Chapter One for Why the Church?
1
Introduction
The impetus for this book came from the journalist Volker Resing, for many years editor-in-chief of the monthly Herder Korrespondenz, a thought-leading journal among Catholic Christians in Germany. Resing was previously responsible for initiating the lengthy debate between eminent Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann (d. 2018) and myself, which he moderated and excerpts of which he published in 2018 as a book titled Beten bei Nebel: Hat der Glaube eine Zukunft? (Praying in the dark: Does faith have a future?). Over many a shared lunch, but also in an extended circle with editors from the Herder publishing house, we discussed which question was inflaming passions in Christian circles in Germany today—much as the question of whether religion has any future at all did in the early days of the new century. At that time, a debate that had taken off a few decades earlier in the social sciences was attracting growing attention on a much broader basis.
The debate in question revolved around attempts to critique and overcome so-called secularization theory, in other words, the idea that economic and scientific-technological modernization ineluctably results in the weakening of all religion. More than ever before, this debate was gripping the wider public in the churches and beyond. In line with this, “Do we need religion?” was the topic of the first keynote lecture at the first Ecumenical Church Congress ever held in Germany in 2003, which I had the honor of giving. Drawing inspiration from that gathering, I also published a short book of my own essays under the same title in 2004.1
Now, the exponents of secularization theory, as defined above, have by no means fallen completely silent. The turn away from the churches, especially the Catholic Church, which was already under way in certain countries, has intensified following the exposure of countless cases of sexual and spiritual abuse by clerics and the habitual cover-up of these cases by church officials—or the inadequate acknowledgment of their own wrongdoing. This turning away is undeniable and is not difficult to understand. No wonder, then, that the proponents of a scholarly position that had been on the defensive are once again becoming more vocal, convinced that they can confirm the global decline of religion after all. Perhaps the most prominent author among them was the leading scholar of value change, Ronald Inglehart, who died in 2021. In 2004, he and coauthor Pippa Norris came up with an original way to reconcile the basic idea of advancing secularization due to modernization with the simultaneous but—on this premise—seemingly paradoxical finding of an increasingly religious world.2 They did so by taking greater account of the demographic dimension, that is, the different birth rates and variable population growth of societies depending on their degree of secularization. While his proposed explanation was problematic in many respects,3 it was still an important step forward. In more recent works, however, Inglehart again tended to fall back on conventional secularization theory.4 His key evidence in this regard was the increase in the number of people who no longer belong to a religious community in the United States. I will come back to this later.
First, however, it should be noted that in the discussions mentioned above we were quick to agree about another issue: for many Christians today the pressing question is not whether religion or Christianity has any future at all but whether there is any need for a church in that future. Many contemporaries view the Christian ethos of love for one’s neighbor as plausible, at least in essence, and also find Christian forms of spirituality attractive. As a result, they have a hard time imagining that this heritage will one day lose its vigor completely and vanish from the scene. In any case, many of them are determined to hold fast to it personally, even in the face of strong resistance to Christianity in a secularized world. But they increasingly ask themselves why one cannot be a Christian without belonging to a church. So the pressing question today is not “Do we need religion?” but “Do religious people—do Christians—need a church?” Might a free, in other words, institutionless Christianity better facilitate the spread of the Christian message? Do clergy and church do more to obscure than to convey this message? What would be missing—many Catholic Christians are now asking themselves—if there were no more priests, bishops or popes?
Historically, these questions are by no means entirely new. In many a rebellious movement in church history and within Protestantism, especially in its more radical forms, and in reaction to ossification within the Reformed churches, they were posed long ago. Sectarian splinter groups and attempts to retreat into mysticism have featured in the history of the churches since time immemorial. In fact, in the theology of the Enlightenment era, the distinction between church and Christianity became central, both in the sense of individuals’ claim to determine for themselves what the Christian ethos demanded of them and in terms of the unbiased perception of Christianity in all its historical and cultural diversity—but also in light of its congruence with other religious traditions. At present, however, these impulses do not seem to stem primarily from intellectual and political motives—in contrast to the past, when there were protests against the church’s entanglement with feudal power structures, the lower classes harbored utopian hopes of overthrowing the prevailing order, and the middle classes aspired to autonomy at both the political and intellectual levels. The wellspring of these shifts is now more likely to lie in cultural tendencies toward individualization. Beyond the field of religious institutions, these are bringing to an end the era of permanent membership in organizations and lifelong loyalty to political parties, and certainly the selfless commitment of the “party soldier.” Once again, we can identify precursors in the shape of the religious quest movements around 1900 with their distinction between the spiritual and the religious, and in the hopes expressed by thinkers such as pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in the 1930s, who believed that the “religious” sphere would have to emancipate itself from all institutional forms, from all traditional mythologies and dogmas and from any claim to exclusivity in order to finally develop without constraint.5 Under these circumstances, many people find that they can extol their faith only in light of its invigorating, comforting, inspiring effect and thus as something that helps them personally, perhaps even something that enables them to achieve autonomy and take action to help others. But this makes it more difficult for them to ascribe a constitutive role in their personal development to the church as an institution, to describe the Catholic Church, for example, through the metaphor of the “Mother Church”;6 they may also struggle to acknowledge possible restrictive effects of faith that arise from commitment to ideals and that entail a profound shift in people’s lives—away from a focus on realizing their own potential and the optimization of the self.
