In attempting to place First UU Springfield in the context of modernity as a project, I am, of course, obliged to note from the outset that modernity has proven to be a difficult object to define for theorists and philosophers alike, and it is perhaps just as difficult for those who “live” or “practice” modernity to grasp it cognitively. Talal Asad, the foremost anthropologist of secular modernity, has suggested that this condition is more than the unfortunate result of simple theoretical shortcomings; for modernity, he admits, “is neither a totally coherent object nor a clearly bounded one.” Yet even if “modernity” has no essence, it is still useful as an epistemological tool for making connections in contemporary societies. Therefore, even though there is no single space or time that epitomizes “modernity,” one can understand modernity indirectly through its attitudes toward itself and others.
Asad has written elsewhere that one such attitude is the modernist notion of critique, or secular criticism; in one essay, Asad argues, “The practice of secular criticism is now a sign of the modern, of the modern subject’s relentless pursuit of truth and freedom, of his or her political agency.” But what is “criticism,” and how might it work in a religious congregation like First UU Springfield? Asad points to the introductory chapter of Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic, in which Said defines “criticism” as that which is “always situated; it is skeptical, secular, reflectively open to its own failings. This is by no means to say that it is value-free.” This strikes me as a suitable definition to start with, though by using Said’s definition here, I do not mean to suggest that First UU Springfield is operating under Said’s specific definition of criticism—and neither am I, for that matter. It seems obvious that criticism does not need to be secular, to be reflexive, to turn inward and take itself into account. Nevertheless, I find it helpful that Said’s definition balances the idea of critique as “skeptical,” “secular,” and “open” (thus creating the necessary distance between the critic and the object of critique) and at the same time his definition affirms the subjective values of the critic (thus establishing a fixed but reflexive and amendable point from which the critic views the object of critique).
This dual responsibility of “criticism,” to be seemingly impartial yet not neutral helps to illustrate what Foucault in a talk called “What Is Critique?” calls the “critical attitude” of modernity: “[B]etween the high Kantian enterprise and the little polemical professional activities that are called critique, it seems to me that there has been in the modern Western world…a certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to society, to culture and also a relationship to others that we could call, let’s say, the critical attitude.” With this argument, I think Foucault develops a key insight into a specific aspect of post-Enlightenment Western culture, an epistemic that allowed for the establishment of new modes of thinking and critical discourse about the previously sacrosanct, untheorizable religious object.
If First UU Springfield is to fit into the modernist context I am describing, then one would expect “critique” to be an important part of the congregation’s religious practice; and indeed, within the congregation (and, for that matter, in the larger UU tradition), there does seem to extend a consistently positive valuation of one’s individual intellectual investigations into (and interrogations of) religious and non-religious traditions and beliefs that might be called “critical religious practice.” In other words, the specific practices each individual congregant takes upon herself ought to be less important than the reasons she gives for them and the intellectual processes by which she reaches her conclusions. “Critical religious practice” cannot terminate either—it is seen as an ongoing process of negotiation. As a congregant commented in an interview, “We don’t define things rigidly. We do accept, honor, and actually encourage people to use the platform of the church as a way to determine for [themselves] how to live ethically… [This church] promotes thought—or stimulates thought—rather than ends it. We have more question marks than we do periods at the ends of our sentences.”
The valorization of critique as the most ethical way of living in and relating to the world—this is, in a word, how First UU Springfield aims at being “modern” and, also, at being “religious.” And yet there is, in a sense, a failure or exhaustion of religious critique at First UU Springfield, a lapse into uncritical tolerance in which religious and ideological differences are officially supported but generally ignored by the congregants. The foundational value placed on the individual’s journey, and the corresponding need to tolerate uncritically the differences that arise because of it, inhibits the growth of intra-religious, dialogical critique, and thus the church fails to locate itself in the context of world capitalism, much less offer a coherent, mobilized resistance to the patterns of social and economic injustice that characterize our era. In the following, I want to discuss First UU Springfield with reference to the external socio-economic forces at work and, in doing so, seek a way out of the exhaustion of the critical faculty that characterizes not only First UU Springfield, but perhaps all religious institutions today.
