Abstract
It is beginning to appear that modernity and postmodernity have undermined the strength and meaning of a personal identity that participates in and yet is distinct from a universal humanity. Such a shared humanity has been steadily reduced to a barely unique set of biological and social tendencies. The individual, the self, is both accidental and incidental. Trapped between the meaninglessness of the individual biological machine and the fissiparousness of the concept of the human, people are vesting meaning into group identities that promise both endurance and particularity. And just as these groups offer some a more enduring locus for a sense of self, they equally come under threat of dissolution and destruction. We are mercilessly conscious of history, and of all the lost tribes for whom it is the graveyard. The result is a new anxious tribalism. The sense that a tribal identity is crucial for a meaningful life, lived out in the threat of the destruction of the tribe. A public missiology must understand the social and political effects of this emerging anxious tribalism as it enters into a public discourse about the meaning of the gospel in contemporary society.
Conditions of the new tribalism
Christian mission, the proclamation and realization of the gospel beyond the church, is uniquely tied to public discourse around social and political change in modern democratic societies. The Christian vision of both how individuals and societies structure their lives is not limited to forms of personal behavior and church organization. It extends to social and political behaviors that must both account for and justify themselves within the broader social setting. In short, mission in public demands a public missiology because Christians as agents of social and political change must justify their intentions and actions in public, to the public, in relation to social and political structures shaped by Christian witness.
That public is presently characterized by shifting social structures within which stable public identities change and even break down. In Soul, Self, and Society, a Postmodern Anthropology Mike Rynkiewich deconstructs the idea that there exist distinct, unchanging cultures within which humans understand and construct the meaning of being a self in society (Rynkiewich, 2011). Whether in articulating varied and evolving kinship systems, changing structures of caste, class, and ethnicity, or evolving systems of political and economic power distribution, Rynkiewich shows how an aware anthropology forces missiologists to new understandings of a relevant public voice.
This is particularly true in the North Atlantic region. Religious identities, as we can readily observe through various Pew Research Center surveys, are increasingly unstable (America’s changing religious landscape, 2015). Robert Wuthnow (After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s) and others have highlighted the extent to which, in the West, increasing numbers of persons no longer choose between existing religions and their relatively stable communities, but construct their own religious identity and thus ever-shifting beliefs, rituals, and affiliations (Wuthnow, 1998). Indeed, as Charles Taylor reminds us, religion may be dispensed of altogether in what he calls the secular age (Taylor, 2007).
It isn’t just religious identity that is in flux. The United States in particular is a highly mobile society, so that increasing numbers of Americans have little sense of a hometown identity other than the place they happened to have been born. And beyond the USA migration brings new people into communities who possess an equally fluid sense of belonging. Marriage between multiple ethnic and religious groups over time loosens established identities. Something as seemingly unchangeable as gender is increasingly regarded as a matter of personal choice rather than biological destiny. Thus there is in the modern world, even beyond the North Atlantic realm, a deep consciousness that public identities, the ways in which we are known not only to ourselves, but others, are both chosen and chosen by others in the midst of identity uncertainty and instability.
Facilitating these changes is a shift in the way identity is constructed, from thinking of the self as possessor of primal and unchanging characteristics to the construction of a narrative self. As Calvin Schrag has point out in The Self After Postmodernity, a narrative identity is one in which the past is less a fixed set of characteristics than a matter of selection and interpretation, while the future remains open to choices that may change one’s sense of self in significant ways (Schrag, 1997) Moreover, narrative identities are chosen in a social context saturated with identifying narratives from which one can choose. To “reinvent” one’s self has become a touchstone of modern identity.