So why the church? Quite deliberately, the title of this book asks “why?” and not “what for?” In the aforementioned speech, “Do We Need Religion?,” I distinguished between two possible meanings of this question.7 It may imply that we are looking for benefits of some kind that individuals, society or humanity might derive from religion, such as happiness, stable morality, mental health, social cohesion or peace. This way of posing the question features a disturbingly autosuggestive undertone. Ultimately, everyone knows that even the most convincing proof of the utility of faith does not lead to faith. So we have to discern another meaning in the word “needs,” namely, whether something may in fact be dispensable under certain conditions. When it comes to religion, this pertains to the “extra-ordinary” human experiences that are articulated in faith. Hence, when it comes to the church, the goal cannot be to seek to legitimize it as an institution because it fulfills a purpose or proves “functional” for a certain “system.” Instead, the imperative must be to reflect on the factors that once prompted believers in Jesus Christ to create and imbue with life an institution that differs from all other contemporary social forms such as family and kinship, but also those characteristic of the polity. After all, not all religions have brought forth such an institution. Reflection on these historical causes, however, if convincing, may itself engender reasons and motives to hold fast to the social form of the church in the present and to actively participate in it—despite all the disappointment, even despair, about its concrete form in place and time.
That is what the present book is about. Rather than a monograph, it is a collection of essays that, instead of dealing with the topic in systematic, step-by-step fashion, illuminate it from a number of different angles. Forming the consistent background to all of them, however, is my longterm project of providing a systematic, historically grounded alternative to so-called secularization theory, but also to the grand, influential historical narratives centered on a world-historical process of disenchantment (as in the work of Max Weber), world history as divine reason coming to know itself (as expounded by Hegel) or the emergence of secular reason (as in the writings of Jürgen Habermas). This alternative consists of a global history of moral universalism, that is, grasping the diversity of religious and philosophical sources of an ethos directed at all of humanity. For now, all I will say about this is that it places Christianity in a light that allows for a new perspective on the church.8
The first essay most directly addresses this connection between moral universalism and appropriate forms of social organization. This chapter asks whether the human relationship to transcendence is even amenable to organization. Only against this background, in other words, after clarifying the deeper meaning of the church as institution, can we meaningfully probe power, authority and the separation of powers in the church. While these issues arise in all human institutions and organizations, they do not appear in every setting in the way typical of truly political institutions. I therefore express reservations here about rallying cries for the democratization of the church.
This key text is followed by a chapter that concisely summarizes my view of the failure of “predictions” of secularization and disenchantment. I also take the opportunity to reflect on the limits of historical forecasting in general and predictions about religion in particular. My reflections in this chapter raise the question, which I am unable to pursue further in the present book, of when in the history of Christianity the idea that it might ever perish arose last in antiquity and first in “modernity.” For more than a millennium—I surmise—it was inconceivable, despite the significance of apocalyptic statements in Christianity, that the world could continue to exist if Christianity disappeared.9 Today, however, many commentators refer to our entry into a “post-Christian” age as if this were a foregone conclusion.
These two chapters are followed by my thoughts on experiences of self-transcendence and then by an essay that attempts—even more clearly than the previous one—to set the meaning of Christian faith apart from the influence of present-day notions of self-optimization and to derive from this some consequences for the cultural role of the churches today. I place particular emphasis on access to a sphere of experience in which individuals can go beyond the limits of the self, for example, in the liturgy and by entering into “sacred spaces.” Religious education, even in its rational forms, depends on access to this sphere.
The next pair of chapters links two texts that are particularly close to my heart but which may well irritate some readers. The first presents an interpretation of Alfred Döblin’s great “narrative work,” written in exile, on the German Revolution of 1918–19. In the context of his own conversion to Catholic Christianity and in light of his experiences of emigration and exile, Döblin articulated a view of Germany’s political history in the first half of the twentieth century that I believe to be of truly explosive import. Beyond all established forms of political Catholicism or of any sort of politics calling itself Christian, he asks how a person who took the message of the Gospel completely to heart while simultaneously seeking to be a root-and-branch realist with regard to human beings ought to have behaved within and toward this history. Döblin does this in prose brimming with vividness, next to which any kind of analytical speech necessarily falls short.
