While waiting to board my flight the other day, I was “rockin’ out” to the string quartet version of “Working for the Weekend” by Canadian rock band Loverboy playing through the waiting area sound system. Per usual I was engaging in two of my favorite activities while traveling – people watching and eavesdropping – when bits and pieces of a nearby conversation between three gentlemen drifted over me. I’m not certain of the exact subject, but I heard one individual speaking about their personal faith and its pietistic expression (not a phrase you often hear in an airport) and another individual talking about being “practical” and “pragmatic.” Piety and pragmatism. Pragmatic piety.
My first thought was that it was interesting that the adjective “pragmatic” was being spoken of in tension with the noun “pietism,” implying that pietism somehow, in and of itself, lacked practicality. Unfortunately, just as I was positioning myself to better eavesdrop, the gate agent rudely interrupted the adrenaline-inducing chorus of the string quartet to give pre-boarding instructions. I was unable to hear more, as the conversation between the two gentlemen was swallowed in the ensuing din of passengers preparing to board.
Pragmatic piety, however, stuck in my mind. It kept coming back to me on my flight home, and once home, it danced in and out of my thoughts the whole weekend – the weekend for which, according to Loverboy – I had been working for. At one point, I looked up the definition of pragmatic and, according to Webster, pragmatic is defined as “…dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.” So, I found myself wondering if we in the pietistic tradition have drifted into the realms of a theoretical, theological, and so-intensely-personalized-faith as to be, from a cultural perspective, of little sensible or realistic good.
Most of one side of my family are not people who profess a faith and, given that they love me, they don’t have the outright disdain for evangelicals that many understandably do. However, that being said, they have shared that they feel those evangelicals with whom I associate live in the impractical realms of the theoretical.
In fact, it was an uncle who, years ago while we were discussing the crisis-du-jour, turned to me in exasperation and sarcastically asked “What do you care? You’re going away to heaven anyway, right?” It dawned on me then, that a tenant of theology may have been having (and continues to have) a cumulative eroding effect on how Christians, particularly those of us from the evangelical tradition, engage our world in pragmatic and practical ways.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that he wasn’t completely wrong. I’ve wrestled with the evangelical notion of a heaven or a “celestial kingdom” to which we will be transported when we die. Let’s face it. While the theological discussion on the topic can be intellectually stimulating, we simply don’t know, and won’t know how accurate or inaccurate our understanding of heaven will be until we die.
Of more interest to me, is the natural, human response to something that is temporary?
More to the point, I know my own attitude toward something that is a temporary – “rental-like” so to speak – something that isn’t mine and in which I have no future stake, no skin in the game. If I’m honest with myself, it calls forth a posture that, at its core, is one of relative indifference. So, I wonder about the pragmatic result of a this-world’s-not-my-home-I’m-just-passin’-through perspective when it comes to the here and now in which we live. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me – given human nature – that if we hold such a view, on some level we’d ask ourselves “Why try to set right the world? Why join in trying to fix the world when we know we’re just passin’ through?” It would seem to me that indifference would easily become spiritualized, and resignation to the inevitable decay of this world strangely reassuring – a “piety” that is not practical; not pragmatic. Or as Brian D. McLaren pointed out, “…the kind of person who wants to participate in the healing of the world is very different from the kind of person who wants to leave this world behind so [they] can go to a better one.”
The problem is that such a posture is quite different from the engaged Jesus I know, personally and from the biblical witness. His piety was quite pragmatic, calling out the indifference of the faithful whose “piety” was for show, but had no sensible, realistic, or practical impact. Jesus’ piety, if you will, addressed (and continues to address) such tangible realities as the disparity of wealth, extending dignity to the marginalized, stepping in for the vulnerable, welcoming the refugee, and dying on behalf of so many who didn’t care about him in the least. It’s almost as if Jesus knew and modeled that quietly doing good work – outreach without expectation – was and still is the best expression of our love and devotion to him and to others; that engaging in sensible and practical things “speaks” more loudly than actual words.
It’s what motivates me and why I work for an organization whose founders were determined to live their Christian faith in the streets as well as the pews; pragmatic pietists who in 1886 founded a refuge that housed a hospital on the first floor, a home for the aged on the second floor and an orphanage on the third.
In an increasingly skeptical culture where one’s words matter only until they don’t, this pragmatic piety may be the one remaining and most pure form of communication for followers of Christ to clearly live out their faith.
So perhaps there is something to this “pragmatic pietism.”