We can see this in the dramatic turn in popular television from the human identity and meaning found in the primal family in the 1950s to 1980s (Ozzie and Harriet, My Three Sons, Leave it to Beaver, Bonanza, Dallas) through the transition to literally narrated identity in The Wonder Years to the meaning found in voluntary, even serendipitous communities in the 1990s and up to today (Cheers, Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Big Bang Theory, House, Grey’s Anatomy, and so on). Modern Family offers both a crystallization and narrative exploration of community almost completely divorced from the imagined and imaginable identities of 30 or 40 years earlier. What drives the plot of these new stories is the tension inherit in a temporary confluence of personal narratives and the question of whether a shared narrative can last long enough for any of the characters to gain a real sense of him- or herself in relation to others.
Complexity and instability in forming identities is also driven by marketing. Companies have discovered that using the media to identify, encourage, and even invent new identities is good for business. The vast expansion of media outlets through cable television creates a widening diversity of characters and stories, giving possibilities if not necessarily depth to the emerging tribes of yuppies, hipsters, boomers, emos, bikers, skaters, punks, nerds, geeks, and so on. In a highly mobile society, one in which few of one’s immediate acquaintances are familiar with one’s past, these constantly emerging narratives offer continual opportunities for self-discovery, and with it commercial exploitation. A three year old can join any of these groups if her grandmother buys her the right outfit from Walmart. Indeed, there is a major clothing chain called Urban Tribe.
These three things—the breakdown of stable public identities, the consciousness that identity and affiliation are chosen rather than given, and development of narrative as the basis of identity—provide an important impetus for forming new tribes. When the whole of society no longer supports a particular narrative, a particular identity, whatever that identity may be, then people appear to seek some relief from constant choosing by affiliating with those who have (voluntarily or under compulsion) made the same choice.
Just as importantly, it appears that many will affiliate with those who reject the possibility of any other choice. Although these new tribal identities are chosen, through the exclusion of other choices they assert themselves to be primal, to be beyond choice. The tension between narrative and reality creates the anxiety characteristic of these new tribes and their role in public life.
New tribes
The new tribes, really ersatz tribes, are social groups that appear to offer a stable identity that in the premodern world might have come from the tribe or religious sect into which one was born.
Premodern identities are primal in the sense that they are not chosen but are understood to exist prior to the individual or even group that holds them. Because they are not chosen they are both secure, and they are exclusive and excluding. They distinguish the group and its members from all other possible identities presented by the diversity of persons and groups in the larger cultural or social realm. Moreover they exclude the possibility of crossing from one group to the other. And finally these premodern tribes build their sense of a place in the larger setting of social interactions through what are claimed to be unchanging narratives whose ramifications in their contemporary setting are unavoidable.
The emerging new tribes seek to assert an identity with the characteristics of premodern tribes. Membership is taken for granted as something that chose people rather than vice versa. Tribe members aggressively assert the primacy of their identity as the norm within the larger social setting. They are, like the Comanche of the high planes, simply “the people.” Likewise these new identities are exclusive and excluding, regarding those who are ethnically, culturally, or religiously different as permanent outsiders. And finally the new tribes seek to solidify their identity by participation in the construction of identity through normative narratives that predetermine the possibilities for social interactions with both supposed friends and enemies.
The Tea Party
One example (of many that could be offered) of the kind of new tribe that has emerged is the contemporary Tea Party. It has constructed a primal narrative based on its particular reading of US history, rooted in a mythologized account of the Boston Tea Party and the subsequent American revolution.
The origins of this movement, and of an emerging nativist movement in American politics, appear to be a sense of marginalization by groups within the traditionally conservative Republic Party, a sense increased by the election of the first African American president. Institutional affiliations that appeared to be touchstones of political identity for many Americans have been changing, even breaking down, demanding new sources of identity.
Two narratives, both anachronistic, form the basis for the Tea Party’s identity. One is that of America as a “Judeo-Christian” nation. The Tea Party asserts “a strong belief in the foundational Judeo-Christian values embedded in our great founding documents” (About us, 2012). Like its rendition of colonial history, this is an equally mythological and anachronistic reading of political history. The term “Judeo-Christian” emerges in US discourse only in the 1950s. Kevin Kruse, in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, tells the origin story of this particular narrative, one that is entirely lost to those who identify with it (Kruse, 2015). Yet the origin of the narrative isn’t so important as the fact that it creates a single identity that effectively excludes first atheists and then Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists.
