Crumbling Cultural Christendom? Resentment at AAR Part Two

In my last post, I wrote about how American society and the American Academy of Religion both reflect and don't reflect the demise of cultural-Christendom, which is seen in the resentment of Christians about their loss of power and status and in the resentment of non-religious people when religious people retain power and status. It honestly wasn't clear to me who might resent the new AAR VP David Gushee more: conservative Christians, because Gushee is now LGBT affirming, or nonreligious scholars, because their scholarly guild will be led by a "professional Christian" (Gushee is a Christian theologian and ethicist). But frankly, with the elections over, whatever resentment existed was not very palpable. However, I mentioned that I clearly saw resentment in one group of scholars.

Just for kicks, I stopped in at a session of the “God Seminar” of the Westar Institute. The “God Seminar” is like the famous Jesus Seminar (also a Westar project) that voted on which sayings of Jesus from the Gospels were authentic. Following this model, the God Seminar scholars (16 white males and 2 white females, overwhelmingly American philosophical theologians) tinkered around with and then voted on a few propositions about God. At one point, one of them expressed resentful bewilderment regarding why their theological hero, Paul Tillich, didn’t have the same kind of long-term influence as the more evangelical theologian Karl Barth. One member of the panel suggested that it was at least partly due to a well-endowed center for Barthian studies (I assume he meant Princeton), a speculation that met some approval. It reminded me of baseball’s resentful/envious Yankees-haters and made me think that in America, maybe religious people, non-religious people, theologians, scholars of religion and baseball fans are one big mutual-resentment society. In America, we compromise, and nobody gets everything they want.

So what does this all mean? I’m not sure I know, but resentment is ugly, whether you see it on the news or in the mirror and mutual encouragement, appreciation and understanding are beautiful. Confronting my cynicism about the state of society, at the Temple University Department of Religion breakfast, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, non-religious, straight-people and LGBT-folks all ate a great meal, encouraged each other in their endeavors and caught up on each others’ kids and families. 
 
“The times they are a changin’” – Bob Dylan
 
“There is nothing new under the sun.”  - Ecclesiastes