American Liturgy: Finding Theological Meaning in the Holy Days of US Culture

By James Calvin Davis

How can celebrating the "holy days" of American culture help us to understand what it means to be both Christian and American? In timely essays on Super Bowl Sunday, Mother's Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and other holidays of the secular calendar, James Calvin Davis explores the wisdom that Christian tradition brings to our sense of American identity, as well as the ways in which American culture might prompt us to discern the imperatives of faith in new ways. Rather than demonizing culture or naively baptizing it, Davis models a bidirectional mode of reflection, where faith convictions and cultural values converse with and critique one another. Focusing on topics like politics, race, parenting, music, and sports, these essays remind us that culture is as much human accomplishment and gift as it is a challenge to Christian values, and there is insight to be discovered in a theologically astute investment in America's "holy days."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725271326

James Calvin Davis

James Calvin Davis is Associate Professor of Religion at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. He is the editor of On Religious Liberty: Selections from the Works of Roger Williams.

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Introduction

Christian Theology and American Culture

How can celebrating the holy days of American culture inform the relationship between Christian faith and American identity? Mother’s Day, Independence Day, Super Bowl Sunday, and other cultural holidays of various origins have become part of the way Americans tell time. These holidays mark our collective progression through each year, while encouraging us to revisit values and practices that we associate with national life. Some of these holidays reflect the Christian heritage of the United States, while others are primarily patriotic in their reference. Some of the holy days of American culture reflect seasonal activities, like summer vacations and the resumption of school in the fall. Observing these holy days of culture has been important to our sense of national identity, ritual markers of an American civil religion.

For a variety of reasons, I think it is appropriate for Christians to reflect theologically on the meaning in these cultural celebrations. Obviously American Christians live in the intersection of two identities, so that faithful participation in both religious community and nation requires that we think about how the two loyalties complement and challenge one another. Reflection on the rituals of national life through the lens of Christian belief invites us to consider the relationship between related but distinct sets of values. Are there ways in which the rituals of national life mark a kind of idolatry that pulls us away from the central convictions of Christian faith? In what ways might Christian convictions critique or deepen our participation in national culture? Are there values in the rituals of the American calendar that complement or constructively critique our practice of Christian values?

Christian theology and the holy days of American culture often come together in Sunday worship, as preachers across the country regularly offer sermons on Father’s Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and other holidays, sermons that attempt a connection between Christian convictions and cultural themes. Unfortunately, my experience has been that many of these attempts peddle in simplistic associations that take one of two forms: either an insufficiently critical baptism of cultural celebrations or an equally superficial hostility toward the culture in favor of more authentic Christian values. My hope is that the essays in this book offer a more nuanced alternative than those two options. Some of these essays view the holy days of the American calendar through the lens of Christian faith to reveal shortcomings in our culture. Other essays will use a cultural holiday to challenge how the church practices its faith. Still other essays will suggest ways in which Christian and cultural values cooperate to call our attention to something authentic and good. Many of the essays will try to do more than one of these things. Together I hope they will help preachers and laypeople think with theological subtlety about the connections and disconnect between being Christian and being American.

Thinking Theologically

Perhaps a book that encourages Christians to think theologically about aspects of culture ought to make clear what it means to think theologically. In my last book, I offered this definition of Christian theology: Christian theology is the collective project of understanding ourselves, the human community, the world, and the cosmos in relation to God, through the interpretive lens of what Jesus Christ reveals to us about God and in conversation with the best sources of knowledge available in our time and place.¹ A couple of things are important about this understanding of theology. First, the aim of theology is to help us relate our experience of the worlds we inhabit to God, as we know God to be revealed in Jesus Christ. That means that Jesus’ testament to God becomes paramount to making sense of not just our religious lives, but our social, cultural, moral, and political interactions with members of all the other communities in which we participate (human and otherwise). Of course, Christians disagree about what is most important to draw from Jesus’ ministry for our understanding of God and our obligations to God. This means the work of interpretation is essential. No single understanding of God falls out of the biblical stories of Christ and his significance, so Christians owe it to themselves and the broader church to do the work of interpretation, to learn more about how others past and present have understood Jesus Christ and his ministry, and to discuss and debate with one another about which interpretations of Christ’s revelation of God ought to strike us as most compelling.

