Christian thinker Brian McLaren is both heralded and vilified as an elder in the Emerging Church movement. In 2005, Time magazine named him one of “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.” On Feb. 1 and Feb. 2, he will be at Area 15 in NoDa. McLaren was in Davos, Switzerland last week, but he answered a few questions from CL via e-mail.
Creative Loafing: In your book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, you use the phrases “suicidal societal machinery” and the “covert curriculum.” Could you explain what you mean by them?
McLaren: In my research for the book, I reviewed the books, articles, Web sites and other resources on global crises and, as you can imagine, I felt overwhelmed. There are so many problems, and so many brilliant people have devoted their lives to each one. I quickly realized that if we see each crisis as its own self-contained world, we’ll quickly experience the paralysis of analysis — we’ll have “compassion fatigue” before we even begin. So I realized that we need to see how global crises are interrelated.
For example, everyone agrees that HIV/AIDS is a major problem, but many people don’t realize that at the center of the epidemic now are girls from the ages of 10 [to] 19. Many are the victims of rape, sex trafficking, and incest — they are the most vulnerable to the abuse of men. So, you realize that to address HIV, you need to teach girls their right to say “no” and to report abusive behavior. But then you realize that in many parts of the world, girls don’t even have birth certificates, so in the eyes of the state, they don’t even exist, and the police often don’t take seriously crimes done against them. So you begin to realize that to address the AIDS crisis, in addition to talking about condoms and anti-retrovirals and abstinence, you have to talk about educating girls and educating police, and educating boys and men about their need to respect the rights of girls and women.
Then you realize that when you educate girls, they grow into women who are likely to have fewer children, and this is terribly important in many parts of the world where the population is growing, but food and water supplies are limited and sometimes shrinking due to global climate change. So, now HIV, education of girls and boys, improvements in justice systems and police education, population issues, and climate change are all interwoven. These interrelationships spread out like a huge network of complexity. I began looking for some kind of image or model that could show these interrelations and interconnectivity with both accuracy and simplicity.
I seized on the image of a machine to describe our global civilization, a machine with three moving parts, driven at the center by a kind of drive shaft or engine. Through this simple image, I could show how global crises can be traced back to four central crises — one in each moving part, so to speak. I could then show how our civilization is on a suicidal trajectory unless we address these deep issues, and give readers a sense of what we can do to rebuild the machine to serve us and future generations rather than destroy us.
The first crisis has to do with the planet — how our economic systems are unsustainable ecologically. The second has to do with poverty — how the gap between rich and poor is growing wider and wider. The third has to do with peace — and the growing danger of catastrophic war. The fourth of those crises relates to what I call “framing stories.” These are the stories that guide a nation or civilization in its development. Some stories are destructive, and some are constructive. Cultures teach their framing stories through what I call a “covert curriculum” — the subtle set of values and rules that are taught in a thousand unrecognized ways: through advertising, for example, or popular music, or movie plots, or religious songs, or political slogans.
As I worked on this book, I realized that on this level of framing stories is where our religions fit in. They can teach us stories that make us fearful or hopeful, loving or hateful, peaceful or violent, greedy or generous. They can expose the covert curriculum and try to offer something more healing and constructive, something oriented toward the common good and long-term sustainable living. In that way, we can contribute to the answer to the Lord’s prayer that many Christians pray Sunday by Sunday: “May your kingdom come, and may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
How does the current era differ from previous generations? Certainly, previous generations had to deal with “systemic injustice, poverty and dysfunction.”
Yes, great point. All generations have to deal with the issues we face today. But our generation has reached a tipping point in human development. That difference is hidden in the world “global.” In the 20th century, we developed weapons that could destroy all human life on the planet. Weapons of that magnitude never existed before. In the late 20th century, probably in the 1970s, we reached a kind of environmental boundary, where the impact of human beings on the planet became unsustainable by the planet. We began producing so many wastes on a daily basis — like carbon dioxide, for example — that the environment could no longer absorb them, and we began taking so many resources — oil and fresh water are two prime examples — that the environment could no longer supply them for very long. On a more abstract level, through digital technology, we have created a global digital economy that transcends national boundaries, and so our economic problems are more interwoven than ever, as our recent market fluctuations have made clear. And on top of all this, we’ve learned that if people are desperate and poor in one part of the world, they can board a plane and do acts of terrorism in another part of the world. So these problems have long existed, but never have we been so interdependent and interconnected.
