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In a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge (included in Letters and Papers from Prison), theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer asks why he is instinctively drawn more to religionless people than to the religious--an affinity he feels in his language, in the naming of God before these two groups of people. He does not, in the letter, answer his own question but rather describes the differences: when he is among the religionless, the name of God emerges easily in his speech, but among the religious, the name tastes plastic, feels forced, and induces in him a sense of dishonesty. What Bonhoeffer describes seems sadly to persist today. It corresponds to my own experience, especially where public forums are concerned.
I don't know whether Bonhoeffer assumed the "why" of this preference to lie within himself or in the two societies themselves--the religious and the religionless--as each placed upon him different requirements for acceptable dialogue and communication. I think, in fact, that the cause is a combination of both, since I feel myself to be different in the contexts of different communities. But I would like both to assess the differences as I have experienced them and to suggest one cause. For simplicity's sake, I will restrict my thoughts about that cause to the variant expectations of the two communities.
The secular world is not, in fact, my family--not in the most intimate sense. Nevertheless, when in formal, public speech before that world I name God, that name comes from my lips naturally, spontaneously, and full of substance. When I speak of God, God is--because the secular world permits me to use God's name in what may be called a signifyin' way, according to the apt expression from the black ghetto community. I need do no more, I can in good faith do no less than signify.
The Christian community, on the other hand, is my family intimately and spiritually. We confess one God. Yet, when I name that God formally before that community, I often find myself checking the names before speaking them. I "watch my mouth," as it were. I objectify the speech in order first to analyze it--so that when I speak of God it is the speech, the words, the names, that exist most prominently between us--not God. God, rather, is discussed.
In the Christian community I sense a requirement that the religionless do not impose (because, of course, the religious care so much for the God they already know): I must use the name of God in a qualifying way--to explain, to define the deity. This qualifying of the deity becomes a sort of running catechetics: formal, public speaking tends to be, among us, theologizing. But (and here's the rub) catechetics puts the catechumen under examination. The focus subtly shifts from the subject of the names of God to the speaker of the names of God. A tight, self-conscious, self-defining society needs means to identify its own--who does and who does not belong--and thus its most consecrated language becomes species-specific (however universal it declares its truths to be), becomes a standard for judgment. And the names of God become a kind of shibboleth, either admitting or dismissing the speaker.
Among the religionless, this is possible: that the naming of God is a matter of being. Among the religious, this is possible: that the naming of God is a matter of being right.
In the oppressive atmosphere of the ghetto, young blacks--primarily young black males--have for generations practiced a patterned speech called signifyin'. By it they assert themselves. More to the point, they name themselves publicly. They make a name for themselves and proclaim it.
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