This is hard work, and it is the work of the whole church. Christian theology is not an individual experience to be privatized with the secrecy of the ballot box. Christian theology is not just a personal belief system but a collective endeavor, because theology is the language of the whole church. Neither is theology the domain of a specialized group. To be sure, some members of the Christian community may be specially trained in biblical studies, historical studies, systematic thinking, or ethical analysis, and we certainly should avail ourselves of that expertise. But doing the theology of the church is not a chore we simply relegate to those with advanced degrees. The task of theology ultimately belongs to the whole church, because it is our collective expression of the witness of Jesus Christ to the worlds we inhabit.

Finally, theology requires us to think expansively, understanding ourselves in the widest contexts possible. This is not to dismiss the importance of particular communities as the context for theological reflection. The best Christian theologies of justice being written today originate from the perspective of historically marginalized communities, arguing that the experience of oppression and injustice itself is a source of God’s revelation. Good theology thinks seriously about the particular experiences that shape its starting point, but good theology also commits to moving beyond local, tribal, and national communities to consider our relation to God and others in global, ecological, even cosmic contexts. To do so is to imagine the universe with God as its center, rather than our own clan or species. That theocentric commitment is, to my mind, the most faithful rendition of a basic Christian confession: God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.²

This theocentric perspective is a chief characteristic of the subtradition in Christian theology with which I identify and which you will see reflected in these essays: Reformed theology. The easiest way to define Reformed theology is to say it is a tradition that draws on the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformer John Calvin. This is a family lineage that includes English and American Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Charles Hodge. More recently it includes Karl Barth, the Niebuhr brothers, James Gustafson, Allen Boesak, Katie Cannon, Douglas Ottati, and Cynthia Rigby. Theologians within this tradition respect and build from the work of thinkers before them, but they are not excessively or exclusively beholden to them.

What they draw from this tradition, and what binds them to it, are certain themes. Reformed theology begins with belief in the ultimate sovereignty of God, by which Reformed thinkers mean the conviction that God is the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of the entire cosmos. This emphasis on God’s sovereignty contrasts with relegations of God’s relevance to private spirituality or the experience of one group of people over and against others. In Reformed theology, the God whom Christians worship is the God of the whole cosmos. Reformed theology also takes seriously the reality of sin as an important dimension to the human condition. Sin is a serious impediment to knowing what is good and doing what is right, and it is rooted in something deeper than mere ignorance. Sin is a self-defeating penchant that is hardwired into individuals and communities, and it manifests itself in human tendencies like pride, inordinate self-regard, and the abuse of power. As an antidote to this human condition, Reformed theology emphasizes the necessity of divine grace for the redemption of the world. In contrast to theologies that suggest human beings must merit salvation by doing good things or following God’s laws, Reformed theology insists human beings are reconciled to God through the initiative of God’s grace alone. This is not to say human effort is irrelevant to the life of faith, but for the Reformed tradition our efforts to do good are properly understood as grateful response to the God who first reaches out to us. The result is a Reformed vision of piety in which gratitude is lived in and for the world. Instead of withdrawing from a world considered dangerous to faithfulness, Reformed Christians express their gratitude for divine grace by living faithfully in the world, and in doing so testify to the goodness of God, who offers the gift of reconciliation to the world.

These are some of the theological themes that draw the Reformed Christian tradition together; you will see them at work in many of the essays that follow. Reformed theology bases its understanding of this grand narrative of grace in the Bible. The Bible is the reliable testament to the character and intentions of God, who is revealed decisively in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. You also will see regular appeals to sources beyond the Bible in these essays, which discloses another important feature of my theology. An unapologetic embrace of other sources of insight besides Scripture marks my theology as liberal, and I proudly embrace that label. Liberal theology takes seriously the wisdom we glean from science, philosophy, history, rational reflection, and the experience of individuals and communities. It sees this wisdom as opportunity to confirm or revise what the Christian tradition has said about a whole host of topics. For instance, modern science invites us to subscribe to a geological understanding of the world that is different than the one reflected in the biblical texts. The experience of women compels us to critique and correct Christianity’s preoccupation with men’s power and perspective. History helps us to understand the commonalities and differences between discrete episodes in the Christian story. Philosophy reminds us that there is wisdom to be found beyond the Christian tradition that can deepen or correct theological claims. A hallmark of liberal theology is that these other sources of insight are no threat to the integrity of Christian believing, and in fact they often contribute constructively to Christian theology by helping us distinguish traditional convictions that remain authentic and useful from those that ought to be revised or set aside in our time and place. To appeal to sources beyond the Bible is to affirm faith in a sovereign God who is powerful enough to speak through conduits other than Scripture.

