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S tarting with its first issue, Wired magazine has featured an unusual item on its masthead. Along with the customary job titles, there is a listing that reads: "Patron Saint: Marshall McLuhan." If Books & Culture were to follow suit, we'd have to list a number of names, not just one, but among them for certain would be Stanley Hauerwas.
Hauerwas is professor of theological ethics at Duke University's Divinity School. He is the author of many books, including A Community of Character, In Good Company: The Church as Polis, and, with Charles Pinches, Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics (all three of which are published by the University of Notre Dame Press).
A Methodist who draws on diverse sources—especially Roman Catholic and Anabaptist—Hauerwas is a profane, pugnacious pacifist. His understanding of the church was well summarized by Rodney Clapp more than a decade ago in Christianity Today (Sept. 5, 1986): "Worshiping together and supporting one another in community, Christians are a sign to the world. Sustained by the miracle of the Holy Spirit, the church is a palpable presence proving, by its existence and unique character, that the way of the world is not the only way—and certainly not the true way—to live."
Clapp talked with Hauerwas in Durham, North Carolina, this summer. Expletives mostly deleted.
What's the biggest challenge facing the North American church today?
It's very simple: survival. And surviving is a big thing. By survival I mean sustaining the everyday practices that make Christians Christian. Robert Wilken, in The Christians As the Romans Saw Them, explains that the Romans didn't notice the Christians for a long time because they just weren't that significant. Pliny, when he finally noticed the Christians, said, "I can't figure out who these people are. I think they're a burial society because they go out to the cemeteries."
That's a pretty good description of Christians. We're a burial society. We know how to bury people in a way that shows they are part of our community and our community's ongoing memory. That's a lot, to be a burial society in the kind of world in which we live. My own view is that within a hundred years, Christians may be known as those odd people who don't kill their children or their elderly. That's a lot, too. And that's what I mean by survival: maintaining everyday small lines of resistance to a world gone mad seeking perfection.
Right now we're imperiled both within and without. We have lost confidence in our common actions—our basic convictions and practices—and because of that we have become shrill. People get concerned about making our common actions meaningful, and you get bizarre things like the church-growth movement, which is surely a sign of unbelievable desperation. Or, to take another example, Methodism looks like it may well come apart on the gay issue, which is a very strange thing to have happen. And so we're threatened from within, having lost a sense of internal discipline that makes any sense of our lives as Christians.
That in turn means that we're threatened from without, because the people outside can't tell that there's any difference between being Christian and anything else. So they wonder, what's the point? The North American church is in a very awkward time.
But Christians are obligated to be hopeful, and I'm hopeful because this is about God, after all. It's not about the survival of the North American church. On the whole, Christianity is over in the West. And there's not any great tragedy in that—it won't be long before the churches of Africa and Asia are sending missionaries here. That's okay. Christianity is never dependent on numbers. And I think what has primarily killed us, by the way, in spite of all my criticisms of liberalism, is wealth. It's very hard to be Christian and wealthy.
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