On Friday I did something I haven’t done in a while: I went to church. I’m a lapsed church-goer. Over the past couple years, I’ve attended a grand total of five religious services (not including funerals which typically are an insult to the term “religious”). I’ve never felt an affinity for the right; I’ve grown tired of the mainstream’s obsession with mere survival; and as for the left … well, even the left has its dogma, if only to assert that it has no dogma. Plus there’s this nagging matter of belief. Even if it takes the form of belief in a watered-down, non-theistic, numinous je ne sais quoi, the very mention of the word “belief” makes me want to clap my hands over my ears and shout: “Na, na, na, I can’t hear you.” Nevertheless I deliberately, and with malice aforethought, went to church.
To be truthful, I didn’t go to a church service; I went to a book study where a group of thirty people are discussing a collection of essays by a secular-ish but inspiringly ethical American writer.
The decision to go to church wasn’t a spontaneous impulse, like the decision to get a coffee, but was the result of a slow-dawning notion that first took hold exactly six months and nineteen days earlier. That seems awfully precise, but it’s true. It was six months and nineteen days earlier that I had attended a protest of the G20 Summit and later found myself caught in the middle of a riot, and in the midst of all this—the mass arrests, the application of brute force to silence dissent, the complicity of mainstream media, the indifference of a comfortable middle-class suburbia—that nagging thought took hold: church (and the synagogue and the mosque and the temple) is still the most effective vehicle for dissent.
I’m thinking of an idealized church. After all, there are churches of every stripe that have no perception of themselves as engaged with the most pressing issues of the day. Instead, they follow more inward-looking goals: pleasant worship, good music, social opportunities, and a cozy building. Churches can become institutions which preach power over liberation, conformity over creativity, and passivity over engagement. But I’m not interested in church that aligns itself with power. My ideal church is one which aligns itself with the aspirations of ordinary people. To the extent that secular institutions work to thwart such aspirations, my ideal church pits itself against secular institutions by creating a space for ordinary people to voice dissent.
On the weekend of June 25th, I saw hundreds of security forces dressed in riot gear. I witnessed an almost primitive display as those security forces thudded their boots in lockstep on the pavement and banged their night sticks on their shields. The brutish message was loud and clear. Protesters had gathered at Queen’s Park with a thousand different stories, but all these stories could be woven as threads in a single banner: we are ordinary people who have been hurt by you governments and you corporations who are bigger than we are. My wife and I walked with these people and unwittingly found ourselves in the middle of a splinter group which chose to vent its frustration by smashing windows. As we heard the crack of hammers and two-by-fours against glass, I recall thinking that this is where church belongs. It is a thought which returned to me with mounting force during marches I joined in succeeding weeks to protest the victimization of vulnerable (mostly young) people who, for the most part, had been doing nothing more than exercising what is supposed to be a constitutionally protected right to engage in reasonable dissent.
At its best, church does dissent like nobody’s business, but its methods are non-obvious, and so we often forget that these things count as dissent.
Time
In the economic religion of neoliberalism, the guiding doctrine is efficiency, and waiting close by is efficiency’s handmaiden—time. (Yes, I’m being deliberately medieval in my choice of metaphor.) To satisfy this religion’s fundamental tenet, life moves fast. By contrast, church moves slow. Church’s detractors talk about institutional inertia, fear of change, sticks in the mud, tradition for its own sake, blind conservatism. On the other hand, its proponents offer some variation on a theme of enduring values grounded in the timeless nature of God. But there’s a third way to think about church’s temporal stodginess—resistance.
Church is one of the few institutions with any memory. In addition, it’s one of the few spaces left where a community can exercise a collective pause. It is a place whose (often unacknowledged) purpose is to nurture wisdom. It can’t be such a place if it hops with the rest of the world onto the accelerating treadmill of latest technologies and trends. The long pause, the slow draw of breath, these are deep acts of resistance.