The other narrative is that in which American identity is based on continual participation in the struggle against tyrannical government to preserve a particular reading of the freedoms found in the 1st and 2nd amendments. By stressing that “true American Patriots” agree with this narrative and its non-negotiable principles the Tea Party is both exclusive and excluding, so that members can readily distinguish between themselves and others. Such exclusion is driven home by the assertion “English as a core language is required” and that “illegals are here illegally.” Not surprisingly the Tea Party’s formal statements of faith are shot through with religious language. Gun ownership, for example, is characterized as “sacred.” It is a critical part of a narrative of wary opposition to government by the faithful.
This new tribal identity and narrative offers those who accept it at least the appearance of privilege and stability in a rapidly changing social landscape. It places them at the founding of the United States, and locates them in an ongoing and unceasing story of the nation. What makes this new tribe relevant to Christian witness is its deep engagement in the larger public discourse about US identity, political leadership, and social policies. Itself dismissive of alternative narratives, it cannot be easily dismissed by missiologists concerned with Christian witness.
The new atheism
The same can be said for the Tea Party doppelgänger, the new atheist tribe. This group likewise appeals to the founding principles of the United States, but magnifies the constitution to justify its increasing unwillingness to tolerate religion in forums of public discourse. For example, a recent issue of the AARP magazine that spoke of older Americans being “prayerful” drew, in the words of its editors, “an angry response to mentions of prayer” (An angry response to the mention of prayer, 2015). A letter in that issue made clear what was at stake: “We don’t want to read religious articles.” This author has seen the same thing in responses to his blog post, with aggressive assertions that freedom of religion really should mean freedom from religion.
The sense of threat underlying new atheist assertiveness is not surprising. For much of the latter half of the 20th century a scientific, if not necessarily atheistic framework for comprehending both social and physical reality seems ascendant. An identity is based on a narrative of continual human progress through the gradual elimination of superstition and the increase of rationality held sway from the office of the president down to the public school systems. Then came the rise of Evangelicals as a political force, and soon a force seeking to overthrow all the progress made in public education and wider public perceptions of reality. Atheists were no longer a small avant-garde slowly drawing society into the future. They were a threatened minority whose views were rapidly being purged from the public space.
Writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins characterize an aggressive response to this threat, and the rise of their own form of exclusivism. The new atheist narrative isn’t one of gradual progress toward the elimination of religion and superstition. It is of a battle against ignorance and a place in society for the one true search for truth. It excludes as invalid or irrelevant other stories, such as those of religious revival, and aggressively mocks them through spokesmen like Bill Maher. Only slightly more positively, Carl Sagan in his The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark offered a new narrative of rational triumph over religion, and similar perspectives can be found in the works of physicists Laurence Krauss, Stephen Weinberg, and most recently Neil deGrasse Tyson. Like the Tea Party the new atheist movement takes institutional form in organizations like the Freedom from Religion Foundation, whose celebrity scientist members appear regularly in publications like Scientific American, which give it an organizational center (Freedom from Religion Foundation, n.d.).
Islamic Essentialism
This new tribalism isn’t just manifest in Anglo-American Christian communities or among atheists in the West. One finds it in American Muslim communities that have increasingly narrowed the scope of possible narratives that a “good Muslim” can pursue.
Several factors appear to have led to the emergence of this new identity. One is a relatively rapid influx of Muslim immigrants seeking to preserve their Islamic identity in an overwhelmingly Christian and secular society. Another is the threat felt by Muslims after 9/11, and the need to create both Muslim solidarity in the USA across multiple ethnic and sectarian identities and the need to offer a robust apologetic for Islam at a time in which it is associated with terrorism and violence. And finally there has been the need to preserve a distinctive Muslim identity among second- and particularly third-generation American Muslims who fully participate in the fissiparous forces shaping future American identities.
