During the past 20 years, we have seen a surge of explicitly religious involvement in political life in many areas of the world. Many of these religio-political upheavals contain an open or implicit struggle between efforts at religious restoration and efforts toward religious renewal.
Sometimes a "restorationist" religious feeling has won out--as in Iran, where the subjection of women has been only one element in a passionate effort to return to Islam "as it was," an effort that has so far defeated elements of an "Islamic Left" that were trying to translate Muslim thought in new ways.
Sometimes a "renewalist" religious feeling has won out, as when the black churches of the American South renewed--"made new"--the elements of Christianity in American society, drawing on very ancient strands of nonviolence in Christian thought, but translating them in fresh ways to address a 20th-century society. Similarly, the basic Christian communities of Catholics in Latin America and the liberation theology that has emerged from their work have drawn on old strands of Christian thought, but renewed them in fresh ways.
What these movements for religious restoration and religious renewal have in common is that they pose a radical critique of modern society--the society created in the last 300 or so years by the industrial revolution, explosive technological development, and the use of new means of mass control of large populations. The critique reaches across the conventional secular boundaries to question both capitalism and socialism as they now exist, and although it sometimes coheres with nationalism it often raises problems for that modern ideology as well.
The restorationist aspect of this religious upheaval is relatively easy to understand. We have at least some image in our heads of how the religious traditions used to operate, and we can understand why their surviving institutions and staff--like the mullahs in Iran--would feel threatened by modernism and want to restore their power.
It is a great deal harder to know what the efforts at religious renewal portend, since they claim to incorporate parts of the modern worldview and to go beyond it by drawing on some aspects of very ancient ideas and practices. To much of the secular Left, they are suspect on the basis of the classic Marxist critique that a focus on God necessarily obscures the ability of human beings, moving in concert, to change their own lives. To a those who have encapsulated religion into their private, personal lives, they seem to be twisting and misusing religious language for dangerous political ends.
To those who want to restore older religious practices, the renewal seekers seem to be traitors and liars--describing as "true Islam," "true Christianity," "true Judaism," what no one can remember ever being actually practiced under those labels. And of course to those who hold great power in modernist societies and have an unambiguous commitment to the ideologies of modernism, these movements for religious renewal are simply an enemy.
At the political level, the most basic question these movements pose is whether sets of pre-modern ideas and practices, all of which were forced to retreat and become apologetic during the modern age, have anything useful to contribute to the creation of successful, decent, post-modern societies.
Why were religious traditions forced into retreat by modernism? Basically because they focused on "mystery" as against "mastery." They saw the world as shaped more by an "Other" than by "us"--shaped more by God, infinite, indescribable, only partially revealed and explained, than by the perceptible, organizable energies of humankind.
But the three centuries of modernism have demonstrated the enormous capacity of human will and intelligence to master and transform the planet: nature, social organization and history, even the human psyche. Human beings showed themselves capable of carrying out "miracles" of divine power--of destroying all life as in the Flood, liberating the oppressed as in the Exodus from slavery. Feeding the poor, healing the sick, enlightening the ignorant--all these technology seemed to do. So religion retreated from the public sphere into the private one of individual solace and celebration.
For the last 20 years--or perhaps, it should be dated from 1945, from the simultaneous revelations of Auschwitz and the atomic bomb--there has been a growing doubt that the blessings of modernism came unadulterated. Our ability to destroy human life, or indeed all life, and our continuing march in that direction, come to seem an ironic confirmation of secularism.
Yes, the human race has divine powers, but total mastery of the world seems inexorably tending toward "totaling" the world. Perhaps after all there is a mystery concealed within our mastery? Perhaps after all there is a deep structure or, better, a deep process, whereby the human race cannot really master its own fate--because the mastery cancels itself out? Perhaps what Godel showed--that no mathematical process can be explained in its own terms; a higher system is always required--is in fact true of human history too--not as a mystical revelation, but as an empirical fact?
At the moment when to some people (that is, some "new" people--some secularists) this begins to seem true, the religious traditions begin to seem relevant again on the social and political level. For the religious traditions both accept that there are limits to our mastery, and show ways of setting them.
One of the most important aspects of these limits is what the religious traditions do with time. The traditions use rhythms in time to set limits to the various forms of human mastery: acquisition, overpowering, exploitation. They do not rule out human mastery, but they incorporate it into a larger cycle of mastery-and-contemplation, mastery-and-sharing.
The traditions' rhythmic sense of time was important in pre-modern societies. It was nearly abandoned in the modern age, and indeed one of the crucial definitions of modernity may be that it abandoned any sense of rhythm in time, especially between work and contemplation. Modernity substituted a fear of "wasting" time that could be used "productively"--that is, to master the world.
Can a sense of rhythmic time help to deal with the crises of post-modern societies? Following are areas in which the religious traditions might help to renew our sense of time.
A time to work and a time to rest.
The biblical religious traditions provided for a rhythmic alternation between time for work--the economic development of the world--and time for rest--the contemplation and re-evaluation of the world. The most well-known aspect of this rhythm is the institution of the weekly universal sabbath. There were also rhythms of greater length that dealt with large-scale social structures and arrangements, notably the commands to let the whole land lie fallow in the sabbatical (seventh) and jubilee (50th) years.
