Historian in-coming, as they say on social media reels:
There never was a normal.
That’s not what we want to hear, because we want to think there’s stasis, or at least some sort of benchmark. Almost always, when we talk about things not being how they used to be, or not being “normal,” what we mean is “things aren’t like they were when I was young.”
Since the beginning of the modern era, by which we mean the mid-eighteenth century or so, humans have had to face what they feel to be radical change each generation. This is quite different from the pre-modern period, in which change occurred, albeit much more slowly. Occasionally, there would be massive shifting disasters like earthquakes, fires, or plagues that would shift society in dramatic ways. Or there might be a big invasion or cultural change, such as the Muslim conquests, or the Aztec movement into Central America. But these were rare, and, once they happened, things settled into slow change again.
But we live in “Modernity”—the “Age of the Institutionalization of Technical Specialization,” as the twentieth-century scholar Marshall Hodgson termed it. And even though it has been going on for 250 years, our brains and DNA are not wired for it. So, we experience it as trauma. And make no mistake, we still aren’t totally Modern, and we are reacting to it all the time, but the conflict with the experience is what forms our attempts at creating community, worship, and political organizations.
Let’s describe the values and attributes of the Modern, and then explain how that is shaping us in the church.
Modernity’s primary commitment is to Progress. This is radically different from what had gone before, where most societies are interested in recovering some sort of past or looking to the past as a model for how to be. On its own, this is a huge shift. But because modernity was based on the economic and technical changes from integrating the Americas and the intellectual shifts of the Scientific Revolution, it also included another massive shift that is profound break with the past: We have new ways of knowing.
In the pre-modern, we “knew” something was True because authorities told us it was—mostly authorities in the past. Sometimes Truth was discerned through philosophical speculation and reasoning, but, even in these cases, it was done by using the rules and definitions laid out by the wise ones of the past. Or it might be received by accepted supernatural means such as visions or the results of rituals provided through a spiritual mediary. There was no universal way of deciding what was true, no one way of knowing. Each culture and geographical region had its own methods of discerning truth or identifying the authorities
The modern era developed new ways of knowing, ones that they determined had universal applications. There was now one way to know something was Truth: measurability, verifiability, definability, explicability. This was radically different from the past. But it went along with the other values of Modernity: a focus on productivity
and efficiency. The inventions and practices of the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution privileged homogeneity and uniformity—it was easier to mass produce when all the products were the same. When the same laws and legal system applied to all citizens the same, or when everyone received the same education, it also contributed to individualism. But this wasn’t an individualism that focused on uniqueness; instead, people were cogs in the great machine of society rather than standing out as quirky characters.
The pre-modern world had valued the personal, the beautiful, the mysterious. But with modernity, the focus on technical specialization in all areas of life meant increasing commitments to homogeneity in education, politics, and industry. And then increasing bureaucracy to measure and manage the productivity with greater efficiency. Technical specialization occurred in all areas of life—greater specificity about citizenship, borders, academic disciplines, religious ideology, capitalism, and the dependence on paperwork and administrative organization that went with it.
The commitment to progress and greater productivity created a constant expectation of change; in fact, to fail to change or to assess greater efficiencies, profits, or growth was seen as “backward” or inefficient or even corrupt. To focus on the personal or the beautiful at the expense of the productive would even be considered immoral in the era of the modern. And yet, as humans, we rebelled against this. And we still do. We know that the personal and the beautiful and the mysterious matter. We “know” things that aren’t verifiable using data. I like to tell my students that I “know” my sister is angry with me just as surely as I “know 2 + 2 = 4.” We don’t want to treat everyone exactly the same, even though the values of modernity say we need to. We know that sometimes some people (especially those we love) need different treatment. And we love the inefficiencies of beauty and mystery. We know life is more than productivity.
But it was in the height of the Modern, the era of technical specialization, that the Adventist church was formed. Against our founders’ strongest ideals, we formed an official organization, developed the thick bureaucracy and secretariat that the Victorians were so good at, created a brand, kept membership lists and ever-accumulating records, and tracked our growth and efficiency in giving Bible studies and collecting offerings.
Each generation found a way to integrate spiritual practices into the current technical specialization. New institutions such as publishing houses, medical establishments, food industry, and eventually media empires grew. Programs developed, administrators hired to oversee all the programs, and a professional educated class inserted to be the middle managers of conferences, schools, and industries. There was a constant need to update, improve, and provide numbers demonstrating growth. This is just what the values of Modernity require. Homogeneity and reliance on data impacted the Church as well as political structures and educational institutions.
But within our structures were embedded the values and assumptions of the pre-modern. The historical Church is based on the ancient truths that beauty and personal relationships and mystery are at the heart of our practice and belief. This remains true even in the modern era. Each week when we worship, each day when we read our ancient text, we are brought back to a historical way of being human. And the way we express truth is best done in the ancient way. Because there are different ways of knowing. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. Our belief in the Incarnation is not double-blind-study verifiable.
So, when things in the modern world fall start changing, it is just part of what has been happening for 250 years. And perhaps it is a rejection of what has happened in the last 250 years and a recovery of a better way of being human. There’s never a “normal” in the modern world, just a constant chasing of the elusive thing called “progress” and our human attempt to extract some sort of embodied value out of it that is based on the sublime and the loving rather than the productive.
And yet, we don’t like change, and each of us can only explain the present in the light of the previous decades of our own life. And we decide what to use as a benchmark for productivity. If some of the assumptions of modernity continue to prove to be less than universal, or the practices of modernity are less valued, it can make us fearful. We worry that there might not be a way to demonstrate universal Truth or that we aren’t keeping our children as members, or our schools are getting smaller. By modernity’s standards, this might feel like failure.
If we are losing our commitment to bureaucracy and expansion as a church, if we begin to think we may not be homogeneous or unified globally as an institution in the modern way, if we aren’t sure we can rely on definitions and measurability as a test of what is True, then we can rest assured that others who have gone before us have done this as well.
Maybe we will become more like the pre-moderns. Maybe the postnormal is going to be more like the pre-modern. Christians found ways to flourish in that world, and we will find ways to flourish in ours. We have nothing to be afraid of. It is always a good time to be the Body of Christ, to find ways to love and create beauty and justice, and it may not look like measurable growth in numbers and there may be fewer institutions, but there will be the Holy Spirit, love, confession, and forgiveness.
Lisa Clark Diller, PhD, is chair of the History and Political Studies Department at Southern Adventist University. Email her at: ldiller@southern.edu