This new American Muslim tribe has two clear identifiers. The first is a focus on outward signifiers such as conformity of women to the demand to cover their hair, neck, and shoulders and men wearing beards. The second is the normalization of a single narrative centered on an imagined Muslim golden age of true justice, equality, and peace and the rejection of other narratives equally present in Islamic history, not to mention any emerging narratives of Muslim identity.
Both of these aspects of the new Muslim identity are most evident when they are contested, such as when identifying the headscarf with Islam (Nomani and Araf, 2015), or when American Muslim leaders reject any characterization of Islam that doesn’t conform to their narrative of a nonviolent, intellectually progressive Islam, as happened in response to Graeme Wood’s Atlantic Monthly article describing the Islamic nature of ISIS (Wood, 2015). I recently attended a seminar, hosted by the Foreign Affairs Council at the recent Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City. Participants tried to shout down Wood because of his failure to reiterate their narrative of true religion as solely a force for peace.
Anxiety and the new tribes
In all three cases and many others these new tribes emerge to secure an identity for their members in the midst of instability, and play themselves out in public discourse as they try to secure a place in the larger narrative of the nation and world. Yet they and their members remain deeply anxious.
This anxiety arises in part because although the narratives of these new tribes claim to be primal, they are in fact both chosen and constructed. Charles Taylor points out that the naive belief in God that characterizes non-modern societies is unavailable in a secular age. I would argue that, in the same way, the naive belief in primal narratives and identities that characterizes non-modern societies and even modernity is unavailable to postmodern new tribes. Whether one is a Tea Party nativist, a new atheist, or a Muslim essentialist, one is aware that not only has one chosen one’s identity and group, but that others, probably within one’s own family and circle of friends, have made different choices or have dramatically different interpretations of the same narratives.
Moreover, these new tribal narratives are inescapably part of a contentious public discourse over the rights and boundaries of all such narratives. It is the nature of contemporary society that there are no private narrative worlds, and certainly none involving substantial groups of people. At the very least every voter, or consumer, is constantly being sought out in an effort to draw them into some other narrative. In contemporary society everyone is being evangelized, often aggressively, all the time.
Nor can these new tribal narratives escape the reality of diversity, an almost insidious diversity at the heart of all modern social groups. Tea Party nativists now find themselves led by politicians like Ted Cruz who were not even born in the United States. New atheists find that they are in the midst of what Taylor calls “cross pressures” as science faces the finitude of its theoretical and experimental resources and must resort to theories based no less on faith in scientism than those of believers asserting the existence of God (Ellis, 2014). Among Muslims Sunni feminists and other progressives contest the narrative of a single normative Islam.
And finally, all of those immersed in these pseudo-primal narratives are aware not only of other narratives, other identities, but that these other identities are critical to their own continued existence. They cannot tolerate diversity but they cannot live without it. It was a telling moment when the Texas Association of Business told Texas Tea Party politicians to back down on their anti-gay rhetoric and anti-Muslim laws (TAB comes out against religious freedom amendments, 2015). In essence the association reminded nativist, conservative Christian Texans that they can’t have both their exclusionary narratives and a robust economy.
And this only underscores the reality that any narrative dominance, or even secure place in the larger social structures, is continually under threat by global patterns of migration, constantly shifting power structures, and larger economic and political forces these new tribes cannot control. The new tribes are subject to the same postcolonial forces as those faced by much more ancient people groups. So naturally they are anxious. Their identity and thus existence is constantly under threat.
The failure of the imagined universal
To fully appreciate the challenge faced by Christians in witnessing among these new anxious tribes we must also recognize the failure of modernity to secure a primal, universal narrative.
