Countercultural does carry some important insights—insofar as they’re reframed within the context of faith/human communities’ responding to socio-ecological collapse. (I’ll mention four of them.) But Rendle never connects these dots himself. And from where I sit—at the crossroads—it’s hard to credit any future-oriented church-help book that does not accord the challenges of climate/collapse the central place they will hold in ALLpursuits of meaning and morality in the next generation.

1. So, for instance, this is surely a moment in which congregations (and other faith/human communities of committed goodwill) must speak truth and embody the truth they speak in their communal lives today. After decades of rising individualism, it has been easy for churches to despair of having a vital place in public space. Now, fortuitously, the oscillation of cultural values appears likely to offer churches a new window of opportunity. No one—neither church nor wider society—can afford for that opportunity to be missed. But to seize this day in a way that truly matters will mean something far more countercultural and subversive than Rendle describes.

2. Similarly, when he calls out anomie (from the Greek: to be without shared norms or morals) as the “spirit of the I-era,” he completely overlooks how climate/collapse will interact with this. Yes, the apex of our cultural swing toward individualism has been evident in the anomie of fraying of social safety networks, rising xenophobia, and the sense of freedom to fashion as “truth” whatever suits us. However, even as the pendulum may well be ready to swing back to a stronger sense of shared values and a re-blossoming of the common good (as it has in every previous cycle), this current hinge moment is going to be seriously destabilized—maybe entirely undone—by the twin forces of climate and collapse.

Chaos supercharges anomie, and human driven climate breakdown—now unleashed with a fury and an inertia wholly beyond our control—will threaten to maintain anomie in the decades to come. This makes for an extremely fraught moment. A return to—indeed a cosmic-ecological deepening of—WE-ness is our only hope to weather the coming storm. And yet the conditions of the storm itself (more than in ANY previous era) will be allied with anomie and work against WE-ness. Especially so long as WE-ness remains (as it does throughout Countercultural) rhetorical sleight-of-hand for an Anthropocentric-I.

3. We often think of morality as a set of principles by which we gauge dilemmas and reason our way to right choices and good deeds. Rendle argues—and I agree—that moral compasses and the overarching human hunger for meaning in our lives that animate them are most often story-bound: held by narratives that live in our imaginations. He’s also right that new moments (hinge moments, in particular) call for new stories. Sometimes they simply recast ancient wisdom for the mindset/heartset of a new era. But sometimes they need to re-true tales and themes that no longer work for the common good.

Many religious stories carry themes of humanity set above or apart from the rest of nature (as well as stories of dominion, patriarchy, and all manner of xenophobia). Such stories, beginning long ago, paved the path that now carries us faster and faster toward an existential cliff. So, we desperately need new stories. Tales creatively and warmly spun to carry truths that can take root in the imagination, that place where heart and mind touch. Tales that speak of the deep connection between all things that are. A connection that is life-giving, ennobling, humbling all at once. The science (both hard and soft, that explores the webs in which we live) is dense, but the stories must reach for a “simplicity on the far side of complexity,” as Rendle names it.

My children’s book, When God Was a Little Girl, is one such story. Simple, but deep and evocative in its reach toward a more diversity-embracing, Earth-honoring cosmology. The Madonna Secret is another. Regardless of how much objective history it echoes, the story it tells is of human holiness that is wholly Earth-held. Even Eisenstein’s often opaque book directly addresses and critiques what he calls “The Story of Money,” “The Story of Separation,” and the “Story of People,” insisting that if we wish to live in new ways, we must fashion new stories in which to live. And Hothouse Earth is, in many ways, a field guide for the future that is being written by the dysfunctional stories (cosmological, ecological, economic, and more) that have been the dominant theme of both the WE- and I-poles of Western uncivilization.

Stories—sacred and simple—are the infrastructure of human existence. The stories we need today must run countercultural and subversive in ways deeper than Rendle seems to grasp. And—they must be “hardened” (wizened?) to hold against (or bend with) the seismic shifts of collapse.

4. Rendle zeroes in on the neighborhood as the space where congregations must do their best work. While acknowledging that “community” takes many forms (and will continue to do so, especially in a digital age), he is nevertheless persuaded that it is the neighborhood—embodied and shared space, materially inhabited by real people and woven of real relationships, the radically local sphere—where WE-ness will re-emerge. And thus, this is where congregations should invest their best energies, try out their most vibrant visions, learn their biggest lessons.

I agree, though with two important notes. First, the local is also where collapse will finally hit home. Yes, it is already hitting hard; we catch the images and can read the news of other lands, other states, other communities, other homes undone by climate disasters. But, whether by full-on disaster right here or by the slower unraveling of supply chains, when collapse reshapes the way we live in our homes, in our neighborhoods—that’s when it becomes real to us. Thus, the WE-ness congregations sow in neighborhoods—the experiments in living they undertake—ought aim to vividly anticipate the stresses neighborhoods will bear in collapse, forming practical networks of care to meet these stresses … as well as postures of mutual flexibility to meet other stresses we can’t yet anticipate.

Second, the only WE-ness able to ground a truly common good is one that reaches all the way to the ground. To the dirt beneath our feet—in our neighborhood. The radically local WE-ness congregations bear witness to must include the very local (and often very unknown-to-us) ecology of where we live. Our neighbors must include the plants and animals, the ground and air, the watersheds and geological history of our place. Complex? Yes! But these relationships used to be intimately well-known; these diverse and deeply interdependent neighbors used to be held as our kin. Unless we reclaim that kinship, any (merely human) WE-ness recovered will be far too little. And far too late.

Okay, that’s enough. Perhaps the merit of Countercultural (for me at least) was in its ability to provoke often irritated rejoinders. Discontented that Rendle’s context seems too small and that his project—audacious in its own way—lacks the audacity demanded by the day, he nevertheless drew me—and my literary companions at the crossroads—into conversation. Compelling me to clarify my own thinking … for my own project … for the days to come … for all of us. And reaffirming my intuition that the WE that matters most of all is the one that runs “all the way home,” linking us from the ground up, to Earth and all that is.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.