The Irrelevance of Relevance

Some words are used less to convey thought than to induce an emotional attitude. I am not speaking about the emotional freight that all words carry and that is properly exploited by every competent speaker or writer. I am referring to the misuse of words in order to trigger what literary critics call a “stock response.”

Robert Louis Stevenson once remarked, somewhat cynically, “Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords.” A dictionary definition of catchword is: “A temporarily popular, often meaningless, phrase in politics, etc.” I would define it myself as a means of catching the intelligence and holding it captive in a net of prejudice. Once a catchword has ceased to be popular, we are all eager to ridicule it. Today we refer contemptuously to the cant of politicians who appeal to motherhood and the flag in order to conceal their lack of principles. Yet, while a word or phrase remains popular, we challenge it at our peril. Relevance is such a word.

Relevance has become to a large extent today’s criterion of value. It certainly outranks goodness. If someone says, “This seems good to me,” someone else will almost certainly say, “Yes, perhaps. But is it relevant?” No longer is it enough to prove worth unless relevance also can be claimed; and, by the same token, if relevance is granted, then the notion of worth is not even taken into account. In the university, subjects are not estimated on the basis of their promoting intellectual agility or enlarging the cultural horizons. More and more, the criterion is whether they can be made to seem relevant, and therefore immediately attractive. The shibboleth of relevance has also come to dominate the realm of religious discussion. And that is my concern in this essay.

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Since sacred scriptures are widely judged to be irrelevant, I shall draw my text from a self-proclaimed secular source. The following statement comes from the preface to Gustave H. Todrank’s book The Secular Search for a New Christ (Westminster, 1969):

Traditional Christianity is largely irrelevant to the current world situation. For any religion to become and remain a vital force in the lives of a new generation it must be remodeled from time to time. This is especially important in times of rapid and basic social change. Ours are such times, and Christianity has not kept pace.

I have chosen this passage simply because I happened just recently to open the book it introduces. I am sure you have heard the same sentiments, expressed in almost identical terms, dozens (if not hundreds) of times. I know that I have.

Ours is a time of rapid social change, so all the champions of relevance assure us. Perhaps. Yet, very evidently, it is also a time of monotonous repetition of clusters of catchwords, as though the contemporary mind were afraid of encountering a new idea but must be comforted by settling within a narrow circle of familiar cliches. Consider how the title The Secular Search for a New Christ echoes so many others in recent years. To quote three titles only: Gregor Smith’s Secular Christianity appeared in 1966, W. R. Miller’s The New Christianity in 1967, and John J. Vincent The Secular Christ in 1968. This was also the period in which the so-called New Quest for the Historical Jesus was much to the fore. Thus the words making up the title of Todrank’s book are all current catchwords. And any combination of these words would add up to the same thing. Instead of The Secular Search for a New Christ we could substitute The New Search for a Secular Christ, or The Search for a New Secular Christ, or The New Secular Search for a Christ.

The dictionary reminds us that a catchword may well be meaningless. It would seem, at any rate, that confidence in repeating it is usually in inverse proportion to careful consideration of its meaning. A short time back there was a conference at Notre Dame University to discuss the impact of secularity upon religion today. Disagreement about the meaning to be attached to the word secularity was so great that one learned gentleman said the debate had taught him one thing: that he would never use the word again, since it was so fraught with ambiguity. Well, my subject is the meaning of the word relevance. And I shall argue in a similar direction, though I hope to reach not altogether so sweeping a conclusion as to rule out the use of this word entirely.

The word is ambiguous, of course. Confronted by the opening sentence of my chosen text, we might read it in varying ways. “Traditional Christianity is largely irrelevant to the current world situation.” We might mean by that that the two simply move in different dimensions, and so cannot meet. This would be a plain statement of fact, as when Paul Tillich affirms that, in his opinion, theology and philosophy cannot fight because they have no common basis. Or we might mean that the current world situation is a situation of blindness and ignorance of truth. This we might express when, upon hearing that a man on an LSD trip has walked out a seventh-floor window and fallen to his death, we remark, “Of course, laws of the external world would be irrelevant to anyone in his state.”

However, in the given context, although ambiguity exists, no ambiguity is intended. We can be sure that the writer means to tell us that the current world situation is such that everything must relate to it, directly and positively. And, because traditional Christianity does not show any such relation, it must be wiped off the slate of things that count.