If one reads the founding documents of the United States, and indeed of many other nations that have emerged in the last two centuries, one can see what the Enlightenment offered. It seemed to lay before humanity a world of individual choice, of the possibility that people could now loose the centripetal force of social pressure as easily as balloons, airplanes, and rockets could free us from the pull of gravity. Modernity promised a new kind of identity, one that was intensely personal and yet richer, more lasting, and more universal than the primal identities of ethnicity, religion, and culture and nation.
It offered a universal human identity, given nuance and particularity by citizenship in a nation, residence in a city or village, and membership in any of a myriad of social institutions from clubs to religious congregations to unions. Or, alternatively, it offered a universal human identity emerging with the triumph of the proletariat and creation of a communist utopia. Either way the Enlightenment promised that we could continually choose this universal primal human narrative by choosing just those particular life stories and related affiliations that best suited our individual personality. We could fulfill our personhood through making choices while maintaining a deep sense of security through participation in the fundamental human narrative.
This hasn’t worked out.
The democratic/communist narrative has largely collapsed, betrayed by its own leaders in favor of the lucrative possibilities of totalitarianism and crony capitalism. The democratic/capitalist narrative turns out to have assumed a structure of social institutions running the gamut from the family through volunteer societies to small businesses, to churches, to corporations, to many and varied governments from local to federal and even international.
Yet the assumption of stability was misleading, and existing social structures are in constant flux and often under constant threat from both internal and external forces. A kind of hyper-capitalist ideology has gradually reduced the possibilities for individuals and groups to choose their identity to a single option—consumer. And what increasingly appear to be repeated waves of migration from social instability elsewhere in the world strain, if not always social structures, at least the perception of social stability.
Nor has science offered us a significantly more stable self-understanding. Given charge of articulating the universal, science has steadily reduced our shared humanity to a barely unique set of biological and social tendencies. Humanity is both accidental and incidental. The assertion of long-term stability is seen as sociologically and culturally naive, and the idea of a self as more than a complex and temporary association of atoms is seen as nothing more than a psychological crutch. At a biological level the term “human” signifies next to nothing. A fruit fly shares 95% of our DNA, and chimpanzees and great apes approach being genetically indistinguishable from humans.
Thus in the post-Enlightenment age we find ourselves without a functional primal narrative that is more than the story of random movements of molecules realizing their possible interactions over eons of time, while our individual narratives are not (as we imagine) realized by conscious choice but are rather hobbled together post-facto by brains for which this work of assigning meaning to random events is evolutionarily useful.
There is no cure for anxiety there.
Christian witness amid anxious tribes
I suggest that public missiology in a time of anxious tribalism will be primarily focused upon understanding how Christians can witness to the unity and diversity of human persons and societies as disclosed in God incarnate in Jesus Christ. If in the past the task of Christian mission has been primarily to articulate God’s claim on individuals and societies as disclosed in Jesus Christ, in a time of anxious tribalism our primary task in public witness is to witness to God’s claim about humanity and its transcendent destiny.
In a time of anxious tribalism Christians as agents of social and political change must justify their intentions and actions in public, to the public, in relation to social and political structures, in terms that are cognizant of the anxiety over identity present in the public space, and address it in positive ways.
Traditional Christian claims made on individuals, particularly when they are accompanied by the demand to abandon one community and embrace another, appear in a time of anxious tribalism to threaten identities and communities more than to assert the righteousness and grace of God. In a time of anxious tribalism we must learn to engage in public discourse around discovering a significant universal human narrative that recognizes and draws strength from a diversity of cultural, religious, social, and individual human narratives.
It is impossible in this brief article to fully articulate such a theology of Christian witness in public discourse, but I believe that its key tasks are clarified by the understanding of anxious tribalism above.
