Thursday, March 19, 2009

debaptism: a theological punch in the nose

A historian, an atheist, a theologian and a missiologist sat around the lunch table. Wearily they blew steam from their morning cup of tea. The atheist searched for his lighter, the theologian thanked God for her sandwich, the historian fretted over the suduko, the missiologist enjoyed the letters to the editor. All four glanced up, intrigued by the TV newsflash “Debaptise yourself!” Turn it up, the athist asked, and they listened intrigued …

The atheist punched the air in delight. At last, a chance to write a wrong. He’d always been angry at the smirk on the Anglican church’s face when it came to baptism, the way that baptismal numbers were used to swell their sense of societal importance, their colonial paternalism that assumed that somehow God owned him. Why should he feel somehow guilty that he never attended the social club that his parents used to attend? How dare the church somehow consider him linked to the judgmental mumbo-jumbo that it pumped out week by week?

The historian was intrigued. A baptism was a fact. You can’t unpick history. What’s done is done, what’s fact is fact. Records are important, accuracy is essential to memory and contentedly, she returned to her suduko.

The theologian was angry. Infant baptism was a sacrament of grace, a sign of God’s embrace and acceptance. Treating it as history was an insult to theologies of covenant, in which God’s people were welcomed despite their enslavement, their doubt, their immaturity, their potential to rebel and wander desert byways. Angrily the sandwich was thrown at the TV, smearing butter over the glass screen as the bishop pontificated.

The missiologist was intrigued. He knew that infant baptism worked best in Christendom, a sophisticated way of telling the Christian story, at the event itself, through the ongoing socialisation expected of parents and church, capped off by confirmation, with the chance for faith to be owned for oneself. A marvellous way to transmit faith in a society with church central. But he knew that at some point, infant baptism must bear the hard scrutiny of post-Christendom. A marginal church must surely seek to renounce privilege.

Yet he’d read Callum Brown’s book, The Death of Christian Britain (Christianity and Society in the Modern World), which charted the de-Christianisation of Britian, not based on numbers, but based on the loss of Christian themes from societal narratives. And Brown’s claim that this was the fault of the church in the 60s, who raised the bar around infant baptism and the expectations for parents to tell the Christian story. In so doing, they cut off their links with a more widespread folkish religion. In other words, get elitist over infant baptism and you lose the chance to tell the story. An intriguing question began to gel. If a post-Christendom church decided to free itself from it’s Christendom rituals, what non-elistist places in contemporary culture might still be carriers of folk religion?

Slowly he turned back to his iPOD. The new U2 album, No Line on the Horizon was playing. The missiologist drummed the beat as Bono screamed “Breathe/Sing your heart out/I’ve found grace inside the sound.”

Posted by steve at 11:01 AM

5 Comments

  1. […] Steve Taylor’s excellent narrative on this video and the whole idea of de-baptism. Tagged as: anglicans, atheists, baptism, […]

    Pingback by New Church Report » Spotlight » De-Baptizing Yourself is Like Unwinding A Clock | Church news, ideas & information from around the web. — March 19, 2009 @ 2:42 pm

  2. It’s hard to know if this means that Atheists view themselves as a counter-religion… “Anglicans: Get ’em young, before Amway does”

    Comment by Spanky — March 19, 2009 @ 9:49 pm

  3. “Do you remember the one about the atheist, the theologian, the historian, and the missiologist”?

    Brilliant, Steve. Absolutely brilliant.

    Comment by Pernell — March 23, 2009 @ 3:57 am

  4. Whats the big deal?

    You just walk away from and forget about a silly little archaic tribalistic ritual that was done to you when you were a baby and thus without your permission, and without you having any idea about what was going on.

    And why not make fun of it. What else is there to do with such one-dimensional silliness.

    As though the Primal Energy that creates and destroys entire galaxies before breakfast, and murders 300,000 human beings in a Tsunami, gives a naked fig about such trivia.

    Comment by Sue — March 25, 2009 @ 1:25 pm

  5. Interesting comment Sue. Are you saying that the guy bringing the protest and making good TV should stop caring and get on with life? He obviously thinks its a big deal (or enjoys the publicity)

    steve

    Comment by steve — March 25, 2009 @ 2:17 pm

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