First, intentionality is vital and necessary. As I described in the last post, intentionality sits at the heart of Christian moral practice. “Fixing your eyes on Jesus” is an intentional act. And as I described earlier in this series, acts of welcome and hospitality require that we intentionally disengage our social autopilot. Otherwise, our habits of relating will be pulled along by social-psychological dynamics that draw us toward sameness and away from difference. Finally, given the pervasive disenchantment of our culture, many of us must practice habits of attention that open the possibility for mystical encounter.
Second, having lost a cultural taken-for-grantedness, Christianity is now experienced as a decision and a choice. This makes faith fragile and effortful. Consequently, many try to recapture, create, or politically enforce a more homogeneous Christian culture. However, as I’ve noted, these efforts carry their own problems. Most importantly, they can’t escape our new normal. Going forward, at least in our lifetimes, faith will always involve intention and choice. We have to choose it.
And yet, our new normal is, in truth, a return to the old normal. At least as far as choice and intentionality are concerned.
We may lament the loss of Latin Christendom. But Christianity didn’t begin with cultural hegemony. The call for intentionality in the New Testament is pervasive because the early Christians were swimming against strong cultural tides, both Jewish and Roman. They were a “peculiar people,” and they paid real social and economic costs for their conversion. Their life of faith unfolded within a hostile majority culture. And while the pluralism of that world pales compared to our modern situation, the contrast between the Christians and what they called “the world” demanded daily, intentional choices. “Do not be conformed,” preached Paul, “to the pattern of this world.” “Be watchful,” Peter declared, “your adversary the devil is on the prowl.”
Like our own time, this constant demand for watchfulness and nonconformity was effortful and exhausting. Thus the constant exhortations for endurance and perseverance. As the writer of Hebrews preached, “Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees.” We may lament the loss of a culture so homogeneous and ubiquitous that it once carried us along like canoes on a river. But that’s not the world the early Christians knew. They swam upstream. And that demanded effort and intentionality.
So yes, we lost Christendom. We have to be intentional. But our new normal was once the old normal.
We Christians know how to swim upstream.