Now, religiously minded persons who have not surrendered all belief in traditional Christianity (or in Judaism, which is equally charged with irrelevance) feel such a charge to be slanted and unfair. Their most usual reaction, however, is to protest, “Oh, but it really is relevant to the world situation, relevant at the very deepest level.” Or perhaps those who wish to be thoroughly honest and objective may suggest, “Well, it may have been largely irrelevant in the past. But that was because it was not really true to itself, and we must work to see that religious faith becomes a very relevant factor in today’s world.”

Both these reactions have some justification. Yet, tactically, they are very weak as a counterattack. The first is easily met by the retort, “What you call relevance on a deep level is precisely what the contemporary world knows to be irrelevance.” And the second brings the reply, “So long as you are tied to the past, to traditional and outmoded concepts, you can never be open to the present and the future. Only a clean break with tradition and a new beginning can bring you into a position of relevance.”

My personal belief is that it is impossible to argue about religious faith on the basis of relevance. We must, instead, insist upon the irrelevance of relevance and argue upon the basis of truth and truth claims. Here I am speaking as one who, as it happens, is deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian tradition (though, I hope, in a flexible and fair-minded way). But I am speaking also as someone who dislikes shoddy thinking and slogan-mongering, whether it be advanced by the orthodox or the heterodox, by the committed or the uncommitted.

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Relevance, I submit, is irrelevant if we wish to make any positive and meaningful statement. For in the world we live in, nothing can be finally irrelevant. To deny this would be to contradict ourselves. Suppose we make the statement that X is irrelevant. This statement must be itself relevant. Yet we cannot make it without mentioning X. Then X too is proven relevant. You will see that this argument is simply a variant of Augustine’s argument against universal skepticism. Anything whatsoever that is—in any sense—is relevant to everything else that is. Thus simply to speak of relevance is to say nothing more than that we are speaking about something in connection with something else, which is the condition of all speech. For speech to be informative we must assert why we believe X to stand in a certain relation to Y. That is, we must make a truth claim.

Theoretically, everything is relevant to everything else. This truth is illustrated in the old saying that one cannot move a single pebble on the beach without affecting the entire universe. But in practical life we recognize degrees of relevance and irrelevance. The hunter picks out those small indications in the total landscape through which he moves, indications that are relevant to his following the track of his quarry. The historian examines historical documents and selects items that are relevant to the subject of his research. Such activities show, in Aristotelian terms, the use of practical reason.

In the arena of practical reason, the judge of what is relevant and what irrelevant is the man of practical wisdom, and his judgment is relative to his field of specialization. Thus the historian’s knowledge of what is relevant in his field will not serve him if he goes hunting. So relevance can never be established a priori. In some areas, in courtroom procedure, for instance, rules for determining relevance can be laid down. Yet, even here, there can be no finality. Fans of Perry Mason know very well that it is exactly the question that Hamilton Burger objects to as “immaterial, irrelevant, and incompetent” that secures the final triumph of justice.

I have entitled this essay “The Irrelevance of Relevance,” since my argument is that an undefined appeal to relevance says nothing at all. I might equally well have chosen the title “The Relevance of Irrelevance” in order to bring out the other side of the paradox. For, indeed, man has achieved nearly every advance in his knowledge by bringing into relation things apparently unrelated: that is, showing the irrelevant to be relevant.

The history of science is packed with examples of the relevance of the irrelevant. Sir Isaac Newton discovered the relevance of the fall of an apple to the orbits of the planets. Samuel Pepys records, of Charles II’s visit to the Royal Society, that “his majesty laughed mightily” on learning that the members of the Society had done nothing since its founding except to attempt to weigh air. However, the merry monarch did not have the last laugh, since this apparently absurdly irrelevant activity was to revolutionize our world. It is because preconceived ideas of relevance are fatal to the progress of knowledge that Einstein said the most valuable asset for a scientist was imagination.

Today, because we live in a technological society made possible by scientific research, scientists are no longer scoffed at. Their work is very widely considered, without question, to be the touchstone of relevance. But poetry is mostly considered a luxury, irrelevantly decorative. Nevertheless, the poets are the shapers of our language; and language, in the last resort, controls the direction of our ideas. Poetic images bring together widely separated ranges of experience into an imaginative unity. Where poetry is neglected, our imaginations atrophy and our vision of the universe becomes narrow and poor.

