Beyond the Belief That God Is Dead
The Netherlands has a stubborn image as one of the most secularised countries in Western Europe. On international journeys, I frequently find myself being asked to confirm to people that, although my country still has churches and churchgoers, ministers and priests, and even theologians, Christianity is indeed receding in Dutch culture (in the same sentence I am also often asked to confirm that everyone in the Netherlands smokes pot, but that is not the topic of this book). A similar idea is all too often conveyed in Dutch public discourse: over recent decades, the Dutch have gradually left their Christian (predominantly Calvinist) roots behind, and their society is on the verge of attaining a, frequently glorified, secular status.1
Both examples reflect widely spread secularisation discourses in which the ‘traditional’ secularisation thesis seems still alive. This is, however, strikingly at odds with how scholars in the past two decades have come to think about religion and secularisation: they generally agree that the secularisation thesis, as a thesis, is dead. Many of them acknowledge that processes of secularisation (such as, e.g., ‘internal secularisation’: a secularisation of people’s religious longing2 ) are going on, and that the rise of science and reason have caused large alterations in society that also affect religion, religious practices and religious affiliation. However, the thesis that religion dies out as modernisation progresses is and has overall been rebutted by scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, such as, for example, the famous sociologist of religion Peter L. Berger,3 political scientists Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart,4 and philosopher Charles Taylor.5 In the Dutch context, scholars who engage in empirical research on contemporary religious practices in the Netherlands have shown that religion has not disappeared, but has instead deeply altered.6 They have concluded that secular and the religious are not as opposed to each other as Western scholars long assumed.7
In Public Discourses God Still Seems Dead
The thesis that unbelief rules out belief is kept alive in secularisation discourses, though, influenced by, among others, (secular) media and the attention they pay to quantitative research results that point to receding Christianity. In the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous declaration: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”,8 news coverage on Christian religion often presents the Netherlands as a post-Christian nation and God as being incredibly dead in this country.9 This image was, for instance, on show in newspapers and TV and radio programs in March 2016, after the publication of the decennial quantitative study God in Nederland (GIN):
The Netherlands are no longer a Christian nation. This is the main conclusion of the research project God in Nederland that is undertaken among more than 2100 Dutch people by KRO once every ten years. A large majority, 82 percent, never or hardly ever visits a church. And a large majority hold the opinion that religion should no longer play a determining role in politics and education.10
Quantitative investigations like these feed the secularisation discourse in Dutch society, because their results are as plain as day, and easy to convey: traditional Christian belief has crumbled in Dutch society, and the decline of church membership and church attendance that had started decades ago, has kept going: 71% of the respondents in 2016 had no affiliation with a church of religious group, 59% never attended church services (or other religious meetings) and 23% rarely did so.11 According to 52% of the respondents, religion is a personal matter that should be limited to the private sphere.12 The survey that was used in this research measured, among other things, to what extent people subscribed to Christian beliefs, whether people engaged in ‘traditional’ Christian practices such as prayer and reading the bible, or whether they performed other practices such as walking silent marches or lighting a candle for someone. Other quantitative research, e.g. by The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) and Statistics Netherlands (CBS), shows similar results.13
It is a known and irrefutable fact that the institutionalised church has faced tough times over the last decades and processes of ‘de-churching’ have progressed rapidly. Church buildings have been closed, sold or demolished and many Christian congregations and parishes have merged in order to consolidate numbers. There is lack of money, a lack of younger members, and a lack of volunteers to do all the ecclesial work. The ‘traditional’ way of living Christian faith is under pressure and no longer fits what many people are looking for. Despite churches’ missionary initiatives, churches as well as Christian beliefs are in a critical condition.14 This decline ought to be seen as part of a broader, Western situation;15 the decrease of institutionalised Christianity is not distinctively Dutch, as research on, for example, Britain16 and the USA shows.17 Those who form their judgments purely on the basis of such quantitative research reports cannot but conclude that in the Western world, institutionalised Christianity religion is in fact disappearing.
After the Death of God: A New Quest for God
This book ties in with academic research that establishes transformations of religion, and explores how the transformation of Christian religion has taken shape in Dutch society, by investigating a particular ritual in the public sphere. This exploration takes an ‘anatheistic’ approach (see below) and adds to the question how or where God can happen in rituality after the death of God. The thread that runs through this study thus connects to two academic discourses (however to unequal extents): it aligns itself with research in Ritual and Liturgical Studies, which is the major focus, and it relates to ‘the God-question’ and discussions revolving around that topic in the fields of systematic theology and the philosophy of religion.
