Sociology and theology, friends or enemies? For some sociologists, theology is as irrelevant as religious faith to their work – what they are concerned with is practice, and, as Kieran Flanagan points out, often their work is one of exposing contradictions in practice to a religion’s demands. But, try as they might, sociology and theology seem unable to avoid each other. For sociological research, religion seems to crop up everywhere, whether in a broader sense – people who openly say that football is their religion, or jazz – or even, which is the great focus of Flanagan’s study, that it’s in ‘the missing’. Flanagan’s standpoint is that we’re not living with secularism: we’re living with the post-secular. We’re living in a society which is already secularised and has holes to fill. How to conduct a funeral, for example? And how to celebrate Christmas? Flanagan cites the secular Jewish journalist Nick Cohen on ‘something missing’ in secular Christmas.
Theology can’t avoid sociology, either. Grand theories about how to celebrate the sacraments and the liturgy, how people ought to pray, comes up against hard pastoral realities about how Christians – of varying degrees of practice – actually behave in church and in their Christian lives generally. In particular, Flanagan sees the ‘cult of transparency’, of demystification, as a mistake. Did theologians misread the signs of the times?
Seeking, for Flanagan, is about seeking emancipation. Yet in terms of what emancipation might be for people, there are reinventions and contradictions – a funeral becomes about celebrating a life gone, not about praying for eternal rest for the dear departed, though they may be given digital eternal life on Google (for ourselves). He has surprisingly little to say about grief, though, which I’ve found, even in pastoral encounters with the most disaffiliated and secularised at funerals, often shows an openness to something greater and deeper than digital eternity.
Flanagan is good on the messiness of defining religion. Is it the current government’s public religion – for example, the Church of England hand-in-hand with the National Health Service (or, after the publication of this book, the Anglican-Interfaith coronation of King Charles)? Or about people’s diverse beliefs? Flanagan shows that invented religions, such as that of the French Revolution, tend to fail. Is there at all a common belief system among the population? And what about those unlikely, and often sudden, religious conversions?
Having laid his ground, in the final chapter, Flanagan can explore his title theme (and cover image) of portents, centring on the finger. The pointing finger, the judging finger, God’s creative finger, the fingerprint …. He argues both that the prophet has both to see the sign and what it unfolds, yet that the sign cannot be overdetermined, or we will find false Christs. It deals with an absent, but then religion is good at dealing with the absent, he says – in Christianity, the risen, but absent, Christ. Yet the greatest strength of his argument, and this runs through the book in general, is that he does not fall into the trap of some generous-hearted continental theologians who see any metaphysical gesture in the arts or culture in general as doing the same as a Christian prophetic gesture. Yes, a Christian might be brought to meditate on eternal life from a contemporary artwork that focuses on time and mortality: but that is not the same thing as to say this secular artwork proclaims the hope of eternal life. The contemporary atheist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has actually criticised phenomenology for being too Christian …. Flanagan, however, shows both a connection and a rupture: the prophet, the image, the sociological phenomenon, can point, can indeed frighten. But none of these will take us seamlessly to faith and salvation. Perhaps they will precipitate a crisis in which we will ask for faith because, as Irenaeus says, sight is desirable when we learn how awful it is not to see.
I would question Flanagan’s contention that sociology can become a religion for its practitioners and that sociologists acquire a priestly role in the academy and even society – not the observation itself, but because it can happen in any discipline. In secular parlance – again borrowed from religion – we hear that so-and-so is the ‘high priest’ of neuroscience, European history, or even dance. And in the sciences and arts, study can be a locus of a conversion experience. No one quite escapes religion (Prof Dawkins, for example, certainly can’t get away from it and is indeed increasingly receptive to Christian values).
Another area which needs further research, though, is the unpredictable variety of human behaviour. While the socio-anthropological critique of the Vatican II liturgical and ascetical reforms, raised by Mary Douglas, Guy Bourdieu, Stephen Bullivant, and now Flanagan himself, is evidenced by the turn of a significant number of young people to the pre-Conciliar liturgy and classical/strict religious orders, what about the exceptions, on which Flanagan is otherwise very insistent? Not just the Vatican II generation of Catholics, but younger people who want to baptise rather than condemn secular culture, practising Eucharistic adoration and Ignatian prayer and yoga (some of my former chaplaincy students)? And could it be an age thing? If you’re more conservative when you’re young, do you become more liberal when you’re old? Or vice versa?
Flanagan writes with an elegance and panache that carry the reader through long chapters. This book is as much a memoir of a sociologist, and, dare one say, of a sharply aware post-Conciliar Catholic. His writing is well-sourced, but not fussily so: the argument does not drown in its own footnotes. At one point, he suggests that sociologists may be novelists manqués: not an unreasonable thought, given Paul Ricoeur’s recognition that we live our lives in stories – with a past, present, and future. While calling out sociologists who were big on theory and thin on fieldwork, and whose work risks sliding into fantasy, perhaps Flanagan has ample material from his research for some novels that could take up where David Lodge left off.