Challenging narratives of exclusion
A public missiology will begin by challenging those narratives put forward in current Christian witness that exclude or deny the identities of persons in the public space. One example is the entire “Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve” religio-political discourse. It both reduces the scriptural beginnings of the human narrative to a parody for political purposes and does so in a way as to deny a public identity to gay couples. Similarly public missiology must address whether armed protesters who march in front of mosques in the name of Christ, and preachers who denounce Islam and Muhammad from their pulpits as a form of evangelism, constitute valid forms of Christian witness, necessary assertions of freedom of expression, or forms of hate speech. Beyond this public missiology must ask which freedoms constitute the appropriate framework for Christian witness in a society that allows full freedom of expression while also guaranteeing people of all religions or no religion at all full, safe access to the public space, including equal protection under the law.
Such questions are not relevant only in the USA or Western environments. Christian minorities in democratic societies such as India, Malaysia, and Indonesia must also formulate understandings of a distinctly Christian witness to the nature of a democratic, multireligious society. And they must do so recognizing that while the precariousness of their own situation invites an anxious tribal response, they continue to be seen as representatives of Christian colonialism and thus themselves may be seen as anxiety-creating agents.
Eschatological narratives of unity and diversity
It is not self-evident, particularly to those who feel their communities at threat, that the freedom for all religions to proselytize in a global free market for religious ideas is a manifestation of God’s love and grace revealed in Jesus Christ. Thus a public missiology addressing an age of anxious tribalism should witness to how the universality of God’s grace can be manifest in the multiform particularity of contemporary society rather than being deployed to destroy it.
One approach to this may be to embrace theologically, and then interpret into secular discourse, the reality well attested in Scripture that human unity is eschatological, and not merely primal. It has been almost reflexively Christian to think of difference as a function of deviation driven by sin, and therefore of unity as a process of purification. Certainly some of the anxious new tribes are seeking to establish their identities on this basis. But in an increasingly complex and diverse society such efforts are doomed to both fail and increase the anxiety of those being purified out of existence.
Beyond exposing the insufficiency of the notion of diversity as deviation, a public missiology must also interrogate the notion that the eschatological ending of humanity is cultural and religious uniformity. The New Jerusalem, as depicted in the book of Revelation, isn’t the capital of a Christian empire whether progressive or evangelical. It is, rather, a sanctuary for a great diversity of those willing to put aside evil and be embraced by God’s healing grace. In it the multiplicity of nations and cultures is received because they bring with them a multiplicity of gifts. And such a vision must take into account those portions of the Old Testament narratives such as Isaiah 19:19–23, Amos 9:7, and Malachi 1:11 reminding Israel that that it has no exclusive claim on God and the worship of God, just as the New Testament narratives remind us that Jews have no exclusive claim on the possession of faith. Since Scripture asserts that the gates of the New Jerusalem are eternally open it is wise for us to avoid shutting them in anyone’s face.
A gospel without anxious urgency
A public missiology needs to also challenge the urgency characteristic of so much Christian witness. Whether in seeking to claim the world for Christ in the first generation of the 20th century, or to free the world from poverty and injustice and ring in God’s reign in the 21st century, modern Christian witness has shown an impatience to save souls and reform society. Each of these endeavors creates anxiety among those whose sense of identity is under threat.
Among those for whom membership in a family, clan, or tribe is an essential part of human personhood, efforts of Christian evangelists to draw off their brothers and sisters one by one will hardly seem like good news. The new and open family of the church is a priceless opportunity for the outcast and the marginalized, but its adoption process looks more like sectarian kidnapping to kinfolk who genuinely love and care for their children. A public missiology must ask whether freedom of religion necessarily entails a free market for religion, and whether urgent evangelism creating anxiety and defensiveness is essential to the gospel.
A public missiology will also recognize that among anxious tribes social reform may create as much anxiety as it relieves. Colin Woodard, in his book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, reminds us that North America is home to a number of different value-forming narratives, as well as groups whose different identities in relation to government and governance gather around those narratives (Woodard, 2011). What looks to one group like common-sense governmental action for the good of society may look to another like an unwelcome intrusion into matters left best in the hands of individuals and their close kin. A public missiology will need to explore how Christian witness to the public good can identify and draw on shared values rather than pitting competing narratives against each other. And it will need to address what political structures are capable of discovering those shared values, particularly at a time when such structures appear to have completely collapsed.