In the fields of Ritual and Liturgical Studies, over the last decade, there has been a research focus on ritual practices and the shifting location of sacrality. Whereas the sacred has long been found predominantly in liturgical ritual and the ecclesial domain, sacrality today is encountered in ritual practices in many other domains. This has led ritual studies scholar Paul Post, for example, to distinguish various fields of the sacred: the religious field, the field of healing, of memorial culture, of culture, of leisure culture – all of which are ritual-sacral ‘areas’ of practices interacting with places, locations, ideas and ideals, dreams and visions.18 ‘Sacred’, in this approach, is not necessarily synonymous with ‘religious’: the sacred is not limited to the religious field, nor to religion, neither is the ‘secular’ domain (e.g. the public sphere, or nature) necessarily excluded from sacred meaning-making and practices.19 The sacred in discourses of sacrality has broadly come to be approached as a construction, in various disciplines it has come to be taken as “an actively constructed value within a particular meaning system, from which people in turn mix and match elements to their own convenience and liking”.20 Kees de Groot, a Dutch sociologist, has taken up this point in a number of Dutch case studies that sketch the development of religion in transition, thus also refuting the idea that religion slowly disappears. He rather speaks of a ‘liquidation of the church’.21
A parallel development can be seen in systematic theology and the philosophy of religion, where newly arisen discourses have explored ways to rethink God.22 After ‘the death of God’, various scholars have ventured to think God anew, taking as a starting point unbelief in God, in the existence of God, and/or in the idea of God as a transcendent, sovereign, supreme being. The ‘post-secular’ has, according to systematic theologian Rick Benjamins, been a concept used to point “to some space, period, or context where the opposition between the religious and the secular as well as the demarcations between religious denominations are weakened or even surpassed, because we have left both the fixed outlines of institutionalised religions and the reductionist assumptions of secular and scientific reason”.23 A number of post-secular thinkers have arrived at new perceptions of God under flags such as ‘theothanatology’, ‘death-of-God-theology’ or ‘radical theology’. Richard Kearney, whose work I will use in this study, has for example developed, what he terms, a hermeneutics of the possible, thinking of God as a God who may be, instead of a God who is; as posse over esse;24 as a God who may arrive in the welcoming of a stranger.25
As a practical theologian specialising in ritual and liturgical studies, I investigate the transformation of religion in a public sphere that may be described as ‘post-Christian’ and ‘post-secular’ at the same time and seek to understand this transformation as a new quest for God.26 It looks into a public ritual event and poses the question how God can happen after the death of God, thus advancing Kearneys’ anatheistic theory with a contribution from the field of practical theology, more particularly (liturgical-)ritual studies. This approach is fairly new: in the field of ritual studies scholars have studied the transfer and transformation of the sacred, yet without posing theological questions or engaging in theological discussions, and the anatheistic theory as introduced by Richard Kearney has not been explored much yet in studies of ritual, let alone of public ritual.27 His theory for a long time had a theopoetic and rather linguistic focus, as it mainly concentrated on texts (poems, and biblical as well as other narratives/stories; and to a lesser extent paintings).28 Delving deeply and empirically into a ritual in the public sphere, this study explores how God can happen again at a time where the ‘old religion’ apparently has come to fall short.
Like many other theories that were developed in the wake of the rebuttal of the secularisation thesis, this study connects to what sociologist Robert Wuthnow has described as the recent movement from a spirituality of dwelling, which emphasises habitation, in which God dwells in a sacred space where humans too can stay, to a spirituality of seeking, which emphasises negotiation, where individuals are convinced that the divine exists, but search for sacred moments to confirm and reinforce that conviction.29 God and the sacred are no longer fixed categories: they are at different times found, discovered, encountered. This practical theological study is itself a quest for God in a particular public ritual – a ritual that in the public sphere has so often been framed as ‘a miracle in the secularised Netherlands’.30
This study sets off with the seeming paradox that a contemporary multi-media event in the public square, based on the religious narrative of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ in ‘the secularised Netherlands’ has become so popular. In line with research that has countered a dichotomous thinking in binary oppositions such as religious–secular or religious–cultural, I use the case of The Passion to illustrate how Christian religion in the Netherlands has indeed not disappeared, but has undergone deep transformations. And I suggest that a new quest for God requires an open theological view and open theological concepts. To prevent misunderstandings, I should make clear that I do not simply intend to classify The Passion as religion, or as a religious event: it is a complex phenomenon with a variety of religious and non-religious meanings attached to it. The Passion is a religious phenomenon and, at the same time, it is not. It is a sacred event, and, at the same time, it is not. As will be seen in Chapter 1, many atheists and agnostics attend the event, and it is not just Christians who gather around this musical narrative. I use the example of The Passion to proffer further interpretations and characterisations of the transformation of Christian religion in Dutch society. The Passion, in this book, functions as a pars pro toto for broader reconfigurations of the religious landscape in the Netherlands. Similarly, my re-interpretations of The Passion as not only a ritual performance, but also as a quest for God, suggest how new outlooks on where and how God can happen anew could take shape and may lead to discover traces of God in contemporary culture.
