The Purpose of Religious Speech
Religious speech is hard. Any form of communication is challenging enough on its own, but when you introduce weighty concepts of religion, communication seems impossible. How would you judge an effective bit of religious speech? Another way to put my question is blunt: what is religious communication for? Some religious folk might answer with one or more of the following: conversion, moral formation, social justice reform, church growth, community organizing/building, or giving voice to calamity.
I am convinced that most people, even the devout, do not consciously think about the purpose of a piece of religious speech like a sermon, but they participate in the communication, nonetheless. Innately, we tend to slide into rhythms of behavior that include religious speech. We speak and we listen to messages and filter them through the cultural and political trends of the day (plus many others). For cultural animals native to late modern capitalism, this means that religious messaging is often judged by its ability to persuade others or gain further attention—we are in the “attention economy,”1 as many have noted. Church sermons often try to convince listeners to join, show up, volunteer, or chip in the donation plate. Prophetic appeals in front of the courthouses are about convincing society or the ruling bodies to expand their understanding of justice. The popular pundit and psychologist Jordan Peterson uses religious speech to convince young men to take responsibility and find purpose in their lives—doing so with as much fervor as a tent revival preacher.2 And since convincing is the aim, it seems to me that so much of what counts for religious speech today is dominated by explaining ideas, knowledge transfer, teaching, and the like. To me, this leaves so much of what passes for a sermon or even a piece of religiously motivated art (poetry, music, film) to fall flat and boring. Perhaps the very best of religious speech should be more than simply about convincing people to some sort of action. I do not think so, or at least I hope for more. The purpose of religious speech is not merely about convincing; it must be about the strangest yet most desirable of phenomena: transfiguration of people.
Recently, an important but under-engaged philosopher put a fine point on the confusion and shortcomings of religious speech in a moving meditation called, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech. That philosopher is the late Bruno Latour, a French catholic from a family of winemakers (dating back to the 17th century). He was a leading thinker in the philosophy of science and technology writing on science communication, politics, ecology, and modernity. Latour’s work has always had the ability to look at concepts that we widely consider without much thought only then to expose the common concept as a bit weirder and harder to hold after an intentional analysis. His work is important because it can make you do the hard work to really understand the things you take for granted. This is helpful for the question that drives me, because Latour can help us get behind what religious speech does and what we should expect from it. To this aim, what is the point of a sermon? According to Latour it is not simply about information but rather transformation is the goal. But before we explore further, let’s consider the “torments” as Latour understands them.
In Rejoicing, Latour writes in a personal, meandering, and meditative style about what causes him shame when thinking about “religious speech.” His style is not propositional, nor is it scientific, and I am certain that the medium is an attempt to demonstrate the message. This is why his is a book beyond description, rather it needs to be experienced. I think it is fair to say that Latour would agree with my feeling that we are living in a dearth of quality preaching and religious communication in our time. Latour’s feelings are complicated. On the one hand he laments what he hears from pulpits each Sunday. There a clergy person presumes that the sermon, or homily, is the moment of information communication, as if religious “facts and figures” or simple explanation of its content may be delivered like scientific and political fact. But, as he points out, religious speech cannot do that, nor should it even try. It cannot because it is a constant act of translation between worlds, texts, terms, and concepts.3 The knowledge it aims to share is only ever approximate, incomplete, and girded by mystery.
Complicating matters is that religious people tend toward preservation. It makes sense, if you came to understand something as “sacred,” you would no doubt want to hold onto it, to safeguard its meaning and value. Religious people tend to cling on to the way religious ideas are understood and expressed in the past because that is where they have found light and life. This leads to a certain conservatism in religious life. There is more than an aversion to change going on here, on behalf of the religious observer—having a spiritual awakening or experience is not a normal event, so when one takes place in you, you cling onto it for dear life. The irony here is that by holding on to these religious relics of meaning and insight, we hold them in place with such a strong grip they begin to lose their ability to shed insight onto todays or tomorrow’s world. They become dusty, antiquated relics of time, eventually appearing more superstitious than truthful. Indeed, the religious act of translation and interpretation never ceases. Humanity has yet to exhaust the meaning of God or the world, let alone our own subjective selves.