The second is dedicated to the intellectual development of perhaps the greatest Polish philosopher of the twentieth century, Leszek Kołakowski. Once a prominent Marxist, Marxist dissident and historian of Marxism, he is little remembered today. I have two reasons for dedicating a chapter to him here. First, his gradual journey from Stalinist critic of religion and church hater in the early days of communist Poland to a positive assessment of Christianity—and eventually even of the church itself—reads like an object lesson illuminating the path of a secular thinker who, displaying great scrupulousness and authenticity, eventually finds his way to Christianity or at least into its vicinity. In the sense of interest to us here, Kołakowski seems to me to have followed a more consistent path than Habermas, a figure who is vastly more discussed today. I suggest that the route taken by his thought, once distant from Christianity and later close to it, can help us find “a new language” for the Christian faith. Second, as Kołakowski proceeded along his intellectual path, in the 1960s he produced a fundamental historical work, still largely unknown in Germany and the English-speaking world, that examines the pursuit of a nondenominational or even noninstitutional Christianity in the period between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. This book sheds much useful light on the question “Why the church?,” which makes it worthy of in-depth treatment in the present context.
The fourth pair of chapters focuses on the idea at the core of what philosophers call moral universalism. I am referring to the notion of universal human dignity, the equal dignity of all human beings, which they did not acquire through any sort of feat and which no misdeed can deprive them of. For many Christians and Jews, but also for many nonbelievers, this idea represents the ultimate moral and political ideal—one whose demise they cannot imagine and which they are determined to defend. But this raises the question of whether this universalist ideal and especially its impact on the field of sexual morality and the associated sensibilities can and should constitute the essence of a new religion—beyond all traditional religion—or whether it can and should exist only in connection with specific, and in this sense particular, religious or nonreligious formations. The first study is dedicated to this issue, while the second, much shorter one was composed in a state of shock at the gross violations of human dignity represented by the torture practiced by members of the US Armed Forces in Iraq. It asks whether the widespread implementation of the ideal of human dignity is still realistic today or whether it is merely a fair-weather phenomenon that soon proves illusory at times of crisis such as military conflict.
The volume concludes with a discussion that builds on ideas I put forth in my short 2016 book Kirche als Moralagentur? (Church as moral agency?). At the time, the two largest Christian churches in Germany were expressing unconditional support for a liberal immigration policy. In light of this, though I did not question their political role as such, as I was sometimes accused of doing, I did articulate reservations about the unambiguous way in which Christian arguments were being made in a single policy field. I highlighted the selective derivation of political consequences from the ethos of the Gospel with respect to migration policy without thinking through the implications, while the same did not apply, for example, to matters of peace and disarmament. In the first of the two texts combined here I recall my arguments on this topic in the above-mentioned book, while in the second I address the statements of some of the most prominent critics of and commentators on my position (from Annette Schavan to Peter Dabrock). I do so to clarify the core of my argument that moral universalism can be lived only while simultaneously taking account of incommensurable particular obligations. As important as the moral universalism of Christianity is to my understanding of the church, the church must not become a mere agent of morality, not even in the name of a universalist morality.
As this overview shows, the present book is neither a manifesto for church reform nor a guidebook on the Synodal Way in Germany or in the world. Of course, this does not mean that I have no opinions about controversial issues such as the ordination of women, compulsory priestly celibacy, sexual morality or the nontransparency of developmental processes within the church. I have already expressed these opinions or made them apparent in many of my publications.10 But in the highly charged situation of crisis currently facing the church, I want to do much more than communicate these opinions and their rationales: my hope is that the ideas presented in this book might help ensure that the disputes between reformers and preservers go beyond a mere power struggle. After all, nothing is gained if one side wins in the short term but the institution suffers in the long term. The common goal must be to reflect on every institutional question in light of our guiding ideals and with a view to strengthening the church in its mission of propagating the ideal of universal human dignity. Only by redoubling its efforts in pursuit of this goal can the church gain new self-confidence and renewed vigor—and not solely by remedying its shortcomings, as important as this obviously is. Some merely defend existing institutional forms without showing that they have served and continue to serve this ideal. Others want to change them, but they cite only political democracy as a positive role model, while failing to develop their own bespoke vision, one centered on the meaning of the church. As I see it, both are failing to focus on the goal identified above. It is this that I wish to foreground here, and this seems imperative even if we have no future path clearly laid out in front of us.
