One of the repeated notes of this newsletter is the reminder to discern when someone’s message or argument can be summed up with one statement: “things used to be better.”
It is remarkable how often you see this. There are entire news organizations that have this as their guiding principle. I have attended supposedly intellectually fulsome lecture series where all of the material can be summarized by that one line. My response is that if that is all they have, then they don’t have much for me to think about, even if they are right (and mostly they tend not to be, most things did not used to be better). The “things used to be better” argument is the base of many religious organizations and it pervades much of what is passed off as thoughtful preaching. I think that it is lazy, fearful preaching that sometimes borders on religious control and spiritual abuse.
We have talked about how nostalgia can have positive aspects to it emotionally and in terms of community, but it can also prevent us from living in the present and looking towards the future. Nostalgia has been defined as “longing for a time that never existed”.
I find it interesting how some points of caution about the “things used to be better” approach sound different in this pandemic era. In Canada, some stats came out last week that, for the first time since WWII, the average life expectancy has gone down. People are living, on average, seven months less than before the pandemic. Before this, each year saw approximately a six month increase in life expectancy. All of this to say that when you think about living in a time of global crisis, there are more ways in which things really did used to be better. Some of the social angst and conflict comes from a desire to get back to the way things were and from the assumption that, no matter what, we have the right to get back to that. The problem is that there are times (like now) when getting back to the way things were is not possible.
Much of my career working in Christian churches has been in contexts in which many people assumed that things used to be better. There was, on the part of very many people, an assumption that people used to be better, people used to care about God more, people used to be more moral and so on. When these assumptions are examined, they do not generally prove to be accurate. As a pastor, I felt that the “things used to be better” mentality was actually a main reason that people had a hard time considering the transcendent, engaging with the God in which they believed. Our society has become less, not more, violent through recent centuries. People may have sought to become more, not less, understanding and accepting of others. Honour codes, which saw violence as a means to protect reputation, have largely been abandoned, and this has led to a decline in almost every kind of violence.
We can sometimes long for a past that we see, from this present perspective, as a more simple time, and there is much that we can learn and gain from the wisdom of those who have come before us. However, Christian faith, properly understood, is a faith that looks to the future, even as it seeks to honour and learn from the richness of tradition.
I mentioned in this week’s Tuesday newsletter a recent article in The Atlantic magazine that speaks about how the music industry in the United States (and Canada) is caught in a kind of “things used to be better” mentality. Seventy percent of sales are of old music. Do we have all the music that we need? Maybe we can just listen over and over again to old music and recall what life used to be like and who we used to be. Perhaps, there is no need to write any new music at all. The same thing can happen in the movie industry. It is a little disheartening to me to see how many movies are simply new versions of a franchise or sequels, prequels, and the like of a movie from decades ago.
Sometimes we see the same thing in sports. My brother-in-law is a well informed, thoughtful person. He is up to date on issues of the day and he is always up for engaging conversation. I can’t really talk to him about hockey, though. Every single time hockey comes up, or if a game is on when we are in the same house, he will, without fail, say that hockey used to be so much better. He will mention an, apparent, golden era when Bobby Orr and others were playing. “That was exciting hockey,” he will say. I will then usually reply with the argument that the players now are miles ahead of the players from back then and that the game is faster and more skilled. During the era that he longs for, players regularly showed up to training camp out of shape and well over their playing weight. Training camp would be used to get into shape. Today, that would not happen. Maybe there was more excitement in some games of the past, but it is not because the players were more skilled than players today. Perhaps, because the general skill level was lower, highly skilled players like Bobby Orr stood out more.
What happens if the church looks only to the past for its identity and energy? While we can sometimes act as if all of the music that we need has already been written, many Christians can gather over and over and over again to hear the same thing over and over and over again. Too often, churches are open to new worship music, new structure, new cosmetic changes, but not real consideration of the future. Maybe there will be a change in wardrobe for the pastor, no longer a suit and tie, replaced by jeans and an untucked shirt. This is what too often passes as change. I think that many of the supposed updates and changes mask a core that still looks back rather than ahead.
In your evangelical experience can you point to how a pastor or preacher outlined how people used to see God, but how that view has changed or grown? If what you hear instead of things like this is a lament about how bad the world is because it is not interested in keeping things the same, then, perhaps, that church does not have a lot to offer in terms of theology. This is not a young/old thing. Some of the most forward looking people that I have known in church have been older people. Ask someone that you know from church how their view of God has changed or how their view of morality or religion has changed.
Thinking back to The Atlantic article, the old music might well be good, but there is a lot of music still to be written. Old ways of seeing religion and the world might have some good about them (lots of bad, no doubt as well), but there is lots of theology and understanding of God yet to be spoken, and doing this is not “un-Christian”.
The church right now is at a point where so much that has been taken for granted is up for grabs. The way things have been done is no longer enough. My hope is that the changes will not be only cosmetic (bigger screens, better technology), but that we will see that the real heart of moving forward in religious understanding is theological renewal.