Although this monograph is based on one Dutch case, the narrative of this book exceeds the religious activities of a tiny country in north western Europe: it also shows how cultural dimensions deeply transform religious forms. In doing so, it does not depart from religion as a fixed and well-defined phenomenon, in fact, religion can be defined in very many ways and scholars continue to wrestle with the term.31 Rather, this book understands ‘religion’ in an open, dynamic and situational manner. As anthropologist Martin Stringer has argued, religion is not a distinct and coherent ‘thing’, nor is it “essentially an intellectual activity”.32 It is not a set of dogmas and values to be swallowed or affirmed – this is a fixed and one-sided view of the phenomenon. Stringer suggests that “the definitions [of religion, MK] that have developed (…) “have been heavily dependent on certain preconceptions within a series of Western discourses that are essentially underpinned by Protestant Christianity”.33 Much like Stringer in his study, I do no enter my study with a pre-established understanding of religion. Going out to ‘the other’, as scholars using ethnographic research methods do, I want to understand deep transformations that are occurring, whether or not these are eventually defined as ‘religion’, drawing on empirical studies of ordinary people and parties engaged in a ritual based on a Christian narrative. ‘Ritual’ here is used as an anthropological term denoting “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely coded by the performers”.34 The ‘sacred’, a concept that will also be discussed in various chapters, in this book is generally taken as the things and events that are set apart, either physically or mentally (in processes of meaning-making), either religious or secular (in the sense of: not having any reference to the transcendent).35
The Place of the Case in This Book
After initially embarking upon empirical investigation of contemporary passion performances in Dutch culture in 2010, in early 2011 I began also to engage in fieldwork on The Passion, during the very first edition of the event. At the time I had no idea that The Passion would become so big, either in terms of media attention or viewers, nor had I expected that this one-off study would subsequently result in longitudinal empirical research. Since The Passion proceeded to develop into an annual event and, over time, developed as a recognised phenomenon in the Dutch public sphere (and moreover: proved to be a very rich case), I decided to make it the central point of focus for this book that I characterise as an ‘ethno-case study’.36
Using The Passion to demonstrate how people in our late-modern network society deal with the sacred, this book has a two-fold aim: to contribute to a deeper understanding of the transformation of Christian religion after the devastating impact of the decline of religious institutions in contemporary late-modern Western Europe. And, by extension, to further the development of new ways to speak about God after God. I have thus formulated the following central research question: How is Christian ritual repertoire being transferred, transformed and reconstructed in Dutch late-modern society and where to find traces of God in this newly appropriated ritual repertoire? In my playing with this explorative question, The Passion will serve as a case. In describing and analysing a particular religious trajectory within the network society, I elaborate how conceptions of religion are re-invented, how theology is re-constructed and where traces of God may be discovered in our network culture. I do this through investigation of The Passion, focussing in on practices, discourses, narratives, values and lines of thought.
This has two implications for this book. Firstly, the book is not a handbook on the case of The Passion and, secondly, it does not pretend to offer a complete view of how Christian religion ‘works’ (or does not work) in the 21st century. I offer an ethno-case study in order to contribute to the academic study of religion and theology. The misunderstanding that one cannot generalize from the study of one case was refuted by Bent Flyvbjerg in an important article in which he states that the case study is in fact a reliable method that contributes to scientific development.37 Because of its closeness “to real-life situations and its multiple wealth of details, [the case study] is important for the development of a nuanced view of reality”.38 Elaborating the ways in which case studies played a crucial role in the development of theories by famous scholars such as Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Marx and Freud, Flyvbjerg convincingly argues: “One can often generalize on the basis of a single case, and the case study may be central to the scientific development via generalisation as supplement or alternative to other methods. But formal generalisation is overvalued as a source of scientific development, whereas ‘the force of example’ is underestimated”.39 Eileen Campbell-Reed, in discussing one of the conundrums in practical theology, points to the power and danger that lies in the writing of a single case study: it involves both creating and discovering narratives and ways of analysis. Useful cases are those in which practical theologians use a wide range of methodological tools, she says, and “attend to uses, misuses and possible abuses of power within the situations under study, including their own social location and personal interests in the case”.40 In line with Flyvbjerg’s argument, she restates the value of case studies for practical theology as follows: “A search in the scholarship of practical theology for universal, predictive theories is in vain. The most valuable knowledge is the context-dependent knowledge found on concrete cases”.41
This touches on epistemological questions: what counts as knowledge? What is theory? I find myself at home with the epistemological stance of religious scholar Thomas Tweed, who claims that theory is “purposeful wandering” and “embodied travel”.42 Theorists “lean on “staffs” bestowed by others as they set out in one direction on a journey of uncertain duration toward sites unseen and vaguely imagined, and they negotiate the trail by what illumination they can find along the way”.43 And, as Barnard et al. have convincingly demonstrated in their ground-breaking book on liturgical ritual in the network society, knowledge is always “a specific perspective on a particular phenomenon. (…) There is no definitive knowable truth about liturgical ritual, nor of any other phenomenon in this world; there are many perspectives. (…) Knowledge is always transitional in nature, moving between different terms”.44 This particular view on theory-construction relates to a specific cross-disciplinary model: a transversal approach to interdisciplinary work. According to Richard Osmer, this approach “pictures the relationship of the disciplines as an interacting network of different fields”, a specific dialogue between researchers from different fields generates new and particular knowledge where values and perspectives intersect.45 I take a transversal approach of cross-disciplinary dialogue because it acknowledges a late-modern view on contemporary Western late-modern culture that is characterised to a high degree both by pluralisation and by fluidity of boundaries. Each interpretation is one among an endless possible number of interpretations of a limited practice.46 As a result, in the subsequent chapters of this book, I offer theories that are au fond dynamic. The narrative, perspectives and theories I present, are self-evidently not the only possible narrative, perspectives and theories. Yet, they do shed light on some significant aspects of the transformation of religion in our late-modern culture, and on how this affects the practical theological discipline. The transformation of religious forms and the emergence of new quests for God in a late-modern, liquid society (see Chapters 2 and 3) entail the need for open, updated and sometimes new concepts, metaphors and methodological approaches. Just as I understand ‘religion’ in an open, dynamic and situational manner, therefore, I also understand practical theology as an open, dynamic and situational discipline – a discipline that is perceived and defined in various ways, depending, among other things, on the perspective of the researcher and the context or situation in which the discipline is practiced (see Chapter 8).