In Germany in particular, debates about the church and church reform often take place in an atmosphere of impending doom. This contrasts markedly with the fact that the globalization of Christianity has made the present one of the greatest phases of expansion in its entire history.11 Logically, of course, European decline and global expansion do not contradict each other; empirically, they may occur simultaneously. In conclusion, however, I want to briefly address whether it is not more convincing—as Inglehart claims—to speak of a global decline of religion in our time. I limit myself to remarks on the two great powers of the present, whose world-historical collision represents one of the great dangers of the twenty-first century: the United States and China. Is the United States now catching up with European secularization after a historic delay? Is China becoming a world power without religion?
The assumption that the United States is catching up with European secularization and is thus conforming to the classic path of modernization-plus-secularization is supported by the rapid increase in the proportion of US citizens who state in surveys that they do not belong to any religious community. This increase has become particularly evident since the early 1990s. While the proportion was 10 percent in 1997, for example, it rose to 15 percent ten years later, reached 20 percent in 201412 and, according to the Pew Research Center survey published in December 2021, is now as high as 29 percent. What once looked like a mere rounding error is thus said to be poised to account for a quarter of the American population.13 Of course, researchers in the sociology of religion have long been aware that it is risky to base statements about religiosity mainly on data about membership in churches and religious communities. After all, one can be a member without in any serious sense orienting one’s own conduct of life toward faith. By the same token, one can also be a believer without belonging to a religious organization at the time a survey is undertaken. Hence, there can be no question of interpreting the mere increase in nonmembers (“religiously unaffiliated,” “nones”) straightforwardly as an increase in irreligious let alone antireligious attitudes. To come to such a far-reaching conclusion, we would have to break down more precisely which attitudes and behaviors with regard to religion and religious communities the “nones” exhibit. Whether such a breakdown is possible, however, depends on the categorizations prespecified in a given survey. Here, attempts to at least distinguish between confirmed atheists, agnostics and people who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” with regard to religion have proved helpful.
If we make this kind of distinction, it becomes clear that the number of staunch atheists is only about one-fifth of all the religiously unaffiliated individuals in the United States. Any attempt by organized atheists to be recognized as spokespersons for all the religiously unaffiliated is therefore unwarranted, at least in the United States. Agnostics also make up a similarly large (or small) proportion of this group. More than half of the religiously unaffiliated are in fact people who, while they do not currently identify with any specific religious community, can by no means be described as areligious in their attitudes. While more than a quarter of Americans today do not belong to a religious community, only a much smaller proportion deny the existence of God (4 percent according to some studies or, if those who consider the question of God unanswerable, the “agnostics,” are included, 10 percent). The group of the unaffiliated is in fact highly heterogeneous; it includes almost half of all US Americans of Asian descent, because their traditions typically evade the “denominationalization” of faith, and a growing proportion of low-income blacks. A particularly striking finding is that in the short span of four years (2010 to 2014), one in four of the unaffiliated joined a religious community, mostly a Christian one. This suggests that for a significant portion of the “nones” in the United States, nonaffiliation is only a temporary phase in their lives. This is quite different in other countries where nonreligious or antireligious beliefs are well established and have been passed down across generations.
But this is not to detract from the fact that the increase in “nones” does indeed seem to be historically significant. Various explanatory factors are brought into play in the literature, such as the decline in marriages and parenthood, since the unmarried and the childless are twice as likely as married people and those with children to belong to no religious community. However, political attitudes seem to be the most significant factor responsible for this change. Since the 1970s, Christian churches and religious communities—including so-called mainline Protestants, Evangelicals and even the Catholic Church—have increasingly been perceived as allies of the political right in the United States, which means that Democrats and left-wingers feel less and less represented by them. Repelled by this, often people decide to pursue their religious or spiritual path outside these organizations. This could be described (following Spanish American sociologist of religion José Casanova) as the punishment that looms when Christian churches and groups simply become part of the culture wars instead of being sites of their resolution.
This is not the place to go into these issues in depth.14 It should be noted, however, that this political explanation for the declining importance of the churches is different from one that emphasizes modernization processes. While the former prompts us to seek the cause of the churches’ loss of credibility, even among Christians, in their one-sided political positioning, the latter treats the weakening of the churches as an inevitable consequence (whether welcome or regrettable) of economic and scientific-technological progress.
