If you want to make a postmodern pietist—and I hope you don’t—here are the six ingredients you need:
1. You need an impossible standard. This can be complete personal holiness, as with the historical pietists. Or it can be becoming completely unracist, for multicultural pietists, to name one example. Whatever it is, this goal that can never be reached should be held up as a goal everyone should meet. Both the failure to meet it and the failure to want to meet it are held up as grave sins, even if “sin” language is never used. Finding new sins to detect, or new ways to detect sins already known, is viewed as especially helpful (see ingredient #5).
2. You need constant self-surveillance.1 I do not mean simple introspection. I mean that at every moment, you must watch over yourself to make sure that you are not straying from the path, whatever that path is. When you do stray from the impossible standard—and you will, constantly—you must at every moment ask yourself how exactly you failed this time, what led to your failure, and how you will reorient your very self so that you do not fail again. And when you find that you have not been watching over yourself constantly—another impossible standard—you must question yourself about this latest of your many failures.
3. You need transformative group experiences. Traditionally, these are gripping worship experiences where new pietists are brought into the fold. For our multiculturalist pietists, though, these are workshops where they are led to feel, deeply, the weight of their pervasive racism and devote their lives to becoming completely unracist. Having leaders tell stories of how their lives were improved by devoting themselves to this ruthless spirituality is essential. The leaders should lift up the self-loathing central to this from of pietism as a good and beautiful thing and relate how their lives before their commitment to the impossible standard pale in comparison to a life lived under constant self-surveillance. The end result is more selves reoriented toward the impossible standard.
4. You need unwashed masses, who serve two purposes. First, converting others is a sign of commitment to the impossible standard, so the unwashed masses function as walking, talking targets, as objects in need of the pietist’s attention. Second, the unwashed serve as objects of contempt because the pietist believes that the unwashed should know better, and do know better. In this way, converting one of the unwashed masses is actually awakening a fallen person to something they already knew about themselves but were in denial about. While the unwashed masses alternate between being objects of pity and objects of contempt, the pietist grows grateful that he is not one of them, deepening his commitment to the impossible standard.
5. You need group enforcement. Everyone must watch everyone else to see if anyone is missing the mark, so that the pietist is surveilling not only himself but also everyone else in the group. Since the standard pietists seek to meet is impossible, there is a lot of missing the mark for everyone to see. Punishments will be meted out, formally and informally, privately and publicly, ranging from subtle social slights to public chastisements. These punishments culminate in a shunning from the group, which returns the blackslidden pietist to the ranks of the unwashed masses, a move that threatens that pietist’s very identity. Pietists will avoid being shunned at any cost.
6. Despite constant self-surveillance seeking after an impossible standard, you need a decaying soul. Or, rather, this is the only kind of soul the postmodern pietist will find, in time. Postmodern pietism is a viscious circle. No matter how vigilant the pietist is, he will never arrive.2 As Paul discovered, the Law produces Sin. Pietists have a lot of laws, so there is always plenty of sin. Desperation rises, leading to a pitted out self.
Since this is a recipe, you need all the ingredients or it won’t turn out right. It might turn out to be something else interesting—some form of postmodern fundamentalism perhaps—but it won’t be postmodern pietism.
It’s important we remember just what we’ve got here: the pietism I’ve painted is the psychological equivalent of self-flagellation. And we are teaching it to each other, and to children, and not just inside the confines of conservative Christianity.
I have picked on multiculturalist pietism, but there are other justifications too: environmentalism, vegetarianism, patriotism, and more. What’s important isn’t the particular “-ism,” the chosen ideology, but the form.
You could even say that the pietists I’ve painted here don’t worship their chosen “-ism” at all—however much they think otherwise. What they truly worship is the form of postmodern pietism itself. The “-ism” they claim is merely incidental.
If anyone ever figures out how to market different flavors of postmodern pietism, and make a lot of money at it, we’re all in trouble.
(Photo by Garry Wilmore. Used under Creative Commons license.)
- I have Foucault to thank here. [↩]
- Zeno’s Paradox is a nice illustration of how this happens even for a pietist who is making progress toward the impossible standard. [↩]