While the drive to build God’s reign on earth may seem attractive to those behind the wheel, it can create a powerful sense of anxiety among those who fear that they, and their stories and the values contained in those stories, will simply be run over by a Christian juggernaut or its political proxies of one sort or another. Instead of public missiology built on being the successors to John the Baptist in driving the gospel steamroller over every moral or faith impediment to God’s coming reign, we might return to those more humble images of salt and leaven that are relevant to a modest role in contemporary society and thus form a firmer basis for realistic Christian political theory.
Narrating diversity rather than divergence
Another way to alleviate an oppressive urgency is to focus on the Christian understanding of public life in the complex middle of the Christian narrative rather than its anthropocentric and ethnocentric beginnings. Rather than reading our narrative as one in which God creates a world that slides into unfortunate divergence longing for cultural and religious unity restored in the Christian church, we might consider both the act of creation and the Creator as drawing us all toward a diversity that extends eternally, unified but not made uniform by Christ.
It is in such a narrative that the Christian narrative intersects and indeed reiterates and deepens an emergent public discourse around the human as a uniquely responsible creature; the only one capable of shaping the whole of creation into either its own flawed and self-destructive image, or that of something greater, more complex, richer, and certainly more likely to survive than mere earthbound humanity.
There is a legitimate theological difference between seeing the eschatological visions of God’s reign as ideals to be realized in public life and promises in which to hope, and this difference will need to take center stage in public missiology. Making this distinction will free us to focus on the practical ways in which Christian witness in the realm of public social life alleviates suffering and injustice and creates opportunities for growth. It will leave the reign of God as an inspiring vision, one that can inspire everyone precisely because it is God’s reign and not the reign of God’s responsible but limited and anxious creatures.
If we tell our story by embracing a biblical narrative in which God, and not humans, has the final say, it will both have credibility and bolster public discourse shaped around the reality of actual and increasing social diversity. This is a narrative that offers just what the ideological narratives of the 20th century, which are nothing more than fantasies of Eden, and the contemporary narrative of science (bound to entropy) do not offer, an embrace of both our sense of human responsibility and our longing for transcendence.
The gospel story of God’s providence
Finally, public missiology for anxious times must recover a sense of God’s providence and project it into both the public sphere and the future if we are to engage in public reflection on God’s mission in our world. If we look closely I believe we will find it is rather liberating for public Christian witness to abandon making demands on God’s behalf, something that inevitably both appears laughably egotistical and creates quite warranted anxiety, to showing the multiple ways that God’s providence is at work inviting human participation from a diversity of groups in a diversity of forms.
It is useful to recall that the apostle Paul regarded God at work in just those human powers that were persecuting him and the nascent Christian community (Rom 13:1–7). Paul wished for rulers and emperors that they would know what he knew, not so that they could become God’s instruments, but so that they would know whose instruments they already were. In a modern democracy God’s rule isn’t absent, it is simply unrecognized by those whose lives and society would be most enriched and ennobled if they could begin working with instead of against God’s will.
And this may be the most important contribution of a public missiology in a time of anxious tribalism: to articulate the Christian confidence that God is at work through the mechanisms of government, and the ways in which those mechanisms can be changed to allow even greater scope for individuals and groups to join in that divine work.
Conclusion
Public missiology in an age of anxious tribalism needs to show what seems to me to be revealed throughout the long arc of the scriptural narrative; that God’s providential leading of humanity toward God’s reign appears in the most surprising and socially marginal of places. If Christian mission in the public realm is shaped around exposing, revealing, God at work across all the anxious tribes, it will offer an embracing narrative that allows the aspirations for a real and stable identity to be realized without abandoning the particular life stories that have shaped individuals and communities both through history and in our current time. That seems to me, if not the entire gospel, the particular good news that Christ offers in our time.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.