Finally, anyone approaching China through the lens of modernization theory would expect a high level of religiosity there and a low one in the United States. Yet in the first instance the findings paint exactly the opposite picture. Obviously, when it comes to the situation in China, the decades-long repression of all religions by the communist state played a crucial role. Particularly during the Maoist “Cultural Revolution” this repression was so severe that some referred in triumphant tones to the overcoming of all religion on Chinese soil. Of course, the Marxist critique of religion and continuity with Stalinist policies in the Soviet Union played a major role in this repressive policy, but the oppression was in fact greater than in the Soviet Union and the European communist states. In order to understand this, we must recognize how much China’s own religious traditions were perceived in the twentieth century even by noncommunist reformers as obstacles to economic modernization, as mere cults and superstitions that lacked the institution-building power of Christianity. Thus, for many Chinese, it was the institution of the church that underlay the strength of Christians and the West. Many communists were additionally motivated by the struggle against imperialism. If one’s own religious traditions appeared as an impediment to modernization, while Christianity was viewed as a tool of Western imperialism and Buddhism, with its organizational structures, as an instrument of Japanese imperialism, then radical secularism seemed like the only route to China’s rebirth.
After Mao’s death, but especially from the early 1980s onward, an epoch-making process of religious revitalization began in China, which was paralleled by an equally significant process of economic and scientific-technological modernization.15 The revitalization of religion applies to the country’s own religious traditions as well as Christianity. I will not be going into the diverse forms of expression of this revival, its significance to ethnic conflicts (Uyghurs, Tibet) or the differences between the Catholic Church and Protestant free churches in China. Although state repression in the religious field has increased massively again under Xi Jinping, it would be wrong to interpret this as a sign of deeply rooted Chinese secularism. On the contrary, it seems more convincing to attribute this repression to the widespread perception that the option of faith is becoming ever more popular in China. Even prior to any form of institutionalization, many people see in it the potential for a search for existential meaning and reassurance that goes beyond history and politics, a phenomenon that can in itself be seen as a threat to existing power structures. At the institutional level, pretensions to total state control are colliding with supranational religious institutions’ aspiration to resist such control. The question of how to assess these clashing aspirations and their prospects of success is one of the great historical challenges of the present. Confucianism’s relative political passivity after the collapse of the empire in 1911–12 has been attributed in part to the fact that it lacked a church and thus became a “soul without a body” in the absence of the imperial state.16 It makes sense to probe the meaning of the institution of the church in these contexts as well.
To conclude, I would like to mention that this book is dedicated to two individuals who have made the Catholic Academy in Berlin one of the liveliest sites of cultural and religious dialogue in the German capital and a meeting place for all those who are willing to listen to each other. They have also turned it into a home for me personally. With gratitude and in friendship, I dedicate this book to Susanna Schmidt, director from 1997 to 2006, and Joachim Hake, director since 2007.17
Notes
1. Hans Joas, Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).
2. Pippa Norris and Ronald F. Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
3. For a critique, see, for example, Daniel Silver, “Religion without Instrumentalization,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 47 (2006): 421–34.
4. Ronald F. Inglehart, “Giving Up on God: The Global Decline of Religion,” Foreign Affairs 99 (2020): 110–18.
5. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934).
6. Hans Joas, “Mutter Kirche,” Herder Korrespondenz 75, no. 12 (2021): 15–16.
7. Joas, Do We Need Religion? (see Chapter 4 in this book). Revised versions of this chapter and Chapter 8 are taken from the earlier book.
8. For a more detailed engagement with my research, which is only hinted at here, see Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013); Hans Joas, The Power of the Sacred: An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Hans Joas, Under the Spell of Freedom: Theory of Religion after Hegel and Nietzsche (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), especially the final chapters in the latter two books.
9. For initial reflections on this, see Hans Joas, Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 13–16; and Hans Joas, “Wann glauben Religionen an sich selbst?,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 3, 2015, 9.
10. See, for example, Joas, Faith as an Option, and many shorter texts and interviews.
11. See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
12. For many of the quantitative data that appear in what follows and their statistical interpretation, see Ryan P. Burge, The Nones: Where They Come From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021).
13. Ibid., 4.
14. For a more detailed treatment, see Philip Gorski, American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy before and after Trump (New York: Routledge, 2020).
15. A book by a longtime American China correspondent paints an extremely vivid picture: Ian Johnson, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao (New York: Pantheon, 2017).
16. Yu Yingshi, quoted in Ji Zhe, Religion, modernité et temporalité: Une sociologie du bouddhisme chan contemporain (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016), 46.
17. Thanks are also due to Daniel Deckers for valuable substantive and editorial input on the entire manuscript of the book; to my assistants Emma Sandner and Jan Philipp Hahn for their help in sourcing literature and producing a print-ready text and the Bibliography; and to Christian Scherer for his help in proofreading the text and compiling the index.