Metaphors and the Structure of the Book
The Passion is a public event, a ritual-musical play. This has led me to choose metaphors related to play, plays and theatre (e.g. lighting terms), in structuring the book. The metaphor of a play underlines the conviction that what I stage in this book is only one of many possible narratives – it is one, contextual and situational interpretation of how religion has changed in the Netherlands, and of how a public ritual practice can be read as a new quest for God. This Prologue functions as an introduction: a program, making clear what the book is about and what type of play will be presented to the reader. The eight chapters following this introduction are staged in three parts.
In Part 1, I present and introduce the basic claims of this book: that religion in network societies is a complex matter; that, in this complexity, the quest to think God afresh is a key concern; and that this quest requires concepts and language that enable us to theologise beyond the normativity of institutionalised religion. I will introduce the case of The Passion in detail (in Chapter 1), sketch the dynamic and changing religious landscape that forms the scenery against which this play is performed (in Chapter 2), and show how in this public ritual God may ‘re-appear’ on the scene in a new form (in Chapter 3). I thus set the stage for the middle part of the book.
In Part 2, various chapters shed light on these matters from perspectives related to different disciplines. As I have already highlighted, these perspectives are not exhaustive – many more viewpoints are possible and would definitely yield more and different knowledge – but they present at least a number of crucial elements and aspects of how religion moves around in contemporary culture. These ‘cross-fading perspectives’ on The Passion thus unveil several qualities found in practices of Christian ritual repertoire in the contemporary world.
Chapter 4 focuses on The Passion as a spatial practice. Although many atheists would like to see religion safely hidden behind the front doors of people’s houses, religion is often reinvented in the public sphere: it is a collective spatial practice. Within the public sphere, parties other than the institutionalised church seem to have taken the ‘traditional’ place of the church in shaping a ritual practice that has Christian roots. When broadcasting companies and their partners stage The Passion in the public square, we see religion taking the form of a multidimensional spatial practice that is often also a contested practice: different people and different parties appropriate the common ground differently, and (religious) conflicts are never far away.
In Chapter 5, a digital media perspective shows that religion has increasingly become a playful phenomenon that includes all kinds of digital technologies. Demonstrating how multimediality, virtuality, interactivity and connectivity come into play in the performance of a multimedia passion event, we here describe the phenomenon as a ludic practice, linking contemporary ritual practice with a global ludification of culture and the anthropological stance of homo ludens.
Chapter 6 points to the reflective quality of public ritual events that have Christian roots. This becomes clear when we demonstrate how The Passion engenders public reflexivity in Dutch society: it serves as a mirror reflecting contemporary religious and moral debates, for instance on the supposedly secular nature of Dutch national identity and on the rise of Islamophobia.
Chapter 7 describes the theological quality of public ritual events. In rituals based on Christian religious narratives that are broadcast and even shaped by the media, theology is constructed. Although the practice of theology is not limited to academia – the activities of believers and of religious leaders, among other things, are considered as forms of practical theology as well – theology in liquid societies is not only performed by scholars and/or clergy and/or believers, but has become a practice undertaken by various and different practitioners whose core business is not theologising, but something else. This chapter sheds light on how the body of broadcasting companies and TV producers and channel coordinators engage in public theology in their own right and manners.
The respective chapters in Part 2 are followed by Side lights, in which I theologically reflect on issues that loosely relate to one or more topics in the preceding chapters. These deserve a brief explanation and further characterisation here.
