Originally posted in 2007.
How do Christians in the modern Western nations discuss the rise of a magical-mythic literalistic Christianity in Africa? Not with enough genuine ambivalence, if they’re looking from a green lense, I’m afraid. In “Africa and the Bible,” Father Jones writes:

Africans are generally critical of modern Western approaches to the Bible, including those of the 19th century evangelists who brought them the Bible. Africans identify very much with the worldview of the Bible – finding it reminiscent of their own traditional African worldviews. They believe the modern Western worldview, bereft of mystery, spirits and supernaturalism, doesn’t truly resonate with the biblical worldview. The typical African sees a universe steeped in mystery – a cosmic landscape dotted with spirits, sorcery, animal sacrifice, ancestor worship, and so on – much like the one they find described in Scripture. When Africans were freed from Western interpretations of the text, and Western disparagement of African culture, they could read the Bible themselves. And, importantly, the world Africans encountered in Scripture was closer to their own world than the world of the missionaries. “When they would encounter passages about sacrifice, tyranny, blood, suffering, spirit, healing, etc. – they could deeply grasp it as of their own worldview,” Le Marquand writes. “The African noted how closely connected that their world and the biblical world are.”

In addition to identifying more closely with the Bible’s own supernaturalist worldview, Africans also identify with the Bible’s communal vision of humanity. Africans are surprised by Western individualistic approaches to the Bible. They do not believe individuals are equal to the task of biblical interpretation. Ubuntu is the African notion that a person’s identity depends upon her relationships. Whereas the modern Western mindset seems to be, “I think therefore I am,” the ubuntu mindset is, “I am because we are.”

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In Whole Writing, cultural criticism isn’t mainly about agreeing or disagreeing with the object of your analysis or deconstructing the contexts to prove the perspective marginalizing or oppressive. To critique is to step empathetically into the worldspace of another, to understand not only how that worldspace articulates its values and belief but how it feels from the inside out. Then, and only then, is it possible to recognize its beauty as a representative of an entirely healthy and indispensable part of human nature by situating the object within a more encompassing and comprehensive map of reality than is offered by the object itself.Afterwards, and only after, is it appropriate to judge. First, to judge the relative health and coherence and accuracy of the position from within its own worldview AND worldspace. Secondly, to articulate a dialogical response in conversation that is not intended to elicit agreement or agreement, nor even necessarily understanding or misunderstanding.

The point of the dialogue: to open ourselves, out of curiosity and affection and love, to the possibilities of the Moment. To suspend our critical eye of judgment in favor of a more radical apprehension: hope. In hope, we open ourselves to the possibilities for the unexpected and the surprising. We ground our expectations not in the conflict of the past or the anticipation of a predetermined outcome, but the mysterious present of until.

Here’s the meat of Andrew Sullivan’s “Into Africa,” a short post on Daily Dish:

They key divide in faith today is between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. The divide exists within most churches, including the lay Catholic population. As fundamentalism advances, the clash between the two may become so severe in the U.S. that more and more American churches will tilt to the developing world for leadership and clout. The orthodox Catholic hierarchy would have no future without reinforcements from Africa and Asia. And charismatic pentecostalists, with socially conservative politics, are going to find their worldview far better represented in Nairobi than New York.

But you also see in this story a shift from a traditional, ritual-based, small-c conservative form of faith toward a radical, modern, individualistic brand of fundamentalism. This is the strain within Islam as well. The Wahhabists - with their contempt for tradition, custom, conventional authority, and ritual echo the modern mega-churches of evangelical Christianity. Both strains hark back to the ideal of an original, pure faith - and deploy modern technology to advance it. They also more crudely but effectively answer the sense of personal loss and fear of “moral entropy” that tends to occur in periods of rapid economic and social change. They have the momentum. Whether they have the answer is another question.

How would I fisk Sullivan based on Whole Writing methods? I need not make any changes to his text, nor provide any counter-argument nor deconstruction. (That’s strictly optional.) I colorize. That is, I merely estimate the Kosmic addresses of Andrew’s own speech to the best of my reckoning:

They (sic) key divide in faith today is between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. The divide exists within most churches, including the lay Catholic population. As fundamentalism advances, the clash between the two may become so severe in the U.S. that more and more American churches^Q/LR will tilt to the developing world for leadership and clout. The orthodox Catholic hierarchy would have no future without reinforcements from Africa and Asia. And charismatic pentecostalists, with socially conservative politics, are going to find their worldview far better represented in Nairobi than New York.