In the modern period, the practice of a rhythmic alternation between work time and contemplation time was abandoned on the social level (even though some individuals and small groups preserved it in their private lives) in favor of continuous and unremitting work, the expansion of technology, and exploitative economic development. Even the expansion of the sabbath into a two-day weekend in industrial societies was subverted from within by making the weekend a time of consumption and vacation, rather than contemplation.
This abandonment of rest in favor of continuous economic development, production, and consumption seems to be the most basic characteristic of the modern age--what has made it "modern," across the various ideological boundaries, and what has allowed it to transform the biological and social grounding of the planet.
Could a post-modern society usefully explore this kind of rhythmic alternation as a way of dealing with both environmental problems and with explosive social and technological changes? For example, could there be a periodic pause in technological research and development, to reconsider its directions and intentions?
A time to amass and a time to share.
Closely connected with the work-rest rhythm was one in which society dealt with the products of work already done. In the modern age, the accumulation of wealth and power became much more gigantic--in potential and in actuality--than ever before. Then came a constantly intensifying, increasing struggle and continually worsening exchanges of brutality between those who had accumulated wealth or overwhelming power and those who wanted to share it.
The biblical traditions provided that in the sabbatical year all debts were annulled and in the jubilee year all land was redistributed in equal shares. This biblically rooted pre-modern notion of a rhythm between accumulation and sharing has been abandoned in the modern age--both by ideologies that stress accumulation and those that stress sharing.
Could a post-modern society usefully explore this rhythmic alternation? How could it deal with the problem of the use of power by those who had already amassed wealth and power, to prevent the rhythm of sharing from being acted out?
A time to be born, a time to give birth, a time to die.
The religious traditions emphasized the human life-cycle, celebrated its defining moments, and built both transgenerational families and cultures by enriching the cyclical sense of a life-rhythm.
Secular capitalist and socialist ideologies alike have utterly ignored these "nature" rhythms, whether in the cycles of the earth or the cycles of the human generations--probably because they have been so profoundly convinced that human politics and history are in charge that these nature rhythms felt inconsequential. Modern societies have dulled and confounded the sense of a lifetime rhythm and thus weakened the sense of intergenerational community both in the family and in the society at large, encouraging intergenerational conflict and the objectified use of one generation by another.
Could a post-modern society re-create these rhythms and strengthen these intergenerational linkages, in any of three different ways: in the framework of the biological family? in the framework of "intentional families" built on choice rather than biological connection? on the basis of broad age groups in the society at large and explicit covenantal ceremonies between such age groups?
A time to conflict and a time to unite.
The religious traditions speak a double message about the circle of community. Some strands within the traditions emphasize internal cohesion and a willingness to oppose or even attack outsiders; but other strands emphasize the extension of the bounds of community to the whole human race. In the pre-modern past, one strand of Christian practice used the rhythmic approach to time to limit violence and encourage universal community, by inventing the "truce of God" and "peace of God" as periods of peace even during hostilities.
In the post-modern present, would the deliberate encouragement of rhythmic alternation between recognized times of inward cohesion, separateness, and conflict and recognized times of universal unity be fruitful?
A time to practice and a time to celebrate.
Liturgy, shared ritual and ceremony, comes as crystals of extraordinary time in order to concentrate and intensify the daily life-practice enjoined on the society for its life in ordinary time. Liturgy thus heightens the common commitment of the community to carry out that life-practice.
Shared liturgy strengthens the sense of community that arises from this shared task, so that the community comes to include all members despite barriers of age, ethnicity, class, or others. Can liturgies be developed that will renew the sense of common sharing in a post-modern society?
One of the most interesting of these liturgies of crystallized time is that of pilgrimages to a sacred place. Pilgrimages bring together people across national, political, and class boundaries. They may provide a basis for strengthening transnational ties and commitments and creating a set of checks against war. The Muslim practice of the Hajj to Mecca may be especially instructive, along with Christian pilgrimages to Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Rome, and Jewish pilgrimages to Jerusalem.
Even though present practices are obviously not enough to prevent war, do they point in that direction? Can the notion of sacred times for visiting sacred places be consciously made more universal and emotionally more powerful (for example, pilgrimages to Hiroshima?) so as to develop a transnational network of the religiously active?
Other aspects of the religious traditions might come to be especially important in controlling the excesses of modernism and in creating a fruitful post-modern society. What I have attempted to show here is that the recent upheavals of religious movements are not merely local accidents or the results of leftover social structures, but expressions of profound needs that may have been ignored for three earth-shaking centuries and are now coming back into their own. If so, the world-views that have emerged during, and are products of, the period of modernism (liberalism, socialism, science, nationalism) will probably not be adequate to meet these needs and to transcend the modern period.
On the largest scale of rhythmic time, the last three centuries have been a time for secularism, for the explosion of immense human energies. We may now be at the beginning of a time for the renewal of the pre-modern religious traditions.
Arthur I. Waskow was the editor of Menorah, a monthly journal of Jewish renewal, and the author of God Wrestling when this article appeared.
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