As I see it, the popularity of the catchword relevance today is a symptom of such impoverishment. And I believe it to have contributed more than a little to the increase among us of polarized opinion—and so of violence. After all it is not a great step, psychologically, from judging another man’s beliefs irrelevant to thinking his continued existence unnecessary. Asserting for ourselves the unqualified right to decide what is relevant—assuming that there can be no argument about it—indicates a failure in imagination. And it indicates an even greater failure in imaginative sympathy. For it is to deny to others the right to live within the same universe with us, unless they think precisely the same as we do.

Not every appeal to relevance, of course, invokes the full logic of its presuppositions. Yet to dismiss anyone’s belief as irrelevant, especially without specifying very precisely the criterion used to determine relevance, is to enter the dangerous territory of arbitrary pronouncement. And the territory is no less dangerous if it is entered chiefly because a lot of other people have gone there first and it seems to be the “in” place. The road to hell is said to be paved with good intentions. The same road is also worn smooth by the feet of sheep, each sheep following the one in front of it. The fact that we are urged to seek relevance rather than truth makes conformity a virtue, since the bogey of irrelevance that is waved in our faces is clearly the balloon of social unpopularity inflated. How terrible a fate to be left behind while the rest of the crowd streams by! Who would be so bold, when placed in such a predicament, as to ask where everyone is actually going, or why?

More than a hundred years ago Søren Kierkegaard warned that the age of the crowd was upon us. In such an age, said Kierkegaard, people would not think of deciding for themselves. They would follow the advice given to children going off to a party: “Look and see what the others are doing, and behave like them.” Kierkegaard did not foresee that men could carry out the process quite easily by spreading around the catchword relevance. He did see that the authority that man in the crowd would be willing to obey would be the abstract coercion arising from the crowd itself.

With these thoughts on relevance in mind, I return to my text. Let me quote it again:

Traditional Christianity is largely irrelevant to the current world situation. For any religion to become and remain a vital force in the lives of a new generation it must be remodeled from time to time. This is especially important in times of rapid and basic social change. Ours are such times, and Christianity has not kept pace.

When this writer says that religion has to be “remodeled,” he uses an image derived from engineering, and familiar to us particularly in connection with the automobile industry. He seems to assume that religion follows the pattern of industrial production. It must keep pace with the market and meet the demand of consumers, who will certainly demand the latest model off the assembly line.

This seems to be a naïve assumption. If we look at today’s scene, the fastest-growing and most pervasive religious phenomenon is probably the cult of astrology. This cult makes no attempt to “keep pace” with the contemporary world but retains a fully traditional—indeed archaic—form. And the same may be said of other popular cults: divination, Tarot-pack fortune-telling, Krishna devotion, witchcraft, and the search for spiritual liberation through drugs. (The last named certainly uses new drugs made available by modern science as well as very ancient ones, but its basic character comes down from early times unchanged.)

In fact, the rapid spread of such cults is largely to be explained by the fact that they are “irrelevant” to “the current world situation.” Disillusionment over the values promoted by our mass society created by technological know-how, with its incessant demand for change and its faith in material progress, has led people to turn back to the spiritual resources of pre-industrial societies. In the period when the scientific attitude was proving its ability to transform the world, religion seemed to be increasingly ineffective, as all religious beliefs were under attack for being obscurantist and superstitious. Now we are seeing the revival of practically every type of superstition among those who have grown up outside any religious tradition.

Those who have kept more or less within the living tradition of Judeo-Christian faith do not give us so clear a picture. This is natural enough, since they have been more exposed to cultural conditioning. The churches and synagogues to which they belong have had to come to terms, over a long period, with the prevailing culture and its values. Yet, as far as I can gather, it is the liberal congregations that have been most affected by the so-called crisis of faith, and the conservative ones that have retained the greatest attraction for the young.

The large number of theological movements succeeding one another during the past ten years or so is an indication of a desperate search for the illusory goal of relevance. We have seen the New Theology connected with the names of Bishop Robinson and Bishop Pike, the Death of God Theology, the Theology of the New Hermeneutic, Secular Theology, the Theology of Hope, the Theology of Revolution, and now the Theology of Futurology. (Futurology, the latest theological “fad,” seems to me just as implausible as astrology and not nearly so colorful.) Each of these movements has made a bid for popularity by attempting to prove itself “relevant” to the contemporary world. It has done so by catching hold of some aspect of modern life that it thought expressed the contemporary consciousness and offering a religious option exactly fitting this.