The Side Lights are a kind of ‘free play’: rather than a critical scholarly treatise, in these creative interruptions I offer theological reflection in a different style. Each reflection is written in a different (theological) genre (a meditation, a Twitter thread, a meditative exegesis, and a letter), often bringing in a mix of Biblical sources, imagination and engagement.47
Academic research sometimes takes creative forms. Research in the creative and performing arts, although still not uncontested, has acquired a place in academia in the past two decades: art practices and products are considered to embody a unique type of knowledge. Artistic research can be seen as a form of knowledge production. This type of knowledge may be less conventional than scholarly knowledge, but is an epistemological resource nonetheless, according to professor of theory of research in the arts, Henk Borgdorff.48 He claims that “Art practice – both the art object and the creative process – embodies situated, tacit knowledge that can be revealed and articulated by means of experimentation and interpretation”.49 Borgdorff concludes that research in the arts and research of the arts are of equal value.50
In practical theology too, creativity and imagination have a place. Richard Osmer has described the work of a practical theologian as the work of an artist in his/her artist’s studio, pulling together insights that have evolved from examinations; a practice that requires creativity and imagination.51 Marcel Barnard, Johan Cilliers and Cas Wepener et al. have epistemologically described the investigation of liturgical ritual as splattering or laying out dots on a blank sheet. They conclude that a non-discursive and non-conceptual approach of research in the arts may advance the understanding of the liturgical ritual.52 Other practical theologians have taken the notion of creativity even further: Courtney Goto teaches her students to reflect theologically by creating art in her course ‘Doing Theological Aesthetically’, offering them a way to experience that aesthetic sensibilities are also part of theological construction, which involves processes of knowing and reflecting – not just in words, text, language.53 Heather Walton, among others, has performed practical theology in the shape of creative writing, thus seeking how pastoral poetics can yield knowledge by means of, or rather: in the form of, deep metaphoric and reflexive writing. By doing so, she aims to open new horizons for the discipline of practical theology. Poetics, according to Walton, has the potential to change our understanding of Christian practices. This understanding is the result of “practical theology’s quest to name God as the one who calls us to incarnate a witness to passion and resurrection in the poetry of our practice”.54
In line with these developments in academia and in practical theology, I offer a different type of theological reflection in the four Side Lights in Part 2: playful, creative, self-reflective (and partially essay-ish) texts that intend to evoke thoughts rather than prove a point. Since they are part of a scholarly monograph, but also because these reflections are theological practices in their own right, I consider them as academic practical theological texts of their own kind, hoping that the ‘space’ between the chapters in Part 2 and these respective reflections may help to see more clearly what could be going on in terms of a new quest for God.55
Finally, Part 3, by way of ‘Full-up finish’, ties together what has been presented in Parts 1 and 2. In Chapter 8, I reflect on the path of religion through society, addressing the question of what the interplay of transfer, transformations and theological reconstructions in Dutch late-modern society after the death of God means for the practice of Practical Theology. Similar to how lighting operators bring all relevant dimmers to full for the finale of a show, I highlight my view on the implications of what I have staged in the preceding chapters for the discipline of Practical Theology, relating this study to broader developments and conundrums in the field. With this, I walk off the stage and leave the spectator to ruminate, and the reader to ponder.
Appendix 1 offers an account of the research methodology underlying this book. I chose to first tell the story and afterwards account for the research process and methods, but any reader who wishes to do so, can start their reading with this methodological account. Appendix 2 contains tables with quantitative research data on the viewers of The Passion that support the account of Chapter 1. Throughout this book, Bible verses and quotes are taken from the English Bible translation New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), unless otherwise specified.
Authorship
Before I enter the stage with my narrative, a few words on authorship. In several chapters of this manuscript, I have presented colleagues (theologians with different specialisations, in practical theology and/or systematic theology, sociologists of religion, and religious studies scholars) as co-authors. Over the past couple of years, I have published a number of co-authored articles, parts of which were used in and amended for this book. Each chapter contains a footnote indicating which co-author contributed in what way, and in which previous publication. So, although I designed and executed this research project, although I wrote this monograph, and although the cover has my name on it, the book contains portions of texts that were initially written by others. My co-authors have all allowed me to adapt the text and take up the thread of our narratives again. The use of first-person pronouns in this book therefore reflects the contributions of different authors: first-person single pronouns refer to myself, whilst in co-authored chapters first-person plural pronouns refer to myself and the authors whose names are mentioned under the titles of the respective chapters. The idea and composition of the entire narrative of this monograph is mine and is entirely new.
Positionality Statement
As a practical theologian, trained in various theological sub-disciplines and specialising in liturgical and ritual studies, I have always had a particular interest in music. I was raised in a Lutheran family, which profoundly shaped my faith and theology, and have been actively involved in making (classical) music since the age of seven. I am intrigued by the dynamics of cult and culture, and I find myself sliding back and forth between being orthodox and rather ‘churchy’ and looking at the church and Christian religion somewhat critically and from a distance. As an ordained minister in the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, I understand and am aware of the challenges that those responsible for liturgy in the church face in the late-modern Western world. I thought and still think that in a network society, it is as realistic as it is necessary to acknowledge that theologians and churches can learn from people and parties in the broader cultural domain and the ways in which they appropriate and transform music and rituals that are part of Christian heritage. This conviction has a normative element to it too, and one that is theologically informed: it turns out I have a weakness for (those engaging in) practices that are frowned upon, condemned, or bashed, by people who are all too convinced that they are right. People who know all too well how God wants things to be, and what is theologically right (even if Sachkritik and ritual criticism are part of the game) often make me suspicious. This normativity does not make me an advocate of practices such as The Passion, of course (although I have been depicted in the media as a supporter of The Passion a number of times, because of my research on the topic); it is just that people and practices that are looked down on simply spark my interest and are reason for investigation. I value these practices in the broader cultural domain as part of a new quest for God – even when those engaging in them do not explicitly frame them as such, or wonder aloud whether God actually exists. What helped in this respect is the fact that I myself have also not been entirely unfamiliar with feelings of god-forsakenness, the desire to turn my back on God, and at times even the conviction that there is no God at all. But every inch a theologian, I always end up trying to find traces of God in the world we inhabit. This research is an effort to arrive at a better understanding and deeper knowledge of how contemporary appropriations and transformations of religion work and where, in all this, traces of God might be found. This requires an open mind; not uncritical, but primarily aimed at understanding how in our 21st century society Christian religion changes and how we can imagine God pitching tent with people in their particular times and places.