Consumption
I have never been in a church and heard the phrase “This service was brought to you by …” or “This event was made possible by the generous support of …” followed by the name of a corporate sponsor. What happens in a church is only ever made possible by the people in that church. And when I visit a church, I don’t ever find myself seized afterward by a desire to run to the local mall and shop for things. Although the modern church isn’t given to asceticism, it isn’t given to orgies of consumption either. Instead, it provides a respite from a world saturated by images of desire whose primary aim is to make us feel unhappy and dissatisfied with ourselves. Church becomes a site of resistance when it encourages people to seek personal and communal fulfillment and to find satisfaction in intangibles like friendship and service.
Authority
The word authority could be understood as the way in which power determines social relations within a community. But here, I mean something simpler, something more along the lines of “voice”. In a world that prefers to exercise authority in hierarchical relationships, a church becomes a site of resistance when it gives a voice to its people. I don’t mean “a voice” in the democratic sense of participation in community decision-making. I mean something more visceral than that. I have a voice when I feel I count, when I know that I will be heard. A church can give me a voice within the church community, but it goes further and commits an act of resistance when it also confers on me a feeling of entitlement to my voice, the feeling that my voice counts even beyond the walls of the church. Once church grants me that gift, it becomes difficult for secular institutions to strip me of it. I go out into the world with that sense of entitlement and speak to power with a voice of authority.
And so on Friday I went to church—to a book study group. Having been absent for so long, I was nervous at first, wondering in part about how I would be received, and wondering, too, about how I would manage my ambivalent feelings. The first part of my wondering was easy; I was warmly received. The second part of my wondering took longer to discern. At first, I revisited many of the feelings that had been problematic for me in previous years. There is a sense of regret that these kinds of events—and all of church for that matter—doesn’t attract young people. There is a frustration, too, at the group’s general discomfort with new ways of doing things. So, for example, while some people haven’t purchased the book because it’s not available in local book stores, I purchased my copy online in thirty seconds and arrived with copies loaded on both my Kobo ereader and iPod touch. And then there’s that ants-in-the-pants feeling I get as the conversation meanders around the room, and I start to wonder if maybe I’ve been teleported into Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves, sitting around a fire, sharing a pipe, and listening as the tribe’s elders mull over important concerns.
But that is only one side of the ambivalence I feel; the other side takes hold as I recognize that all these feelings of impatience and frustration have little to do with the group itself and far more to do with the fact that I am a child of a culture that has conditioned me to respond in these ways. I’ve been taught to grow impatient at the languorous thoughtful conversation. It is embarrassing for me to confess, but I can be as good a consumer/citizen as the next person, snapping up the latest gadget and quietly scorning the Luddites who don’t keep pace with the trends of the day. And it is disquieting to find myself in a group like this that has no leader, no one with a microphone or a conch or a sceptre to signal that they are in charge and will deliver a slick and programmed evening.
The ambivalence of my response is rooted in the recognition that mostly my feelings have nothing to do with this group and everything to do with impulses wound so tightly around my marrow they almost belong to my DNA. I want to cut them out of myself with a kind of self-administered surgery. Maybe the word that best describes this operation is resistance. I want to resist the culture-bred impulses that feed my ambivalent feelings.
What I have come to discover is that church as a site of resistance does not preach from some high pulpit, and to the extent that church tends to regard itself as a gargantuan book study group, the precise book, and the precise content of that book, doesn’t really matter. And in the case of this particular book study group, in a snowy suburb of Toronto, it could be one book or it could be another book, but that is of little importance when measured against the fact that whatever the book, the group is doing the work of a resisting church. It resists the illusory demands of an efficient world. It offers relief from relentless pitches to buy the latest useless goods. And it affirms to (extra)ordinary people that their voices matter. This kind of resistance lacks the immediacy of marching with a sign or smashing a window with a hammer, but like the tortoise, church is in this for the long run, and quietly reminding ourselves of that fact is, in itself, a fine act of resistance.