Liberal theology also takes seriously that human communities are products of history, so both the biblical authors’ and our own understandings of God and the world are affected by time and place. As a result, we should not be surprised when the passage of time requires some adjustment in understanding, even an understanding that is reflected in the Bible. None of this is to say that the past is always disposable. Rather it is to suggest that good theology engages Scripture and tradition in a bidirectional relationship of reflection with other sources of insight, allowing the wisdom of the past and the knowledge of the present to inform, challenge, and revise one another. As Christians we measure the authenticity of this bidirectional reflection against what we know to be true about God as revealed to us in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. To engage in this theological exercise is to live into a mantra for which the Reformed tradition is well known, a commitment to a church that is reformed and always reforming.

This openness to a bidirectional relationship of influence between the past and the present and between the Bible and other sources of insight distinguishes my theology from many so-called conservative Christian theologies, in which authority is recognized as flowing only one way. In the effort to literally conserve the past, conservative Christian theologies demand that the principal authority for the life of faith is Scripture, and all other sources of knowledge must conform to or be revised according to that authority. This categorical deference to Scripture is often accompanied by an allegedly literal reading of the Bible, and the claim is that there is a timelessness to scriptural witness from which we cannot deviate without challenge to the authority of the Bible.

Of course, the claim to timelessness ignores the reality that the Bible was inspired by God but written by human hands. Those human writers existed in time, and their understanding of God’s word reflects their context. So it is with current-day conservative Christians who read the Bible; their reading of what is literally in the Bible also reflects the influence of their time and place, whether they admit it or not (and they often do not). Reading the Bible as signaling a clear preference for democracy, or an endorsement of capitalism, or an unambiguous condemnation of abortion betrays the influence of modern American values and preoccupations onto the exercise of biblical interpretation. Neither democratic governance nor capitalist systems nor modern scientific understandings of fetal development were ideas known to the biblical writers. Conservative Christians interpret the Bible just like liberal Christians, and in interpreting the Bible, conservatives read it through the prism of two millennia of Christian tradition and through the influence of their own time and contexts, just like liberal Christians. There is no such thing as reading Scripture without interpreting it, and there is no way to interpret Scripture in a historical or cultural vacuum. Put sharply, the classic byline of classical Reformers, sola scriptura (Scripture only), is the great Protestant lie! The difference between conservative Christian theologies and liberal ones is not that the former respect the authority of the Bible and the latter do not. Both conservative and liberal theologies interpret the Bible in their historical context and are influenced by insights and values gleaned from sources beyond the scriptural texts. The difference is that conservative theologies often deny that this is what they are doing, and liberal theologies usually celebrate it.

To be open to revised interpretations of the Bible and Christian tradition is not to say that the Bible and classical Christian teachings lack authority, and it does not mean that the newest information we have is always the likeliest to be true and accurate. This last point is an important one to make in response to some contemporary Christian liberals. Some liberal Christian theologians write as if no perspective older than the twentieth century is relevant, for what could it possibly offer to the consideration of modern social justice issues with which Christian liberals are preoccupied? In fact, some liberal theologians define a liberal approach as beginning with the rejection of traditional sources.³ The popular disregard for anything old among liberals is the reason I have less and less use for the term progressive as a description of my own theology. In many circles, liberal and progressive are used interchangeably, but the word progressive implies that what comes next is better than what came before. Christian progressives often pride themselves on disregarding tradition as archaic and irrelevant, declaring (as my local Unitarian Universalist church advertises) to value today’s questions . . . more than yesterday’s answers.

That assumption may be a common move for so-called progressive theologies, but its historical nearsightedness offends not just the Christian historian but also the humanist in me. Anyone who studies literature, history, philosophy, or art knows that more recent specimens are not necessarily more beautiful or wiser than the old. Should we prefer Barber over Beethoven because the former is more recent? Is Lockean political philosophy irrelevant to modern debates because it was written centuries ago? Ancient texts and art offer wisdom and elegance that can betray the shallow pedestrianism of more modern work. Theology is no different. Students of Christian thought know that classical theology is a treasure trove of wisdom. While our theological ancestors may not have anticipated all the problems we encounter in the modern age, they wrestled with concerns of their own that often serve as useful analogues to ours. The psalmist conveys an angst about suffering that still speaks to people struggling with trauma today. In the sixteenth century, John Calvin wrote with nuance about the gifts and limits of medical science in a way that offers helpful insight to modern Christians who are wrestling with the moral implications of medical technologies he could not even imagine. In the seventeenth century, the Puritan Roger Williams wrote about conscientious freedom and the relationship between religion and state with a complexity and realism that relatively few modern philosophers have matched. In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards wrote about virtue and beauty with such sophistication that he remains one of America’s most profound intellectuals. Scripture and classical theology often speak a word of wisdom to us across the ages, and often that wisdom surpasses our own attempts at depth and discernment.