Now, let the play begin.
On the debate regarding secularisation narratives in Western Europe in the 1950s, see Herman Paul, “The Sociological Myth. A 1954 Controversy on Secularization Narratives”, Journal of Religion in Europe 9 (2016), 201-224. Paul mentions an observation by Dutch theologian Berkhof in 1954 that time and again church periodicals in the stories used formulations which included the words “still” and “no longer”. “Pastors write that “part of the congregation still visits the Sunday service”, while others complain that “the youth is no longer interested in matters of religion””. Paul, “The Sociological Myth”, 208.
Herman Paul, De slag om het hart. Over secularisatie van verlangen (Utrecht: Boekencentrum, 2017).
As long ago as 1999, Berger published a book entitled The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent religion and world politics. Berger, at that time, did not falsify secularisation theses, but claimed to have identified processes of counter-secularisation within cultures and societies. Cf. Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, D.C./Grand Rapids, MI: Ethics and Public Policy Center; Eerdmans, 1999).
In 2004, in their book Sacred and Secular. Religion and Politics Worldwide, political scientists Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart stated that “secularization theory is currently experiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history”. Cf. Pippa Norris and Ron Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. They took an important step in revising the ‘traditional’ secularisation thesis, stating that in developed countries religious institutions and their authorities were indeed in decline, however, ‘spiritual concerns’ (relating to the meaning and purpose of life) were becoming increasingly important. Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular, 75.
Charles Taylor in 2007 published A Secular Age, an ambitious work that would become a best-seller in which he addressed not so much the increasing marginalisation of religion from the spheres of public life, or the decline of religious belief and practices, but focused on what he calls a third type of secularity. This type does not so much point to an absence of religion, but rather to the fragmentation and continuing multiplication of new options to make sense of our world and to give shape to their spiritual ambitions, in a universe that does not turn around a central point. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2-3.
A landmark was the publication of a voluminous research report by The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR; an independent advisory body for government policy) in 2006. Cf. Wim van de Donk, A.P. Jonkers, G.J. Kronjee and R.J.J.M. Plum, eds., Geloven in het publieke domein. Verkenningen van een dubbele transformatie, WRR Verkenningen 13 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), https://www.wrr.nl/publicaties/verkenningen/2006/12/19/geloven-in-het-publiek-domein-verkenningen-van-een-dubbele-transformatie---13. Also see Joep de Hart, Paul Dekker and Loek Halman, Religion and Civil Society in Europe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013). For a more extensive list of references, see Chapter 2.
In practical theology, this opposition has, for example, been countered by Elaine Graham in an interesting publication that deals with the legitimacy of religious voices in public life and develops proposals for a Christian apologetics of presence. Cf. Elaine Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age (London: SCM Press, 2013). Stephen Pattison had already emphasised, with reference to Don Browning, that faith, worldviews and belief systems not only inform the practices of religious, but also secular institutions. Cf. Stephen Pattison, The Challenge of Practical Theology. Selected Essays (London: Jessica Kingsley 2007), 11. Also cf. Tom Beaudoin (ed.), Secular Music and Sacred Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press 2013), x, where the editor mentions that his edited volume aims to demonstrate that and how (secular/popular) music is related to things religious, spiritual, sacred and/or to God. It is important to realize, however, that the religious-secular dichotomy is a contextual one. This contextuality must not be overlooked: the construction of a religious-secular divide has proven to be problematic in non-Western cultures and worldviews. Several practical theologians have, for instance, rightly emphasised the importance of recognising the differences between Western and African ‘spiritual ontologies’ (cf. Lars Charbonnier, Johan Cilliers, Matthias Mader, Cas Wepener and Birgit Weyel (eds.), Pluralisation and social change. Dynamics of lived religion in South Africa and in Germany (Berlin: De Gruyter 2018), 3. DOI:
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) par. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. and transl. (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181.
Christian media form an exception: smaller national Christian newspapers like Nederlands Dagblad and Reformatorisch Dagblad do not share in this overall negative attitude towards religion. Other exceptions are a few particular journalists working for large national newspapers such as NRC Handelsblad and De Volkskrant, who occasionally show a more open attitude towards (Christian) religion when writing about religious matters. The most striking change of stances regarding Christian religion and church (from rather sceptical to more open) was observed in the past five years in the religion section of Dagblad Trouw.
ANP (Netherlands national news agency), “Hoe God (bijna) verdween uit Nederland”, 13 March 2016. http://nos.nl/artikel/2092498-hoe-god-bijna-verdween-uit-nederland.html. Last accessed May 10, 2020.
