When I write on modernity, I suspect I give off the ‘vibe’ that everything was better in some golden age in the past. At the very least I sound like something is profoundly wrong with the moment in which we find ourselves.
This codes me as ‘conservative’ in the broadest way: conservatives are those who believe in a golden age in the past and progressives those who believe in a golden age in the future. It’s in this sense, if not many others, that you can describe Christianity as ‘progressive.’ There’s something utopian about the vision of the kingdom to come, as there’s something utopian about a vision of Eden spoiled, though to be truthful we must see how the faith also subverts the most basic conservative and progressive aspirations.
I think I can sound deeply nostalgic for a world that once was and a critical reader could easily poke firmly here. After all, I’ve never lived in another age, and they could suggest that such a golden age didn’t ever exist.
I think that they would be right. Consider even the way we reflect on our own childhoods. I was talking the other day about how TV was better when I was a kid. That could be objectively true in some fashion and we could advance some arguments for why that would be, but a large part of this has to be sepia-tinted glasses that make our own recent past look better than today. We all fall into the nostalgia trap, especially when faced with a contemporary situation which poses a problem or causes us pain. It’s natural to look backwards and see a better example of how things were done.
The problem is that even if that’s true it won’t be true in all respects. Our view of things is rarely holistic, which is a feature of humanity rather than a bug: we’re creatures not creators. We should we wary of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, the past was not littered with roses (or electricity).
But something is profoundly wrong with today. This is perhaps only ‘different wrong’ to the past but that doesn’t make it less wrong. The past was better in those respects that critics of modernity criticise even if not in lots of others. It’s not sepia-tinted to suggest so, and we should be able to do so in every age until the kingdom is fully unveiled. Which is to say let’s be wary of nostalgia, but let’s be wary of lazy critiques of it too.
You can see this in the way people discuss a complex and ethically freighted question from the past like that of Christendom. Were we better off in days when the church influenced society vastly more than it does in the modern west? Some will instinctively want to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ like it’s obvious and no right-thinking person would think otherwise. Let’s avoid that knee jerk reaction and instead consider carefully why someone might disagree with us. It’s an academic question in modern Britain, though it might alter some aspects of your current political engagement as a church depending on how you’d answer, it’s not going to be a particularly large factor in whatever decisions you make.
But let’s at least remember that the current ‘settlement’ of the position of the church in our society (which may not feel very settled!) is not how it’s always been. The past will have been better and worse in various ways; seeing that it’s different allows us to better see our modern day and freely critique it rather than assuming that things must always be like this. They will change many times in the lifespans of our churches, even if not in our own lifespans. Though that’s an assumption, I can’t read the future any more than you and everything looks uncertain from where we sit right now.
That’s a positive use of something like ‘nostalgia,’ but there’s a better one which I think is vital for Christian faith.
C. S. Lewis called it sehnshuct, a German word for nostalgia or longing. It’s usually as longing that I’ve discussed it in my writing. It’s a huge theme for Lewis, used more often than it’s mentioned. The novel that encompasses it best is Till We Have Faces. He would speak of it as a nostalgia for a place that we haven’t been. It’s nostalgia for the kingdom of God, for the resurrection and unification of all things.
This form of nostalgia should be encouraged in all churches. We need to read the world to see the way it points beyond itself to something deeper that sits in the future/past. There is a day coming when heaven meets earth and they get married. It will be profoundly similar and in no way the same as the creation we know. When we catch a strain of Bach or see a tree mournful and disrobed for winter something in us catches at a world we don’t know but wish could be.
That wishing is captured in myth and fiction, and the claim of Christianity is that the myths are true and the world we wish for is this one transfigured into the image of Christ.
Which is why nostalgia is good for us. It trains us to read the world. We just need to aim it in the right place.
Photo by Anna Zakharova on Unsplash
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