From the Archives: "The Liturgies of Church and State"
Each month, our blog features articles from the archives of Liturgy. Our goal is to share the wisdom from decades past so that we might celebrate the work and insights of these excellent ministers and scholars.
At this time in the world’s experience of changing national policies and practices, the loss of churches, and especially with the advent of polarized citizenry in many countries, William Cavanaugh’s article “The Liturgies of Church and State” offers food for thought about the rituals we undertake to sustain church and non-church communities. He describes the ritual gestures and objects that ground the nation (flag, pledge, song, etc.) just as religious objects (cross, menorah, prayer rug, etc.) define and bring faith to life. His argument is trained on the demise of Christian liturgical relevance, saying that because of the distinction between “sacred” and “secular,” Christian ritual practice has been split off from the world God created. He makes his case by suggesting an erasure of the distinction between sacred and secular. –– Melinda Quivik
Selected Quotes from
“Ritual Music and Formative Spirituality”
~ ~ ~
The problem is that “sacred” has been opposed to “secular,” and the two are presumed to describe two separate—but occasionally related—orbits. The problem is not simply that this separation leaves the church’s liturgy begging for relevance to the “real world.” The problem is rather that the supposedly “secular” world invents its own liturgies, with pretensions every bit as “sacred” as those of the Christian liturgy, and these liturgies can come to rival the church’s liturgy for our bodies and our minds.
~ ~ ~
Liturgy in a basic sense enacts and maintains community by the ritual remembering or re-presentation of foundational narratives, thereby helping to construct the perceived reality in which each member of the community lives.
~ ~ ~
Patriotic liturgies are cyclical, constantly establishing the present reality by reference to past sacrifice which has triumphed over chaos. The present tries to re-present a link with the founding sacrifices through ritual. . . Thus, D-Day celebrations were marked by guilt that the present generation is merely living off the sacrifices of those who died there. . . In contrast, the Christian liturgy is not merely cyclical but points forward to the eschatological consummation of history in which violence and division is overcome. The Eucharist is the re-presentation of Christ’s foundational sacrifice, but it does not re-sacrifice Christ, nor is new blood sacrifice demanded of us, for as Hebrews makes plain, Christ died “once and for all” (Heb. 7:27, 9:12, 10:1).
~ ~ ~
We therefore approach the altar not marked with guilt but “with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Heb. 10:22), for the altar we approach is not bound by a bloody past, but is a
foretaste of a perfect future.
~ ~ ~
Patriotic liturgies have succeeded in imagining communities because Christian liturgies have failed to do so in a fully public way. As the church expanded after Constantine, Christian worship was not centered on the parish but on the whole city. No Roman or Greek assumed a city could exist without a public cult. The church sought to replace the pagan cult of the city with the Christian liturgy. Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other feasts therefore generally took the form of a series of services in churches and public spaces, linked by public processions, totaling six to eight hours. Here was the church taking itself seriously as nothing less than “the embodiment in the world of the World to come.” Much of this way of imagining the world has been lost as the liturgy has shrunken to a short, semiprivate gathering.
~ ~ ~
William T. Cavanaugh is associate professor in the theology department at St. Thomas University, St. Paul, Minnesota. He has authored a number of articles and books, including
Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ, in the series Challenges in Contemporary Theology, and Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time.
Cavanaugh, W.T. “The Liturgies of Church and State” Liturgy 20, no. 1 (2005): 25–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/04580630590522876.
If you would like access to this article, please follow this link.