A rabbi recently told me a parable that describes our situation very clearly. Imagine two castaways floating on a life boat in the middle of the ocean. One of them takes out a drill and starts drilling a hole in the bottom of the boat. The other screams, “What are you doing?” And the first one answers, “Don’t worry. I’m only drilling on my end of the boat.” That’s the difference in our generation today: We realize, as never before, that we’re all in the same boat.
You write on your Web site that your book originally included an “imaginary transcript of a speech President Bush could have given after Sept. 11, 2001,” but you dropped it for a “variety of reasons.” What were some of those reasons?
There were practical reasons like the fact that the book was [more than] 300 pages long, and I’d rather have a shorter book that people actually read than a long one that intimidates people. And then I realized that by the time the book came out, there would only be a year left in the President’s term. I expect the book to have a lot longer shelf-life than that, and I didn’t want readers of the book in 2009 or 2019 feel that it was focused on past issues. So I decided to make the article available at my Web site, which is brianmclaren.net, and keep the book contemporary in a longer-term way.
You’ve been quoted as saying, “More and more Christian leaders are beginning to realize that for the millions of young adults who have recently dropped out of church, Christianity is a failed religion. Why? Because it has specialized in dealing with ‘spiritual needs’ to the exclusion of physical and social needs. It has focused on ‘me’ and ‘my eternal destiny,’ but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, poverty, and dysfunction.” Do you expect this book will yield any common ground with your more conservative contemporaries?
I have some very loyal critics who are passionately and sincerely opposed to my work. We honestly and deeply disagree about some matters, and I certainly didn’t expect this book to win them all over — although some of them have said that this book is worth reading and makes some important points. Among conservative Christians in general, I think a real shift is beginning to take place. It’s a move from the old “two-moral-issue” politics of the ’80s and ’90s as people realize that how we care for the planet is a moral issue, and how we treat poor people is a moral issue, and whether we rush into unjust wars is a moral issue. It’s a shift in the direction of compassion and a more mature sense of morality and justice, and I think my book is contributing to that shift in some small way. Another important factor: The younger generation of conservative Christians is not interested in taking the baton they’re being handed. They love God and they believe in Jesus just as much as their parents did, but they’re not interested in the tone of culture wars and one-sided politics. They’re realizing that their future is different in many ways from their parents’ generation’s past, and so they — like every generation, really — need to ask some tough questions in order to make the faith their own. Many parents of young adults are finding that my books help them and their kids understand each other and find some common ground, which is always very encouraging for me to hear as a parent myself. I think the old saying is true: parents raise their children for 16 years or so, and then children raise their parents for the next sixteen years — by challenging the parents to rethink a lot of what they hadn’t thought about much since they were in their 20s themselves.
Charlotte has many churches that either are part of the Emerging Church Movement or cater to a younger crowd, including NoDa’s Area 15 and Revolution Charlotte, which meets at the Milestone and is probably best known for being co-founded by Jay Bakker. Where do you think the Emerging Church Movement will be in 20 years? Will the young emergent Christians of today still be worshipping in the same way, or will they have “moved on” to more traditional Christianity?
Well, my real hope is that in 20 years we won’t be talking about “the Emerging Church Movement.” My hope is that the issues a number of us are raising will become accepted elements of a more mature and holistic Christianity that is shared by Christians in general. One dimension of that more mature Christianity would be, I hope, an assumption that diversity and creativity in forms of worship is a good thing, not a bad one, and that change is not only unavoidable and normal, but a wonderful opportunity for growth. That will mean moving on from the old assumption that there’s only one right method or liturgy or doctrinal statement or organizational structure, and moving into a realization that our mission and message can take many forms. To use Jesus’ image, we’ll recognize more and more that what counts is the new wine of the message we carry, not the shape of the wineskins we carry it in. The creative diversity of churches in Charlotte already demonstrates this vitality, I think. I’m really looking forward to meeting people from all of these churches — across styles and denominations — who are interested in seeing what the core message of Jesus has to say to the global crises that challenge both us and our children and grandchildren. I’ve found that when we address these issues, it’s not depressing at all. I think it’s actually exciting and motivating and unleashes hope and energy. I think people of faith in Charlotte have a big role to play in all this!
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2008.