The research God in Nederland was first conducted in 1966 by order of Dutch broadcasting company KRO, in order to investigate the condition of Christian religion in the Netherlands.
Ton Bernts and Joantine Berghuijs, God in Nederland 1966-2015 (Utrecht: Ten Have, 2016), 207-222.
Cf. Joep de Hart and Pepijn van Houwelingen, Christenen in Nederland. Kerkelijke deelname en christelijke gelovigheid (Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, 2018); Schmeets, Hans, Wie is religieus en wie niet? Statistic Trends (CBS), oktober 2018 (PDF-file), obtained via https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/achtergrond/2018/43/wie-is-religieus-en-wie-niet-. Last accessed May 10, 2020.
In the last decade, a strong missionary wind has risen in churches of various denominations. E.g. in the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (that had around 1.85 million members on 1 January 2017), where some 100 “pioneer projects” throughout the country were initiated in order to search for new, and more diverse forms of being church that intend to bring the gospel to more and different people than those who are already involved in and/or part of church congregations. Source: “Statistische jaarbrief en tabellenboek 2017.pdf”, Protestantse Kerk in Nederland. https://www.protestantsekerk.nl/data/import/cb2cfc1245f8b6a07091a0975e47520e.pdf. Last accessed May 10, 2020. Another example is the smaller Reformed church denomination Gereformeerde Kerken vrijgemaakt, that in 2015 also initiated second generation church planting projects. Source: “GKv werkt mee aan 40-tal kerkplantingsprojecten”, Gereformeerde Kerken vrijgemaakt. https://www.gkv.nl/gkv-werkt-mee-aan-40-tal-kerkplantingsprojecten/. Last accessed October 4, 2019.
A global perspective on Christianity shows deep changes. Contrary to a decline in the West, Christianity in the global south (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) is seeing an explosive expansion. Cf. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom. The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Britain, for example, was transformed, in the second part of the 20th century, from a predominantly Christian society into a much more secular one. Cf. Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000, Christianity and Society in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 2001), 1. (Grace Davie, however, in 2015 pointed to the paradox that, at the same time, religion is increasingly present in the public debate in the UK. Cf. Grace Davie. Religion in Britain. A Persistent Paradox (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).) In 2010, a British social research centre reported that “Britain is becoming less religious, with the numbers who affiliate with a religion or attend religious services experiencing a long-term decline”. Cf. Alison Park, et al., British Social Attitudes report 28 (London: Sage, 2010), 173. The report is based on research executed by NatCen Social Research, a large centre for independent social research, “Losing faith?”. NatCen Social Research, http://bsa.natcen.ac.uk/latest-report/british-social-attitudes-28/religion.aspx. Last accessed May 10, 2020. According to this report, 50% of respondents had no religious affiliation (against 31% in 1983), and only 14% of those with a religious affiliation attended religious services or meetings on a weekly basis.
In the US, a similar trend can be seen, although percentages are very different: in 2014, the Christian share of the US population dropped to 70% (from 78% in 2007), and the category of religious ‘nones’ (the unaffiliated, who see themselves as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’) grew from 16% to almost 23% in seven years. Cf. Pew Research Center. “America’s Changing Religious Landscape”. May 12, 2015. Washington D.C. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Complete report available at http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/. Last accessed May 10, 2020.
Paul Post, “Fields of the Sacred”, in Sacred Places in Modern Western Culture, eds. Paul Post, Arie L. Molendijk and Justin Kroesen (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 13-59, here 38.
Gordon Lynch, whose work we will refer to in Chapter 4 and Chapter 6, distinguishes between religion and the sacred in a neo-Durkheimian attempt to disentangle the concepts of the religious and the sacred that have often been confounded in social theory. Cf. Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World. A Cultural Sociological Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) for an extended argument on the distinction between the two concepts.
This is further elaborated in Lieke Wijnia and Mirella Klomp, ”Tarenskeen’s Luther: Allowing for New Forms of Sacrality”, Jaarboek voor Liturgie-onderzoek 30 (2014), 243-259.
Kees de Groot, The Liquidation of the Church, Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).
John Caputo, Richard Kearney, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Thomas Altizer are some of the scholars who have engaged in these discourses.
Rick Benjamins, ”The Postsecular and Systematic Theology: Reflections on Kearney and Nancy”, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 76, no. 2 (2015), 116-128, here 116.
Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be. A Hermeneutics of Religion, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, Ind., [etc.]: Indiana University Press, 2001).
Richard Kearney, Anatheism. Returning to God after God, Insurrections (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
At the Protestant Theological University in Amsterdam, where I am based, liturgical studies as a discipline comes under the aegis of practical theology. Amongst the broader tribe of liturgical scholars worldwide, the Dutch are well known for a strong ritual approach to liturgy: in the Netherlands, liturgical and ritual studies are often mentioned in one breath. The different renamings of the Dutch interfaculty ‘Liturgical Institute’ (founded in 1992) are striking in this respect, as it became the ‘Institute for Liturgical and Ritual Studies’ in 2009, and the ‘Institute for Ritual and Liturgical Studies’ in 2012. ‘Ritual’ has now taken primary position in the institute’s self-description, indicating that, in a Dutch context, liturgy has become a much smaller domain of research than the broader field of rituality. The ritual approach to liturgy, which considers liturgy as action, performance, or practice more than as a ‘thing’, obviously suits its location within practical theology.
