NOTE: Jamie Smith is a friend of mine. We were colleagues at Calvin College for many years. He is also the fellow who gave me the nudge to write my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America.
Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology is the final volume in Jamie’s
Cultural Liturgies trilogy, an ambitious and masterful project that takes its cue from St. Augustine, especially his work in the City of God. The previous two volumes in this series are Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom, all published by Baker.
Jamie’s goal, I believe, is to call and equip Christians for a life that is created, directed and consummated by the love of God (both objectively and subjectively). Thus, Jamie puts Augustine’s central insight at the heart of his analysis: We are what we love. For the church, then, the love of God, our religious affections, becomes the gravitational center properly (re)ordering the Christian’s approach to all other areas of life, especially public life.
This seemingly simple thesis is unpacked throughout the Cultural Liturgies series by dissecting the many ways in which modern society, whether in politics, education, entertainment, media, advertising or what have you, attempts to shape each of us through its own powerful, repetitious, and typically implicit, liturgies of personal formation (or should we call it deformation?).
Such secular liturgies are conducted through the many public rites and rituals in which we all participate every day, whether it be filing our income taxes by April 15, standing (or kneeling) for the National Anthem in a football stadium, or shopping for the newest version of some must-have electronic gadgetry released just before Christmas. Every person’s participation in these daily collective activities, all conceived, orchestrated and implemented by anonymous power-brokers unknown to the average person, engages us in a beggar’s banquet of cultural liturgies.
Here is one of Jamie’s more important points. Liturgical performance, whether religious or secular, is powerfully formative. Human beings are not simply what we think, ala Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” We are also, perhaps even more importantly, formed by the things we do. And our culture shapes the majority of our activities in day-to-day life.
Thus, Jamie asks us to consider the question: as we participate in these frequent cultural liturgies, what kind of formation is happening to us? Are we being turned into more agreeable consumers, more patriotic inductees, more subservient government supporters? And how does this cultural formation process cohere with the Christian’s (presumed) conformity to the person of Jesus Christ?
Jamie correctly insists that every follower of Jesus must remain vigilant in assessing how these competing cultural liturgies are working implicitly, subliminally, to subvert and to replace our love of God with cultural alternatives – love of country, love of new consumer products, love of entertainment, love of sexuality, love of partisan politics, love of warfare, etc. These alternative liturgies are constantly competing for our attention/ participation, and they will change us if we are not very, very careful.
The Church, however, is called to become an alternative society – in the world but not of it, as the old saying goes – where the love of God binds its members to liturgies of Christian worship that are conforming us more and more to the likeness of Christ. Thus, regular (trans)formation through rites and rituals of Christian worship – scripture reading, prayer, biblical teaching, confession, repentance, admonition, praise and adoration – is essential if the church hopes to stand strong as the alternative community that God calls us to be.
My brief synopsis can hardly do justice to Jamie’s more expansive analysis of the church’s role in society and the work of public theology. I heartily recommend that you take the time to read Awaiting the King for yourself. There is much to consider, even though I do not agree with all of Jamie’s analysis or proposed solutions.
However, I will offer a few of my thoughts on Jamie’s final, most practical chapter entitled, “Contested Liturgies: Our ‘Godfather’ Problem.”
I suspect that many of Jamie’s readers have been asking themselves (and him) about the effectiveness of his proposal, e.g. we best counteract the deforming power of secular liturgies by participating in liturgies of Christian worship. Has Jamie overlooked the elephant in the room? Namely, if Christian worship is the antidote to cultural conformity, then how do we explain the many examples, too numerous to count, of church-going people who behave no differently than non-church-goers who don’t know Jesus Christ from a hole in the ground? Worse yet, how about those faithful church-goers who live criminal lifestyles or do horrible things? People like Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” who would never think of skipping out on mass yet remains untouched by the gospel of God’s grace.
Of course, a full accounting of this problem would require a treatise on the Holy Spirit, conversion, sanctification, spirituality and “the imitation of Christ,” all well beyond the scope of this one book.
However, Jamie has not ignored the elephant completely, and he illustrates the problem by exploring two case studies: (1) the history of western colonialism and the slave trade, as well as (2) the church’s contribution to the horrific “liturgies of violence” executed in the Rwandan genocide.
Jamie offers three essential ingredients to any healthy church life intending to help people conform primarily to Christ and only secondarily, in non- compromising ways, to culture.
First, Christianity “is a teaching faith” (175). A “failure of catechesis contributes to a failure of formation” (205). So, the Body of Christ requires continuous, Biblical education.
Second, every local pastor must become an ethnographer and a political theologian. That is, someone who can (a) interpret the competing cultural liturgies working to reshape and deform God’s people, and then (b) can prescribe the Biblical evaluation and divinely preferred alternatives that equip disciples to “cultivate their heavenly citizenship” here and now. Breaking Christianity’s bondage to nationalism and capitalism will be essential to this task as congregations grow in God-honoring worship (174).
Third, worship will never become purely instrumental. “To show up to worship is tantamount to an admission of failure” (207). I like that sentence. Authentic worship liturgies are always theocentric. We adore our Creator and our Savior, first and foremost, because they deserve our honor, praise and service. The fact that we are also transformed through our worship is only gravy. Awesome gravy, but gravy all the same.
By in large, I agree wholeheartedly with Jamie’s diagnosis of where and how the liturgical/discipleship rubber must meet the cultural road. I would prefer, however, that Jamie’s first two points were elaborated more specifically with a laser-beam focus on Jesus as our Paradigm. This, after all, is the consistent New Testament answer to these questions of competing liturgies: follow Jesus, keep your eyes on Jesus, imitate Jesus, imitate me insofar as I imitate Jesus. This is why the eternal Son became the historical Nazarene.
Detailing the necessity of this task, of being Jesus-focused, is the reason I 
wrote my new book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018). I dedicate a chapter each to the dangerous cultural liturgies of nationalism and capitalism, for instance.
Granted, Jamie does elaborate his observation that Christianity is a teaching faith by noting the importance of “imitatio Christi.” He also employs the model of Jesus-as-mulatto developed by Brian Bantum in Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Baylor 2010). In my view, however, this is a serious misstep on Jamie’s part, but I don’t have space here to elaborate my disagreements with Bantum’s mulatto Christology.
It is simply more Biblical, faithful and practically translatable to imitate and to obey the Jesus of the Gospels, to teach what he taught, to model our lives after his, to learn to read our surrounding cultural, political liturgies as Jesus read his, and to embrace suffering for righteousness sake as the measuring rod for our conformity to his image.
Is there a sufficient number of well-equipped ethnographer-political-theologian pastors available in North America to lead God’s people adequately in this task of liturgical discernment and appropriation? No, not by a long shot. And I doubt there ever will be.
Many radio preachers think they are fulfilling this role, but generally they are playing in a multi-million dollar kiddie pool while God’s people are drowning in a turbulent sea of militaristic, nationalistic, capitalistic whirl pools.
But then I remember Jesus’ parable of the sower (Mark 4:1-20) and his (apparent) expectation that only a minority of those who make a start at faith will see it through to the end. I recall Jesus’ description of his “narrow gate” and “restricted road” which only “a few” will ever find (Mathew 7:13-14). I think of John’s stories of the large crowds of “disciples” who abandoned Jesus because his teaching was “too hard” for them (John 6:66).
Perhaps, when the time is right, God’s people will find just as many faithful, Jesus-following, ethnographer-political-theologian pastors as they need, because the number of faithful, Jesus-following, liturgically-discerning and deformity-resisting lovers of Jesus is fewer than we imagine.