On the other hand, Latour is ashamed of the questions he gets about his belief. In Church Life Journal: A Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life, Paul Lynch writes, “he cannot explain his devotion to anyone: friends, colleagues, students, even his children.” Even though Latour struggles through mass because of what he hears in all the religious speech, he continues to go. The experience is best explained by Latour, himself:
and yet the Scriptures have been properly and faithfully handed down. Anyone can hear them. But then the sermon begins – and the overburdened listener feels like running away as fast as his legs will carry him, for what he fears finding is that, in accepting this heritage, he’s made a bad deal....no mountain of debt will make me give up my heritage. I covet the treasure hidden from those on the inside as much as from those on the outside, from the vendors who no longer know the value of what they are offering as much as from buyers who laugh at this old flea-market stuff.4
What is Latour’s primary gripe about “religious speech,” which includes but is not limited to acts such as: preaching, prophetic speech, teaching, liturgy, sacred music, art, etc.? For starters, right and proper religious speech is “never ‘about’ religion. Rather,” according to Latour, “religious speech is that which accomplishes the aims of religion: renewal, conversion, relationship. Religious speech does not convey information; it changes the audiences who hear it.”5 But for Latour, we tend to create religious speech, as much as we expect from it. What we expect is the communication of information about reality, moral teaching, metaphysical data—in a word we try to speak religion like we try to speak the sciences with a sort of one-to-one correlation between a stated fact about a thing that is studied, etc. But can one ever have such a grasp on something such as God or the soul? Speaking about the desire to speak of religion in the same tenor as the sciences, Latour calls, with exceeding cheekiness, the “perils of ‘double-click’ communication,” which for him functions with all the succor of a “madwoman in the attic.”6
Latour argues that actual scientific research is demanding, and so is communicating its findings, but all of that is masked by this “double-click communication,” because by it, “all difficulties vanish, all paths level out: information becomes faithful communication without any transformation whatsoever, through simple obvious likeness between the copy and the original.”7 This double-click communication gives people the illusion that by doing a bit of internet-based reading they understand a thing that was rigorously engaged with and studied in a laboratory with the accoutrements of peer review and lab-to-lab repeatability. Double-click knowledge of a thing is like the knowledge a student can have of Moby Dick by simply asking Chat GPT for a summary, themes, and critique of the book without having entered the narrative through reading and contemplating the text’s use of language, character, and plot. To really know a thing like Moby Dick is to require the transformation of the reader through the subjective journey of reading the text. The same could be said of reading a sacred text like the Holy Bible.
To repeat, for Latour, religious speech exists to transform people. And to make this point, Latour examines the role of angels from the biblical narratives. Claiming that religion does a poor job of communicating information, he says of these “messengers,”
It is precisely the utter lack of information conveyed by the panoply of religious expressions that provides a guarantee that we will never be able to use them to proceed to secrets superior to the secrets of sciences, to loftier mysteries, more exalted spiritualities, less indecipherable gnoses. Do a test: compile a list of everything said by angels in the Bible, despite supposedly being tasked with ‘conveying messages,’ and you’ll learn next to nothing about anything.8
Neither the great “pomp and circumstance” heraldry of the angles, their choirs and voices which fill listeners with fear, nor even their individual visitations to young, betrothed couples concerned much new information about God that was previously unknown. Latour announces, “this is because angels do not convey messages; they change those they address. What they transfer is not an information content, but a new container. They do not bring maps offering some hold to beings starved of knowledge – they transform their interlocutors. What they convey are not telegrams but persons.”9 Therefore, religion is not a life map, because “religion leads nowhere.”10 The real purpose of a pilgrimage is not the destination after all, but it is what happens to the pilgrim along the way. It is about the transfiguration of the pilgrim’s inner life. It is about existential and spiritual maturation. As Paul Lynch concludes, “religious speech...does not cover distance; it creates intimacy.”11
For Latour, the language of lovers is a better metaphor for understanding religious speech. Is this saccharine or shallow? No, this language is useful, because when lovers speak of their love, what is being offered is much more than mere information. If my wife asks, “do you love me,” she is not really asking me to repeat the same phrases, ideas, or stories that I have said 100 times before. My guess is that she is not even asking for assurance of my love. If I professed my love 100 times before, then I would have already and quite clearly shared the information about my affections. Yet, as we know, the language of lovers is endlessly repetitive. At the sound of the question “do you love me,” I cannot simply offer the same old answer, but as Latour reminds me, I “also cannot not repeat old formulas. ‘There’s nothing more repetitive than the music of lovers, they always annotate the same story—theirs.”12 Lynch explains, “sometimes those annotations fail, and they appear to lead lovers to the end. But sometimes the lovers manage to retell their story in a way that renews their love, by ‘twisting, hedging, shifting, redressing, reinterpreting the same episodes.”13
Reiterations of one’s love story reveals the pilgrimage nature of a long love—only by looking back over it and rehearsing the stories of twists and turns, ups and downs, joys and sorrows, can one look back and pay witness to the deep changes that occurred to the couple as a couple and as they exist as individuals. And so, it is with religious speech— “retelling the old recreates the new.”14 Indeed, if the etymology of religion is to “bind back to a source,” then it is a natural religious impulse to rehearse one’s stories and the stories of community.
