Today's Church in America - Part Two
Presented by Phyllis Tickle

Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
January 26, 2003
This talk also available in audio

< Part One 1 2 3 4 5 Next>

Good historians of American religion would stop right here and say, "Not only did the story suffer knocks, but it also suffered the loss of its conservators," and they would date it at 1962. Now, here's another sacred cow, (It's my cow, so you know). 1962 is the year that the birth control pill went on the market. (When that happened, believe me, with seven children, I was in line to take the first ones.) During the second World War, Rosie the Riveter went out and earned a living and found out she could go in after ten hours at the plant and have a beer with the girls and then go home to the kids whom grandma was taking care of. So it's not that 1962 was without precursors.

But in 1962, suddenly there is a level playing field between the genders; that is to say, not only can pregnancy be controlled, but so can menses. (You know, you've got a big corporate board meeting tomorrow, and Ms. Murphy's supposed to come to town. Take an extra pill. Don’t go into a big meeting with PMS for heaven's sakes. Just fix it.) Now we've got two incomes and two careers, as well we should. Before 1962, the home was the thing to “be kept.” Afterwards the home becomes the place to which we go to be ourselves, restored, so we can get out there and do it again. What happens is neither good nor bad. It's just a change. When Mama is working and Daddy is working, and the kids have all been eroded to death by those nasty playmates at daycare, they don't want to go to Grandma's. Mama doesn’t want to cook a big meal. We're not in the business of sitting around on Sunday telling stories. Instead we're doing the wash. Gone is the whole business of the home as altar, the home as conservator, Grandma's stories as telling you who you are.

One of the true difficulties for youngsters right now is that they don't have those old family stories that tell them who they are in quite the same way. The notion you might leave a community church where Daddy and Granddaddy and Great Granddaddy had all gone...why not? But had you been at Grandmas's house every Sunday, Grandma would have caught that little evil idea before it ever got beyond the apple pie. Can you honestly remember or imagine what your grandfathers would have said had somebody stood up in church and said there was no Moses? Why, Grandmother would have had a heart attack, and before the sentence was finished, we'd be carrying her out. The ability to ask the questions comes when you lose the conservators.

And with all due respect to my evangelical friends, whom I do admire—one of the things that troubles me most right now is the strong urge on the part of most evangelical protestant Christianity to talk about family values instead of the story. What they're trying to do is go back to the pre-pill era. They are trying to get back to that which was not necessarily good in and of itself. They are trying to go back to the time when the American flag and the church flag sat in equal spots. They talk about the 1950s. We were talking about James Dobson on our ride in. I have very little patience for Dr. Dobson because I think he does represent a move back that is absolutely destructive of what we’ve gained.

Returning to the cable, the most important element is the mesh sleeve of the common imagination. I highly recommend you view The Truman Story and The Matrix, in that order. The Truman Story comes about eighteen months before The Matrix and is the last gasp of what we call four or five hundred years of rationalism. The difference between The Truman Story and Shakespeare, other than skill and longevity, is minimal.

The Matrix, released on Easter Sunday in 1999, is a deliberate attempt to take the Christian story and lift it out onto the other side of this destruction of rationalism. The main character’s name is Anderson, which means “Son of God.” Morpheus, the old God’s John the Baptist, says “He is The One.” There is a death scene and resurrection in room 203. It’s brillant.

The common imagination from the Renaissance, or from the end of the Middle Ages on was based on rationalism. It was based on the notion that everything could be understood. It was Descartes saying, "I think, therefore I am." What we had was a definition of reality for five hundred years that said that the universe was understandable, almost, if you will, a machine; that it had laws and principles and they could be ascertained. If you couldn't see it, it probably wasn't there; and if you could see it, you could in time understand it if you just kept at it long enough.

You also had Cartesian thinking, which defined the human being as a thinking animal. Basically, what dear old Descartes actually postulated was that down in the pituitary gland, that a little homunculus lived in there as long as you were alive; when you died he went away. His function was to sit like a guard in a modern building watching the T.V. screens. He kept everything going, and he was what mattered.

You are because you think, or I know I am because I think, or because I think, therefore, I am. That's Cartesian thinking.

Well, it worked just great until 1965 or thereabouts, when a little thing called the drug culture came sweeping through this world. We discovered to our horror that if I give you the same amount of the same drug at the same hour every day, and you've had the same amount of rest and the same diet, I can change who you are from A to B and do it predictably. The drug culture was horrible, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about at the popular level in the general culture, it was the first time we had engaged the notion that there could be two people in there—two predictable, producible, entirely distinct people.

< Part One 1 2 3 4 5 Next>

(Return to Top)