Connie-Dodger

Because it's a better word than "legalism"

“Lend me your eyes I can change what you see.
But your soul you must keep, totally free.”

Mumford and Sons, “Awake My Soul”

When Jen and I were married over 30 years ago, the reception included a dance. It was a DJ kind of deal, more of an extended playlist. Among the songs were Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy”, “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC and “Love Shack” by the B52’s. I remember that a number of our friends decided not to join the dance as they had signed a covenant for the Christian university that they were attending. The covenant forbade dancing. Looking back I think that the people who drew up the covenant might also have had some objection to the lyric,

“She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean.
She was the best damn woman that I ever seen”

but I suppose the prohibition on dancing covered a lot of things that could remain unnamed.

We all have things over which we are embarrassed from our past. Sometimes I think back to our wedding and wince a bit at some of the very religious things I said when it was my turn to speak. They feel so self-indulgent now. I console myself that I had just turned 23. I meant well.

I think that the no-dancing friends meant well also. I am not sure if they look back thinking, “I can’t believe that I did that.” The truth is that if they had signed the covenant then their refusal to dance at their friend’s wedding was entirely appropriate. At that point it is not about dancing. It is about keeping your word.

All of this to introduce a topic that received a lot of attention in circles of evangelicalism, the concept of legalism. The no-dancing clause in the “community covenant” was later removed. It would be curious to consider how dancing moved from bad enough to be banned to not so bad at all.

Legalism, in evangelical parlance, was the attempt to externally manage behaviour. To be legalistic was to put rules before people. Legalism was not generally something that was celebrated as good, but it was very much present. In my experience even the people who focused on rules and behaviour were not proudly legalistic. None of them would want to be called a legalist. It was more that there was an idea that you could somehow gauge a person’s spirituality or growth by way of external morality (I’ve written before about “d-christians, s-christians and f-christians”).

I came across a review this week of a book that looks at the recent history of Ireland through the lens of some of the legalism in Irish society. Fintan O’Toole’s “We Don’t Know Ourselves” covers the span of time from the late 1950’s through the early 2000’s.
I have not yet read the book, but the article about it was fascinating.

O’Toole states that Ireland was, at the time of his upbringing, “dominated by the Catholic Church”. He recounts many stories of legalism and imposed morality, and many cases of outright hypocrisy. The review that I read quotes O’Toole in describing the change as Irish society distanced itself from the church:

“This, I think, was what really changed: ordinary Catholics realized that when it came to lived morality, they were way ahead of their teachers.”

That is quite a quote. What it points towards is that the self-imposed arbiters of morality and spirituality may have actually hindered people from moral and spiritual growth. The review of the book includes a sub-title “How Ireland Took on the Church and Freed its Soul”.

One of O’Toole’s stories is of the the Bishop of Cork, Cornelius “Connie” Lucey. Bishop Lucey decided that during Lent there would be a strict version of fasting. Parishioners were restricted to one meal a day, along with two “collations”, something like a biscuit with one’s tea. O’Toole points out that, at such moral imposition, a local baker invented a giant biscuit for sale during Lent. Such biscuits became known as “Connie dodgers”. Fantastic! I love bakers who help people push through legalistic injunctions. I think that church bake sales should always include such profanities.

I am looking forward to reading O’Toole’s book. I wonder already if some people who are familiar with him (I am not) might warn me, “Oh, he is against the church.” Maybe he is, but maybe he is in a way that might actually be helpful. It is a question worth asking. If people picked up mostly legalism from their upbringing, don’t they have a better chance of finding spiritual growth, and even hopeful faith, by pushing away from such structures? Or it could be put this way, “Isn’t it a hope of the church to be freed from the church?”

There is a similar interpretive concept when it comes to understanding scripture. This particular concept comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and it relates to how we should hear scripture in ways that remain open, dynamic, and lead to further growth and insight. The concept is “the word of God against the word of God.” There are myriad examples of how the Bible speaks against the Bible. What I mean by this is the kind of “You have heard it said…” constructions presented by Jesus and in many biblical texts.
Perhaps there is hope for Christian faith in accepting a concept of “the church against the church” as a positive thing.

I'm all for Connie dodgers. Such cutting dissent often appears in the early stages of calling out things from which religious structures need to be freed. Mockery can be a form of prophetic speech. Ridiculous things need to be called ridiculous, sometimes by way of giant biscuits. Such mockery hopefully gives way to something even better, a consideration of what a more helpful, hopeful church that truly values humanity might look like.

O’Toole argues that morality was actually found in rejecting the supposed morality of a form of social theocracy. Maybe a good number of people who are pushing away from their evangelical experience are not against the church. Maybe a good number of them are able to see some of the ridiculousness, and yet hope for something better. Maybe it was the moral imposition, not the biscuit, that was silly, after all. That’s how mockery works. That’s why it is so upsetting to the soldiers of legalism. It makes them look bad.