Latour’s ambivalence about the state of religious education is on target. His meditation shares a lot of truth and wisdom I learned from theologian Ted Smith. Many will have familiarity with Smith’s recent addition to the discussion of religion and secularity through book The End of Theological Education. It is a landmark text for anyone curious about America’s religious trends. Although he draws much on the work of Charles Taylor, Smith’s approach shades more sociological. Specifically, he follows church membership and attitudes toward the professionalization of ministry as they relate to the decline of America’s primary social imaginary, “the voluntary association.” His work shows that declining church attendance is not so much to do with irreligion or a lack of spirituality. Rather it has to do with the diminishment of the voluntary association society which is the primary model of social grouping that America has experienced, and it has been the model for the church of the last 200 years. While researching and writing his book, our congregation hosted Ted Smith to lead a leadership workshop on being a cathedral for a secular age. He was working out many of his ideas on secularity, ministry, and the future of theological education in his presentation to our ministry leaders.
Among all the statistics and trends that Smith used to paint a picture of the growing religious landscape our church was facing, he made many comments about why our society is becoming more secular than previous generations. The section that stuck out to me concerned things that the church has done to increase the pull of secularism. And specifically, what trends in preaching have added to secularity. I sat up in my chair, how could the task of preaching about faith, God, and the supernatural amplify something so opposite? Smith suggested that one of the greatest pitfalls of contemporary preaching is that the sermon has become a “means to an end.” Many homiletics courses have been filled with advice to would-be preachers that they needed to make a “practical application clear.” Personally, I remember a time when I was asked to give a talk during an internship. The talk was to a group of lay leaders and the topic was on some assigned biblical passage that I have now forgotten—it does not really matter. At the end of the talk, my onsite supervisor gave me feedback in the form of a “compliment sandwich”: something to commend, a recommendation, and something to commend! I recall that the commendations were small, minor, and rather underwhelming. He was far more vocal in offering his recommendation, which he introduced with a hearty, “so what!?” I looked confused. So, he continued, “good, you told me about the Bible, and you offered some things many in your audience did not know, but so what? What am I supposed to do with it?”
Recently, I convened a group of clergy from my denomination to hold talks on how we can all improve in our attempts at religious speech. One senior member of our group who had a reputation for inspiring church attendance growth addressed the meeting, “most of the sermons I ever preached had the phrase ‘how to’ in the sermon or in the title. People are practical; they want to know how to improve their lives.” Sermons on leadership, overcoming anxiety, living without regrets, and how to deal with disappointment are common in the world of evangelical church growth preaching, indeed. Ted Smith was right. I recognize in my experiences with clergy colleagues, from my days in homiletics, and a cursory survey of the preaching in the largest churches in our country that the point of religious communication is meant to the end of getting listeners to do something, but what?
Sermons could be an appeal for a moral or ethical change in the listeners. Frank A. Thomas in How To Preach A Dangerous Sermon14 gives expert thought to the notion of preaching with moral leadership toward the end helping form and challenge society’s moral imagination, for example. And his is a necessary message for today’s religious communicators. Also, religious messages may be designed so that the listeners would give more to charitable causes. Religious speech is often used to tell people how to be of service to others, this is indeed the quasi-religious language of the 12-step program. In our age of secularity or at least “church decline” some messages like the “He Gets Us” campaign are designed to make the message of Christ palatable to groups that may have once felt ignored or judged by traditional expressions of Christianity.15 Religious communication, it seems, is about getting people to do something or to respond to an appeal. This means that it exists for some other end.
At that point in the Smith’s presentation, he got quiet and leaned in toward the audience and said, “most people who come to church already know the things that they are supposed to do.” It is true, general ethical teaching and principles are shared culturally, they can be found on children’s television (Bluey makes me want to be a better father!), and if you want to dig into unique themes, you can always take in a steady stream of Ted Talks. “So why,” he pressed, “would someone want to sit in boredom for 20 minutes in order to be told to do what they already know they should do?” At once I felt the sting of that critique, but I also knew he was right—deep in my core.
What if my preaching were not merely a means of getting people to do or not do something? Ted achieved his aim. Quite dramatically then, he peered out behind his glasses and deeply into our eyes and said, “what if the sermon (and the rest of worship) was not a means to an end, but what if it is the end itself—what if it is the reason?”
PART II….COMING