After Religion

Gordon Lynch is post-evangelical in a quite literal sense: he used to be a committed evangelical Christian but he’s not any more. This book sets his personal departure from faith in the context of a wider exploration of Generation X culture and its struggle to find personal spiritual meaning in a world that has lost confidence in traditional forms of religion.

Lynch begins by describing the decline of the Church in Britain and the emergence of what Grace Davie calls ‘common religion’. Christianity has become utterly unimportant for the majority of people, but ‘individuals continue to have a need or desire for personal meaning that may or may not make use of religious ideas or symbols’ (9). A similar trend is found in America though there is not the same degree of institutional religious decline.

The initial stimulus for Lynch’s exploration of new spiritual horizons was Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X. He is critical of definitions of Generation X that identify it with a particular age-group, believing it to be more helpful to regard it as a way of viewing the world—‘a particular attitude towards this process of making sense of who we are and how we should live in the contemporary world’ (30). The Generation X attitude is ‘a product of Western culture in which capitalism and the free market have emerged as fixed points of social organization whilst personal meaning is fluid and unclear’; ‘meaning is not something that can be found in pre-packaged forms in churches, shops or political parties, but rather meaning (if it is found at all) has to be sought in a personal way’ (31).

In chapter 3 Lynch explores the emergence of post-evangelicalism and alternative worship in Britain. He describes the influence of Dave Tomlinson’s book The Post-Evangelical and defines the movement as one for which religious truth ‘emerges out of interaction between the Christian tradition and the personal perceptions, thoughts and values of the individual believer’ (40). He points out that it is often easier to determine what post-evangelicals don’t believe than what they do. If post-evangelicalism is a reaction against rigid, traditional Evangelical ideas of truth, the alternative worship movement can be seen as a reaction to dominant forms of Evangelical worship. The ethos of alternative worship is characterized by ‘the open-ended, creative and personally authentic search for meaning’, faith as a developmental process, a suspicion of authoritative texts or persons, democratic leadership patterns, and a rejection of consumerism (47-48). Lynch makes the important point that these movements lack a deliberate ‘mission strategy’ and as a result are likely to remain peripheral to mainstream Christianity.

Lynch is sceptical of the view popularized by Tom Beaudoin that postmodern culture offers alternative religious ‘texts’. He outlines a number of more sociological reasons for the importance of popular culture for Generation X: it is a focus for social interaction, a means of escapism, and a means by which people communicate about their ‘real world’ experiences (66-67).

In chapter 5 we are given the results of some more empirical research into the role that the clubbing culture plays in the postmodern search for personal and religious meaning. The views of Kath, a committed Christian who regularly goes clubbing, are particularly interesting: ‘Dancing is very important to her because through it she experiences a significant aspect of herself that cannot be expressed verbally’ (84).

In the final two chapters Lynch attempts to sketch a spirituality for Generation X. He suggests that meaning comes to us through ‘moments of grace in which we catch a glimpse of a reality beyond our individual choices, aspirations and failings’. He draws a contrast with traditional sources of meaning: ‘We are thus faced with an another alternative beyond the pre-packaged truths of political, religious or corporate organisations and the individual projects we choose to construct for our own lives—the possibility of a greater reality that we might glimpse fleetingly at different points through our lives’ (101). Perhaps surprisingly, he finds this best expressed in the writings of the German theologian Paul Tillich, for whom faith does not “consist of a commitment to a particular set of religious doctrines or ‘belief in something unbelievable’”, but ‘is an experience in which we become aware of a greater context for our lives, a sense of being part of something greater which helps us both to acknowledge honestly the limitations of our lives and yet to carry on living in constructive ways’ (115).

I don’t particularly wish to offer a critique of this book. It would be relatively easy to complain about the elusiveness and ineffectuality of this sort of definition of faith. The book is valuable principally because it has been written just across the border of traditional faith and for that reason helps us to understand better the spiritual no man’s land where postmoderns wander close to the God of the Christian Scriptures. One of Lynch’s most intriguing insights is found right at the end when he suggests that ‘one of the striking features of contemporary Western culture is the emphasis on activities that are focused around physical or non-verbal experience’ (118). Lynch does not deny the obviously hedonistic attraction of physical activities like dancing. But he wonders whether they do not offer the possibility of a ‘connection with a greater reality or a sense of indescribable joy or deep peace of mind’ that means that such activities ‘could be seen as contributin to a search for meaning that goes beyond pure hedonism’.