Does modern man wish to be free from tradition and to value only what is the creation of the moment? Then the New Theology will be relevant! Does modern man say that God is unbelievable, an outmoded relic of the past? Religious Atheism says so too! Are philosophers talking about Hermeneutic? The New Hermeneutic can cap that! Do Marxists predict a glorious future of freedom under socialism? The Theology of Hope has no other theme! Is there resentment against the establishment and disenchantment with political liberalism? Jesus was the first revolutionary … or perhaps it was Moses! Anyway, real religion is certainly radical religion! If modern man is secular man, then religion is secular too—making us impatient to give our all to the Secular City. Or if there are signs that people are turning to the inner life of the mind, then religion will teach them to celebrate life and to rejoice in the glory of being truly human!

Each of these movements promises to be more relevant to the hour than its non-religious rivals. Unfortunately, theology is always bringing forward its suggestions just a little late; the caravan of modernity has already moved on to another destination. The person whose sole desire is to be in the fashion set by someone else is destined always to look old-fashioned. He puts on discarded clothes.

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The concern of faith is with truth—the divine truth that lies beyond all passing fashions. If a faith is rooted in truth it is eternally relevant, and it does not need to prove itself relevant to the current situation; viewpoints concerning the current situation have to show themselves to be relevant to it. An untrue faith is not only irrelevant—it is misleading, injurious, blasphemous, damnable.

The present preoccupation with environmental pollution threatens to become a fad, like so many other causes that have been taken up in recent years. It has already become so, insofar as it has been put under the rubric of relevance. Politicians, commentators, teachers, preachers, and other persons who address the public today must do one thing to prove their relevance: they must go through the ritual of denouncing pollution with the same vehemence with which, in the fifties, Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced Communism. There are even churchmen who have identified the fight against pollution with the Kingdom of God—trying, once again, the futile old tactic of attempting to prove religion relevant by walking behind the world and picking up any slogan it happens to drop. (The children of light, Jesus might have said, are considerably slower on the uptake than the children of darkness. They specialize in prophecy-the-day-after-it-happens.)

Nevertheless, anti-pollution has one virtue as a cause, even though it can degenerate into a catchword. Pollution is an objective fact that stands as evidence that it is not what we happen to imagine to be relevant that counts. It is truth that counts. It is what actually is, and our coming to make our world what it is today shows how reality breaks in, finally, as judgment upon our indifference to truth.

The unchecked growth of pollution over the past two hundred years is a striking example of the evil fruit borne on the tree of the Cult of Relevance. When the industrial revolution was beginning, those who objected to the ugliness of the new towns and the rape of the countryside were laughed at, or reviled as enemies of progress. Their objections were considered completely irrelevant in face of the current world situation, a situation in which wealth was increasing and affluence and leisure seemed a future certainty for every one. Now we are seeing the cost of imagining that what we call irrelevant can be put aside for ever. This neglected chicken has come home to roost with a vengeance.

Well, consciousness of how the threat of extinction through pollution has come upon us will not bring us to faith. Yet it may bring us to a little humility, which is the soil in which faith grows. The fact that pollution is not a sudden calamity, that it has a history, and that we have been nurturing it ourselves for a long time, unaware of what we were doing—all this should help us to understand a number of things. First, of course, that most of our pronouncements about relevance are likely to be ludicrously far off the mark. Second, that we have to renounce the stupid prejudice about the past being over and done with, so that only the contemporary can be relevant. Third, then, that the assumption that everything in the world follows the pattern of consumer products is unimaginative nonsense. Ideas do not grow old in the way in which household gadgets do; the latest philosophy is not, like the latest detergent, the most effective. Fourth (coming back as it were to the first point), that wisdom was not born with us and will not die with us. It is fine and well to talk about taking up our responsibility as members of humanity and vowing to bring in the human day. Yet it is perhaps more necessary for us to remind ourselves that we are dust—glorious dust, perhaps, but dust—lest our boasts of today cause those who come after us to turn and curse us.

A short time ago a book of essays came out entitled The God I Want. This seems to me to be the quintessence of the cult of relevance, revealing its idolatrous core. Faith starts, at the very least, from the wish to discover The God I Must Acknowledge, Since He Is. Common sense can lead us to recognize the irrelevance of relevance. But grace alone, the kindness of the God who is faithful and true, can lead us out of our narrow prejudices and self-induced fancies into the largeness of the truth that comes from Him.

Kenneth Hamilton is professor of systematic theology at the University of Winnipeg. This essay was delivered in March, 1971, in the Joseph S. Atha Memorial Lectureship at Country Club Christian Church, Kansas City.

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