But you also see in this story a shift from a traditional, ritual-based, small-c conservative form of faith toward a radical, modern, individualistic brand of fundamentalism. This is the strain within Islam as well. The Wahhabists - with their contempt for tradition, custom, conventional authority, and ritual echo the modern mega-churches of evangelical Christianity. Both strains hark back to the ideal of an original, pure faith - and deploy modern technology to advance it. They also more crudely but effectively answer the sense of personal loss and fear of “moral entropy” that tends to occur in periods of rapid economic and social change. They have the momentum. Whether they have the answer is another question.

Because Andrew focuses on the relationship between religion and social change, I will limit this look to his attempts to articulate an opinion about matters of faith and values. I would estimate the center of gravity of Andrew’s analysis at S137 for several reasons. First, it clearly shows a strong disdain for the spiritual values of S136 but justified more on the basis of emphatic condescension rather than overt hostility. Secondly, Andrew’s approach shows signs of integral cognition because of its embrace of a variety of different and conflicting approaches into an attempt at a more coherent whole, even including an implicit or hidden developmentalism.So far as an attempt to discuss the central themes of fundamentalism and modernity in the context of the schism in the Episcopal Church is concerned, and given an approach based on integral-level cognition and an overall center of analysis at the existentialist altitude and a rationalist depth, Sullivan’s approach seems quite worthy.He succinctly and effectively communicates the key developmental divides between levels of religious consciousness in society (even without labeling the differences as evolutionary). He identifies correctly the most salient psychodynamics at work in the conflict, particularly his linking of amber-altitude religionists with fear of the loss of a moral and religious order.However, as this Whole Writing critique has envisioned, Andrew’s account is rather ambiguous, confused, ineffectual in its conclusion, and notably partial. The ambiguity and confusion is plain for anyone familiar with the concept of Kosmic Addresses, particularly in its expression through the writings about Integral notation (Ken Wilber) or the Whole Writing technique (my own adaptation of Wilber’s “integral math”); it is quite possibly invisible to those who are not (though I hope it is suggested in an aesthetic fashion by the colored markup necessary to articulate the Kosmic Address of Sullivan’s short post).To give just one example of Andrew’s confusion, as a general theme of his writing (though it is only too briefly referenced in the “Into Africa” post), he labels as “fundamentalist” religionists both those at the mythic-membership stage and those at the religio-rationalist stage and urges progress toward the “faith of doubt”. However, he shows no indications of having grasped the differences between those religionists who have never really faced honestly the challenges posed by modernity and those who have indeed grasped those challenges, accepted the claims of modernity on modernity’s terms, but then “synthesized” religion and reason by focusing on the essential principles of religion (however those essential principles are defined). These are two distinctly different religious responses, one that is truly pre-rational and the other which is quintessentially modernist (albiet in an ironic, reactionary fashion that is oddly post-modernist). Combining these two disparate groups under one umbrella term “fundamentalist” and then positing “non-fundamentalist” as the alternative is just plain confusing. It is also unlikely to be helpful for any but a few.The weak conclusion of Andrew’s post–”whether they have the answer is another question”–is perhaps symptomatic of the deeper problems in his mode of analysis. Without understanding explicitly the complex developmental dynamics at work in the conflicts of religion and modernity, Sullivan is unable to properly situate the stations of the parties to which he is subjecting to analysis, unable to fully locate his own stational context, and limited in his ability to articulate a strategy for advancing the debate beyond the vague notion that somehow the question of whether the fundamentalists have “the answer” (i.e., whether they are right or wrong) is in any conceivable way relevant to forging workable solutions to the dilemmas they pose in pluralistic and modern societies. Surely Andrew doesn’t believe they really have “the answer,” so his conclusion seems rather confused or confusing (because I can’t read Andrew’s mind, I’m not sure which).Regarding the limitations of Andrew’s post, suffice to say at this time that the key divide in faith today is not merely between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, but between several distinct waves of “stages of faith,” developmental actualities embodied in particular concrete and objective forms^{Q/UR, Q/LR}, and the ensuing conflicts arising by virtue of the failure of each wave to recognize its own contribution to the war of culture, values, and spirit in our midst. Thus, analyses such as Andrew’s which are aimed primarily at telling folk religionists to grow up and fundamentalists to doubt their convictions, are doomed from the outset. Only a more encompassing vision of the world we inhabit, situated in the context of an embodied subjective and intersubjective worldspace^{Q/UL, Q/LL}, can bring forth the sort of solutions that are required.Whether such solutions will eventually emerge, I don’t know. But I do believe this: that the All-encompassing nature of Spirit isn’t an esoteric secret of the mystics; it is the plain reality before our eyes at every moment. Only an integral vision (or higher altitude) that can bring this wholeness to bear on the problems we face, for example, by looking at All as manifestations of the altitude and depth of the One–are capable of providing “the answers,” if there are any to be found.Note: This post was originally published January 7, 2007 on Until.

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