Faith and survival.

Credo | Culture 11 ^ | 10/23/08 | Joshua Trevino

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Credo colleague Chris Dierkes has requested thoughts on the idea of the church as the "resilient community," or the "base community," providing a durable and lasting protection against the shocks of the world; and Justin Hart has responded with his insights from the LDS perspective; and so I will exercise my prerogative to reply in a post.

The idea of faith as the communal bedrock, absorbing the blows of the world, goes back to the Jewish exile to Babylon, and for all we know much before. When the people of Israel were dragged into captivity, there was no reason to assume they would not share the fate of other captive nations of antiquity: absorbed by the conquerer, and lost to history. Yet they returned to Israel generations later as a coherent and cohesive nation, and their Judaism (and, if you're so inclined, the consequent protection of God) was the key factor in their endurance. The subsequent history of Judaism over the following 26 centuries -- diaspora, ghettos, Holocaust, and all -- yields further evidence that there's something about that faith that equips its people to form "resilient communities." Call it God's protection of His Chosen, if you wish. Or consider some other historical cases.

There are other historical cases: the sweep of human experience includes many examples of faith communities enduring against the odds, and in a sea of differing and/or hostile populations. The Zoroastrians, though threatened by restrictive marital laws, are still around -- even if much reduced from their 7th-century apogee at the gates of Europe. The Anabaptists persist, despite two centuries of savage persecution at their birth, most notably as North America's Amish communities. Coptic Christians keep alive the pre-Muslim faith and (to a limited extent) the pre-Arabic language of Egypt, even in the face of social oppression as a minority in an Islamic society. As Hart noted, the Mormons endure -- and thrive, really -- despite having done quite nearly everything possible in their first half-century to become personae non grata in the nation where they arose. My own Orthodox Church? We made it through Diocletian, the Caliphate and Communism, thanks.

So what's the common thread here? If you're a member of any of these faith communities, or sympathetic to them, you see the hand of God. There's nothing wrong with this: it may be so, though I profess bafflement at a God who seeks the perpetuation of Zoroastrians and the Amish. But if we pull back from theistic explanations for a moment -- secularize Occam's razor, so to speak -- it's fairly easy to see that the one thing the Jews, the Parsis, the Amish, the Mormons, the Copts, and the Orthodox Christians have in common is social exclusion and communal particularity. All these groups were (or are) cast out of the ruling class or the societal mainstream, and all these groups maintained rituals or beliefs that overtly set them apart from that mainstream. It would be tough for a Roman devotee of Jupiter to detect a Roman devotee of Venus in casual conversation -- but a Jew, he'd know in a heartbeat. A 19th-century Methodist would have some difficulty discerning a 19th-century Episcopalian -- but a Mormon would stand out like a sore thumb. Et cetera. Sometimes difference marks a faith, and sometimes difference is the faith -- and it's the latter case that bestows the blessing and burden of resilience across time.

What's the lesson, then? Can faith communities serve as "resilient communities," insulated from worldly shocks? Of course: but there is a price to be paid, in exclusion from the world, in alienation from your neighbors, in the slowing or halting of internal evolution of practice and belief, and in mechanisms of internal cohesion that may drive out the freethinking or the odd. That's a tough call to make, and it's usually not made deliberately. If I had to make the decision for my own Orthodox Christian faith, I would reject the idea: there is a place for withdrawal from the world -- as a monk, on which more shortly -- but the community of believers as a whole are called upon to be "salt and light," not a cloistered elite of survivalist gnostics. Whatever faith you adhere to, it's a good bet its founder wished to share the word: why would we, the believers, think ourselves called to less?