An exception is this PhD dissertation on (liturgical-)ritual music: Hanna Rijken, “‘My Soul Doth Magnify’. The Appropriation of the Anglican Choral Evensong in the Netherlands” (PhD diss., Protestant Theological University, Amsterdam, 2017), S.l., s.n.
After the publication of Anatheism, Kearney’s theory has become widely appreciated and used by scholars in philosophy and theology for the interpretation and elaboration of various topics (e.g. ‘corporality’, ‘otherness’, ‘imagination’, as well as explorations of the return of the divine through particular (art) forms, practices such as literature, painting, liturgy, music and performance. Cf. Richard Kearney and Matthew Clemente, eds., The Art of Anatheism (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) in which a previous version of Chapter 3 of this book was published.
Wuthnow recognizes that world religions host both types of spirituality, but claims that, in times of insecurity and unsettlement, people are forced to negotiate with themselves and others to find the sacred. See Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven. Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 3-4.
I have considered to write God as ‘God’ throughout this book because the word/name has no fixed content. However, I have decided to omit them, because I presumed that the constant use of inverted commas would be an obstacle to the reader. Another reason is that without inverted commas the word God is already a metaphor: it is a name for we-do-not-exactly-know-who-or-what. The difference between God, god, the divine, the O/other, the S/stranger, the sacred and the religious should not be trimmed with all kinds of distinctions or even oppositions, but relativised: I take are all these as open notions that are and may be filled with meaning in various ways.
See Brent Nongbri, Before Religion. A history of a modern concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013) for an elaborate discussion of notions of religion.
Martin D. Stringer, Contemporary Western Ethnography and the Definition of Religion (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), 1-2.
Stringer, Contemporary Western Ethnography, 5. The stubborn image of the Netherlands as highly secularised, which is so chewed over in the media, actually should be no surprise, as the idea clearly has a longer history in Western thinking about religion.
Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24.
This working definition mainly combines the approaches of Gordon Lynch and Lieke Wijnia, see Chapter 4 for the discussion and references.
The term ‘ethno-case study’ was coined by Marie Parker-Jenkins in 2018 to refer to a hybrid form of research: “an inquiry concerning people, which employs techniques associated with long-term and intensive ethnography, but which is limited in terms of scope and time spent in the field”. Marie Parker-Jenkins, “Problematising ethnography and case study: reflections on using ethnographic techniques and researcher positioning”, Ethnography and Education 13, no. 1 (2018), 18-33, here 24. DOI:
Bent Flyvbjerg, “Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research”, Qualitative Inquiry 12, no. 2 (2006), 219-245.
Bent Flyvbjerg, “Five Misunderstandings”, 223.
Bent Flyvbjerg, “Five Misunderstandings”, 228.
Eileen Campbell-Reed, “The power and danger of a single case study in practical theological research”, in Conundrums in Practical Theology, Theology in Practice 2, eds. Joyce Ann Mercer and Bonnie Miller- McLemore (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016), 33-59, here 34. I addressed these issues in the methodological account in Appendix 1, where I elaborate on my own particularity as a researcher.
Campbell-Reed, “The power and danger”, 47.
Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling. A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 11-13. More on Tweeds theory in Chapter 2.
Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 13.
Marcel Barnard, Johan Cilliers and Cas Wepener, Worship in the Network Culture: Liturgical Ritual Studies: Fields and Methods, Concepts and Metaphors, Liturgia Condenda 28 (Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 6-7.
On transversality see Richard R. Osmer, Practical Theology, An introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 170-172.
Cf. Barnard, Cilliers and Wepener, Worship in the Network Culture.
As Ellen Davis and Richard Hays have rightly claimed, “reading Scripture is an art – a creative discipline that requires engagement and imagination, […] Like every other form of art, reading Scripture has the potential for creating something beautiful. Interpretations of Scripture are not just right and wrong, although at times such categories are useful and necessary”. Ellen Davis and Richard Hays, eds., The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), xv-xvi (emphasis in the original text). Also see Paul Ballard, “The Use of Scripture” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 163-172.
See Henk Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. (Leiden: Leiden University Press 2012), 17.
Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties, 53.
Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties, 17.
Richard Osmer, The Teaching Ministry of Congregations. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press 2005), 197ff.
Barnard, Cilliers and Wepener, Worship in the Network Culture, 59.
Courtney Goto, “Reflecting Theologically by Creating Art: Giving Form to More than We Can Say”, Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry 36 (2016), 78-92. See http://journals.sfu.ca/rpfs/index.php/rpfs/article/view/426/413.
See e.g. Heather Walton, “Poetics”, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion, ed. Miller-McLemore, 173-182, 181.
In Chapter 8, I further elaborate on the character of these side lights in the context of doing practical theology in times ‘after God’. Suffice it to say here that identifying God for others, e.g. for those to whom traces of God are not real or do not matter, is not my aim.