To my mind, good liberal theology feels free to revise tradition when warranted, but it also honors the tradition in which it stands. Indeed, liberal theology itself is a tradition, a vein in Christian theology with history and legacy. The tradition of liberal theology consists of a family of thinkers who share a commitment to understanding the historic tenets of the faith in conversation with the best of modern knowledge. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Vida Scudder, Walter Rauschenbusch, Howard Thurman, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosemary Radford Reuther, Rufus Burrow, Sallie McFague, and Catherine Keller represent just a few thinkers in the great cloud of witnesses who belong to the tradition of liberal theology.⁴ And liberal theology can claim antecedent ideas that are even older—for example, the inherent dignity of persons, the importance of reason for religious and moral insight, liberation from injustice, and human rights are all ideals that liberal Christian theologians root deep in theological tradition.⁵ The liberal Reformed theology at work in this book makes regular reference to wise thinkers in the broad Christian tradition, even in the effort to say a new thing about contemporary American culture.

Theological Insights on, in, and from Culture

The bidirectional reflection between the old and the new is a feature of my theology, and it also influences how I think about culture itself. The term culture is notoriously ambiguous, connoting everything from art and literature to social conventions. I am using it here to refer to the practices, systems, habits, assumptions, and values by which a community defines itself. A society’s culture consists of its history and the values it draws from that history, even that part of its history that is contested. Culture consists of traditions that symbolize and reinforce a community’s values, including the traditions of time (that is, calendars and holidays). High art and literature are vehicles of culture, but so are popular media, politics, and civic practices. Culture is not static; it is a dynamic confrontation between a community’s history and its present, as both the defenders and opponents of Confederate monuments in the South know too well. It is subject to challenge and reinterpretation, including identifying aspects of a community’s history that the community no longer finds worthy of celebration, or discovering voices in that community’s history heretofore stifled but worthy of elevation. Culture is the interplay between a society’s dominant memory and, in Emilie Townes’s evocative term, the countermemory of the society’s marginalized and forgotten.⁶ In this way, culture is a dynamic collective experience, lived out in its traditions and practices, of identifying, reinforcing, challenging, and changing the values for which it stands, and thereby symbolizing who it is as community. To belong in such a society is to participate in the traditions and practices of culture.

The United States has a culture—dynamic and contested traditions, practices, and histories that together represent a national identity. Many of these practices and values are symbolized in the holidays featured in this book. Like other sources of insight, the values and media of contemporary American culture can be a help or a hindrance to thinking and living faithfully as a Christian. In many pulpits in the United States, however, the culture is routinely demonized as the moral enemy of Christian conviction. Turn on any of the religious broadcasting networks on your TV and you will invariably hear a megachurch pastor thundering about the anti-Christian temptations that lurk in the culture around us. Popular music encourages sexual promiscuity, while TV shows propagate violence and homosexuality. Political culture threatens the nuclear family, while modern literature encourages juvenile delinquency and anarchy. The culture is a cesspool of deviance against which faith is a bulwark, if only Christians remain vigilant.

In his classic book Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr identified several different patterns that Christians historically have adopted for thinking about the intersection of church and culture. He called the one I am describing now Christ against culture.⁷ Since its earliest days, the church sometimes has defined the life of faith over and against the culture around it. From this perspective, the church is a community founded on radically different values than the culture around it. The world’s culture reflects moral standards and priorities of a profane world that does not know Christ or God’s expectations for humanity. But the church is the fellowship of believers who, in their call to the way of Christ, have taken on new standards for behavior that mark them as distinct from the world around them. In this oppositional framework, the church has a responsibility to stay true to the expectations of Christ and to avoid the pollution of the world. Holiness and purity are goods that the church is called to maintain, in part by limiting its exposure to the temptations of the world around it. These days this oppositional understanding of culture is especially prevalent in American evangelicalism, though it also shows up in the work of the late Pope John Paul II and among disciples of Stanley Hauerwas.

This oppositional understanding of church and